Lionel Dunsterville
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General Lionel Charles Dunsterville (1865–1946) was a British general, who led the so-called Dunsterforce across present-day Iran in an attempt to prevent an invasion of India by a combined Germano-Turkish force.
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[edit] Biography
Lionel Charles Dunsterville went to college with Rudyard Kipling at The United Services College, an educational institution designed to prepare British young men for careers in Her Majesty's Army. He served as the inspiration for the character "Stalky" in Kipling's novel Stalky & Co.
He was commissioned into the British Army infantry in 1884. Later he transferred to the colonial Indian Army and served on the North-West Frontier, in Waziristan and in China.
In the First World War he was initially posted to India. At the end of 1917 he was appointed 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 350 km across Qajar Persia, trying to prevent a feared (though unlikely) invasion of India by Germany and Ottoman Turkey and to help in establishing an independent Trans-Caucasia. The "Dunsterforce" was turned back by 3,000 Russian revolutionary troops at Enzeli.
Dunsterville was now assigned to occupy the key oil port of Baku, held by the Centro Caspian Dictatorship. However, Baku had to be abandoned on 14 September 1918 in the face of an onslaught by 14,000 Turkish troops, who took the city the next day. (Baku was regained by the Allies within two months as a result of the Turkish armistice.)
Promoted to major-general in 1918, Dunsterville died in 1946.
[edit] Source
[edit] References
- S.P. Menefee, "Dunsterville, Lionel Charles," in H.C.G. Mathews and Brian Harrison (eds.), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 17 (2004): pp. 361-63.
- The Adventures of Dunsterforce by Major-General L. C. Dunsterville (1920; Edward Arnold, London)
- Something of myself by Rudyard Kipling
- Stalky and Co. by Rudyard Kipling
