March to Baghdad

The opening phase of the advance went spectacularly well against numerically superior opposition in difficult and hostile terrain and climate, most of the Ottoman forces fleeing or surrendering with comparatively little fighting. Townshend began his advance on 31 May 1915 when he had his 18-pounder artillery guns open fire on the Ottoman trenches while his men in the bellums outflanked the Ottoman positions.^[30] He called his advance on Amarah "Regatta Week" as his fleet began what he called a "vigorous and rapid pursuit by the naval flotilla on Amarah".^[31] He had a very low opinion of the Marsh Arabs whom he regarded as "great scoundrels and even murderers" good only for looting, dismissively referring to them as the "Salvation Army".^[32]

In the Ottoman Empire, the state religion was Sunni Islam and the Marsh Arabs, being Shia Muslims, were oppressed by the Ottoman state; Townshend could have won the Marsh Arabs over to the Allied cause had he been willing to take the time to cultivate them.^[32] A moment in the campaign that captured much attention occurred when Townshend sailed into Bahran on the Espiegle at about 2:00 am to promptly capture the town without a shot being fired, a dramatic action that in the minds of the public sealed his heroic aura.^[31] To move faster, he transferred his headquarters to the armed steamer Comet, which he personally led into the town of Kila Salih, where its one 12-pounder gun cut down the Ottoman cavalrymen guarding the town. Townshend wrote that "Kila Salih seemed a town as large as Kurna. There was a great display of white flags on all the houses ...".^[32]

He met with a local sheik to tell him that 15,000 Anglo-Indian troops were advancing on Amarah, misinformation which, as intended, was promptly reported to the Ottoman commanders at Amarah.^[32] Amarah was taken on 3 June 1915, largely by bluff, with 2,000 Ottoman soldiers captured as prisoners of war.^[26] After taking Amarah, Townshend issued a press release-which completely ignored the role of his Indian soldiers, claiming that a mere 25 British soldiers and sailors commanded by himself had taken Amarah.^[30] At Amarah, he took as one of the prizes of war a gigantic Persian carpet, which he had shipped back to England.^[33] He was popular with his men. McKnight of Sandhurst stated in an interview:

Occasionally his quirky sense of humour plays quite well with the men. There was an occasion early on in the siege where he does a snap inspection twenty-four hours earlier than was expected and discovers the officer in command of the particular redoubt desperately trying to change into something a little bit more formal with no clothes on. Townshend insists the guy accompanies him on the inspection then and there with no clothes on, which obviously the officer hated, but would have been loved by the men in the trenches!^[30]

An extremely aggressive commander whose natural inclinations were for the offensive, Townshend was all for taking Baghdad, and his successes encouraged him.^[28] In a letter to his wife, he described his advance:

...such a rapid, hard-hitting pursuit after a victory has hardly a parallel. Eighty miles without stopping, and I was so excited and never going to sleep and so determined to destroy the Turks that I ate nothing! My constant watchword was 'Smite hip and thigh-the sword of the Lord and Gideon!'^[28]

A very capable tactician with all the natural aggression of a cavalryman and highly ambitious for a promotion, Townshend was quite prepared to take risks, and he was rewarded by his successful advance up the Tigris.^[28]

After taking Amarah, he, like his many of his men, fell ill after drinking dirty water, and suffering from severe diarrhoea and vomiting, he left his command for a modern hospital in Bombay to recover. The ordinary soldiers who fell ill were not so privileged and had to manage as best they could with a ramshackle medical system.^[33] The American journalist James Perry wrote despite the overwhelming need for hospital ships to provide better medical care that "The idiotic Nixon still hadn't provided hospital ships or ambulances or nurses or ice and electric fans".^[33]

Townshend wrote bitterly that Kurna was the supposed location of the Garden of Eden, while Amarah was said to have been the Garden of Tears where Adam and Eve had been banished from the Garden of Eden, saying that the latter description was quite correct, as Amarah was a "thief-ridden incubator of dysentery, sunstroke, malaria and paratyphoid".^[33] The intense heat (the average daily temperature ranged from 100 to 123 Fahrenheit) imposed immense strain on his men, who were always very thirsty and drank from the river Tigris despite warnings that the water was unsafe to drink, causing them to contract dysentery.^[28] The ships that took wounded men down the Tigris for the hospitals in Basra appeared to have ropes hanging from the deck, which were actually stalactites of human faeces, as the ships lacked proper facilities for treating care of the men, who were so closely packed together that they were unable to defecate clear of the deck.^[28]

