John Nixon takes command in Mesopotamia

On 18 March 1915 General Sir John Nixon was appointed commander-in-chief of the British and Indian forces in Mesopotamia. He replaced Lieutenant-General Arthur Barrett, who since November 1914 had commanded Indian Expeditionary Force D. The change was linked to the expansion of the forces on the Persian Gulf. An army corps of two infantry divisions was to be formed from a single division.

A growing threat

After taking Qurna in December 1914 the British controlled Basra and the whole course of the Shatt al-Arab. The Turks, however, would not accept this loss. At the turn of 1914 and 1915 command in Mesopotamia was taken over by the energetic Lieutenant-Colonel Süleyman Askerî, who began to gather regular troops and volunteers from the Arab tribes in order to retake Basra. There was also concern about the situation in the neighbouring Persian province of Arabistan, through which ran the pipeline carrying oil to the refinery at Abadan. In February 1915 some of the local Arab tribes, incited by Turkish and German agents, cut the pipeline and attacked the oil installations north of Ahvaz.

The Government of India, which was responsible for the Mesopotamian expedition, decided to send further brigades to the Persian Gulf. Together with the units already in Mesopotamia they were to form a new 12th Indian Division. A force of two divisions now required a corps headquarters.

The new commander

John Eccles Nixon was 57 and one of the most experienced generals of the Indian Army. He was born in 1857 in England, passed through the Royal Military College at Sandhurst and had been an officer since 1875, spending most of his service in India. He fought in the Second Anglo-Afghan War and on the North-West Frontier, and during the Boer War he commanded a cavalry brigade. He was later Inspector of Cavalry and a divisional commander, from 1912 commanded the Southern Army in India, and in February 1915 took over the Northern Army.

Before leaving he received instructions from the Commander-in-Chief in India, General Sir Beauchamp Duff. He was to secure full British control of lower Mesopotamia, that is the whole Ottoman vilayet of Basra, and the safety of the oilfields and the pipeline in Persia. Duff also told him to prepare a plan for a possible advance on Baghdad. The strategy of the expedition was shaped in India, largely without consulting London, which was then preoccupied with the Dardanelles.

What came next

Nixon arrived at Basra on 9 April 1915 and took over command. Barrett kept the 6th (Poona) Division, but because of illness soon gave up command and left Mesopotamia on 12 April. The division was temporarily commanded by General Fry, and on 22 April General Charles Townshend took it over. Only three days after Nixon’s arrival, Süleyman Askerî attacked the British camp at Shaiba, west of Basra. The Turks were repulsed in a three-day battle, and their commander, wounded and in despair at the defeat, committed suicide.

The victory at Shaiba encouraged Nixon to take the offensive. In the following months his troops advanced up the Tigris and the Euphrates, and in September 1915 they took Kut. Nixon, increasingly convinced of Turkish weakness, brought about the advance on Baghdad, which ended in defeat at Ctesiphon and the siege of Townshend’s division in Kut. In January 1916 the ailing Nixon lost his command, and in 1917 a special commission set up to investigate the conduct of the campaign found him chiefly to blame for the failure of the expedition.