An elderly locomotive towing several flat cars lurched and clattered down a single-track Russian railroad, showers of sparks shooting from its conical stack. On each side of the right of way, a dense forest of pine and birch formed a green wall 50 feet high. Every few miles, a dozen or so drab log huts huddled along the tracks, dominated by the inevitable onion-domed church, with its streaky whitewash.
Stoking pitch pine sticks into the locomotive firebox and hanging on for dear life on board the swaying cars, were sailors from the U.S. cruiser Olympia, clutching their rifles and Lewis machine guns.
The time was a half-century ago, 3 August 1918. The American sailors on board the train were more or less on their adventurous own, spearheading an incredible campaign that would involve the United States in a year of bloody, undeclared war against the infant Soviet Republic.
A mile or two ahead of the American-manned train, the Bolshevist rear-guard pounded southward down the tracks, desperately stoking their woodburner to outpace the invaders nipping at their heels. After some 40 miles of now-you-see-him-now-you-don’t chase, the fleeing Reds managed to burn a bridge behind them and thus bring their pursuers to a halt.
Through the year of ebbing and flowing strife which followed the episode of the train, North Russia was to experience a parade of pretenders, frustrated ambassadors, beautiful spies, unscrupulous schemers, and leaders, both bumbling and outstanding. It would see heroic fighting and ugly mutinies. Fearful spectators to much of this were the 100,000 people of Archangel, backwash of a moribund Imperial society.
Fighting and dying in the swamps and forests were Russian patriots, both Red and White, Americans, French, British, Serbians, Italians and Finns. There were many threads of blue on the generally khaki background; U. S. sailormen in unlikely places, doing unlikely things. And very soon, the American sailors and soldiers were asking each other: “Why are we here? The war in Europe is over. The Armistice is signed. Why are we here?”
This vest pocket war, largely unknown or misunderstood even to this day in the United States, was comic in some instances, but tragic in its pointless casualties. It soured U. S.-Soviet relations for almost a generation, and, in the Soviet Union, is still by no means forgotten or forgiven.
How had it come to pass?
By the spring of 1917, insuperable supply problems and shortages, general discontent, execrable leadership, and deep and widespread suspicions of treachery in high places had brought about the abdication of the Tsar and the collapse of the Imperial Russian government. Hopes proved futile that a rejuvenated, democratic Russia might stage a military comeback; the powerful impact on the soldiers and sailors of the Bolsheviki’s, “Land! Bread! Peace!” pulled the rug from under the new regime and its feeble efforts to mount a 1917 summer offensive against the Central Powers. With the November 1917 political triumph of the Bolsheviki, followed in a few months by their peace treaty with Germany at Brest-Litovsk, the Russian war in the East clearly had been brought to a close.
Not too many U. S. naval officers now alive were old enough to appreciate personally the colossal military impact of this Russian military collapse. To Admiral William S. Benson, Chief of Naval Operations, and Admiral William S. Sims, commanding U. S. naval forces in Europe, the disappearance of the Russia!' military presence was the first scene of a nightmare script involving the transfer of some German divisions from the Eastern to the Western Front to take part in the great Hun offensive planned for the summer of 1918.
There was the additional threat of an evil genie arising from the Russian cauldron, boiling and bubbling now with starvation, violence, chaos, and hate. Hundreds of thousands of German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war roamed, uncontrolled, over the Russian countryside. German uniforms appeared on the streets of Petrograd and Moscow. Large quantities of Allied-supplied military stores lay on the docks at Murmansk, Archangel, and Vladivostok. (In 1917 alone, over 2,000,000 tons of supplies were landed atArchangel and Murmansk.) White Finns, backed by Germans, were believed to be inposition to march north, seize Murmansk and establish a German submarine base to harry the already desperately hard-pressed Allied Atlantic shipping. Stretched out along athousand miles of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the 45,000-man Czechoslovak Legion, mostly deserters from the Austro-Hungarian Army, was moving toward Vladivostok in theFar East. They had armed themselves and were a formidable, if somewhat unpredictable force, scheduled to be transferred by sea hallway around the world to the Western Front to fight for an independent homeland—if they could get out of Russia.
And what of the remnants of the not inconsiderable Imperial Russian Navy? Its officers had fled or had been butchered by mutineers. Machinists mates commanded battleships. Would these vessels fall into German hands? Turned against the Allies, they could upset the delicate balance of naval power in the Middle East and even the North Sea.1
Fighting and dying in the swamps and forests were Russian patriots, both Red and White, Americans, French, British, Serbians, Italians and Finns. There were many threads of blue on the generally khaki background; U. S. sailormen in unlikely places, doing unlikely things. And very soon, the American sailors and soldiers were asking each other: “Why are we here? The war in Europe is over. The Armistice is signed. Why are we here?”
This vest pocket war, largely unknown or misunderstood even to this day in the United States, was comic in some instances, but tragic in its pointless casualties. It soured U. S.-Soviet relations for almost a generation, and, in the Soviet Union, is still by no means forgotten or forgiven.
How had it come to pass? Fighting and dying in the swamps and forests were Russian patriots, both Red and White, Americans, French, British, Serbians, Italians and Finns. There were many threads of blue on the generally khaki background; U. S. sailormen in unlikely places, doing unlikely things. And very soon, the American sailors and soldiers were asking each other: “Why are we here? The war in Europe is over. The Armistice is signed. Why are we here?”
This vest pocket war, largely unknown or misunderstood even to this day in the United States, was comic in some instances, but tragic in its pointless casualties. It soured U. S.-Soviet relations for almost a generation, and, in the Soviet Union, is still by no means forgotten or forgiven.
