British occupy Krasnovodsk

F.J. Moberly’s British official history of the Mesopotamian campaign lists among the operations of 1918 “the occupation of Krasnovodsk” and dates it to 27 August. It was not the capture of the town, but the entry of a small British garrison into a port controlled by the Transcaspian government, an ally of the British. Nor were the men who came there General Wilfrid Malleson’s soldiers from Mashhad, but troops from northern Persia, from Enzeli, where General Lionel Dunsterville’s forces were stationed. Moberly does not describe the landing itself. All that is known is that a company of the 1/4th Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment, carried by ship across the Caspian Sea, reached Krasnovodsk in the last days of August. On 2 September a section of the 44th Field Battery also arrived there from Enzeli.

Krasnovodsk, today Türkmenbaşy, was the terminus of the Transcaspian Railway, which ran through Ashkhabad and Merv into the heart of Central Asia. In July the local workers had joined the rising against the Bolsheviks, and the town was run by a committee in which the railway engineer Kuhn had the most say, subordinate to the government in Ashkhabad. The British were interested in the port for several reasons. If the Turks, who were then assaulting Baku, captured that city and its fleet, they could cross the sea and advance by rail towards Afghanistan and India. Huge stocks of Turkestan cotton also lay at the stations of Transcaspia, and the Transcaspian government feared a Bolshevik landing from Astrakhan.

The first step was taken at the beginning of August. On 3 August Malleson telegraphed to India that an exceptional opportunity had arisen to occupy Krasnovodsk, which in his view would secure the British position in Central Asia far better than troops at Derbent. On 6 August the small mission of Lieutenant-Colonel Battine, a liaison officer with the local authorities, arrived at Krasnovodsk from Enzeli. Dunsterville promised to send him troops, and on 12 August he asked for permission to send a hundred infantrymen at once, since it might no longer be possible from Baku. On 14 August the War Office in London named the permanent occupation of Krasnovodsk as one of three main objectives on the Caspian, alongside control of shipping and the defence of Baku for as long as possible. It agreed to a garrison of up to a battalion, but required that at least a section of guns be sent there in case hostile transports appeared in the port. On 19 August the Transcaspian government, in an agreement with Malleson, undertook to make the port available to the British and help fortify it, and the British promised to defend Krasnovodsk and Baku as long as possible. It was also agreed that the troops stationed in Krasnovodsk could not be moved without British consent.

The Hampshire company, about 120 strong, did not stay long by the sea, however. It went by rail to the front at Kaakha and arrived there on 29 August, the day after a Bolshevik attack had been beaten off. Krasnovodsk itself became an important base for the British when in September they had to abandon Baku. Ships with refugees put in there, and the British garrison remained in the town for several months more after British troops had withdrawn from the rest of Transcaspia in the spring of 1919.