9
Less than a month after “Black Jack” Pershing and his men arrived home from Mexico, Woodrow Wilson summoned Congress into special session “to receive a communication concerning grave matters of national policy.” On the night of April 2, 1917, the president got into a car for the short drive down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. A cavalry escort surrounded his automobile as it rolled past throngs of spectators waving placards and flags. It was pouring rain (“the soft fragrant rain of early spring”), and a cabinet member recalled how “the illuminated dome of the Capitol stood in solemn splendor against the dark wet sky.” The ornate House of Representatives chamber was packed not only with members of Congress but also with Supreme Court justices, cabinet members, foreign ambassadors, leading journalists—just about everyone who mattered in Washington.
All eyes were on the gaunt president as he began to read, at first with little emotion, then hitting one crescendo after another like the expert orator that he was. “Wilson had words that were the equivalent of ten-inch guns,” one observer marveled, “others the equivalent of lances, not omitting yet others that were the equivalent of submarine torpedoes, poison-gas, and tear-bombs.” By the time he reached his stirring peroration—“America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.”—the audience was crying and cheering and clapping.
Within a week, Congress would respond to Wilson’s appeal with a declaration of war. This time America would be facing not a ragged bunch of Villistas or Haitian cacos but the combined might of the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires. One of the unforeseen consequences of the president’s fateful speech was that America would also be drawn, within a year’s time, into a small war on the soil of its ally, Russia.
Russia had not been far from Wilson’s thoughts as the president grappled with the decision of whether to go to war. He had waited and agonized, despite one provocation after another from Imperial Germany, not only because he was genuinely loath to join the slaughter on the Western Front, but also because he did not want to align the republic of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison—his fellow Virginians—with the despotic regime of the czars. Wilson had been exhilarated when, on March 17, 1917, he had received news that a liberal revolution had deposed Nicholas II. The former president of Princeton joked with his cabinet that Russia’s new provisional government must be a good one; after all, its leader was a professor.
Now the European war could be depicted as a struggle between tyranny and freedom, and America’s participation justified as part of a crusade to make the “world safe for democracy.” In his April 2 speech to Congress, Wilson alluded to “the wonderful and heartening things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia,” developments that had made Russia “a fit partner for a League of Honor.” Wilson backed up his rhetoric by sending assistance in the form of loans and advisers to the provisional government.
The idealistic president, who claimed, based more on wishful thinking than anything else, that Russia had “always been in fact democratic at heart,” was dismayed at how little time it took that country to revert to its illiberal ways. In November of 1917, the Bolshevik Party overthrew Premier Alexander Kerensky, dissolved the Constituent Assembly, and proclaimed a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Wilson had mixed feelings about foreign revolutions. He was sympathetic to uprisings that espoused liberal ideas, such as those of Madera in Mexico and Kerensky in Russia. On the other hand, notwithstanding his proselytizing for the creed of “national self-determination,” Wilson had used military force to affect the outcome of revolutions in Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. He justified this seeming discrepancy by reasoning that U.S. forces were acting against despotic cliques and laying the foundation of liberty in those countries. Wilson viewed Vladimir Lenin much as he had viewed Victoriano Huerta—as a strongman with no legitimacy. The president called Bolshevism “the poison of disorder, the poison of revolt, the poison of chaos,” and “the negation of everything that is American.” In neither Mexico nor Russia did Wilson want a conservative dictatorship resurrected, whether of the Diaz or Romanov dynasty. He wanted to aid liberal democrats who had briefly held power before being toppled—Maderistas in Mexico, Social Revolutionaries and Constitutional Democrats in Russia. This, he felt, was in the best interests of Mexican peons and Russian peasants alike.
The analogy between Wilson’s views of the Mexican and Russian revolutions is not one imposed after the fact by historians; Wilson himself was conscious of it. “My policy regarding Russia is very similar to my Mexican policy,” the president declared. Just as he had refused to recognize Huerta, so now Wilson refused to recognize the Soviet government. And just as he had given covert aid to Huerta’s enemies, so now he authorized secret assistance to anti-Bolshevik forces in Russia. But would the U.S. intervene militarily in Russia, as it had in Mexico in 1914 and 1916?
Not at first. But on March 3, 1918, the Soviet government signed the one-sided Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, taking Russia out of the Great War and ceding vast tracts of land—the Baltic provinces, Ukraine, southern Russia—to Berlin. Russia’s abandoned allies, France and Britain, were apoplectic. The end of the Eastern Front meant that Germany could transfer a million soldiers to throw against their exhausted armies on the Western Front. They also feared that the Bolsheviks would turn over to the German army vast quantities of war supplies they had shipped to Russia. Rumors were rife that Lenin, who had been returned to Russia from foreign exile in a sealed German train car “like a plague bacillus,” was an agent of the kaiser.
Just three days after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, 160 British Royal Marines disembarked at the northern Russian port of Murmansk. They landed, oddly enough, at the request of the local soviet (or workers’ council), which wanted protection from the German army massing in nearby Finland. Before long, several thousand British troops were occupying Murmansk. The British government asked its allies—France, the U.S., Japan—to send reinforcements not only to north Russia but also to eastern Siberia. The British hoped to keep war supplies out of German hands, to aid anti-Bolshevik Russians (known as the Whites) and to reestablish an Eastern Front.
Opinion was divided in the U.S. government. The American ambassador to Russia, David R. Francis, and Secretary of State Robert Lansing, both conservative Democrats, were staunchly anti-Bolshevik and inclined to intervene. On the other side, General Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force in France, and General Peyton C. March, army chief of staff, opposed any involvement in Russia as an unnecessary and unwinnable diversion from the Western Front. Theirs was the narrow view of military professionals focused on a narrow military problem—defeating Germany. They ignored the larger question of what the postwar world would look like and failed to realize how damaging the existence of a “Red” regime in Russia would be to America’s hopes to “make the world safe for democracy.” (Some of their successors took a similarly blinkered view of U.S. war aims in 1945 and did not perceive the need to occupy more of Central Europe before the Red Army arrived and the iron curtain descended.)
