End of the battle of Shaiba

On 14 April 1915 the battle of Shaiba, west of Basra, was decided. The British and Indian troops of General Charles Melliss came out of the camp where they had been beating off attacks for two days and after a whole day of heavy fighting took the Turkish trenches in front of Barjisiyah wood. The Ottoman troops broke into disorderly flight, and their commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Süleyman Askerî, shot himself. It was the last Turkish attack to threaten Basra.

The sortie of 13 April

Melliss, an Indian Army officer with long service in India and Africa, awarded the Victoria Cross for the fighting in Ashanti in 1900, took over command at dawn on 13 April. He went over to the counter-attack at once. In the morning the cavalry brigade attacked a hillock north-west of the camp, known as North Mound, where Arabs had gathered. The attack was repulsed, and Major George Wheeler of the 7th Hariana Lancers, who had galloped far ahead of his squadron straight at the enemy’s standards, was killed on the mound. Before noon, however, three battalions of General Walter Delamain’s 16th Brigade, supported by the fire of all the camp’s artillery, took North Mound. The Arabs fled, leaving 90 dead on the mound.

Delamain pushed on to the south-west. The 104th Wellesley’s Rifles took several lines of Turkish trenches with the bayonet and captured 150 prisoners, and the 24th Punjabis seized two mountain guns abandoned by the Turks. At about 3 p.m. Melliss decided that the tired men, who had fired off most of their ammunition, could attack no more and called them back to the camp. The day brought the British more than 400 prisoners at a cost of 132 men. According to information from Turkish sources quoted in the British official history, Ali Bey, who was in actual command of the troops, had wanted to withdraw to Barjisiyah wood after the failed night assault and wait there for the British attack. Askerî, however, insisted on renewing the attack on 13 April.

The attack on Barjisiyah

On the morning of 14 April the area around the camp was clear of the enemy, but Melliss did not know exactly where the main Turkish forces stood. Reports were arriving that the Turks were withdrawing from the wood, and he did not want to let them go without a fight. At 9.30 a.m. he left the camp with most of his troops, leaving only two battalions behind. He had about 4,600 rifles and more than 700 cavalry sabres.

The cavalry soon ran into the Turks near the so-called South Mound and then at Zubair’s Watch Tower, a landmark visible from afar on a low ridge above Barjisiyah wood. It turned out that the Turks held a front more than five kilometres wide, from near the tower to the northern edge of the wood. Arabs hovered on their flanks. Melliss gave up the idea of an outflanking move, and between 11.30 a.m. and noon the 16th and 18th Brigades advanced to a frontal attack. When at about 12.20 p.m. the first lines of the Dorset battalion and the 24th Punjabis came out on the ridge, they came under heavy rifle and machine-gun fire from trenches lower down the slope. A second Turkish line, well hidden in the scrub, hit the British silhouetted against the sky. Mirage and the lie of the land meant that the British artillery, despite an enormous expenditure of shells, could do little to help the infantry.

For several hours a static exchange of fire went on in the heat. One of the commanders of the Indian battalions recalled that exhausted men, many of them under fire for the first time, fell asleep in the line for a dozen minutes or so while their neighbours fired slowly. At about 4 p.m. Melliss, convinced that the attack might fail, ordered carts to be prepared for the wounded and cover for a retreat. Just then, however, the Turkish guns fell silent and the fire from the trenches began to slacken. At about 4.15 p.m. some of the men, who had crawled forward to within two hundred metres, charged with the bayonet, and the whole line followed them. Both brigades, Delamain’s and Fry’s, later claimed to have been first into the Turkish trenches. By 5 p.m. the Turks had abandoned the first line, and the defenders of the second hoisted a white flag. Immediately afterwards a mass of fugitives poured out of Barjisiyah wood.

The retreat and the death of Askerî

The British did not pursue the enemy. The infantry was exhausted by three days of fighting and by the heat and almost out of ammunition, and the cavalry happened to be changing position. Melliss did not realise that the battle was won and expected the Turks to defend themselves in their main position by the wood. At 6 p.m. his troops returned to the camp, taking the wounded with them. The day cost them 1,062 killed and wounded, including 161 killed. Some battalions lost more than a quarter of their strength.

The harshest pursuit of the Turks was carried out by their former allies. Once the outcome of the battle was decided, Arab warriors fell upon the fleeing units and plundered them. The Turks fell back in disorder all the way to Khamisiyah on the Euphrates, about 140 kilometres from Shaiba. The British official history, citing accounts, states that throughout the battle Askerî had a bed kept in Barjisiyah wood from which he could not move. After the defeat he gathered his officers, accused the Arabs of treachery and shot himself. Turkish sources give the date of his death as 14 April 1915. He was 30 or 31 years old. He had been born in 1884 in Prizren, and before the war had fought in Libya against the Italians and in the Balkans.

The victory over Askerî secured Basra and the refinery at Abadan. The defeat also affected the Turks’ relations with the tribes. The Arabs, who had failed at Shaiba, lost faith in Turkish strength, and in the following months revolts against the Ottoman authorities broke out in the Shiite towns of central Iraq. The British, emboldened by their success, soon went over to the offensive up the Tigris and the Euphrates.