Military History magazine
29 June 2005
historynet.com
Battle for Baku
On the plains of Central Asia, the men of ‘Dunsterforce’ fought Germans,
Turks, Bolsheviks and Persian warlords with equal verve.
By Pierre Comtois
At midmorning on August 26, 1918, a small contingent of British
soldiers from D Company of the North Staffordshire Regiment lay dug in
along a defensive line at the crest of a dubious geological formation
known locally as the Mud Volcano. It was the key in a defense plan
protecting the vital oil town of Baku on the Caspian Sea — and the
target of Ottoman forces seeking to take advantage of the internal
chaos created by Russia’s ongoing revolution.
All had been quiet until about 10:30 a.m., when the British
defenders spotted a long line of about 1,000 Turkish infantry
and cavalry marching slowly at first, then more quickly toward
their positions. Suddenly the enemy struck the line with light and
heavy artillery. Then all along the ridge British machine guns began
sputtering in response. Five times the Turks lunged at the defenders,
taking heavy casualties. At last, outflanked on the north side of
the volcano and coming under machine gun fire from the reverse slope,
the “Staffords” were forced to retreat to a secondary position among
the oil derricks northeast of Baku. The final battle for the city
had begun — or so it seemed. In the confused seesaw situation in
Transcaucasia following the collapse of tsarist Russia, nothing could
be taken as final.
Although World War I’s principal area of conflict was in Europe,
the armies of Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Turkey and Japan also
fought in Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Among the least known of those
scattered battlegrounds was what at that time was called Transcaucasia
and Transcaspia, an area occupied by the newly independent nations of
Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. There, secret agents from half a dozen
powers prowled the streets of such legendary cities as Samarkand, Kabul
and Bukhara, seeking allies and stirring up the native populations.
The Allies had suffered a major disaster when revolution overtook
Russia’s creaking empire. Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the throne on
March 15, 1917. At first the new government was determined to continue
the war against Germany, but then, almost in a flash, it was replaced
by the more radical Bolshevik faction. With the signing of the Treaty
of Brest-Litovsk by the Bolsheviks in March 1918, the Allies’ worst
nightmare came true. Freed from the Russian threat in the east, Germany
was able to transfer the bulk of its divisions to the Western Front.
Even worse, with the situation in revolutionary Russia still unsettled,
anarchy reigned throughout much of the country. In the Ukraine,
Georgia and Armenia, the Germans held sway, draining those lands of
their natural resources for shipment west. Soon they were eyeing the
oil fields around the city of Baku on the Caspian Sea.
Shortly before World War I broke out, London had ordered India to
station troops in the Persian Gulf to protect its oil fields and the
refinery at Abadan at the head of the gulf, in what is now Iran. When
hostilities began, the troops went ashore. After a long and arduous
campaign, the British finally occupied Baghdad on March 11, 1917. All
their gains were placed in jeopardy when the Bolsheviks took Russia
out of the conflict, rendering the vast landmass that stretched from
the Black Sea to the Indian frontier vulnerable.
British spies throughout Central Asia began sending back disturbing
signals.
German agents were at work in Afghanistan and Turkestan. Turkey was
seeking to take advantage of the civil chaos in the Turkic-speaking
lands bordering their empire to invade Transcaspia. Furthermore,
London was under the false impression that the Germans were on good
terms with the new regime in St.
Petersburg, making Bolshevik agitation in Central Asia and the German
presence in Georgia and Armenia appear ominously coordinated.
Then in the spring of 1918 Enver Pasha, war minister, commander in
chief — and de facto ruler — of Turkey, began planning an offensive
to seize Baku and unite the Turkic-speaking peoples of Central Asia
under Ottoman rule.
Enver Pasha had cannily bided his time after the revolution until
the demoralized Russian army stationed in northeastern Turkey simply
melted away, leaving the way to Baku invitingly open. Enver’s scheme
did not sit well with his German allies, however. When he ignored
their request that he cancel the invasion, the Germans turned to
the Russians and offered to stop the Turks in return for guaranteed
unlimited access to Baku’s oil.
