Battle of Bayramaly

The British chronology of the war records under 15 August 1918 an “action at Bairam Ali” in Transcaspia: the forces of the anti-Bolshevik government in Ashkhabad were beaten there by the Bolsheviks. The date itself is uncertain. F. J. Moberly’s British official history of the Mesopotamian campaign, and Michael Sargent, who drew on Moberly’s volume on the operations in Persia, state that the Bolsheviks attacked on 12 August. Charles Ellis, a participant in the later fighting in Transcaspia, writes of 13 August. The latest date, 15 August, was adopted by the British Battles Nomenclature Committee and by some more recent studies. All the accounts, however, agree on the course of the fighting.

The Ashkhabad government, which had taken power in the Transcaspian Oblast in July, was fighting for survival from the start. Its troops advanced towards the Amu Darya, but at the end of July the forces of the Turkestan Soviet Republic routed them at Chardzhui (on 24 July according to Sargent, on 28 July according to Russian sources). The Transcaspians fell back by rail to a position just east of Bayramaly, on the edge of the Merv oasis. The terrified committee in Ashkhabad turned for help to General Wilfrid Malleson’s British mission in Mashhad. On 7 August Malleson received a Transcaspian envoy, who asked above all for two machine guns to be sent to the front at once. The general agreed, and according to Ellis on 8 August the command in India authorised him to give the Ashkhabad government limited military and financial aid.

On 11 August (according to Ellis a day earlier) a section of two machine guns of the 19th Punjabis left Muhammadabad, crossed the Russian frontier near Artyk station on the Transcaspian railway and went by train to Bayramaly. It was accompanied by Major W. H. Bingham, who was to examine the situation at the front. Immediately afterwards, according to Moberly the next day, the Bolsheviks attacked. They had about a thousand men in the front line and as many or more in reserve. Roughly a thousand Transcaspian soldiers, most of them Turkmens, put up only weak resistance and began to flee. According to the official account of the Transcaspian government, the retreat did not turn into a disaster only thanks to the Indians. They fired until the barrels grew so hot that they could not be touched, and were said to have inflicted about 350 casualties on the enemy. Two Indian soldiers were wounded, and one of the machine guns had to be abandoned because the two men who tried to carry it away were burned by the hot weapon.

The beaten Transcaspian forces withdrew in armoured trains and other trains along the railway through Merv as far as Dushak station, according to Ellis nearly 160 kilometres to the rear. The machine-gun section returned to Muhammadabad, reportedly put out of action by casualties and influenza. In this way the Bolsheviks regained access to the fertile oasis on the Murghab, from which Ashkhabad drew its food, and to the railway leading to the fortress of Kushka on the Afghan border.

Although it was a small skirmish, its significance reached far beyond Transcaspia. According to Sargent, this was when British participation in the fighting in Transcaspia began, and Ellis notes that it was the first time British Indian soldiers had clashed with Russians in Central Asia, though not because of the old rivalry of the two empires, but in the face of a common enemy, the Turks and the Germans. The defeat prompted the Ashkhabad government to conclude a quick alliance with Malleson, signed on 19 August, and the general began to move further companies of Punjabis across the frontier.