MAP 9.1Russia, circa 1918
Woodrow Wilson was more concerned about events in Russia, but he too was reluctant at first to intervene. While he would have been happy to see the Bolsheviks overthrown, he feared that sending foreign soldiers into Russia, especially Japanese, would trigger a nationalist backlash. Wilson eventually agreed to an intervention, albeit a very limited one, for a variety of reasons: to restrain the Japanese in eastern Siberia; to placate the Allies; to combat Germany; to rally anti-Bolshevik Russians into action. The pivotal factor, however, was the plight of the plucky Czechoslovak Legion.
The legion was made up of some 70,000 Czechs and Slovaks, prisoners of war and deserters from the Austro-Hungarian army who had volunteered to fight for the Allied cause in order to secure independence for their homeland. Now that Russia was no longer in the war, the legion planned to make its way across Siberia to Vladivostok, and then sail to France to fight on the Western Front. At first the Bolsheviks permitted them to go on their way, but then, fearing that the Czechs would link up with the Whites, they tried to disarm the legion. War Commissar Leon Trotsky issued an order that any armed Czech should be shot on sight. The Czechs would not give up their weapons and, after a series of small clashes, full-scale fighting broke out on May 25, 1918—often cited as the starting date of the Russian Civil War.
The Czechs were virtually the only organized military force left in Russia. It did not take them long to seize the Trans-Siberian Railway from the Pacific Ocean to the Volga River, which gave them mastery of two-thirds of Russia’s land area. Their success caught everyone off guard. The Allies’ Supreme War Council decided to take advantage of the situation by asking the Czechs to remain in place for the time being in order to form the nucleus of an Eastern Front. Having issued those orders, the Allies, including the U.S., felt a moral responsibility to safeguard the legion. This was uppermost on Wilson’s mind when, on July 17, 1918, the president sat down at his typewriter and typed out a famous aide-mémoire:
Military action is admissible in Russia, as the Government of the United States sees the circumstances, only to help the Czecho-Slovaks consolidate their forces and get into successful cooperation with their Slavic kinsmen and to steady any efforts at self-government or self-defense in which the Russians themselves may be willing to accept assistance. Whether from Vladivostok or from Murmansk and Archangel, the only legitimate object for which American or allied troops can be employed, it submits, is to guard military stores which may subsequently be needed by Russian forces and to render such aid as may be acceptable to the Russians in the organization of their own self-defense.
These ambiguous instructions were to cause no end of confusion: Which Russian forces could U.S. troops assist in their efforts at “self-government or self-defense,” and to what extent? Those questions would be answered by America’s men in the field, who enjoyed a large degree of autonomy from Washington.
Siberia
The biggest U.S. force sent to Russia was under the command of Major General William S. Graves. A Texan who had previously served in the Philippines and with the Pershing Punitive Expedition, before taking a succession of staff jobs in Washington, Graves had recently been placed in command of the 8th Division at the Presidio in California and hoped to join the fighting on the Western Front. On August 2, 1918, he received a telegram urgently summoning him to a meeting in Kansas City with Secretary of War Newton Baker. Graves grabbed the first train he could. At the Kansas City train station, Baker told him that his destination would be Siberia, not France, and handed him an envelope containing Wilson’s aide-mémoire. “This contains the policy of the United States in Russia which you are to follow. Watch your step; you will be walking on eggs loaded with dynamite. God bless you and goodbye.”
That was all the instruction Graves was to receive before sailing for Siberia. With “no information as to the military, political, social, economic, or financial condition in Russia,” the general reached the Bay of the Golden Horn on September 1, 1918. He discovered that Vladivostok had earlier been occupied by the Allies and was now under a White government. (The “White” label was applied to all foes of the Bolsheviks—the “Reds”—including czarists, socialists, liberal democrats, and various ethnic minorities.) Before long he had more than 8,000 men under his command, drawn from his own 8th Division based in California and from the 27th and 31st Infantry Regiments based in the Philippines. A bluff sort with little patience for the complexities of diplomacy, Graves found himself aggravated by the maneuvering of America’s supposed allies. The British, Italians, and French had token forces in Siberia (829, 1,400, and 107 men, respectively), but the Japanese, who were supposed to have no more than 12,000 men, had actually sent more than 70,000. They were there not to further the Allied war effort but as part of an attempt to grab Russia’s maritime provinces.
Britain and France were eager to secure American cooperation in moving west and helping the Czech Legion and the White Army fight the Bolsheviks. This Graves refused to do. He interpreted his vague orders to mean that his men should remain neutral in the Russian Civil War. While he later agreed to have U.S. soldiers guard sections of the Trans-Siberian Railway—an act that wound up drawing them into battle against Red partisans—he refused to engage in an offensive against the Bolsheviks, or even to confiscate weapons from suspected Communists. Graves was more appalled by the actions of Whites than of Reds. Two Japanese-sponsored Cossack warlords, Ataman Kalmykov and Ataman Semenov, terrorized the Siberian countryside, killing, torturing, and robbing countless innocents whom they accused of Bolshevik sympathies. “I am well on the side of safety when I say that the anti-Bolsheviks killed one hundred people in Eastern Siberia, to every one killed by Bolsheviks,” Graves wrote. (The general apparently was not aware that in the areas under their control, Lenin’s secret police, the Cheka, were executing hundreds of thousands of “class enemies.”)
Graves’s refusal to help the Whites caused no end of consternation among the other Allied governments and among the pro-White State Department representatives in Siberia, who demanded that Washington relieve the general. But the Wilson administration stood behind Graves—even as other American soldiers in North Russia were doing what Graves would not: fight the Bolsheviks. Years later, Graves wondered: “If these two expeditions had the same instructions, how is it possible that the Archangel expedition was used in hostile combat against the Soviet forces, while the Siberian expedition was not?” To answer that question, we must examine how the mission to Archangel developed.
North Russia
The first Americans in North Russia reached Murmansk aboard the Olympia, Admiral Dewey’s old flagship from the Spanish-American War, at the end of May 1918. From here, they joined a small expedition under the command of British Major General Frederick C. Poole, who had been ordered by the Supreme War Council to seize Archangel, a port on the White Sea not far from the Arctic Circle. Unlike Murmansk, Archangel offered a rail connection to the Trans-Siberian Railway. If Allied troops grabbed Archangel and the railroad, they could “establish communications with the Czechs.” That, in turn, was supposed to be the prelude to rallying the Russian people to reenter the Great War.
