Battle of Omdurman

The Battle of Omdurman, also called the Battle of Karary, was fought on 2 September 1898 on the plain of Kerreri north of Omdurman, the capital of the Mahdist state in Sudan. An Anglo-Egyptian army under Herbert Kitchener, armed with modern rifles, machine guns and artillery, defeated a much larger army led by the Khalifa Abdallahi ibn Muhammad. The battle decided the British-led reconquest of Sudan and showed the overwhelming advantage that modern firepower gave European-led armies in colonial wars.

In 1885 the followers of Muhammad Ahmad, the self-proclaimed Mahdi, had taken Khartoum and killed the British general Charles Gordon, ending Egyptian rule over Sudan; the Mahdi died soon afterwards and the Khalifa succeeded him. In 1896 the British government, which controlled Egypt, decided to reconquer the country, citing the security of Egypt and the Suez Canal and the suppression of the slave trade. Kitchener, commander of the Egyptian army, advanced up the Nile, taking Dongola in 1896 and Abu Hamed in 1897 and defeating a Mahdist army at the Atbara in April 1898. On 1 September 1898, supported by a flotilla of gunboats, he reached the outskirts of Omdurman.

Kitchener had about 8,200 British troops and 17,600 Egyptian and Sudanese soldiers. He drew them up in an arc around the village of Egeiga with their backs to the Nile, protected by a zariba, or field barricade, and supported by gunboats on the river. The Khalifa's army is estimated at 35,000 to 50,000 men, divided into several bodies, some of them hidden behind hills. Some carried rifles, but most were armed with older weapons.

Fighting began at about six in the morning, when around 8,000 men under Osman Azrak advanced straight across the open plain, followed by thousands more from the north-west. British artillery opened fire at long range, followed by machine guns and rifle volleys, and the attack collapsed with heavy losses; none of the attackers reached the British trenches. On the northern flank, Egyptian cavalry and camel troops were saved from being overrun only when gunboats turned their guns on the pursuing Mahdist forces.

Kitchener then moved towards the city. The 21st Lancers, sent ahead to clear the way, charged what they took to be a few hundred men and found about 2,500 hidden in a depression; they forced them back after a fierce fight. Among the lancers was the young Winston Churchill, then a soldier and war correspondent. Meanwhile the Khalifa threw his reserves at the rear brigade under Hector MacDonald, mostly Sudanese troops. MacDonald turned his battalions to face successive attacks from the west and north, and with reinforcements and more machine guns brought up, the Mahdist assaults broke. By late morning the march on Omdurman resumed.

According to the usual figures, about 12,000 Mahdist fighters were killed, 13,000 wounded and 5,000 taken prisoner. The Anglo-Egyptian force lost 47 or 48 killed and 382 wounded. The killing of wounded Mahdists after the battle soon became controversial in Britain: a journalist present, Ernest Bennett, criticised it in print, and Churchill privately agreed that Kitchener had been too harsh, though he toned down his criticism in later editions of his account, The River War.

The Khalifa escaped and was killed a year later at Umm Diwaykarat, which ended the Mahdist War. Days after the battle Kitchener was sent up the Nile to Fashoda to confront a French expedition, and he was made a baron, Kitchener of Khartoum. Sudan became an Anglo-Egyptian condominium, effectively under the British Empire, until its independence in 1956.

Our 1900 map shows the newly established Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, which today is Sudan and South Sudan.