Surrender of Kut

On 29 April 1916, after a siege of 147 days, General Charles Townshend surrendered Kut on the Tigris to the Ottoman forces. In the morning he destroyed his guns and ammunition, and in the afternoon the Turks entered the town. According to the British official history (Moberly, The Campaign in Mesopotamia, vol. II), the garrison numbered 13,309 men that day: 10,061 soldiers, including 2,592 British and 6,988 Indian rank and file, and 3,248 Indian followers. It was not an assault that forced them to surrender, but hunger. After the failure of the third attempt at relief and the unsuccessful voyage of the Julnar, there was no longer any hope of rescue.

The last rations

On 21 April the food in Kut ran out, apart from the meat of slaughtered animals, the parcels dropped from aircraft and a two-day reserve of iron rations. This reserve was spread over four days, from 22 to 25 April: each soldier received about 170 grams of biscuit and the same amount of tinned meat a day. From 26 April the men lived only on what the airmen dropped, about 110 grams of food per head per day. Between 15 and 27 April the aircraft dropped a total of just under 8 tonnes of supplies, the most on a single day being little more than 900 kilograms. According to Townshend’s reports, an average of fifteen men a day were dying of dysentery, and many suffered from scurvy. The Indian troops, who had long refused to eat horsemeat, were the weakest of all.

As early as 23 April, the day after the last failed attack at Sannaiyat, Townshend wrote to the commander in Mesopotamia, General Percy Lake, that relief would not arrive in time, and proposed negotiations: the Turks would take over the town and the garrison would sail downriver. Lake decided to make one more attempt to run food into the town by ship, and asked London and India for permission to negotiate should that fail too. On the morning of 25 April it emerged that the Julnar was stuck at Magasis.

Negotiations

At 3.30 a.m. on 26 April Lake instructed Townshend to open negotiations. Townshend could offer the Turks one million pounds sterling, and later there was even talk of two million. Lake assigned to help him the head of intelligence on his staff, Colonel Beach, and two captains: Aubrey Herbert, a member of the House of Commons and an expert on Turkey, and Thomas Edward Lawrence of the intelligence staff in Cairo, later “Lawrence of Arabia”, who had been sent to Mesopotamia in the spring partly to try to bribe the Turkish commanders. Townshend wrote to Halil Bey (Halil Kut), commander of the Ottoman forces, asking for a six-day armistice, for food to be let through and for the garrison to be released with its arms to India. He invoked the honourable terms the Austrians had granted Masséna at Genoa in 1800. Halil replied courteously that after so heroic a defence Townshend and his soldiers would be received in Turkey as the Russians had received Osman Pasha, the defender of Plevna.

On 27 April complete silence fell over Kut. Major Sandes, one of the defenders, recalled that after months of din it was extraordinary. Townshend met Halil in the cabin of a Turkish motor launch about two and a half kilometres upriver from the town. Halil was most courteous but demanded unconditional surrender. Only when money was mentioned did he promise to consult Enver Pasha. On 28 April Townshend offered 40 guns and one million pounds for the release of the garrison on parole. Enver’s reply was unequivocal: the Turks wanted all the men, the guns and the equipment, and only Townshend could go free, if he gave his word not to fight against Turkey and her allies until the end of the war. According to German accounts, Halil himself advised Enver to release the garrison on parole. Townshend decided that his duty was to go into captivity with his men.

The day of surrender

At six in the morning on 29 April Townshend sent Halil a letter saying that hunger forced him to surrender, and asked for food to be sent at once. Beforehand his men had destroyed the guns and most of the ammunition. It proved impossible to block the river channel with sunken boats, as Lake had wished, because the water was too high. At 11.40 a.m. Townshend reported this to Lake, and at 12.42 p.m. that a Turkish regiment was approaching the fort to take over the guard. At one in the afternoon the wireless station sent “goodbye” and was destroyed. Townshend and General Charles Melliss were ill, so the town was handed over to the Turkish divisional commander by General Walter Delamain. From two in the afternoon the garrison began moving to a camp at Shumran upriver, mostly on foot, because there were not enough boats. The Turks issued no rations to the prisoners until the following day, and then gave them biscuits as hard as stone. Meanwhile they had the Julnar in their hands with over 200 tonnes of British food.

That same day Beach, Herbert and Lawrence came out of the British trenches under a white flag. Herbert later described in his book Mons, Anzac and Kut how they were led blindfold through the Turkish lines and then on horseback to Halil’s tent. Halil was polite but did not hide his anger that Townshend had destroyed the guns he had been counting on. He said he could have prevented it with shellfire but had not wished to. He agreed to exchange the most seriously sick and wounded for Turkish prisoners. He refused, however, to give any assurances regarding the Arab inhabitants of Kut who had helped the British. He regarded them as Ottoman subjects whose fate was no concern of the British. Herbert noted that Halil had seen Townshend that morning and that the general had a slight fever.

Captivity and repercussions

Over the following days the Turks handed over to the British 1,136 of the most seriously sick and wounded. At the beginning of May Townshend left by steamer for Baghdad and from there for Constantinople, where he remained an honoured prisoner until the end of the war. He spent most of his captivity in a villa on the island of Büyükada in the Sea of Marmara. The fate of his soldiers was entirely different. The starving rank and file were driven on foot to Baghdad and on into Anatolia, and according to the British official history, of the roughly 12,000 men who went into captivity over 4,000 died. The British blamed the Turks for this, while some historians attribute these deaths to extreme neglect and incompetence rather than deliberate policy. The town’s inhabitants were also victims of the surrender: the Turks hanged several of those who had helped the British.

In Constantinople the victory was celebrated, while in Britain the news was received as a humiliation. Historians often write that no British force so large had surrendered since Yorktown in 1781. As early as 2 May, in the House of Lords, Viscount John Morley demanded papers on the “unfortunate and deplorable affair at Kut”, and the government promised to produce them. Thus began the reckoning over the expedition that in the summer led to the appointment of the Mesopotamia Commission. The commander of the Ottoman Sixth Army, Field Marshal Colmar von der Goltz, had died ten days earlier, so in Turkey the victory was credited above all to Halil.