On August 1, 1918, the Allied armada seized Mudyug Island just north of Archangel in an amphibious assault assisted by seaplanes. The next day, anti-Bolshevik forces organized with the aid of the Allies overthrew the Archangel Soviet. When Allied troops disembarked at Archangel on August 2, they were met by cheering locals. A new government was installed under Nikolai K. Chaikovsky, an elderly socialist intellectual who had spent years plotting against the czar.
Fifty American sailors from the Olympia landed on August 3 to help police Archangel. Twenty-five of them proceeded to the railroad yard, where they got in a gun battle with some Red Guards who were just leaving town. An ensign named Donald Hicks was wounded in the exchange, making him the first American casualty in Russia—but far from the last.
When the Bolshevik leaders in Moscow heard that Allied troops were landing in Archangel—presumably sent by the capitalist imperialists to stamp out the workers’ revolution—they began packing their archives. First the revolt of the Czech Legion, now this. The cause seemed lost. Even War Commissar Leon Trotsky despaired: “More and more, the front of the Civil War was taking the shape of a noose that seemed to be closing tighter and tighter around Moscow. The soil itself seemed to be infected with panic. Everything was crumbling. There was nothing to hold on to. The situation seemed hopeless.”
The Bolsheviks would have cheered up considerably if they had realized how inconsequential the Allied force actually was. Poole gamely tried to advance south, but he had barely enough men, fewer than 1,500, to occupy the town of Archangel. Seizing the whole province, an area almost the size of France and Germany combined, was out of the question. Prime Minister David Lloyd George and President Wilson were willing to send some reinforcements but hardly enough to march to Moscow. Both Lloyd George and Wilson were ambivalent about the intervention—the president called it “modest and experimental”—and so limited their exposure. The British sent some 5,000 infantrymen who had been declared unfit for active duty, along with two squadrons from the Royal Air Force. (Its biplanes and monoplanes, with their open cockpits, proved of limited use in the harsh winter conditions.) The U.S. Army sent the 339th Infantry Regiment accompanied by the 337th Ambulance Corps, the 337th Field Hospital, and a battalion of the 310th Engineers—about 5,700 men in all.
The 339th, “Detroit’s Own,” was composed mainly of men from Michigan and Wisconsin. Some of them were the sons of recent immigrants from Eastern Europe and therefore had the advantage of speaking Russian, but neither officers nor men had much military experience. They had been drafted in May 1918, given less than two months’ training at Fort Custer, Michigan, and shipped to England at the end of July. A month later, they were on their way to Archangel. An influenza epidemic broke out aboard the crowded transport ships. By the time the ships docked in Archangel on September 5, 1918, many of the men were sick and about 100 were either dead or dying.
“Mud, filth and dark skies were our welcome. We were disappointed, disgusted and disheartened,” wrote a private. “Our welcome was unpleasant. Our prospects, gloomy.”
British General Poole, acting under orders from the Supreme War Council, hoped to seize the two railroads running to Kotlas and Vologda, towns about 400 miles south of Archangel and 350 miles north of Moscow. From there, he could hook up with the Trans-Siberian Railway controlled by the Czech Legion. This was a considerably more ambitious goal than merely guarding Allied war supplies, and to accomplish it, Poole would need the cooperation of American troops.
The U.S. ambassador to Russia, David Francis, had by this time arrived in Archangel. Francis heartily approved of Poole’s mission. In fact, he asked President Wilson for up to 100,000 reinforcements to help “suppress bolshevism.” This extra force was not forthcoming, but Francis allowed U.S. troops to participate in Poole’s offensive. Unlike General Graves in Siberia, the 339th Regiment’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel George E. Stewart, was also amenable to offensive action. Stewart, an up-from-the-ranks officer who had won the Medal of Honor in the Philippines, pretty much gave up all responsibility for his troops. He holed up in Archangel for the duration of the campaign, much to his men’s disgust. Since he raised no objections, two of the 339th’s three battalions were rushed from Archangel to the front, where they would fight under British command. (The third battalion remained behind to guard Archangel.)
Poole split his force into two major columns, one following the Archangel railroad south to Vologda, the other the Dvina River to Kotlas. The Allied advance was unopposed at first, but before long the Anglo-Americans found themselves skirmishing against an enemy they called “Bolos,” a combination of the Red Guard militia and the newly formed Red Army. Their offensive bogged down, literally. The soldiers did not have adequate maps and kept running into unmarked swamps. The most successful force turned out to be two platoons of Company A, 339th Infantry, under Captain Otto “The Viking” Odjard. They managed to capture the popular summer resort of Shenkursk (sometimes spelled Shenkhurst) and to advance a bit farther south—about 200 miles from Archangel—before turning back.
By mid-October 1918, the Allied offensive had stalled out, swallowed up in the vast depths of Mother Russia like most invasions throughout history. Already 30 Americans had been killed and 76 wounded. The chances of achieving General Poole’s original objective—reaching Vologda and Kotlas and linking up with the Czechs and Whites on the Trans-Siberian Railway—had evaporated. The only goal left for the Allied expeditionary force was to survive its visit to Russia.
Poole was left holding an area bigger than the Western Front—about 500 miles—with fewer than 10,000 men thinly spread out to face an enemy growing stronger by the day. The Red Army would reach almost a million men by the end of 1918, 3 million a year later. Luckily for the Allies, most of the Communists’ energy was expended fighting the White armies in Siberia, South Russia, and the Baltics. But the Red Army was still able to throw numerically superior forces against the Allied and White armies in northern Russia.
And in mid-October 1918 came the first flakes of snow, the first of many that would paralyze the region for the remainder of the winter.
Ironside
Into this dismal scene stepped a giant called Tiny. William Edmund Ironside had earned that nickname because he was a hulking 6 feet 4 inches tall and weighed 270 pounds. He had joined the British army as a subaltern in 1899 and had rapidly advanced to the temporary wartime rank of brigadier general at age 38. His most notable characteristic, apart from his size, was his linguistic ability. Over a career that took him from South Africa to India, he had picked up knowledge of 16 languages ranging from Urdu to Russian. In September 1918, he was commanding an infantry brigade in France when a telegram summoned him to London. Here he met the chief of the Imperial General Staff, who told Ironside that he would be going to Archangel as chief of staff of the Allied force. “You are to prepare for a winter campaign. No joke that!”