Some months before the Turkish invasion, the British, fearing a
Russian withdrawal from Transcaucasia, decided to send a mission to
the Georgian city of Tiflis, to help stiffen local resistance to the
Germans. By the time that expeditionary force, called “Dunsterforce”
after its commander, Maj.
Gen. Lionel C. Dunsterville, reached the area, Tiflis and most of
Transcaucasia was in German hands. The mission’s parameters were
changed to fit the new scenario: Now Dunsterforce would seek an
accommodation with local revolutionary elements at Baku in an effort
to deny it to the Turks, and do what it could to aid a second mission
operating farther west in Transcaspia.
Dunsterville, a boyhood friend of Rudyard Kipling and the inspiration
for the character Stalky in Stalky and Co., Kipling’s novel about
their schooldays together, was fluent in Russian and had commanded the
1st Infantry Brigade on India’s Northwest Frontier until he received
secret orders to report to Delhi. There, he learned the details of
his new assignment. Together with a handful of 200 officers and NCOs
and a small train of armored vehicles with supplies, he was to proceed
north from Baghdad to the Caspian Sea. From there, his force would go
to Tiflis and form the nucleus of a reorganized Russian force meant
to restore the Allied line facing the Turks.
Dunsterville arrived in Baghdad on January 6, 1918, to find orders,
maps and intelligence reports awaiting him — but no army. Three weeks
later only 12 officers, a number of Ford vans and a single armored
car had joined him, but Dunsterville decided to carry out the first
part of his orders and clear the road to Enzeli, on the southern shore
of the Caspian Sea, hoping the rest of his modest force would follow
him in good time.
Although Dunsterville’s orders seemed clear-cut, no one knew much
about the military situation in the Transcaucasus. In fact, a Turkish
military mission, headed by Enver Pasha’s brother, Nuri Pasha, had
arrived at Tabriz, in what is now northern Iran, in May 1917 and was
organizing a Caucasus-Islam army, sometimes referred to by Enver as
his “Army of Islam,” to bring Azerbaijan under Ottoman rule. Soon
afterward, an advance column of 12,000 men, commanded by Mursal
Pasha, was making its ponderous way toward Baku. Germans and Turks
controlled most of the local railways, and Persian revolutionaries
called Jangalis, led by warlord Mirza Kuchik Khan, terrorized the
Enzeli road. Meanwhile, in Baku, the revolutionary central committee
had reached an impasse, split between factions loyal to the Russian
government at Petrograd, those eager to join with the Turks, and
Armenians sympathetic to the British.
Not all the news was bad for Dunsterville, however. When the Russian
army was ordered back north, Colonel Lazar Bicherakov decided to remain
behind with several hundred of his Cossacks. They eventually attached
themselves to Dunsterforce, which had spent the three weeks since
its departure from Baghdad crossing the jungles of Gilan province and
plowing its way through mountain passes filled with 12-foot snowdrifts
and stray Jangalis. At last the force arrived in Enzeli, where the
local Soviets insisted that Russia was out of the war and did not want
anything to do with the British, including helping them to reach Baku.
That initially cool reception soon turned dangerous for
Dunsterville. The local Persian population surrounded and threatened
to massacre his small force. With only a single armored car to impress
2,000 Bolshevik soldiers and 5,000 rowdy Persians, Dunsterforce slipped
away one night and made its way back south to the town of Hamadan,
about halfway from Enzeli to Baghdad.
