British set out for Transcaspia

The British chronology of the war records under 19 July 1918 the beginning of British operations in Transcaspia, the Russian Transcaspian Oblast lying between the Caspian Sea and the Amu Darya, in what is now Turkmenistan. On that day, however, not a single British soldier crossed the border. The British researcher Michael Sargent, who described these events on the basis of India Office documents, states that on 19 July a detachment of about 200 soldiers set out from Mashhad towards the Russian border. According to F.J. Moberly’s British official history of the Mesopotamian campaign, it consisted of 175 men of the 19th Punjabis with a machine-gun section. The detachment was to be stationed at Muhammadabad (today’s Dargaz), a small Persian town right by the border, from which Transcaspia was most easily entered, and one platoon went to Quchan. The march through the mountains took two weeks, and the soldiers reached Muhammadabad only on 2 August.

They were sent by Major-General Wilfrid Malleson, the same man who in 1916 had commanded a brigade in the fighting near Kilimanjaro. At the end of June he left Simla, and on 16 July, after a long journey through eastern Persia, he arrived in Mashhad, where troops of the East Persia Cordon had been stationed since the spring. His military mission was to observe Russian Central Asia and counter German and Turkish agents trying to reach Afghanistan. As early as 25 June the British government had assigned to India responsibility for southern and eastern Persia, Transcaspia and Turkestan. Malleson’s instructions did not, however, provide for armed intervention on Russian territory. Moving the detachment up to the border had been planned for the first half of July, but it was held back until the general arrived. On 17 July, when Malleson sent his first report from Mashhad, the India Office told him to hasten the move and, when the opportunity arose, to send British officers or troops across the border to rally forces friendly to the Entente.

Meanwhile the situation across the border had changed sharply. Railwaymen on the line from Krasnovodsk to Ashkhabad had long been in revolt against Bolshevik rule in Tashkent, the capital of the Turkestan Soviet Republic. Tashkent sent Frolov, head of the local Cheka, to Transcaspia; he declared martial law and had several workers’ leaders shot. When he went on to Kyzyl-Arvat, the railwaymen shot him and part of his guard, on 12 July according to Sargent. In Ashkhabad the workers rose on 11 and 12 July, and according to Charles Ellis, a British officer who took part in the later fighting, on 14 July they formed a government, an executive committee chaired by Fyodor Funtikov, a worker and a Socialist Revolutionary. The British usually called it the Menshevik government, although Socialist Revolutionaries also sat in it. Krasnovodsk and Merv followed Ashkhabad, and the Bolshevik commissars arrested there were shot. The British in Mashhad learned of the coup late. As late as 15 July the military attaché, Colonel Redl, reported only that an approaching anti-Bolshevik movement could be sensed in Turkestan.

What worried the British above all was what was happening across the Caspian Sea. The Turks, who on 10 July had taken Kurdamir, were approaching Baku, and in London and Simla it was feared that, together with the Germans, they would cross to Krasnovodsk and advance along the Transcaspian Railway towards Afghanistan and India. Huge stocks of Turkestan cotton, a valuable war material, also lay at the stations of Transcaspia. Malleson’s intelligence was already active on the other side of the border. At the beginning of July the political officer Reginald Teague-Jones set out for Transcaspia, and agents disguised as Persian merchants visited Ashkhabad and Baku.

The departure of 19 July proved to be the first step towards war with the Bolsheviks. On 24 July Tashkent’s forces attacked the forces of the Ashkhabad government on the Amu Darya and pushed them back to Bayramaly. The government then appealed to Malleson for help, and he reported this to India on 1 August. On 11 August two Punjabi machine guns crossed the border to support the Transcaspians, and on 19 August Malleson signed an agreement with the government in Ashkhabad. Sargent points out that permission to send soldiers across the border at the discretion of the commanders on the spot was given in the second half of July, roughly two weeks before General Poole’s troops landed at Archangel.