It became even less of a joke when Ironside arrived in Russia, just 12 days after leaving France. Though he expected to serve under General Poole, Poole told him that he was leaving immediately for England. Ironside was thrust into command of the Allied expedition, which he would retain since Poole would never return from his leave. (He was recalled due to clashes with David Francis and other Allied ambassadors, who felt that Poole was too high-handed in his dealings with the White Russians.)
Ironside found the situation dismaying. He had been told that the Allied troops were there merely to assist the efforts of the legitimate government of Russia. But the Whites were in a sorry state. When Ironside called on Nikolai Chaikovsky, the head of the provisional government in Archangel, he found “a placid old gentleman of over seventy years of age, very tall and thin, but surprisingly active in body. He spoke fluent English, having spent long periods of exile in England and the United States, interspersed with several terms of imprisonment in Russia.” Ironside urged Chaikovsky to organize a formidable army, but he found the old revolutionary unresponsive. “The old man was completely and utterly unmilitary, and did not seem to realize that force would be necessary to defeat the Bolsheviks. He was living quietly in the past, and he was the same old plotter he had always been.”
As it turned out, Chaikovsky had little control over the White army under his ostensible command. In early September 1918 the army, led by czarist officers, had briefly ousted him in a coup that was at least winked at by General Poole. Only through the intervention of David Francis and other Allied ambassadors was Chaikovsky reinstated in power. The northern White Army was good for little more than political intrigue, at least in the beginning. Ironside urged Chaikovsky to replace the army’s leadership, which was done, but it took a while to find competent officers to take over. In the meantime the Slavo-British Legion was formed—a force composed of Russian enlisted men under British officers.
Ironside discovered that there were not even adequate maps of the Allied positions. So he set out to tour the front himself, traveling by pony-drawn sleigh, often accompanied only by his faithful servant, Piskoff. What he found was not encouraging.
The general remembered his first meeting with an American unit: “The whole company was lined out, peering into the forest with their arms at the ready. No clearings had been made for even a modest field of fire. I explained to the company commander what he should do, so that a few sentries should watch while the remainder of his men rested or took their meals. He stared at me with obvious amazement and then burst out with, ‘What! Rest in this hellish bombardment!’”
Ironside looked around to see the “hellish bombardment.” All he noticed were “a few shells . . . falling wide in the forest.” The American soldiers clearly had a long way to go before they measured up to the standards of the Western Front.
“Tiny” tried one last, limited offensive to gain more defensible quarters for the winter. After this petered out he went on the defensive. Since it was impossible to build Western Front-style trenches in the frozen tundra of northern Russia, Ironside ordered the erection of log blockhouses. The 310th U.S. Engineers tackled the task with enthusiasm and skill. Eventually they would build 316 blockhouses that were so sturdy as to be impervious to anything short of a direct artillery hit.
“The Ground Trembled”
It did not take long for these defenses to come in handy. In early November 1918 the Reds launched an offensive. The brunt of the attack fell on Tulgas, a “group of low, dirty log houses huddled together on a hill” near the Dvina River, about 200 miles south of Archangel. This village was held by one company of U.S. infantry, one company of the Royal Scots infantry, and one section of the Canadian Field Artillery—about 600 men altogether, commanded by a U.S. Army captain with all of one year’s service. On the morning of November 11, 1918, a carefully planned Bolshevik assault caught Tulgas by surprise. More than a thousand Russian infantrymen charged out of the forest and fell upon the Allied positions from the rear.
The Reds immediately overran a field hospital full of Allied wounded. A curious drama ensued. A giant commissar named Melochofski wearing a big black fur hat loudly ordered his men to kill all the patients. He was momentarily distracted by a quick-thinking British NCO who offered him rations and two bottles of rum. A young Russian woman then marched in and announced that she would shoot any Soviet soldier caught harming the wounded. This turned out to be Melochofski’s mistress. Faced with her displeasure, he countermanded his order and, grumbling, left the hospital to continue the battle. She stayed behind to care for the wounded, as the fighting swirled in all its fury around the hut. No more was seen of Melochofski until he staggered into the field hospital a few hours later, fatally wounded, to die in the arms of his lover. This woman’s name is lost to history, but to the wounded men whose lives she saved she was known as Lady Olga.
The delay in the hospital—as well as a few minutes spent by Red troops ransacking part of Tulgas—proved to be the turning point of the battle. It gave the Canadian gunners just enough time to wheel around their two field pieces, which had been facing the wrong direction, and load them with shrapnel. When the Russians renewed their attack, they were stopped at point-blank range by muzzle blasts that “shattered them into ghastly dismembered corpses and hurled blood and human flesh wide in the air in sickening, spattering atoms.” Some 100 Soviet soldiers, Melochofski among them, were killed and many more wounded in the first day of the Battle of Tulgas.
The fighting did not abate during the next three days. Bolo gunboats anchored in the Dvina River kept up a steady bombardment of Allied positions. U.S. Army Lieutenant John Cudahy later remembered how “the air was stabbed by the sibilant, vindictive snarl of the shells” and how “the ground trembled in quaking travail.” Among those who fell victim to the shelling were the village priest, “the crown of his head cut clean as with a scalpel, exposing the naked brains,” and his two children, who had been sleeping alongside him. By the end of the third day of battle, Cudahy wrote, “A quarter of the little company had been hit, and those who remained were hollow-eyed from fatigue, so weary that they staggered like drunken men.”
Relief came on November 14, the fourth day of the battle. Cudahy, heir to a meat-packing fortune and a graduate of Harvard, took a few men into the forest and blew up a Bolshevik arms dump. The resulting explosions of ammunition “sounded like the musketry of a regiment,” Cudahy wrote, “and the tired and discouraged Bolsheviks thought it was a fresh regiment firing unseen from the unknown depths of the forest.” This caused panic among the raw Red troops, most of whose commissars had been killed. The weather finally sealed the Bolsheviks’ fate. The Dvina froze, forcing their gunboats to depart, and the infantry retreated with them.
By the time the Bolos gave up the attack, 300 had been killed, with many more wounded. The Allied losses were 28 men killed, 70 wounded, with the brunt of the casualties falling among the Royal Scots. As on the Western Front, the side on the defensive had prevailed, but it was a near thing.