At Hamadan the British established temporary headquarters and a
defensive line that consisted mostly of bluff until it was joined
by Bicherakov’s Cossacks, who were disappointed to discover just
how weak Dunsterforce really was. As winter gave way to spring and
summer, however, the rest of Dunsterville’s men began to arrive,
including two Martinsyde G.100 Elephant bombers of No. 72 Squadron,
flown by Lieutenants M.C. McKay and R.P. Pope, which went a long way
to improve morale and impress Dunsterforce’s local allies. At last,
with the force’s assigned complement of officers and the addition of
a mobile force of 1,000 rifles of the 1/4 Hampshire Regiment and the
1/2 Gurkhas with two mountain guns, Dunsterville felt strong enough
to move forward to clear the Enzeli road once and for all of Kuchik
Khan’s guerrillas, who had seized the Menjil Bridge, a vital position
on the way north.
Bicherakov had been agitating to attack the Turkish sympathizers for
weeks, but Dunsterville had hesitated, fearing Kuchik Khan might be
too much for the intemperate Cossacks. Finally he could put off the
impatient Bicherakov no longer, and after talks with Kuchik Khan
failed, plans were made to attack his positions at Menjil.
On June 11, Bicherakov left Dunsterville’s forward position at Qazvin,
Iran, at the head of his Cossacks and elements of the 14th Hussars. At
first light on June 12, the Cossacks started for the bridge expecting
a hard fight, but as the Martinsydes flew over the enemy positions,
their pilots discovered that the Jangalis had failed to occupy a key
ridge commanding their lines.
Bicherakov quickly took the ridge and sited his artillery. A German
adviser with Kuchik Khan, realizing the importance of that move,
called a truce and tried to bluff a victory from certain defeat,
but Bicherakov refused his advances and pressed the attack. Almost
immediately the Jangalis broke and ran, leaving scores of dead and
wounded behind.
With the bridge secured, Bicherakov, supported by mobile units from
Dunsterforce, continued northward to the provincial capital at Resht,
just south of Enzeli, where on July 20 he routed the remnants of
Kuchik Khan’s Jangalis in a final battle. Meanwhile, Dunsterville had
established his headquarters at Qazvin, about midway between Enzeli
and Hamadan.
More reinforcements reached Qazvin in July, including a group from
the Royal Navy under Royal Navy Commodore David Norris, who brought
with him several 4-inch guns. That happy event was dulled, however,
by news of Bicherakov’s defeat east of Baku by the Turks, who had run
off the newly formed Red Army and captured an armored car and its
British crew, which had been on loan from Dunsterforce. By the end
of the month, Mursal Pasha’s force was outside Baku. Then the Turks
suddenly departed. The reason was never made clear, but the alerted
German occupation forces may have posed a threat to their flanks —
though that threat proved to be nothing more than a rumor. At almost
the same time, the Baku Soviet was deposed and the new regime decided
to make contact at Qazvin with the British, who in the meantime had
received permission from London to occupy Baku.
After stressing to Baku’s new rulers, who somewhat grandiosely
called themselves the Central-Caspian Dictatorship, that the British
could only provide help on a small scale, Dunsterville sent Colonel
C.B. Stokes to Baku with 44 men of the 4th Hampshires. They arrived
just in time to help repel a desultory attack by elements of the
Turkish army that had been left behind.
Two days later, Colonel R. Keyworth arrived with the 7th North
Staffordshires to organize the city’s defense. He found only a few
defenses there, all sited improperly. Nobody knew what supplies were
available or where they were located. There was little food, fodder
or oil. Worst of all, the local soldiery was little better than a
disorganized mob.
Receiving this disheartening news back at Enzeli, Dunsterville was
moved to commandeer three local ships, President Kruger, Abo and Kursk,
and arm them with heavy guns, thus providing the means to evacuate his
men from Baku if the need arose. Dunsterville himself landed on August
16, along with a battalion each of the understrength 9th Warwickshire
and 9th Worcestershire regiments, which were immediately sent into the
thin defensive line around the city. Dunsterville then met with the
town’s new rulers to impress upon them the fact that although every
effort would be made to prepare their men for battle, they could not
depend solely on Dunsterforce’s 1,000 or so men to defend Baku.