How had it come to pass?
By the spring of 1917, insuperable supply problems and shortages, general discontent, execrable leadership, and deep and widespread suspicions of treachery in high places had brought about the abdication of the Tsar and the collapse of the Imperial Russian government. Hopes proved futile that a rejuvenated, democratic Russia might stage a military comeback; the powerful impact on the soldiers and sailors of the Bolsheviki’s, “Land! Bread! Peace!” pulled the rug from under the new regime and its feeble efforts to mount a 1917 summer offensive against the Central Powers. With the November 1917 political triumph of the Bolsheviki, followed in a few months by their peace treaty with Germany at Brest-Litovsk, the Russian war in the East clearly had been brought to a close.
Not too many U. S. naval officers now alive were old enough to appreciate personally the colossal military impact of this Russian military collapse. To Admiral William S. Benson, Chief of Naval Operations, and Admiral William S. Sims, commanding U. S. naval forces in Europe, the disappearance of the Russia!' military presence was the first scene of a nightmare script involving the transfer of some German divisions from the Eastern to the Western Front to take part in the great Hun offensive planned for the summer of 1918.
By the spring of 1917, insuperable supply problems and shortages, general discontent, execrable leadership, and deep and widespread suspicions of treachery in high places had brought about the abdication of the Tsar and the collapse of the Imperial Russian government. Hopes proved futile that a rejuvenated, democratic Russia might stage a military comeback; the powerful impact on the soldiers and sailors of the Bolsheviki’s, “Land! Bread! Peace!” pulled the rug from under the new regime and its feeble efforts to mount a 1917 summer offensive against the Central Powers. With the November 1917 political triumph of the Bolsheviki, followed in a few months by their peace treaty with Germany at Brest-Litovsk, the Russian war in the East clearly had been brought to a close.
Not too many U. S. naval officers now alive were old enough to appreciate personally the colossal military impact of this Russian military collapse. To Admiral William S. Benson, Chief of Naval Operations, and Admiral William S. Sims, commanding U. S. naval forces in Europe, the disappearance of the Russia!' military presence was the first scene of a nightmare script involving the transfer of some German divisions from the Eastern to the Western Front to take part in the great Hun offensive planned for the summer of 1918.
It was to all these agonizing problems that the Supreme Allied War Council had to address itself in that close-to-desperate spring and summer of 1918.
On 3 March 1918, the Germans forced the fledgling and nearly powerless Bolshevist government to accept the humiliating treaty of Brest-Litovsk. This recognized the independence of the Baltic States, Belorussia and, most importantly, that great breadbasket, the Ukraine. It also promised Germany vital raw materials that had theretofore been cut off by the Allied blockade.
To ensure the delivery of these raw materials, German troops not only immediately occupied these “independent” countries, but also spilled over into the oil, coal, and grain-rich Caucasus and Don Basin.
Deeply alarmed at this encroachment on areas outside those covered by the Treaty, the Bolshevist leaders at once sought out the Moscow representatives of the “dirty Imperialists” (Anglo-French department) for conversations on joint action against the Germans. Hope was thus born in London, Paris, and Washington that the Eastern Front, which had collapsed in 1916 under the Imperial Russians and again in 1917 under Alexander Kerensky’s “republic,” would be reconstituted a third time in 1918 under the Bolshevist regime’s military operations.
Thus, the early March 1918 landing of a small British force at Murmansk was welcomed by the brilliant, bewhiskered Bolshevist War Commissar Leon Trotsky, as a preliminary step in Allied help in protecting Petrograd and the railway to Murmansk against the Germans and White Finns.
Meanwhile, the Allies themselves were far from united in their views as to the best solution. The British hoped the Bolsheviki would legitimatize the intervention by inviting it. The French leaned toward support of the emerging anti-Bolshevist armies in south Russia and Siberia, in which they were joined by the Japanese. President Woodrow Wilson, washed this way and that by his lofty sentiments concerning the self-determination of peoples, was not keen to intervene under any circumstances, reinforced in his beliefs by well-founded suspicions of Japanese intention to seize and hold eastern Siberia for themselves, should joint intervention come about.
By May of 1918, events had taken a decidedly unsatisfactory turn as far as the Bolsheviki were concerned. Trotsky had commenced to have second thoughts about accepting Allied help. The Czech Legion had just reacted sharply to Bolshevist efforts to disarm it. (“Shoot down every armed Czech!” Trotsky had ordered.) The Czechs, commanded by a French general, had seized virtual control of a good portion of the Trans-Siberian railroad and were co-operating with the anti-Bolshevist forces of White Russian Admiral A. V. Kolchak. “Things are in a bloody awful mess!” was a typically mild British understatement of affairs at that moment.
On 23 June, additional British forces landed at Murmansk, to a mixed reaction by the local Soviet, wavering between loyalty to Mother Moscow and the side on which their bread was buttered. At least there was no equivocation on the part of Lenin, Trotsky and Co. “The English landing,” they thundered, “cannot be considered other than an act against the Republic . . . for overthrowing the Workers’ and Peasants’ power!”
They continued in a vein that made quite clear that joint Allied-Bolshevist action was out the window.
Meanwhile, Admiral Sims, foreseeing the shape of things to come (the clarity of his vision no doubt enhanced by British suggestion) told the Chief of Naval Operations on 8 April that, “A force of considerable strength may be needed at any time. The Russians of all classes should be impressed with the unity of the Allies.” He added that the Russian feeling for the United States was somewhat more friendly than for Great Britain, so that some difficulties might be avoided if a U. S. man-of-war were present.
