Here's some history I was unaware of.....
Baghdad lessons, writ in blood
Climate, terrain, Iraqi tenacity - and a leader's folly - punished Brits
01/19/2003
By DAVID WOOD / Newhouse News Service
dallasnews.com
With fluttering flags, glinting weapons and high expectations, an
expedition set off into the interior of Mesopotamia confident of its military
superiority, intent on securing the country's oil and capturing Baghdad for
a brisk regime change.
Instead, in a sobering lesson for imperial ambitions in the place now called
Iraq, the British army campaign of 1915-16 was a colossal and costly
blunder, a bloody, nightmarish tragedy of incompetence, slaughter and
betrayal.
Machine guns manned by entrenched enemy mowed down British troops
by the thousands. For lack of medical care, many of the wounded and
mangled were left in the sun for days. Thousands of British enlisted men,
abandoned by their commanding general, starved or fell to disease.
"It was a disaster," said retired British Air Vice Marshal Ron Dick, a military
historian and author. For that reason, he added wryly, "Hardly anybody
remembers it."
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.
51,800 lost in Iraq
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.
Mr. 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 introducing democracy to
Iraq, that generous impulse soon gave way to the harsher requirements
of just keeping control.
Regarding political forms, British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour
wrote in 1918: "I do not care under what system we keep the oil, but I am
quite clear it is all-important for us that this oil should be available."
Oil was the prize
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, Gen.
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.
Gen. Townshend was intelligent, brave and charming, but also vain and
dishonest, wrote Mr. Dick in a paper on leadership for the U.S. Air Force's
Air University. Gen. Townshend was "an egotist driven by ambition and
ravenous for popular acclaim. He craved honor, rank and the admiration of
others."
Nevertheless, Gen. 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 of
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.
More bad decisions
Gen. 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.
Gen. Townshend's retreating forces regrouped at the village of Al Kut 200
miles downstream, where Gen. Townshend estimated he had 22 days'
supplies. The enemy laid siege. Gen. 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, Gen. 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," Mr. Dick wrote.
Gen. Townshend offered to surrender, volunteering to turn over 1 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,
Gen. Townshend surrendered unconditionally; the siege had lasted 147
days.
According to the British government's official account, Gen. Townshend
was whisked away to the pasha's luxurious palace in Constantinople, then
capital of the Ottoman Empire of which Iraq was a part, where "he lived in
comfortable captivity" for the rest of the war.
Mr. 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.
'Dreadful spectacle'
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 - slowly dying of dysentery and neglect."
Some 3,000 men died in captivity. Gen. Townshend was sent back to
England and peaceful retirement.
"The British army closed ranks" against any questions about his conduct of
the campaign, Mr. Dick said.
Mr. Wilby's mother, back home in the village of Earsham northeast of
London, received a pension of 5 shillings a week and a letter from War
Secretary Winston Churchill conveying "His Majesty's high appreciation" of
Mr. 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.
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