BATTLES ON THE TIGRIS
BATTLES ON THE TIGRIS
by
Ron Wilcox
First published in Great Britain in 2006 by
Pen & Sword Military
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street
Barnsley
South Yorkshire
S70 2AS
Copyright Ron Wilcox
ISBN 1 84415 430 0
eISBN 978 1 52678 166 6
Mobi ISBN 978 1 52678 1673
The right of Ron Wilcox to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Contents
List of Maps
Acknowledgements for Illustrations and Maps
General Acknowledgements
Chapter 1 Small Beginnings
Chapter 2 Ambition is Stirred
Chapter 3 Townshends Regatta
Chapter 4 The Repulse at Ctesiphon
Chapter 5 The Medical Scandal
Chapter 6 The Beginning of the Siege
Chapter 7 Attempts at Relief
Chapter 8 The Surrender of Kut
Chapter 9 A Nightmare Journey
Chapter 10 The Capture of Baghdad
Chapter 11 Advances in the North
Chapter 12 Dunsterville
Chapter 13 The End of the Campaign
Chapter 14 Consequences
Chapter 15 Aftermath
Bibliography
Maps
Lower Mesopotamia
Shatt-al-Arab operations
Fighting near Qurna
Operations near Nasiriya
Battle of Ctesiphon
Plan of Kut drawn by Mousley.
Plan of fort at Kut
Battle of Sheikh Saad
Battle of the Wadi
Battle of Umm-el-Hanna
Attack on Dujaila Redoubt
Battle of Beit Aieesa
Battle of Sannaiyat
Map showing route taken by prisoners
Battle of Mahomed Abdul Hassan
Turkish Trench system on the Hai Salient
Situation around Baghdad
Northern Mesopotamia
Battle of Jabel Hamrin
Battle of Istabulat
Battle of Band-I-Adhaim
Battle of Ramadi
Battles of Daur and Tikrit
Dunstervilles Area of Operations
Battle of Khan Baghdadi
Operations leading to Tuz
Sharqat Operations
Battle of Sharqat
Abbreviations on Maps
 | Trench lines |
| Art | Artillery |
| Cav | Cavalry |
| CB | Cavalry Brigade |
| CT | Communication Trench |
| H/Huss | Hussars |
| L | Lancers |
| M.T. | Motor Transport |
| OP | Observation Point |
| VP | Vital Point |
Acknowledgements for Portraits and Maps
Burne, Lieutenant Colonel A.H., Mesopotamia, the Last Phase , Gale and Polden (nd)
Candler, Edward, The Long Road to Baghdad , Vols I & II, Cassell (1919)
Dunsterville, Major General L.C., The Adventures of Dunsterforce , Edward Arnold (1920)
Marshall, William, Memories of Four Fronts , Ernest Benn (1929)
Moberley, Brigadier General F.J., The Campaign in Mesopotamia 1914 1918 , Official History, Stationery Office, Vol I, 1923, Vol II 1924
Mousley, E.O., The Secrets of a Kuttite , Bodley Head (1922)
One of its Officers, With a Highland Regiment in Mesopotamia 1916 1917 , The Times Press, Bombay (1918)
Sherson, Erroll, Townshend of Chitral and Kut , Heinemann (1928)
Staff College, Quetta, Critical Study of the Campaign in Mesopotamia up to April 1917 , Government of India, Calcutta (1925)
Tennant, Lieutenant Colonel J.E., In the Clouds above Baghdad , Cecil Palmer (1920)
Wilson, Sir Arnold, Loyalties Mesopotamia, 19141917 , OUP (1929)
General Acknowledgements
I gratefully acknowledge the invaluable help of Bobby Gainher in editing the manuscript and saving me from many errors, and for my sons computer expertise in preparing the maps.
Chapter One
Small Beginnings
(See Map 1)
On the day after Britain declared war on Turkey in 1914, a force of British and Indian troops landed in southern Iraq, a country then usually known as Mesopotamia. Its orders from the Indian Government were to safeguard the Anglo-Persian oilfields leased from Persia at Shushtar in southern Persia and the pipeline that ran from there down to the refinery at Abadan on the Shatt al Arab river close to Mohammera. The Sheikh of Mohammera was friendly to the British, as was the Sheikh of Kuwait on the opposite side of the Persian Gulf, but this attitude was in contrast to most of the tribes in the area.
Shatt al Arab was the name given to the combined waters of the Tigris and Euphrates on their way to empty into the northern shore of the Persian Gulf. Mesopotamia was officially the three Turkish vilayets (provinces) of Basra in the south, Baghdad in the middle and Mosul in the north, but at the time the ancient name of Mesopotamia was used by the British for convenience to describe these particular sections of the Turkish or Ottoman Empire. Its name means the land between two rivers, the two rivers being the Euphrates on the west and the Tigris further east whose waters combine near the town of Amara.
In the remote past, Mesopotamia had been a rich and fertile land, the home of some of the greatest civilizations of the Middle East. Four thousand years before, the Uruk culture of the south had invented the earliest form of Western writing on clay tablets and produced the oldest work of literature in existence The Epic of Gilgamesh and had first divided the hour into sixty minutes and the circle into 360 degrees. These people were followed by the Sumerians and later by the Babylonians with their great kings Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar who defeated Egypt, conquered Syria and Palestine, and captured Jerusalem. Their lands were converted from desert by elaborate networks of canals and channels using the waters of the two great rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris, but by 1914 the cities and the irrigation systems responsible for creating the agricultural wealth of the ancient world had collapsed, leaving behind a countryside of ruin and poverty that had mainly reverted to primeval desert and marsh.
Mesopotamia had been part of the Turkish Empire from the sixteenth century but it was only after the discovery of oil in southwestern Persia that the area became of much interest to European nations, amongst whom Britain and Germany were the most prominent. It was (and is) a Moslem country with the people of the south, from Basra to Kut al Amara (henceforward referred to as Kut) Shia Moslems, professing allegiance to the Sultan of Khalifa, and the people of the north, Sunni Moslems, who used to profess allegiance to the Shah of Persia.