On 24 May, as a result of this appeal, the 6,000-ton cruiser Olympia2 nosed into the long, mile-wide estuary of the Kola River that led to Murmansk. As one might expect of an elderly lady, her lines and speed no longer had the dash of that day a generation earlier when she had carried Dewey into Manila Bay. Iron-sighted 8-inch turret guns had been replaced by ten new 5-inchers. She carried 28 officers and 400 men, many of whom, including her commanding officer, Captain Bion B. Bierer, would soon be scattered over most of Northwest Russia, facing the muzzles of guns which so short a time before had ranged on the Allied side.
Command relationships, ever a touchy subject in allied operations, were taken in hand well before the Olympia’s arrival. “I beg USS Olympia may have orders to come to Murmansk,” wirelessed the British Senior Naval Officer Murmansk, Rear-Admiral Thomas W. Kemp, “and that she be put definitely and fully under my orders in the same way as the French cruiser Amiral Aube. There can be only one Allied head here and I consider this step indispensable for both military and political reasons.”
Murmansk was scarcely what one might term the Paris of the North. Formerly the fishing village of Romanovsk, it was the recently developed terminus of the new railway, and the only year-around, ice-free, north Russian port. There were no shops, amusements or diversions of any kind under the perpetual daylight of summer or the endless nights of winter.
In a harbor which could have held all the world’s fleets lay the old British battleship Glory, flagship of Rear Admiral Kemp, the French cruiser Amiral Aube, and a number of merchantmen flying a wide variety of Allied and neutral flags. A few scraps of laundry drearily floated in the breeze on board the Russian cruiser Askold, lying at anchor nearly crewless, under the command of a committee of Bolshevist enlisted men. The majority of the Russian sailors had simply melted into the woodwork. One large group was freebooting its way down the railway, looting, killing, and rioting, en route to Petrograd and more salubrious surroundings. The officers, fearful of the summary executions handed out to fellow officers in other Russian fleets, had long since made themselves scarce, electing some occupation with a higher life expectancy.
The 8th of June 1918 was for America a momentous day. On the orders of Admiral Kemp, the Olympia put ashore eight officers and 100 men, one-fourth of her complement. It marked the point of no return in our war with Russia and in the eyes of Moscow indelibly lumped the United States together with Britain and France as aggressors against a struggling new Russian Republic then facing a universally hostile world.
As far as the United States was Concerned-Secretary of State Robert Lansing, on June 1918, laid down policy for the Chief of Naval Operations to the effect that our interests were: to protect Allied property now in Murmansk and Vladivostok, to conduct no active operations on Russian soil except on invitation of a recognized Russian authority, and to make no promise to the Czechoslovak troops, but to transport them to the European front, if they so desired. Alas! How the piouspronouncements of diplomats can be stretched to suit the circumstances!
On 13 June, Admiral Sims sent CNO the reassuring news that, “The British admiral at Murmansk . . . had been told not to commit himself to any land operations away from the port. . . but he may use the crews . . . to stiffen local resistance against the Germans if found practicable.” Sims concurred in this, including the fact that he felt it essential that our forces be under British command at Murmansk. That British marines were then 105 miles down the railway, on a collision course with Germans and White Finns was no doubt considered to be a slight but acceptable | stretching of the Murmansk port limits.
If any Allied doubts still persisted concerning Bolshevist views, they were set straight on 22 June by the ebullient War Commissar Trotsky. In an impassioned speech directed toward the Allied intervention in Murmansk, just reinforced by the modest addition ashore of Olympia’s landing force, Trotsky raged, “Between the Germans and the encroachments of armies of the ‘friendly’ Allies we see no difference. . . . Those who twist this statement into an argument that we plan an alliance with the Germans against the ‘Allies' are either naturally stupid or are being paid to be stupid.”
At the same time, the Allied ambassadors-" including the elderly (67) politician-turned-diplomat American Ambassador, David R. Francis—had for some time sequestered themselves at the small, provincial city of Vologda, halfway between Moscow and Archangel. They had left Petrograd, firstly because it was no longer the capital, and secondly, because it was threatened by German occupation. But they did not care to come to Moscow, the new capital, and thus give de facto recognition to the Bolsheviki. Moscow was in a near anarchic state, inflamed with revolutionary passions and its atmosphere punctuated altogether too frequently by the zap! zap! of bullets. In any case, Moscow now housed a real enemy, Count von Mirbach, the new German ambassador.3
By 13 July, shortly over a month after the Olympia's men had come ashore, affairs at Murmansk had reached a point where the façade of collaboration with the now-cool, now-hot local soviet fell apart; the British proceeded to disarm the local pro-Bolshevist Russians and seize the Russian cruiser Askold from her committee of Red sailors. She would shortly thereafter be manned by 400 British tars, the Imperial Russian ensign at the main and the union jack of Great Britain at the jack staff forward, another of the many anomalies of that strange war.
By 25 July, the Bolshevist newspaper Izvestia, in Moscow, vituperatively discussed the Anglo-French attacks at Archangel, although no such attacks had yet been made. Many Allied hostages, over 200 of them British and French, had been arrested in Moscow. Along the Trans-Siberian, the Czech Legion was battling a mixed bag of Bolshevist Red Guards and armed Hungarian war prisoners, the latter hopefully headed west and homeward. Clearly, things were “hotting up.”
