British occupy Kermanshah

On 24 March 1918 the first British detachment rode into Kermanshah, the chief town of western Persia. It consisted of fifty riflemen of the 1/4th Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment, accompanied by Lieutenant-Colonel A. S. Capper, appointed commandant of the whole British line of communication beyond the Mesopotamian frontier, and the British consul in Kermanshah, Colonel R. L. Kennion. According to F. J. Moberly’s British official history of the Mesopotamian campaign, Capper and Kennion set out by car on 18 March and on the way, at Surkhadiza Khan, picked up the Hampshire men. Downpours, snow and a sodden road meant that the journey took six days. A year earlier, in March 1917, the Russians had retaken the town from the Turks. Now the British took their place. The British chronology of the war already gives the occupation of Kermanshah under 25 February, but Moberly states plainly that in February no British troops went beyond Qasr-e Shirin on the frontier.

The town after the Russians left

At the turn of January and February the Russians were leaving Kermanshah. Still remaining there were the Cossacks of Lieutenant-Colonel Lazar Bicherakhov, who according to Moberly saved the Russian retreat from turning into a panic-stricken flight. On 3 February it was two of his Cossacks who brought into the town General Dunsterville’s mission, which was on its way to the Caucasus. The Persians greeted the departure of the Russian troops with joy. The British reported that the local factions in Kermanshah had made peace with one another so as not to give them a pretext for occupying the town. The commander in Mesopotamia, General William Marshall, in any case considered it better for the time being to keep British soldiers away from Kermanshah, ready at Qasr-e Shirin to block any Turkish march. Throughout February only a single British armoured car stood in the town; it had driven there at the beginning of the month and could not return because of the snow. Lieutenant-Colonel Matthews’s column meanwhile was repairing the road near the Pa Tak pass, in downpours and blizzards.

British interests in Kermanshah were represented by Kennion, a well-known traveller and hunter. He hired Kurds to guard the road, so that, as Dunsterville joked, a traveller did not know whether a Kurd he met was there to protect him or was the one he needed protecting from. The country was ravaged by war and famine. Dunsterville saw by the roadside the bodies of people who had died of exhaustion, and at Kerend crowds of villagers repairing the road under the direction of an American missionary, as part of famine relief organised by the consul. On 26 February Dunsterville, who had returned to Hamadan after his failed attempt to get through via Enzeli, proposed to London that the whole road from Qasr-e Shirin to Enzeli be held by an infantry brigade with cavalry, mountain artillery, armoured cars and aircraft, with centres at Kermanshah, Hamadan and Qazvin.

The decision to enter Persia

The decisions were taken in March. On 1, 3 and 6 March the Chief of the Imperial General Staff instructed Marshall to keep open the road from Qasr-e Shirin to Kermanshah with armoured cars and cavalry as soon as conditions allowed, and to strengthen the garrison of Qasr-e Shirin. On 7 March Marshall replied that the road could not be relied upon before May, and that Kennion had arranged with the tribes that they would keep it open for light traffic. On 9 March London urged that troops be sent to Kermanshah as soon as possible, even with pack transport, before the road was opened to regular traffic. Marshall set up a chain of posts with supplies beyond Qasr-e Shirin. On 16 March a platoon of the Hampshire battalion reached Kerend, and eight days later more of its men stood in Kermanshah. Capper’s report confirmed that the country was devastated and that the population had fled from the villages to the towns or into the mountains to the tribes.

The garrison was a token one, but its main purpose was to open the road further on. A few days later the Hampshire men set off to join Dunsterville in Hamadan, and their place was taken by another, equally small detachment of the same battalion. By the end of March the area of the British III Corps already reached Kermanshah. The British had no large army in western Persia, but from then on it was their soldiers, not the Russians, who guarded the route from Mesopotamia through Kermanshah towards the Caspian Sea.