British reach Kut

On the morning of 3 December 1915 General Charles Townshend’s 6th (Poona) Division covered the last few kilometres to Kut on the Tigris. No one harassed it any more. The Turks had been left far behind and that day reached only Kala Shadi, about 35 kilometres upstream. So ended the retreat from Ctesiphon, which had begun on the evening of 25 November. At Kut, which the division had taken in September in the First Battle of Kut, Townshend decided to halt, defend himself and await relief.

The last days of the retreat

The last two days were the hardest. On 30 November the division halted for the night at Umm al-Tubul, because Townshend did not want to leave unprotected the vessels that were struggling along the shallow river. In the evening the whole Ottoman army of Colonel Nureddin Bey unexpectedly came upon the camp. At dawn on 1 December the two sides saw each other at a distance of three kilometres. The British artillery and the gunboats’ guns opened fire on the Turkish columns and encampment, and the Ottoman XIII Corps fled in panic. Townshend used the moment of confusion to break off the fight and withdrew south in good order. He lost, however, the gunboats Firefly and Comet, which ran aground under fire. According to the British official history (Moberly), British losses on 1–2 December amounted to 37 killed, 281 wounded and 218 missing, largely on abandoned barges. The Turks lost about 750 men at Umm al-Tubul.

Then came the march the soldiers remembered longest. To break away from the pursuit, Townshend ordered a march without a halt to Kala Shadi, about 40 kilometres. The head of the column arrived there at nine in the evening, the rearguard only towards morning. The night was freezing and there was no food. On 2 December the division covered almost another 30 kilometres and spent the night a few kilometres short of Kut. Moberly stresses that for twelve days the soldiers, mostly young, had been fighting or marching almost without a break, often without enough food, water and sleep. Townshend wrote that on 2 December it seemed for a moment that the whole division would lie down and be unable to go on.

The decision

The decision to defend Kut was taken while still on the march. On 2 December Townshend met General Rimington, commandant of the local garrison, who considered the position in front of the town indefensible and advised falling back to the old Turkish positions at Es Sinn. Townshend replied that he would stay at Kut. He judged that his exhausted troops would get no further, and that there would be no time to remove the stores and ammunition accumulated in the town. Kut also lay at an important point: at the mouth of the Shatt al-Hai channel, down which the Turks could move south towards the weak garrison at Nasiriyah. The commander of the forces in Mesopotamia, General John Nixon, had indeed sent a message on 2 December leaving it to Townshend to choose how far to fall back, but owing to a staff officer’s mistake Townshend received it only on the evening of 4 December.

On 3 December Townshend telegraphed to Nixon that he would defend Kut because it was an important strategic point, and that he had a month’s full rations for the British soldiers, two months’ for the Indian soldiers, and enough ammunition. In a further telegram he added that he meant to defend Kut as in 1895 he had defended the fort at Chitral on the Indian frontier, where he had held out under siege until relieved. Nixon replied at once that he was glad of the decision and that reinforcements would be sent upriver as fast as possible. He himself was already on his way to Basra: he had left Kut by boat on the evening of 1 December to speed up the transfer of two Indian divisions that were just on their way from France.

That same day Townshend retook the village of Yakasub on the right bank, opposite the town. The day before, Turkish and Arab horsemen had occupied and plundered it. The British called it Woolpress, after its tall iron wool press. Some historians regard the decision to stop at Kut as a mistake. General Delamain, commander of the 16th Brigade, later maintained that after a day’s rest his soldiers could have marched on. At the time, however, both Townshend and Nixon were sure that reinforcements would quickly fight their way through to the town. They differed only on timing: Townshend reckoned on a month, Nixon on two. A few days later Ottoman forces surrounded Kut.