British take Baghdad

On the morning of 11 March 1917 British and Indian troops entered Baghdad, the former capital of the Abbasid caliphs and the most important city of Ottoman Mesopotamia. They did not have to fight for it. The Turks had left Baghdad during the night, and after their last patrols all that remained were fires, explosions in the citadel and gangs looting the bazaars. For General Frederick Stanley Maude, who since December 1916 had been leading his troops up the Tigris, it was the goal of the whole campaign. For Britain, which after Gallipoli and the surrender of Kut had long had nothing to boast of on this front, it was the greatest victory over the Ottoman Empire so far.

The night of the retreat

The fate of the city was decided the previous evening. When III Corps had forced the Diyala and I Corps was advancing along the right bank of the Tigris against the positions at Tel Aswad and Umm at-Tubul, the commander of the Sixth Army, Halil Pasha (Halil Kut), called a conference in the Khar pavilion near the Iron Bridge, in front of the city on the right-bank side. He himself wanted to give battle, but his corps and divisional commanders convinced him that the army was too weak to repel an outflanking move and that fighting might end in a retreat through the streets of the city and the loss of the whole corps. At about 8 p.m. the order was given to retreat north along the railway to Samarra. Halil left by car for his headquarters at Kadhimiya.

A Turkish officer, Muhammad Amin, who was then on Halil’s staff, later described that night. A sandstorm was raging, there was chaos at the station, wagons were in short supply, and piles of weapons, ammunition and stores were left on the platforms, along with the sick and wounded. The train carrying army headquarters had barely moved off when fires and explosions began to flash over Baghdad. Sappers were hastily blowing up whatever they were to destroy. The great German wireless station, recently completed for direct communication with Berlin, was blown up. The bridge of boats over the Tigris was torn away by the gale, and columns of transport, guns and infantry blocked the road north. Muhammad Amin wrote that any bolder enemy detachment could have wrought havoc in that crush that night. The British noticed nothing. The police and gendarmerie left Baghdad with the last units, and looting began in the city, carried out by Arabs and Kurds from the surrounding area.

First into the city

After midnight British patrols on both banks of the Tigris reported that the Turkish trenches were empty. At 4.17 a.m. the commander of I Corps, General Alexander Cobbe, telegraphed the commander of the 7th Division, General Fane: “It looks as though there is no one in front of you. Why send patrols? Form an advanced guard at once and march on Baghdad”. Before the order reached the troops, patrols of the 21st Brigade had passed the Iron Bridge, and just before 6 a.m. a patrol of the Scottish battalion of the Black Watch under Second Lieutenant Houston occupied the railway station, which lay about a kilometre outside the city.

The city was to be occupied by the 35th Brigade, as Maude had planned a few days earlier. Led by the 1/5th Battalion of the Buffs, it set off at 8.30 a.m. and entered the right-bank part of Baghdad before nine. According to the British official history (Moberly, The Campaign in Mesopotamia, vol. III) the Buffs were the first battalion in the city. The bridge over the Tigris had been destroyed, so the soldiers crossed to the other bank in local round boats, and Captain G. K. Harrison hoisted the British flag on the citadel. After three-quarters of an hour it was moved to the clock tower of the barracks of the Turkish headquarters, where it could be seen better. Today it is kept in Canterbury Cathedral.

On the left bank the advanced guard of the 13th Division marched in almost at the same time: the Hertfordshire Yeomanry, the 6th Battalion of the King’s Own and the Indian 32nd Lancers. The order not to enter the city reached it too late. When it turned out that the 35th Brigade’s crossing would take time, the division sent another battalion and a half into Baghdad to stop the looting and restore order. In the afternoon the commander of the 35th Brigade, General Thomson, took over the administration of the city. He was helped by the American consul, the Persian consul-general, the chief rabbi and other local notables. Apart from the looters, the inhabitants, of whom there were about 150,000, Muslims, Jews and Christians of various denominations, remained calm, and many greeted the British warmly. Muhammad Amin later admitted that Baghdad was passing into a conqueror’s hands for the thirtieth time, but never before had it happened so peacefully.

Maude in Baghdad

At 8.30 a.m. a flotilla of seven gunboats set off upriver from Bawi. Among them was Firefly, recaptured from the Turks at the end of February, flying the British ensign above the Turkish one. Maude was aboard the steamer P 53. At 3.30 p.m. the flotilla reached Baghdad and Maude went ashore. The gunboats went on more than 20 kilometres further and shelled the Turkish rearguard. Airmen reported that about 25 kilometres north of the city, by the railway, stood a Turkish rearguard some 4,000 strong, and that further on troops were still being loaded onto trains. The cavalry division occupied Kadhimiya, sacred to the Shiites, and took a hundred prisoners and four damaged aircraft there.

The soldiers, who for months had dreamt of Baghdad, were disappointed. The official history describes suburbs strewn with carrion, thousands of neglected graves, ruined houses of sun-dried brick, narrow, filthy alleys and packs of starving dogs. The only wide street had recently been laid out by the Turks and named after Halil Pasha to commemorate the capture of Kut. The shops in the bazaars were empty, because for two weeks the Turks had been requisitioning the merchants’ goods and taking them by rail to Samarra. A great deal of military equipment, however, remained in the city: guns, including guns lost by Townshend at Kut, rifles, ammunition, cylinders of poison gas, machinery, railway workshops and rolling stock. In the citadel the British found burning, petrol-fed fires and fuses laid to the ammunition stores. Putting them out took the soldiers the whole afternoon and most of the night.

Significance

The Turks had lost their most important base in Mesopotamia and a large part of the army that had been defending itself at Kut since December. Maude wrote on 28 February that since the start of the offensive his army had taken about 7,500 prisoners, although later findings put the number somewhat lower. Of 91 Turkish guns, according to the findings of the official history, the Turks saved only 28, while the British captured 39. In the following days Maude strengthened his positions around the city and pushed troops north along the railway, as he was threatened by the prospect of the Turks cutting the embankments and flooding the area with the spring waters of the Tigris and Euphrates.

The news went round the British Empire and the Allied countries. Maude received congratulations from the King and the government and promotion to lieutenant-general. The official history stresses that the fall of Baghdad strengthened British prestige in Persia, in Afghanistan and among the Muslims of India, where the authorities feared German and Turkish agitation. It also made it easier for the Russians to march from Persia towards the Ottoman frontier. For Germany it was a blow: Paul von Hindenburg wrote years later that the loss of Baghdad buried many German dreams. On 19 March Maude issued to the inhabitants of the vilayet a proclamation prepared in London. In it he assured them that the British armies came into their cities “not as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators”.