make it or break it came out on june 22, 2009.
make it or break it came out on june 22, 2009.
when did make it or break it come out?
june 22 , 2009
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subsequent increasingly desperate relief expeditions dispatched from basra to attempt to rescue the 6th division fared equally badly against the defences erected against their passage by goltz (who would not himself see the military victory of the siege, dying of typhoid in baghdad before its end). when townshend reported that his men were running out of food, london ordered him to break out to link up with the relief force commanded by sir fenton aylmer (who had also saved townshend at chitral), townshend suddenly "discovered" that he had enough food to hold out longer and a break-out was unnecessary; from townshend's viewpoint it was better from a public relations standpoint if aylmer should break the siege rather him breaking out to link up with aylmer. one attempt reached a point just from kut, but repeated assaults against turkish positions trying to break through them to reach the town failed. the last effort, after three weeks of attacks, took place on 22 april 1916, but also ended in failure. the british were to lose 26,000 men killed in the attempts to break the siege of kut while townshend refused to make any effort to break out of kut, saying it was up for general aylmer to break in. during the siege, townshend displayed in the words of regan a "profound egotism and a disgraceful neglect for his men". much of townshend's time was spent sending radio messages back to london asking for a promotion and inquiring about his friends in london such as "actors and gaiety girls" while he spent an inordinate amount of his time making certain that his dog spot did not suffer from the siege, a tender concern that did not extend to the ordinary british and indian soldiers under his command. despite the fact that by the end of the siege, much of the anglo-indian garrison were either slowly starving to death and/or dying of diseases, townshend never visited the hospital although he found time to take spot out for a daily walk and to spend his afternoon reading works of military history in french. a 1923 report by the british army about kut concluded that "visits by the commander and his staff to the troops would have even more effective" at sustaining morale rather than the "barrage of communiqués" that townshend unleashed. townshend spent almost all of his time either in his headquarters, a two-story mud house writing up messages or "gazing out across the turkish lines from his observation post on the roof". when townshend learned that aylmer had been replaced with gorringe as commander of the relief force, he was heard to say: "but he's junior to me!" this was a mere prelude to townshend going into a bout of hysteria as he began jumping up and down, screaming and crying his eyes out that it was completely unfair for him to be rescued by a general junior to himself like gorringe rather than a general of equal rank like aylmer, saying how he was supposed to come out of this siege a hero if the rescue force was commanded by a general of lower rank than himself. townshend was gravely offended by the decision to give command of the relief force to gorringe, sending out a long radio message saying giving the command to gorringe was "a slight on my record of service...i am deeply concerned to have brought up the question of promotion at so inopportune a time, but my active-service record is a honourable one and like my family before me for the past 300 years, i have served the state well". the british psychologist norman f. dixon wrote that townshend's often irrational behaviour at kut was due to "cognitive dissonance", writing: "no better example [of cognitive dissonance] is afforded than that of townshend's occupation of kut. since his advance up the tigris was totally unjustified by facts of which he was fully aware, his dissonance, when disaster struck, must have been extreme and, to a man of his egotistical nature, demanding of instant resolution. so, again, in the face of much contrary evidence, he withdrew into kut. the wiser and possible course of retreating to basra would have been a greater admission of the lack of justification for his previous decision. by the same token, once inside kut nothing would budge him, because to break out, even to assist those who had been sent to release him, would have emphasised his lack of justification for being there in the first place. in short, an inability to admit one has been in the wrong will be greater the more wrong one has been, and the more wrong one has been, the more bizarre will be subsequent attempts to justify the unjustifiable". when a british artillery officer almost killed goltz with a well-aimed shot (goltz stood out by dressing in the full uniform of a prussian field marshal and because of his weight), townshend was extremely angry, saying that he did not want goltz killed because if he had to surrender kut, it was much better to surrender to a german officer rather an ottoman officer. by the end of the siege, townshend's men were living on five ounces of bread/per day and a slice of mule meat. townshend grew increasingly desperate as the siege went on, at one time sending off a message claiming that if kut fell, it would be a worse defeat than yorktown, maintaining that the entire islamic world would rally for the ottomans if he had to surrender and this would be the beginning of the end of the british empire. in march 1916, the ottomans began particular heavy bombardments of kut, and they were seen unloading mysterious canisters from a barge, which everyone assumed was poison gas from germany. morale began to collapse among the indians as more and more indians began to desert, there were several cases of indian soldiers killing their ncos and many indians began to engage in self-mutilation to get themselves into the presumed safety of the hospital. whenever news of german advances at the battle of verdun reached the ottoman lines, the turks would give a giant three cheers for germany while townshend was comforted when he received a message over the radio that the russians had taken by storm the allegedly impregnable ottoman city-fortress of erzerum, which he believed meant the russians would soon relieve him.
charles townshend (british army officer)