With a Machine Gunner in Mesopotamia Private George C. Aird

This is the story of Private George C. Aird, a machine gun transporter, who entered the Great War in 1915 as a replacement troop in the 2nd Black Watch Battalion, which had been thinned from initial relief attempts in Mesopotamia. Starting from Davenport, England, Aird sailed through the Mediterranean and Suez Canal, around the Arabian Peninsula into the Persian Gulf. From the Basra port, he marched and fought up the Tigris River as far north as Baghdad and Tikrit for the next year-and-a-half as a member of the 21st Brigade, 7th Indian Division, Tigris Corp. This paper presents Private Aird's background prior to World War I, explains the chain of events that required his deployment into the Mesopotamian Theater and describes the battles his unit fought in to relieve the besieged division at Kut-al-Amara.