It was not until later in the summer of 1915 that Townshend returned to his command.^[34] He reported that if he could defeat the Ottomans at Kurna, he could take Baghdad at once, which led Nixon to reply that he was looking forward to riding into Baghdad in triumph on a white horse.^[30] On 23 August 1915, Townshend reported to London that if he defeated the Ottomans "and stampeded them, as at Kurna, he was willing to take the responsibility of entering Baghdad".^[18] He noted that it was about 500 miles from where he was to Baghdad and that he was "undermanned as regards land and water transport", lacking enough ships and wagons to supply a drive to Baghdad, but reflecting the optimistic mood, wrote "Sir John Nixon told me to send him a wire if I intended a rush into Baghdad, as he might be able to come on in time to enter Baghdad with me."^[18] As long as the outcome of the Battle of Gallipoli was in doubt, the Ottomans exerted all of their efforts there and largely ignored Townshend's "Regatta up the Tigris". However, by August 1915 it was clear that Gallipoli was a stalemate following the failure of the British to break out after their landings at Suvla Bay, which ended the last British chance of victory there. The deadlock was strategically an Ottoman victory, as it prevented the Allies from taking Constantinople. With the Allies contained at Gallipoli, the Three Pashas who now ruled the Ottoman Empire sent a substantial force of Turkish infantrymen under General Nureddin Pasha to stop Townshend.^[34] Before the arrival of Nureddin, Townshend had been facing Ottoman Arab units which were of lesser quality as compared to the ethnic Turkish Ottoman units.^[35] The core of the Ottoman Army had always been Turkish peasant conscripts from Anatolia, well known for their toughness and tenacity in combat.^[36] As he was soon to learn, the ethnic Turkish units in the Ottoman Army were far tougher opponents than the ethnic Arab ones.^[34][35]

Townshend had learned from aerial reconnaissance that Nureddin Pasha had dug in with about 8,000 Turkish infantrymen from Anatolia and about 3,000 Arabs recruited locally. Townshend's plans called for the Minimum Force (Column B) to attack the strongest Ottoman position, while the Principle Mass (Column A) was to encircle the Ottoman position and attack from the rear.^[18] At Kut, he sent his "Principle Mass" at a weak point in the Ottoman lines, only for General Hoghton, who was commanding the "Principle Mass", to get lost in the desert during a night advance.^[30] Townshend's diversionary force of the Dorset Regiment and the 117th Mahrattas, which was supposed to distract the Ottoman forces, instead ended up taking the entire weight of the Ottoman counter-attack, which at times came close to crushing the Anglo-Indian force.^[30][18] Townshend later wrote that "The whole point of the Mass on the enemy's weakest point was thus lost and it went near to costing us the battle".^[18]

Facing disaster, the "luck of the Townshends" then came into play; General Hoghton finally found the Ottoman camp and attacked from the rear, leading to a collapse of the Ottoman forces. The Sikh soldiers of the 22nd Punjab went about enthusiastically killing as many Muslims as they could during that attack. The Anglo-Indian forces had taken such heavy losses at Kut that Townshend was unable to order a pursuit of the retreating Ottoman Army.^[30] He lost 1,229 killed and wounded, and owing to the poor medical care, most of the wounded were to die in the following days. The smell of the wounded flesh and human excrement, together with the lack of tents for sheltering the wounded (who were left to lie out in the open), attracted vast hordes of flies which mercilessly tormented the wounded, dying soldiers. There was such a shortage of splints to treat smashed limbs that the medical officers had to break apart the wooden cases of Johnny Walker whisky to provide makeshift splints.^[18]

After his victory, Townshend issued a bombastic press release which claimed that "The Battle of Kut-al-Amara can be said to have been one of the most important in the history of the British Army in India!".^[37] After this, the campaign's objectives were extended to encompass the town of Kut-al-Amara, further up the river, which was captured after a set-piece battle on 28 September 1915. The victorious passage of the campaign received much coverage in the British Empire's press, which was encouraged by a British Government anxious for good war news for the public to counteract the military difficulties it was experiencing in Europe on the Western Front and at Gallipoli.^[6] Strachan in a 2000 interview stated:

Townshend in the first three months in Mesopotamia achieves a stunning series of successes. He was expected to break through Turkish defences and capture the town of Amara, but he was not expected to do this with a motley fleet of steamers pursuing the Turks in his own personal steamer and actually taking Amara with something like 70 men holding 1,000 prisoners. It was a spectacular advance, very bold, very imaginative and, of course, in 1915 nowhere else in the First World War was there any similar spectacular success, so Townshend overnight becomes a British sensation. He's a success story and that's something that he can build on to make his career go further.^[30]

