Ottawa Citizen January 4, 2003 Saturday Final Edition
SECTION: Saturday Observer; Pg. B3
HEADLINE: Been there, done Iraq: As the U.S. again eyes Iraq, Britain and Canada can reflect on the disastrous 1914-18 campaign to take what was then Mesopotamia. Bill Twatio reports on what one British general colourfully called the 'Bastard War.'
SOURCE: The Ottawa Citizen
BYLINE: Bill Twatio
An Arab proverb has it that when Allah created hell, He found it wasn't bad enough so He made Mesopotamia -- and added flies. Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, has another name today: Iraq. But does the proverb still hold true?
"Desert Storm" swept through in 1991, the troops gone before they could weigh the truth of the saying. But to the soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force -- including scores of Canadians -- who fought both the Turks and the elements here from 1914 to 1918, it was an understatement. Historians have called it the "war in the cradle of the world," or "war in the Garden of Eden," referring to legends and biblical stories situating Eden in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. British general George Gorringe called it "The Bastard War," saying it was ignored as a "sideshow and no man's child."
Conducted in an intolerable hell of heat, mud, floods -- and Allah's ubiquitous flies -- the campaign in Mesopotamia, then a province of Turkey, proved to be as costly in lives as the debacle in Gallipoli.
"It passeth my understanding," a Punjabi trooper muttered after disembarking at Basra, "why the British Government should be interested in this Satan-like land," according to British military historian A.J. Barker.
It also passed the understanding of the Canadians who served in the Royal Engineers, the boat crews of the Canadian Pioneer Training Depot, and the 40 officers "of strong character, adventurous spirit, and good stamina," seconded in 1916 to the group from the Canadian Expeditionary Force in France.
British interests lay not so much in Mesopotamia, but in the Gulf, particularly in the Shatt-al-Arab, the estuary in southern Iraq where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers meet. Oil had been discovered in southern Persia (modern-day Iran) in 1908 and Abadan at the mouth of the Shatt had been developed as a great oil-shipping port by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.
In 1914, the British Admiralty acquired a controlling interest in the company to ensure a secure supply of fuel for its new oil-driven warships. This and other long-standing British interests in Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait were increasingly challenged by Turkey and its ally, Germany.
German influence in Turkey, which had been growing since the 1880s, was powerful by the outbreak of war: The country's administrative services were run by German advisers and the Turkish army was commanded by a German general. It was even rumoured that the Kaiser's family was descended from the Prophet Mohammed's sister, and that the Kaiser had embraced Islam and made the pilgrimage to Mecca; Kaiser Wilhelm became known as "Hadji Mohammed Guilliano, Saviour of Islam and Sword of the Lord."
In August 1914, Germany and Turkey signed a secret treaty of alliance. With the outbreak of war in Europe, Turkey massed troops in Palestine and invaded Egypt. A cry for jihad, or holy war, went out to all Muslims from the caliph of Constantinople, urging them to rally around the Turks and their allies.
The British were accused of wanting to wage war in order to rifle the tomb of the Prophet and add his bones to the collection in the British Museum. The British, duly provoked, declared war on Turkey on Nov. 5, 1914. Canada, still a self-governing colony, had been at war since Britain declared war on Germany on Aug. 4 that year.
Loaded down with Keating's anti-insect powder, carbolic soap, and mosquito nets, British Expeditionary Force "D," under Gen. Arthur Barrett, sailed from Bombay on Oct. 16 in anticipation of hostilities, to the strains of regimental bands playing Goodbye Dolly Grey.
The campaign, which initially involved a hastily organized, joint Anglo-Indian force some 15,000 strong, was conducted quite separately from Britain's military operations in Europe and the Mediterranean, with Indian army headquarters in faraway Simla, in northern India, responsible for command and logistical support.
This arrangement was to prove disastrous: The army had already been hobbled by pre-war budget cuts and ancillary services were totally inadequate. Trained to fight on the Indian North-West Frontier, it lacked heavy artillery and was not prepared for a foreign expedition.
Even so, the forces were very successful at first, occupying Fao opposite Abadan at the mouth of the Shatt on the morning of Nov. 5, while the Royal Navy's Gulf Division steamed 72 kilometres upstream to Basra, which they took handily. The Turks fell back on Qurna at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, which fell on Dec. 19. More than 2,000 Turks surrendered; British losses were 27 dead and 292 wounded.