On board the Olympia when she arrived in Murmansk had been a passenger who would become something more than controversial before the year was out: Major-General Frederick C. Poole, British Army, Allied commander-in-chief designate, North Russia. He was prepared to make the most of the occasion, whether it be a friendly conversion or one conducted at the point of bayonets in the hands of his modest force then en route. Toward the Russians, Poole, like a good many Britishers of that day when confronting foreigners, exhibited a certain degree of infuriating condescension. “Generally speaking,” his instructions read, “the Russian is exactly like a child—inquisitive, easily gulled, easily offended. He is very clever in a theoretical way but is rarely practical. Treat him kindly, absolutely justly but absolutely firmly. Never believe him when he says, ‘It is done!’ Go and see for yourself.” As General Poole would ruefully discover in the months to come, his assessment had overlooked the fact that the Russian was uncommonly hardy and stoic, that he was outstandingly good at improvisation, and that he had an abiding love for and willingness to defend to the death Matyushka Rus, his Mother Russia.
Murmansk had by now been well secured for the Allies. Captain Bierer, representing the United States, had joined the Allied seniors in signing an amicable agreement with the newly constituted local soviet, by virtue of which the soviet’s members could now be considered to have crossed to the Allied side of the Rubicon. “It is all very well for you to talk that way, sitting there in Moscow!” the Murmansk Commissar petulantly informed Moscow on the latter’s peremptory directive to “throw the Allied rascals out!”
For some time, British agents had been at work in Bolshevist-controlled Archangel, so General Poole, chafing at the inactivity of things in dull Murmansk, was happy but not surprised to hear that an “uprising” against the Bolshevist garrison was set for the night of July 31-August 1st. The Allied expedition, including one French battalion, was hurriedly embarked and set out in the mild northern summer; it could be as high as 85° ashore in the 20-hour long day. The Olympia’s 26-foot draft made her a poor candidate for the shallow approaches to Archangel, well up the Dvina River. Consequently, Captain Bierer gladly accepted the invitation of General Poole to accompany the General in his yacht, HMS Sylvator. A fleet of some dozen vessels made up the convoy of 1,300 troops. Resistance to its passage through the White Sea was slight—a few scattered shots from Bolshevist shore batteries vindicated the Reds’ honor before they broke and ran from cruiser gunfire and the bombs of seaplanes from the carrier, HMS Nairana, history’s first air-sea-land assault.
It is not impossible that Poole was familiar with Caesar’s terse resume, “Veni, vidi, vici!" on his conquest of Gaul, as Poole’s report carried a similar vibrant ring. “I occupiedArchangel today,” said Poole in his dispatch to London. “Our casualties were light. Two Frenchmen wounded.”
Captain Bierer, as senior American, felt the whole affair to be a smashing success. He ecstatically reported that, “General Poole, Admiral Kemp, myself and other officers landed by invitation and we were received by the representatives of the new government and a guard of Russian infantry and cavalry. The people simply went wild with joy to an extent almost beyond imagination.”
On 10 August, Captain Bierer gave an account of the situation as regards American participation. “Two officers and 25 men landed with the landing force and 25 men at Archangel. They were divided due to the desires of Admiral Kemp, who felt the great desirability of having American forces here. Admiral Kemp also wanted the Olympia’s band ashore to be used in recruiting Russians, Poles, etc., for the Slavo-Allied forces.”
On the same date, Ensign Donald M. Hicks, with one French soldier and one U. S. seaman, brought into Archangel 54 Bolshevist soldiers who had surrendered at Tundra, on the railroad about 30 miles south of town.
Also on the 10th, one American officer and 25 sailors pushed up the Dvina from Archangel toward Kotlas, embarked in small river steamers, on an expedition which paralleled that of their shipmates who on 3 August had rattled down the railway toward Vologda with their antique locomotive and two flat cars. Allied troops were by this time 60 miles down the railway into the heart of Russia. They had engaged the Bolsheviki on 6 August, with one dead ally and 11 wounded, but the enemy had scurried on southward. The war was on.
Meanwhile, the Olympia, sitting it out at Murmansk, had not been wholly idle. On 17 July, the Russian destroyer Kapitan Yourasovski had been turned over to her by the British Senior Naval Officer. “Repair it as quickly as possible. Then furnish a crew and be prepared to take it to sea on short notice,” directed the SNO. “This seemed to be almost impossible at the very outset,” complained Captain Bierer, “because the little craft was in dreadfully bad condition.” But all the available force and skill of the Olympia's crew was brought to bear, Captain Bierer added, and in a few days the Yourasovski was ready for any eventuality, manned by two Russian and three American officers, eight Russian sailors and 47 of the already thinly spread Olympia crew, the Imperial Russian Saint George’s cross at her main.
By mid-August, men from the Olympia were in the thick of it. Captain Bierer reported that, “The river expedition to Kotlas has met with considerable opposition from a small battery of field guns on shore and from motor launches with machine guns. One officer and 25 men from Olympia are patrolling along the railroad and one officer and eight men are serving with the Russian-Allied Naval Brigade at Solombala.” Meanwhile, the Olympia’s band was still tootling away in Archangel, “attracting recruits.”
By the end of August, we find the Olympia's various detachments still hammering away in the warmish, mosquito-infested wilderness.
The railroad party confined itself to bringing in prisoners. Ensign Hicks, commanding the Dvina River party, was seeing hotter action. “We left Bakarista (several miles from Archangel) on barges,” says Hicks, in a chatty, informal report, “and arrived at Suskoya (120 miles south of Archangel) two days later. We marched inland about 45 versts, stopping at several towns on the way. The people were very friendly. At one town (Vaimusku) the people cheered when we arrived and made tea and lunch for all of the men. We arrived at Tegora, August 15th, 3 a.m. and learned that the enemy occupied the next town.”
“They had 250 men, mostly sailors, with Popov as their leader. One armored car (British make), 7 machine guns and two field guns (18-pounders).
