Troops of D Company, North Staffordshire Regiment, at the Mud Volcano.
Bolstered by 10,000 Armenians, Russians, Cossacks and Tartars of wildly
inconsistent reliability, the British at Baku found themselves defending a
shrinking perimeter against Nuri Pasha’s larger expeditionary force.
Britain’s main interest in the Baku region was the oil fields, such as
this complex at Binagadi.
On the plains of Central Asia, the men of ‘Dunsterforce’
fought Germans, Turks, Bolsheviks and Persian warlords with equal verve.
All had been quiet until about 10:30 a. m., when the British
defenders spotted a long line of about 1,000 Turkish infantry and cavalry
marching slowly at first, then more quickly toward their positions. Suddenly
the enemy struck the line with light and heavy artillery. Then all along the
ridge British machine guns began sputtering in response. Five times the Turks
lunged at the defenders, taking heavy casualties. At last, outflanked on the
north side of the volcano and coming under machine gun fire from the reverse
slope, the “Staffords” were forced to retreat to a secondary’
position among the oil derricks northeast of Baku. The final battle for the
city had begun-or so it seemed. In the confused seesaw situation in
Transcaucasia following the collapse of tsarist Russia, nothing could be taken
as final.
Although World War l’s principal area of conflict was in
Europe, the armies of Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Turkey and Japan also
fought in Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Among the least known of those
scattered battlegrounds was what at that time was called Transcaucasia and
Transcaspia, an area occupied by the newly independent nations of Armenia,
Azerbaijan and Georgia. There, secret agents from half a dozen powers prowled
the streets of such legendary cities as Samarkand, Kabul and Bukhara, seeking
allies and stirring up the native populations.
The Allies had suffered a major disaster when revolution
overtook Russia’s creaking empire. Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the throne on
March 15, 1917. At first the new government was determined to continue the war
against Germany, but then, almost in a flash, it was replaced by the more
radical Bolshevik faction. With the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk by
the Bolsheviks in March 1918, the Allies’ worst nightmare came true. Freed from
the Russian threat in the east, Germany was able to transfer the bulk of its
divisions to the Western Front.
Even worse, with the situation in revolutionary Russia still
unsettled, anarchy reigned throughout much of the country. In the Ukraine,
Georgia and Armenia, the Germans held sway, draining those lands of their
natural resources for shipment west. Soon they were eyeing the oil fields
around the city of Baku on the Caspian Sea.
Shortly before World War I broke out, London had ordered
India to station troops in the Persian Gulf to protect its oil fields and the
refinery at Abadan at the head of the gulf, in what is now Iran. When
hostilities began, the troops went ashore. After a long and arduous campaign,
the British finally occupied Baghdad on March 11, 1917. All their gains were
placed in jeopardy when the Bolsheviks took Russia out of the conflict, rendering
the vast landmass that stretched from the Black Sea to the Indian frontier
vulnerable.
British spies throughout Central Asia began sending back
disturbing signals. German agents were at work in Afghanistan and Turkestan.
Turkey was seeking to take advantage of the civil chaos in the Turkic-speaking
lands bordering their empire to invade Transcaspia. Furthermore, London was
under the false impression that the Germans were on good terms with the new
regime in St. Petersburg, making Bolshevik agitation in Central Asia and the
German presence in Georgia and Armenia appear ominously coordinated.
Then in the spring of 1918 Enver Pasha, war minister,
commander in chief-and de facto ruler-of Turkey, began planning an offensive to
seize Baku and unite the Turkic-speaking peoples of Central Asia under Ottoman
rule. Enver Pasha had cannily bided his time after the revolution until the
demoralized Russian army stationed in northeastern Turkey simply melted away,
leaving the way to Baku invitingly open. Enver’s scheme did not sit well with
his German allies, however. When he ignored their request that he cancel the
invasion, the Germans turned to the Russians and offered to stop the Turks in
return for guaranteed unlimited access to Baku’s oil.
Some months before the Turkish invasion, the British,
fearing a Russian withdrawal from Transcaucasia, decided to send a mission to
the Georgian city of Tiflis, to help stiffen local resistance to the Germans.
