Christmas Eve assault on Kut

On Christmas Eve 1915 Ottoman troops launched their biggest assault on besieged Kut. They struck at the fort in the northern corner of the British defences, above a bend of the Tigris. The fighting went on intermittently from the morning of 24 December until the early hours of 25 December. The Turks made their last attack at about 2.30 a.m. Christmas Day found the defenders in the ruins of the fort, among heaps of Turkish dead. The British chronology of the war places this event under 25 December. It was the last Turkish assault on Kut. From then on the Turks relied on hunger alone.

Against Goltz’s orders

After the failed attacks of the first days of the siege the German Field Marshal Colmar von der Goltz, commander of the Ottoman Sixth Army, forbade further assaults on 12 December and ordered the town to be starved out. For the next ten days there was relative calm. The Turks dug saps ever closer to the fort, and the garrison strengthened its defences. According to Lieutenant-Colonel Hans von Kiesling of Goltz’s German staff, Colonel Nureddin Bey attacked in the absence of the field marshal, who had left for Kermanshah in Persia, and against his express orders. The British official history (Moberly) cites this version. For the assault Nureddin threw in the fresh 52nd Division, which had just arrived from the Caucasus.

The British were expecting an attack. The fort was the weakest point of the defences. Pushed far out to the north, it had mud walls that could not withstand shelling. The Turkish infantry had approached along irrigation ditches to within a few hundred metres of the walls, and then by saps closer still. During the night of 17–18 December the defenders made a successful sortie: they killed 40 Turks, took 11 prisoners and established that the enemy was not mining under the fort. Inside, trenches, loopholes and a stockade of fodder bales were built across the neck of the threatened north-eastern bastion.

The assault

Before dawn on 24 December the Turks opened heavy fire on the Woolpress village on the far bank, but did not attack there. At about seven in the morning the artillery began to pound the town, the first line and above all the fort. The defenders counted 22 guns trained on the fort. The fire quickly knocked out two guns of the Volunteer Battery and cut communications with the artillery. The shells crumbled the walls. By eleven little was left of the wall and the north-eastern bastion, and the bastion’s garrison had to be withdrawn behind the stockade.

Between eleven and noon the bombardment died down and the Ottoman infantry went in to the assault, mainly against the north-eastern bastion. The Turks managed to get onto the walls. The bastion was defended by Mahrattas of the 103rd Regiment, and the stockade by thirty men of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, joined by gunners of the Volunteer Battery with rifles and bayonets. The battery consisted largely of Anglo-Indians, among them boys straight out of school. Bombs made from jam tins, produced on the spot by the sappers, were thrown, because the division had no grenades. After half an hour’s fighting the Turks fell back. On the north-eastern wall Major Anderson of the Volunteer Battery rallied men of the 119th Infantry, who had lost almost all their British officers, and drove the enemy out.

At about eight in the evening, as the moon rose, the Turks attacked again, preceded by bombers. As planned, the Mahrattas withdrew from the bastion to the flanks, so that the stockade could hit the attackers from three sides. The bombs, however, killed or wounded almost all the men in the side galleries and most of the defenders of the right flank of the stockade. For a moment the situation was critical, but the Turks did not exploit the opportunity. At about eleven some two hundred men of the 48th Pioneers, who had been digging a second line of defence nearby, came up to the stockade. Almost all of the first of them were killed or wounded, among them their commander, Captain Neumann. The rest, however, held on, and at about midnight the Turks withdrew. The last attack, at about 2.30 a.m. on 25 December, also collapsed.

Losses

According to Moberly, the defenders of the fort lost 315 killed and wounded, including 17 British officers, and 67 men outside the fort. Of the thirty men of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry at the stockade, 23 were killed or wounded, and of the 33 men of the Volunteer Battery only 14 came through unwounded. Turkish losses are not known exactly. According to prisoners, the 52nd Division lost at least 2,000 men. In the morning masses of dead and badly wounded Turks lay around the walls. Attempts to bring them in were driven off by Turkish fire, so the defenders could only throw them water bottles and bread. On 29 December a Turkish regimental commander asked for permission to bury the dead. Townshend replied that he could grant an armistice only at the request of the Turkish commander-in-chief, and no agreement was reached.

The success gave the garrison confidence. The soldiers were still receiving full rations and expected the relief to arrive any week. From 4 December to the end of the year the garrison lost 1,625 killed, wounded and missing.