Townshend was impressed with the news that the German field marshal Baron Colmar von der Goltz had been sent to stop him, not the least because Goltz was a very respected military historian whom he regarded as his equal, unlike the Ottoman officers whom he held in contempt.^[30] Enver Pasha had sent Goltz primarily not to retake Basra, but rather "to prepare for the independent war against India" as Enver had plans to invade Persia and Afghanistan with the aim of taking India.^[38] The ambitious Townshend desperately wanted to be promoted to lieutenant general and have the command of a corps, and he believed that taking Baghdad was the best means of achieving both.^[34] The Francophile's hero was Napoleon, and some of his colleagues reported he developed "some of the quirks and mannerisms of the First Consul".^[18] By this stage in the campaign, he believed that he could win enough bold "Napoleonic" victories to ultimately make him commander-in-chief of the entire British Army.^[18] One officer who knew him commented that he was "excellent company when one could get him off the subject of Napoleon" and that he "discoursed at great length" about the victories of his ancestor, Charles Townshend.^[8]

At this point, Townshend suggested halting at Kut-al-Amara to gather strength in men and material before attempting an advance upon the city of Baghdad, but General Nixon was convinced by this time that the Ottoman Army was of a sufficiently inferior quality that there was no need, and dash was what was required rather than a more cautious strategy. Townshend reported "These troops of mine are tired and their tails are not up, but slightly down".^[39] The Dorset Regiment was down to only 297 men fit for combat, and he expressed worry about the quality of the Indian replacements being sent to him.^[39] He always demanded that Nixon supply him with two divisions to take Baghdad, but never asked that Nixon do something to improve his logistics, which become more and more tenuous as he advanced farther and farther away from Basra.^[28] Given his supply problems, his demands for another division or two would have increased his logistical difficulties, requiring landing additional supplies at Basra, which was already a hopelessly clogged bottleneck.^[28] Townshend told Nixon that he needed at least another division to take Baghdad and hence a promotion to command the newly created corps, which Nixon refused for reasons of spite rather than because of logistics.^[37]

The Ottoman caliphate had proclaimed a jihad against the British Empire in November 1914, and by 1915, there was serious discontent among the Indian Muslim soldiers who were extremely unhappy about fighting Ottoman Muslims on behalf of the British. By contrast, the Hindu and Sikh soldiers stayed loyal to the British. By the autumn of 1915, Townshend, faced with increasing desertions by his Indian Muslim troops, sent all of his Muslim soldiers, numbering about 1,000, back to Basra, saying that Indian Muslims would rather desert than fight other Muslims (however, Townshend retained the Muslims to serve as support troops).^[37] The Indian Muslims complained that it was blasphemous that they should be expected to fight near the tomb of Suliman Pak, the barber of the Prophet Mohammed and preferred to desert to the enemy (though the Ottomans were not troubled by the prospect of fighting near the tomb of Suliman Pak).^[40]

Townshend asked that Nixon send all of the British soldiers working as policemen, clerks and batmen in Basra up to the front to replace the Indian Muslims Townshend had sent away, a request that Nixon refused. Relations between Nixon and Townshend were extremely poor and Nixon went out of his way to make things difficult for Townshend.^[37] By this time, Townshend had advanced over 500 miles up the Tigris and he was at the end of a long and tenuous supply line that was stretched more and more as he continued his way up the river.^[41] Supplies from Basra were brought up in mahelas, a type of Arab sailing boat with enormous sails that moved very slowly at the best of times.^[40] A further problem for the Anglo-Indian forces was the lack of hospital ships for the treatment of the wounded and sick and by the autumn of 1915, illness had incapacitated much of the Anglo-Indian forces.^[33]

In a letter to his friend in the War Office, Townshend wrote "We have certainly not good enough troops to make certain of taking Baghdad, which I fear is being fortified..." and went on to warn that a retreat from Baghdad would mean "an instant rising of the Arabs of the whole country behind us", adding that the Persians and the Afghans would likely be swept up by the Pan-Islamic propaganda of the Ottomans to join the jihad against the Allies.^[33] Townshend wrote that "We ought to hold what we have got and not advance anymore... All these offensive operations in secondary theatres are dreadful errors in strategy: the Dardanelles, Egypt, Mesopotamia, East Africa!".^[30][34] Townshend believed the main theatre of the war that would decide its outcome were the operations in France and Flanders, and believed that Britain should be concentrating its strength in Europe, observing that if Germany were defeated, the war would be won, but if the Ottoman Empire were defeated, Germany would still have to be defeated. However, the egomaniac Townshend wrote in a letter to his wife Alice seventeen days later "I told you, darling, that I only wanted my chance! You should have seen the British and Indian soldiers cheering me as I stood on the Comet. I must have the gift of making men (I mean the soldier men) love me and follow me. I have only known the 6th Division for six months and they'd storm the gates of hell if I told them to".^[30][34]