We arrived at the edge of the town they held at 7:30 p.m. It took about an hour’s bombing to get the armored car. We also got one of their machine guns. The fight lasted about five hours and kept us fairly busy. We had one seaman, George Dewey Persche, wounded; the British lost one officer, the French four men and the Poles one killed. We expect to move in a day or two and by all reports I believe we will have a busy time.”
Hicks couldn’t have been more right. This was merely the start of his campaign in the swampy, north Russian wilderness. The Allies remained in the newly taken town about a week, meanwhile reconnoitering the surrounding territory, alive with Bolshevist bands. Eight of the 25 U. S. sailors manned machine guns, a weapon now in the hands of every soldier, but in those days considered something quite special and best entrusted to mechanically minded sailors. On the 22nd, the Bolsheviki were attacked again, beginning a series of engagements that lasted until 3 September and involved French, British, White Russian, and Polish troops with as conglomerate a cross-pollination of command as any war has ever seen. It might be added that, as the hospital report phrased it, the wounding of Persche was, “the first American blood to be shed on Russian soil for the cause of democracy.” He would be only the first of many hundreds more during the ensuing 12 months of desultory struggle in the wilderness, and one wistfully reflects on the validity of the comment concerning “democracy.”
Hicks’ little frolic was not to go unnoticed. “I have the honor to recommend for British reward Ensign Hicks, for Distinguished Service Cross,” read General Poole’s commendation. “The conduct of himself and detachment not only under fire, but at all times, was a great example to all.”
Archangel meanwhile had become a busy international city with much of the tinsel and intrigue of a bona fide capital. The Allied ambassadors, exercising rare prescience, a week prior to the Allied landing at Archangel had cajoled the Bolsheviki into attaching a locomotive onto their special train at Vologda and had scampered northward to Bolshevist-held Archangel, further persuaded the reluctant Bolsheviki to send them by ship to Allied-held Kandalaksha (on the White Sea), whence they had returned to Archangel after the Allied invasion ax had fallen there.
American Ambassador Francis, soon to be invalided home, was nevertheless fit enough to occupy the dean of the corps’ seat on the merry-go-round of North Russian power play There was continuous pulling and hauling and intrigue, between General Poole, the multitude of Russian factions, and the foreign ambassadors, with the Americans in the middle, lacking any clear mandate from home, but with a major stake in the turn of local events.
A U. S. assistant naval attaché had meanwhile appeared on the scene, in response to urgent requests on the part of Ambassador Francis. Between voluminous reports on the enemy, who, with satisfying frequency, “retired in headlong flight,” or, “received heavy casualties,” the naval attaché was able to engage in the type of research for which intelligence agents are better known. “Notbeing successful in gaining official permission to come here from Petrograd, Dolina for such was our beautiful spy’s name came anyway!” the attaché wrote. “She walks with Americans, English and French sailors in the Summer Garden and even entertains them in her room at all hours,” the attaché continued, adding that an American military doctor had presented her with a gold watch. The attaché came to the regretful conclusion that among other things, Dolina was a Bolshevist-German spy. That the mistress of one of the several Allied ambassadors also was a suspected German agent in no way eased the security problems for our young sleuth.
Admiral Sims, in faraway London, demonstrated his objective grasp of things before the summer was out, in a report to CNO on what he saw in the future of Intervention. Explaining his “incomplete information of Allied plans in Russia” (an endemic American complaint in those parts) he wrote that, “It would seem there is a danger of a disaster unless adequate military forces are assigned to whatever tasks are undertaken in that country.”
Captain Bierer, of the Olympia, exhilarated in the beginning by the novelty of it all and by the legendary magnetism of the senior British officers, began, little by little, to conclude that the bloom on the rose might bear closer scrutiny. He went so far, in fact, as to voice a suspicion that already was a glaring and nefarious fact as far as Lenin and Trotsky were concerned: that the British and French Were interested more in saving their enormous investments in Russia than they were in establishing an Eastern Front, much less saving a few paltry thousands of tons of military supplies, the lion’s share of which already had been nabbed by the Bolsheviki and moved to safety in the interior. “I obtained the deep founded impression,” wrote Bierer, “that both British and French are taking special interest in this region and these waters, especially the British. The British hope that conditions may so shape themselves or that they may be able to so shape circumstances, that this region as well as the Waters, may come under their control or domination.”
On 24 October 1918, one of the most fortuitous events of the American intervention took place: Rear Admiral Newton A. McCully, Jr., U. S. Navy, arrived in Murmansk and broke his flag in the Olympia as Commander U. S. Naval Forces, Northern Russia. This remarkable, colorful 1887 graduate of the U. S. Naval Academy had been assistant naval attaché in Russia during the Russo-Japanese War and naval attaché from 1914 to 1917. He understood the Russian language, the Russian soul, and the Russian land. One later day he would adopt and raise seven Russian children. As senior American in North Russia after Ambassador Francis’ departure, McCully, at a time requiring the greatest delicacy, would consistently defend the U. S. position with skill and diplomacy, would provide Washington and his boss Sims in London with sensible advice and his forces with the undeniable benefits of sound administration.
McCully almost immediately left Murmansk for Archangel, where the action was. By 7 September, he was able to inform Sims that, “There are no more than 200 Allied soldiers here and quiet reigns. Poole has an expedition on the Vologda railroad 100 miles south, and up the Dvina River 200 miles toward Kotlas, but before attempting further advance, is awaiting reinforcements. Four thousand eight hundred Americans are expected by Poole September 15th and on September 1st, 1,000 British.”
