Author Topic: Raglan's Adventures with Dunsterforce 1918 (Read 26597 times)

Lord Raglan · « **on:** January 01, 2019, 06:07:22 PM »

Dunsterforce, officially called the British Military Mission to the Caucasus, was a secret force of 450 to 1,000 imperial soldiers commanded by Major-General Lionel C. Dunsterville. Its mission was to safeguard the immense oil installations at Baku from the Ottomans and the Germans, while organizing local groups of Armenians, Georgians, and anti-Bolsheviks to safeguard the railways and approaches to Afghanistan and India.

Text courtesy of 1914-1918 Online.

British Officers

My Dunsterforce collection consists of the following units:

4 x British Officers
3 x 8 man British Infantry Sections
3 x 10 man Gurkha Infantry Sections
1 x 10 man Sikh Infantry Section
2 x British HMG Teams
3 x 18 pdr Artillery Guns with 6 crew
1 x 9 man British Hussar Cavalry Troop
1 x 9 man Indian Lancer Cavalry Troop
2 x Austin Armoured Cars
1 x Lanchester Armoured Car
5 x Ford Vans
1 x Sopwith Camel

Lord Raglan · « **Reply #1 on:** January 01, 2019, 06:12:29 PM »

By war’s end, 890,000 British imperial soldiers had served in the Middle Eastern theatre, suffering roughly 95,000 casualties, with a financial cost of £350 million. It was into this muddled, secondary or “side-show” theatre of war that Dunsterforce, an undersized, elite, secret unit made up of 450 choice soldiers of “highly individualistic characters of the do or die type” from across the empire, was deployed in 1918 to seize the oil installations at Baku on the western shore of the Caspian Sea. Oil progressively became more important in British strategic thought and action, most notably in 1918, and into the peace negotiations. This mission was officially sanctioned in December 1917 as the British Military Mission to the Caucasus — commonly known as Dunsterforce, after its commander Major-General Lionel C. Dunsterville (1865-1946).

British Communication Officers

Lord Raglan · « **Reply #2 on:** January 01, 2019, 06:22:49 PM »

Given the turmoil created by the various ethnic groups and factions operating in the Caucasus region, it was necessary for the commander of this force to be familiar with the capricious state of affairs. Dunsterville met the criteria, as he was fluent in Urdu, Punjabi, Pashtu, Persian, Russian, German, French and Chinese. By this time, Dunsterville was already a legendary figure thanks to his childhood friend Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), who immortalized him as the bold leader “Stalky” in the boyhood picaresque adventure tale Stalky and Co. (1899).

9th Service Battalion - Royal Warwickshire Regiment

Lord Raglan · « **Reply #3 on:** January 01, 2019, 06:45:32 PM »

Major-General Dunsterville’s first task was to organize a coherent body of resistance out of the miscellaneous, and often mutually hostile, groups of anti-Bolshevik Russians, anti-Ottoman Georgians, Armenians, and Assyrians spread across the Caucasus region. Once established, the primary mission of his collective force was to guard the Transcaucasian Railway line from the Russian cities of Baku to Tbilisi, in addition to protecting natural resources, including the oil fields at Baku, from the Ottomans (and the Germans), while defending the 51 percent stake in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company owned by the British government. It was also hoped that Dunsterville could aid in the establishment and maintenance of an independent group of nations — Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan — although this was a secondary objective in order to facilitate the application of the primary concern i.e. oil. Another reason for occupying Baku was to prevent the enemy route to India. The Berlin-Batum-Baku-Bukhara line was a more dangerous enemy route to the Indian frontier than was Wilhelm II, German Emperor’s (1859-1941) envisioned Berlin-to-Baghdad railway.

7th Service Battalion - Gloucestershire Regiment

Lord Raglan · « **Reply #4 on:** January 01, 2019, 06:49:34 PM »

The conditions and geography of the Middle East and Caucasus in which Dunsterforce traversed and fought were unrelenting and austere. Marches of ten to thirty miles per day under blistering temperatures topping 50C or plummeting to -40C in mountain passes exceeding 10,000 feet became routine. They were often treated as unwelcome strangers in lands wracked by drought, famine, genocide, and civil war. Isolated from immediate reinforcements or a reliable supply-line, the men of Dunsterforce trudged forward from Basra to Baghdad to Baku. They were ostensibly wandering orphans of the war, and dubbed by one participant as “no man’s child.