Start of the pursuit to Baghdad

On the morning of 25 February 1917, while sailors from the gunboat Mantis were raising the flag over the abandoned town of Kut, the troops of General Frederick Stanley Maude were already moving up the Tigris after the retreating Ottoman army. After the Second Battle of Kut, XVIII Corps numbered, according to the Turkish officer Muhammad Amin, about 10,000 soldiers, exhausted by two months of fighting and a night march. Maude wanted to deal it a few more heavy blows before it could break away. A pursuit began which, two weeks later, brought the British to Baghdad.

At six in the morning the advanced guard of the 13th Division, with the 38th Brigade and a squadron of Hertfordshire Yeomanry, set out from the Shumran peninsula along the left bank of the river, the route which, for lack of water, the main Turkish forces also had to take. The cavalry division, delayed by late rations, set off three-quarters of an hour later, in a wide arc to the north, to outflank the Turks and cut them off at Bughaila. Airmen reported that the enemy’s main forces were already in the Bughaila area, covered by a rearguard of about 1,500 rifles and 17–20 guns dug in along an old canal north of the river at Imam Mahdi. Muhammad Amin wrote that the Turks had occupied this position in the early hours and, despite extreme fatigue, dug trenches until dawn, because although the position was supposed to have been prepared, in reality nobody had fortified it.

At about 11 a.m. the 38th Brigade ran into the Turks and came under heavy artillery fire. It was supported by Captain Wilfrid Nunn’s river flotilla: Tarantula, Mantis, Moth, Gadfly and Butterfly had passed the bridge at Shumran at eight and shelled the Turkish positions. At noon the attack stalled a few hundred metres from the trenches. In the afternoon the 39th Brigade struck the enemy’s left flank, took two lines in the canals with the bayonet and captured several hundred prisoners, but a Turkish counter-attack, supported by fire from concealed positions, threw back some of its battalions, and in the confusion many of the prisoners escaped. The fighting went on until two in the morning. The cavalry division fought dismounted all afternoon against a second group of the rearguard and failed to reach Bughaila, as Maude had wished. At dusk, with no water for the horses, it withdrew to the river. The 13th Division lost 556 men that day, the cavalry 69. Aircraft dropped 94 bombs on the retreating Turks and their steamers, and in the evening forced the steamer towing the pontoon bridge from Bughaila to cast off its tow, so that the boats drifted away with the current.

Muhammad Amin admitted that XVIII Corps had not had time to prepare its position and had been outflanked on the left, but thanks to the resistance of the 51st Division and the enemy’s lack of resolution it slipped away more than 30 kilometres upriver during the night. The British official history (Moberly, The Campaign in Mesopotamia, vol. III) believes he had the cavalry in mind, but defends it: Mesopotamia was unfavourable to mounted operations, and Maude required its commander to report by wireless every hour, which cramped his initiative.

The pursuit gathered pace the next day. On 26 February the gunboats caught up with the Turkish vessels in the Nahr al-Kalek bend, under fire from three sides, and recaptured the gunboat Firefly, which the British had abandoned at Umm al-Tubul in December 1915, as well as the steamer Basra with several hundred wounded. On 28 February General William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, passed on to Maude the decision of the War Cabinet: he was permitted to press the enemy in the direction of Baghdad. The British entered the city on 11 March 1917.