Fall of the Ottomans : The Great War in the Middle East (9780465056699) by Rogan Eugene

Author:Rogan, Eugene [Rogan, Eugene]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780465056699
Publisher: Perseus Book Group

THE DANGERS OF LIFE UNDER SIEGE WERE IMMEDIATELY APPARENT TO the defenders in Kut al-Amara, who must have felt like the proverbial fish in a barrel. “The Turks set about drenching the place with shells,” G. L. Heawood, a junior officer attached to the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry recalled, “and when they got closer they swept all the flat ground with machine gun fire; from this day the river bank sniping also got serious.” As the British struggled to deepen their trenches against the relentless fire, the Ottomans drove their saps ever closer to the British lines. “During these early weeks the Turks made no actual assault, but they got up very close, and we had some rather anxious nights,” Heawood confessed, as Turkish lines reached to within one hundred yards of British positions.2

Field Marshal Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz, the German commander of the Ottoman Sixth Army, visited the front at Kut and met with Nurettin Bey to discuss strategy. The two commanders disagreed fundamentally. Nurettin, ever the fighting general, wanted to storm Kut and defeat the British outright. Goltz, determined to preserve his forces from needless losses, argued for a tightening of the siege to starve the British into surrender. As the two were unable to resolve their differences, Nurettin waited until Goltz left to inspect the Persian front before sending his troops into battle.3

The Ottoman commander launched his attack on Kut on Christmas Eve. Artillery blew great holes in the mud-brick walls of the fortress as British and Indian troops struggled to repel waves of determined Turkish infantry charging their trenches. Heawood’s unit faced the brunt of the Turkish offensive: “After dusk they kept assaulting and bombing all through the night. . . . They had obtained a footing in one bastion of the Fort, and a temporary barricade had been built up out of hay bales, store tins, flour bags, and everything that could be got handily. The enemy were on one side and our people on the other and bombing at this barricade went on most of the night and all the heavier casualties of Christmas were here.” The casualties were heavy on both sides, but as was so often the case in the Great War, the attackers suffered the most. As dawn broke over Kut on Christmas morning, the Turkish dead and wounded lay in piles stretching from the British trenches back to the Ottoman lines. Many of the British survivors wrote of their attempts to assist the Turkish wounded pinned down by the gunfire between enemy lines. In the end, they threw bread and water bottles to those soldiers within range and suffered the groans of the injured until, with time, death brought silence to the terrible battlefield. Weeks later, many of the Ottoman dead still lay where they had fallen on Christmas Eve.

After the battle of 24 December, Nurettin Bey made no further efforts to storm British positions. Falling in line with Goltz’s strategy, he ordered a tightening of the siege

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