Having argued for another extension of the mission, and obtained approval for it from the British Government, Townshend's counsel was over-ridden by Nixon and he was ordered to continue with an advance upon Baghdad without reinforcement.^[26][42] Furthermore, the Tigris had become too shallow for the Royal Navy boats that had provided such useful fire support and Townshend would have to do without their services as he set out for Baghdad.^[40] Even through Townshend had advised against a further advance, his aggression and ambitions soon started to press him otherwise, especially as he had nothing but contempt for the enemy.^[28] Townshend claimed in My Campaign in Mesopotamia to have been opposed to advancing on Baghdad after receiving the orders from Nixon, but at the time he expressed no opposition and was all for advancing onto Baghdad.^[28]

At the time, Townshend reported meeting some stiff resistance from the Ottomans, but predicted that his men would advance rapidly once they had broken into the open country, which he stated would happen soon, further adding that a KCB was the greatest military honour that would please both himself and his family.^[28] Townshend was encouraged in his optimism as he had seriously underestimated the Ottoman numbers, believing he was faced with less than 10,000 Ottomans when in fact he was going up against more than 20,000.^[28] After Neuve Chapelle, Loos and Gallipoli, the British Government was desperately seeking a success and after seeing Townshend's advance, Prime Minister H. H. Asquith was more than inclined to believe the reports of Nixon and Townshend that they would soon take Baghdad, giving his approval out of the hope that taking Baghdad would at long last give his government a victory.^[28] As the general in charge of the only victorious campaign for the Allies in the autumn of 1915, the campaign in Mesopotamia had acquired a massive degree of media attention that tended to overrate the importance of taking Baghdad, and with journalists writing articles predicting the coming fall of Baghdad, Townshend found himself "riding a wave" that he "could not get off".^[39]

On 1 November 1915, Townshend led the 6th (Poona) Division from Kut-al-Amara and marched up the course of the River Tigris. Ctesiphon, some 25 miles (40 km) south of Baghdad was reached on 20 November 1915. Here they met an Ottoman force of more than 20,000 troops that had issued from Baghdad to oppose their approach to the city, giving them a numerical advantage of 2 to 1 over the 6th Division,^[26] sited within well-prepared defensive trench fortifications. General Nureddin Pasha had the command of four divisions, namely the 35th, the 38th, the 45th and 51st, which he had dug in at trenches built over the ruins of Ctesiphon.^[40] At Ctesiphon, Townshend was obsessed with the Arch of Ctesiphon. Strachan stated:

"The centre of the battlefield of Ctesiphon is the Arch, and it figures in all of the photographs of the Army when they reached this high point of the advance. And it’s immensely powerful for Townshend, the student of military history, because this marks the extremity of the Roman Empire, this marks the point where Belisarius, the famous Roman commander, had got to, coming in the other direction, of course. But for those with a classical education, as of course just about every British officer had received before the First World War, then this is a very powerful image indeed".^[43]

Townshend had divided his division into four columns. To Column A, he assigned the Dorset Regiment, the 104th Rifles and the 30th Composite Brigade to which he attached two Gurkha companies.^[44] To Column B, Townshend assigned the Norfolk regiment, the 7th Rajputs and the 110th Mahrattas. To Column C went the Oxfordshire Light Infantry, the 22nd Punjabi regiment, the 103rd Mahrattas and 119th Infantry and finally to Column D went the 7th Lancers, the 16th Cavalry, the 33rd Cavalry and S battery of the Royal Horse Artillery.^[44]

Townshend's plans called the Principle Mass "either to throw the Turks into the Tigris or compel them to a disastrous flight across the Diala river, some six miles behind them". Column C was to attack Nureddin Pasha's right flank to distract him while the "Principle Mass" of Columns A and B were to attack the left flank of the Ottoman lines while Column D was to race around the Ottoman positions to attack from the rear. Townshend was in a notably bad mood before the battle and much to the shock of his servant Boggis, savagely beat his dog Spot when he found Spot cuddled up next to Boggis asleep. When Boggis asked "What are you doing that for sir?", he received the reply "He was sleeping with you! He's my dog and he's got to learn." Boggis later recalled that Townshend was a "harsh bastard" who treated his men no better than he treated Spot.^[44]