Early in the New Year, Gen. Barrett fell ill and was succeeded by the stubborn and irascible British Gen. J.E. Nixon. Force "D" dug in around Qurna, a time-consuming and frustrating task, as groundwater lay just below the surface.
Street signs in the camps reflected the biblical associations of so many place names in Mesopotamia. "Eden Gardens" crossed "Eve's Walk," which ran into "Temptation Square." When the winter rains arrived, however, streets and signs alike sank into a quagmire, with tents popping up like islands in the soggy plain. One disgusted Canadian complained that "if this is the bloody Garden, it wouldn't take no bloody angel with a flaming sword to turn me back. This here is the land of sweet 'eff all with a river up it."
The British forces amassed reinforcements at Qurna, bringing in some 40,000 more soldiers by March 15, 1915.
A parade of visiting dignitaries passed through, including Lord Hardinge, the viceroy of India, and Sir Percy Cox, the chief political officer, who suggested that the British hold onto Basra after the war to further ensure British access to the area's vast oil reserves.
But London urged caution, refusing to sanction any further advance beyond Qurna. "Our present position is strategically sound," the War Office cabled, "and we cannot afford to take risks by extending it unduly. In Mesopotamia, a safe game must be played."
The British had quickly and cheaply achieved all the objectives of the expedition, securing the oil fields and forestalling a Turkish advance to the south. But pre-war budget cuts had left the reinforcements critically short of transport and medical services, and the British made no special provisions to make up for those shortfalls, even after the war broke out.
Unfortunately, what had been intended as a strictly defensive measure became a full-scale, costly offensive as the domes and minarets of Baghdad beckoned to ambitious generals.
Baghdad was of no strategic importance. However, the War Office came to see its capture as a means of restoring British prestige in the Middle East following the debacle at Gallipoli in what is now Turkey. It was there that 10,000 British, French and Australian troops were slaughtered in a futile attempt to take the Dardanelles, the straits that separate European and Asiatic Turkey. Gen. Nixon was given guarded approval to move his forces north.
Gen. Charles Townshend, a great-grandson of Lord Gordon Townshend, Gen. Wolfe's successor at Quebec, began the advance at the end of May 1915. Townshend, a showman in the Montgomery mould, was a 54-year-old veteran of some half-dozen campaigns and an amateur violinist who was known to regale his staff with impromptu concerts.
British and Canadian troops under his command developed a great affection for him, referring to him as "Our Charlie," although the Indians never took to him in the same way, referring to him as "the new General Sahib."
The troops set off, relieved to be leaving the monotony of Qurna behind. A ramshackle fleet of gunboats, sternwheelers, and barges dubbed "Townshend's Regatta," manned in part by Canadian sailors with experience in British Columbia's coastal waters, followed them along the Tigris carrying supplies, it never having entered the official mind to use the river to transport troops. Three thousand mules and 1,200 camels were deemed sufficient.
By the time the troops had set off, the Mesopotamian summer had already begun. Relief at leaving Qurna soon gave way to despair as the troops slogged forward in temperatures exceeding 45C degrees, the only relief coming from a northwest wind the Arabs called "The Blessing."
The flies became unbearable, covering all exposed skin as well as food and cooking utensils. Rain, when it fell, left a sea of mud overlaid by floodwater. There were few landmarks and mirages distorted the terrain, inducing a strange sense of isolation. Sheep and camels were continually mistaken for enemy patrols.
At Sharba Bund, such a mirage saved a British detachment when the Turks mistook a supply train for cavalry, drawing them away from the troops. Heatstroke, fever, and dysentery ravaged the ranks, and medical personnel could not cope with the growing number of sick and dying. An officer recalled a burial detail:
"Before we had gone half the distance, a man went down with heatstroke, and was carried back limp and twitching. As the corpse was being lowered into the grave, one of the men on the ropes stumbled forward and fell into the grave on top of the dead body, and as we fell in to march back, another man went down.
"Luckily we had brought a spare stretcher, and with one man on this and the other on the stretcher on which the dead man had been carried to the grave, we returned. We had buried one man, and lost three others over the job."
