Dunsterville at Enzeli

On 17 February 1918, about an hour before sunset, Major-General Lionel Dunsterville’s column of Fords caught sight of the waters of the Caspian Sea and drove into Enzeli. Three weeks earlier this handful of officers and drivers had set out from Baghdad to reach Baku and Tiflis through Persia and there help the Georgians and Armenians hold the front against the Turks. From the Persian port only the voyage across the sea to Baku remained. It turned out, however, that this was exactly where the journey ended.

The road to the sea

After a short halt at Kermanshah the mission was stuck in the snow on the passes before Hamadan, which the cars reached only on 11 February. Further blizzards held it there until 15 February. Beyond that ran a good road built by the Russians, but it was crowded with Russian soldiers going home in disorder, on foot and in huge Persian carts. A light armoured car, sent ahead earlier, joined the column. At Qazvin Dunsterville met the British minister in Tehran, Charles Marling, and was told that going further was impossible. The last few dozen kilometres before the sea led through the province of Gilan, ruled by the Jangali movement of Mirza Kuchik Khan. Kuchik Khan had announced that he would not let the British through, and his committee worked in Enzeli together with the Bolshevik committee. Dunsterville, however, judged that many earlier “impossible” obstacles had proved harmless at close quarters, and decided to try.

On 16 February the column spent the night at Manjil, and the next day it descended through a gorge across the Elburz mountains and the forests of Gilan. The drivers kept their rifles to hand, the armoured car and a Lewis gun went in front, but no one fired at them. In Rasht, the Jangali capital, they passed Kuchik Khan’s men, armed to the teeth, who contented themselves with menacing looks. F.J. Moberly’s British official history of the Mesopotamian campaign attributes this largely to the impression made by the armoured car.

The committee in Enzeli

The port was in the hands of a revolutionary committee which regarded itself as the authority of the Russian troops withdrawing from Persia. According to Moberly it was backed by about 3,000 soldiers with guns and gunboats. Dunsterville recalled that at the time there were about 2,000 demobilised Russian soldiers in the town, curious rather than hostile. That same evening two envoys of the committee arrived, its chairman Chelyapin, a former clerk in a shipping office, and a sailor, demanding explanations. Dunsterville put off the conversation until the morning. On 18 February twelve members of the committee told him that they knew the mission’s plan, that Russia had made peace and was no longer Britain’s ally, and that they would not allow the British to sail to Baku. The Bolsheviks in Baku, warned by wireless, had ordered the mission to be stopped at all costs. All the ships had been nationalised and were guarded, and a gunboat lay in the roads ready to open fire. In any case no steamer would have taken more than ten of the mission’s 41 cars.

Already on 17 February Dunsterville had telegraphed for two further groups of his mission to be halted on the way: the second, 14 officers and 11 men, at Khanaqin, and the third, 40 officers and 165 men, at Shahraban in Mesopotamia. On 19 February he told the committee that he was giving up, and obtained from Chelyapin a written allocation of petrol. Before dawn on 20 February the cars left Enzeli. Soon afterwards a detachment of Red Guards arrived from Baku which, according to Moberly, was to arrest the British. It later came out that the Jangalis had wanted to ambush the column, but the commanders of the withdrawing Russian troops had refused them help. Through Qazvin the mission returned to Hamadan on 25 February.

The expedition to the Caspian Sea ended in failure, and Dunsterville judged it so himself. He telegraphed that further attempts were pointless until there had been either a fight or an agreement with Kuchik Khan. He remained in Persia, on the road from Baghdad to the Caspian Sea. He returned to Enzeli only at the end of June 1918, after a fight with the Jangalis at Manjil, and in the summer his soldiers finally reached Baku.