Charles Vere Ferrers Townshend

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Charles Townshend, 1916
Townshend and Halil Pasha with British and Ottoman officers after the fall of Kut

Sir Charles Vere Ferrers Townshend KCB , DSO (* 21st February 1861 in Southwark ; † 18th May 1924 in Paris ) was a British officer , who in the First World War, a British advance in today's Iraq against the Ottoman Empire led.

Life

Townshend was born into a family with strong ties to the British Army . He was a great-great-grandson of Field Marshal George Townshend, 1st Marquess Townshend . He received his military training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst . Townshend gained his first experience as a participant in the expedition to Sudan in 1884. He also served in the crown colony of India. During the Mahdi uprising in Sudan, he took part in the Battle of Omdurman in 1898 .

After the turn of the century, he made a steep career in staff. In 1909 he was promoted to brigadier general, two years later to major general . At the beginning of the First World War in 1914 he commanded the 6th Indian Division. This unit represented an elite association within the British-Indian colonial army. In the spring of 1915 he and his unit were sent to Mesopotamia , then an Ottoman province.

Townshend was to advance up the Tigris with his units and take Baghdad . At the beginning, the campaign was quite satisfactory. On June 3, 1915, Townshend captured Al-Amarah almost without a fight . Three months later, on September 26th, Kut also fell into the hands of the British. Townshend wanted to halt the advance at this point and consolidate its positions. His superior in command, General John Nixon, was convinced of the weakness of the Turkish armed forces. Townshend's expeditionary force was thus instructed to proceed towards Baghdad.

In November Townshend put the 1st and 6th Indian Divisions back on the march towards Baghdad. They reached Al-Madain on November 20, 1915, just 25 kilometers south of their destination, Baghdad. Here, however, they were expected by a strong Ottoman force. The 30,000 man force of the Ottoman army was commanded by the German general Colmar von der Goltz . In the Battle of Ctesiphon , the two British-Indian divisions lost a third of their 11,000 soldiers and on November 22nd both sides withdrew. Townshend withdrew his troops to Kut. However, the Turkish troops took up his pursuit and a few days after his arrival in December 1915, Townshend and his soldiers were surrounded by a siege ring.

The siege of Kut was a defeat for the British army. Townshend's troops had received too few supplies due to logistics problems. Townshend said the soldiers in Kut had only been given supplies for a month. A relief group that was hastily thrown together and was supposed to advance to Kut via Al-Basra was easily repulsed by Ottoman troops. Townshend's army in fact lasted until April 1916. However, all further attempts to break open the siege ring were unsuccessful. After another three-week breakout attempt, the British troops surrendered on April 29, 1916. However, his opponent von der Goltz had died of an illness two weeks earlier. Townshend himself spent the rest of the war in a rather comfortable captivity near Istanbul , he was relatively free to move around the capital. In his memoirs, the German journalist Friedrich Schrader , then deputy editor-in-chief of the German-language Istanbul daily newspaper “ Ottoman Lloyd ” and married to a British woman, reports in his memoirs of a visit to Townshend's editorial office, which at the time was one of the few institutions in the city that had a telegraph decreed. Townshend picked up a telegram from London informing him of his being ennobled as Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath . In October 1918, Townshend was finally still involved in the negotiations that led to the Moudros armistice between the Entente and the Ottoman Empire.

After the war, he resigned from the army in 1920. In retirement he published his book My Campaign in Mesopotamia in 1920 . In November 1920 he was elected in a by-election in the constituency of The Wrekin as a member of the right-wing Independent Parliamentary Group in the British House of Commons . However, when reports about the suffering of his soldiers in captivity became public, he lost his reputation considerably (half of the survivors of the siege died in Turkish captivity). In addition, his military capabilities were questioned. In the general election in November 1922 he was defeated by the Conservative Party candidate and left parliament.

He died in Paris in 1924. From his marriage to the Frenchwoman Alice Cahen d'Anvers (1876-1965), daughter of the Jewish banker Louis Cahen d'Anvers (1837-1922), he left a daughter, Audrey Dorothy Louise Townshend (* 1900), who the Belgian Count Baudouin de Borchgrave d'Altena (1898-1993), a descendant of the Burgraves of Altena , married.

literature

  • AJ Barker: Townshend of Kut: a biography of Major-General Sir Charles Townshend (1967)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Friedrich Schrader, A Refugee Journey Through Ukraine . Journal pages of my escape from Constantinople. Dedicated to my dear wife Fanny C. Goldstein. JCB Mohr (Paul Siebeck), Tübingen 1919, p. 4: 14/137
personal data
SURNAME Townshend, Charles Vere Ferrers
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Townshend, Charles
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British officer and politician, Member of the House of Commons
DATE OF BIRTH February 21, 1861
PLACE OF BIRTH Southwark
DATE OF DEATH May 18, 1924
Place of death Paris