British take Qurna

On 9 December 1914 British and Indian troops occupied Qurna at the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates. The Turkish garrison, cut off the day before by the Indians’ crossing of the Tigris, surrendered without further fighting. The Turkish envoys had agreed to unconditional surrender during the night, and in the morning only the formalities remained.

The surrender

At 8.30 a.m. Brigadier-General Charles Fry met the Turkish delegation aboard the sloop HMS Espiegle and settled the details of the surrender. All troop movements were halted. At about 10 a.m., taking advantage of the tide, Espiegle pushed her way over the muddy shallows and, together with the Lawrence, river steamers and launches, slowly steamed upstream. The ships turned into the Tigris and just before 11 a.m. anchored opposite Qurna.

At 1.30 p.m., on the bank, Fry, the flotilla commander Captain Arthur Hayes-Sadler and Sir Percy Cox, the corps’ chief political officer, accepted the surrender of Subhi Bey, the vali of Basra. The Indian battalions that had crossed the river the previous day surrounded the town and the surrendering Turks with pickets. According to the British official history, 45 officers and 989 men were taken prisoner, mostly from an artillery regiment, two infantry regiments and the Basra gendarmerie. Other sources give 42 officers. The British captured two field guns and two mountain guns, and also recovered a machine gun they had lost on 4 December.

Only now did it emerge that on 7 December the Turkish gunboat Marmaris had also been at Qurna, driven upstream by British artillery fire. The same day shells from the ships sank an armed Turkish motor launch off the town.

A disappointing Eden

According to local tradition it was at Qurna, between the two rivers, that the biblical Garden of Eden lay. The soldiers were bitterly disappointed. They found filthy alleys, huts of mud and reed, a few brick houses, barracks and a customs house, all in a sorry state after the Turks’ departure. The British official history quotes a disheartened soldier who remarked that it would not take an angel with a flaming sword to keep him out of Qurna. Jokes about the “paradise” charms of the little town accompanied its garrison throughout the British presence.

In spring, when the swollen rivers flooded the surrounding country, Qurna became an island amid marshes and floodwaters. It was protected from flooding only by earth banks, so in the following weeks the garrison had to put much work into strengthening them. The town was held by an infantry brigade with two squadrons of cavalry, two batteries of artillery and a company of sappers.

The first stage completed

The capture of Qurna completed the first stage of the Mesopotamian campaign. The British now controlled the whole of the Shatt al-Arab, Basra and the approach to it from the Tigris. The town was the best forward position they could take, although it lay far from Basra for the forces at the disposal of Lieutenant-General Arthur Barrett.

The victory quickly brought political benefits too. The local Arab sheikhs, who had stayed neutral during the fighting, began coming to the British with assurances of support. The interrogation of prisoners at last made it possible to establish where the remaining Turkish forces were: the main body had fallen back up the Tigris towards Amarah, and the remnants of the Basra division stood on the Euphrates in the area of Nasiriyah.