Was Dunsterforce a Disaster?

On a bleak morning in January 1918 one of the oddest military formations ever put into the field by imperial Britain set out from Khanaqin, in what is now Iraq, to cross the border into Persia. ‘Dunsterforce’, as it was called, consisted of just 41 Ford vans and cars with their drivers, two sergeant clerks, and 12 officers. Ahead of it lay a journey of some 700 miles on roads not built for wheeled traffic across mountainous, snow-covered, and famine-stricken territory.

The force commander, Major-General Lionel Dunsterville, was making for Enzeli, a Persian port at the foot of the Caspian Sea. From there he hoped to sail to Baku, the capital of present-day Azerbaijan on the western shore of the Caspian, before travelling across the Russian-controlled Caucasus to Tbilisi. His vans carried large sums of money in British gold and Persian silver to bribe Georgian and Armenian forces to fight the Ottoman Turks.

He had also been promised reinforcements of around 350 elite officers and NCOs from Britain’s ‘white dominions’, who had volunteered for a mysterious ‘hush-hush’ mission. An American colonel who met some of them in Baghdad called them ‘the most efficient looking crowd of high class, patriotic, and altogether worthy cut-throats and desperadoes that I have ever seen – they were superb’.

Dunsterville’s mission had been prompted by one of the 20th century’s seminal events. Two months before he set out, Russia had undergone the second of the two revolutions which convulsed the country in 1917. As a result it had crashed out of the First World War: the new Bolshevik leaders, Lenin and Trotsky, had signed an armistice with Russia’s principal enemy, Germany, and the armies of the old tsarist regime had spontaneously demobilised. Little now stood between Germany’s Turkish allies and Baku, one of the world’s most important oil-producing centres, which could prove immensely valuable to the Turkish and German war effort.

Just as alarming from the British perspective was the prospect of the Turks pressing on across the Caspian to invade Muslim Central Asia, from which they might threaten Britain’s prized imperial possessions in India. Such a threat had been among British strategists’ worst nightmares for much of the 19th century – though in the past it had been the Russians, not the Turks, who were the principal danger.

In the absence of organised Russian resistance to the Turkish armies following the revolution, a British agent in Baku had suggested in December 1917 sending a high-level political-military mission to the Caucasus to persuade the locals to take up arms against the Turks. Dunsterforce was the result.

The mission was an exceptionally challenging one, but Britain’s military planners believed they had the right man for the job. Dunsterville was a career Indian Army soldier, but also unusually capable of thinking outside the box. He had been at school with Rudyard Kipling, who later wrote a series of school stories under the umbrella title Stalky & Co. Stalky was an insurgent prankster, a young Lord of Misrule, well known to be based on Dunsterville. Perhaps the brass-hats in London had read their Kipling and concluded that Dunsterville-Stalky was the man for them.

Dunsterville’s mission received an early setback. When he reached the port of Enzeli three weeks after setting out he found it in the hands of young Russian Bolsheviks who barred him from proceeding on the grounds that he was trying to prolong a war they were desperate to end. So he spent five months twiddling his thumbs in Persia, his ‘cut-throats and desperadoes’ engaged not in fighting the enemy but in famine relief, road-building, and training local volunteer troops.

Only in August 1918 was the Bolshevik regime governing Baku overthrown, leaving the way open for Dunsterforce to land in the city, which by then was surrounded by a Turkish army. The British force had now swollen in size to some 1,500 troops, including a brigade of infantry, and their arrival stiffened the city’s resistance, but not enough to stave off defeat. The Armenians who dominated Baku’s government had plenty of citizen-soldiers but, according to the British, these local conscripts did not want to fight, abandoning their positions in the trenches around the city every evening to carouse with their girlfriends in the cafes.

Dunsterville’s men suffered heavy losses and he decided to evacuate the city, moving his troops stealthily to the harbour and embarking by night on 14 September. Among them was a character even more remarkable than Dunsterville himself, Colonel Toby Rawlinson, who was given a key role in the evacuation.

Rawlinson was a sportsman and daredevil who had been a pioneer of both motor-racing and flying. In 1914, aged 47, he and his new Hudson racing car joined a volunteer unit ferrying staff officers around the battlefields in France: by November that year the vehicle, with one of Rawlinson’s personal machine guns mounted on the bonnet, was riddled with bullet holes.

In 1915 he had been given the task of defending London against Zeppelin bombing raids, and helped develop some of the earliest anti-aircraft weapons, but by 1918 he was bored and volunteered to join Dunsterville. In Baku he was put in charge of the city’s ammunition reserves, which he had loaded onto a ship ahead of the evacuation. When the ship set sail Rawlinson held a revolver to the head of the reluctant captain, who was terrified that gunboats at the harbour entrance would open fire on them. And to discourage the mutinous crew from trying to shoot him, Rawlinson also barricaded the bridge with cases of dynamite. The gunboats did fire but, despite being hit several times, the ship did not explode.

Many of the men involved in Dunsterforce were equally colourful characters. But some of those who should have been in Baku could not make it. The agent who first suggested sending a mission to the Caucasus was Edward Noel, an eccentric whose exploits in later life included attempting to drive a charcoal-fuelled Rolls-Royce from London to India. Noel should have been part of Dunsterforce but had been captured by local freedom-fighters on a visit to Persia and imprisoned for five months. He had been put on trial, marched out to face a firing squad, and held for much of the time in solitary confinement. His cable to London when he was finally released was a masterpiece of laconic understatement: 

‘As result of my fifth attempt to escape … I was flogged, kept in chains for sixty-five days, fed on rice alone, tied to a tree at night, led out to be shot, etc. Health good.’

The Battle of Baku is today largely forgotten. Some thought Dunsterforce a ‘Dunsterfarce’, incompetently led and chaotic. But most observers then and now think Dunsterville did a decent job in very difficult circumstances. And though British troops suffered a defeat, their efforts were not in vain, since they deprived Britain’s enemies of access to Baku’s valuable oil for six critical weeks in the closing months of the First World War.

Nick Higham’s latest book is Mavericks: Empire, Oil, Revolution and the Forgotten Battle of World War One (Bloomsbury, 2025).