“Filth and Cooties”
The irony of the Battle of Tulgas is that it began on the day the World War ended—November 11, 1918. “It was hard for our men to realize,” wrote General Ironside, “why they, of all the great armies which had fought so well and so long, should have to go on fighting in a cause which they understood so little.”
There was no good answer. The original objectives that had led to the sending of expeditionary forces to Russia—saving the Czechs, reviving the Eastern Front, preserving war supplies—no longer applied. The Allies decided to retain their forces mainly because they were loath to abandon their White Russian allies. By mid-November, retreat was impossible in any case. Archangel was iced in.
Spirits sank among the troops when they realized that they would be trapped in Russia for the winter. French colonial troops chanted “the war is over” and refused to fight, as did portions of the Slavo-British Legion and the White Army. All these mutinies were put down at gunpoint, but clearly morale was plunging, along with the thermometer.
The north Russian winter did not help. In December and January, there were no more than four hours of daylight. Life seemed to be enveloped in a cold, gloomy twilight, with temperatures frequently plunging to 40 or 50 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. “The wind howled and blew,” wrote U.S. Private Donald E. Carey, a 25-year-old school teacher from rural Michigan. “It caught one’s breath; chilling through in almost no time, shooting its intense cold to the very marrow.”
The extreme cold made it difficult to perform even the simplest task outdoors. Frostbite was a constant menace, and anyone who touched a gun barrel with his bare hand felt as if he were holding red hot metal. But the extreme cold also had its positive aspects: Sanitation was good and wounds were antiseptic since anything outside froze instantly.
The men stationed in Archangel had a relatively easy time of it, frequenting the town’s cafés, theaters, and bordellos and getting plenty of rations, even if they had to steal them from the warehouses that they were supposed to be guarding. Next down the hardship scale were troops on the railroad front; they were quartered in relative luxury inside railroad cars. Those on the river front had the hardest time; they had to make do in Russian peasant huts.
Relations between Americans and Russians were generally good, but the doughboys did not enjoy being quartered in these primitive dwellings. “Our small, dingy, unventilated room was overrun with cockroaches and harbored a stench. . . . ” Private Carey complained. “The filth and cooties produced such irritation that at times it seemed I would become insane.”
Another major irritation to the Yanks was the British officer corps, the hearty Tiny Ironside excepted (the Americans applauded him as “the soldier’s type of commanding officer”). Stories spread that the British were hoarding medical supplies and shipping crates of Scotch to their officers instead of food to the doughboys. The Americans were thoroughly irritated by the British rations they did receive—bully beef (akin to corned beef), hard biscuits, dehydrated vegetables, and, worst of all for these coffee-drinkers, black tea.
“The ‘limeys’ as they were contemptuously called—when not designated by some foul names—were anathema to most of our troops. The snobbish self-assurance and patronizing air of English soldiers, even in colonial times, never met favorably with Americans. . . .” Carey wrote. “One E Company corporal told me he said to an English officer, ‘We licked you twice and can do it again.’”
No doubt such remarks did not endear American soldiers to British officers. Luckily ordinary Tommies and doughboys generally got along better. They had to. If they did not cooperate, neither would leave Russia alive.
“Valley of Death”
After the November assault on Tulgas, the next major Red assault was aimed at driving the Allies out of Shenkursk, which stuck out from the Allied lines like a toe dangling in shark-infested waters. This summer resort, located on the Vaga River, was protected mainly by Company A, 339th Infantry, under the command of Captain Otto “The Viking” Odjard, the same men who had captured it back in the fall of 1918. The doughboys were deployed about 18 miles south of the city with the most outlying U.S. position, in the village of Nijni Gora, occupied by 46 men under Lieutenant Harry Mead.
At dawn on January 19, 1919, Bolo artillery concealed in the surrounding forest opened up “a terrific bombardment” of Nijni Gora. An hour later the shelling stopped and swarms of white-clad infantry some 1,000 strong rose out of the snow and charged into the village with fixed bayonets. Seeing that the situation was hopeless, Lieutenant Mead decided to make a hasty retreat. But the Bolshevik machine guns made it suicide to go down the village’s streets. Mead wrote:
To withdraw we were compelled to march straight down the side of this hill, across an open valley some eight hundred yards or more in the terrible snow, and under the direct fire of the enemy. There was no such thing as cover, for this valley of death was a perfectly open plain, waist deep in snow. To run was impossible, to halt was worse yet and so nothing remained but to plunge and flounder through the snow in mad desperation, with a prayer on our lips to gain the edge of our fortified positions. One by one, man after man fell wounded or dead in the snow, either to die from the grievous wounds or terrible exposure.
Only seven men of the original 46 were unwounded by the time they reached Visorka Gora, the village where the main body of Company A was quartered. Yet even the entire company—about 200 men—was pitifully too small to stand and fight against the onslaught they now faced. Retreat was the only option. The next five days would be a nightmare of fighting and marching, freezing and bleeding, with the men receiving little food and less sleep. One by one they were picked off, this man from a rifle bullet, that man from artillery shrapnel, a third from the icy, unrelenting grip of the Russian winter. Among those severely wounded was their commanding officer, The Viking, Captain Odjard. By the time the remains of Company A staggered into Shenkursk on the afternoon of January 24, some soldiers were so weary that they fell asleep on the spot.
They did not have long to rest.
Shenkursk’s 1,100 defenders were practically surrounded by more than 3,000 Red Army troops. General Ironside, anxiously monitoring events from Archangel, ordered the garrison evacuated before it was wiped out. The only escape route not yet blocked by the Red Army was over an old logging trail that snaked through the forest. Yet what if the Bolsheviks knew about this trail too? What if they were playing a game, drawing the garrison out, only to slaughter them on the narrow path where they would be easy targets for marksmen waiting in the woods? They would have to take that chance. To stay in Shenkursk any longer would mean either death or surrender.
