Second Battle of Qurna begins

On 31 May 1915 General Charles Townshend’s British 6th (Poona) Division attacked the Turkish positions on the Tigris north of Qurna, which the British had taken in December 1914. The British chronology of the war calls this engagement the “second action at Qurna”. It opened the advance upriver that the commander of the British forces in Mesopotamia, General John Nixon, had planned after the victory at Shaiba. Its objective was the town of Amara, further up the Tigris, an important centre of Ottoman administration and of trade with Persia.

Attack in boats

The spring flood had turned the area around Qurna into a shallow lake overgrown with reeds. The Turks held the sandy hillocks rising out of the water, which the British named Norfolk Hill, One Tower Hill, Gun Hill and One Tree Hill, and behind them, on both banks of the river, they had their main position. They could neither be outflanked nor reached by wading. The infantry of the 17th Brigade therefore went into the attack in bellums, long, narrow Arab boats propelled by poles. According to the British official history 372 of them were prepared, of which almost 300 were to carry about 2,600 soldiers. The battalions had practised handling them for weeks. The mountain guns and machine guns went on rafts. The officers, and with them Townshend himself, had serious misgivings about such an attack and preferred to wait until July, when the waters would fall, but Nixon ordered the attack.

At five in the morning, at sunrise, the Turkish posts came under fire from howitzers and heavy guns at Qurna and from the ships of the Royal Navy flotilla. Townshend directed the battle from the deck of the sloop Espiegle. Just before six the boats moved forward. At 6.30 a.m. the 22nd Punjabis, who since one in the morning had been pushing their boats through the shallows on the left bank, took One Tree Hill. At about 7.30 a.m. a battalion of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry jumped from the boats in front of Norfolk Hill and took it by storm. At 9.30 a.m. One Tower Hill fell, where the British found the apparatus for electrically firing 24 mines laid in the river. After eleven the garrison of Gun Hill surrendered, to which the 103rd Mahrattas had been forcing their way through dense reeds.

The day’s result

Before noon all the advanced posts were in British hands. They had been defended mainly by Arab soldiers of the Ottoman army under Turkish officers. Over 250 of them were taken prisoner, and on Norfolk Hill alone 75 defenders were killed. British losses were negligible. According to the official history, in the whole operation, up to the capture of Amara, they amounted to 4 killed and 21 wounded. The British owed this unexpectedly easy success above all to their superiority in artillery, for which the hillocks rising out of the water were an easy target. Both British aircraft, which had begun flying in Mesopotamia only a few days earlier, also circled over the battlefield.

The main Turkish position at Abu Aran, Ruta and Muzaibila remained untouched. In the great heat, after many hours of pushing the boats, Townshend halted the attack and issued orders for the next day. He expected a stubborn defence, but on the morning of 1 June it turned out that the Turks had abandoned their positions and were fleeing up the Tigris. The British flotilla set off in pursuit, which on 3 June brought it to Amara.