Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran

• 1. Introduction

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  The Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran began before dawn on the 25th of August, 1941, when Royal Air Force aircraft crossed into Iranian airspace and dropped bombs on Tehran and Qazvin. The attack had a name: Operation Countenance. It would be over in six days. What made this strike remarkable was not its speed. It was its target. Iran had declared itself neutral. Its government had repeatedly told both sides it wanted no part of the war. Yet within a week, one of the world's oldest nations had been carved up between the British Empire and the Soviet Union, its ruling Shah was on his way into exile, and a twenty-one-year-old prince had been installed on the throne.

  Why did two major powers attack a country that posed no direct military threat to either of them? And why did that occupation stretch years beyond the war's end, sparking one of the first crises of the United Nations? The answers begin with oil, a single railway line, and a Shah who spent years playing Germany against Britain and the Soviet Union.

• 2. Reza Shah's Balancing Act

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  In 1925, after years of civil war, foreign intervention, and political collapse, a military officer named Reza Pahlavi seized power through a coup against the Qajar dynasty. He crowned himself Reza Shah that same year. What followed was one of the most ambitious modernisation drives in the Middle East: new schools, new infrastructure, expanded transportation, modernised cities. In 1935, Reza Shah formally asked foreign governments to stop calling his country Persia and use its own name, Iran, in official correspondence.

  To fund all of this, Reza Shah needed Western money. But he also resented the degree to which Britain and the Soviet Union had historically treated Iran as a sphere of influence to be divided between them. Germany offered a third option. It had no imperial footprint in Iran, making it a useful partner for a ruler trying to reduce foreign dominance. By the time World War II broke out, Reza Shah had allowed hundreds of German agents to operate inside Iran. His government also accused the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company of cheating Iran on its share of profits under the D'Arcy Concession, a 1901 agreement that gave the British company the exclusive right to prospect for Iranian oil for sixty years, with Iran receiving sixteen percent of the net profit. In 1931, Reza Shah unilaterally cancelled that concession, setting off a diplomatic crisis. A new deal was eventually negotiated on better terms, but the episode left the British deeply suspicious of the Shah's intentions toward their oil interests.

  The Abadan Refinery, owned by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, refined eight million tons of oil in 1940 alone. British planners understood that if that facility fell into German hands, the Allied war effort would face a serious blow. That calculation would prove decisive.

• 3. The Strategic Calculus

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  In June 1941, Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, its surprise invasion of the Soviet Union. That attack transformed the strategic map overnight. Britain and the Soviet Union, previously wary of each other, became formal allies facing a common enemy. It also created an urgent practical problem: how to get war supplies to the Soviets.

  Convoys to Arkhangelsk in the far north were becoming increasingly dangerous, battered by German U-boat attacks and winter ice. The Persian Corridor, formed by the Trans-Iranian Railway, offered an alternative. Ships from the then-neutral United States could send Lend-Lease goods by sea, land them at Persian Gulf ports, and move them north through Iran into Soviet territory. That railway became one of the most important logistical arteries of the entire war.

  Britain was already present in force across the border. The Anglo-Iraqi War of May 1941 had placed sizable British forces in Iraq. Allied commanders feared that Germany, pushing steadily east through the Soviet Union, might eventually use Turkey and then Iran as a corridor to threaten the Baku oil fields or to outflank British positions in the Middle East. The international correspondent C. L. Sulzberger wrote in a major strategic analysis in the New York Times that military experts considered it virtually certain that if Germany succeeded in the east, an attack on Egypt would follow, and that occupying the Caucasus and pushing through Iran to the Persian Gulf would outflank British positions across the region.

  By July and August 1941, the British were demanding that Iran expel its German residents, estimated in one British embassy report at close to one thousand people. A study by historian Joan Beaumont put the number at probably no more than three thousand Germans in Iran, but noted they were believed to hold outsized influence due to their roles in strategic industries and transport networks. Reza Shah refused the demands. Two diplomatic notes were delivered, on the 19th of July and the 17th of August. The prime minister, Ali Mansur, recognised the second note as a disguised ultimatum. Neither side blinked, and the attack came.

• 4. Six Days of Fighting

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  The Royal Navy and Royal Australian Navy struck from the Persian Gulf at 04:10 on the 25th of August, opening fire on the Iranian sloop Palang at Abadan and sinking it in a single salvo. At Khorramshahr, HMAS Yarra surprised and sank another Iranian sloop, Babr. The head of the Iranian navy, Gholamali Bayandor, was killed in the fighting. The armed merchant cruiser HMAS Kanimbla navigated the Khor Musa inlet to Bandar Shapur, landed two battalions of troops without resistance, and seized seven Axis merchant vessels. An eighth was scuttled.

  In Khuzestan Province, some twenty-seven thousand Iranian troops from four infantry divisions put up resistance around Ahvaz. Iranian forces had entrenched themselves around the city with artillery and tanks, and they repelled a British attack. General Mohammad Shahbakhti's defenders held firm enough that the Indian Army advance stalled at the Karun River. Whether they could have held indefinitely became moot on the 29th of August, when word reached Ahvaz that the Iranian government had accepted a ceasefire.

  In central Iran, the 10th Indian Infantry Division under Major-General William Slim crossed from Iraq at Qasr-e Shirin and moved into the Naft-e Shah oilfield. The RAF fought several dogfights with Iranian aircraft, shooting down six Iranian fighters for no losses. British forces reached within two miles of Kermanshah by the 29th, at which point Iranian commanders there also received the ceasefire order.

