'Only by the Sword': British Counter-Insurgency in Iraq, 1920

'Only by the Sword': British Counter-Insurgency in Iraq, 1920

Introduction

Beginning in June 1920, British and Indian troops suppressed a nationwide revolt in Iraq. It was the largest British-led military campaign of the entire interwar period, but it has escaped the attention lavished upon many smaller scale episodes.1 Probably because the Royal Air Force afterwards took over the policing of the Iraq mandate, observers wrote the experience off as an anomaly. Approximately four divisions, two of them already in Iraq when the revolt began, took six months of hard fighting to stamp it out. Although 90 percent of the troops involved were Indian, their contribution drew less attention, largely because Indian politicians resented the use of Indian troops in such roles, and the British rulers saw little use in reminding them of what had

Happened. Nor did colonial administrators wish to advertise what had happened and remind other colonial people that rebellion had led to autonomy and then to independence. Thus, the Arab revolt remains a bitter footnote to the star-crossed Mesopotamian campaign as a whole.

British administration of Iraq in 1919-1920 was an uneasy amalgam of military and civilian responsibilities, which owed its genesis to the failure of the Mesopotamian Campaign. Although

Originally instigated and supplied by the Government of India and directed from Army Headquarters in India, military operations in Mesopotamia were turned over to the War Office in February 1916 even before the fall of Rut. Civil administration functioned under

The military commander, but British personnel who administered Iraq came overwhelmingly from the Indian Political Service, just as the laborers who unloaded cargo and laid railways were Indians. This anomalous arrangement survived the war because it remained unclear how Iraq would be governed once a formal peace with Turkey was signed. In 1915, Sir Henry McMahon had assured the Shari of Mecca in their famous correspondence of British intentions to reward the Arab peoples with self-determination. General Sir Stanley Maude, on entering Baghdad in March 1917, had issued an officially sanctioned proclamation promising self-determination for Arabs. Then, too, both President Wilson (whose 12th point was often cited in this context) and Lloyd George had spoken eloquently of national self-determination. On 18 November 1918, the British and French had issued a joint declaration reaffirming their commitment to self-rule by the indigenous populations of Mesopotamia and Syria. The politically minded Sunnis who formed the governing class of Mesopotamia had reason to think that these fine words applied to themselves as well as to inhabitants of odd bits of Europe.3

Pending a resolution of these issues, administration lay in the hands of Captain (Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel) Arnold T. Wilson, the acting civil commissioner. Technically, Wilson, a member of the Indian Political Service, was a staff officer to the General Officer Commanding (GOC), but he reported not to the War Office but to the Government of India in Simla. Wilson, 'A.T. ' to many, had much of the authoritarian paternalism that characterized the Indian Civil Service. He saw in the arid and unsystematically watered Euphrates basin a potential Punjab, an imperial granary which proper administration (financed in turn by more efficiently collected taxation) could transform and thereby revive.4

At the beginning of 1920, the GOC in Mesopotamia was Major-General sir George F. MacMunn. He reported to Field- Marshal sir Henry Wilson, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), and Winston Churchill, Secretary of state for War since 1918. Their counsels reflected the confusions of purposes in the postwar British position. Henry Wilson, MacMunn recalled, impressed on him the paramount importance of securing the Mosul frontier against Turkish efforts to regain it. Churchill, who answered to Parliament and to the Treasury for the costs of such measures, told MacMunn to 'organize levies and try and get the troops home as soon as possible'.5

To support the nascent civil administration, A. T. Wilson had prevailed upon MacMunn's predecessor, Lieutenant-General sir William Marshall, to establish a military presence in as many towns as possible. These posts were not always readily supported or even supplied reliably. These small garrisons were hostages to political fortune, since they lacked both animal and motor transport. The outposts, too weak to defend themselves and too immobile to tour the countryside or reinforce other sites, drew criticism from home. However, in the political climate that obtained both in Iraq and in the region as a whole, withdrawal of forces anywhere suggested that the British were about to evacuate the entire country.

