Military History

Theatre of War	Medals	Commonwealth War Grave of Memorial
Mesopotamia	1914 -15, British War & Victory Medals	Basra Memorial
Arrived in Theatre	Medal Citation (if app)	SWFHS Area Memorials
5 Dec 1915	~	Wellesbourne
Action, Battle or Other Reason Killed	Date and Place Enlisted	Other War Memorials
Died of illness while a Prisoner of War	August 1914 at Warwick
Place of Death	Previous Regiments or Units
Badhdad

Circumstances Leading to Death (Normally from War Diary)           

Frank died of illness in a Turking Prisoner of War Camp in Baghdad. He would have been captured at the fall of Kut on and then taken on the infamous 400 mile forced march to Baghdad.

The prisoners were marched 100 miles to Baghdad in just eight days, herded and beaten along the way by the Arab conscripts who formed part of the escort. By time they reached Baghdad many men had bartered all their possessions, including their shoes. Others had had them stolen while they slept. Some of the sickest prisoners were returned to the British, but deaths continued at the rate of around 19 each day.

From Baghdad the march northwards continued, to Tikrit, Samarra and then Mosul which the first group of other ranks reached on 3 June. Around 100 soldiers remained at Mosul to receive treatment, but most died there. From Mosul the trek continued to the railhead at Ras-Al-Hain, some 200 miles to the north-west, travelling via Dolabia, Rumailan, Kabir, Nisibin and Kochhisar. Many men remained in these places to work on the Baghdad Railway, among them Fred Richards, who bravely endured the long march to Nisibin despite the wounds he had received in the fighting at Kut. He died at Nisibin (now Nusaybin on the modern Turkey-Syrian border) sometime before the end of January 1917.

Some soldiers owed their lives to the Germans they encountered on the march. Appalled at the treatment being meted out to fellow Europeans, these Germans remonstrated forcefully with the Turks and arranged for medical help and better work conditions in the camps. Conditions on the journey to Ras-Al-Hain were perhaps the worst of the entire march. Almost certain death at the hands of the Arab guards awaited those unable to keep up, as one British officer recounted:

The tail of the column was an awful place … For the most part British soldiers stayed with their friends until they were dead … I shall never forget one soldier who could go no farther. He fell resignedly on the floor, the stump of a cigarette in his mouth, and with a tiredness born of long suffering, buried his head in his arms to shut out the disappearing column and smoked on … I saw another man crawling on all fours over the desert in the dark quite alone.

Those prisoners taken to hospital en route did not always fare better. An Army chaplain wrote about his visit to one ‘hospital’ in Nisibin on 29 June:

I thought I had witnessed horror enough in these frightful hospital conditions, but another more terrible sight had got to be seen. There was a small, dark, dank room, with no windows to it, only a few feet square. Something told me to go inside this room, and there to my horror I saw two British soldiers, absolutely naked, lying in their own faeces, which had not been cleaned up for several days. They were both dying and, thank God, one was unconscious. The other said to me ‘Oh, sir, please kneel down and ask God may let me die quickly. I can no longer stand these horrors’.  They were horrors repeated a thousand times over on the road to Ras-Al-Hain.

After reaching the railhead, most of the British prisoners continued over the Taurus Mountains on foot to Asia Minor where they were dispersed among the smaller work camps. The soldiers worked mainly on railway construction projects at Ras-Al-Hain, Afion Kara Hissar, Mamourie, Bagtsche and Yarbaschi. Other prisoners ended up at Entilli, Kedos, Adana, Airan, Angora, Tarsus, Changri, Daridja, Mosul and Baghdad.

Conditions in the camps were poor. Bagtsche was known as ‘The Cemetery’ and was eventually closed down in 1917 when details of conditions there were leaked to the outside world. Yarbaschi closed the same year for the same reason.

Survival rates among the Kut prisoners differed markedly. Of the ten 1/4th Battalion officers captured all survived while only 50 of the original 178 rank and file made it home again. Of the 13,309 soldiers who surrendered at Kut, 13,078 went into captivity. Of these at least 4,718 died, more than 3,000 on the march into captivity. This figure, however, does not include the men who died from other causes such as Spanish Flu. After the war survivors erected a plaque in the crypt at St Paul’s Cathedral dedicated to those who died in the siege and afterwards in captivity. The total given is 5,746.