Enemy on the Euphrates, page 35
But for now, the commander-in-chief had more urgent matters to attend to. After the retreat from Rumaytha, the bulk of the troops belonging to its garrison and those of RUMCOL, which had rescued them, were still at Diwaniyya, forty-three miles south-east of Hilla, or strung out along the Hilla road, holding small outposts along the line of retreat. In total, this force amounted to two squadrons of cavalry, four batteries of Royal Field Artillery (less two sections), one battery of pack artillery and five Indian infantry battalions plus the elements of four other Indian battalions including some pioneers and sappers. In addition, there were 1,120 civilian railway personnel, 300 cart-loads of ammunition and supplies and 23,000 gallons of water. This brigadesize force under the command of General Coningham, together with the accoutrements, supplies and materiel of a much larger military formation, was now dangerously isolated in overwhelmingly hostile territory with the very real threat of encirclement and destruction.
Haldane decided that extricating Coningham’s troops as rapidly as possible by withdrawing them north, to Hilla, was of the utmost importance. However, the road transport available at Diwaniyya for a march back to Hilla was quite insufficient to carry the six days’ rations it was believed the retreating column would require. The railway would have to be used, but as each day passed, the rebels were becoming increasingly active and proficient in destroying the track. Haldane faced the very real possibility that ‘the Arabs might tear up and damage the railway to such an extent that General Coningham’s force might find itself marooned midway between Hilla and Diwaniyya, possibly at some waterless spot where the difficulty of further progress would, for much of it, be insuperable.’
In fact, an initial attempt to use the railway to move more troops back to Hilla had already failed. On 27 July a train en route from Diwaniyya to Hilla had been derailed and isolated at Guchan station, some twenty-eight miles north of Diwaniyya. And on the following day a relief construction train sent out to assist the earlier one had also been attacked by Arabs and failed to reach Guchan. Meanwhile, Haldane began to fret about the slowness of extricating the force at Diwaniyya, blaming this shortcoming, also, on Major General Leslie. Indeed, from that point on, Haldane began to communicate directly with Brigadier Coningham over the head of Leslie, which understandably resulted in a further exacerbation of the ill-feeling between the two men.
Meanwhile Coningham was assembling what must have been, at that time, one the most remarkable military formations in the history of the British Empire – a huge armoured column combining both railway and road transport which would eventually stretch for over a mile in length. Along the railway track, truckage was allotted to each unit and department, together with the railway personnel and some thirteen Armenian lady school teachers who happened to be at Diwaniyya. In the centre of the train a portion was set apart for a hospital for the sick and wounded and at the rear a few trucks and an engine were converted into an armoured train carrying two armoured cars and two machine guns. As night began to fall on the evening of 29 July everything was complete; the men were issued with six days’ rations and as much water as could be carried. Then, at 6.30 the following morning, the huge column began to move off.
As this long, snake-like formation slowly trundled northwards, small parties of mounted insurgents followed it at a respectful distance, occasionally loosing off volleys of rifle fire into the column, but without much effect. At the same time, the crew of the train which had been cut off and isolated at Guchan began to re-lay the sleepers and railway tracks in their rear and slowly move south to meet Coningham’s column moving north. By 8.00 a.m. on 2 August the two trains were only a mile apart and a couple of hours later they met, with great cheering and general jubilation. After their reunion the combined force proceeded north to Guchan, which was reached at 4.30 p.m. Here, the railway tanks were refilled and an advance force of railway construction workers, protected by the 45th Sikhs, was sent ahead to repair the railway line as they approached the important Jarbuiyya bridge over the Hilla branch of the Euphrates; but news of a large concentration of Arabs in the vicinity of the bridge compelled Coningham to stop the advance and consolidate his position at Guchan station.
