The capture of Baghdad

General Maude enters Baghdad on horseback at
the head of his troops on 12 March 1917

As covered in the 1916 year end post (see 23/12/2016) a second and better planned advance by the British Army in Mesopotamia had begun. Stung by the humiliation and the tragedy of the siege of Kut (see Post 1/2/2016), honour was to be restored by Sir Stanley Maude’s leadership of the Mesopotamia Expeditionary Force (MEF). His force was 50,000 strong, comprising two Army Corps. By the end of December, the MEF, supported by better supplies and communication lines, had advanced to envelop Kut, and turn the tables on its Turkish garrison, which had only the river Tigris as an escape route to the north. Nevertheless, in conditions of widespread flooding from torrential rains it took several weeks of battling and manoeuvring for the MEF to take the city. A two-pronged approach was led by Lt. Gen. Cobbe VC on the right bank and Lt. Gen. Marshall on the left bank. Both army corps performed magnificently in dreadful conditions. On 24^th February, just ten months after Townshend had spiked his guns and surrendered his garrison, Cobbe’s forces entered Kut, and the British gunboats were able to come upstream and anchor in the city.

From here, things moved rapidly. A pursuit by Marshall’s troops of the northwardly retreating Turks followed shortly. The terrain alongside the tortuous course of the Tigris upstream allowed for advances by British cavalry forces as well as the infantry – a rare occurrence in World War 1. The cavalry reached the river town of Laj on 5^th March, and to the east the infantry took Zeur, seven miles south of Laj, and an eighteen miles march on the road from Kut. By 7^th March they had reached Diala, nine miles south of Baghdad, where the tributary river Diala joins the Tigris. At this point the Turks made a determined stand to protect Baghdad, and fierce resistance to Marshall’s infantry was encountered. That night a furious dust storm incapacitated both sides. By morning the Turks had withdrawn and the British groped their way to Diala station. On the right bank, Cobbe’s forces had made good progress in parallel, prompting the Turks to abandon their defences there, and shortly after Baghdad itself. By mid morning Marshall entered the centre of Baghdad to a tumultuous welcome from the local population. British troops burst into the arsenal, where they found the guns spiked on Townshend’s orders ten months earlier.

If not a major strategic victory, this was a tremendous morale boost for the British, and more generally for the Allies. This was the first major city to be captured by any allied force. Most of all, for the British, after the shame of Gallipoli and Kut, this restored some of their prestige in the middle east, and lifted spirits at home (although Churchill makes no mention of it in The Great War).

Great credit was due to Maude, the Commander of the MEF since July 1916. Acting somewhat against the orders of Sir William Robertson (Chief of the Imperial General Staff and a staunch Western Front man), he had built up his forces for the campaign, encouraged by pro India politicians, especially Curzon, the previous Viceroy. When, in December 1916, Robertson changed his mind due to Russian success further north, Maude was ready to sweep into action.

Maude - 'liberator' of Baghdad

Sir Herbert Stanley Maude (not to be confused with Maude Stanley of Five Dials fame) was a quintessential upper class British officer, although more successful than most of his contemporaries. With a lineage extending back to the Norman Conquest, and a military father who won the VC at the Crimea, Maude excelled at both Eton, where he was cross-country champion, and at Sandhurst. He performed heroically in Autumn 1914 in Flanders, when he was injured and invalided to England; and at Gallipoli, where in December 1915 he was the last man to be evacuated from the ill fated landing at Suvla Bay (see Post 14/10/2015). His command of the technically challenging Baghdad campaign was exemplary. Sadly he did not live long to celebrate his achievements. Later in 1917 when leading actions towards Ramadi and Tikrit, he succumbed to a fulminating attack of cholera, and died suddenly at the age of 53 in November. An impressive statue of him in Baghdad as the city’s liberator from the Ottomans survived until a government coup in 1958 (see photo). He also has a memorial in the Brompton cemetery in London, alongside that of his father.

For Turkey, the loss of Baghdad was a crushing blow, signifying further shrinkage to its Ottoman Empire, and offering encouragement to an Arab revolt far to the south, where Lawrence of Arabia would grasp the British public’s attention within a few months.