On a bleak morning in January 1918 one of many oddest army formations ever put into the sector by imperial Britain set out from Khanaqin, in what’s now Iraq, to cross the border into Persia. ‘Dunsterforce’, because it was known as, consisted of simply 41 Ford vans and automobiles with their drivers, two sergeant clerks, and 12 officers. Forward of it lay a journey of some 700 miles on roads not constructed for wheeled site visitors throughout mountainous, snow-covered, and famine-stricken territory.
The drive commander, Main-Common Lionel Dunsterville, was making for Enzeli, a Persian port on the foot of the Caspian Sea. From there he hoped to sail to Baku, the capital of present-day Azerbaijan on the western shore of the Caspian, earlier than travelling throughout the Russian-controlled Caucasus to Tbilisi. His vans carried massive sums of cash in British gold and Persian silver to bribe Georgian and Armenian forces to struggle the Ottoman Turks.
He had additionally been promised reinforcements of round 350 elite officers and NCOs from Britain’s ‘white dominions’, who had volunteered for a mysterious ‘hush-hush’ mission. An American colonel who met a few of them in Baghdad known as them ‘probably the most environment friendly trying crowd of excessive class, patriotic, and altogether worthy cut-throats and desperadoes that I’ve ever seen – they have been very good’.
Dunsterville’s mission had been prompted by one of many twentieth century’s seminal occasions. Two months earlier than he set out, Russia had undergone the second of the 2 revolutions which convulsed the nation in 1917. In consequence it had crashed out of the First World Warfare: the brand new Bolshevik leaders, Lenin and Trotsky, had signed an armistice with Russia’s principal enemy, Germany, and the armies of the previous tsarist regime had spontaneously demobilised. Little now stood between Germany’s Turkish allies and Baku, one of many world’s most essential oil-producing centres, which may show immensely priceless to the Turkish and German struggle effort.
Simply as alarming from the British perspective was the prospect of the Turks urgent on throughout the Caspian to invade Muslim Central Asia, from which they could threaten Britain’s prized imperial possessions in India. Such a risk had been amongst British strategists’ worst nightmares for a lot of the nineteenth century – although previously it had been the Russians, not the Turks, who have been the principal hazard.
Within the absence of organised Russian resistance to the Turkish armies following the revolution, a British agent in Baku had recommended in December 1917 sending a high-level political-military mission to the Caucasus to steer the locals to take up arms in opposition to the Turks. Dunsterforce was the outcome.
The mission was an exceptionally difficult one, however Britain’s army planners believed that they had the correct man for the job. Dunsterville was a profession Indian Military soldier, but additionally unusually able to pondering exterior the field. He had been in school with Rudyard Kipling, who later wrote a collection of faculty tales below the umbrella title Stalky & Co. Stalky was an rebel prankster, a younger Lord of Misrule, well-known to be primarily based on Dunsterville. Maybe the brass-hats in London had learn their Kipling and concluded that Dunsterville-Stalky was the person for them.
Dunsterville’s mission acquired an early setback. When he reached the port of Enzeli three weeks after setting out he discovered it within the fingers of younger Russian Bolsheviks who barred him from continuing on the grounds that he was attempting to lengthen a struggle they have been determined to finish. So he spent 5 months twiddling his thumbs in Persia, his ‘cut-throats and desperadoes’ engaged not in combating the enemy however in famine aid, road-building, and coaching native volunteer troops.
Solely in August 1918 was the Bolshevik regime governing Baku overthrown, leaving the best way open for Dunsterforce to land within the metropolis, which by then was surrounded by a Turkish military. The British drive had now swollen in measurement to some 1,500 troops, together with a brigade of infantry, and their arrival stiffened town’s resistance, however not sufficient to stave off defeat. The Armenians who dominated Baku’s authorities had loads of citizen-soldiers however, in line with the British, these native conscripts didn’t need to struggle, abandoning their positions within the trenches across the metropolis each night to carouse with their girlfriends within the cafes.
Dunsterville’s males suffered heavy losses and he determined to evacuate town, transferring his troops stealthily to the harbour and embarking by night time on 14 September. Amongst them was a personality much more exceptional than Dunsterville himself, Colonel Toby Rawlinson, who was given a key function within the evacuation.
Rawlinson was a sportsman and daredevil who had been a pioneer of each motor-racing and flying. In 1914, aged 47, he and his new Hudson racing automobile joined a volunteer unit ferrying employees officers across the battlefields in France: by November that 12 months the automobile, with certainly one of Rawlinson’s private machine weapons mounted on the bonnet, was riddled with bullet holes.
In 1915 he had been given the duty of defending London in opposition to Zeppelin bombing raids, and helped develop a few of the earliest anti-aircraft weapons, however by 1918 he was bored and volunteered to affix Dunsterville. In Baku he was put accountable for town’s ammunition reserves, which he had loaded onto a ship forward of the evacuation. When the ship set sail Rawlinson held a revolver to the pinnacle of the reluctant captain, who was terrified that gunboats on the harbour entrance would open fireplace on them. And to discourage the mutinous crew from attempting to shoot him, Rawlinson additionally barricaded the bridge with instances of dynamite. The gunboats did fireplace however, regardless of being hit a number of occasions, the ship didn’t explode.
Lots of the males concerned in Dunsterforce have been equally vibrant characters. However a few of those that ought to have been in Baku couldn’t make it. The agent who first recommended sending a mission to the Caucasus was Edward Noel, an eccentric whose exploits in later life included trying to drive a charcoal-fuelled Rolls-Royce from London to India. Noel ought to have been a part of Dunsterforce however had been captured by native freedom-fighters on a go to to Persia and imprisoned for 5 months. He had been placed on trial, marched out to face a firing squad, and held for a lot of the time in solitary confinement. His cable to London when he was lastly launched was a masterpiece of laconic understatement:Â
‘As results of my fifth try to flee … I used to be flogged, stored in chains for sixty-five days, consumed rice alone, tied to a tree at night time, led out to be shot, and so forth. Well being good.’
The Battle of Baku is at this time largely forgotten. Some thought Dunsterforce a ‘Dunsterfarce’, incompetently led and chaotic. However most observers then and now suppose Dunsterville did an honest job in very troublesome circumstances. And although British troops suffered a defeat, their efforts weren’t in useless, since they disadvantaged Britain’s enemies of entry to Baku’s priceless oil for six important weeks within the closing months of the First World Warfare.
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Nick Higham’s newest guide is Mavericks: Empire, Oil, Revolution and the Forgotten Battle of World Warfare One (Bloomsbury, 2025).
