Fighting at Khan al-Baghdadi

On 26 March 1918 General Harry Brooking’s Anglo-Indian 15th Division attacked the Turkish 50th Division at Khan al-Baghdadi, an old caravanserai on the road to Aleppo, about 35 kilometres up the Euphrates from Hit, occupied two weeks earlier. At Hit the Turks had slipped away without a fight. This time the new divisional commander, Nazim Bey (in some accounts Nazmi Bey), decided to make a stand. This was exactly what the British had been counting on. All day the infantry pushed the Turks from one position after another, while the 11th Cavalry Brigade with armoured cars went round them through the desert. By the evening the Turks were surrounded.

Night and morning

General Andrew’s group left Sahiliya at nine in the evening on 25 March, and after midnight General Lucas’s group followed. The war correspondent Edmund Candler, who rode with the mobile column in Ford vans, recalled that at 2.25 a.m. they heard the boom of guns and greeted it with relief: it meant that the Turks were still in their trenches. In the bright moonlight the Turks sent up flares and opened fire. Three companies sent against the forward position lost 43 men and withdrew. At 3.30 a.m. General R.A. Cassels’s cavalry with thirteen armoured cars turned off the road into the desert to go round the Turkish right flank.

After dawn an aircraft flew over the position and before seven dropped a message: the forward trenches were strongly held, the rear ones only weakly, and there was no sign of a retreat. At about ten o’clock the mere movement of Andrew’s group against the western flank induced the Turks to abandon the first position. By 11.30 a.m. the British had taken it almost without a fight, along with about a hundred prisoners. The pursuit stopped at about one in the afternoon before the main Turkish position on the steep slopes above a deep ravine, about one and a half kilometres beyond the caravanserai.

The trap closes

Meanwhile the cavalry was making its way through one ravine after another, guided by contact aircraft which, according to F.J. Moberly’s British official history, rendered it invaluable service. At 1.50 p.m. it reached the Wadi Hauran, and at about five in the afternoon it cut the Turkish telegraph and took up a position astride the Aleppo road, about ten kilometres north-west of the caravanserai. The airmen of the Royal Flying Corps bombed and machine-gunned the Turks all day. They also spotted Turkish guns firing from barges on the Euphrates. The barges managed to get away upstream, but one of them ran aground and sank.

At 5.30 p.m., under cover of half an hour of artillery fire, the infantry of the 42nd and 50th Brigades went into the attack. Candler wrote that the clouds of dust thrown up by the shells must have blinded the Turks like a smoke screen. The British crossed the ravine with almost no losses. A company of the 6th Jats captured four machine guns and took a whole Turkish battalion prisoner, twelve officers and 250 men. At about six the main line fell, and with it four guns and many prisoners. In the evening the airmen estimated that the British had already taken more than a thousand men. At 10.15 p.m. Brooking ordered the cavalry to close the road and the river tightly, and the tired infantry to give the Turks no respite. Just before midnight the Turks tried to break through Cassels’s line. After three quarters of an hour of fighting they began to surrender.

Two prisoners

At that very moment two British officers were in Turkish hands. The day before, the aircraft of the commander of the air service in Mesopotamia, Lieutenant-Colonel John Tennant, who was flying with Major Percy Hobart to look at the Turkish position, had been hit by machine-gun fire and made a forced landing in a ravine. The airmen managed to set fire to the machine before the Turks reached them. On the evening of 26 March, as Tennant recalled, they were sitting in Haditha when at about six a horseman galloped in with news of the defeat. The guards threw them into an Arab cart and drove them all night towards Anah. The British on the Euphrates, who were just closing the ring around the 50th Division, did not yet know where their comrades had been taken.