First attack on Sannaiyat

At dawn on 6 April 1916 the British-Indian 7th Division of General George Younghusband attacked the Turkish position at Sannaiyat, on the left bank of the Tigris, about 24 kilometres downstream from besieged Kut. The day before, the 13th Division had taken the positions at Hanna and Fallahiyah, and the commander of the Tigris Corps, General George Gorringe, wanted to strike before the Turks had time to dig in. The attack broke down under machine-gun fire, a few hundred metres short of the Turkish trenches.

The plan relied on surprise. Airmen reported that the left flank of the Turkish position, by the Suwaikiya marsh, recently uncovered by the receding water, had no trenches yet. Under cover of darkness the 19th and 28th Brigades were to move along a Turkish communication trench that led from Fallahiyah straight to Sannaiyat and attack this flank at 4.55 a.m. The distance was estimated at about 4.5 kilometres. Younghusband had no time to carry out a reconnaissance, because the assault on Fallahiyah had been postponed to the evening, and a new sketch map, issued on 5 April, showed a distance more than a kilometre and a half greater. The British official history (Moberly, The Campaign in Mesopotamia) admits that this one was closer to the truth.

The march went badly from the start. Wounded men and units of the 13th Division returning from Fallahiyah were passing through the assembly area, so the brigades did not set off until just before two in the morning, in column of route rather than in deployed formation as planned. The night was very dark. While crossing the captured trenches at Fallahiyah the columns lost their way at least once and had to turn back. The commander of the 28th Brigade, General George Kemball, considered that they would no longer be able to attack before dawn and proposed digging in under cover of darkness as close to the Turks as possible. Younghusband, convinced that the troops were closer than Kemball thought, nevertheless ordered the attack. By 5.30 a.m. it was light enough to see objects a few hundred metres away, but the Turkish trenches were still not visible. A north-westerly wind was driving water out of the marsh and narrowing the strip of dry land to about 350 metres.

A few minutes later violent rifle, machine-gun and artillery fire from both banks of the river fell on the 28th Brigade and then on the 19th Brigade. The war correspondent Edmund Candler called it a “torrent of death”. A battalion made up of drafts for the 1st Battalion of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, shut up in Kut, and the 51st Sikhs advanced about another 200 metres and came to a halt a few hundred metres from the Turkish line. Of this battalion’s 13 officers and 266 men, all the officers and 220 men were killed or wounded. Moberly recalls that on the same day, 104 years earlier, their predecessors had won fame at Badajoz. Nothing could be done without artillery support, so both brigades dug in where they stood. Kemball was also wounded, but nevertheless remained in command until the afternoon.

Gorringe wanted to renew the attack during the night, but once again the weather prevented him. The wind drove water from the marsh into the trenches on the 7th Division’s right flank, and the Tigris rose above the highest level of the year and threatened to join up with the marsh. By 1 p.m. some of the 28th Brigade’s forward trenches had to be abandoned, and at 2.40 p.m. Gorringe called off the night attack. The two brigades lost 1,168 men that day. Moberly notes that the Turks carefully avoided firing at the stretcher-bearers. In Kut the cannonade from the direction of Sannaiyat was heard in the morning, and the garrison’s guns shelled the Turkish crossing at Magasis until a mirage obscured the view. Townshend received no news of the fighting at all that day. Gorringe was to try again at Sannaiyat on 9 April, this time with a night attack by the 13th Division.