Failed attack at Hanna

On 21 January 1916 the British and Indian troops of Lieutenant-General Fenton Aylmer attacked the Turkish position in the Hanna defile, a narrow strip of land between the Tigris and the Suwaikiya marsh. It was the third and last action of the first attempt to relieve General Charles Townshend’s division, besieged in Kut. After the fighting on the Wadi the Turks had shut themselves up in the defile, which could not be outflanked. For a week gales and downpours wrecked the British bridges and turned the ground into mud. Aylmer preferred to wait and move more guns to the other bank, but the outgoing commander of the forces in Mesopotamia, General John Nixon, rejected all half-measures, and Kut reported that food would last only until the beginning of February.

After a day-long bombardment on 20 January, the infantry of General George Younghusband’s 7th Division, thinned in the previous battles to about 3,700 rifles, went in to the assault at 7.55 a.m., when the morning mist had lifted enough for the artillery to fire. By the river about fifty men of the Scottish Black Watch battalion and ten of the 6th Jats broke into the Turkish trench and took a section of it with two machine guns. Support never reached them: the battalions of the 9th Brigade advanced across open ground under murderous fire, and one of them lost its direction. After more than an hour the Turks counter-attacked and drove out the handful of attackers. On the right wing, by the marsh, the 19th Brigade was pinned down a hundred metres short of the wire, and the Dogras who ran up to the wire found it intact.

At about 11.30 a.m. a downpour began, with a gale. The ground turned into a quagmire, in places knee-deep, the telephones stopped working, and orders were carried by runners, many of whom were killed. A renewed attack at 1 p.m. made no progress: soaked, numbed soldiers could not run in the mud. In the afternoon Younghusband ordered a withdrawal after dark to the starting positions. Aylmer countermanded the order, but the message did not arrive in time. The British lost 2,741 men that day. The 2nd Battalion of the Black Watch lost 181 of its little more than three hundred men. The night was so cold that the marsh froze, and many of the wounded who could not be brought in died of exposure.

That same day Townshend informed Aylmer that he was going on to half rations, because he had full rations left for only fourteen days, and that water from the swollen Tigris was flooding his trenches. During the night Aylmer gave up the idea of renewing the attack. On 22 January the British and Turks concluded a six-hour truce to collect the wounded and bury the dead. The first attempt to relieve Kut had ended in failure, and the Tigris Corps had lost more than 8,000 men in it in two weeks. It soon turned out that, once the food in the town had been requisitioned, the garrison could hold out much longer than had been thought. The British made their next attempt, at the Dujaila Redoubt, only at the beginning of March.