ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the campaign in Mesopotamia waged by the Indian Expeditionary Force ‘D’ from the declaration of war against Turkey to the surrender of the 6th Indian Division at Kut in April 1916 after a bitter siege of four months. It is an axiom of military history that poorly trained forces generally fight more effectively from prepared positions and find themselves out of their depth when engaged in mobile warfare. In the British imagination Mesopotamia was the most vulnerable part of the Ottoman Empire. Turkish authority in the region was friable, with the Turks holding down a restive Arab population. In India, the “great betrayal of 1857” had not been expunged from British consciousness and suspicions about Indian soldiers under British command still lingered. The valour shown by Indian soldiers did little to bridge the trust deficit between them and their British commanders.
