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.

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. North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) is geographically the smallest of the four provinces of Pakistan. ... Waziristan location map A flag used by a resistance movement in Waziristan against the British during the 1930s, with the Takbir written on it. ...

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. Avicennas tomb in Hamedan Hamadan or Hamedan ( Persian: همدان ) is the capital city of Hamadan Province of Iran. ... Bandar-e Anzali (in Persian: بندر انزلی), known as Bandar-e Pahlavi (بندر پهلوی) before the Iranian Revolution, is a harbour town on the Caspian Sea, in the Iranian province of Gilan, close to Rasht. ...

The thus reputed leader and master of logistics Dunsterville was now tasked with an expedition to occupy, the key oil port of Baku, in the then Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, 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). Municipality: Baku Area: 1000 km² Altitude: -28 m Population: 2,074,300 census 2003 Population density: 1280 persons/km² Postal Code: +99450 Area code: 012 Municipality code: BA Latitude: 41° 01 52 N Longitude: 21° 20 25 E Weather types: 9 of 11 Mayor: Hajibala Abutalybov The Baku region. ... Motto: Odlar Yurdu Land of the Eternal Fire Anthem: AzÉ™rbaycan Respublikasının DövlÉ™t Himni March of Azerbaijan Capital Baku Largest city Baku Official language(s) Azerbaijani Government President Prime Minister Representative democracy Mammed Amin Rasulzade Fatali Khan Khoyski Independence - Declared - Formerly From the Russian Empire May...

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. Rudyard Kipling Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) was a British author and poet, born in India, and best known today for his childrens books, including The Jungle Book (1894), The Second Jungle Book (1895), Just So Stories (1902), and Puck of Pooks Hill (1906... United Services College was an English public school for the sons of military officers, located at Westward Ho, near Bideford in North Devon. ...

Source

• Encyclopaedia of the First World War- Who's Who

References

• S.P. Menefee, "Dover, Thomas," in H.C.G. Mathews and Brian Harrison (eds.), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 17 (2004): pp. 361-63.