By the time that expeditionary’ force, called “Dunsterforce” after
its commander, Maj. Gen. Lionel C. Dunsterville, reached the area, Tiflis and
most of Transcaucasia was in German hands. The mission’s parameters were
changed to fit the new scenario: Now Dunsterforce would seek an accommodation
with local revolutionary elements at Baku in an effort to deny it to the Turks,
and do what it could to aid a second mission operating farther west in
Transcaspia.
Dunsterville, a boyhood friend of Rudyard Kipling and the
inspiration for the character Stalky in Stalky and Co., Kipling’s novel about
their schooldays together, was fluent in Russian and had commanded the 1st
Infantry Brigade on India’s Northwest Frontier until he received secret orders
to report lo Delhi. There, he learned the details of his new assignment. Together
with a handful of 200 officers and NCOs and a small train of armored vehicles with
supplies, he was to proceed north from Baghdad to the Caspian Sea. From there,
his force would go to Tiflis and form the nucleus of a reorganized Russian
force meant to restore the Allied line facing the Turks.
Dunsterville arrived in Baghdad on January 6, 1918, to find
orders, maps and intelligence reports awaiting him-but no army. Three weeks
later only 12 officers, a number of Ford vans and a single armored ear had
joined him, but Dunsterville decided to carry out the first part of his orders
and clear the road to Enzeli, on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea, hoping
the rest of his modest force would follow him in good time.
Although Dunsterville’s orders seemed clear-cut, no one knew
much about the military situation in the Transcaucasus. In fact, a Turkish
military mission, headed by Enver Pasha’s brother, Nuri Pasha, had arrived al
Tabriz, in what is now northern Iran, in May 1917 and was organizing a Caucasus-Islam
army, sometimes referred to by Enver as his “Army of Islam,” to bring
Azerbaijan under Ottoman rule. Soon afterward, an advance column of 12,000 men,
commanded by Mursal Pasha, was making its ponderous way toward Baku. Germans
and Turks controlled most of the local railways, and Persian revolutionaries
called Jangalis, led by warlord Mirza Kuchik Khan, terrorized the Enzeli road.
Meanwhile, in Baku, the revolutionary central committee had reached an impasse,
split between factions loyal to the Russian government at Petrograd, those
eager to join with the Turks, and Armenians sympathetic to the British.
Not all the news was bad for Dunsterville, however. When the
Russian army was ordered back north, Colonel Lazar Bicherakov decided to remain
behind with several hundred of his Cossacks. They eventually attached
themselves to Dunsterforce, which had spent the three weeks since its departure
from Baghdad crossing the jungles of Gilan province and plowing its way through
mountain passes filled with 12-foot snowdrifts and stray Jangalis. At last the
force arrived in Enzeii, where the local Soviets insisted that Russia was out
of the war and did not want anything to do with the British, including helping
them to reach Baku.
That initially cool reception soon turned dangerous for
Dunsterville. The local Persian population surrounded and threatened to
massacre his small force. With only a single armored car to impress 2,000
Bolshevik soldiers and 5,000 rowdy Persians, Dunsterforce slipped away one
night and made its way back south to the town of Hamadan, about halfway from
Enzeli to Baghdad.
At Hamadan the British established temporary headquarters
and a defensive line that consisted mostly of bluff until it was joined by
Bicherakov’s Cossacks, who were disappointed to discover just how weak
Dunsterforce really was. As winter gave way to spring and summer, however, the
rest of Dunsterville’s men began to arrive, including two Martinsyde G. I00
Elephant bombers of No. 72 Squadron, flown by Lieutenants M. C. McKay and R. P.
Pope, which went a long way to improve morale and impress Dunsterforces local
allies. At last, with the force’s assigned complement of officers and the
addition of a mobile force of 1,000 rifles of the 1/4 Hampshire Regiment and
the 1/2 Gurkhas with two mountain guns, Dunstewille felt strong enough to move
forward to clear the Enzeli road once and for all of Kuchik Khan’s guerrillas,
who had seized the Menjil Bridge, a vital position on the way north.
