For over 140 days they’ve stood out, but now they can no longer. This week the British
and Indian army at Kut surrenders to the Ottoman Empire.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week saw naval action off the English coast though the European fronts were mostly
quiet because of rains and floods, but in the Middle East the British position had become
desperate, as neither British nor Russian relief could not make it through.
And since it’s the big news this week, let’s go there first.
On April 29th, 1916, General Charles Townshend surrendered at Kut Al-Amara to the Ottoman
Empire. Historian James Morris called this, “the most abject capitulation in Britain’s
military history.” And when you think about it, more men surrendered here than did to
the Americans at Yorktown, so this was a huge victory for the Turks, and since it came only
a few months after the British debacle at Gallipoli, the British public was shocked.
The men had been under siege since early December and starvation and disease were now epidemic,
and photos from this month are horrifying. 2,500 sick and wounded men were allowed their
freedom in exchange for a similar number of Ottoman troops in British captivity, but over
3,000 British and 6,000 Indians were taken prisoners. The next day the newly captured
troops began their long march toward Anatolia and prison camp.
So the Mesopotamian Front grew quiet for the time being, but another front flared to life
this week, the Italian Front.
Now, the Italian forces that were massing along the Isonzo River were larger and better
armed than they had been in 1915, and Italian army Chief of Staff Luigi Cadorna gave responsibility
for a future offensive against Gorizia to the Third Army and beefed it up by transferring
General Luigi Capello and his VI Corps in from the Second Army. Capello was given a
major role in the planned offensive; he was to take Mt. Sabotino, Oslavia, and Podgora
to open up the way across the Isonzo and take Gorizia. Capello had promoted Pietro Badoglio
to Colonel. Badoglio would later be commander of the Italian army in World War Two, and
now in 1916 he showed his worth by analyzing the problems likely to face VI Corps. His
planning began with both infantry and air patrols to reconnoiter Austro-Hungarian defensive
positions, and he really studied each element of the earlier battles to try to anticipate
Austrian Commander Svetozar Borojevic von Bojna’s overall response to Italian actions.
He reorganized his artillery so each group had specific targets, something really missing
in the last battle in March, and he improved communication between artillery and infantry,
AND he created a mobile response force of 18 cavalry and 4 bicycle squadrons. Those
squadrons and fresh regiments would follow the fighting infantry units into battle, since
in earlier battles once troops reached their first objectives they were often too exhausted
to exploit success or resist counter-attack, so this would hopefully tackle that problem.
On May the 4th, the Italian army made a diversionary attack on the southern Corso. This was supposed
to fool Borojevic into believing it would be the main force of the future offensive
so that he would hopefully transfer troops south from Gorizia. The attack began with
a four-hour artillery barrage and then four divisions quickly captured the first line
of Austro-Hungarian trenches. Borojevic argued with Austrian High Command for immediate reinforcements,
but Austrian Army Chief of Staff Conrad von Hotzendorf wouldn’t oblige, so unfortunately
for Cadorna and Capello, no Austrian troops were transferred from north to south.
And further to the Northwest was an attack that was anything but diversionary.
At Verdun, where the endless battle was over two months old. On May 3rd, 500 German heavy
guns opened fire on a front about a mile wide. The bombardment continued for two days and
nights. Alistair Horne writes that the men on the ground thought that “as if to finish
us off the Germans had decided to point one cannon at each one of us.” This was the
big German attempt on Cote 304, a major strategic target, and General von Gallwitz had vowed
to blast the French off the hillside. It seemed that he was succeeding, because there were
no deep shelters left after all the weeks of bombardment. Horne writes, “One French
officer describes how he was buried three times that day in his trench, and dug out
each time by his men. Others were less fortunate. Of one battalion, only three men were said
to have survived; many of the remainder were simply buried alive by the shells. One by
one the French machine guns were destroyed. For over two days no food or supplies could
be got through to the defenders, nor any wounded evacuated. Reinforcements fortunate enough
to arrive got lost in the chaos atop the ridge... it was impossible to move. Orders had pushed
up men on top of men and set up a living wall against the monstrous German avalanche.”
The Germans finally got a foothold on the summit, but it was three more days of close
combat before Cote 304 was finally theirs. The German conquerors immediately demanded
double rations of cigars to mask the smell of the corpses. Indeed, the Germans had the
smell of the dead in their bread and water; the earth surrounding them was so packed with
dead bodies that it permeated everything.
But the capture of Cote 304 was the first break in the French Line of Resistance and
the stage was set for a big attack on the Mort Homme. It would come soon.
And something else happened in early May in Eastern France.
On May 1st, James Gerard, American Ambassador to Germany, protested directly to the Kaiser
himself at Charleville, German army headquarters, about the continuing policy of German subs
sinking merchant ships. The Kaiser took the opportunity to rail against the British blockade
and American compliance with it. Gerard pressed the Kaiser to have the subs exercise “the
right of visit and search, but must not torpedo or sink any vessels unless the passengers
and crew are put in a place of safety.”
On the 4th came the official reply. Germany will no longer sink vessels without warning
and without saving life unless there is resistance or an attempt to escape. This was the Sussex
Pledge, named after the passenger torpedoed by the Germans in March. While Gerard was
happy to receive the pledge, he wrote to the U.S. State Department that he believed Germany
would “at some future date, forced by public opinion, and by von Tirpitz and the Conservative
parties, take up ruthless submarine war again, possibly in the autumn, but at any rate about
February or March, 1917.”
Thing is, there was a split between the German military, which was all for lack of restrictions,
and Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg, who represented the civilian government. He made pledges and
the navy disregarded them, and the Kaiser was either unwilling or unable to really support
the Chancellor, but with Admiral von Tirpitz’s sudden retirement, things seemed to swing
toward the Chancellor. One thing you have to realize, under German censorship the U-boat
campaign was reported in only boastful terms, with little or nothing about non-combatant
and civilian deaths, so the German people were uniform in demanding its continuation.
Something else the German people probably didn’t hear too much about was this:
April 30th saw the third German gas attack against the British in four days on the Western
Front. This was on a front over 3 kilometers wide, but a wind blew the gas this day over
10k behind the British lines. Rats, cows, and pigs all fell in droves. soldiers died
and over 500 incapacitated.
And we reach the end of another week of war, the 93rd, with poison gas in the west, the
Italians launching a diversion, the Germans taking a vital tactical position at Verdun,
and a British humiliation in Mesopotamia.
And it was a big one, but a well-deserved one. What did they expect? They had marched
up river, undermanned, under-equipped, with no supply chain against forces with modern
weapons like machine guns that could easily be supplied from their base at Baghdad. What
did they expect? Historian Geoffrey Eton wrote of the men being marched away, “none of
them fit to march 5 miles... full of dysentery, beriberi, scurvy, malaria, and enteritis;
they had no doctors, no medical stores, and no transport.” They would also be treated
with extreme brutality by their captors and 2/3 of the British and nearly a third of the
Indians would never see their homes again. What did they expect? This was Modern War.
The Siege of Kut was the longest siege of the entire war. Another long siege happened
on the Eastern Front in the fortress of Przemysl and if you want to find out more about that,
click right here.
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