British occupy Tikrit

On 6 November 1917 British and Indian troops occupied Tikrit on the Tigris, about 150 kilometres north of Baghdad. The Turks gave up the town without a fight, but only after spending the whole of the previous day defending the trenches in front of it. The British chronology of the war records the occupation of Tikrit under 6 November, as do the German general Otto Liman von Sanders in his memoirs and the American monthly Current History.

On the evening of 5 November General Vere Fane’s 7th Division held the captured stretch of the Turkish line south-west of the town. The commander of I Corps, General Alexander Cobbe, ordered it to hold its position and to push out patrols boldly. After reorganising, at one in the morning of 6 November, strong patrols set out to occupy a line north of Tikrit, running west from the bank of the Tigris. They met very little resistance. In the morning it turned out that the main Turkish force had withdrawn far to the north during the night. The British entered the walled town, built on a cliff that drops to the river in a sheer wall more than 25 metres high. According to tradition, the sultan Saladin was born in Tikrit in the 12th century.

Tikrit was the forward base of the Turkish XVIII Corps, but the prize proved more modest than General Frederick Stanley Maude had hoped. As early as 4 November reports had reached him that the Turks were removing their stores, and before leaving they burned or destroyed much of what they could not carry away. Among other things the river steamer Julnar went up in flames. In April 1916 the British had tried to break through with it carrying food to besieged Kut. The ship had then been caught at Magasis on a cable stretched across the river and fell into Turkish hands. Despite the destruction, a considerable amount of abandoned equipment remained in Tikrit. For the whole day’s fighting on 5 November the British took 137 prisoners. The British official history estimates Turkish losses at about 1,500 men.

The British had no intention of going further. Their supply lines ended at the railway station in Samarra, about 50 kilometres downriver, and the Turks had fallen back to a previously prepared position at Al-Fatha, where the Tigris breaks through a range of hills. Maude wanted to destroy the Turkish base and break up the forces on the Tigris, not to take new ground. Accordingly, on 7 November the Cavalry Division moved south, and on 10 November the rest of the troops began withdrawing to Samarra. Liman von Sanders noted that the British were then still about 200 kilometres from Mosul.

The occupation of Tikrit ended for that year the advance up the Tigris that Maude had begun in December 1916 with the offensive on Kut. Together with the capture of Ramadi on the Euphrates and the occupation of the Jebel Hamrin hills on the Diyala in October, it pushed the Turks back on all three axes from Baghdad. The British returned to Tikrit for good only in July 1918, when they extended the railway north from Samarra.