Setback at Ctesiphon

The Battle of Ctesiphon that followed was hard-fought over two days starting on 22 November 1915, with Generals Townshend and Nixon both being personally involved in the fighting. The Ottoman force consisted of about 25,000 men, but British intelligence had estimated the Ottoman force as only about 9,500.^[28] The battle began with Hoghton leading Column C in an attack in the early morning mist with the men of Column C using the outline of the Arch of Ctesiphon as their guide, which quickly brought down murderous Ottoman fire on his men.^[45] In the meantime, General Delamain led Column A under heavy Ottoman fire to capture the Vital Point (V.P.) later that morning.^[46]

After the capture of the V.P, Townshend believed that the battle was won, only to discover much to his shock that the Ottoman Army was much larger than he had thought and his forces were at the receiving end of a vigorous Ottoman counter-attack.^[46] During the fighting at Ctesiphon, Townshend suddenly demanded a change of uniform, which required his manservant Boggis to run across a mile of battlefield in order to bring Townshend his new uniform.^[47] Once Boggis returned, Townshend stripped himself naked in full view of his men before putting on "a silk vest, silk underpants, a khaki shirt, his breeches, boots and sunhelmet and, picking up his binoculars, eating a piece of plum cake passed to him by a junior officer, resumed his inspection of the battle".^[47] Amid much heavy fighting, Column D which was to strike the Ottoman lines from the rear was intercepted by an Ottoman cavalry force under Halil Kut, leading to a swirling cavalry action in the desert that ended in a draw, but strategically was a defeat for the British as it ended Townshend's hope of having his cavalry smash into the rear of the Ottoman forces .^[48]

As the Ottoman forces counter-attacked, Townshend was forced to pull back as his forces were outnumbered. He claimed that the withdrawal was due to the Indian troops under his command pulling back without orders, something which Townshend ascribed to significant numbers of their British officers being killed or wounded. After a hard day's fighting, he ordered what was left of his division to dig in while Nureddin Pasha ordered his troops to pull back; Townshend quickly began reorganising his men to defend against another Ottoman attack.^[48] On the next day, Nureddin Pasha ordered a general attack with the aim of destroying Townshend's force.^[49]

Amid the ruins of Ctesiphon, Ottoman forces attacked the British and Indian defenders, with the fiercest fighting occurring at the Water Redoubt where about 100 men of the 22nd Punjabi Regiment and about 300 Gurkhas stood their ground and beat off successive attacks by the 35th Ottoman Division. One of Nureddin Pasha's staff officers, Muhammad Amin, later wrote that it was amazing that this "brave and determined little force" had stopped an entire Ottoman division and finally pushed them back to their second line of defence. Townshend, "quick enough to criticize the performance of his Indian troops", made no mention in his post-war writings of the action at the Water Redoubt. After the second day of fighting, Nureddin Pasha ordered his men to withdraw. The Ottomans had suffered more dead and wounded at Ctesiphon, but Nureddin's greater size of forces could sustain his losses, continue to fight while the smaller size of Townshend's division meant that his losses at Ctesiphon were proportionally more costly.^[49]

The result of the battle was indecisive, both sides having sustained heavy losses. Townshend had defeated Nureddin Pasha at Ctesiphon, but the losses taken by the 6th Division were such that a further advance towards Baghdad was impossible.^[47] At this point Townshend, finding himself almost 400 miles deep into hostile country leading a lone division that had lost one-third of its men in casualties, with inadequate facilities for their medical evacuation, a tenuously over-stretched line of supply, and facing multiple hostile divisions issuing from Baghdad towards his force with no other substantive British Empire forces within reach to call upon for assistance, resolved to retire back to Kut-al-Amara seeking shelter for the 6th Division, and await reinforcements in accordance with his original intentions. As Townshend retreated, Nureddin Pasha was in hot pursuit with the aim of destroying the 6th Division.^[50]

On 1 December 1915 Nureddin caught up with Townshend at the village of Umm al-Tubul (the "Mother of Tombs") where a sharp action occurred that ended with the Ottomans being driven off with heavy losses. The Ottoman setback at Umm al-Tubul gave Townshend and his men several days lead over the pursuing Ottoman forces as their losses had disorganised them, and it took Nureddin some time to reorganise his men.^[50] Townshend arrived back in Kut on 3 December 1915 after a retreat harassed by pursuing fresh Ottoman troops that had appeared on the scene post-battle.^[26] On 7 December the pursuing Ottoman force surrounded and besieged Kut, trapping the 6th Division within its walls.^[42] The British historian Russell Braddon wrote “After Ctesiphon, in his telegrams, communiques, diaries and autobiography, he [Townshend] reveals himself as a man whose mind was governed almost entirely by wishful thinking".^[50]

