The Tigris in the First World War

The Tigris was the main road of the Mesopotamian campaign. Along it British and Indian troops advanced from its confluence with the Euphrates through Kut and Baghdad all the way to Mosul, while river steamers carried their soldiers, guns, supplies and wounded. Most of the campaign’s battles were fought on its banks, from Qurna in 1914 to Sharqat in 1918. The state of the water, the floods and the number of boats set the pace of the war here.

The river and its seasons

The Tigris joined the Euphrates in Lower Mesopotamia, and from there the two rivers flowed on to the Persian Gulf as the Shatt al-Arab. According to F.J. Moberly’s British official history the water began to rise after the rains in mid-November, in March the melting snows lifted it, in April and May the river was at its highest, and from August to November at its lowest. The floods therefore came not from local rain but from the thaw in the mountains of the Caucasus and Asia Minor. In the flood season almost the whole of Lower Mesopotamia lay below the water level, and the rivers were held in their beds only by low banks of heaped earth.

Navigation was difficult. Between Ezra’s Tomb and Qala Salih, on the stretch called the Narrows, vessels could not pass one another, and between Kut and Baghdad at low water the way was obstructed by shoals and winding channels. Above Baghdad the river carried mainly rafts, and small steamers went no further than Samarra. It was on rafts that Turkish reinforcements came down from Mosul.

Upriver (1914–1915)

The war reached the Tigris in December 1914, when after the occupation of Basra British and Indian troops crossed the river above Qurna and surrounded its garrison. Half a year later General John Nixon was ordered to take control of the whole Basra vilayet. On 31 May 1915 General Charles Townshend’s division attacked Turkish positions on the flooded marshes in Arab boats, and the flotilla chased the Turks so fast that on 3 June a handful of sailors accepted the surrender of more than a thousand soldiers at Amara. The British called this operation “Townshend’s regatta”.

Easy victories led them further. On 29 September 1915 they took Kut, and in November they stood before Ctesiphon, about 25 kilometres from Baghdad. The further they went, the harder they were to supply: at low water the boats kept running aground on shoals, and there were too few river steamers. The Battle of Ctesiphon cost Townshend’s division nearly 40 per cent of its men and ended in a retreat downstream.

The river of the relief (1916)

In the winter and spring of 1916 the Tigris was both a road and an obstacle. Kut, where the Turks besieged Townshend, lay in a tight loop of the river, and the Tigris Corps, marching to his relief, broke itself along its banks against one Turkish position after another: on the Wadi, in the Hanna defile, at Dujaila and at Sannaiyat. On 14 March the annual flood arrived and the water swamped some of the trenches. In April a steamer with food for the besieged caught on a cable stretched across the river. On 29 April 1916 Kut surrendered.

In May 1916 the allies met on the Tigris: a sotnia of Kuban Cossacks crossed the mountains from Persia to Ali al-Gharbi, and the Russians linked up with the British in the field for the first time. In the summer General Frederick Stanley Maude took command. New river steamers arrived at Basra, the port was expanded, and railways and roads were built.

From Shumran to Sharqat (1917–1918)

On the night of 13–14 December 1916 Maude moved against Kut. On 23 February 1917 the pontoons of the 2/9th Gurkhas crossed the Tigris under fire at Shumran, and the next day the Turks abandoned Kut. The gunboats set off in pursuit and on 26 February recaptured the gunboat Firefly, lost in December 1915. The pursuit ended on 11 March with the capture of Baghdad, which the British entered without a fight.

Above Baghdad the war now followed the banks and the railway. In April the British took Samarra, the end of the railway from Baghdad, and at the beginning of November 1917 they captured Tikrit. In the last week of October 1918 I Corps set out from Tikrit up the Tigris, and two cavalry brigades crossed the Little Zab and the Tigris and closed the Turks’ road to Mosul. On 30 October, the day the Armistice of Mudros was signed, the Turkish Tigris Group surrendered at Sharqat. According to Moberly the British took over the whole of Mosul on 10 November.

After the war

The waters of the Tigris were on people’s minds even during the war. In the partition agreement that Edward Grey accepted in May 1916, Britain secured a guarantee of water supply from the Tigris and the Euphrates from the French zone to the British one. After the war the whole lower and middle course of the river came under the British mandate for Iraq. The dispute over the Mosul vilayet dragged on for years, until the League of Nations awarded it to Iraq and Turkey accepted this in a treaty of 1926.