The disarray of the entire region exacerbated the tactical problems of holding Iraq. The British-supported regime in Persia lacked stability, and a substantial garrison in Iraq offered support as well as the ability to reinforce it if the Bolsheviks marched south. With the fall of Petrovsk in Daghestan late in March 1920, remnants of Denikin's Volunteer Army found refuge at the Persian Caspian Sea port of Enzeli, along with the White flotilla, whose 21 ships were turned over to the British. The portion of MacMunn's forces responsible for Persia was the Northern Persia Force (Norperforce), and its two Indian regiments and a mountain battery were all that stood between Bolshevism and vital British interests.

The greatest uncertainty in the region in early 1920 was that caused by the failure to conclude a peace treaty with Turkey, since upon its terms hinged the form that the League of Nations mandate for Iraq would take. Formally, the Entente powers and Turkey remained at war until June of 1920, when the Sultan's government signed the Treaty of Sevres with France and Britain on the very eve of the revolt in Iraq. Increasing doubt that the Sultan’s government in Constantinople actually controlled Turkey compounded this worry. Thus, the Allies faced the prospect of treating with the Nationalist regime now at Ankara. Its growing strength throughout 1919 not only seemed to threaten British control of the northernmost vilayet (province) of Iraq, Mosul. The Nationalist ascendancy also suggested to some Iraqis that their country might potentially revert to Turkish rule.

To MacMunn, Wilson, and the Cabinet, these issues loomed much larger than Arab political sentiment. Arab nationalists in Syria and Iraq interpreted wartime British promises to Sharif Hussein of Mecca as binding Britain to create an Arab state or states--not British or French colonies, veiled or not by League of Nations artifice. On 20 March a congress of Arab notables met in Damascus and offered the crown of an Arab state comprising Syria and Palestine to one of the Sharif's sons, Feisal. They offered his brother Abdullah the crown of Iraq. Some of the Sharifians, as they were called, claimed for Feisal not only present day Syria but Lebanon, Mesopotamia, and Palestine, points that no British government was likely to concede.

During the summer and autumn of 1919, the British in Iraq stamped out a succession of tribal rebellions in Kurdistan.6

These events convinced MacMunn to deploy the bulk of his forces to the north of Baghdad, which had the added and by no means insignificant benefit of being a healthier area for the troops who lacked permanent cantonments. Besides covering Kurdistan, these dispositions addressed the Turkish danger and the Bolshevik threat to Persia. And these, MacMunn was convinced, were the real dangers. In March 1920, Lieutenant-General Sir Aylmer Haldane

relieved MacMunn. Although not an Indian Army officer, Haldane had abundant Indian experience. He had also served in the Boer War, where he was captured with Winston Churchill and imprisoned in Pretoria before escaping. Before Haldane left for Iraq early in 1920, the War Office told him that Persia, not Iraq, caused the greatest anxiety. Britain had to hang on in Iraq because it was the key to Persia, 'essential if the Bolshevik menace develops and we are to meet it'. While at the War Office, Haldane also visited Churchill, who directed him to halve his command by year's end and warned against appeals for reinforcements. Haldane's notes of that encounter convey something of the torrent of ideas that gushed from Churchill: 'Garrison must be reduced; have fort at Baghdad, flying columns, air force, river gunboats, defended cantonments, native levies, steel pepper boxes round cantonments. ' Something like that, at any rate. However, Churchill admitted that his demand to halve the garrison left out of account the possibility of a Bolshevik coup against Persia.7 The Lloyd George Coalition was under mounting pressure from 1919 onwards first to demobilize and second to reduce military spending, which remained at levels stubbornly higher than pre-war.8 Civilian policy makers, MPs,

and newspaper leader writers credited Haldane with 80,000, and this number stuck. The discrepancy between the perceived strength of the garrison and its actual strength sowed the seeds of near catastrophe.

