Voyage of the Julnar

On the evening of 24 April 1916 the river steamer Julnar, plated with steel and loaded with 270 tons of food, set off up the Tigris from Fallahiya. She was to slip past the Turkish positions by night and deliver supplies to General Charles Townshend’s division, besieged in Kut. Had she succeeded, the garrison would have gained about a month, and the Tigris Corps time to prepare another attack. After the last, failed attack on Sannaiyat it was the only hope of saving the town.

The idea of sending a ship had been considered earlier by General Percy Lake, commanding in Mesopotamia, but it had been rejected. He returned to it on 12 April, when the commander of British naval forces in the East Indies, Vice-Admiral Rosslyn Wemyss, arrived at the front. The admiral judged the chances to be very slight. He agreed to make the attempt as a last resort, provided the general assured him that success would genuinely improve the chances of relief. Wemyss chose the Julnar, a steamer of the Lynch shipping company built in England in 1908. She was prepared at Amara, officially for service on the Euphrates, but according to the British official history (Moberly, The Campaign in Mesopotamia) many people knew her real purpose, the Turks among them. Almost every sailor of the river flotilla volunteered. Command was given to Lieutenant Humphrey Firman of the Royal Navy. His second in command was Lieutenant-Commander Charles Cowley of the naval reserve, who had sailed the Tigris with the Lynch company for more than thirty years and had earlier been master of the steamer Mejidieh. The crew was completed by Engineer Sub-Lieutenant W. L. Reed and twelve unmarried sailors from the gunboats.

The Julnar cast off after dark, at 7 p.m. according to the official history, at 8 p.m. according to the command’s report and the naval history. British artillery and machine guns opened fire to drown the noise of her engines and distract the Turks. The night was cloudy and moonless, but the Turkish outposts soon spotted the ship. Against the current, swollen by the spring floods, the Julnar could make at most six knots. At Sannaiyat she came under heavy machine-gun and rifle fire, and from the Es Sinn position under gunfire as well. Just before the bend at Magasis a shell hit the bridge. Firman was killed outright, and the wounded Cowley took command. A few minutes later the ship ran into a cable stretched by the Turks across the river, swung round with the current and grounded on the right bank, opposite a Turkish fort. She could not be got off and the crew had to surrender. According to various accounts, she was about 13–15 kilometres short of Kut.

In Kut the soldiers heard the firing on the river banks drawing nearer. At about midnight a burst of heavy firing came from the direction of Magasis, and then silence fell. At one in the morning Townshend reported that the ship had not arrived. In the morning airmen saw the Julnar in Turkish hands. Since 15 April British aircraft had been dropping food to the besieged, but there was too little of it to prolong the defence. Now there was no other way left to feed the garrison.

The Turks took the five wounded sailors and the rest of the crew prisoner. Cowley was separated from them and disappeared without trace. The Turks first stated that he had been found dead on the ship, and later that he had been shot while trying to escape. According to rumours and testimony gathered after the war, the Turks executed him because they regarded him as an Ottoman subject and could not forgive him for the help he had given the British. Cowley himself had said earlier that if he fell into their hands he would be executed. Firman and Cowley were awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously, gazetted in February 1917. The navy had regarded the expedition as a forlorn hope from the start. Moberly wrote that the navy and the nation had every reason to be proud of it. A few days later Kut capitulated.