Bicherakov had been agitating to attack the Turkish
sympathizers for weeks, but Dunsterville had hesitated, fearing Kuchik Khan
might be too much for the intemperate Cossacks. Finally he could put off the
impatient Bicherakov no longer, and after talks with Kuchik Khan failed, plans
were made to attack his positions at Menjil.
On June 11, Bicherakov left Dunsterville’s forward position
at Qazvin, Iran, at the head of his Cossacks and elements of the 14th Hussars.
At first light on June 12, the Cossacks started for the bridge expecting a hard
fight, but as the Martinsydes flew over the enemy positions, their pilots
discovered that the Jangalis had failed to occupy a key ridge commanding their
lines. Bicherakov quickly took the ridge and sited his artillery. A German adviser
with Kuchik Khan, realizing the importance of that move, called a truce and tried
to bluff a victory from certain defeat, but Bicherakov refused his advances and
pressed the attack. Almost immediately the Jangalis broke and ran, leaving
scores of dead and wounded behind.
With the bridge secured, Bicherakov, supported by mobile
units from Dunsterforce, continued northward to the provincial capital at
Resht, just south of Enzeli, where on July 20 he routed the remnants of Kuchik
Khan’s Jangalis in a final battle. Meanwhile, Dunsterville had established his
headquarters at Qazvin, about midway between Enzeli and Hamadan.
More reinforcements reached Qazvin in July, including a
group from the Royal Navy under Royal Naw Commodore David Norris, who brought
with him several 4-inch guns. That happy event was dulled, however, by news of
Bicherakov’s defeat east of Baku by the Turks, who had run off the newly formed
Red Army and captured an armored car and its British crew, which had been on loan
from Dunsterforce. By the end of the month. Mureal Pasha’s force was outside
Baku. Then the Turks suddenly departed. The reason was never made clear, but
the alerted German occupation forces may have posed a threat to their
flanks-though that threat proved to be nothing more than a rumor. At almost the
same time, the Baku Soviet was deposed and the new regime decided to make
contact at Qazvin with the British, who in the meantime had received permission
from London to occupy Baku.
After stressing to Baku’s new rulers, who somewhat
grandiosely called themselves the Central-Caspian Dictatorship, that the
British could only provide help on a small scale, Dunsterville sent Colonel C.
B. Stokes to Baku with 44 men of the 4th Hampshires. They arrived just in time
to help repel a desultory attack by elements of the Turkish army that had been
left behind.
Two days later, Colonel R. Keyworth arrived with the 7th
North Staffordshires to organize the city’s defense. He found only a few
defenses there, all sited improperly. Nobody knew what supplies were available
or where they were located. There was little food, fodder or oil. Worst of all,
the local soldiery was little better than a disorganized mob.
Receiving this disheartening news back at Enzeli,
Dunsterville was moved to commandeer three local ships, President Krüger, Abo
and Kursk, and arm them with heavy guns, thus providing the means to evacuate
his men from Baku if the need arose. Dunsterville himself landed on August 16,
along with a battalion each of the understrength 9th Warwickshire and 9th
Worcestershire regiments, which were immediately sent into the thin defensive
line around the city. Dunstenville then met with the town’s new rulers to
impress upon them the fact that although every effort would be made to prepare
their men for battle, they could not depend solely on Dunsterforces 1,000 or so
men to defend Baku.
Ten days later, Nuri Pasha, learning that the Germans had no
men to spare in trying to stop him-even if they contemplated so extreme a move
against their ally-once again ordered advance elements of his 60,000-man army
to move on Baku. The British had used every day following their arrival to
assemble the city’s stocks of weapons and ammunition and organize an army of
10,000 men. With all they had accomplished in the short time at their disposal,
however, the British knew that Baku could not withstand a determined attack.
Their 7,000 Armenian conscripts were unreliable, the 3,000 Russian troops would
break and run at a moment’s notice and the Tartar population only waited for a
Turkish victory to rise up and slaughter the defenders.
