10 February in military history: Battle of Sobraon, 1846

10 February 1846 · 180 years ago

A bridgehead on the Sutlej

The Sikh state in the Punjab had been built into a strong power by Maharaja Ranjit Singh, but after his death in 1839 it fell into near anarchy, and the army became the real power in Lahore. In December 1845 the Khalsa crossed the Sutlej into British territory. It was defeated at Mudki and Ferozeshah, and on 28 January 1846 Sir Harry Smith beat another Sikh force at Aliwal, a battle described on our 28 January page.¹

The main Sikh army then held an entrenched bridgehead on the British bank of the Sutlej at Sobraon, with the river at its back and a bridge of boats linking it to the far bank. The commander in chief, General Sir Hugh Gough, waited until Smith's division had rejoined him and his heavy siege guns had come up. The Governor-General, Sir Henry Hardinge, was with the army and took part in planning the attack.²

The bayonet after the guns

A thick mist delayed the start on the morning of 10 February. When it cleared the British guns opened fire, but the bombardment did little harm to the Sikhs, and after about two hours the heavy guns ran short of ammunition; Gough then sent in his infantry.³

The main attack fell on the western end of the Sikh line and was made by Major General Sir Robert Dick's division, while the divisions of Gilbert and Smith were to make feint attacks on the rest of the line. Dick's men got into the works but were driven out by Sikh counterattacks, and Dick was mortally wounded. Gough turned the feints into real assaults; some brigades reached ramparts too high to climb and were thrown back with heavy loss before they broke in at the second attempt. At last engineers cleared a way through the defenses, and British cavalry rode into the Sikh position.⁴

The bridge of boats

The Sutlej had risen in the night and was in flood. The Sikhs fell back toward their bridge of boats, many refusing to surrender; British guns fired on the men crowding the bridge and struggling in the water, and thousands died. Among the dead was the veteran general Sham Singh Attariwala, who repeatedly rallied his men and fell fighting.⁵

Why the bridge failed is still argued. The Sikh commander Tej Singh had fled early in the battle. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says he had the bridge destroyed behind him; Cunningham, who served on Hardinge's staff, wrote that he sank a boat in the middle of the bridge, “either accidentally or by design”. Fortescue notes that the central boat had been removed, and the National Army Museum leaves open whether it was cast loose on purpose or the bridge broke under the traffic of the retreat.⁶

Losses and the peace

No exact count exists. The National Army Museum puts the Sikh losses at perhaps as many as 10,000 and Fortescue at 8,000 to 10,000 dead. Cunningham thought they perhaps exceeded 5,000, while Gough later learned that the heirs of 3,125 dead soldiers had claimed their arrears of pay and estimated the Sikh losses at 12,000 to 15,000; the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism gives the 3,125 as the Sikh loss in the action. The Sikhs lost all the guns they had in the entrenchments, 67 according to Fortescue. British and Indian losses were 320 killed and 2,083 wounded according to Cunningham, 2,283 in all according to Fortescue.⁷

The British crossed the Sutlej and marched on Lahore. Under the Treaty of Lahore, signed in March 1846, the Sikhs gave up the land between the Sutlej and the Beas, Kashmir was separated from the Punjab and the Sikh army was limited in size. The peace did not last: a second Anglo-Sikh war broke out in 1848. Its hardest battle is told in our article on Chillianwala.⁸