Ten days later, Nuri Pasha, learning that the Germans had no men to
spare in trying to stop him — even if they contemplated so extreme
a move against their ally — once again ordered advance elements
of his 60,000-man army to move on Baku. The British had used every
day following their arrival to assemble the city’s stocks of weapons
and ammunition and organize an army of 10,000 men. With all they had
accomplished in the short time at their disposal, however, the British
knew that Baku could not withstand a determined attack. Their 7,000
Armenian conscripts were unreliable, the 3,000 Russian troops would
break and run at a moment’s notice and the Tartar population only
waited for a Turkish victory to rise up and slaughter the defenders.
Baku sat on the southern shore of a narrow spit of land that stuck out
into the western side of the Caspian Sea. A series of cliffs to the
east of the city were dominated by the railroad that crept from the
west to service the oil fields to the northwest of the town and then
circled eastward to Baku’s seaport. Beyond the cliffs, a succession
of ridges formed the high ground of the tiny peninsula, among which
gathered a number of salt lakes and marshes.
It was on that high ground, from which they could study the enemy’s
movements, that Stokes and the other British officers decided they
could best defend the city. Thus the Turkish charge that struck the
North Staffordshires atop the Mud Volcano on the morning of August
26 was expected.
The Turks attacked with more than 1,000 men, supported by cavalry
and artillery. Four times the Staffords threw them back, but with no
sign of their expected Armenian reinforcements they were eventually
forced to abandon their position atop the volcano after losing all
of their officers and 80 men.
Dunsterville rushed reinforcements from Baku aboard a caravan of
careening trucks. Sixty Staffords and 70 Warwicks arrived on the scene
too late to help and were forced to join the dozen or so survivors
as they retreated to new positions among the oil derricks east of
the volcano. A company of the 9th Worcesters joined them there in
midafternoon.
The position atop the volcano had been the key to Dunsterville’s
entire line, and when its defenders were forced to retreat, the whole
19-mile front was obliged to fall back to an inner line of prepared
positions. By early afternoon, the volcano was in Turkish hands.
At the same time as they attacked the volcano, the Turks moved out from
the village of Novkhany on the north side of the peninsula, where a
sunken road allowed them to approach close to the British lines while
under cover. They charged a hill east of the village of Binagadi,
held by a battalion of Armenian conscripts. When word reached them
of the attack on the volcano, a company of North Staffords was told
to abandon their positions at Diga and reinforce the Armenians on
Binagadi Hill. When they reached the crest, however, the British found
it deserted, with 250 Turks coming up the opposite side. The company
lost 10 men killed and wounded before it threw back the attack with
a hail of lead from its Lewis machine guns and rifles at point-blank
range. A second assault was also repelled, and the men breathed easier
when they saw the Turks retire toward Novkhany.
Dunsterville found his fallback position was a crooked, unsatisfactory
line, inferior to the first. In addition, the Turks now commanded the
heights atop the volcano and were bombarding the city with artillery
fire. Also disturbing was the news that conscripts had abandoned the
Armenian hilltop.
It seemed to be the same everywhere — while his men fought off
the Turks, the local militia loitered in town and Russian soldiers
attended political meetings. Dunsterville faced a difficult dilemma
— if his men were all that stood between the Turks and Baku, they
were surely doomed to failure, but if he decided to abandon the city,
he would be leaving the valuable oil fields in enemy hands.
Talks with the Baku government yielded glib promises from the local
commander, a General Dukuchayev, that his forces would fight to
the death.
The central committee adamantly resisted Dunsterville’s more realistic
suggestion — that they prepare to destroy the oil fields — since
its members considered them the city’s only claim to importance.
Meanwhile, the Turkish shelling increased. The Hotel d’Europe,
Dunsterville’s headquarters, was reduced to rubble, forcing him to
relocate to another hotel. That building too came under accurate
fire, and the British began to suspect that there was a spy in their
midst. After the war, they learned that a Turkish colonel, disguised
as a Tartar fodder merchant, had been spotting for the enemy artillery
all along.
