KUT-AL-AMARA
Britain's refusal to respect Turkish military competence or take local conditions into account contributed to the disaster at Gallipoli. Similar chauvinism helped create another disaster at Kut-al-Amara.
Britain regarded Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) as falling within its own sphere of influence. An expeditionary force under Sir John Nixon was despatched to consolidate British authority in the area.
The lead division, commanded by Sir Charles Townshend, was sent to secure control of Baghdad in mid-1915. However, Turkey's 6th Army (which would come under the command of Field Marshal von der Goltz later in the year) was already in the area and determined to deny Baghdad to the British.
Townshend got to within 25 miles of his objective and fought a battle at Ctesiphon before vulnerable and over-extended lines of communication forced him to retreat to Kut-al-Amara, a small town on a bend in the river Tigris, on 28 September 1916.
It was here that Townshend's naïveté came to the fore, for he believed that he merely had to wait for the arrival of reinforcements before continuing with his mission. He completely under-estimated the resilience of the Turkish army, which besieged the British troops from 7 December.
Map depicting location of Kut-al-Amara
When the British sent a boat up the Tigris to resupply Kut, the Turks captured it by stretching a cable across the river. In the end, the attempts to relieve Townshend's 13,000 men during the 147-day siege cost the British thousands of casualties.
On 29 April 1916, Townshend finally bowed to the inevitable and surrendered to the Turks. Of the 10,000 remaining soldiers who surrendered with him, only 3,000 lived to see the end of the war, an appalling blot on the wartime records of both Britain and Turkey. Townshend himself was held in comfortable captivity in Constantinople for a year and then released.
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