On 4 August, the column, now consisting of six locomotives and 250 railway wagons, once again moved off towards Hilla. It was a crucial race against time. The Arabs knew that by destroying the track in front of the column and forcing delays to repair it, they were forcing Coningham’s men to use up their food and water supplies. And because the insurgents were now removing the railway sleepers and hiding them in neighbouring villages, the British had to lift the track and sleepers in their rear and carry them forward to replace those which had been removed. All this involved exhausting work for the predominantly Indian labourers upon whom this gruelling task fell and who were toiling in the most excessive heat.
As the force again approached the Jarbuiyya bridge, Arab attackers once more harassed its advance, although a flight of five aircraft from Baghdad helped to drive them off. Still, the advancing column was making only very slow progress and the men were now placed on half-rations, but by 8 August the work of repairing began for the last time and at 9.20 a.m. contact was made by heliograph with a construction train moving south from Hilla to meet them. At 4.45 p.m. the railway line to Hilla was finally restored and by the afternoon of the following day, to Haldane’s great relief, the weary British and Indian troops marched into the town.
In many ways the withdrawal from Diwaniyya was a remarkable success. The possibility of an encirclement and the inevitable military disaster had been avoided. But from the insurgents’ point of view, the British withdrawal from Diwaniyya – the British retreat, as they saw it – was a great propaganda coup. Now a second British military base had been abandoned and another great swathe of occupied territory had been liberated. Even more evidence seemed to point to an imminent British withdrawal from Iraq as a whole, and as news of this second Arab ‘victory’ circulated among the tribes more and more waverers were drawn to the banners of Islam and independence. By now around 130,000 Arabs had joined the uprising.
While the British GHQ was greatly relieved at the news of the successful withdrawal from Diwaniyya, another piece of news was less welcome: a few days earlier the insurgents had captured the Hindiyya Barrage, the great dam sixteen miles north-west of Hilla at the point where the Euphrates divides into its two main branches, the Hilla and Hindiyya.
Meanwhile, on 14 July, as the military situation in the Kufa–Diwaniyya–Hilla ‘triangle’ was beginning to deteriorate, the river gunboat HMS Firefly arrived at Kufa. Firefly was one of sixteen gunboats of the Fly class which had seen active service during the war, mainly on the Tigris, where they had provided valuable flank guards for the British and Indian infantry as they advanced up the river in the campaigns of 1915 and 1917. The gunboats had originally been ordered from the shipbuilders Messrs Yarrow by the Admiralty in February 1915 for the operations in Iraq, but to camouflage their destination they were originally referred to as ‘China gunboats’. After construction, they were dismantled and sent out in parts to be re-assembled on slips at the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s concession at Abadan.3
HMS Firefly had been one of the first to be sent out to Iraq and the first to see serious action. Like the other ships of her class she had a displacement of 98 tons and was 126 feet long and 20 feet in the beam. However, in order to cope with the extreme variations in depth on both the Mesopotamian rivers, her draught was only two feet. Her armament consisted of one 4-inch main gun, one 12-pounder, one 6-pounder, one 3-pounder, one 2-pounder anti-aircraft pom-pom and four Maxim machine guns. The crew consisted of two naval officers and twenty infantrymen.
Firefly and her sister ships were powered by a single oil-fired 175hp engine which gave her a top speed of around nine and half knots. But the gunboats had three main defects. Firstly, their extremely shallow draught made them almost impossible to navigate in strong winds and on the Euphrates they were unable to manoeuvre at all – they could only steam ahead or astern.4 Secondly, for some reason, in early 1915 the Admiralty had been under the impression that the gunboats’ prospective adversaries would only be lightly armed Arab irregulars, not disciplined regular troops with heavy weapons; consequently, the vessels were only provided with armour sufficient to withstand rifle fire. And thirdly, since they had only one boiler, were this to be put out of action for any reason – as indeed might be case if they met up with an enemy equipped with heavy arms – a hit on the boiler by shellfire would leave the ship absolutely helpless.5
The gunboat HMS Firefly, one of the ‘Fly Class’ gunboats used against the insurgents
Indeed, Firefly herself had been smashed up by Turkish artillery in December 1916 during the retreat of ‘Townshend’s Regatta’ following the battle of Ctesiphon, after which she was captured by the Turks and used to considerable effect. However, she was later recaptured by the British during General Maude’s successful counter-attack the following year. So, since the British believed that the insurgents of 1920 had neither the heavy guns nor the military knowledge and experience to use them, news of the arrival of Firefly at Kufa in mid-July was received with great relief and jubilation.