On August 31, Mursal Pasha struck again at Binagadi Hill. Early that
morning, the 7th North Staffords under the command of Lieutenant
R.C. Petty brushed off a strong enemy patrol, then reported that at
least 500 Turks were forming up to attack. The British quickly shifted
a company of Warwicks to the center of the oil derricks near Binagadi
Hill to be held in reserve, and sent an armored train filled with
Russians to Baladjari village to pin down the enemy at the Mud Volcano.
At 6 a.m. Turkish machine guns and artillery opened an enfilading
fire on the men on Binagadi Hill, inflicting heavy casualties. With
Lieutenant Petty dead, the British survivors retreated to a fallback
position called Warwick Castle. A nearby Armenian unit took too long
to react, arriving long after the hill had been abandoned. The Armenian
reinforcements failed to hold their new position on the right, however,
and the retreat of another battalion on the left made Warwick Castle
indefensible. The remainder of the Warwicks then made a fighting
retreat through a forest of oil derricks to the northeast. A second
company of Warwicks, ordered to plug the gap in the new line, found
the position amid the derricks too weak. After nightfall, everyone
was pulled farther back to Baladjari.
Angry at the sight of hundreds of demoralized Russian troops streaming
through the streets of Baku even as his own men were dying in their
defense, Dunsterville fired off none-too-polite letters to General
Dukuchayev, who tried to soothe the British officer by inviting him
to attend a council of war. That meeting devolved into a series
of long-winded speeches suggesting unlikely plans for the city’s
defense. “Stalky” expressed his disgust with his allies by walking
out of the meeting.
All this time Dunsterville had kept his navy, now grown to four ships,
close at hand in Baku’s port. On September 1, he notified the central
committee that there was nothing more his men could do for the city
so long as its local defenders refused to join the British at the
front. Over the next few days, a flurry of correspondence produced
a provisional promise from Dunsterville to remain in Baku if the
Russians showed more spirit.
A few days later, a deserter who identified himself as being from the
Turkish 10th Division informed the defenders that the Turks planned
a major attack on the 14th. In the meantime, 500 men and 10 machine
guns from Bicherakov’s force had arrived and immediately found a
place in the city’s new line of defense.
Because their informer was unable to tell them just where the Turkish
attack would come, the defenders were forced to draw their perimeter
tight around Baku, in some places leaving little room for maneuver or
retreat. The heights to the immediate south of the city near the Bibi
Eibat oil fields were held by 60 men of A Company, North Staffords,
while 100 Armenians were held in reserve. Just to the north and hugging
tight to Baku itself was Wolf’s Gap, a narrow space between hills
crucial to the city’s defense, manned by Russians with two machine
guns, two howitzers and a battery of field guns. B Company of the
North Staffords held the thin line from Wolf’s Gap to the village
of Khoja Hasan, northwest of Baku, which was held by more Armenians
and a battery of howitzers. Bicherakov’s Cossacks watched the line
from Khoja Hasan to Baladjari. At Baladjari two companies of the 9th
Worcesters were settled in the village even as the 9th Royal Warwicks
watched the line out to the Darnabul Salt Lake and four machine guns
and an armored car machine gun squadron guarded its eastern shore.
Bad weather had grounded Dunsterville’s tiny air force, leaving him
guessing as to just where Nuri Pasha intended to strike next along
his 14-mile-long front. Then, before dawn on September 14, a Turkish
artillery barrage struck everywhere along the line. Eight to 10
battalions of Turkish infantry swarmed across the railroad tracks
south of Khoja Hasan, rolled over Bicherakov’s stunned Russians,
breached Wolf’s Gap and gained the cliffs overlooking Baku. The 39th
Brigade rushed to stem the tide but lacked the strength to throw
the Turks from the heights. Lieutenants McKay and Pope, finding
their Martinsydes unserviceable, burned them and joined the British
infantry. Dukuchayev ordered counterattacks, but due to poor leadership
his men accomplished little. The Turks poured in reinforcements and
consolidated their hold along the cliffs. There, the action halted,
but the Turks awaited only the arrival of artillery on the heights
before swooping down into the city.
