An Iron Cross For DELIBERATE "Friendly" Fire

[Rick Research]

To look at, this is not only simply yet another boring old hectographed "dog license," it is also singularly "undesirable" for being post-war. And yet...


Bayer. Jäger-Rgt.15

Besitz-Zeugnis

Dem Sgt. Forster Michael Bay. Jäg. Rgt. 15 2 MGK.
ist durch Truppenkommando-Befehl IIa 6940/18
v. 28.11.18 das Eiserne Kreuz II. Klasse
verliehen worden.

den 1.4.19
Scheuring
Major & Regts. Kommandeur

[Rick Research]

In a land once known to the ancient Greeks as Colchis, the "ends of the earth," where Jason and his Argonauts had sought the Golden Fleece, armies moved again through the Caucasian mountains.

Another ship, the Reichspostdampfer "General" brought another army-- the Bavarian 4. Chevaulegers Regiment, here being unloaded in Poti harbor, in the Menshevik Democratic Republic of Georgia, from 6 to 8 September 1918 in the final acts of a forgotten war within a war.

At backwater stations, in nameless railway tunnels, over vaulting river bridges, a shooting war flared between two allies.

The issue was oil... the bottomless lakes of "black gold" gushing from the fields of Baku, Azerbaijan, on the shores of the Caspian Sea, across the Caucasus range.

Everybody wanted that oil. Everybody needed it. Britain's "Dunsterforce" was within view of it, from the other direction, a threat so grave Germany began the process of entraining disassembled Uboats to ride across the Caucasus and be put together on the Caspian inland sea.

And wartime allies Imperial Germany and Ottoman Turkey would set aside their common goals to fight and kill each other for it, even when NEITHER actually possessed it-- puppets on a string dancing to the tune of Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, better known as

Lenin.

Photo © and with kind permission of the Bavarian Main State Archive-War Archive, # F IV- 149/82

[Rick Research]

Bavaria's 1st Reserve Jäger Battalion and the Prussian 10th Sturm Battalion (217th Infantry Division) were the first troop units dispatched from the Crimea, arriving in Poti harbor on 8 June 1918 at the request of the Menshevik regime in Tiflis. The original post-1917 Transcaucasian Federation had collapsed into ethnic bickering, and sauve qui peut panic, Muslim populations accepting Ottoman blandishments to join a delusional "Pan-Turanian Empire." Georgia's immediate peril was from a Turkish occupation, but in Moscow Lenin thundered that if Germany allowed Baku's oilfields to fall into Turkish hands, the Brest-Litovsk truce was off, and Bolshevik Russia would re-enter the war against Germany.

Within days, the German troops, reinforced by released German and Austrian ex-POWs and former tsarist Balts, with a sprinkling of local Georgians, was in action against Turkish regulars and their co-religionist hill tribesmen.

Here we see officers from Sturm Baon. 10 overseeing interrogation of Muslim irregulars. Despite the Elbonian "fuzzy gumdrop" headgear, the three men in the light colored tunics are Turkish uniformed regulars.

Photos all © and used by permission of the Bavarian War Archive, this being Positiv-Bildsammlung Nr. 623-unten.

[Rick Research]

But all was not embarassed averted gazes and shuffled feet. Though never more than ambushes and skirmishes, blood was shed on both sides, and soldiers died.

This © BWA photo (Positiv-Bildsammlung Ostfront Nr. 607-oben) I could identify from the 15th Jäger regimental history as the Tiflis funeral of 2nd Company, 1st Bavarian Reserve Jäger Bataillon Oberjäger Alois Hitzler, mortally wounded in a scrap at Emir on 13 June 1918, who died on 8 July.

Behind the hearse next to the elderly Georgian officer is German Mission General Staff chief Jenö von Egan-Krieger (later a Luftwaffe Generalleutnant) and the tall officer with hands clasped behind his back, wearing the first version Order of Saint Tamara awarded to him in 1917 as commander of the Muslim-deserter "Georgian Legion ( ! ) is Hauptmann der Reserve Friedrich W. Graf von der Schulenburg (German Ambassador to the Soviet Union when Hitler invaded, and later executed for involvement with the 20 July 1944 plotters).

[Rick Research]

But back to Sergeant Forster's boring old wrinkly dog license.

Truppenkommando-befehl IIa 6940/18 of 28th November 1918 was made by Oberst iG Friedrich Freiherr Kress von Kressenstein (24.4.1870-6.1.1948), Chief of the Imperial German Military Mission to the Caucasus. Recipient of the Bavarian Military Max Joseph Orders in Knight and Commander grades, as well as the Prussian Pour le Merite, he had led an expedition across the Suez Canal into Egypt earlier in the war, and had held the Allies out of Palestine, Syria, and the Transjordan for 3 years. He would go on to be the man whose singlehanded action stopped an Austrian street punk named Adolf Hitler from toppling the Bavarian government in the Beer Hall Putsch of 8-9 November 1923.

