We are diving into a piece of history today that
is as fascinating as it is deeply unsettling.
Truly unsettling. Yeah. If you are joining us
to understand those rare pivotal moments where
geography, human error, and just sheer desperation
collide, you are in the right place. Today, we're
looking at a comprehensive stack of source material
covering the Siege of Cut. Right, in what was
then Ottoman Iraq. Exactly. This is a World War
I battle, and military historians actually describe
it as the absolute worst defeat of the Allies
in the entire First World War. It's a really
profound historical event to study. What we have
here is a 147 -day siege that basically serves
as a masterclass in how compounding communication
errors, incredibly rigid bureaucracy, and honestly,
a stark lack of empathy and leadership can lead
to catastrophic human suffering. As we go through
this material, I really encourage you to think
critically about how information is managed in
high -stakes situations because You know, when
the flow of truth breaks down at the top, the
consequences at the bottom are incredibly dire.
Yeah. The mission today is to extract the most
crucial and devastating lessons from those 147
days. And the materials we're pulling from outline
a story that is almost hard to believe. I mean,
we are going to examine a totally unprecedented,
completely secret, two million pound bribe. Involving
T .E. Lawrence, no less. Right. the world's first
ever aerial supply drop, and a shocking contrast
in how different levels of command behaved while
thousands of people starved. Okay, let's unpack
this. To understand how a disaster of this magnitude
unfolds, you first need to look at the board.
The geography here is everything. Set the scene
for us. So it's December 1915, and the 6th Pune
Division of the Indian Army has just retreated
to the town of Kut, which sits about 160 kilometers
south of Baghdad. This division was under the
command of Major General Charles Townsend. And
they had just been through the ringer row. Oh,
absolutely. They had just fought a brutal battle
at a place called Setesifon, and the retreat
left them totally battered. We are talking about
a force that had dwindled down to just 11 ,000
soldiers, plus some cavalry. So they arrive in
Kut, and Townsend makes a strategic choice. He
decides to stay and hold the position right there,
rather than continuing to retreat further south
toward the safer base in Basra. Which is a massive
decision. Huge. But if you picture a map of Cut,
you can sort of see the logic, at least initially.
The town is situated inside this incredibly sharp
U -shaped river loop of the Tigris. It looks
exactly like a horseshoe. Right. The river wraps
around the town almost completely, acting as
this brilliant natural moat for defense. But
there is a massive flip side to that geography.
While it keeps the enemy out, it creates a terrible
bottleneck for your own supply lines. You're
essentially trapping yourself in a sack with
only one way out. And waiting right outside the
opening of that sack were the Ottoman forces.
Initially, the pursuing forces commanded by Halil
Pasha numbered around 11 ,000 men, which was
roughly equal to the British inside cut. But
they didn't stay at 11 ,000 for long. No, their
numbers were increasing steadily with constant
reinforcements. But more importantly, we have
to look at the tactical mind advising and leading
these Ottoman troops. They were commanded by
a highly respected elderly German general and
military historian named Baron Bondergoltz. This
wasn't just some random advisor assigned to the
region. Not at all. Baron von Reultz knew the
Ottoman army intimately. He had actually spent
12 years, from 1883 to 1895, working specifically
on modernizing their military infrastructure.
Wow, 12 years. Yeah. So he brings this immense
granular tactical expertise to the siege. After
a few initial attacks in December, Goltz assesses
the geography and realizes he doesn't need to
force his way into Coute. Instead, he directs
the building of extensive siege fortifications
facing the town to keep towns and locked in.
Just seal the bag. Exactly. But here is his truly
devastating tactical move. He anticipates that
the British command will send relief ships up
the Tigris River from Basra to rescue the garrison.
So he builds robust defensive positions further
downstream, specifically designed to block any
river -borne relief forces. He effectively locks
the door to cut and then builds a fortress around
the keyhole. Which sets the stage for the crisis
inside cut. And this brings us to a massive communication
failure. Townsend sends a report downriver to
his commander, General Sir John Nixon. In this
report, Townsend states that he only has one
month of food left for his men. When, in reality,
the historical record shows he actually had food
for more than four months. Four months? Yes.
It would have meant living on reduced rations,
certainly, but it was a four -month supply nonetheless.
Wait, hold on. If he actually had four months
of food, why intentionally tell his commanding
officer he only had one? He had to know that
would trigger an absolute panic, right? Right.
What's fascinating here is the psychology behind
that lie. And it introduces a crucial theme for
you to keep in mind the immense danger of filtering
information to protect your own position. Townsend
absolutely refused to attempt an infantry retreat.