With scattered artillery fire pounding Baku and his last line of
defense breached, Dunsterville decided that further resistance
was futile.
Accordingly, he ordered the Royal Navy to have its ships ready to
evacuate Dunsterforce.
At 8 p.m., with their positions around the city deteriorating fast
in the face of renewed Turkish attacks, the Warwicks and Worcesters,
screened on the left flank by the North Staffords, began abandoning
their places in the line and streamed toward the docks. The evacuation
was complicated by the knowledge that if Baku’s populace learned
they were leaving, they would become hostile and an angry central
committee might turn the guns of its own ships in the harbor on the
British vessels. The sick and wounded were evacuated first aboard the
improvised hospital ships Kursk and Abo, which then managed to slip
away from the city unnoticed. Next, Dunsterforce loaded its equipment
and ammunition on the 200-ton Armenian.
During a propitious lull in the fighting, the last elements of
Dunsterforce found their places aboard President Kruger at 10 p.m. Just
before the crew cast off, a Russian soldier noticed the activity around
the British vessel, and minutes later Dunsterville was confronted by
two members of the central committee. They warned him that if he was
leaving, they would act to stop him. Dunsterville reminded them of
his warning that if greater efforts were not forthcoming from their
own men, he would have no choice but to abandon the city. He then
ordered the ship to cast off.
With Baku lit by flames and its streets beginning to ring with the
din of combat, Kruger began heading out to sea. Its leavetaking was
not without a moment of tension, when all its lights suddenly and
inexplicably flashed on.
Before they were once more extinguished, a Russian guard ship
spotted them.
The vessel ordered Kruger to halt, then opened fire. Luckily
for the British, the shots fell short, and the ship made good
its escape. Armenian, however, still lay somewhere behind Kruger,
surrounded by now-alerted Russians. Twelve hours later, it entered
Enzeli Harbor, having been struck six times by Turkish fire that
miraculously had not touched off the ammunition on board.
The mission to Baku had cost Dunsterforce 180 men dead, wounded
and missing.
Mursal Pasha later stated that the Turks had suffered 2,000
casualties. The Turks’ hard-won victory would prove less than
satisfactory, however. With its armies in Palestine and Mesopotamia
smashed, the Ottoman empire signed an armistice on October 30, 1918.
On November 17, a British military mission returned to reoccupy
Baku and supervise the removal of Nuri and Mursal Pasha’s forces. In
London, however, the failure of Dunsterforce to hold Baku was seen
as an embarrassment, and Dunsterville became its scapegoat.
With the war ended, British forces in Transcaucasia found their
mission changing, as they became involved with the tangled politics
of revolutionary Russia. As the Allied intervention in that country
ran its course, limits were placed on British activities in Central
Asia, followed by disengagement. By April 1919, it was all over. The
British soldiers who had been cast into the farthest corners of the
tsar’s empire to keep it out of the hands of Germany and Turkey, then
later the Bolsheviks, were reassigned to their accustomed billets in
India, the Middle East and England itself.
The strange saga of Dunsterforce and its courageous stand receded
from the consciousness of the West for the better part of 60 years,
until the tumultuous events of the 1980s, 1990s and the early 21st
century once again placed Transcaspia at the center of world conflict.
For further reading, Lowell, Mass.-based writer Pierre Comtois
recommends: A Peace to End All Peace, by David Fromkin; Like Hidden
Fire, by Peter Hopkirk; and The Baku Commune, 1917-1918, by Ronald
G. Suny.
This article was originally published in the July 2005 issue of
Military History magazine.