The Kasaba of Kut-el-Amara, Mesopotamia, where a British Indian army was surrounded and besieged by Turkish forces from the end of 1915 until the British surrender on April 29, 1915. Photograph from 'Four Years Beneath the Crescent' by Rafael De Nogales, Inspector-General of the Turkish Forces in Armenia and Military Governor of Egyptian Sinai during the World War.
The Kasaba of Kut-el-Amara
"'I have hoisted white flag over town and fort. Troops commence going into camp near Shumran 2 p.m. I shall shortly destroy wireless.' . ..Nine thousand fighting men, 3,000 British and 6,000 Indians, exclusive of followers, surrendered at Kut; and it is useless to try and gloss over the disgrace which is attached, not to our soldiers, but to the politicians responsible for the disaster. There has been no surrender on the same scale in the history of the British army. The nearest parallel to it is that of Cornwallis with 7,073 officers and men in the American War of Independence."
Excerpt from an account of the investiture by Turkish forces of a British-Indian army under the command of General Townshend in Kut-el-Amara, Mesopotamia by Edmund Candler, an official British observer with the Relieving Force that was unable to break the Turkish siege. Attempting to seize Baghdad, the British had been defeated at Ctesiphon on November 21, 1915, 22 miles short of their goal, and forced back to Kut where they were surrounded by increasingly strong Turkish forces. All attempts by the relieving force to break the siege failed, and only limited supplies could be dropped by aircraft. One pound rations of mule in mid-February had been reduced to four-ounce rations of horse meat that gave out in on April 21. 'During the last week of the siege the daily death-rate averaged eight British and twenty-one Indians' (p. 142).
The Great Events of the Great War in Seven Volumes by Charles F. Horne, Vol. IV, 1916, pp. 128, 129, copyright © 1920 by The National Alumnia, publisher: The National Alumni, publication date: 1920
1916-04-29, 1916, April, Mesopotamia, Kut, Kut-al-Amara, Kut-el-Amara, surrender