The local Arabs -- "Boodhoos" to the troops -- dogged the rearguard and flanks, sniping and ever ready to strip, loot, and murder any luckless soldier who fell behind. The wounded were dispatched with a knock to the head or a handful of sand thrust down the throat. Their bodies were sometimes disinterred and decapitated as it was said that the Turks offered gold for British heads.
Nominally the Arabs were fighting for the Turks, but there was no trust between them. Given the opportunity, they would murder and loot the Turks as well, without the slightest compunction. One captured Turkish officer told a British interrogator: "It would be better if we could join hands and make an end to these scavengers. We could settle our own differences later."
In truth, the Arabs favoured neither the British nor the Turks. To them, the war was a great nuisance. Both sides ruined their fields, dug trenches in their crops, cut down their date palms and treated them with contempt. Regarded as alien infidels by a sullenly hostile population, Gen. Townshend's discouraged troops sang a ditty called The Alphabet, a stanza of which ran:
W stands for the wonder and pain
With which we regard our infirm and insane
Old Generals who run this campaign
We are waging in Mesopo-tamia.
Nasiriyah, which was enveloped by American troops during the Gulf War, fell on July 24. The British marched into Kut, a filthy, fly-blown town of 7,000 souls, strategically located at the junction of the Tigris and the Shatt-al-Hai, southeast of Baghdad, on Sept. 8.
Gen. Townshend was now 480 kilometres upstream from Basra and about 260 kilometres from Baghdad at the end of a fragile supply line, and was reluctant to move on without reinforcements.
In his diary, he noted that "personally, I had no doubts in my mind ... (about) this advance, an offensive undertaken with insufficient forces ... in a secondary theatre of war, where our strategy should have been to have remained with minimum forces sufficient for that purpose. All my study indicates disaster to me."
Gen. Nixon ordered him to advance.
Gen. Townshend moved swiftly and arrived at Cstesiphon, 50 kilometres southeast of Baghdad on the night of Nov. 22, where he found the Turks dug in along a double line of defences anchored on an imposing, centuries-old arch.
Taking up the cry: "Are we downhearted? No! No! No!" his troops broke through both lines three days later and were pressing on to capture the guns in the rear when the situation was dramatically reversed by the arrival of Turkish reinforcements from Baghdad.
Townshend was forced to retreat after suffering 4,500 casualties. The wounded were carried to the river in terrible agony as they were jostled about on springless water carts and sent south to Basra by ship, a 10-day journey.
Maj. E.M. Carter, a medical officer, described the arrival of one ship:
"When the Medjidieh was about 300 yards off, it looked as if she was festooned with ropes. The stench when she was close was quite definite, and what I mistook for ropes were dried stalactites of human feces. The patients were so crowded and huddled together on the ship that they could not perform the offices of Nature clear of the ship's edge and the whole of the ship's side was covered."
Maj. Carter was silenced by senior officers when he protested against conditions and was threatened with the loss of his command because he was "an interfering faddist."
Gen. Nixon cabled the headquarters at Simla that "general conditions of wounded very satisfactory. Medical arrangements under circumstances of considerable difficulty worked splendidly."
Gen. Townshend pulled out of Ctesiphon on Nov. 26 and began to fall back on Kut. Beating back the pursuing Turks on Dec. 1, he brought his force safely into town the following morning.
Surrounded, but full of fight, he issued a communique to his troops:
"I intend to defend Kut and not to retire further. Reinforcements are being sent at once to relieve us. The honour of our Mother Country and the Empire demands that we all work heart and soul in the defence of this place.
"We must dig in deep and dig in quickly. We have ample food and ammunition, but we must husband that ammunition and not throw it away uselessly. The way you have managed to retire some 80 or 90 miles under the very noses of the Turks is nothing short of splendid, and speaks eloquently for the courage and discipline of this force."
The Turks attacked on Dec. 10 and were beaten back five times in the course of the day. They attacked again on Christmas Eve and succeeded in breaching the outer defences. Again and again that evening they tried to force the main line, but called off the attacks after losing more than 2,000 men, many of them to the bayonet in hand-to-hand fighting. Exhausted, the troops in Kut sat down to a hastily improvised Christmas dinner.