The weary men were told to get ready to move by midnight on January 24. As the appointed hour arrived, chaos gripped the streets of Shenkursk. One hundred of the worst wounded were packed on sleighs, wrapped tightly against the sub-zero temperatures, and sent ahead, pulled along by ponies. Behind the sleighs trudged 1,000 soldiers, British, Americans, and White Russians, accompanied by 500 civilians who feared falling into Bolshevik hands. Many of the marchers had carried along too many possessions, and as they progressed the trail became littered with horded treasures. And with tired men. “Time after time that night,” recalled Lieutenant Mead, “one could hear some poor unfortunate with his heavy pack on his back fall with a sickening thud upon the packed trail, in many cases being so stunned and exhausted that it was only by violent shaking and often by striking some of the others in the face that they could be sufficiently roused and forced to continue the march.”
The Shenkursk garrison had not experienced much luck so far. Now fate smiled on these tired, downtrodden men as they marched mechanically through the black forest. No Red Army snipers appeared out of the woods to pick them off. Nothing blocked their way. They were 10 miles out of Shenkursk, when, at 8 A.M. on January 25, they heard “the roar of cannon . . . far behind us.” The Bolsheviks were bombarding Shenkursk, unaware that the garrison had slipped out the previous night.
The Allied troops kept marching for another two days, with only a few hasty stops along the way, until they reached the village of Vistavka. Here they dug in and finally, one assumes, got a little sleep. Company A stayed in Vistavka for two months, enduring numerous attacks, until the spring thaw finally forced the Reds to suspend their offensive.
The men of the Shenkursk garrison no doubt cast up more than a few thanks heavenward for their narrow delivery. Yet if they were happy, the Bolsheviks had reason to smile as well. They had not wiped out the garrison, but perhaps that was just as well; killing so many English and American soldiers might have backfired by enflaming Western public opinion. The Reds had accomplished something more important than a massacre: They had succeeded in driving the Allies farther north at a critical moment when a large White army was advancing west from Siberia. By routing the Allies out of Shenkursk, the Reds had prevented any possibility of a linkup between these two “bourgeois” forces. It was a significant victory for the newly formed Red Army.
Paris
The future of the Allied expeditionary force would be decided not in the bloodstained snows of Russia but in the gilded conference halls of Paris. Here, in January 1919, the Allied leaders convened to shape the postwar world. A sharp difference of opinion developed over what to do about the Bolsheviks.
Winston Churchill, the newly appointed British secretary of state for war, joined with French Field Marshall Ferdinand Foch to urge a more wide-ranging Allied intervention. Churchill “agreed that none of the Allies could send conscript troops to Russia”—such a move would not be popular with any electorate—but he “thought that volunteers, technical experts, arms munitions tanks, aeroplanes, etc., might be furnished.” Even if the Allies did not choose to send more soldiers, Churchill and Foch urged the conference to repatriate Russian prisoners of war held by Germany to White-controlled areas, where they could join the anti-Bolshevik armies. In addition, Churchill and Foch suggested, the Allies should mobilize the states bordering Russia, especially Finland, Poland, and the Baltics, to cooperate with the Whites in crushing the Reds.
Churchill argued adamantly and eloquently for his position before, during, and after the Paris conference. “Of all the tyrannies in history, the Bolshevist tyranny is the worst, the most destructive and the most degrading,” he declared, warning that if it was not stamped out there would be “a union between German militarism and Russian Bolshevism . . . which would be unspeakably unfriendly to Britain and to the United States and France, and to all that those free democracies stand for.” But Churchill’s prophetic warnings fell on deaf ears—much as his warnings about the Nazis would be ignored in the 1930s.
It was not that the Allied leaders were sympathetic to the Bolsheviks. But British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and President Woodrow Wilson were convinced that further intervention would be counterproductive. They did not think foreigners could suppress a revolution, even though Britain and America had successfully suppressed revolutions from India to the Philippines. They thought the Bolsheviks would fall from power on their own if they were unpopular; and if the Reds were winning, it must be because they had popular support. It did not occur to them that the Communists’ success might be due, as it largely was, to purely military factors—the Reds had better and more unified leadership, more materiel and men, and greater willingness to brutalize the population into acquiescence than the Whites did. This more than compensated for the fact that in 1917 the Bolsheviks had won only 24 percent of the vote in the last elections for the Constituent Assembly. Nor did it occur to these Western statesmen that, although many of the White leaders were hardly democrats, the Reds were imposing upon the Russian people a regime that would make Ivan the Terrible’s look almost benign by comparison. Finally, there was little awareness of the danger posed to the West by Bolshevik rule in Moscow. Lloyd George was more fearful of the supposed threat that a czarist Russia would pose to British India. The sorely mistaken British prime minister argued, in all seriousness, that the “Bolsheviks would not wish to maintain an army, as their creed was fundamentally anti-militarist.”
Behind all these arguments lay a simple fact: The Allies were war-weary, and their leaders thought there would be no popular support for further action in Russia. Back in Congress, Senator Hiram Johnson, a leading Republican isolationist, kept introducing resolutions calling for the troops to be recalled from Russia. His last resolution, on February 14, 1919, was defeated by the narrowest possible margin, with the vice president casting the deciding vote. Other congressional leaders—including House Speaker Champ Clark and Senators William Borah and Robert LaFollette—joined the get-out-of-Russia chorus. While some prominent Republicans like Senator Henry Cabot Lodge were prepared to support a serious intervention that looked likely to topple the Bolsheviks, they were not enthusiastic about the inconsequential deployment that was actually being undertaken.
Wilson, for his part, had allowed himself to be talked into a half-hearted intervention mainly to help the Czechs, satisfy the Allies, and stymie the Germans. With the war over, none of those reasons applied anymore. On February 16, 1919, the president told Secretary of War Newton Baker to call off the expedition to North Russia. The British War Cabinet followed suit. The actual withdrawal could not occur until the spring—until then the North Russia expedition was iced in—but the end was in sight. The Western policy toward Communist Russia was metamorphosing from attempted overthrow to the creation of a “cordon sanitaire.”
Withdrawal
The American troops in North Russia learned of their imminent pullout in late February 1919 from their newspaper, The American Sentinel, which had picked up the news from the New York Times. The War Department did not bother to officially notify the 339th Regiment’s commander, Colonel George Stewart. The men were happy to be going, but felt dejected that the withdrawal was months away. As with U.S. forces in Vietnam after 1968, morale, never high to begin with, plunged as it became clear that they were only marking time and that their commanders had no intention of seeking victory. An anonymous typed sheet circulated among the U.S. troops claiming “We have no heart for the fight.”