Meanwhile, far to the south, another gunboat of the same class, HMS Greenfly, under the command of Captain Alfred C. Hedger, had already set off upriver from its base at Nasiriyya with orders to patrol the Euphrates north and south of Samawa. On 5 July, accompanied by another defence vessel, F10, she arrived at Samawa itself.6 For the next month Greenfly and her consort steamed up and down the muddy river, returning fire upon any insurgents who had the temerity to challenge them and dealing out death and destruction to the reed huts of the rebels’ riverine villages. However, on 10 August, while heading downriver to help defend the town and railway station of Khidhr, Greenfly ran aground at a point five miles above its destination.
Had the Hindiyya Barrage still been under British control, Greenfly might have been floated off by closing the Hilla channel and directing all the water of the Euphrates down the Hindiyya branch. But the barrage was now in rebel hands. To make matters worse, this was the season of the year when the Euphrates water level was steadily falling. Over the next few days intense efforts were made to pull Greenfly off the sandbank. On 15 August, a second gunboat, HMS Greyfly, and another lightly armoured launch, F11, joined in the struggle to free her, coming under intense enemy fire while doing so and suffering numerous casualties from tribesmen firing from concealed positions on the river bank. On the 20th another effort was made. On that day Greyfly, accompanied by two launches, each carrying a company of Indian troops, managed to reach the Greenfly and to their surprise found that the insurgents had withdrawn. For the next two days strenuous endeavours were made to free Greenfly from the sandbank, but the mud had now closed further upon her with a vice-like grip. In the end, the little flotilla of rescuers had to admit defeat and set off back downriver to Nasiriyya.7
The British had no wish to see Greenfly captured by the insurgents so there were now only two options open to them: abandon and scuttle the gunship or leave the crew on board, well equipped with rations and ammunition, ready for a second major rescue attempt as and when the necessary ships and special equipment could be assembled. Eventually the decision was taken to leave the crew on board; it was a decision which was later to have particularly tragic consequences.
One of the reasons against scuttling Greenfly was that, only a few days earlier, the British defenders of Kufa had themselves reluctantly decided to send one of Greenfly’s sister ships to the bottom. And this was not an action anyone wanted to repeat, if at all possible.
After arriving at Kufa in mid-July, HMS Firefly had tied up alongside a small redoubt, part of the British defensive position on the right bank of the river, and remained at that station guarding the approaches to the town from the east. On the opposite side of the river were dense palm groves and once the encirclement and siege of the town commenced, the gunboat began to receive sporadic rifle fire from groups of insurgents occupying them. Returning fire with its much heavier weapons, Firefly soon discouraged these sharp-shooters and for a time fighting at this point subsided.
Then, on the morning of 17 August, the gunboat was suddenly subjected to heavy shellfire from the other side of the river and in a few minutes, during which a British soldier on board was killed and another badly wounded, the ship was set ablaze. After a further battering of shells, Firefly’s commander, Lieutenant D.H. Stanley, was fatally wounded and the remainder of the crew had to be taken off.
To Kufa’s garrison, the attack came as a terrible surprise. How had the despised ‘Budoos’ managed to field such heavy weapons against them? For many of the defenders it could only mean they were once again at war with the Turks. What they didn’t know was that the shells which were crippling the Firefly were fired by the 18-pounder British gun, captured by the rebels during the defeat of the Manchester Column. Haldane and his staff were well aware that this powerful field gun had been lost on the Kifl road; but they were fairly sanguine about it because, a few minutes before its capture, one of the British gunners had managed to remove the breechblock. What the British did not appreciate was that the small number of experienced former Ottoman army officers and NCOs fighting in the insurgent ranks had managed to forge a replacement for the missing part and bring the gun back into service.
