The British in Baku

On 4 August 1918 the first British detachment sailed into the port of Baku from Enzeli. It was led by Lieutenant-Colonel C. B. Stokes, a staff officer of Major-General Lionel Dunsterville, commander of the British forces in northern Persia, known after his name as Dunsterforce. It was more a reconnaissance than military help. According to the British official history of the Mesopotamian campaign by F.J. Moberly, Stokes had with him 44 officers and men of the 1/4th Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment, and according to the British historians of the Caucasian wars W.E.D. Allen and Paul Muratoff about 70 infantrymen and a few officers. He was to announce the arrival of larger forces and assess whether the city could still be defended.

The invitation

The British had been called in by the city’s new authorities. At the end of July the Baku soviet voted to invite the British, and on 1 August, after the fall of the Baku Commune, power was taken by the Centro-Caspian Dictatorship, based on the Socialist Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks and the Armenian Dashnaks. In accordance with a plan agreed earlier, it at once sent Dunsterville a request for help. The general had nothing to send yet. The road from Baghdad to the Caspian Sea had been open only recently, since the repulse of the Jangalis at Rasht, and the battalions of the 39th Infantry Brigade were travelling across Persia by lorry, in successive echelons, strung out along the road from Hamadan to Qazvin.

The situation in Baku looked hopeless in any case. On 30 and 31 July Dunsterville received reports that the city would fall before any reinforcements could arrive. After the loss of Kurdamir the Baku troops had fallen back to the city itself, and according to Moberly the Turks stood on the heights above it, about 3 kilometres from the quays. Then, however, they unexpectedly withdrew, and the local units followed them, though without retaking the heights west of the railway. Colonel Lazar Bicherakhov also left the front. According to Soviet sources he had already set off with his Cossacks on 30 July northwards along the railway, to Dagestan, and Allen and Muratoff write that about a thousand soldiers of the Baku garrison went with him. Dunsterville later regarded his departure as a mistake that largely sealed the city’s fate. Even so, he sent Stokes.

Disappointment and the Turkish assault

The people of Baku had expected ships full of soldiers, and rumours were circulating in the city of 20,000 or 30,000 British on their way. Stokes’s handful of men was a bitter disappointment to them. Dunsterville wrote, however, that the mere sight of “well-set-up soldiers” raised the defenders’ spirits. The next morning, 5 August, Nuri Pasha’s Caucasian Army of Islam launched its first assault on the city. Turks and Azerbaijani volunteers attacked from the direction of Bibi-Heybat, along the main road leading through the pass in the line of cliffs known as the Wolf’s Gate. In places they reached the top of the escarpment, but they did not take the pass. At about noon the defenders, among them the Bolshevik detachment of Grigory Petrov, counter-attacked and threw the attackers back to the railway. According to Dunsterville, every man in the city then grabbed a rifle and ran to the front line. He added bitterly that it was the only such instance of valour during the whole defence.

Losses on both sides were heavy. Allen and Muratoff write of about 600 men and 20 officers of the defence killed and wounded. According to the memoirs of Rüştü Bey, chief of staff of the Turkish 5th Caucasian Division, the Turks lost 148 killed that day, including 9 officers, and 463 wounded. According to Allen and Muratoff they left 16 machine guns on the battlefield. They nevertheless held the heights west of the railway, from which they could shell the city.

The first reinforcements

On 4 August Lieutenant-Colonel R. Keyworth also sailed from Enzeli with a group of artillery officers, armoured-car crews, half a machine-gun company and 150 soldiers of the 7th Battalion of the North Staffordshire Regiment. He reached Baku the next day and took command of the British units in the city. Stokes telegraphed that the military situation looked better than he had expected and asked for the rest of the battalion to be sent quickly, or better still a whole brigade with artillery. In his view the city’s defence consisted of about 8,000 men, divided among five mutually independent political organisations. He also quietly saw to his own line of retreat: he secured two steamers for the British, which in the event of defeat were to carry them out of Baku.

Further echelons arrived over the following days, and on 17 August Dunsterville himself came to Baku. The British were still too few, however, to replace the Baku units, and these, as soon became clear, quickly lost their enthusiasm for fighting after the success of 5 August.