British recover Kut

On 24 February 1917 the Ottoman forces abandoned the positions on the Tigris they had held since the spring of 1916 and began to retreat upriver towards Baghdad. Kut, where ten months earlier General Townshend’s division had surrendered, was left without defenders. In the evening General Frederick Stanley Maude telegraphed that he held all the enemy positions from Sannaiyat to Kut, and that the town itself, now of only sentimental importance, “passes automatically into our hands, although we have not yet occupied it”. The British entered it only the next morning.

The last day of the battle

The previous day and night had been decisive. On 23 February the British forced the Tigris at Shumran, and during the night the commander of the Sixth Army, Halil Pasha (Halil Kut), ordered a retreat. On the left bank, downstream, the 7th Division spent the whole night sending patrols deep into the Turkish trenches at Sannaiyat. At about four in the morning the Black Watch and the 9th Bhopal Infantry occupied the fifth line without a fight, and after eight the sixth and last. The Turks were withdrawing fast, probably even before dawn. The British infantry, which since April 1916 had known nothing but trench warfare, advanced cautiously across the empty plain cut by successive lines of trenches. By evening it stood on the Suwada position, and I Corps had lost only 29 men that day.

Upstream the fighting was much harder. At 6.15 a.m. the 14th Division moved north across the Shumran peninsula, under machine-gun fire from the flanks. Before eight the 37th Brigade, with the Norfolks in the front line, took the Dahra ridge. Only after heavy shelling by artillery from the other bank did the Punjabis force the surrender of the Turks holding out in a maze of canals by the river, taking more than 300 prisoners there. At 6.30 a.m. an airman reported to Maude’s headquarters that the Turks were in full retreat towards Baghdad, so Maude ordered the cavalry division to cross the bridge and pursue them along the left bank. The Turkish rearguard, which the British estimated at about 2,500 men with artillery, dug in, however, in the canals north of the peninsula and held up both the infantry and the cavalry until dark. The official history (Moberly, The Campaign in Mesopotamia, vol. III) admits that it covered the retreat of the main forces admirably. The 14th Division lost about 1,100 men that day, but took 740 prisoners, including five Germans of a machine-gun company. In the afternoon aircraft of the Royal Flying Corps bombed the retreating columns and the steamers near Bughaila.

The flag over Kut

In the morning the commander of the river flotilla, Captain Wilfrid Nunn, proposed that the gunboats should steam up the Tigris. Maude agreed in the afternoon. Mantis, Tarantula, Moth, Butterfly, Gadfly and Snakefly avoided several floating mines and at about 9.30 p.m. anchored off Kut. According to Moberly the town was found the next morning, 25 February, deserted and in ruins, and a party from the gunboat Mantis landed and raised the British flag over it. Some works, and also the British chronology of the war, link the occupation of the town with 23 or 24 February, because those two days decided its fate.

For the British it was revenge for the humiliation of April 1916. Of the roughly 12,000 soldiers who had then gone into captivity, more than 4,000 died, according to the official history. Maude, however, reported soberly that something else mattered more than the town: the Ottoman XVIII Corps was shattered, and the Tigris up to Shumran was open to British ships. The previous night Halil had already ordered a position to be prepared at Kala Shadi and was bringing a division from the Persian front to Baghdad.

At 7.25 p.m. Maude issued orders for the pursuit the next day. He also sent a telegram to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General William Robertson, asking whether the government would be willing to change its cautious instructions of the autumn of 1916. He announced that until he received a reply he would follow the retreating enemy, taking care to do nothing that would later make it difficult for him to conform to new orders. He believed that a series of defeats would have broken any army of less fighting value than the Turks, and that the opportunity for a further advance was favourable.