Third attempt to relieve Kut begins

On the night of 31 March – 1 April 1916 the British 13th Division began taking over the trenches facing the Turkish position in the Hanna defile on the Tigris, relieving the exhausted 7th Division. On the same day the commander of the Tigris Corps, General George Gorringe, issued the operation order for the third attempt to relieve General Charles Townshend’s division, besieged in Kut since December. According to the British official history (Moberly, The Campaign in Mesopotamia), the order had blanks for dates and times, because it was not known when the weather would allow an advance. Gorringe wanted to begin on 1 April itself. Immediately after the relief began, however, rain poured down and went on until 2 April, and the attack had to be put off until the morning of 5 April.

After the defeat at Dujaila on 8 March, Gorringe, who a few days later replaced General Fenton Aylmer, changed the plan. Instead of outflanking the Turks on the right bank, where the route could easily be flooded, he decided first to take the successive lines of trenches on the left bank: at Hanna, Fallahiya and Sannaiyat, in the narrow strip of dry land between the river and the Suwaikiya marsh. He reckoned that with two bridges over the Tigris he could move troops from bank to bank faster than the Turks, who had only a ferry crossing at Magasis. He wanted to complete the first stage by 8 April, because according to Townshend the food in Kut would last until 15 April.

The main striking force was to be the 13th Division of Major-General Frederick Stanley Maude, made up entirely of British units, veterans of Gallipoli. By 24 March its infantry had reached Sheikh Saad, but a thousand of its transport carts were stuck in the floods. To keep the Turks from discovering the arrival of the new division, some of the Indian soldiers were left in the front line for the time being. The sappers pushed forward to about 140 metres from the Turkish trenches, and the artillery destroyed the wire entanglements and the dams with which the Turks protected themselves from the water. In mid-March the Tigris reached its greatest floods. The water undermined the embankments on both banks and flooded roads and trenches, and on 24 March the river reached a level considered the highest that year. There was also a shortage of aircraft: three new machines were not due to reach the front until 2 April.

According to the official history, Gorringe had just over 30,000 infantry and 127 guns. He estimated the Turkish forces at Kut at about 30,000 infantry, but Moberly judges that in reality there were about 20,000. The weakest point was supply. On 2 April the staff in Basra pointed out that the Tigris Corps had food for only seven or eight days, so the columns with 32 guns, cavalry, 2,600 infantry and transport, which were coming up the river road, were halted at Amara. Moberly writes that once again bad weather and the shortage of river steamers prevented all the forces from being assembled in time.

In Kut the rain of the first days of April added to the misery of the hungry garrison. Townshend could not tell his soldiers the date of the attack, because the town was swarming with Turkish spies. On 2 April he reminded Gorringe that he could not help him across the river until the relief force stood opposite the town. Gorringe replied that he was counting on the garrison’s cooperation only in the final phase, on the left bank. On 4 April the ground had dried enough for the final orders to be issued, and the commander in Mesopotamia, General Percy Lake, arrived at Sheikh Saad. At dawn on 5 April the 13th Division advanced on Hanna.