War Office takes over the Mesopotamian campaign

A British chronology of the war records under 16 February 1916 that the War Office took over control of operations in Mesopotamia from the India Office. This ended an unusual arrangement under which the expedition to the Tigris and Euphrates had been directed since November 1914 not by London but by the Government of British India and the Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army, General Beauchamp Duff. The British official history (Moberly) gives no single date for the change, and the report of the Mesopotamia Commission of 1917 says only that the War Office took control of the expedition “early in February 1916”. The decision itself was taken in London on 3 February, and the authorities in India accepted it on 10 February.

Too long a chain of command

The custom that expeditions based on India were directed by the government in Simla was an old one and had its merits when knowledge of local conditions mattered most and India could itself provide the troops needed. In Mesopotamia this was no longer enough. By the end of January 1916 General Charles Townshend’s division had been besieged at Kut for nearly two months, and General Fenton Aylmer’s corps, marching to its relief, had been repulsed at Hanna. Reinforcements could now come only from Britain, from Egypt or from other fronts.

On 26 January, under the impression of the defeat at Hanna, the War Committee of the Cabinet instructed the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General William Robertson, to prepare an appreciation of the situation in Mesopotamia, and the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, to consider whether the way the campaign was directed should be changed. Robertson, who had headed the General Staff since December and believed that operations on all fronts must at last be coordinated from London, prepared a memorandum in which he called the existing system “undoubtedly cumbrous”. The War Committee’s decisions travelled through the Secretary of State for India to the Viceroy, from him to the Commander-in-Chief in India, and only from him to the commander in Mesopotamia. The War Office did not even have accurate figures on the strength and distribution of the troops on the Tigris, yet it had to supply men and ammunition whenever India’s resources proved insufficient. Events in Mesopotamia, over which it had no influence, thus affected the fronts for which it was responsible.

A new division of responsibilities

On 3 February the War Committee accepted Robertson’s proposal, subject to the Viceroy’s opinion. The Secretary of State for India, Austen Chamberlain, summarised it the same day in a private telegram to the Viceroy, Lord Charles Hardinge, and accepted it with relief. Neither he nor the Viceroy could provide any more troops, so they depended on the War Office in any case. Responsibility and power had been divided, and the new system was to unite them in the hands of the Imperial General Staff under the supervision of the Cabinet. On 10 February Hardinge replied that he and Duff accepted the new arrangement wholeheartedly, and the same day Duff informed General Percy Lake, commanding in Mesopotamia, who had taken over command less than a month earlier.

From then on, instructions on operations in Mesopotamia and Persia were to be issued to the Commander-in-Chief in India by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, on behalf of the Secretary of State for War and on the basis of the War Committee’s decisions, exactly as to commanders on other fronts. India remained the main base of the expedition, and Duff continued to administer it. Whatever India could not supply, the War Office was to send from other parts of the Empire. Lake was to send his reports, strength returns, requests for reinforcements and proposals for senior appointments to India and to London at the same time, and to order drafts for Indian units and equipment from India through Duff as before. Robertson and Duff were to communicate directly.

Reinforcements and the other side

The change coincided with the first major reinforcements from outside. On 7 February, when it became clear that Lake could receive and feed a new division and that Townshend had food in Kut until mid-April, Robertson ordered the transfer to Mesopotamia from Egypt of the 13th Division, withdrawn from Gallipoli and being reorganised in Egypt, and of a mountain artillery brigade. Its first units reached Basra on 27 February. Heavy guns, high-explosive shells and trench mortars were a different matter. The Master-General of the Ordnance at the War Office, General Stanley von Donop, later admitted to the Mesopotamia Commission that until March or April 1916 his department could do little to help India.

On the same day, 16 February, the commander of the Ottoman Sixth Army in Mesopotamia, the German Field Marshal Colmar von der Goltz, drew up his own appreciation of the situation. In his view the four Turkish divisions on the Tigris, each of 4,000–5,000 men, were together weaker than the combined forces of Aylmer and Townshend, and the position could become dangerous if the Russians, who were just then taking Erzurum, advanced further.

The Mesopotamia Commission later judged that the War Office’s takeover of the expedition had done the troops good, especially in matters of supply. In July 1916 London also took over the entire administration of the campaign, and India ceased to be responsible for it.