The American troops, the 339th Infantry regiment, arrived as scheduled. They had been recruited in the Wisconsin area not long before, and to their intense wonderment on arrival in Britain after a short training period, had been issued heavy winter clothing, skis, and snow shoes, and their Enfield rifles had been exchanged for the long-barrelled variety turned out for shipment to the Imperial Russian Army. It looked more like a prospective sporting expedition than any crack at the dirty Hun. Their suspicions were partly augmented by the chill trip through the Arctic Sea to Archangel. An instant transfer on arrival, to the ubiquitous “forty-and-eight” railroad cars, confirmed their worst fears; one of the American battalions was very soon bumping its way down the railroad toward the front, its departure so precipitous that there had been no time to break the sheepskin coats and skis out of the hold to accompany them. The second battalion was next day loaded into bug-ridden, leaking barges and they, too, departed for the south via the mile-wide Dvina River. The third battalion remained at Archangel, by then a teeming wooden city, swelled to twice its normal population of 50,000 by White Russian refugees. The place was equipped with many of the amenities which garrison troops find interesting: bistros, eateries, bars, and sundry establishments about which the less said the better. as low as 50° below zero.
The indefatigable crew of the Olympia meanwhile had repaired and manned another Russian destroyer, the Beschumni, causing one to wonder from what bottomless pit came the supply of U. S. sailors. But dawn sometimes breaks from an unexpected direction; two other Russian destroyers collided, one with a French crew, so the latter was available to relieve the hard-pressed Olympians who, together with one Russian officer and one Russian seaman, had flown the Saint George’s cross over the Beschumni.
By October 1918, disenchantment with the course of events was clearly evident in a telegram of instructions from Sims to McCully. In substance, the U. S. government’s policy was against undertaking any military activities in European Russia west of the Ural mountains in aid of Czech forces, which included non co-operation in any effort to effect the earlier plan of establishing lines of communication through from Siberia to Archangel—or any linkup with White Russian, anti-Bolshevist Admiral Kolchak. As to North Russia, U. S. military forces were to be directed solely, “to guarding the ports themselves and as much of the country around as may develop threatening conditions.” (The latter was a masterpiece of ambiguity, in that “threatening conditions” then existed in Russia as far south as the Black Sea and as far east as the Pacific Ocean.) No more American troops would be sent to northed1 ports. If any Allied authorities pressed our commanders to exceed these limitations, such requests were to be politely but firmly refused. Moreover, the exact nature of these instructions was not to be divulged to non-Americans.
These may indeed have been policy instructions, but little of the benefits ever trickled down to thousands of American doughboys fighting and dying in the forest quagmires, or later in the iron frost which dropped as low as 50° below zero. Detachments of the advanced line are composed of half American troops,” an unhappy officer reported. “The remainder are British, French Poles and Russians in about that order of strength. All operations are directed by British general officers, and all detachment except that part south of Obozerskaya, which is commanded by a French officer, are commanded by British officers, these being givenwhen necessary temporary rank to render them senior to other Allied officers.”
At the end of September 1918, there occurred one of those personnel changes which change with it the face of a campaign. General Poole—whose cavalier treatment of North Russian government officials, lack of sincerity with foreign ambassadors, and haphazard, remote control running of the war from the rear had something less than endeared him to his “clientele”—was replaced by Major-General Edmund Ironside.
Six-foot-four “Tiny” Ironside, as E. M. Halliday put it in his outstanding account of the Intervention,4was a man, “whose entry to Who’s Who reads like a quick trip along the Path of British Empire from Victoria to George VI.” Having in abundance many of toe finer human traits, Ironside was never content to run a war from the rear. He was happiest when he had tucked his enormous bulk into a tiny sleigh and was gliding along a forest path near the front, a cloud of steam issuing from the nostrils of the diminutive, torry, north-Russian pony trotting ahead of him. It was Ironside, almost single-handedly, who held together through the winter the shaky fabric of the Allied front, beset by cold, Bolshevist bullets, and the thoughts that in Europe, the war was over.
And the winter was desperately hard. By early spring, even in Archangel itself, morale was low and gave rise to second thoughts about the whole operation. Linkup with the Czechs on the Trans-Siberian was a dead dream; the latter were in retreat and the new Red Army under the brilliant Commissar Trotsky was being forged into a highly effective weapon. On 28 February, Admiral McCully visited our advance positions on the Archangel-Vologda railway front, which was held by two companies of the 339th and one French company. Daily harassment came from the Bolshevist side in the form of sporadic bombardment directed from an observation balloon. One never could tell for sure whether the wraith-like movements at the edge of the clearing were Bolshevist soldiers in white camouflage suits, ready to spearhead a slashing charge in force—or whether it was a flurry of snow set up by the biting, sub-zero wind. “They are not any more pleased with their job than hitherto,” wrote Admiral McCully. “But they have learned to adapt themselves to the climate and to the British methods of supply.” This, of course, included the substitution of tea for good, black American coffee, and British cigarettes, described by the average American doughboy and sailor as something less than camel droppings.
The nagging problem of foreign command was ever with them. “Dissensions with the British have increased,” McCully continued, “aggravated somewhat by an American soldier’s being killed by a Canadian airman’s bomb and by the murder of a British officer by an American soldier.” It was indeed fortunate for the survival of the Allied effort that a man of such consummate tact as General Ironside was in charge.
By early April 1919, things had taken a serious turn. McCully’s inspection on the fifth of that month revealed that morale, as he put it, “is thoroughly rotten,” Low morale was not confined to Americans alone; Royal Scots and Liverpools on the Dvina front refused to go on patrol. McCully warned that failure to relieve the 339th regiment at the earliest practicable date would result in serious trouble.