Because of the terrain. Breaking out of that
horseshoe bend would have meant marching his
battered men south through hostile tribal lands
without the protection of river transport, which
he didn't have. By artificially shrinking his
survival window down to just one month, he essentially
forced General Nixon's hand. He manufactured
a ticking clock to compel a rapid, fully protected
rescue by river. But forcing a ticking clock
means forcing an unready rescue. General Nixon
now believes his men will scarve in 30 days,
so he frantically starts demanding transport
ships from London to evacuate Townsend's division.
And the delays in getting that rescue force together
are a prime example of administrative paralysis.
Put yourself in London at this time. It's an
absolute bureaucratic nightmare. Exactly. This
connects directly to the broader systemic dysfunction.
You have General Nixon screaming for ships, but
the War Office in London was right in the middle
of this agonizing reorganization of its military
command structure. Right. Shifting power around.
Previously, orders and logistics for this specific
region had come from the Viceroy and the Indy
office. Now power is shifting. thousands of miles
away to London. You had an aging military official,
General Maurice, who insisted on being briefed
on every single detail as evidence trickled into
the Committee of Imperial Defense. This endless
red tape? Endless cabinet debates over whether
to send one division or two. Imagine trying to
get an emergency sign off, but the chain of command
spans thousands of miles and requires unanimous
approval from a reorganizing committee. This
bureaucratic friction meant the transports Nixon
ordered simply never arrived in time. And because
the transports didn't arrive, but the manufactured
one -month clock was ticking, the military had
to attempt land rescues. Starting in January
1916, Lieutenant General Elmer led these desperately
rushed relief expeditions upriver to save Koot.
These became the battles of Sheikh Taad, Wadi,
and Hana. And the conditions were just appalling.
You really have to visualize the horrors of this
environment. The troops aren't just fighting
the Ottomans, they are fighting the earth itself.
Heavy rains made the primitive roads completely
impassable. Men are trying to march through freezing
mud, pushing into those downstream entrenched
positions that Goltz had specifically designed
to stop them. The casualties were horrific. Just
at the Battle of Hanna alone, the British lost
2 ,700 men killed and wounded fighting in that
freezing mud. Elmer tried time and time again
to break through. There was a failed attack in
March on the Dujayla Redoubt. That was a temporary
fortification, right? Yes, a temporary but formidable
supplementary fortification built by the Ottomans.
And that single attack cost another 4 ,000 men.
After that, Aylmer was dismissed. General George
Goranj replaced him and tried again in April.
Goranj amassed a massive force of about 30 ,000
men. But even with those numbers, they just couldn't
break through the Ottoman defenses at Senayat.
The human cost is staggering to think about.
In total, all these failed relief expeditions
under Elmer and Goranj cost the Allies around
30 ,000 dead or wounded. To put that in perspective,
the Ottoman casualties during these same defensive
engagements were around 10 ,000. The Allies suffered
three times the losses purely because they were
forced to repeatedly hurl men at heavily fortified
choke points on a completely artificial panicked
timeline. And despite sacrificing 30 ,000 men,
they still couldn't reach the starving garrison
in Coote. When you lose 30 ,000 men trying to
break down the front door, have to look for a
window or in this case, the sky. Here's where
it gets really interesting. Desperation breeds
innovation. And in April 1916, the military tried
something that had never been done before. The
Royal Flying Corps No. 30 Squadron carried out
the first aerial supply operation in human history.
It was a completely groundbreaking concept. The
idea was to bypass the impenetrable land blockades
entirely and use aircraft to drop food and ammunition
directly to the defenders inside that river loop.
But the technology just wasn't there yet to match
the ambition. It's not like today where we have
precision -guided air drops. They were dealing
with strong winds, primitive planes, and no real
delivery mechanism. Right, they were just basically
throwing things over the side. Reverend H. Spooner,
who was there, noted that as often as not, the
parcels of food went straight into the Tigris
River, or the wind blew them directly into the
Ottoman trenches. They ran this operation for
almost three weeks in April, and the total food
they managed to successfully drop was barely
enough for three days of rations. It was an incredible
historical first, but operationally, it was a
complete failure. And while those planes are
dropping vital supplies into the river, life
inside the siege is deteriorating into something
unimaginable. We get a very clear, visceral picture
of this from the account of a Sergeant Munn who
was trapped inside. He details how desperate
the measures became just to trick the body into
feeling sustained. By mid -February, all the
tobacco was gone, so the men started smoking
dried green leaves or tea leaves mixed with sawdust.