As the fire on board the Firefly raged from stem to stern, the British and Indian defenders, cooped up within the perimeter of their strongpoint along the right bank of the Kufa channel, realised that the ship’s magazine would soon explode, seriously damaging the redoubt and neighbouring positions along the river bank and possibly devastating their occupants. Since they had no wish to abandon those positions the decision was taken, very reluctantly, to scuttle Firefly. So several Lewis guns were brought up and the gunboat’s plates were swiftly perforated by heavy fire. Within minutes the little gunship tilted to one side and then settled down on the silty bottom of the Hindiyya channel, where she would remain for the duration of the campaign.
While General Haldane’s attention was focused primarily on the precarious situation of the troops retiring from Diwaniyya to Hilla, he remained anxious about the fate of the capital. The wholly inadequate size of its garrison and the increasingly truculent attitude of the local Muslim population meant that for a time he was compelled to resort to rather crude ruses – such as marching the same units backwards and forwards across the city – to try to give the impression that the garrison was considerably larger than it actually was. Haldane also began the construction of a number of defensive earthworks around the city’s perimeter, which were later to be replaced by high, brick-built blockhouses.
Meanwhile, further bad news arrived. The insurrection was no longer confined to the central and southern Euphrates but had spread northwest, where the ‘Azza and other smaller tribes on the Diyala river had joined the revolt.
For some time the Euphrates rebels had been sending out emissaries all over Iraq to try to win the support of the other tribes. In late July a sayyid named Sa’id Sara al-‘Azawi reached the ‘Azza, whose tribesmen inhabited the lands along the Khalis canal, north-east of the orange-growing town of Ba’quba. Ba’quba itself was the principal town of the Diyala Division, situated on the left bank of the river of the same name, thirty-four miles north-east of the capital. The news that Sayyid Sa’id brought was that the uprising which had begun in the mid-Euphrates was spreading north and south while everywhere the British were retreating from their main strongpoints. He urged the ‘Azza to join the uprising.8
The paramount sheikh of the ‘Azza was the twenty-five-year-old Sheikh Habib al-Khayizran and although he listened respectfully to the sayyid’s exhortations, for the time being he held back from committing himself and his tribe to what would clearly be an extremely dangerous venture. However, a few days later, some travellers on the main road to Ba’quba were attacked and pillaged in what was probably a simple act of banditry; but this was not how the local PO, Major Hiles, saw it. Fearing an imminent outbreak of the kind which had occurred on the Euphrates, he immediately called up police and military from Baghdad. On their arrival, Hiles sent out orders to the sheikhs of all the tribes in the Ba’quba Division, including Sheikh Habib, to assemble in the centre of Ba’quba town on the pretext that he wished to obtain further information about the robbery. Once they had all arrived, Hiles had them all arrested. The assembled sheikhs were then lectured on the mandate and the requirement that they must on no account have anything to do with the insurgents or try to get in contact with them. Some days later the sheikhs were released – all but Sheikh Habib – who for some reason had attracted the attention of Major Hiles.
Years later, Sheikh Habib gave the following testimony of the attempt by Major Hiles to win him over to the pro-British camp.
After some days, Major Hiles summoned me and said, ‘You’re an intelligent man; you know very well the military forces which are at the disposal of the British Government and the power with which it can ruthlessly crush its enemies. Those Iraqis who have rebelled against it including the leaders of the tribes will, in the end, be exterminated. However I like you and I’m concerned about you; I don’t want you to fall into a trap; I’m seeking a happy outcome for you. If you follow my advice, without doubt you will be viewed by Great Britain as one of the great men of Iraq. Moreover the government has ordered me to give you 40,000 rupees for you to spend as you wish and is ready to double that when you want it.’9
