Fall of Baku

On the night of 14–15 September 1918 steamers carrying the British soldiers of Major-General Lionel Dunsterville slipped out of the port of Baku. Behind them, all night and into the morning, thousands of Armenians fled by ship. The city, which for six weeks had been defended by the troops of the Centro-Caspian Dictatorship and a handful of British, was left at the mercy of Nuri Pasha’s Caucasian Army of Islam. Turkish and Azerbaijani troops entered Baku, and its Armenian inhabitants were massacred. The British official chronology records the start of the evacuation under 14 September and the final British departure from the city under 15 September.

The last day of the defence

The assault, of which the defenders had been warned by an Arab deserter from the Turkish army, began before dawn on 14 September. The main blow fell on the cliffs north of the Wolf’s Gate pass, held by Armenians, and on the sector near Biləcəri station. The British official history of the Mesopotamian campaign by F.J. Moberly describes a day full of counter-attacks that broke down as local units abandoned their positions. A company of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment under Captain Bushell and men of Bicherakhov’s detachment attacked the Turks who had broken through beyond the Wolf’s Gate, but halted when their officers fell. According to the British historians of the Caucasian wars W.E.D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, these were Baku Armenians who had joined Bicherakhov’s Cossacks in August and later returned to the city by sea from Derbent. Major Havelock was killed near Biləcəri. At about 3 p.m. both British aircraft, riddled with bullets, were destroyed on the ground.

Dunsterville, warned by the Russian commander-in-chief that further resistance was impossible, visited in the afternoon the headquarters of Lieutenant-Colonel Keyworth, commander of the British troops in the city, and left him the decision on withdrawal. At about 3 p.m. Keyworth concluded that if the British did not want to be killed or taken prisoner, they had to leave. Major Ley with the North Staffordshire companies was to hold the cemetery heights above the city until 8.30 p.m., covering the withdrawal of the rest. The Turks, also exhausted, made no serious attacks from the afternoon onwards. Moberly puts British losses that day at about 125 men. Dunsterville wrote of 180.

Escape from the port

The evacuation had been prepared in advance. The sick and wounded were loaded onto the steamers Kursk and Argo, most of the soldiers, with Dunsterville and his staff, onto the President Kruger, and the ammunition onto the ship Armenian. By 10 p.m. everyone was on board. Then two members of the Dictatorship arrived at the quay demanding that the British return to the front. The shelling had stopped, the Turks had not yet entered the city, and Baku, they said, wanted to fight on. When Dunsterville refused, they threatened that the fleet would sink his ships. The general took the risk. The warships had no searchlights, the sailors disliked the Dictatorship, and the only real danger was the guardship at the harbour entrance.

The President Kruger cast off from the quay only after midnight, because she was waiting for the families of crew members. As she passed the guardship, someone in the crew switched on all the lights. The guardship opened fire but missed. The Armenian was hit by a few small shells but got through without loss of life. On 15 September all the ships reached Enzeli. The British took away all their men and guns, and in Baku destroyed only the wireless station. Their horses and mules they handed over to Bicherakhov’s men.

Behind the British came the flight of the inhabitants. According to Allen and Muratoff, by six in the morning of 15 September about 8,000 Armenian soldiers and civilians had left the port. That night the Centro-Caspian Dictatorship also vanished from the city. In the chaos of the last hours the Bolshevik commissars of the former Baku Commune, arrested in August, walked out of prison and towards morning sailed away on one of the last ships.

The Turks’ entry and the massacre

During the night armed Azeri inhabitants of the city began murdering and looting Armenians. On 15 September units of the Army of Islam entered Baku. According to Turkish and Azerbaijani sources, it was on that day that the city was taken. Allen and Muratoff, however, write that regular Turkish troops came down from the line of cliffs only at five in the morning of 16 September and only then put an end to the murder, looting and arson that had gone on throughout 15 September and the following night. The massacre, which the Armenians call the September Days, was revenge for the March Days, when in March 1918 the Bolsheviks and the Armenian Dashnaks had killed thousands of Muslims in Baku. A commission of the Armenian National Council counted 8,988 victims. Other estimates are higher: the German staff officer Ernst Paraquin wrote in a report of about 15,000 killed, and some authors speak of as many as 30,000. According to figures cited in Russian and Azerbaijani literature, 36 officers and 1,651 soldiers were taken prisoner, including four British.

Paraquin, a staff officer in the Army Group East of Halil Pasha, had largely prepared the plan of the attack on Baku. In a report to General Hans von Seeckt he wrote that not only Azeri volunteers but also Turkish soldiers took part in the looting and rapes. According to German accounts he protested sharply to the Turkish command and was soon afterwards removed from duty.

For Azerbaijan it was also the day on which the government of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic regained its capital. On 16 September Halil Pasha took a parade in the city, and on 17 September the government of Fatali Khan Khoyski moved to Baku from Ganja. In today’s Azerbaijan 15 September is marked as the day of the liberation of Baku. In 2018, on the centenary of these events, the presidents of Azerbaijan and Turkey took a parade in the city.

Consequences

The Turks took Baku without German help, indeed against German wishes. On 27 August Berlin had promised Soviet Russia that it would not allow foreign troops into the Baku district, in return for a share of the oil output. The German corps in the Caucasus was only preparing to march on Baku when news came of the city’s fall. Moberly writes that the Germans had just overcome the difficulties of landing reinforcements that had come by sea from southern Russia.

The fall of Baku forced the British to rethink their whole policy on the Caspian. On 16 September the War Office asked the commander in Mesopotamia, General William Marshall, how many ships Dunsterville had, what destruction had been left behind in Baku and whether troops had been sent to Krasnovodsk, whose importance was now growing. On 17 September Marshall recalled Dunsterville and dissolved his mission, placing the troops in northern Persia under General Thomson. London nevertheless ordered that Enzeli be held and control of the Caspian Sea be sought.

The Turks did not enjoy their prize for long. The 5th Caucasian Division remained in Baku, while the 36th Division moved north along the coast towards Derbent and Petrovsk. After their defeats in Palestine the Ottoman Empire signed the Armistice of Mudros on 30 October, and in November the British returned to Baku.