invited the Allied expedition. One Colonel Tschaplin (later to be
dubbed “Charley Chaplin” by American officers who took him humorously)
who had served under the old Czar and had had, according to his
yarns—told by the way in the most engaging English—a very remarkable
experience with the Bolsheviks getting out of Petrograd. He was, it is
said, influenced by some of the subordinate English officers to make a
daring try to hasten matters.
On the evening of the 5th of September, while the American soldiers
were patrolling the Smolny area, near Archangel proper, this Col.
Tschaplin executed his _coup d’etat._ He quietly surrounded the homes
of Tchaikowsky and other members of the Archangel State Government and
kidnapped them, hiding them away on an island in the Dvina River.
Great excitement prevailed for several days. The people declared
Tschaplin was moving to restore monarchy under aid of the foreign arms
and declared a strike on the street railroads and threatened to take
the pumping station and the electric power station located at Smolny.
American troops manned the cars and by their good nature and patience
won the respect and confidence of the populace, excited as it was. The
American ambassador, the Hon. David R. Francis, with characteristic
American directness and fairness called the impetuous Tschaplin before
him and gave him so many hours in which to restore the rightful
government to power. And Tchaikowsky came back into the State House on
September 11th much to the rejoicing of the people and to the harmony
of the Allied Expedition. The diplomatic and military authorities of
the American part of the expedition had handled the situation in a way
that prevented riot and gained esteem for Americans in the eyes of all
the Russians.
Archangel, Smolny and Bakaritza now were busy scenes of military
activity. Down the streets of Archangel marched part of a battalion of
doughboys past the State House and the imposing foreign Embassy
Building. Curious eyes looked upon the O. D. uniform and admired the
husky stalwarts from over the seas. Bright-eyed women crowded to the
edge of the boardwalks amongst the long-booted and heavily bewhiskered
men. Well-dressed men with shaven faces and marks of culture studied
the Americans speculatively. Russian children began making acquaintance
and offering their flattering _Americanski Dobra_.
At Solombola, Smolny, Bakaritza, sounds of firing were heard daily, but
the populace were quieted when told that it was not riot or Bolo attack
but the Americans practising up with their ordnance. In fact the
Americans, hearing of actions at the fronts, were desperately striving
to learn how to use the Lewis guns and the Vickers machine guns. At
Camp Custer they had perfected themselves in handling the Colt and the
Brownings but in England had been obliged to relinquish them with the
dubious prospect of re-equipping with the Russian automatic rifles and
machine gun equipment at Archangel. Now they were feverishly at work on
the new guns for reports were coming back from the front that the enemy
was well equipped with such weapons and held the Americans at great
disadvantage.
Here let it be said that the American doughboy in the North Russian
campaign mastered every kind of weapon that was placed in his hands or
came by fortune of war to his hand. He learned to use the Lewis gun and
the Vickers machine gun of the British and Russian armies, also the
one-pounder, or pom pom. He became proficient in the use of the French
Chauchat automatic rifle and the French machine gun, and their rifle
grenade guns. He learned to use the Stokes mortars with deadly effect
on many a hard-fought line. And during the winter two platoons of “Hq.”
Company prided themselves on the mastery of a battery of Russian
artillery patterned after the famous, in fact, the same famous French
75 gun.
While the 2nd Battalion under Major Nichols was establishing itself in
quarters at Smolny, where was a great compound of freshly unloaded
supplies of food, herring and whiskey (do not forget the hard stuff)
and, becoming responsible for the safety of the pumping station and the
electric power station and the ships in the harbor, Captain Taylor
established the big Headquarters Company at Olga barracks at the other
end of the city on September seventh where he could train his men for
the handling of new weapons and could co-operate with Captain Kenyon’s
machine gun men. They on the same day took up quarters in Solombola
Barracks and were charged with the duty of not only learning how to use
the new machine guns but to keep guard over the quays and prevent
rioting by the turbulent Russian sailors. Their undying enmity had been
earned by the well-meant but untactful, yes, to the sailors apparently
treacherous, conduct of General Poole toward them on the Russian ships
in the Murmansk when he got them off on a pretext and then seized the
ships to prevent their falling into the hands of the Red Guards. And
while the doughboys on the railroad and Kodish fronts in the fall were
occasionally to run up against the hard-fighting Russian sailors who
had fled south to Petrograd and volunteered their services to Trotsky
to go north and fight the Allied expeditionary forces, these doughboys
doing guard duty in Archangel over the remnants of stores and supplies
which the Bolo had not already stolen or sunk in the Dvina River, were
constantly menaced by these surly, scowling sailors at Solombola and in
Archangel.
