The 5th Sussex (Reserve) Battery, were involved in the month long Afghanistan War, which started on 3rd May 1919 and ended with an armistice on 3rd June 1919.
On 3rd May 1919, Amanullah, the new ruler of Afghanistan, suddenly attacked the British. Amanullah knew how fragile the British positions were on the Afgan border. Together with growing unrest in India, a feeling of British fatigue after the First World War, he tried to strike home a blow that he hoped would consolidate his power at home.
Amanullah gave the British ample warning of his intentions. He wrote to the viceroy clearing stating that he rejected the control Britain had over his foreign policy and announced that Afghanistan was fully independent.
At the start of the war, the British and Indian forces, not including frontier militia, totalled eight divisions, as well as five independent brigades of infantry and three of cavalry. But whilst they had this large force in existence, it was needed elsewhere as well, and at least initially, within the immediate North-West Frontier area, the resources that the British could use were limited to two horse-mounted cavalry brigades, two infantry divisions, and three frontier brigades as well as a number of frontier militia and irregular corps. Artillery was also in short supply, and the two divisions on the frontier each had only eight 18-pdrs, four 4.5-inch howitzers, and eight 2.75-inch mountain guns. The cavalry brigades were each equipped with four 13-pound guns that were crewed by the Royal Horse Artillery. Machine guns, at least on the Khyber front, were old .303 Maxims.
The British gained a command and control advantage with their use of motor transport and wireless communications while armoured cars and RAF detachments increased their firepower and reach, the latter being demonstrated to the Afghans by a bombing raid on Kabul itself.
But the main problem for the British was manpower. The troops in India were no longer of the standard that they might otherwise have been at another time. Coming just after the end of a very costly war in Europe, the British will to fight and military-industrial capability to fight another war was very low. The Indian Army had been heavily committed to the First World War and had endured a large number of casualties. Many of its units still had not returned from overseas, and those that had begun a process of demobilisation and as such many regiments had lost almost all their most experienced men.
Likewise, the British Army in India had been gutted. Prior to 1914 there had been sixty-one British regiments serving in India. However, of these all but ten (two cavalry and eight infantry) had been withdrawn in order to fight in Europe or the Middle East. In their place, units of the Territorial Army, part time soldiers usually only intended for home defence but who had volunteered for overseas service, had been sent in order to release regular units for the fighting in France. After four years of mundane garrison duty, away from their families and disaffected, most of these men were understandably really only interested in demobilisation and returning to Britain to get on with their lives. They were in no way prepared for a hard fought campaign on the Indian frontier.
The Afghan forces achieved some success in the early days of the war as Pashtun tribesmen from both sides of the border joined forces with them. The military skirmishes soon ended in stalemate as the British recovered from their initial surprise. The war did not last long, it had started on 3rd May 1919 and the armistice was signed on 3rd June 1919, however, because both sides were soon ready to sue for peace; the Afghans were unwilling to sustain continued British air attacks on Kabul and Jalalabad, and the British were unwilling to take on an Afghan land war so soon after the bloodletting of World War I. The month long war resulted in about 1,00 Afghan dead and 2,000 British and colonial deaths. What the Afghans did not gain in battle they gained ultimately at the negotiating table.
The British virtually dictated the terms of the 1919 Rawalpindi Agreement, a temporary armistice agreement that did provide-somewhat ambiguously-for Afghan autonomy in foreign affairs. Before signing the final document with the British, the Afghans concluded a treaty of friendship with the new Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union; Afghanistan thereby became one of the first nations to recognize the Soviet government, and a "special relationship" evolved between the two governments.
For more information and a timescale : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Anglo-Afghan_War
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