The situation was even worse among other nationalities. There had already been mutinies among the Slavo-British Legion and the French colonial troops. Much to General Ironside’s distress, the infection had spread to his own countrymen. At the end of February 1919, the newly arrived Yorkshire Regiment was ordered to the front. Two sergeants stepped forward to announce that the men would not fight. The mutineers were court-martialed and given life sentences. The Yorks did eventually fight, however reluctantly, which was a good thing from Ironside’s perspective. He needed every man he could muster to hold off the Reds’ incessant attacks. In March 1919, Tiny even had to rush 500 rear-unit soldiers, ranging from clerks to bakers, from Archangel to the front to prevent a Bolshevik breakthrough.
In the end the Allies were rescued by the weather. The onset of spring in April 1919 turned the roads into mud and forced the Reds to suspend their offensive.
In mid-April 1919 U.S. Brigadier General Wilds P. Richardson, a veteran of Alaskan service, arrived to supervise the withdrawal of American forces. General Ironside, still in command of the Allied expedition, had the doughboys pull out slowly, turning over their defensive positions to White Russians. One of the positions handed over to the Russians was Tulgas. A few weeks later, on April 25, 1919, Tulgas’s White Russian garrison murdered its officers and surrendered the town to the Bolsheviks. It was not easy for the American troops, who had fought so hard to hold Tulgas the previous November, to hear of this setback. (British and White Russian troops recaptured the town in mid-May.)
By early June 1919 practically all the U.S. troops were gone from Archangel. During the North Russia campaign, the Yanks lost 244 men—144 from battle, the rest from disease and accident. Three hundred and five Americans were wounded in battle. The British lost even more men. Allied casualties would have been higher still were it not for the fact that they spent most of the campaign on the defensive. That the Reds suffered far greater losses was scant consolation.
General Ironside remained behind after the Yanks left. His ranks were swollen by some 8,000 volunteers sent from Britain to help extricate his soldiers from North Russia. Ironside decided to give the Reds one last hard blow in order to allow a clean withdrawal of his men and to leave the White Army in a defensible position. On August 10, 1919, 3,000 British and White Russian soldiers attacked an estimated 6,000 Red troops on the Dvina River. The attack was a smashing success: The Anglo-Russian force inflicted 1,300 casualties and took 2,000 prisoners. That was the British army’s last hurrah in Russia. In early September 1919, the British began evacuating Archangel, taking with them 5,500 Russian refugees. The northern Whites managed to hold out by themselves for only a few months. On February 21, 1920, the Red Army marched into Archangel. Murmansk fell two days later.
Suchan Valley
The Allied mission to Siberia would last longer. It will be recalled that General William Graves, the U.S. commander in Siberia, was unwilling to commit his men to battle. He focused his energy not on fighting the Bolsheviks but on dissuading the Japanese, with their 70,000 men in Siberia, from simply seizing Russia’s Pacific provinces. Graves was, for the most part, simply a spectator to the White Army’s efforts to fight the Reds.
The initial White government in Siberia, based in Omsk, 3,000 miles west of Vladivostok, had been headed by Social Revolutionaries. The White Army, run by czarist officers, was not in sympathy with these socialists. On November 17, 1918, Cossacks and White officers staged a coup that overthrew the Omsk government and installed in power Alexander Kolchak, an admiral in the czar’s navy. Kolchak was designated Supreme Ruler in command of all White armies, but his command did not really extend beyond Siberia, since there was no effective communication with the three other White armies—the north Russia forces under General Eugene Miller, the Baltic contingent under General Nikolai Yudenich, and the Transcaucasus command under General Anton Denikin.
The Czech Legion—the initial reason for the Allied intervention—was exhausted by the fall of 1918. The legionnaires just wanted to go home, and they stopped fighting once the Social Revolutionary government, with whom most of the Czechs sympathized, was overthrown. It was left to Kolchak to organize an indigenous force to attack the Reds. He turned out to be a poor organizer. Nevertheless, the White Army staged a Siberian offensive in March 1919 with 100,000 men and managed to get to within 500 miles of Moscow. (It was just as this White advance was reaching its peak in April 1919 that the Red Army attacked Allied troops at Shenkursk in north Russia in order to prevent the two forces from joining.) The Whites’ success was short-lived. In mid-June 1919 the Red Army counterattacked and drove Kolchak back. It was the beginning of the end for the supreme ruler.
The U.S. troops in Siberia were far from the front but not entirely removed from the action, since numerous Red partisans were operating behind White lines. A flash point became the Suchan Valley, a region 75 miles east of Vladivostok that produced coal needed to keep the Trans-Siberian Railway running. In May 1919, at Communist instigation, the Suchan miners went on strike, dealing a major blow to the White Army. General Graves refused Admiral Kolchak’s request that U.S. troops put down the strike, but American soldiers could not entirely avoid being drawn into the conflict because they guarded the railway to the Suchan Valley. The local Red partisan leader, Yakov Ivanovich Triapitsyn, a former sergeant in the czarist army, threatened to run the Yanks out of the Suchan Valley by force if necessary.
On June 22, 1919, five U.S. soldiers fishing on the Suchan River were captured by Triapitsyn’s partisans. A patrol from the 31st Infantry that set out to free the prisoners came under fire from hidden Red partisans. The doughboys flushed out the snipers, but not before five of them had been killed.
Worse was to come.
On the night of June 24, 1919, Company A of the 31st Infantry Regiment, under the command of Lieutenant Lawrence Butler, bivouacked at the base of a hill in Romanovka, an important spur on the railroad between the Suchan Valley and Vladivostok. A guard was posted at the top of the hill with orders to remain there until sunrise. The newly arrived Butler probably did not realize that at this time of the year the sun rose in Siberia at 4 A.M., long before reveille. The sentry duly returned to camp at that hour, while his mates were still snoring in their tents.
A few minutes later several hundred Red partisans slithered undetected through the tall grass on the hill to open fire on the camp below, catching the 76 Americans by surprise. Nineteen doughboys were killed in the first few minutes of shooting, many still in their beds. Lieutenant Butler had the lower part of his jaw shot away and his leg wounded but nevertheless managed to use hand gestures to get the remainder of his men into a firing line. The surrounded Americans, outnumbered three or four to one, retreated behind a large woodpile and then behind a log house, all the while keeping up a steady fire.
