Dunsterville's mission

At seven in the morning of 27 January 1918 a column of 41 Model T Ford cars lined up beneath the walls of Baghdad: four cars and several dozen light vans. They carried a dozen or so officers, a handful of NCOs and orderlies, drivers, stores, medicines and boxes of Persian silver and English gold. At their head rode Major-General Lionel Dunsterville, appointed head of the British military mission to the Caucasus and British representative in Tiflis. So began the expedition that went down in history as Dunsterforce. F.J. Moberly’s British official history of the Mesopotamian campaign counts 11 officers, four NCOs and four orderlies in the first party. Dunsterville himself lists twelve officers and two clerk sergeants in his memoirs. For fighting he had the drivers’ 41 rifles and one Lewis gun.

The gap left by the Russians

The mission was a response to the disintegration of the Russian army. From the Black Sea across the Caucasus to western Persia the front against the Turks had until then been held by the Russians, whose left wing almost touched the British in Mesopotamia. After the Bolshevik revolution and the armistice with Turkey their troops were going home. In London it was feared that the Turks and Germans would move into this vacuum, reach for the oil of Baku and the Caspian Sea, and through Persia and Turkestan threaten Afghanistan and India, especially as thousands of German and Austrian prisoners of war were held in Russian Turkestan and beyond the Caspian, and they might be released once peace was made. There was no way of sending a large army there: according to the British general and historian of Persia Percy Sykes, Baghdad was some 800 miles, nearly 1,300 kilometres, from Baku, mostly over bad roads through a devastated and starving Persia. It was therefore decided to send instructors. Under orders of 14 January Dunsterville was to help the Transcaucasian authorities raise, train and arm Georgian and Armenian troops so that they could hold the front in the Caucasus, cover the part of Turkish Armenia occupied by the Russians and frustrate the Turks’ Pan-Turanian plans. Indirectly this was to cover the right flank of General Marshall’s army in Mesopotamia. It was expected that in time the mission would need about 150 officers and 300 NCOs, picked from various fronts, and a squadron of armoured cars, which, however, could not reach Mesopotamia before March.

The man and the road

Dunsterville was an Indian Army officer who knew Russia and the Russian language well. As a pupil at the school at Westward Ho! he was a friend of Rudyard Kipling, who made him the model for Stalky, the hero of the school stories Stalky & Co. He sailed from Karachi on 6 January, was in Basra on 12 January and in Baghdad on 18 January. There he waited a week until at least a small group of officers had assembled. On 24 January he sent two officers ahead with an armoured car to secure petrol supplies along the road to Hamadan. The plan was simple: to drive without halts through Khanaqin, Kermanshah and Hamadan to Enzeli, the Persian port on the Caspian Sea, and from there by ship to Baku and on to Tiflis. Dunsterville reckoned he would reach Baku in about twelve days.

He saw the difficulties from the start: mountain passes at heights from about 1,500 to over 2,400 metres, winter blizzards, armed Kurds along the road, a lack of food in a ravaged country, and petrol that had to be brought from Baghdad as far as Kermanshah. The most dangerous, however, were the Jangalis of the province of Gilan, a movement of Persian nationalists led by Mirza Kuchik Khan. They had taken control of the whole of Gilan, through which the last 110 kilometres or so of the road ran, and together with the Bolsheviks they held Enzeli. On the first day the column covered 94 miles (about 150 kilometres) to Khanaqin in ten and a half hours. Further on it was worse. On the road that British troops had secured a few weeks earlier, the cars had to be pushed by hand in rain, snow and gales up the steep ascent beyond Pa Tak, and the stretch to Harunabad, less than 70 kilometres long, took five days.

The mission reached Kermanshah on 3 February and Enzeli on 17 February. There the local Bolsheviks would not let it sail to Baku, and Dunsterville had to turn back to Hamadan. The mission, conceived as a quick dash by a dozen or so instructors, grew in time into a larger force, part of which did reach Baku in the summer of 1918 and defended the city against the Turks for several weeks.