Kut in the First World War

Kut (Kut al-Amara), a small town in a tight loop of the Tigris, became in the First World War the name of the heaviest British defeat in the Middle East. Taken in September 1915 on the way to Baghdad, from December it was the place where the Turks besieged General Charles Townshend’s division until, on 29 April 1916, hunger forced it to surrender. For more than a year the battles of the Mesopotamian campaign were fought around the town, and in February 1917 the British recovered it as a ruin.

A town in a loop of the Tigris (1915)

Before the war Kut lived on the grain trade, the grain arriving down the Shatt al-Hai, a channel that left the Tigris here towards the Euphrates. Caravan routes also led from the town to Baghdad and northwards to Mandali on the Persian border. About 6,000 inhabitants, mostly Arabs but also Jews, Sabians and Nestorian Christians, lived in a few hundred houses and mud huts around a covered bazaar. The whole little town occupied the end of a peninsula that the river surrounded on three sides.

The commander of the British forces in Mesopotamia, General John Nixon, wanted to take it because it lay just beyond the boundary of the Basra vilayet, and from here the Turks could threaten both Amara on the Tigris and Nasiriyah on the Euphrates. In the first battle of Kut on 28 September 1915 Townshend’s division drove the Turks from the Es Sinn position, and the next day its cavalry and flotilla entered the town without a fight. Nureddin Bey’s Ottoman army, however, escaped upstream, and according to Nixon the expedition’s line of supply grew by about 250 kilometres.

The siege (1915–1916)

After the Battle of Ctesiphon the exhausted division returned to Kut on 3 December to wait there for relief, and on 7 December the Turks began to close the ring around it. Townshend allowed more than 6,000 permanent inhabitants to stay, because if driven out in winter they would have perished in the desert. The town held 11,607 soldiers and about 3,500 Indian followers. The hospitals were set up in the covered bazaar, which held about 1,450 patients. The division’s senior medical officer, Colonel Hehir, later testified that it was the most insanitary place the British had occupied in Mesopotamia.

Field Marshal Colmar von der Goltz forbade further assaults and decided to starve the town out, and the Christmas Eve attack was the last Turkish attempt to take it by force. From January to April 1916 the Tigris Corps tried three times to break through from downstream, at Sheikh Saad, at Dujaila and at Sannaiyat, and lost more than 23,000 men in under four months.

The inhabitants shared the garrison’s fate. Townshend requisitioned their stores, and according to F.J. Moberly’s British official history 247 of them were killed and 663 wounded during the siege. On 14 March the annual Tigris flood arrived and the water swamped some of the trenches. From 15 April aircraft dropped food to the besieged, but too little, and a steamer with supplies that tried to break through to the town caught on a cable stretched across the river and fell into Turkish hands.

Surrender and captivity (1916)

On 29 April 1916, after 147 days of siege, Townshend surrendered the town. He and his second in command were both sick, so Kut was handed over to the Turks by General Walter Delamain. 13,309 men went into captivity, among them 3,248 Indian followers. The Turks hanged some of the inhabitants who had helped the British. Townshend was taken by steamer on 3 May through Baghdad to Constantinople, where he was well treated for the rest of the war.

The rank and file met a far worse fate. On 6 May, when nearly 300 of them had already died since the surrender, they set out on foot from Shumran to Baghdad. The Turks promised that the column would not march more than eight miles a day, but kept their word for only one day. Arab guards drove the stragglers on with sticks and whips, many men died by the roadside, and at Aziziyah the 350 weakest were left behind. From Baghdad the prisoners were driven on to the railway and the camps in Anatolia. Of about 12,000 men more than 4,000 died. Moberly put the blame above all on Turkish negligence in providing food and clothing.

For the Turks it was, alongside Gallipoli, the greatest success of the war, and the victor, Halil Pasha, later took the surname Kut. In London the defeat caused a storm, and the Mesopotamia Commission passed severe judgement on the authorities in India and on the expedition’s command.

The British return (1917)

The town was recovered by General Frederick Stanley Maude. On the night of 13–14 December 1916 he opened the second battle of Kut, on 23 February 1917 he forced the Tigris at Shumran, and on 24 February the Turks abandoned Kut. That evening Maude telegraphed that the town now had only sentimental value. On the morning of 25 February sailors from the gunboat Mantis found it deserted and in ruins and raised the British flag over it. Less than two weeks later Maude’s troops entered Baghdad.

The surrender of 1916, however, remained in British memory as a humiliation. Historians often write that no British force of that size had surrendered since Yorktown in 1781. The town itself, badly damaged in the war, was afterwards rebuilt almost from scratch.