Siege of Kut [SEP] end time
Siege of Kut
The siege of Kut Al Amara (7 December 1915 – 29 April 1916), also known as the First Battle of Kut, was the besieging of an 8,000 strong British-Indian garrison in the town of Kut, south of Baghdad, by the Ottoman Army. In 1915 its population was around 6,500. Following the surrender of the garrison on 29 April 1916, the survivors of the siege were marched to imprisonment at Aleppo, during which many died. Historian Christopher Catherwood has called the siege "the
to surrender to a German officer rather an Ottoman officer. By the end of the siege, Townshend's men were living on five ounces of bread/per day and a slice of mule meat. Townshend grew increasingly desperate as the siege went on, at one time sending off a message claiming that if Kut fell, it would be a worse defeat than Yorktown, maintaining that the entire Islamic world would rally for the Ottomans if he had to surrender and this would be the beginning of the end of the British Empire.