  In the north, Soviet forces were moving on multiple fronts simultaneously, using more than one thousand T-26 tanks and three armoured spearheads from Soviet Azerbaijan, Soviet Armenia, and Soviet Turkmenistan. The Iranian Air Force flew a collection of outdated biplanes, including British Hawker Fury fighters and Hawker Hart bombers, along with French aircraft such as the Bréguet 14 and the Potez VIII. These planes were no match for the Soviet Air Force, which destroyed Iranian airbases in preliminary strikes. The Iranian Army had a standing force of between one hundred and twenty-six thousand and two hundred thousand men, but they were spread across multiple fronts with inadequate armour and no air cover.

  In Iranian Azerbaijan, three individual Iranian soldiers held a bridge against the 47th Army until they ran out of ammunition and were killed. The Soviets refused to use artillery for fear of damaging the bridge they needed. The 47th Army captured Tabriz and eventually reached Qazvin, one hundred miles west of Tehran, by the 30th of August. British and Soviet forces met at Sanandaj and Qazvin on the 30th and the 31st of August respectively. Reza Shah had already ordered his military to stand down on the 29th, four days into the invasion.

  Reza Shah refused his generals' requests to destroy the road and transportation networks he had spent years building. That decision helped the Allies win so quickly.

• 5. The Fall of Reza Shah

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  When the surrender came, the Shah's anger turned inward. He had watched the army he spent decades constructing collapse in less than a week. Many of his generals had behaved incompetently; others had secretly supported the British and effectively sabotaged Iranian resistance. When the Shah discovered that his generals had gathered secretly to discuss surrender options, he beat the head of the armed forces, General Ahmad Nakhjavan, with a cane and physically stripped him of his rank in front of the others. The Crown Prince intervened before Nakhjavan could be shot, and Nakhjavan was sent to prison instead.

  The Shah then turned to diplomacy, dismissing his prime minister Ali Mansur and replacing him with Mohammad Ali Foroughi, a former prime minister whom the Shah had previously driven out of politics and whose son had been executed by firing squad. The choice proved fatal to Reza Shah's hold on power. Foroughi opened negotiations with the British and, according to the historical record, implied that both he and the Iranian people wanted to be liberated from the Shah's rule. Foroughi reached an agreement: the Allied withdrawal from Iran would require the expulsion of all German nationals, including their families, a condition that effectively meant internment for those handed to the British and possible death for those handed to the Soviets.

  Reza Shah stalled. By the 18th of September, he had secretly arranged for most of the German nationals to escape across the Turkish border. In response, the Red Army moved on the 16th of September to occupy Tehran. Reza Shah, in a letter written by Foroughi, announced his abdication. Fearing execution by the communists, much of Tehran's wealthier population fled. The British wanted to restore the Qajar dynasty, but the Qajar heir, Hamid Hassan Mirza, was a British citizen who spoke no Persian. Crown Prince Mohammad Reza Pahlavi took the oath as Shah instead, with the help of an official named Ardeshir Reporter.

• 6. Occupation and Its Costs

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  Iran under Allied occupation became a country under sustained pressure. The Persian Corridor eventually moved more than five million tons of matériel through Iran to the Soviet Union. In 1943, thirty thousand Americans helped man that corridor, and between twenty-six and thirty-four percent of all Lend-Lease supplies sent to the Soviets passed through Iran.

  For Iranians, the occupation brought hardship on a large scale. The Soviets appropriated most of the harvest in northern Iran, producing food shortages across the occupied zone. The British and Soviet occupiers used grain deliveries as a bargaining tool. Foreign troops consumed local food supplies and occupied the transport networks needed to move goods. Under pressure from the British, the new Shah appointed Ahmad Qavam as prime minister, who mismanaged both the food supply and the broader economy. In 1942, bread riots broke out in Tehran. Martial law was declared and several rioters were killed by police. Inflation rose by four hundred and fifty percent, devastating the lower and middle classes. In some areas there were famine deaths.

  German intelligence made two notable attempts to disrupt Allied operations in 1943. Operation François, run by the Abwehr, tried to use the Qashqai people of Iran to sabotage British and American supply lines to the Soviet Union. Operation Long Jump was an alleged German plot to assassinate Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt at the Tehran Conference in November 1943. At that conference, the three Allied leaders publicly reaffirmed their commitment to Iranian independence and territorial integrity. The new Shah had signed a Tripartite Treaty Alliance with Britain and the Soviet Union on the 29th of January, 1942, which formally committed the Allies to leaving Iran no more than six months after the end of hostilities. Iran declared war on Germany in September 1943, qualifying it for membership in the United Nations.

  Arthur Millspaugh became Iran's finance minister and attempted to stabilise the country's finances, running into sustained opposition at every turn.

• 7. The First UN Crisis

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  On the 12th of December, 1945, a Soviet-backed separatist state called the People's Republic of Azerbaijan was declared in Iran's northwest. The Kurdish People's Republic was also established in late 1945. When Iranian government troops attempted to restore control, Red Army units physically blocked their path.

  The withdrawal deadline arrived on the 2nd of March, 1946, six months after the end of the war. The British began to withdraw as agreed. The Soviet Union did not. Moscow cited threats to Soviet security and kept its troops in place. Iran brought its complaint to the newly formed United Nations Security Council. That complaint became the first ever filed by a country in the UN's history, and it became an early test of whether the new institution could actually resolve disputes between major powers. The Security Council did not take direct steps to force the Soviets out. Soviet troops did not leave Iran proper until May 1946, following the diplomatic pressure and Iran's formal appeal to the international body.

  The crisis left a clear mark on how the postwar order would work, or fail to work, when a permanent member of the Security Council was the party accused of violation. The Soviet delay in withdrawing, after years of occupation, set conditions for what became known as the Iran crisis of 1946, and it confirmed for Iranian leaders just how exposed a small country could be when two great powers decided its territory was strategically useful.