Meanwhile, fresh troops were arriving in Mesopotamia. Gen. Nixon, his notorious temper approaching apoplectic fit, had resigned for reasons of health and was succeeded by Sir Percy Lake.
Gen. Fenton Aylmer, an old friend of Gen. Townshend's, was commissioned to bring relief troops to Kut, managing to get his troops as far as Umm-al-Hanna, 25 kilometres south of the town. There his troops found the Turks dug in behind five lines of trenches, with the Tigris on one side and a swamp on the other. An attack on Jan. 21 faltered after 2,741 men were lost and Gen. Aylmer was brought to a dead halt.
Meanwhile in Kut, the garrison was being subjected to air raids and constant artillery barrages. Gen. Townshend was forced to reduce rations by half and began to slaughter his transport animals. Morale plummeted when Gen. Aylmer's relief attempt failed and hit bottom when another force, led by Gen. Gorringe, was forced back on April 17.
Khalil Pasha, the Turkish commander, called on Gen. Townshend to surrender as the last mule went into the pot in the besieged town. Gen. Townsend radioed Sir Lake:
"... I think you should see if Khalil will allow my garrison to go down and join your force, Kut being given up to the Turks. These would be honourable terms. Besides, the Turks cannot feed my force. They have not enough ships to take it to Baghdad, and if it had to march, the force would all die, both from weakness and Arab bullets. In three or four days the men will be so weak as to be incapable of all exertion, and such are the stenches in Kut that I fear pestilence at any time."
The War Office in London had taken over responsibility for the campaign from Simla headquarters on Feb. 16. Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, the commander-in-chief of the British army, proposed a large bribe to relax the Turkish grip on Kut. Capt. T.E. Lawrence was dispatched from Cairo to make the arrangements, arriving in Basra on April 5.
Capt. Lawrence, soon to be famous as "Lawrence of Arabia," reported to Sir Lake's headquarters, where he informed him that he been authorized to spend one million pounds in gold to purchase the co-operation of Gen. Khalil or his deputy.
Sir Lake reluctantly agreed and Capt. Lawrence, accompanied by Col. Beach, the head of military intelligence, and Capt. Aubrey Herbert, was sent north to negotiate. Col. Beach described his companion in a letter home: "My other pal was a little man called Lawrence -- archeologist, captain, general staff 'for the war' -- from Egypt Intelligence. Knows Turkey and Asia well. Jolly good fellow."
A crewman aboard the steamer carrying the party upriver, said of Capt. Lawrence that, "dressed up, he looks just like one of them bloody Arabs."
On the morning of April 22, they walked into no-man's-land toward the Turkish lines, Capt. Lawrence limping on an injured knee. Capt. Herbert noted in his diary: "Beach, Lawrence, and I went out of the trenches with a white flag and walked a couple of hundred yards or so ahead, where we waited with an unpleasant battlefield smell all around us. It was all a plain, with the river to the north, and the place crawling with huge black beetles and singing flies that had been feeding on the dead."
They were blindfolded and led to Gen. Khalil, who declined their offer, realizing the propaganda value of an unconditional surrender. They returned to Basra the following day. Capt. Lawrence stayed on for a time as an adviser on the use of aerial photography, then limped back to Cairo, his hour yet to come.
A week later, Gen. Townshend radioed: "Turkish regiment approaching to take over guards in Kut. I have hoisted the 'White Flag' over town. Troops commence going into camp near Shumran at 2 o'clock. Will shortly destroy the wireless as it is worn out as it is. To all ships and stations from Kut. Goodbye & good luck to all."
He destroyed the remainder of his supplies, smashed his guns, and surrendered with the 14,000 men of his command. It was the largest capitulation of a British army since Lord Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781, ending the American Revolutionary War.
The troops were paraded through the streets of Baghdad, where they were jeered and spat upon, then force-marched across northern Iraq into Anatolia. A survivor recalled the march:
"Some fell and those with the rearguard came in for blows from cudgels and sticks. Some were thrashed to death, some robbed of their kit and left to be tortured by the Arabs. Men were dying of cholera and dysentery, and often fell out from sheer weakness."
