Our Journal: First World War Studies

In August 1918, 1500 British troops sailed across the Caspian Sea and occupied Baku. Dunsterforce – named after its leader Lionel Dunsterville – ended in tactical failure. One month after entering the city, the British force withdrew. Many historians have written Dunsterforce off as an ambitious, but ultimately unsuccessful, intervention on a peripheral front. In this article, however, I argue that the operation achieved greater strategic success than it is often given credit for. Dunsterforce’s achievements, however, cannot be disentangled from broader developments on other fronts in late 1918. As such, this success was largely incidental. Although some authors have argued that Britain was driven by economic interests, the principal objective of Dunsterforce was the protection of Britain’s position in the Middle East and India. By occupying Baku and thus controlling the Caspian, Britain hoped to forestall a Turko-German invasion of India. Operating in an unpredictable strategic environment, Dunsterforce’s objectives evolved over time; the operation suffered from what modern strategists have labelled ‘mission creep’. Originally tasked with training local levies, Dunsterville’s mission had evolved into a field force: Dunsterforce. Under relative autonomy from London, Dunsterville drove the intervention. His ambitions extended to restoring the entire Eastern Front by linking up with forces in the Ukraine. Three factors contributed to Dunsterforce’s failure. First, it arrived too late. By the time Dunsterforce disembarked in Baku, the city was already under siege by the Turkish army. Second, the resources available to Dunsterville – both in terms of men and materiel – were insufficient to accomplish the mission’s tactical end: holding Baku. Third, the residents of Baku were too occupied with in-fighting to mount a united defence. Despite being a military defeat, Dunsterforce achieved some successes. The British presence in Baku helped deny the Central Powers access to Baku’s oil for six vital weeks. No oil from Baku travelled further than Tiflis (modern-day Tbilisi) by the time the armistice was signed. At a time when German forces on the Western Front were hampered by chronic fuel shortages, this was a significant feat. Indeed, on 17 November, a British force occupied Baku once more. The capture of Baku by the Army of Islam proved the zenith of the Pan-Turanian dream, and Turkey’s expansionist plans were never realized. The British retained command of the Caspian from their base at Enzeli in north-west Persia, giving the British a foothold from which the successor of Dunsterforce, Noperforce, could operate against the Bolsheviks. India remained unthreatened, and thus Britain had secured its strategic objectives in the region.

Key Words: Dunsterforce, expeditionary warfare, Caucasus, India, Persia, pan-Turanism, Drang nach Osten,

This paper argues that German occupation, through its military state of Ober Ost, fundamentally transformed Lithuania and Courland in 1915–1918. The German occupiers were determined to solve the refugee crisis, resulting from Russian evacuation policies, and the ensuing social and economic disorder by controlling all transport of people and goods. External borders were hermetically closed and internal district borders used to supervise and control movement within Ober Ost. These measures, however, impeded economic recovery entirely and had a disastrous impact on the everyday life of the population as well as on the image of the German occupiers. Large parts of the population resorted to smuggling to make a living. Increasingly, mobility policy was used to control repatriation – especially in the case of Courland, which became earmarked for annexation. Ultimately, German defeat meant that Ober Ost movement policies provided Lithuanians with a territory that was completely transformed and disengaged from the former imperial space, while at the same time impeding Latvian state formation. The Lithuanian state was thus able to inherit core strategies of territorialization from the occupation regime, such as economic monopolization and Ober Ost’s specific border policies.

Key Words: Ober Ost, Lithuania, mobility, territory,

This essay focuses on May Sinclair’s A Journal of Impressions of Belgium (1915, London: MacMillan), Mary Roberts Rinehart’s Kings, Queens and Pawns: An American Woman at the Front (1915, New York: George Doran Company) and Edith Wharton’s Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (2010, London: Hesperus Press Limited), and examines how these writers reflected and negotiated in their writing their status as eyewitnesses to the First World War. In a male-dominated world, the presence of women writers at the front was unusual. These three authors wrote about their condition as ‘other’ in a world that had been traditionally secluded for them, and had to negotiate the strategies they would resort in order to portray the conflict.

Key Words: eyewitness accounts, literary journalism, war reportage, May Sinclair, Edith Wharton, Mary R. Rinehart, First World War literature,

In the last two decades, historical scholarship has challenged the argument that British soldiers fighting the First World War found Victorian principles of masculine heroism wanting in modern warfare. However, these researchers have neglected to examine military aviation in their studies. Recruitment patterns, training guidelines and media coverage of the earliest British airplane pilots idealized a normative model of aviators as courageous and physically strong, a hegemonic masculine identity linked to a recent revival of chivalry and elite athleticism in British culture. Yet, numerous British aviators who flew during the Great War faced bodily harm and psychological strains, resulting in disillusionment with wartime leadership and with media portrayals of ideal manhood. Despite such scepticism, the masculine archetype endured because the British War Office, prominent medical officers and the administrators of the air forces claimed that symptoms of traumatic stress fundamentally originated in a failure of physical and moral character. During the war and in its aftermath, as these experts and bureaucrats forged the cult of the aviator as a military hero, they also reinforced stigma associated with mental disability when treating or disciplining fliers who complained of psychological distress. Hence, the intersection of ideology with experience led to tensions between veterans of air combat and the medico-military establishment over understandings of gender and disability.

Key Words: Britain, aviation, masculinity, trauma, disability,