In August, Robinson was sent to Anzac Cove as a naval liaison officer and on his second day there, was badly wounded near the front line, forcing his evacuation to England, where King George V presented him with his medal at Buckingham Palace. Returned to the Mediterranean in December 1915 following his recuperation, he took over the coastal monitor HMS "M21", in which he shelled Turkish positions throughout Egypt and Palestine and was awarded another mention in despatches and the Egyptian Order of the Nile, 4th Class. Returning to England in the summer of 1917, he narrowly missed selection for Keyes's operations against Zeebrugge and Ostend owing to his war wounds, and instead trained crews of coastal torpedo boats, a role which led to a distant posting in the Caspian Sea during the Russian Civil War, fighting the Bolshevik forces along the Russian coastline. Robinson commanded a squadron of coastal torpedo boats in the Caspian and forced the surrender of several enemy forts through aggressive tactics. These achievements would later win him the Imperial Russian Order of St. Anne, 2nd Class. His most notable achievement at this time was leading a small coastal motor boat inside the harbour of Fort Alexandrovsk, where he sank a barge and prompted a mass surrender from the garrison.