Forty five soldiers were to be decorated by that Troop Command Order, for their action against Germany's central Powers ally, Turkey.

But what with the whole world going to hell, the Russian Civil War, Turkey's surrender, and Allied interdiction of armed Germans at large in the Meditteranean, 1 April 1919 found Major Martin Scheuring (1870-after 1935) and his men in a most

unexpected


location.


Aboard the steamer "Minna Horn" in the middle of the English Channel, six days out from Hamburg on their long, hard journey home from Georgia.

[Rick Research]

Indeed, the wanderings of Sergeant Forster's unit would defy belief.

From receiving (on paper) an award named for a nymphomaniacal and homicidal (there's a combination! ) medieval Orthodox queen canonized for political reasons, and bestowed by a godless Socialist regime playing warring allies against the Greater Foe in Moscow...

the Democratic Republic of Georgia's Order of Saint (or Queen-- no one could ever quite decide which was correct) Tamara:

[Rick Research]

... The men of Bavarian Jäger Regiment 15 would emerge to stretch their legs for the first time in their native land on the railway platform in Würzburg, and discover that their very own home land had gone mad in their absence...

Wittelsbach dynasty fled, and Red militia in the streets. Their streets.

Among the last overseas troops to return home (even Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck's Schutztruppen from German East Africa reached home before they did! ), Scheuring's command (armed only with officers' sidearms and other light weaponry hidden from British naval inspectors) transformed on the spot into the ephemeral one-day-only Freikorps Würzburg and routed the Communist rabble, harbinger of the retaking of Munich.

And in the process made themselves the recipients of what would prove to be the LAST Freikorps award ever issued in Germany... 15 years after their Last Action.

[JaimeH]

Rick, simplfy this for me. Germany and Turkey went at it, over oil about 2 months before the armistice. Orchestrated by Lenin who would have had some control over Georgia in 1918?

[Rick Research]

Yup. Lenin had NO control outside Baku, however, where an earlier "ethnic cleansing" had slaughtered thousands and left the survivors torn between blood vengeance and welcome to ANYONE who would turn up and stop the killing--or at least only kill the "other" sides.

There were NO shipments of oil getting out of Baku. The Bolshevik survivors there couldn't get it shipped through Menshevik Georgia, and the looming British occupation threatened a "race to the sea" between them and the Turks.

Lenin told the Germans THEY had to keep the Turks out (nobody could keep the Brits out, except for grossly overstretched supply lines and inadequate armed force) or the whole Eastern Front would reopen...

just as the Americans flooding into France threatened to tip the balance in favor of the Allies, and every German soldier freed from the East had to be fed into the lines there.

The problem was oil. The solution was transportation.

And the transportation was ONLY through completely inadequate rail lines through the Caucasus Range.

Here is a sample of the terrain, another © BWA Positiv-Bildsammlung Ostfront photo, Nr. 619-oben. Eerily reminiscent of Mexico, "banditos" could--and DID-- easily interrupt service by blowing bridges, digging up rails, and sabotaging tunnels and telegraph wires. These are members of the Georgian army, at a now unknown station.

[Chris Boonzaier]

A nice piece of paper indeed.

Did you buy it knowing the history.... or did you find that out as a bonus?

[Rick Research]

Hadn't a clue what they were--and neither did the catalog seller. It and his Tamara document (which I also got) came from a "big name dealer" still with us today, back in 1977 at ludicrously small cost, offered seperately and without any translation. It seems some dealers never CAN be "bothered" to read German. My mommy "read" the Sutterlin to me over the phone while I was at college (mail delivery being unreliable in my neighborhood) ... and my undergraduate honors thesis was the result! Saul on the road to Damascus could not have been more surprised.

BTW, Sergeant Forster was born in Thonhausen 3 September 1892 and died as a pensioner in Munich, 20 May 1966. Discovering, in those far off day when there were only two kinds of mail-- surface and air-- that it was possible to do Bavarian archival research turned me from the Zinky Path and I have been in the Imperial Light ever since... with minor excursions into Soviet.

What is a loose medal but a lump of metal and ribbon? The story-- the LIFE-- is in the document, unique to each person. There were 5 million WW1 EK2s, but there was only ONE Michael Forster.

[Carlo Pozza]

Very good find, Rick!

Reminds us that every EK has a story behind it.

[Daniel Cole]

I think the signature I quote from Nietzsche works well with collected pieces of someones history. Makes them never die.

[Bill M]

--That was a great read. It was just what I needed too.

[Chris_Werner]

An excellent and interesting thread. Research is the best part of militaria collecting.