Fighting on the Wadi

At seven in the morning of 14 January 1916 General George Younghusband’s brigade commanders reported that the Turkish trenches on the Wadi stream, a few kilometres up the Tigris from Sheikh Saad, were empty. The day before, Lieutenant-General Fenton Aylmer’s Tigris Corps, advancing to the relief of the division besieged in Kut, had fought a hard battle here. The British chronology of the war records the fighting on the Wadi under 14 January, but according to the British official history (Moberly, The Campaign in Mesopotamia) the actual fighting took place on 13 January, and on 14 January the British occupied the abandoned position and moved up to the next one.

A week after the Battle of Sheikh Saad Aylmer wanted at last to destroy the Ottoman forces, not merely push them back. When airmen reported that the Turks were digging in behind the Wadi, he sent Younghusband’s 7th Division north by night to cross the stream above the Turkish trenches and get into their rear, while General George Kemball’s 28th Brigade was to pin them from the front. On 13 January fog, the steep banks of the Wadi and the slow crossing of the guns delayed the turning movement. The Turks had time to move reserves to the threatened flank and dig in facing north. Younghusband, convinced that his brigades were closing a pincer on the enemy, was in fact stuck a few kilometres from the river. In the afternoon the 28th Brigade advanced frontally across the flat, open plain and reached the bank of the stream, but cross-fire from machine guns stopped it. By nightfall it had lost 648 men.

During the cold and rainy night Field Marshal Colmar von der Goltz, who had just arrived at the front, ordered the Ottoman troops under Halil Bey (Halil Kut) to break contact with the British. The withdrawal to a prepared position in the Hanna defile, between the Tigris and the Suwaikiya marsh, went unnoticed. On the morning of 14 January the 35th Brigade reached the river and moved upstream along its bank, but soon came up against a line of trenches about 1,200 metres long, barring the entrance to the defile from the river to the marsh. Aylmer demanded a proper artillery preparation before an attack, and a gale and downpour delayed it so much that the attack never took place. The gunboats Gadfly and Cranefly tried to move upstream, but accurate fire from the Turkish guns forced them to turn back. The storm carried away a large part of the pontoon bridge being towed up from Sheikh Saad.

For Aylmer it was a bitter disappointment. The British lost 1,613 men in the fighting on the Wadi. Aylmer estimated the Turkish losses at 2,000, but later research in the Turkish archives points rather to about five hundred. Once again there was no way of treating and evacuating the wounded. In the evening Aylmer reported to General John Nixon that the Turks in the defile had to be driven out before his troops could advance further towards Kut, and that he now faced soldiers of an entirely different class from before, mostly Turks. That night heavy rain began again. The British official history writes that rain, gales and floods were the Turks’ best allies in those weeks. A week later the Tigris Corps had to attack the Hanna defile frontally.