1st Brandenburg Regiment met the most stubborn defense that morning. The road they were on was constricted by a deep marsh on the right, and crossed by a canal leading to a water pump station on the river. This created a bottle neck no more than 500 meters wide, and into that narrow passage went all three battalions abreast. That might be the frontage for a single battalion on attack, and it made for too many bodies in too open an area, so the companies ended up moving forward in waves. Behind them Konrad’s entire Lehr Regiment was forming up, meant to exploit into the Kazimiyah district, a more heavily built up area to the east.
When the attack slowed to a crawl, quite literally, with the rifle squads on their bellies in the open ground, the Germans then sought to flank the position with 2nd Regiment attacking south of that marsh. They would swarm into the smaller suburb of Al Haditha, named after the town Guderian had taken nearly two weeks earlier at the junction of the Tripoli / Haifa pipelines. This position was guarded by troops of the 1/10 Baluch Rifles in a large walled factory with looms and weaving equipment. They fought hard for four hours, the bullets snapping against those white stone walls and ricocheting off the looms at close quarters. Then the Germans brought up their PzJager battalion, a special unit attached to this regiment that had 12 Panthers and an equal number of Marder III’s.
The long barreled 75mm guns on the Panthers blasted away at the factory buildings, which was simply too much for the Indian rifle squads to endure. That site was right on the main road, and when it fell, it would open the way into the hamlet of Zidan, with its lush palm lined gardens and date trees. 7th Battalion had already been fighting its way through this area, opposed by the men of 3/15 Punjab Rifles. Behind it, just south of the main road below Zidan, was yet another factory processing grain, and 4/8th Punjab had thrown up walls of grain bags and fortified the whole site. The tall concrete silo brought back bitter memories of Volgograd for some of the veteran German infantry who had fought there.
The Germans wasted no time bringing up engineers, assault pioneers attached to Obersturmführer Duren’s regiment, and he watched through his field glasses as his troops made a classic attack on that silo. By noon, both the Spinning & Weaving Factory and the Grain Factory had been taken, save one building on the south side of the complex where a company of 4/8th Punjab still held out. Yet the British were not about to give up that easily. The 6th Indian Division, defending in all these areas, had a battalion of Royal Engineers, and they were sent in to try and retake the grain silos. They got over the wall on the eastern side of the complex, then three companies attacked, supported by artillery.
It was a gallant attack, the Royal Engineers pressing forward, Bren guns spitting fire at the soldiers of the 9th Brandenburg Battalion. They reached the silo, set charges against one wall to blow a hole, and then stormed in. For the next hour, they had the silo back again, their fire so hot that two German companies had to retire west of the outer wall for cover, where they immediately began regrouping for a counterattack. It was what Guderian had feared, a heavily built up area, with good concrete and stone buildings, and it would be back and forth for hours to reduce that strongpoint.
With 8th Battalion in reserve, the Germans sent it forward, fresh troops to press an attack against the southern wall of the Grain Factory. At the same time, they moved up more of their own Pioneers, with six panzerfaust teams ready to blast away at the silo. The Royals held the position, braving heavy fire, but events were transpiring east of the Tigris that would soon make a mockery of their gallantry.
4th Panzer Division was on the move, pushing over a narrow watercourse that arced around the outlying city settlement of Adhamiya. It was there that 17th Indian Brigade under Brigadier Jenkins of the 8th Division held the line, but they were about to endure the wrath of a full German Panzer Division on attack, something that was quite outside their wartime experience.
The Germans, mounted in halftracks, were organized into three heavy kampfgruppes. Closest to the Tigris, KG Rosenfeld had two battalions of Panzergrenadiers, backed by the Panzerjager company and 2nd Battalion of the 35th Panzer Regiment. They quickly pushed the enemy off their sandbagged positions on the watercourse, forcing them to retire to the outskirts of Adhamiya.
Further east KG Schafer, structured along the same lines as Rosenfeld, came forcefully up a secondary road, and followed a north-south canal the led them to a hole in the enemy lines. Schafer sent his panzers on through, dismounting infantry to try and widen the breach. They had help on their left from a battalion of the 78th Sturm Division, which had finally come down from Kirkuk in time for the attack.
The built up area of Adhamiya was relatively thin, no more than 400 meters, and once beyond it, a secondary road ran south through open fields and local cultivation that washed up against the thicker settlement of the Al Zamiyah District. That district harbored several key objectives. It was accessed by the Kazimiyah Bridge to the west, (called the Aa’mah bridge in 2021), and the Royal Mausoleum of King Faisal was nested further south behind the prominent domed mosque of Immam Al Azam, two schools, and a hospital. There was also an important fuel depot in the district, which is why 8th Indian commander General Russel had placed a second line of defense on the northern fringe of Al Zamiyah. On the far right, the whole district was protected by two elevated ‘bunds’ above flooded, marshy canal zones. They roughly followed the lines of what was once the old city wall in ancient times, and now they stood as lines of defense in this new war.
The importance of this sector could not be underestimated, for it if was overrun, it would mean the Germans would already be cutting off General Thompson’s 6th Indian Division on the western side of the Tigris, still stubbornly defending Kazimiyah. The vital bridge that bore that same name was the one link that connected the two divisions, and it had to be held. With Jenkins’ 17th Indian Brigade embroiled in the fight for Adhamiya, its lines penetrated by KG Schafer, and with Brigadier Ford’s 19th Indian Brigade fighting off a heavy attack over the canal and bund line to the east, the fate of the Al Zamiyah District now rested with that second line of defense, the 21st Indian Regiment under Brigadier Purves.
The German halftracks had already come barreling up that secondary road, racing across the open fields, and smashing right into a company of 3/15 Punjab, which shattered and began a hasty retreat. It fell back to artillery that had been brought too far forward, and soon the German machineguns were raking those batteries, sending gun crews scrambling for cover. The other companies of that battalion were shifted west to try and seal the breech, but it was riflemen against armored Panzergrenadiers and tanks.
The one battalion of British regulars in this brigade, 5th Queen’s Own Rifles, had been posted along the shores of the vital Kazimiyah bridge and nearby ferry sites. They had not expected to be threatened from the rear, and now the men were looking nervously over their shoulders, hearing the growing sounds of battle behind them.
“Look to your front!” growled Color Sergeant Kemp, though even he could not help but turn his head and cast a wary glance to the east. The mid-day sun gleamed off the golden dome of the Mosque of Imam Al Azam, and they could hear the rising and falling call to prayer from the onion capped spires of the ‘minarets,’ a word derived from the Arabic word for a lighthouse. Yet these tall towers would not call out to distant ships at sea, but to the sea of the faithful, surrounding the mosque on every side. They were thought to be ‘gates joining heaven and earth,’ which is why their tall thin spires strained upwards to the sky, much like the towers of Western Cathedrals.