This Day in World War 1 History: APRIL 27, 1916 : BRITISH ATTEMPT TO BARGAIN WITH TURKS OVER KUT

On this day in 1916, three British officers, including the famous Captain T.E. Lawrence (known as Lawrence of Arabia), attempt to engineer the escape of thousands of British troops under siege at the city of Kut-al-Amara in Mesopotamia through a secret negotiation with the Turkish command.

Since December 1915, British forces under the command of Sir Charles Townshend had been under siege from Turkish and German forces in Kut, on the Tigris River in the Basra province of Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq). Four attempts to push the enemy troops back had resulted only in some 23,000 casualties—nearly twice the strength of the remaining regiment. Exhausted, undersupplied and plagued with illness, Townshend’s men were on the brink of surrender when the British regional command decided to try one last diplomatic maneuver.

Then working in military intelligence in Cairo, Egypt, the recently promoted Captain Thomas Edward Lawrence found office work dull, and thus was excited to be sent, along with two other officers, on a secret mission to negotiate the escape of Townshend and his troops with their Turkish counterparts. On April 27, they made their offer: if the Turks allowed the men in Kut to leave the city and rejoin Allied regional forces located to the south of Kut, they would be rewarded with £1 million in gold.

Turkish officers, confident of their imminent victory at Kut, refused the offer, and all Lawrence and his comrades were able to secure was the release of some of the wounded. Kut fell on April 29, as Townshend and his remaining 13,000 men were taken prisoner, in the largest single surrender of troops in British history to that point.

Lawrence’s well-written reports to British military command, both about Kut and Arab nationalism, won him high favor among his superiors. He was soon sent on another important mission, to help engineer an Arab revolt against the Turks led by Feisal Hussein.

Article Details:

April 27, 1916 : British attempt to bargain with Turks over Kut

• Author

  History.com Staff

• Website Name

  History.com

• Year Published

  2009

• Title

  April 27, 1916 : British attempt to bargain with Turks over Kut

• URL

  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/british-attempt-to-bargain-with-turks-over-kut

• Access Date

  April 27, 2015

• Publisher

  A+E Networks

This Day in World War 1 History: APRIL 24, 1916 : THE EASTER RISING BEGINS IN DUBLIN

Around noon on Easter Monday of 1916, some 1,600 Irish nationalists–members of the Irish Volunteers–launch the so-called Easter Rising in Dublin, seizing a number of official buildings and calling on all Irish patriots to resist the bonds of British control.

Since the outbreak of World War I, the leading Irish nationalist, Sir Roger Casement, had pressed the German government to see the potential benefit of an Irish rebellion against British rule. Consequently, on April 2, the German merchant ship Aud was sent to the Atlantic coast of Ireland, loaded with some 20,000 rifles and 1 million rounds of ammunition bound for the hands of the Easter rebels. Before the Aud reached its destination, however, a British ship intercepted it, and the crew members of the Aud scuttled the ship with all its cargo. When Casement himself traveled from Germany to Tralee Bay, also on the Atlantic coast, three weeks later, he was put ashore by the Germans on an inflatable raft. He was subsequently arrested, tried and executed for treason by the British authorities.

Meanwhile, plans for the Easter Rising had gone ahead without Casement or German help. Due to last-minute uncertainty, however, one of its leaders canceled the orders for mobilization on the Saturday before the planned uprising—because of this only 1,600 of an expected 5,000 participants gathered at Liberty Hall on April 24 to march towards the center of Dublin. There, they seized the post office, several court buildings, St. Stephen’s Green and several other locations. From the steps of the post office, the rebels declared Ireland an independent republic, stating that We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible.

Despite the rebels’ hopes, the public did not rise to support them, and they were quickly crushed by the police and government forces sent against them, among them some newly recruited troops bound for service in World War I. Sixty-four rebels were killed during the struggle, along with 134 troops and policeman, and at least 200 civilians were injured in the crossfire. Fifteen of the uprising’s leaders were eventually executed; a sixteenth, Eamon de Valera, was saved from a death sentence because he was an American citizen.

Even in its failure, the Easter Rising and the continued volatility of the so-called Irish question demonstrated the thwarted desires for self-determination that still bubbled beneath the surface in Great Britain, as in many countries in Europe, even as the larger matter of international warfare superseded them for the moment.

Article Details:

April 24, 1916 : The Easter Rising begins in Dublin

• Author

  History.com Staff

• Website Name

  History.com

• Year Published

  2009

• Title

  April 24, 1916 : The Easter Rising begins in Dublin

• URL

  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-easter-rising-begins-in-dublin

• Access Date

  April 24, 2015

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  A+E Networks

This Day in World War 1 History: APRIL 23, 1915 : POET-SOLDIER RUPERT BROOKE DIES IN GREECE

On this day in 1915, Rupert Brooke, a young scholar and poet serving as an officer in the British Royal Navy, dies of blood poisoning on a hospital ship anchored off the Greek island of Skyros, while awaiting deployment in the Allied invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula.

Brooke, born in 1887 in Rugby, Britain, attended King’s College in Cambridge, where he befriended such future luminaries as E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes and Virginia Stephens (later Woolf) as a member of the famed Bloomsbury set. Brooke’s travels in the United States in 1912 produced a series of acclaimed essays and articles; he also lived for a time in Tahiti, where he wrote some of his best-known poems. Returning to England just before the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Brooke gained a commission in the Royal Naval Division with the help of his close friend Edward Marsh, then secretary to First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. In his poetry, Brooke welcomed the arrival of war, writing: Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour/And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping.

Rupert Brooke saw his only action of World War I during the defense of Antwerp, Belgium, against German invasion in early October 1914. Although aided by a stiff resistance from Antwerp’s inhabitants, British troops suffered a decisive defeat in that conflict and were forced to retreat through a devastated Belgian countryside. Brooke subsequently returned to Britain to await redeployment, where he caught the flu during the training and preparation. While recovering, Brooke wrote what would become the most famous of his war sonnets, including Peace, Safety, The Dead, and The Soldier.

Brooke sailed for the Dardanelles near Turkey on February 18, 1915; problems with enemy mines led to a delay in his squadron’s deployment and a training stint in Egypt, where Brooke contracted dysentery. By this time, Brooke’s poems had begun to gain notice in Britain, and he was offered the chance to return to Britain and serve away from the battlefield after his recovery; he refused. On April 10, he sailed with his unit to Greece, where they anchored off Skyros. There, Brooke developed a fatal case of blood poisoning from an insect bite; he died on April 23, 1915, aboard a hospital ship, two days before the Allies launched their massive, ill-fated invasion of Gallipoli.

On April 26, The Times of London ran an obituary notice for Brooke written by Winston Churchill. The thoughts to which he gave expression in the very few incomparable war sonnets which he has left behind, Churchill wrote, will be shared by many thousands of young men moving resolutely and blithely forward in this, the hardest, the cruelest, and the least-rewarded of all the wars that men have fought. The opening lines of The Soldier, Brooke’s most famous poem, evoke the simple, heartfelt patriotism to which Churchill felt all England’s soldiers should aspire: If I should die, think only this of me/That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England.

Article Details:

April 23, 1915 : Poet-soldier Rupert Brooke dies in Greece

• Author

  History.com Staff

• Website Name

  History.com

• Year Published

  2009

• Title

  April 23, 1915 : Poet-soldier Rupert Brooke dies in Greece

• URL

  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/poet-soldier-rupert-brooke-dies-in-greece

• Access Date

  April 23, 2015

• Publisher

  A+E Networks