Defeat at Dujaila

On 8 March 1916 Lieutenant-General Fenton Aylmer’s British-Indian Tigris Corps made a second attempt to relieve General Charles Townshend’s division, besieged in Kut. After the failed attack at Hanna in January, Aylmer shifted his blow to the right bank of the Tigris. His objective was the Dujaila Redoubt on the right flank of the Turkish Es Sinn position, a dozen or so kilometres from Kut. After a night march across the desert, about 20,000 soldiers stood at dawn before the weakly held Turkish flank. By evening the attack had been lost, and the next day the troops were returning to where they had started, with losses of up to 3,500 men.

In the morning everything depended on speed. The column of General George Kemball, which was to strike first, reached its position late, already in daylight rather than under cover of darkness as planned, and halted in a fold of the ground to sort out the battalions, guns and transport that had become mixed up in the dark. At about seven o’clock the corps artillery opened fire before the infantry moved off, and alerted the Turks. Halil Bey (Halil Kut) brought reserves to the threatened flank and began ferrying fresh units from the left bank in boats and on rafts. When at about 9.45 a.m. Kemball’s brigades went forward, they met fire from trenches that the airmen had not detected, and were held up more than a kilometre short of the redoubt. The second column, which had been standing east of the redoubt since the morning, waited for their attack as planned.

Towards evening the 8th Brigade was ordered to storm the redoubt from the east. At about 5.15 p.m. men of the 1st Battalion, Manchester Regiment, with Indians and Gurkhas, broke into the redoubt and took two lines of trenches, but they ran out of grenades, and Turkish counter-attacks at dusk drove them out again. Aylmer concluded that his exhausted and thirsty troops could not renew the attack, and the next day withdrew them to the Wadi. According to the British official history (Moberly), the British lost 3,474 men on 8 and 9 March, and the Turks, according to the German officer Hans von Kiesling, fewer than 1,300.

In Kut the garrison had been standing ready since 5.30 a.m. Townshend kept two brigades ready to cross the river to meet the relief force, and 21 guns were to fire to the south. At 7.10 a.m. a cannonade was heard from the direction of Es Sinn, but from the town all that could be seen were flocks of sheep and transport moving towards the Shatt al-Hai canal, and before noon a mirage hid everything. Townshend waited for visible signs of the outflanking move and did not send any soldiers across the river all day. He learned of the defeat the next morning. According to Candler, the war correspondent with the Tigris Corps, the disappointment there was greater than after the January defeats.

Food became the most urgent matter. The British soldiers in Kut were by now receiving only about 340 grams of bread, a little over half a kilogram of horse or mule meat and some jam a day. The Indians, most of whom still refused horse meat, received barley flour and a little ghee. On 9 March Townshend cut the bread ration and ordered more than a thousand animals to be slaughtered, reckoning that this would make the stocks last until April. On 10 March Halil called on him to surrender, and Townshend refused. According to the official history, as early as 11 March Aylmer was replaced at the head of the Tigris Corps by his chief of staff, General George Gorringe. Some studies give 12 March.