First attempt to relieve Kut begins

On 4 January 1916 the advanced guard of the force that was to relieve besieged Kut set off upstream from the camp at Ali al-Gharbi on the Tigris. It was led by Major-General George Younghusband. He had under him the 7th Division, the 6th Cavalry Brigade and three new river gunboats, in all, according to the British official history (Moberly), about 13,300 combatants: about 9,900 infantry, 1,340 cavalry, 36 guns and 52 machine guns. The rest of General Fenton Aylmer’s troops, called the Tigris Corps, were to join a few days later. So began the first of three attempts to come to the aid of General Charles Townshend’s division, besieged in Kut since the beginning of December.

A race against time

Aylmer, until then adjutant-general at the headquarters of the army in India, received on 8 December from the commander of the forces in Mesopotamia, General John Nixon, the order to defeat the Turks on the Tigris and relieve Townshend. On 12 December he took command at Amara. His force was only just assembling. The two Indian divisions that had left France were arriving at Basra in batches, in disorder, often without horses, wagons and staffs, and there were not enough steamers on the river to carry them further. In mid-December Aylmer judged that Townshend could not be counted on to hold out beyond 15 January, and proposed setting off on 3 January with whatever could be gathered, even a single division and a cavalry brigade. Nixon agreed. On 29 December he sent him the order: the first objective was the relief of Kut; for the time being there was to be no advance beyond it, towards Baghdad.

Disturbing news came from Kut. After the Christmas Eve assault Townshend reported that he had lost more than 1,700 men since the beginning of the siege and that, after “unsatisfactory incidents” in the Indian battalions, he wanted a speedy relief. Aylmer would have preferred to advance with the whole corps at once, methodically, and wrote to Townshend that haste inevitably meant poorer organisation. Nixon agreed with him, and on 1 January Townshend replied that he would ask for immediate help from the advanced guard only as a last resort, because the Turks, alarmed by the approach of the relief, were turning the siege into a blockade. Aylmer arrived at Ali al-Gharbi on 1 January and put off the departure by one day, to 4 January, because the advanced guard was still not ready.

An army cobbled together in haste

By 3 January 16 infantry battalions, 17 cavalry squadrons and 42 guns had assembled at Ali al-Gharbi. The British official historian makes no secret that this force lacked cohesion. Aylmer had no proper corps staff, and the staff of the 7th Division had not yet reached Mesopotamia, so both were cobbled together from whatever officers were at hand. The three brigades making up the division had never fought together before. One of them, the 28th Brigade, had recently come under the command of General George Kemball, until then Nixon’s chief of staff, because Younghusband had been promoted to command the division. There was almost no land transport, so the force had to keep to the river and the ships. There were not enough pontoon bridges. The medical services, calculated on pre-war scales, were sufficient for roughly a third of the force. A large consignment of medical supplies was left behind in Basra by mistake and reached the front several weeks too late.

The soldiers from France, thinned out in Flanders and filled up with recruits, were used to fighting under cover of powerful artillery, of a kind not available in Mesopotamia. Some of them regarded the new front as secondary, and the Indians regretted that they were not going home. Between the “French school” and the “Mesopotamian school”, as Moberly writes, an unnecessary ill feeling arose. Nixon and Aylmer knew of these shortcomings, but both believed that Townshend had to be rescued without delay.

The first day of the march

On the morning of 4 January a violent gale from the south-east damaged the ferry boats and delayed the departure until 10.45 a.m. The troops advanced along both banks: on the right Kemball’s column with the 28th Brigade, on the left General G. B. H. Rice’s 35th Brigade, followed by the reserve with the 19th Brigade and the heavy artillery. The cavalry covered the left flank on the right bank, and down the middle of the river, level with the infantry, sailed the gunboats and supply ships. Resistance came only from two squadrons of Turkish horsemen and two to three hundred Arabs on the right bank, whom the cavalry easily drove off. By 2.30 p.m. the columns had covered the planned 14 kilometres or so and pitched camp. On 5 January they reached the eastern end of the Musandaq bend, a few kilometres short of the Turkish trenches at Sheikh Saad.

Meanwhile the Turks had also moved. On the evening of 3 January Townshend saw large columns, estimated at two divisions, moving down the left bank of the river, and on 4 and 5 January he reported that the enemy camps around Kut had emptied. According to the German officer Hans von Kiesling, the commander of the Ottoman forces on the Tigris, Nureddin Bey, taking advantage of the absence of Field Marshal Colmar von der Goltz, who had gone to Persia, decided to leave only small forces at Kut and send most of his troops to meet the relief. The British in any case overestimated the enemy’s strength: Nixon’s staff estimated the Ottoman forces around Kut and downstream at more than 25,000 rifles, whereas Kiesling gives about 20,000 in the second half of December. On 6 January Younghusband’s advanced guard came up against the trenches at Sheikh Saad.