Really it is no wonder that the several Allied troop barracks were
always guarded by machine guns and automatics. Rumor at the base always
magnified the action at the front and always fancied riot and uprising
in every group of gesticulating Russkis seen at a dusky corner of the
city.
The Supply Company of the regiment became the supply unit for all the
American forces under Captain Wade and was quartered at Bakaritza,
being protected by various units of Allied forces. “Finish” the package
of Russki horse skin and bones which the boys “skookled” from the
natives, that is, bought from the natives, became the most familiar
sight on the quays, drawing the strange-looking but cleverly
constructed _drosky_, or cart, bucking into his collar under the yoke
and pulling with all his sturdy will, not minding the American “whoa”
but obedient enough when the doughboy learned to sputter the Russki
“br-r-r br-r-r.”
Archangel is situated on one of the arms of the Dvina River which
deltas into the White Sea. Out of the enormous interior of North
Russia, gathering up the melted snows of a million square miles of
seven-foot snow and the steady June rains and the weeks of fall rains,
the great Mississippi of North Russia moves down to the sea, sweeping
with deep wide current great volumes of reddish sediment and secretions
which give it the name Dvina. And the arm of the Arctic Ocean into
which it carries its loads of silt and leachings, and upon which it
floats the fishermen’s bottoms or the merchantmen’s steamers, is called
the White Sea. Rightly named is that sea, the Michigan or Wisconsin
soldier will tell you, for it is white more than half the year with ice
and snow, the sporting ground for polar bears.
While we were fighting the Bolsheviki in Archangel, the National
Geographic Society, in a bulletin, published to our people certain
facts about the country. It is so good that extracts are in this
chapter included:
“The city of Archangel, Russia, where Allied and American troops have
their headquarters in the fight with the Bolshevik forces, was the
capital of the Archangel Province, or government, under the czar’s
regime—a vast, barren and sparsely populated region, cut through by the
Arctic Circle.
“West and east, the distance across the Archangel district is about
that from London to Rome, from New York to St. Louis, or from Boston to
Charleston, S. C. Its area, exclusive of interior waters, is greater
than that of France, Italy, Belgium and Holland combined. Yet there are
not many more people in these great stretches than are to be found in
Detroit, Mich., or San Francisco or Washington.
“Arable land in all this territory is less than 1,200 square miles, and
three-fourths of that is given over to pasturage. The richer grazing
land supports Holmagor cattle, a breed said to date back to the time of
Peter the Great, who crossed native herds with cattle imported from
Holland.
“About fifteen miles from the mouth of the Dvina River, which affords
an outlet to the White Sea, lies the city of Archangel. Norsemen came
to that port in the tenth century for trading. One expedition was
described by Alfred the Great. But first contact with the outside world
was established in the sixteenth century when Sir Richard Chancellor,
an English sailor, stopped at the bleak haven while attempting a
northeast passage to India. Ivan the Terrible summoned him to Moscow
and made his visit the occasion for furthering commercial relations
with England. Thirty years after the Englishman’s visit a town was
established and for the next hundred years it was the Muscovite
kingdom’s only seaport, chief doorway for trade with England and
Holland.
“When Peter the Great established St. Petersburg as his new capital
much trade was diverted to the Baltic, but Archangel was compensated by
designation as the capital of the Archangel government.
“Boris Godunov threw open to all nations, and in the seventeenth
century Tartar prisoners were set to work building a large bazaar and
trading hall. Despite its isolation the city thus became a cosmopolitan
center and up to the time of the world war Norwegian, German, British,
Swedish and Danish cargo vessels came in large numbers.
“Every June thousand of pilgrims would pass through Archangel on their
way to the famous far north shrine, Solovetsky Monastery, situated on
an island a little more than half a day’s boat journey from Archangel.
