OTHER RANKS OF KUT

The portrait of the author shows a Flight Sergeant in the RAF, decorated with the Military Medal, but he says nothing about his service background nor his unit nor how he came to be in Kut when it was captured by the Turks after a five month siege. There is one clue when he refers to “a man of my own battery” which would indicate he was in the Royal Artillery at the time. It might have been RHA, RFA or RGA since all three branches were in Kut. His account starts on 30th April 1916, the day after the surrender, while he was lying on the floor of a mud hut that was graced by the name of No 4 Field Ambulance of the 6th (Poona) Division. After several weeks of suffering from acute stomach trouble he had collapsed. But his suffering then was nothing to what it would be in captivity. In The Secrets of A Kuttite (described elsewhere in this list) we learned how the officers fared, now we read of the dreadful treatment handed out to the other ranks by the Turks. There are many memoirs of NCOs and men who served on the Western Front, but published accounts of other ranks who survived Kut and captivity must be few and far between.
In the preface, Sir Arnold Wilson, MP notes that the Official History of the Mesopotamian Campaign devotes just six of its two thousand pages to the Turkish ill-treatment of the British other rank prisoners. He goes further and points out that the General Staff in Mesopotamia discredited and, where possible, suppressed, almost every report of cruelty and brutality till “the bitter truth could no longer be hidden.” Even the Government spokesman in the House of Lords made an official statement paying tribute to the Turks in respect of their treatment of prisoners of war. The sufferings of those who experienced the “trail of death” from Kut into captivity can be likened to the sufferings of the prisoners of the Japanese on the Burma railway. Turkish soldiers were often brutally treated by their officers – as Long testifies – so they in turn saw nothing unusual in brutalising their prisoners. At the end of his introduction the author writes: ‘To the many who have asked, and to those who would ask, “What happened to you after the surrender of Kut?” and “How did the Turks treat you?” this book is the answer. Read it!