British occupy Ana

At 8.30 a.m. on 28 March 1918 British armoured cars drove unopposed through Ana, a town on the Euphrates about 80 kilometres above Khan al-Baghdadi. Between ten and eleven the 11th Cavalry Brigade of General R.A. Cassels arrived there, together with infantry carried in vans. This was the finale of the pursuit after the Battle of Khan al-Baghdadi, in which General Harry Brooking’s 15th Division had encircled and destroyed the Turkish 50th Division. British troops had never yet got so far up the Euphrates. A British chronology of the war records the town’s occupation under 28 March, and F.J. Moberly’s official history even gives the hour.

The pursuit

After the surrender of the main Turkish force on the morning of 27 March, Brooking at once threw everything he had that was fastest into the pursuit. The armoured cars and Lieutenant-Colonel Hogg’s column in Ford vans took Haditha at about ten. The road beyond was strewn with abandoned carts, field kitchens and baggage, and the fleeing Turks, fired on from the air by British aircraft, surrendered without resistance. The war correspondent Edmund Candler saw an aeroplane herding stragglers with its machine gun into a queue of prisoners. In the hills near Haditha the commander of the 50th Division, Nazim Bey, was captured with his staff, having slipped out of the encirclement during the night. In the evening the cavalry and the cars halted for the night near Fuhaimi, from where they set off for Ana in the morning.

Cassels learned from the inhabitants that the few Turks and the Tatar cavalrymen, mostly deserters from the Russian army, had fled the town on hearing that the British were approaching. Germans with a wireless station had left the previous evening. On the morning of 27 March two British prisoners had also been taken away on camels towards Aleppo: the commander of the air forces in Mesopotamia, Lieutenant-Colonel John Tennant, and Major Percy Hobart, who had been shot down over a Turkish position on 25 March.

Rescue of the prisoners

Cassels sent Captain Tod’s 8th Light Armoured Motor Battery after them, with orders to pursue for as much as a hundred miles. On the way the battery captured the Turkish commandant of Ana with about twenty officers, and then a detachment of about 150 Turks. From one of the prisoners Tod heard that the British officers had been driven on only two hours earlier. He caught up with them about 50 kilometres beyond Ana. The cars suddenly emerged from a bend in the road between a hill and the river and opened fire on the Tatar escort. Tennant recalled that at first they took the rattle of the machine gun for an aeroplane landing. Both men flung themselves off their camels and ran, and Tod jumped out of his car and pulled them into the turret. The battery also captured the wireless station from Ana. For this action Tod was given an immediate award of the Distinguished Service Order.

The depots at Ana

At Ana the British found large depots of ammunition and equipment and a great many river boats. Candler wrote that four million rifle cartridges and 50,000 artillery shells were destroyed there. The stores had been accumulated since the summer of 1917 for the Turco-German army that was to descend the Euphrates from Aleppo and retake Baghdad, before its forces were diverted to Palestine. Only a small part could be carried away; the rest was blown up on 30 March. The day before, the armoured cars had ventured a further 117 kilometres beyond Ana, searching in vain for Turkish gold.

The British had no intention of staying at Ana. London did not want operations up the Euphrates, and supplying so distant a post was too difficult. After the depots had been blown up, Cassels’s troops began to withdraw. According to Moberly, at the end of April small Turkish detachments reoccupied Ana and Haditha, and the British did not enter the town again until the turn of October and November 1918, when the Turks themselves withdrew towards Aleppo.