Just brutal. When the tea ran out, they drank
crushed ginger steeped in boiling water just
to have something hot. All the milk, all the
sugar, completely gone. The situation was particularly
agonizing for the Indian troops. Remember, this
is the Pune Division, and many of these Indian
soldiers were strictly vegetarian for deeply
held religious reasons. By April, the sheer reality
of starvation forced them to abandon their religious
beliefs and eat horse meat just to stay alive.
The medical facilities, headed by Major General
Patrick Heher, were completely overwhelmed. Severe
dysentery and scurvy ran rampant through the
entire garrison. And if the starvation and disease
weren't enough, they were under constant bombardment.
At the beginning of March, the Ottomans opened
up a heavy bombardment using Krupp artillery.
And the name Krupp is significant here. This
signifies state -of -the -art devastatingly effective
German engineering, raining fire down on them,
destroying a huge portion of the town. They had
no safe haven. None. They also had three German
aircraft actively bombing Kut from above. There
was even a heavy psychological warfare element.
The Ottomans were seen unloading these strange
metal cylinders from barges on the Tigris, and
the British assumed they contained chemical weapons
sent from Germany. Townsend wrote in his diary
about this fear, calling chemical warfare a cowardly
barbarism worthy of Chinese pirates. The dissonance
between the suffering of the men and the behavior
of command is truly shocking. You have a garrison
and a civilian population starving to death,
suffering from scurvy, breaking their religious
vows just to eat horses, being blasted by state
-of -the -art artillery. And what is General
Townsend doing during all of this? This part
is just infuriating. He is actively using the
radio to send a series of messages asking command
for a promotion. He wanted to be elevated from
major general to lieutenant general, citing his
earlier successes before the retreat. Asking
for a promotion while your men are drinking ginger
water and eating sawdust is an astonishing lack
of empathy. And that bizarre disconnect wasn't
just happening with Townsend. There was a wild
desperate negotiation happening behind the scenes
that sounds like something out of a spy novel.
The British leadership was so determined to avoid
the sheer humiliation of a military surrender
that they actually tried to buy the army's freedom.
Yes, a team of officers was secretly dispatched
to negotiate with the Ottomans. Remarkably, this
team included Aubrey Herbert and a young intelligence
officer who would soon become world -famous T
.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia.
And the offer they put on the table is staggering.
They offered the Ottoman leadership two million
pounds. To put that in perspective, adjusted
for inflation, that is the equivalent of 190
million pounds today. Incredible sum. Nearly
200 million pounds, along with a sworn promise
that the freed troops would never take up arms
against the Ottomans again just to let Townsend
and his men walk away. But the Ottoman leader,
Enver Pasha, handled this with brilliant, cold
calculation. He didn't just reject it outright.
He pretended to negotiate in good faith. He strung
the British officers along, maximizing his leverage
and watching them sweat. Then, once he had extracted
all the political capital he could, he publicly
publicized the secret offer and formally rejected
it. It was a masterclass in psychological warfare,
designed as a final, crushing humiliation to
the British Empire. They were completely out
of options. They had even held out hope for a
Russian force under General Baratov, who commanded
20 ,000 Cossacks in Persia. He had started advancing
toward Baghdad in April, but when he got the
news of the situation, he turned his forces back.
The inevitable has finally arrived. On April
29, 1916, after 147 agonizing days of siege,
Townsend arranged a ceasefire and surrendered.
Around 13 ,000 allied soldiers were taken prisoner.
Now what happens next to those 13 ,000 prisoners
is a subject of profound polarizing historical
debate. History is rarely agreed upon, and the
aftermath of Kuwait looks incredibly different
depending on whose accounts you read. We have
to be strictly impartial here, and we want to
make it clear to you that we're presenting these
conflicting historical accounts exactly as they
are in the source text. Multiple perspectives
exist, and we are not endorsing either side,
just laying out the sources. Absolutely. For
example, the Turkish writer Elbert or Tylan presents
a specific view of the surrender. He states that
the Ottoman commander, Halil Pasha, acted like
a gentleman to the surrendering British officers.
Ortailou's account notes that Halil Pasha even
offered to take the prisoners of war up towards
the north in comfortable riverboats, provided
that fuel could be supplied from nearby British
bases. But when you look at the accounts from
French historian Mark Farrow, or British historians
like Russell Bradden and Paul Knight, they describe
a vastly different, horrific reality for the
enlisted men. According to these historians,
the surrendered were subjected to a brutal death
march. They detail accounts of starving POWs
being forced to march across the desert and over
mountains deep into Anatolia, constantly whipped
by Ottoman guards to force them to move faster.