Gen. Townshend spent the rest of the war in comfort in a villa in Constantinople, being allowed leave to attend dinner and hunt with his captors. More than 10,000 of his men died.
The surrender at Kut was a tremendous shock to the British public. Indeed, the press had referred to the campaign to this point as the "Mesopotamian Picnic." All communications from the area had been strictly censored. There were no stories of pain, bungling, and incompetence. The defeat, and treatment of the wounded, now became a scandal of Crimean War proportions. Questions were raised in the House, letters written to the Times of London.
Sir Lake was replaced by Gen. Sir Stanley Maude, who the press popularized as the "Man of Mesopotamia." He was a tall, imposing man who had been severely wounded in France at the beginning of the war and later commanded the 13th Division at Gallipoli.
Troops poured in, bolstering his force to 340,000 men. Aircraft began to fly bombing missions. Flying conditions were abysmal, with wooden airframes warping in the heat and sand clogging parts. A notice in Arabic, Turkish, Kurdish, and Farsi was fastened to each plane stating that a reward would be paid for downed aircrew returned to British lines.
Gen. Maude was the first to realize he had to develop the country in order to conquer it. Port and river facilities were improved with steamers and barges requisitioned from as far away as the Thames. Roads were built and a railroad pushed through to Nasiriyah. Irrigation projects were begun and 300,000 acres of land in the south were brought under cultivation to feed the troops.
The offensive resumed at the end of November 1916, this time with quick success. The strategic cities of Sanniyat, Hai, Amara and Babylon fell and Kut was retaken. On March 10, 1917, British troops forced the Diyala River and stormed the trenches at Tel Mohammed, the last defended position before Baghdad. The Turks fell back, forced to abandon plans to create a moat around Baghdad by breaching the drainage and irrigation canals.
The next day, Gen. Maude entered Baghdad. The population of this polyglot city of 140,000, who had jeered Gen. Townshend the year before, turned out to cheer Gen. Maude. A deputation of Arab and Jewish notables met him at the Southern Gate and he rode into the city with the cavalry through delighted crowds of turbanned Muslims, Jews, Persians, and Armenian refugees. Following a flowery proclamation, the Union Jack was hoisted over the citadel.
As well as being the toast of Baghdad, Gen. Maude became the most popular military leader in the Empire, the man who had brought the army out of chaos, salvaged the campaign, and secured the victory. The fruits of victory, however, were short-lived for the Man of Mesopotamia. He died of cholera on Nov. 18, contracted from a glass of contaminated milk drunk at a reception following a performance of Hamlet presented in Arabic by the Israelite Alliance of Baghdad.
Desultory fighting continued in the north for months to come until Gen. Townshend was brought out of captivity to negotiate an armistice, which went into effect on Nov. 1, 1918, almost four years to the day since the first troops had landed at Fao. In that time, the British had suffered close to 100,000 casualties. Although scores of Canadians had participated in the troubled campaign, none were killed.
Mesopotamia became a League of Nations mandated territory under British control following the war. In 1920, 10,000 were killed in a revolt against direct British rule before a monarchy under King Faisal was established in 1921. He was proclaimed king of the secular state of Iraq following a plebiscite on Aug. 23, 1921, and most of the British troops withdrew, leaving behind a string of RAF bases to police the country.
When the Second World War broke out, the British had not forgotten the lessons of the Mesopotamian campaign. They reoccupied the country immediately to avoid being drawn into another costly campaign.
Many years later, the former Capt. Lawrence wrote in his book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom:
"We pay for these things too much in honour and in innocent lives. I went up the Tigris with 100 Devon Territorials, young delightful fellows, full of the power of happiness and of making women and children glad. By them one saw vividly how great it was to be their kin, and English. And we cast them by thousands into the fire to the worst of deaths, not to win the war, but that the corn and rice and oil of Mesopotamia might be ours. The only need was to defeat our enemies, Turkey among them ... All our subject provinces are not worth one dead Englishman."
Bonar Law, the Canadian-born British prime minister, was more succinct. In 1922, he concluded the acrimonious House of Commons debate on the Mesopotamian campaign with the words: "I wish we had never gone there!"
by Editor on January 10, 2003 at 12:27 PM