In desperation, Butler sent a corporal to sneak through the Red lines and get help. The messenger was shot but managed to flag down a passing U.S. supply train. Lieutenant James Lorimar took half a platoon from the train to relieve Company A. He found the shattered remnants of Butler’s command huddled together, with Butler himself passed out by some ammunition boxes. Thirty men wound up dying; another 20 were wounded.
It was a heavy price to pay for a badly positioned camp site and a careless guard detail, but at least the surviving Americans learned their lesson. “From then on we remained on alert at all times,” recalled a soldier, “slept with our clothes on, with rifle in reach.”
Triapitsyn eventually released the five captured American fishermen in exchange for five partisans. But the Reds continued to wage guerrilla war against the Americans in the Suchan area, forcing General Graves to abandon his policy of strict neutrality. American troops, many employing counterinsurgency tactics learned in the Philippines, set out to suppress the partisans in cooperation with Japanese and White units. Each town in the valley fell in turn, though a few Yanks would be killed or wounded during each skirmish. The campaign climaxed on August 7, 1919, when a U.S. combat patrol wiped out 30 partisans in a gunfight, finally convincing Triapitsyn to withdraw from the area. In all, Allied forces killed 500 guerrillas in this running series of battles.
The doughboys’ success had no strategic significance. The Red Army continued to push back Kolchak’s increasingly disorganized White forces. In August 1919, the Allies decided to cut off the flow of supplies to the Siberian Whites, deeming them to be a lost cause. Three months later, on November 14, 1919, Omsk, the White capital, fell, and Siberia disintegrated into chaos. The White army joined a flood of refugees fleeing the Bolsheviks. A typhus epidemic killed 60,000 people. Banditry became rampant. The remainder of the Czech Legion joined the pell-mell scramble to escape. Along the way they captured Admiral Kolchak, who was trying to escape aboard a train with the imperial gold reserves. The Czechs traded Kolchak and his gold to the Bolsheviks in return for safe passage for themselves. The supreme ruler was executed on February 7, 1920.
With the Reds sweeping toward Vladivostok, Secretary of State Robert Lansing warned President Wilson, “If we do not withdraw we shall have to wage war with the Bolsheviki.” On January 16, 1920, the gravely ill president ordered the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Siberia. General Graves and his staff were the last to evacuate; they left in April 1920. As their ship pulled away from the dock, a Japanese band struck up, “Hard Times Come Again No More.”
By September 1920, the Czech Legion too was gone, leaving behind 13,000 dead countrymen. The Japanese stayed until 1922, when a more liberal government in Tokyo gave up hope—at least for the time being—of carving out an empire on the mainland of Asia.
Although Graves had tried to prevent his soldiers from fighting, they had suffered their share of casualties. In Siberia, the U.S. lost 160 killed in action (as well as an additional 168 deaths from accident and disease) and suffered 52 wounded. The expedition was not entirely in vain: While the U.S. intervention did nothing to stop the Bolshevik advance, it did help dissuade Japan from annexing eastern Siberia.
Opportunity Lost
The futility of the Allied intervention in Russia has often been noted. Less commented upon has been the opportunity lost. Historian Richard Ullman writes: “If the initial landings at Archangel could have been carried out by two or three divisions—the number which [British envoy R. H. Bruce] Lockhart and the military attaches at Moscow had insisted was the bare minimum necessary for success—instead of the 1,200 troops who actually occupied the port at the end of July [1918], there is little doubt that they could have forced their way to Moscow and overthrown the Bolshevik regime.” Winston Churchill seconded this view. Two or three divisions—24,000 to 36,000 men—was hardly a huge commitment for the Allies, given that they had 150 divisions fighting on the Western Front with little to show for it.
And there was no shortage of opportunities when even such a small commitment might have made all the difference. Historian Martin Malia has identified three points of “mortal danger” for the nascent Bolshevik regime during the 18 months from mid-1918 to the end of 1919: “The first . . . was the summer of 1918, when the Germans occupied the west and the south, and the Whites advanced from the east. The second was the spring of 1919, when Admiral Kolchak advanced out of Siberia towards the new capital, Moscow. And the third occasion was the fall of that year, when General [Anton] Denikin advanced from Ukraine to within two hundred kilometers of the capital, and General [Nikolai] Yudenich moved on Petrograd from Estonia.”
Given how close the outnumbered and outsupplied Whites got to victory on their own, it is hardly outlandish to assume that, with a little nudge from the Allies at one of these crucial junctures, the Russian Civil War might have had a different outcome. If the Bolshevik Revolution had been strangled in its crib, there would likely have been no Stalinist terror, no great famine in Russia, no Cold War, no Communist takeovers in China or Eastern Europe—and quite possibly no World War II, since if Russia had not had a Soviet government, it might have joined with the West to nip Nazi expansionism in the bud (no Molotov-Ribbentrop pact). Tens of millions of people might have been spared an early death. This is only speculation, but there is little doubt that the Bolshevik hold on power was precarious and that concerted foreign intervention might have made the difference. Instead, Britain and America sent just enough soldiers to allow Lenin to claim that the Bolsheviks were fighting foreign aggression—but not enough to win. The story of the Anglo-American expedition to Russia in 1918, then, is a story of one of the great lost opportunities of history.
Yet it would be wrong to dwell only on the expedition’s failure. The campaigns in Siberia and especially north Russia stand as a monument to the courage and endurance of the American fighting man in the face of almost unbearable adversity. They were not as important in their repercussions as the winter of 1777–78 that the Continental Army spent in Valley Forge, a winter that made American independence possible. They were not as tragic as the 1942 Bataan Death March, an ordeal that resulted in the deaths of up to 10,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war. They were not as epic as the breakout from the frozen Choisin Reservoir in 1950, when 15,000 marines had to escape a Chinese army many times more numerous. Yet the Siberian and north Russian expeditions shared something of the stoic spirit of those more famous events. And the Russia veterans, the “Polar Bears,” as they later called themselves, had the death toll to prove it. Tulgas, Shenkursk, and Romanovka—names now all but forgotten in the annals of U.S. military history—deserve to be mentioned whenever fortitude under fire is discussed.