The granular details from the troops themselves
paint a very grim picture of those early days
of captivity. On the actual day of the surrender,
the Ottomans handed out biscuits to the starving
prisoners. But according to British historian
Russell Braddon, the very next morning, the men
began to die rapidly. Just from the biscuits?
Yes, they were afflicted by enteritis from contaminated
biscuits. Enteritis is a severe inflammation
of the intestines, and in bodies already weakened
by months of starvation, it was fatal. Braddon
describes the men suffering from extreme dehydration,
frothing at the mouth, and dying one after another.
We also have the writings of one of the POW's
Sergeant Long. He described the forced march
from Coote as an appalling misery. He wrote of
men who had fought and starved for months being
driven across the pitiless waste under a scorching
sun, herded along by a brutal and callous escort.
He described the men arriving at camps looking
like animated skeletons hung about with filthy
rags, living in literal holes in the ground.
To give you a sense of how these events are analyzed
by modern historians, Paul Knight draws a direct
comparison between the treatment of the cut prisoners
and the horrific conditions endured by Allied
prisoners taken by the Japanese in World War
II. Knight goes even further, contextualizing
this captivity against the backdrop of the Armenian
massacres. He raises the complex historical question
of whether the deaths of the prisoners at Kut
were the result of deliberate, state -sanctioned
policy to murder through overwork and underfeeding,
or if it was the tragic byproduct of official
negligence and incompetence. He notes that this
debate mirrors the ongoing discussions around
the Armenian massacres, which he states are still
denied by the modern Turkish state. Ortisloe's
account of gentlemanly conduct and offers of
river transport versus the harrowing accounts
of Pharaoh, Braden, and Knight detailing abuse,
severe enteritis, and death marches. But amidst
all of this debate over the suffering of the
enlisted men, there is zero debate about what
happened to General Townsend. And it is the ultimate
infuriating irony of this entire deep dive. Kaunzen
was not sent on a desert march. He wasn't placed
in a camp. He was taken to the island of Hebeleada,
located on the Sea of Marmara, where he sat out
the rest of the war in relative luxury. The author
Norman Dixon actually analyzed Townsend's mindset
in a book called On the Psychology of Military
Incompetence. Dixon noted that during his comfortable
captivity, Townsend seemed almost amused by the
plight of the men he had commanded. He treated
the whole catastrophic surrender as if he had
pulled off some clever trick. According to Dixon,
Townsend was entirely unable to understand why
his friends and comrades back home in Britain
judged his behavior so harshly. So what does
this all mean? We've covered a siege that trapped
thousands in a horseshoe riverbend, a bureaucracy
that paralyzed a rescue, a pioneering airdrop
that failed to deliver, a massive secret bribe
that was weaponized for humiliation, and a general
who lied about his food supply and then lived
in luxury while his men died. This raises an
important question for you to consider as you
digest this history. The Siege of Cut is a harsh,
enduring lesson on the incredible dangers of
filtering information. Townsend's lie about having
only one month of food wasn't just a miscommunication.
It was an ego -driven manipulation that forced
a premature, disastrous rescue attempt, costing
30 ,000 casualties. It perfectly illustrates
how a systemic bureaucracy like the War Office
reorganizing in London can become completely
paralyzed by its own procedures when rapid action
is needed most. But most chillingly, it demonstrates
how a fundamental lack of empathy at the highest
levels of command can directly dictate the survival
of thousands of lives at the bottom. The decisions
made by leadership trying to protect their own
comfort had devastating, very real -world consequences
for the men who had to eat sawdust in the mud.
We want to thank you for joining us on this deep
dive. It is heavy dense material, but understanding
how these massive failures compound is so important.
Absolutely. Before we go, we want to leave you
with one final haunting detail from the source
material to mull over. We talked about how the
Indian troops were forced to abandon their deepest
religious beliefs just to survive, only to be
marched into brutal captivity. Think about what
happens to the human psyche when the system you
trust completely, entirely abandons you. It's
a dark thought. The sources reveal that during
their captivity, some of the abandoned Indian
POWs from Qud were approached by the German High
Command. They were recruited into something called
the Ottoman Indian Volunteer Corps. These surviving
men actually took up arms and fought alongside
the Ottomans against the very British army they
had originally served. Think about that for a
moment. Consider the profound psychological shift,
the absolute breaking of trust, required for
a starving prisoner of war to turn around and
fight for the very army that besieged them. Something
to explore on your own. Until next time.