Nominally, Haldane had 60,200 men, 7,200 British and the remainder Indian. Subtracting troops in transit or in hospital, he had only 2,400 British and 45,000 Indian effectives. Besides these regulars, there were in 1920 some 5,000 Iraqi levies, British-officered but under the jurisdiction of the local political officers. On paper this force exceeded the two divisions into which it was organized, but its units were badly below strength. Because Indian units overseas had no systematic way to obtain replacements, some Indian battalions had as few as 240 other ranks. Many were veterans who had enlisted only for 'duration of war" and thus were owed a prompt discharge once the Sultan's government signed the Treaty of Sevres. The Indian Army expected its Indian other ranks (IOR) to appreciate this formality 18 months after the last shots had been fired. Additionally, most regiments had only seven officers compared with the peacetime twelve, since many had been detailed to civil administration.

There remained the British portion of the garrison, where the contrast between nominal strength and actual hollowness was most marked. Artillery batteries had only two guns. The one British cavalry regiment was a composite of two regiments that numbered only 200 sabres. Infantry battalions consisted of ill- trained volunteers too young to have fought in the Great War, and they averaged only 500 effectives. As late as April, 2,200 British soldiers, disproportionately officers or non-commissioned officers, were still employed in civilian or extra-regimental duties. Wireless had almost completely closed down due to the demobilization of skilled signals personnel.9 Some who criticized the nominal size of the garrison set great stock in modern methods, but the Mesopotamian garrison had few of these. Due to the disbandment of the Machine Gun Corps and the return to civilian life of most of its members, machine guns were equally poorly manned. Armoured cars were a similar story. Since few British recruits could drive and fewer still repair them, only four cars saw regular use. Because armoured cars were useless on any but the well maintained but unpaved roads near Baghdad, Haldane requested the War Office to send out tanks but none were available for Iraq. But in 1920 there were no tanks capable of operating in 'tropical' climates, let alone independently of railheads. Much was hoped for from the RAF, but it could not guarantee more than six flyable aircraft at anyone time, since its establishments in Iraq lacked both the spares and the skilled mechanics to keep more than a token presence in the air.10 These two squadrons were No.6 with Bristol fighters and No.30 with

the DH-9A fighter-bomber. Although promised three squadrons by 15 April, three months later, the RAF in Mesopotamia and Persia had only 16 planes.11 It had no transports with which to move troops. Like the ground forces, its units were scattered around Haldane's vast command. Four flights were concentrated at Baghdad, but the rest were dispersed to Mosul and to Bushire and Kazvin in Persia.

Thus, Haldane's forces consisted of two under strength Indian Army divisions, the 16th (Major-General G. A. J. Leslie) and the 17th (Major-General sir Theodore Fraser), about half a dozen line of communications battalions along the Tigris and the Euphrates, and in North Persia a force now increased to the equivalent of a brigade. Worrying as Sharifian, Turkish, Kurdish, and Bolshevik activities might be, Haldane's most immediate worry was the Secretary of State for War. Churchill cabled to Haldane in late April formally ordering him to cut the garrison by a full 50 percent by the start of the next financial year (1 April 1921). Churchill noted that

although British forces had been cut as directed far fewer Indian troops had been withdrawn. These figures mattered because the Imperial exchequer bore this burden, too. The costs of Indian units in Iraq fell on the War Office vote, since under the wartime financial agreement with the Government of India, the Imperial exchequer assumed that portion of the cost of Indian units stationed overseas that exceeded their normal peacetime cost. The latter figure represented what the units would cost if they remained in India. This basic charge the Government of India paid. Thus, both the Indian government and the government in Whitehall had strong reasons to want to reduce the Iraq garrison. Indeed, more than 18,000 Indian other ranks remained above the level already ordered home. Said Churchill, 'There can be no question of going back on this, and military dispositions and political action must be made to conform’. He told Haldane to concentrate his forces at the most important points on rivers and railways and 'to abandon the present policy of scattering little packets of troops throughout the country'. 12 The difficulty with this advice was that it presumed the country to be already pacified. Moreover, the removal of troops from exposed locations, which sounded good in theory, necessarily confirmed widespread rumours that the British were about to withdraw.