Siege of Kut-al-Amara 1916

The siege of Kut-al-Amara was a drawn out affair for the British Empire, and a bitter one for the men of the 6th Division, surrounded for five months under fire from all sides, and having to fight off several attempts to storm the town by the Ottomans, with dwindling resources in conditions of increasing desperation and deprivation. Townshend began to fall to pieces when he realised that he would not take Baghdad after all, a blow that was psychologically shattering for him.^[47] Strachan commented that:

"...retreating from Ctesiphon for Townshend shatters his dreams of a glorious entry into Baghdad, and that clearly has a profound impact on his decision-making. From Townshend's point of view it could lead to the preference of one of his fellow generals: for example, Major-General Gorringe might get the coveted promotion to lieutenant-general. Even worse, it could lead to the Mesopotamian campaign doing what Townshend's strategic brain told him it ought to do, which is becoming a backwater, any hope of seizing Baghdad being abandoned, and of course any hope of anyone making their military reputation and getting their promotions also being abandoned: the dire possibility of yet again being in another military backwater while the action is elsewhere and the limelight is elsewhere... The ability to sustain a siege was one way of guaranteeing a high profile. The Siege of Mafeking had made Baden-Powell's reputation, had made Baden-Powell into a household name and had prompted enormous jubilation when the siege had been lifted. So he knew full well that conducting a siege was a more satisfactory way to, or more likely to be a successful way to achieve public adulation than simply conducting a very successful fighting retreat down the Tigris back towards Basra".^[51]

Townshend could have retreated back to Basra if he had wanted to do so, but instead he chose to make his stand at Kut and fortify it in the hope of repeating his earlier success at Chitral, knowing that if the Ottomans besieged him at Kut, then the British Army would have to send out a relief force to break the siege. Townshend's decision to allow the Ottomans to besiege his force at Kut was taken to allow him to come out of the campaign as a hero just as he had at Chitral rather than for any compelling military reasons.^[51]

Townshend claimed that his men were exhausted and could not march anymore, hence his decision to stop at Kut. Townshend (who had been part of the relief expedition to save Charles Gordon at Khartoum) had been greatly influenced by how the British press had lionised Gordon, and wished to be lionised by Fleet Street in the same way.^[48] However, Perry noted the difference between "Chinese Gordon" and Townshend as "Needless to say, Townshend had no death wish, simply an obsessive ambition to be promoted and to be recognized as the great warrior he thought himself to be. What he wanted, and no-one seems to have thought about this, was to be a live Gordon, to endure a heroic siege, be rescued by Nixon (or somebody else), and go home to England in triumph".^[48] Townshend arrived in Kut on 3 December 1915 and it was not until 9 December 1915 that the Ottomans finally surrounded Kut, in the interim Townshend had blown up the bridges over the Tigris that could have allowed his men to continue to march south.^[52]

On 10 December 1915, General Nureddin Pasha ordered his men to storm Kut. Townshend repelled the Ottoman assaulting force with heavy losses, though the Ottomans seized enough ground to build another line closer to the walls of Kut.^[53] On Christmas Day 1915 the Ottomans attacked again, breaking through at one point and seizing part of the old fort there before fierce British counter-attacks drove them out.^[53] Afterwards, Prussian Field Marshal Colmar von der Goltz arrived and forbade any more attempts to storm Kut, preferring to keep the town under regular artillery bombardment while waiting for Townshend's men to be starved into surrender.^[53] Germany supplied the Ottomans with 30 of the latest Krupp artillery guns, whose devastating fire destroyed much of Kut.^[53] Townshend complained in his memoirs “The fire from our guns went from the centre to the circumference and so was divergent and disseminated, while that of the enemy was directed from the circumference to the centre and his converged and concentrated".^[53] To escape the bombardments Townshend and his men dug in beneath the ruins of Kut, leading a largely subterranean existence thereafter.^[54] Major Charles Barber, the chief medical officer at Kut recalled how the Anglo-Indian soldiers were tortured by "myriads" of lice, stating "Our wretched patients would sit for hours picking them off their blankets and shirts".^[54] Fleas were also abundant, "and if not fleas, then mosquitoes, failing mosquitoes, or in addition to, the sand fly is provided".^[54] In the absence of these small parasites, Major Barber remarked "there is always the snake, the centipede or the scorpion to fall back upon".^[54]