On the 10th of April, the pot boiled higher. McCully’s flag lieutenant reported that the men openly stated they would not return to the front and that it was urgent that definite information be given the men of the time of withdrawal, or “open mutiny is almost inevitable.”
Incipient mutinies notwithstanding, spring, strange to relate, brought about a momentary upsurge in Allied fortunes. As the prize fighter about to fold up sometimes comes back for a few fast, furious, but futile, punches, so the Allied forces rose to their feet once more before the final inevitable collapse. On 24 May, Admiral McCully rashly reported that, “The critical situation in Northern Russia is now past, and with the apparent general weakening of Bolshevist forces and morale, makes the position in Northern Russia fairly secure.” It was one of the very few instances of bad calling of the shot on the part of an otherwise highly reliable and competent observer. But McCully may have had reason for optimism. The U. S. troops that had been on the very verge of mutiny were now happily preparing to pull out, to be replaced by British reinforcements from the home country who had volunteered for the duty. British gunboats and monitors had broken out of the lower river ice and had left for the upper reaches of the Dvina to reinforce the Allied flank. On 17 May, there were reports of long-range duels between Red and British river gunboats in the vicinity of Toulgas and Kitsa.
It was at this last high tide of the Intervention that there occurred one of the most bizarre episodes of U. S. Navy activity in the Intervention, not even excluding the Train. On 24 April, two motor launches, “motor sailers” as they were then known, were landed at Murmansk, one 34-footer from the USS Yankton and one 30-footer from the USS Galveston, together with Lieutenant D. C. Woodward, U. S. Navy, and 17 enlisted volunteers. The boats and men were forwarded south by rail, intended originally for use on Lake Vig, but the Allied spring advance had surged past that lake by the time the boats arrived. As they proceed south to the vicinity of Lake Onega, we turn to Lieutenant Woodward’s report: “After looking over the ground, I thought it possible to take these boats overland to Lake Onega by an improvised railway, a distance of two and a half miles. . .” On 26 May, “The boats were placed on handcars and these handcars were run over a light railway consisting of 4 sections of 20 pound rails. After the boats had passed, the rails were taken up and relaid. On May 29th 3 p.m., both boats were in the water. We loaded stores and proceeded to Medvejya Gora.”
Woodward wasted no time getting into action. The Atlanta and the Georgia, as he had christened the boats, chugged off to Fedotova, where in the light of the northern “white night,” they “assisted White Russian troops by laying down a barrage with two 37-mm. guns and four Lewis guns, the Lewis guns placed on shore and firing across a 400-yard inlet and the 37-mm. on the boats, 200 yards from the beach, firing at a range of 1,400 yards, over Allied troops.” Woodward reported expending 136 37-mm. and 1,600 rounds of machine gun ammunition, “enemy casualties unknown.” That Woodward was happily able to report no Allied casualties is perhaps due to his holding his barrage high and partly to the fact that the White Russian troops cagily refused to jump off to the attack, barrage or no barrage.
In early June, Woodward’s scene shifts to “sea,” when on the 2nd, “In the early forenoon an enemy steamer was reported off the entrance to Schunga and the Atlanta started out to engage her. She opened fire at 9 a.m. at extreme range, 2,000 yards with 37-mm. and the shot fell 150 yards short. No reply from the steamer, which turned tail and in-creased the range, meanwhile firing at us witha 3-inch gun from aft. The Atlanta continued the chase for ten minutes, but was unable to close the range. At this point, the Atlanta turned and ran for the beach, upon which thesteamer turned and followed, maintaining her fire. She chased for about 20 minutes, then blew her siren three times and a small launch came out from shore about 5,000 yards from us, making no hostile move. The engagement lasted about 50 minutes, during which we fired 20 rounds and the enemy about 70, of which six came very close.”
For most of the rest of June, the Atlanta and the Georgia plied the lake, exchanging shots with Bolshevist steamers and plowing an occasional one into targets ashore.
Opposed to Woodward and his Atlanta and Georgia were something between 30 and Bolshevist steamers based at Tolboi, about 9-miles south of Schunga, all armed with one 3-incher aft and in some cases with one forward as well. Admiral McCully held Woodward’s operation in high regard. “They were he only vessels afloat possessed by the Allies until June 3rd,” McCully writes “. . . and even yet are the only vessels that can be depended on. They have run 500 miles each during the past month, have been under fire on several occasions and their work has been of very great value. They have been the only means of transporting supplies to the Allied front at Schunga.”
On 9 July, with American disengagement from the Intervention imminent, Woodward & Co. reluctantly returned aboard ship, first turning over their two craft to the British who manned the local front. Although it had been a short operation and scarcely of a decisive nature, in its ingenious improvisation, élan, and pluck, it is reminiscent of the spirit of American naval campaigns a century earlier on Lakes Champlain and Erie.5
The redoubtable Olympia had departed Murmansk on 13 November for the Mediterranean, and would not return. On 13 May 1919, the U. S. cruiser Des Moines having arrived in Murmansk, Admiral McCully broke his flag in her and departed for Archangel, where the old ship lost a good part of her wood and copper sheathing forcing her way through the ice pack at the entrance to the White Sea.
By early June, McCully was happy to be able to report that summer had at last arrived in Archangel, where the temperature had risen to 85. “The river continues to fall, he added. “British gunboats are returning to Archangel to have one six inch gun removed and are to be otherwise lightened.”6
This mild period of euphoria was taken advantage of by McCully to assemble his entire “fleet” for target practice in the White Sea: the Des Moines, the Sacramento (later of China Coast fame), three subchasers, the Yankton, and two Eagle boats, those grotesque, coffin-shaped atrocities cranked out on an assembly line by Henry Ford and with seakeeping qualities of an order probably lower than anything since the Mayflower. They even visited famed Solovetsky Island, with its monastery, six churches, gardens, stockyards and one of the richest sacristies in Russia, a shrine normally visited by thousands every summer.
