Word: caspian
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Beside the Götterdämmerung thunders of the Russo-German War, the 80-hour campaign to achieve all these desirable things sounded like the popping of a little corn. Down either side the Caspian came the Cossacks-horsed, mechanized and propellered. Their western column rapidly took Tabriz; their eastern the port of Bandar Shah (see map). To the south the British crossed from Iraq and made sure of the richest single oil field in existence; their warships in the Persian Gulf squashed Iran's minuscule Navy, sinking two sloops, capturing seven Axis ships. Indian troops landed...
...years later the Tsar fell, and this ended the agreement. Britain's Foreign Secretary, the suavely arrogant Lord Curzon of Kecleston, then had a lovely dream. He dreamed of extending British control from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea, thereby adding a magnificent frontier province to British India. The Mesopotamian campaign had slopped over into always neutral Persia, but in 1918 the British drove the Turks out and garrisoned Persia's strong places. The next year Shah Ahmad, even bleaker-brained than Shah Muzaffar, had no alternative but to submit to an agreement by which his country...
...however, Lord Curzon's lovely dream was rudely shattered. The Bolsheviks overran large chunks of northern Persia. Along the shores of the Caspian the British, assisted by the Persian Cossack Brigade, vainly tried to stop them. Those of the old Tsarist officers who were not killed, fled; the brigade started to fall apart...
...three directions lie great deposits of oil, precious as man power to mechanized war: north, on both sides of the Caspian, but principally in and around Baku; west, in Iraq with its colossal double pipeline stretching from Kirkuk clear to the coasts of Syria and Palestine; south, at the head of the Persian Gulf (the richest single oil field in existence, controlled by the British Government for its Royal Navy...
...sticky economic position as he had already paid for certain German goods and services before the war started. Not all Germans in Iran are fifth columnists; most are technicians. Many work on the Trans-Iranian Railway, which is 870 miles long, was eleven years abuilding and connects the Caspian Sea with the Persian Gulf. Others run the new iron smelter at Samnan, which hopes to become Iran's Pittsburgh. The Shah can hardly shove these technicians out abruptly without crippling transportation and production...