Fighting at Fallahiya

On 5 April 1916 at 4.55 a.m., before sunrise, the British 13th Division of Major-General Frederick Stanley Maude went in to assault the Turkish position in the Hanna defile, between the Tigris and the Suwaikiya marsh. Thus began, after a delay caused by a downpour, the third attempt to relieve General Charles Townshend’s division, besieged in Kut. In January the Tigris Corps had bled itself white at Hanna in a frontal attack. This time the attack was not preceded by a bombardment. The artillery was to open fire three minutes after the infantry moved off, on the third line of trenches and beyond.

Maude’s soldiers soon found that there was almost no one in front of them. They took the first and second lines almost without a fight, and further on were briefly held up only by the fire of their own guns, whose crews could not see the infantry’s signals in the half-light. By seven in the morning the division had taken all five lines of Turkish trenches. According to the British official history (Moberly, The Campaign in Mesopotamia) the Turks had withdrawn during the night, leaving only a small rearguard with a few machine guns. Prisoners said they had been forced to retreat by the rising waters. On the right bank General Henry Keary’s 3rd Division took the abandoned Abu Rumman position before noon, almost unopposed. In the afternoon it drove off with fire Turkish infantry, artillery and cavalry approaching from Es Sinn.

The commander of the Tigris Corps, General George Gorringe, learnt from the airmen that the Turks were holding a position at Fallahiya, a little further upstream, and were feverishly fortifying the next one, at Sannaiyat. He decided to give them no respite, all the more so because the river was rising again and the Turks could cut the embankments and flood the ground in front. The 40th Brigade, sent forward at 7.30 a.m., went further than ordered and suffered considerable losses on open ground, while the 38th and 39th Brigades, coming to its aid, were pinned down by fire a few hundred metres behind it. The assault on Fallahiya was set for 12.30 p.m., but in view of the heat, a strong mirage and flat ground without any cover, Gorringe ordered it postponed until the evening.

At 7.15 p.m. the British artillery on both banks opened fire, and at 7.35 p.m. the 38th and 39th Brigades advanced in four waves. Despite strong resistance the 38th Brigade took its sector by 8.15 p.m., and soon afterwards the 39th Brigade, delayed by broken ground, secured its own. The position proved shallower than the British sketches had shown: instead of continuous lines it was a series of separate trenches, and its garrison, according to the British, numbered only three battalions. Moberly judges that the Turks defended it only to gain time. That day the British lost 1,885 men, 1,868 of them in the 13th Division, most of them at Fallahiya. The heaviest losses, about 200–250 men each, were suffered by battalions of the Wiltshire, Cheshire, Royal Warwickshire, Worcestershire, North Staffordshire and Royal Welch Fusiliers regiments.

In Kut heavy gunfire was heard downstream before dawn, and at 8.35 a.m. word arrived that the 13th Division had taken Hanna. The garrison remained on the alert, and its two 5-inch guns shelled Turkish transport and the crossing at Magasis, without visible effect. In the evening the gunfire grew heavier, but no further news reached the town. Townshend learnt of the capture of Fallahiya only on 7 April, because atmospheric interference hampered wireless communication. Meanwhile Gorringe had announced that morning that after the capture of Fallahiya the 7th Division would push on during the night and attack Sannaiyat at dawn on 6 April.