These pleasant days were to be McCully’s last moments of light thoughts in North Russia. He reported to Sims on 23 July that White Russian troops on the front from Onega to Chekuevo had mutinied and joined the Bolsheviki. Monitors M23 and M26 had been rushed to Onega and the Des Moines and the two Eagle boats to Archangel. On 25 July, the whole Onega front was in a state of mutiny, British officers with the Russian troops had been butchered and the city of Onega was under the Red flag. An attempted mutiny on the Murmansk-Petrograd railway front had been subdued and the mutineers disarmed by British and Polish troops. The commanding general appealed for help; the situation was critical. By mid-August, mutinies were felt to be possible in the environs of Archangel itself. The Des Moines landed four officers and 51 sailors at Solombala, near Archangel, to form a reserve in case of an uprising. They clearly were prepared for anything: “A 30-yard indoor rifle range was obtained,” they reported, “long enough for each man to fire ten rounds to familiarize himself with his rifle, plus a pan from each Lewis gun.” One breathes a real sigh of relief on learning that they never were called upon to try their skills in combat.
By mid-September, the curtain had closed on the Great Adventure; the Des Moines sailed out of Archangel for the last time on the 14th, having closed out the American effort. On 26 September, the British withdrawal was complete and White Russian authorities were left with the near hopeless task of defending themselves against the ever more powerful Red Army. They had cast in their lot with the Allies and now were being abandoned to an easily predictable fate. On 21 February 1920, the 154th Red Infantry regiment marched into Archangel, not only unopposed, but also received by the civil population with much the same enthusiasm with which they had greeted the Allied landing a mere 18 months before.
The enigma of our original involvement can perhaps be traced to the preoccupation of President Wilson with what he considered to be weightier things. A distant man, never inclined to share his problems with his advisers, Wilson was to some extent a victim of direct Anglo-French cajolement into an adventure he first tried to avoid, then tried to bind up in agreements that would limit American participation to a wholly defensive role. Undoubtedly the Soviets’ arming of Hungarian war prisoners and the plight of the Czechoslovak Legion both had a marked influence on Wilson’s final decision to go along. George Kennan puts it succinctly,7“He Wilson did not prevent the United States units from being used for precisely the purposes for which he said they should not be used; nor did he withdraw them, as he said he would, when they were thus used; yet he did prevent them from having any proper understanding of the purposes for which they were being used; finally, he rendered the United States vulnerable to the charge, which Soviet propagandists have never ceased to exploit, of interfering by armed force in Soviet domestic affairs.”
A final intelligence report on our operations points out that throughout the entire campaign it had always been a question more of morale of the forces employed rather than their strength. None of the troops were ever keen about the work they were required to do, and the sentiment was carefully fostered by Bolshevist propaganda. The first signs of disaffection appeared in the French organization as early as October 1918, extending later to Americans, British, and Italians, and finally the Serbs. “To the soldier, the question, ‘Why are we here?’ was never satisfactorily answered,” the report concludes.
The U. S. Navy’s part, we can be proud to say, was not only unblemished, but marked by unusual fortitude, good spirit, and good performance. That the American Navy was singled out in Murmansk and Archangel for preferred treatment during World War II is perhaps largely due to the sterling qualities of our permanent U. S. Navy representatives there at the time. Nonetheless, I like to think that perhaps there has been a certain tradition of U. S. Navy élan and gallantry, handed down through a North Russian generation, of the days when U. S. sailors ranged the country in crazy adventures on trains—of on board motorboats armed with 37-mm. popguns—while the Olympia’s band charmed the toddlers and small fry of Archangel. This in spite of the bad image in Soviet history books.
As for our senior American participant, Rear Admiral Newton McCully, we can bless our good fortune that he had surmounted the political naïveté that hobbles a great many senior officers in their conduct of operations involving international questions. His views on Russia were founded on six years of rich experience covering two wars in which that farflung land was deeply engaged. They reflect the bitter experience of Napoleon, to be confirmed by one Adolf Hitler: “Russia is too great a country,” wrote McCully, “and has too much national Slav spirit to be ever reconciled to the domination of any other power. There cannot be foreseen any reason for serious conflict of interests in the future between Russia and the United States, but there are possibilities that in time Russia will be a friend, if we can make and keep her so, of whom the United States will be much in need.”
We would do well to ponder his words.
★
1. The Russian Baltic fleet alone then counted four 24,000-ton modern battleships, two 18,000-ton armored cruisers, 4 small fast cruisers, 14 modern destroyers, 20 small destroyers and 15 submarines.
2. From this same venerable cruiser’s bridge many years before had come Admiral Dewey’s instructions to Gridley to fire when he was ready.
3. Von Mirbach spectacularly justified the Allied Ambassadors’ avoidance of Moscow; the new German envoy was assassinated on 6 July 1918 by Russian extremists.
4. See E. M. Halliday, The Ignorant Armies. New York: Harper & Row, 1960.
5. Woodward, now Rear Admiral, U. S. Naval Reserve, (Retired), was awarded the Navy Cross for this exploit.
6. Old China hands will recall seeing some of these flatiron-shaped gunboats of the Bee class 20 years later on the Yangtze and Pearl Rivers.
7. See George F. Kennan, The Decision To Intervene, p. 421. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1958.