Ross Anderson, "Indian Expeditionary Force D in Mesopotamia, 1914-1918", 1 August 2010.pdf (original) (raw)
Related papers
On 6 November 1914, the landing of the Indian Army's 16th Infantry Brigade at Fao, in the Vilayet of Basra in Mesopotamia initiated land hostilities between the British and the Ottoman empires. Part of the IEFD, these 4,700 soldiers, succeeded in their task of subduing the shore battery and garrison before moving up the Shatt-al-Arab riverway and latter occupying Basra. The Indian Army's performance in the Mesopotamian Campaign was heavily influenced by its recent past, notably the Kitchener reforms of 1904-1909, and official unwillingness to reconcile India's military means with Britain's strategic interests. One of the biggest impediments to the efficiency of the Indian Army in Mesopotamia was the shortage of British officers throughout the war. The IEFD started the campaign ill-prepared for modern warfare against a first-class enemy. It was fortunate in that the Ottoman troops opposing it until the Battle of Ctesiphon were second grade and poorly equipped.
The Medical Services in the Mesopotamian Campaign from 1914 to 1915: A Study in Dysfunctionality
Topics in the History of Medicine, 2023
The near collapse of medical services in the Mesopotamian Campaign of the Great War and the consequent degradation of the effectiveness of the British Indian Army is attributable to disparate factors such as poor prewar readiness, the indifferent status of military medical officers, obsolescent medical orthodoxy and professional discord. It is debatable whether the medical services were undone by military inadequacies and unwise mission expansion or whether their pre-existing structural deficiencies hastened the breakdown. The proliferation of disease and inadequacies of casualty evacuation denuded the Campaign of its fighting strength and eroded the morale of its troops. The resultant attrition made it near impossible to sustain military effectiveness. With the aim of obtaining granular detail, this paper scrutinises the integrity and effectiveness of medical support through the lens of unit war diaries and the diaries of senior medical officers from the time of the Campaign's commencement in November 1914 to December 1915 when expeditionary operations were becalmed by the prolonged besiegement of the fighting line at Kut al Amara. The detail obtained from these diaries reveals administrative apathy, bureaucratic quibbling and personality clashes, all of which further compromised the already inadequately resourced medical support to the Campaign. This article also asserts that the persistent failure of the Indian government to comprehend the logistic challenges posed by the climate, terrain and river systems in lower Mesopotamia led to severely compromised medical capability, especially casualty evacuation and medical resupply.
The British Occupation of Mesopotamia, 1914-1922
During World War I the military campaign in Mesopotamia placed enormous demands on local man- and animal power to provide the logistical resources vital to its conduct. This required the British civil and military authorities to construct a wartime state apparatus that filled the administrative vacuum left by the retreating Ottomans and made possible its downward penetration and mobilisation of local resources for the war effort. This article examines the interaction of politics and logistics in Mesopotamia and views the enhanced wartime levels of resource extraction in light of the British attempts to codify their presence in the country after 1918 and the nationalist backlash that resulted.
The experiences of the Indian Infantry on the Western Front between August 1914 and December 1915?
The aim of this dissertation is to examine the contribution that the Indian forces had on the Allied war effort concentrating on the forces sent to the Western Front. Almost 140,000 troops served on this Front and their contributions have generally been buried deep in the writings on the First World War. It is hoped that this work will be able to highlight the importance of the Indian corps and serve as a testament to those who left their country with no personal grievance in the war and fought for their Imperial Ruler. This work aims to show that the Indian forces had an important role to play and during the period of study ensured that Britain, was at the least, able to create enough soldiers to take over on the Western Front. The aim of the work is to consider the structure of the army, track the motivations for fighting of the troops, their experiences on the front, and fluctuations of morale in the trenches as well as an analysis considering potential failures of the Indian Expeditionary Force. It will consider whether the Corps were a failure or whether they fulfilled the role set to them. It will also seek to analyse the issues regarding loyalty to Britain and whether disloyalty ever manifested itself whilst on the Front.
Medical Support at the Siege of Kohima, April 1944
Journal of Anesthesia History, 2019
The battle for Kohima, 1 75 years ago, during World War Two, was an iconic episode in British military history. Medical aspects of the campaign in North Eastern India and Burma, the medical support at Kohima and the performance of medical personnel against inconceivable odds, are described. Prelude to Battle In September 1939, His Majesty's Government in India entered the Second World War and, even as vociferous nationalist sentiments were mounting that would propel India towards independence a few years later, India made a striking contribution to the war effort both militarily and economically. Initially, however, Britain's commitment to the military in India was at best ambivalent. The long-standing yet conflicting ambitions of maintaining internal security in India while seeking to exploit her considerable manpower and economic resources meant that the Indian Army was chronically overstretched. Coupled with age-old parsimony in funding modernization, the military in India was in no shape to wage effective modern warfare. 2 The Indian Army Medical Service too was under considerable stress, compounded by years of manpower and equipment shortages. This was further exacerbated by the deployment of trained personnel and supplies out of India to theaters in the Middle East and North Africa. At the outbreak of the war there were a mere 87 specialists and no consultants or consultant advisers. While this number rose to 1576 over the next 5 years, increasing demand would mean that a deficit in trained medical manpower persisted, shown in Table1. 3
The article contributes to the global history of the First World War and the history of ‘imperial humanitarianism’ by taking stock of the Indian Young Men’s Christian Association’s Army Work schemes in South Asia, Europe and the Middle East. The outbreak of the war was hailed by some American secretaries of the Y.M.C.A. working in India as presenting overwhelming opportunities for their proselytising agenda. Indeed, the global conflict massively enlarged the organisation’s range of activities among European soldiers stationed in South Asia and for the first time extended it to the ‘Sepoys’, i.e. Indian and Nepalese soldiers serving in the imperial army. Financially supported by the Indian public as well as by the governments of Britain and British India, the US-dominated Indian Y.M.C.A. embarked on large-scale ‘army work’ programmes in the Indian subcontinent as well as in several theatres of war almost from the outset, a fact that clearly boosted its general popularity. This article addresses the question of the effects the Y.M.C.A.’s army work schemes had for the imperial war effort and tries to assess their deeper societal and political impact as a means of educating better citizens, both British and Indian. In doing so, the article places particular emphasis on the activities of American Y-workers, scrutinising to what extent pre-existing imperial racial and cultural stereotypes influenced their perception of and engagement with the European and South Asian soldiers they wanted to transform into ‘better civilians’.