Lake replaces Nixon

On 19 January 1916 at Basra General Sir John Nixon handed over command of the British and Indian forces in Mesopotamia to Lieutenant-General Sir Percy Lake and sailed from Basra. This date is given by the British chronology of the war and the official history (Moberly). The 1917 report of the Mesopotamia Commission speaks of 18 January. Lake, until then chief of staff of the army in India, had been appointed as successor a few days earlier, when Nixon, seriously ill, had himself asked to be relieved.

Things were bad at the front. General Fenton Aylmer’s Tigris Corps, advancing to the relief of Townshend’s division in Kut, stood before the Turkish trenches in the Hanna defile, between the Tigris and the marshes. It had been raining for several days. The swollen Wadi stream had swept away the bridges, the bridge over the Tigris had broken up again, and the ground had turned into a quagmire in which pack animals could barely move. The last instruction Nixon sent Aylmer, on 18 January, said that after reaching Kut the two corps were to hold the town together, since abandoning it along with its guns and stores would be a blow to prestige. Aylmer concluded that he had no choice but to attack Hanna as soon as possible.

Nixon’s departure

The British official historian takes leave of Nixon with appreciation. He recalls that for his first six months in Mesopotamia, overcoming great difficulties with modest means, Nixon had achieved unbroken success, which no other British commander on any front could then claim. When his leading troops stood on the road to Baghdad, he knew that the government wanted the city taken for political reasons, and judged that he must not let the opportunity slip. He lost. Moberly quotes the Mesopotamia Commission’s verdict that the advance on Baghdad was based on political and military miscalculations and was undertaken with tired, insufficient forces, without proper preparation, but adds that some of those on the spot attributed the failure to plain bad luck. The Viceroy of India in 1910–1916, Lord Charles Hardinge, said of Nixon before the commission: “The British Empire has been built up by men of his grit and stamp.”

The commission, whose report was published in 1917, nevertheless judged him severely. It found that he was responsible for recommending successive advances in 1915 without sufficient transport and equipment, and blamed him for the consequences of the shortage of river craft. It considered his responsibility for the sufferings of the wounded separately. Nixon died in December 1921.

Lake’s first steps

At Basra Lake found a bottleneck. Reinforcements and supplies were arriving faster than they could be sent up the river, there was a shortage of labourers, wharves and storehouses, and most of the ground stood in mud or water. Moberly states that on 21 January about 10,000 infantry and 12 guns were waiting at Basra, unable to be moved to the front for lack of steamers. One of Lake’s first decisions was to develop the port at Makil, up the Shatt al-Arab from Basra: embanking the ground against floods, a broad wharf and new landing stages at which ships could moor. The building of roads and flood embankments was also speeded up, including a bund about 14 kilometres long, from Makil almost to Shaiba. Lake visited the hospitals in Basra and judged that the medical service was coping not too badly in very difficult conditions. He did not learn from the patients at the time how badly the wounded had been treated up the river. He also looked into the possibility of building a railway along the Tigris, but the bridges over the Euphrates alone would have required six months’ work, so for the time being he ordered from India only a light railway for the port.

The Mesopotamia Commission later observed that if anyone in India could have understood the difficulties of war in Mesopotamia, it was Lake, who had for years been chief of staff at Simla and had dealt with the campaign daily. Before the commission, however, he admitted openly that he had fully grasped the scale of the obstacles only when he took command on the spot. Soon the direction of the whole campaign changed too. In February 1916 the War Committee in London accepted a proposal by General William Robertson: from then on instructions concerning operations in Mesopotamia were issued by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, as on other fronts, and India remained only the expedition’s main base. Lake commanded in Mesopotamia until August 1916.