Lionel Dunsterville

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General Lionel Charles Dunsterville (1865-1946) lead the so-called 'Dunsterforce' across present-day Iran in an attempt to prevent an invasion of India by a combined Germano-Turkish force.

[edit] Biography

Lionel Charles Dunsterville, born in 1865, was commissioned into the British Army - into the infantry - in 1884. Later he transferred to with the colonial Indian Army and served on the North-West Frontier, in Waziristan and later in China.

Dunsterville's First World War service saw him initially posted to India. He was appointed at the close of 1917 to lead an Allied force of under 1,000 Australian, British, Canadian and New Zealand elite troops (drawn from the Mesopotamian and Western Fronts), accompanied by armoured cars, from Hamadan some 350km across Qajar Persia, trying to prevent a (somewhat unlikely) invasion of India by Germany and Ottoman Turkey and also to aid establishing an independent Trans-Caucasia. They were turned back by 3,000 Russian revolutionary troops at Enzeli.

The thus reputed leader and master of logistics Dunsterville was now tasked with an expedition to occupy, the key oil port of Baku, that was held by the Centro Caspian Dictatorship, which had to be abandoned in turn on 14 September 1918, in the face of onslaught by 14,000 Turkish troops, which took the city on the next day; the port of Baku however would fall to the Allies within two months after the Turkish armistice).

Promoted to Major-General in 1918, Dunsterville died in 1946.

Dunsterville had been a contemporary of Rudyard Kipling at the United Services College, and the character of Stalky in Stalky & Co. is based upon him.