Renewed attack on Bushehr

On 9 September 1915 tribesmen from Tangistan again attacked Bushehr, the Persian port on the Persian Gulf which the British had occupied for a month. About six hundred attackers approached the British posts through the ravines and the flat sands, periodically flooded by the sea, that surround the town. After several hours of fighting a British counter-attack, supported by the fire of warships and a cavalry charge, forced them to retreat. It was the last serious attempt to drive the British out of Bushehr in 1915.

A new commander and the death of Rais Ali

After the destruction of Delvar in mid-August the British returned to Bushehr. On 20 August Brigadier-General Harry Brooking, commander of the 33rd Brigade, arrived there from Mesopotamia and took command of the garrison. He brought with him a staff, 50 Gurkhas trained in laying ambushes, two captured Turkish guns and searchlights. Bushehr lay on a peninsula separated from the mainland by a belt of sands which the British called the Mashila, and the British buildings, including the residency and the telegraph station, were scattered over a wide area. Brooking therefore organised a line of posts. At night searchlights swept the ground in front, and the Gurkhas lay in wait for approaching parties.

According to the British official history, the Tangistan tribes harassed the garrison throughout August and the beginning of September. On 3 September they raided the British posts. In the fighting that day Rais Ali Delvari, the leader of the July attack on the residency, was killed. Iranian sources say that he was killed on the night of 2/3 September, according to some accounts shot by a traitor from his own band. In Iran he is honoured today as a hero of the struggle against British occupation.

The battle on the edge of the sands

On 9 September at about 6.30 a.m. a patrol from Imamzadeh, on the edge of the sands, spotted about twenty enemies in the broken ground south of the Zangina post. It soon turned out that much larger forces were hiding in the ravines. A detachment of sailors with three machine guns under Captain Carpenter of the Royal Marines was sent to Zangina. One of the guns stood without cover, three hundred metres from the tribesmen. It was manned by volunteers, Lieutenant-Commander Dorman with Signaller Wood, who was soon mortally wounded. For about two hours the machine-gun fire closed the gap in the British line.

At about 10.30 a.m. Brooking went over to the counter-attack. The 96th Berar Infantry and the 11th Rajputs advanced, supported by a mountain battery, the Gurkhas and the sailors, while the cruisers Juno and Pyramus shelled the ground in front. The British then counted about six hundred tribesmen. When these began to withdraw across the sands, a squadron of the 16th Cavalry under Major William Pennington approached the enemy closely on foot, then mounted and charged the retreating men. The charge broke the attackers, but the squadron lost a third of its men. Pennington and Second Lieutenant Thornton were killed, and according to the report the squadron’s Indian officers also suffered losses.

Losses and consequences

According to the report of General John Nixon, commander of the forces in Mesopotamia, to whom Bushehr was subordinate, the tribesmen left 43 dead, 14 wounded and four prisoners on the field. They managed to carry many wounded away with them. According to studies based on this report the British lost more than 80 killed and wounded, most of them in the 11th Rajputs and in the cavalry. The British official history of the Mesopotamian campaign writes that Brooking inflicted a heavy defeat on the attackers and for a time put an end to their raids around the town. According to it, the whole operation at Bushehr, conducted in terrible heat, cost the navy and the army more than 150 killed and wounded in action, not counting the victims of the climate.

On 13 September Brooking handed over command to Colonel S. M. Edwardes and left Bushehr. The Tangistanis did not attack Bushehr again, but the struggle against the British in the south of Persia was only beginning. The German agent Wilhelm Wassmuss, who was stirring up the tribes against the British, was still active in the interior, and in the autumn pro-German officers of the Persian gendarmerie seized power in Shiraz.