| Although the British lost almost as many
men in three years as the United States did in nine years in Vietnam, American
military officers are not required to learn about the ill-fated campaign
and its grim aftermath. The subject is missing from the military history
curricula at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, at the Army’s Command
and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and at the U.S. Army
War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pa.
But the bloodletting is remembered by the
families of the 51,800 British and Commonwealth troops — mostly enlisted
men — lost in Iraq, including Pvt. William Wilby of the 2d Norfolk Regiment,
who died of dysentery in 1916 while being held prisoner.
Barely 22, he wrote home in 1915 to apologize
for not writing more often: “I have not had the convenience, but I will
try more in the future,” he promised.
Wilby is buried in Baghdad’s North Gate
cemetery in plot 21, row I, grave number 45.
Britain was ultimately to prevail, but
its imperial experience in Iraq, a 16-year occupation that ended in 1932,
was no cakewalk, either. Its army found itself bogged down in turmoil and
insurrection as clans and tribes revolted against military rule.
Within two years, British officers were
being assassinated on city streets with sickening regularity and violent
anti-British demonstrations had become common, according to the U.S. Library
of Congress country study on Iraq. In 1920, the British had to bring in
Royal Air Force bombers to keep the peace.
While there had been some optimistic talk
of bringing democracy to Iraq, that generous impulse soon gave way to the
harsher requirements of just keeping control.
“I do not care under what system (of government)
we keep the oil,” British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour wrote
in 1918, “but I am quite clear it is all-important for us that this oil
should be available.” |
A British gunboat of
the Insect class in the advance up the
Tigris River in 1915.
Photo from the Imperial War Museum, London |
The British envisioned none of these difficulties when their forces landed
at the southern port of Basra in November 1914. At that time oil — as it
is today — was a major strategic consideration, “a first-class war aim,”
wrote Sir Maurice Hankey, secretary of the War Cabinet, as recorded in
Daniel Yergin’s 1991 history of Middle Eastern oil, The Prize.
Indeed, with the Great War under way on the continent, demand for oil
was rising so quickly that gasoline was in short supply in England. The
London Times warned its readers that private “`joy-riding’ may have to
go altogether.”
The invading force, under the command of Maj. Gen. Charles Townshend,
was made up of bits and pieces of English and Indian units. But it was
armed with gear considered not good enough for regular army, Townshend
wrote to friends at home. He also complained about inadequate logistics
support and poor communications, according to a recent account written
by Air Marshal Dick.
Townshend was intelligent, brave and charming, but also vain and dishonest,
wrote Dick in a paper on leadership for the U.S. Air Force’s Air University.
Townshend was “an egotist driven by ambition and ravenous for popular acclaim.
He craved honor, rank and the admiration of others.”
Nevertheless, Townshend’s men quickly seized Basra and took a year to
consolidate. In September 1915, still lacking logistics support, they launched
up the Tigris River toward Baghdad, carrying six weeks’ supplies. In 120-degree
heat, 11,000 men slogged upriver, dragging their boats and guns through
shallows.
They were badly outnumbered by the time they reached the outskirts of
Baghdad, where the defenders waited on both banks of the Tigris at the
town of Ctesiphon. Half the remaining British force — some 4,600 men —
fell in the ensuing carnage; the rest fled.
Townshend had provided no field hospitals and insufficient medical supplies;
those wounded who were lucky enough to be evacuated were floated downriver
on barges that took 13 days of blazing sun and freezing nights to reach
Basra.
Townshend’s retreating forces regrouped at the village of Al Kut 200
miles downstream, where Townshend estimated he had 22 days’ supplies. The
enemy laid siege. Townshend kept his beleaguered garrison of sick and wounded
on full rations and food quickly ran out.
The British made two futile attempts at rescue, accumulating some 23,000
casualties over three months of maneuvering. In one battle, the British
Tigris Corps marched an exhausting 14 days, then charged straight into
the entrenched enemy forces and was cut to pieces, suffering 4,000 casualties.
Eleven days after the fighting, an observer found more than 1,000 wounded
men still lying out in the open.
By mid-April, Townshend’s troops were starving. Men were dying of scurvy
at a rate of 10 to 20 a day. Heavy rains and lack of sanitation spread
disease. Men ate oxen, camels, cats.
“The suffering of the troops was appalling,” wrote Dick.
Townshend offered to surrender, volunteering to turn over a million
pounds sterling and all his guns, and promised that his men, if let go,
would stop fighting. His offer was abruptly refused. Several days later
Townshend surrendered unconditionally; the siege had lasted 147 days.
According to the British government’s official account, Townshend was
whisked away to the pasha’s luxurious palace in Constanti-nople, then capital
of the Ottoman Empire of which Iraq was a part, where “he lived in comfortable
captivity” for the rest of the war.
Dick is more direct: While his men were dying by the thousands from
disease and starvation, Gen. Townshend “was entertained at Constantinople’s
best restaurants and established in a splendid villa with his servants.”
His surviving men, including Pvt. Wilby, were marched, staggering under
the blows of whips and sticks, to prison camps hundreds of miles away.
One British officer, Capt. A.J. Shakeshaft of the Norfolk Regiment,
came across a straggling column of the emaciated survivors and recorded
his shock: “a dreadful spectacle — British troops in rags, many barefooted,
starved and sick wending their way under brutal Arab guards through an
Eastern Bazaar — (men) slowly dying of dysentery and neglect.”
Some 3,000 men died in captivity. Townshend was sent back to England
and peaceful retirement.
“The British army closed ranks” against any questions about his conduct
of the campaign, Dick said.
Wilby’s mother, back home in the village of Earsham northeast of London,
received a pension of five shillings a week and a letter from War Secretary
Winston Churchill conveying “His Majesty’s high appreciation” of Wilby’s
services.
In 13 little-known cemeteries in Iraq today are the graves of some 22,400
British and Commonwealth soldiers. Late last year, the British government
shipped 500 new headstones to Baghdad to replace those broken and corroded
by weather.
This is copyed only to avoid loseing it.
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