General Townshend's reports to his commander General Nixon (now back in Basra) spoke of a shortage of supplies, in language exaggerated to the point of being misleading.^[55] These supplies, purportedly enough for a month at full ration, only ran out in April 1916, almost five months later. The dire reports fed the London press's portrayal of Townshend as a hero surrounded by Oriental hordes and in desperate circumstances, as he had been during the Siege of Chitral 21 years before; they also induced the British government to hastily dispatch a military relief force from Basra, under the command of Sir Fenton Aylmer. Aylmer found Kut surrounded by unexpectedly strong Ottoman defences under the direction of the newly arrived Goltz,^[26] and badly stretched supply lines left the British with a shortage of artillery shells. All attempts to break the siege ended in failure.^[28] Heavy rains added to the discomfort of both armies, turning the ground to mud.^[56]

Nixon might have been able to relieve Kut had he done a better job of managing logistics.^[53] Sir George Buchanan, the engineer who managed the port of Rangoon in Burma, visited Basra in late 1915 and described a scene of utter chaos.^[53] Buchanan reported to London "I had never before in my life seen such a hopeless mess and muddle and I wondered whether this was the usual accompaniment of war. It seemed incredible that we should have been in operation of Basra for over a year, yet so little had been done in the intervening time".^[54] Basra was not a modern port, but rather an anchorage besides the banks of the Shatt-al-Arab river beyond which was a vast swamp.^[28] At any given moment, there was a line of fourteen ships waiting to unload their cargos at Basra and in 1915 it took an average of six weeks for a ship to unload there.^[54] Buchanan further reported that Nixon was such an utterly inept general that he did not see the inefficient way in which the port of Basra was being run as a problem, and told Buchanan that his expertise at managing the port of Rangoon was not needed in Basra.^[54] It was largely the logistical problems posed by the mismanagement of Basra that doomed the relief expeditions sent out to save Townshend and his men at Kut.^[54] In February–March 1916 a number of new divisions arrived at Basra, but the supply bottlenecks at there meant the British were unable to deploy them to relieve Kut.^[28] Nixon's efforts to hinder any attempt to build modern port facilities such as cranes for unloading goods off ships were a major reason why he was sacked in early 1916.^[28] Furthermore, Nixon was told that the steamers that he needed to transport men and supplies up the Tigris would be available in March 1916 at the earliest.^[28]

Subsequent increasingly desperate relief expeditions dispatched from Basra to attempt to rescue the 6th Division fared equally badly against the defences erected against their passage by Goltz (who would not himself see the military victory of the siege, dying of typhoid in Baghdad before its end). When Townshend reported that his men were running out of food, London ordered him to break out to link up with the relief force commanded by Sir Fenton Aylmer (who had also saved Townshend at Chitral), Townshend suddenly "discovered" that he had enough food to hold out longer and a break-out was unnecessary; from Townshend's viewpoint it was better from a public relations standpoint if Aylmer should break the siege rather him breaking out to link up with Aylmer. One attempt reached a point just 10 miles (16 km) from Kut, but repeated assaults against Ottoman positions trying to break through them to reach the town failed. The last effort, after three weeks of attacks, took place on 22 April 1916, but also ended in failure. The British were to lose 26,000 men killed in the attempts to break the siege of Kut while Townshend refused to make any effort to break out of Kut, saying it was up to General Aylmer to break in. During the siege, Townshend displayed in the words of Regan a "profound egotism and a disgraceful neglect for his men".^[55]

Much of Townshend's time was spent sending radio messages back to London asking for a promotion and inquiring about his friends in London such as "actors and gaiety girls" while he spent an inordinate amount of his time making certain that his dog Spot did not suffer from the siege, a tender concern that did not extend to the ordinary soldiers under his command; despite the fact that by the end of the siege, much of the Anglo-Indian garrison were slowly starving to death and/or dying of diseases, Townshend never visited the hospital, although he found time to take Spot out for a daily walk and to spend his afternoon reading works of military history in French.^[55] A 1923 report by the British Army about Kut concluded that "visits by the commander and his staff to the troops would have been even more effective" at sustaining morale rather than the "barrage of communiqués" that Townshend unleashed.^[57] Townshend spent almost all of his time either in his headquarters, a two-storey mud house, writing up messages or "gazing out across the Turkish lines from his observation post on the roof".^[57] He was violently disturbed by the news that Gorringe had replaced Aylmer as commander of the relief force, since this offered the undignified prospect of being rescued by an officer of inferior rank.^[55] In a long radio message, Townshend described Gorringe's assignment as "a slight on my record of service... I am deeply concerned to have brought up the question of promotion at so inopportune a time, but my active-service record is a honourable one and like my family before me for the past 300 years, I have served the state well".^[57] The British psychologist Norman F. Dixon wrote that Townshend's often irrational behaviour at Kut was due to "cognitive dissonance", writing:

"No better example [of cognitive dissonance] is afforded than that of Townshend's occupation of Kut. Since his advance up the Tigris was totally unjustified by facts of which he was fully aware, his dissonance, when disaster struck, must have been extreme and, to a man of his egotistical nature, demanding of instant resolution. So, again, in the face of much contrary evidence, he withdrew into Kut. The wiser and possible course of retreating to Basra would have been a greater admission of the lack of justification for his previous decision. By the same token, once inside Kut nothing would budge him, because to break out, even to assist those who had been sent to release him, would have emphasised his lack of justification for being there in the first place.^[55]

When a British artillery officer almost killed Goltz with a well-aimed shot (Goltz stood out by dressing in the full uniform of a Prussian Field Marshal and because of his weight), Townshend was extremely angry, saying that he did not want Goltz killed because if he had to surrender Kut, it was much better to surrender to a German officer rather an Ottoman officer.^[51] By the end of the siege, Townshend's men were living on five ounces of bread per day and a slice of mule meat.^[57] Townshend grew increasingly desperate as the siege went on, at one time sending off a message claiming that if Kut fell, it would be a worse defeat than Yorktown, maintaining that the entire Islamic world would rally for the Ottomans if he had to surrender and this would be the beginning of the end of the British Empire.^[28] In March 1916, the Ottomans began particular heavy bombardments of Kut, and they were seen unloading mysterious canisters from a barge, which everyone assumed was poison gas from Germany.^[58] Morale began to collapse among the Indians as more and more Indians began to desert, there were several cases of Indian soldiers killing their NCOs and many Indians began to engage in self-mutilation to get themselves into the presumed safety of the hospital.^[59] Whenever news of German advances at the Battle of Verdun reached the Ottoman lines, the Turks would give a giant three cheers for Germany while Townshend was comforted when he received a message over the radio that the Russians had taken by storm the allegedly impregnable Ottoman city-fortress of Erzerum, which he believed meant the Russians would soon relieve him.^[60]

In late April 1916, Townshend came up with a desperate plan to bribe the Ottomans into letting him and his men leave Kut, an offer that Halil Pasha took up, engaging in talks with Captain Thomas Edward Lawrence of the Cairo Intelligence Staff, before publicising the British offer to humiliate them.^[61] Halil Pasha knew the Anglo-Indian garrison was starving to death, and he had the upper hand.^[61] Having run out of food for the Garrison, General Townshend yielded Kut-al-Amara to the besieging Turks on 29 April 1916, the 6th Division surrendering en masse; during the siege, the Division had lost 1,746 men between 9 December 1915 – 29 April 1916.^[62] The Division ceased to exist at this point and was removed from the British Empire's Order of Battle for the remainder of the war.^[6]

When negotiating the surrender of Kut to General Halil Pasha, Townshend's main concern was to make certain that the Ottomans would not mistreat Spot (who they promised they would send back to Britain, a promise that Halil Pasha kept).^[55] Townshend found it deeply humiliating to surrender to a Turkish Muslim like Halil Pasha rather than the German Lutheran Goltz as he would have preferred. Major Barber described the victors: "Their uniforms were ragged and patched in all directions. Their boots were worn beyond hope of repair, and they were generally the most disreputable-looking specimens of a modern army. But they were good-natured fellows, broad, strong as oxen, with plenty of bone, ruddy complexions and in many cases blue eyes and ginger whiskers. They looked like what they were, I suppose, just easy-going, illiterate Anatolian peasantry".^[62] The news of the fall of Kut was received with enormous sadness all over the British Empire while prompting jubilation all over the Ottoman Empire with Enver Pasha telling a vast cheering crowd in Istanbul that Allah was truly with the Ottomans as He had humbled the British first at Gallipoli and now at Kut.^[63] The German Emperor Wilhlem II praised Townshend's defeat in a press statement as a "shining monument to German-Turkish brotherhood in arms", claiming that it was Goltz who had done most of the work at Kut, a statement which offended his Ottoman allies who disliked the implication of the Kaiser's press statement that they would have failed at Kut on their own, and needed German officers to lead them to victory.^[63] All of the people of Kut who were deemed to have collaborated with the British during the siege were publicly hanged as an example to those who would betray the Ottoman Empire.^[64]

Townshend claimed that the siege of Kut had "saved us from simply being kicked out of Mesopotamia".^[28] However, the Ottoman forces at Kut were at the end of a long supply line in the form of camel convoys and, even if they had wanted to march on the Persian Gulf, would have had to face British and Indian divisions well dug in further south, making the siege unnecessary to stop the Ottomans from trying to take Basra.^[28]