Crossing of the Diyala

On the morning of 7 March 1917 the advance guard of General William Marshall’s III Corps approached the village of Diyala, where the Diyala river flows into the Tigris, a dozen or so kilometres south-east of Baghdad. General Frederick Stanley Maude, who two days earlier had resumed the advance from Aziziyah, believed that the Turks had left only a weak rearguard on the river. Airmen reported that both bridges over the Diyala had been dismantled and that few troops could be seen on the far bank. In the afternoon, however, after a personal reconnaissance, General Marshall concluded that the enemy was holding the lower course of the river in strength and had at least seven guns there. The cavalry division, which had moved a dozen or so kilometres up along the Diyala, reported that the Turks had lined almost the whole bank with guns and numerous machine guns. The British chronology of the war records the crossing of the Diyala on 7–10 March.

The first two nights

By the village the river was about 110 metres wide, with a slow current and steep banks six metres high. In a reconnaissance at dusk the commander of the pontoon detachment found only one place where pontoons could be launched: the ramp of a former bridge in the village. At about 11 p.m. the 6th Battalion of the King’s Own occupied the left-bank part of the village and brought up the pontoons, but it was a clear, moonlit night. When an attempt was made to launch the first pontoon, so many men fell that it had to be abandoned. At the second attempt, under covering artillery fire, three pontoons had barely pushed off from the bank when every man in them was hit, and the current carried them down into the Tigris. The detachment lost 64 men. At the same time, in order to turn the Diyala line, the 35th Brigade began crossing by steamer to the right bank of the Tigris at Bawi.

The following night, 8–9 March, the crossing was prepared more carefully, a few hundred metres upstream from the village. At midnight the artillery opened a hurricane bombardment, and the 6th Battalion of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment set off across the river in four columns, each with one pontoon and rowers from the neighbouring Lancashire battalions. The first pontoon reached the far bank but sank on the way back. The second managed two round trips before all its rowers fell, and the two more sent up in its place managed two further trips. The third made six trips; the fourth could not even be launched from the steep bank. Before new ones arrived, dawn was approaching and the crossing was halted again. About a hundred men were left on the right bank, scattered in three groups over a stretch of 300 metres.

The Lancashire bridgehead

Their commander, Captain Oswald Reid, gathered the men in one place, behind a bend in the bund along the river, and held off repeated attacks there until morning. The Turkish 44th Regiment, which had earlier distinguished itself at Ctesiphon, Dujaila and Sannaiyat, tried with determination to drive them into the river: the regimental commander personally led his battalions into the attack five times and lost most of his officers and hundreds of men. A Turkish officer, Muhammad Amin, who was on the staff of the commander of the Sixth Army, admitted that the only result of these bloody assaults was to shut up in a palm grove by the crossing a detachment the Turks estimated at 50–60 men with two machine guns. On the morning of 9 March the commander of the 38th Brigade reported that the Lancashire men, about sixty of them, were well dug in and would hold. All attempts to get ammunition and grenades across the river to them broke down under Turkish fire. In the evening the 44th Regiment attacked once more, lost over a hundred men and all its remaining officers, and its remnants were withdrawn from the line. The battalion lost a hundred men on the Diyala, and the supporting 6th Battalion of the East Lancashire Regiment forty. Reid, wounded, held the bridgehead for 30 hours and was awarded the Victoria Cross for it.

The crossing of 10 March

The Turks no longer had the means to fight on the Diyala. When the commander of XVIII Corps concluded that the main British blow was coming along the right bank of the Tigris, he shifted most of the 51st Division there, leaving the 14th Division and the bled-white 44th Regiment to defend the river. At four in the morning of 10 March, after deceiving the enemy with night shelling, the East Lancashire battalion crossed at the three places used by the Lancashire men, and the 5th Battalion of the Wiltshire Regiment a kilometre higher up. Resistance was weak and losses slight. Reid’s men were found in the bridgehead almost without ammunition. By six both columns were on the far bank, and the Turks fell back, leaving about 200 prisoners. Before noon the sappers built a bridge by the village, and the rest of the 13th Division crossed by it. In the afternoon a sandstorm blew up, and at Qarara, a few kilometres beyond the river, a Turkish rearguard held the British up until dusk.

The crossing of the Diyala cost the British several hundred men and took three nights, but it pinned the Turks on the left bank at the moment when the fate of Baghdad was being decided on the right. That same evening Halil Pasha (Halil Kut) decided to give up the city. The British entered Baghdad on the morning of 11 March.