British take Hit

On 9 March 1918 the British Indian 15th Division of General Harry Brooking took the town of Hit on the Euphrates, about 50 kilometres upstream from Ramadi, without a fight. The previous day British patrols had found that the Turks had abandoned both the town and their main position behind it. The next day, 10 March, the British entered Sahiliya, which according to Candler lay about 25 kilometres further on. The Turkish 50th Division fell back to Khan al-Baghdadi, about 35 kilometres above Hit, and British aircraft bombed and machine-gunned its columns all day. The date of 9 March is given consistently by the British chronology of the war, the official history of the campaign and the war correspondent Edmund Candler.

After Ramadi

Since the capture of Ramadi in September 1917 the front on the Euphrates had stood still. The Turks, however, had brought up reinforcements there. At the beginning of February 1918 the British estimated that part of the Turkish 50th Division, the 157th and 169th Infantry Regiments, stood in the area of Hit and Sahiliya, in all 4,000 to 5,000 men. The main Turkish position lay about three kilometres behind the town, beyond a depression in the ground that the British called the Broad Wadi, and roughly two-thirds of the force stood at Sahiliya.

Hit was of strategic importance. Desert tracks linked it with Tikrit on the Tigris, with Karbala and with the country to the west, and in the area there were springs of natural bitumen (PL), invaluable for caulking boats and building roads. At the beginning of February the commander in Mesopotamia, General William Marshall, instructed Brooking to take Hit together with its garrison as soon as preparations and the weather allowed. He himself believed that driving the Turks out of the town would be easy, but after the experience of Ramadi surrounding them would be very difficult.

On 18 February a strong reconnaissance force under General Lucas left Ramadi and took up a position about 15 kilometres from Hit. The same day the extension of the railway from Fallujah to Dhibban was completed, which made supply easier. Over the following three weeks the two sides watched each other with patrols. At the beginning of March Marshall informed London of an attack on Hit in about three weeks’ time and its temporary occupation to secure the bitumen fields.

The Turks withdraw

The Turks did not wait. On 8 March reports came in that they were abandoning the position behind the Broad Wadi and falling back, and Brooking’s troops at once moved forward. In the town they took only a few prisoners, and captured two mountain guns, more than a hundred river boats and other stores. Brooking later believed that it was the excessive activity of British reconnaissance that had prompted the Turks to retreat. The headquarters of the 15th Division was set up in Hit, and its three brigade groups at Sahiliya, in the town and a dozen or so kilometres below it.

Candler, who had already visited Hit in 1898, described it as a town built of grey limestone which from a distance looked like an Italian hill town. Here the Euphrates emerged from a stony valley onto the alluvial plain of Mesopotamia, and by the river stood great water wheels, norias, drawing water for the gardens. Close up the charm vanished: the streets had turned into sewers, and from the nearby bitumen springs, which the Arabs called the “mouth of hell”, came the smell of hydrogen sulphide. The inhabitants could not forgive the Turks for having cut down most of the trees in their mulberry and fruit gardens to revet trenches which they then did not even defend.

What next

According to British intelligence, the Turkish commander of the 50th Division lost his post for giving up Hit too hastily. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff in London approved the occupation of the town, because the British presence at Hit threatened a further advance and kept the Turks guessing, but he did not want the troops to go further up the Euphrates. On 11 and 12 March Marshall and Brooking were already conferring in Baghdad on a blow that was to push the Turks as far as possible from the town. At the end of March the 15th Division was to try again what had failed at Hit: to close the Turks’ line of retreat.