“The city acquired its name from the Convent of Archangel Michael. In
the Troitski Cathedral, with its five domes, is a wooden cross,
fourteen feet high, carved by the versatile Peter the Great, who
learned the use of mallet and chisel while working as a shipwright in
Holland after he ascended the throne.”
To the sailor looking from the deck of his vessel or to the soldier
approaching from Bakaritza on tug or ferry, the city of Archangel
affords an interesting view. Hulks of boats and masts and cordage and
docks and warehouses in the front, with muddy streets. Behind, many
buildings, grey-weathered ones and white-painted ones topped with many
chimneys, and towering here and there a smoke stack or graceful spire
or dome with minarets. Between are seen spreading tree tops, too. All
these in strange confused order fill all the horizon there with the
exception of one space, through which in June can be seen the 11:30 p.
m. setting sun. And in this open space on clear evenings, which by the
way, in June-July never get even dusky, at various hours can be seen a
wondrous mirage of waters and shores that lie on the other side of the
city below the direct line of sight.
Prominently rises the impressive magnitudinous structure of the
reverenced cathedral there, its dome of the hue of heaven’s blue and
set with stars of solid gold. And when all else in the landscape is
bathed in morning purple or evening gloaming-grey, the levelled rays of
the coming or departing sun with a brilliantly striking effect glisten
these white and gold structures. Miles and miles away they catch the
eye of the sailor or the soldier.
Built on a low promontory jutting into the Dvina River, the city
appears to be mostly water-front. In fact, it is only a few blocks
wide, but it is crescent shaped with one horn in Smolny—a southern
suburb having dock and warehouse areas—and the other in Solombola on
the north, a city half as large as Archangel and possessing saw-mills,
shipyards, hospitals, seminary and a hard reputation, Archangel is
convex westward, so that one must go out for some distance to view the
whole expanse of the city from that direction. A mass of trees, a few
houses, some large buildings and churches mainly near the river, with a
foreground of shipping, is the summer view. The winter view is better,
the bare trees and the smaller amount of shipping at the docks
permitting a better view of the general layout of the city, the
buildings and the type of houses used by the population as homes.
Along the main street, Troitsky Prospect, runs a two-track trolley line
connecting the north and south suburbs mentioned in the preceding
paragraph. The cars are light and run very smoothly. They are operated
chiefly by women. Between the main street and the river-front near the
center of the city is the market-place. This covers several blocks and
is full of dingy stalls and alleys occupied by almost hopeless traders
and stocks in trade. As new wooden ware, home-made trinkets,
second-hand clothing and fresh fish can be obtained there the year
around, and in summer the offerings of vegetables are plentiful and
tempting, the market-place never lacks shoppers who carry their paper
money down in the same basket they use to carry back their purchases.
Public buildings are of brick or stone and are colored white, pink,
grey or bright red to give a light or warm effect. Down-town stores are
built some of brick and some of logs. Homes are square in type, with
few exceptions, built of logs, usually of very plain architecture, set
directly against the sidewalks, the yards and gardens being at the side
or rear. For privacy, each man’s holdings are surrounded by a
seven-foot fence. Thus the streets present long vistas of wooden ware,
partly house and partly fence, with sometimes over-hanging trees, and
with an inevitable set of doorsteps projecting from each house over
part of the sidewalk. This set of steps is seldom used, for the real
entrance to the home is at the side of the house reached through a
gateway in the fence.
The houses in Archangel are usually of two stories, with double windows
packed with cotton or flax to resist the cold. When painted at all, the
houses have been afflicted by their owners with one or more coats of
yellowish-brown stuff familiar to every American farmer who has ever
“primed” a big barn. A few houses have been clap-boarded on the outside
and some of these have been painted white.
The rest of the street view is snow, or, lacking that, a cobbled
pavement very rough and uneven, and lined on each side—sometimes on one
side only, or in the centre—with a narrow sidewalk of heavy planks laid
lengthwise over the otherwise open public sewer, a ditch about three
feet wide and from three to six feet deep. Woe be to him who goes
through rotten plank! It has been done.
So much for general scenic effects at Archangel. The Technical
Institute, used as Headquarters by the American Forces, is worth a
glance. It is a four-story solid-looking building about one hundred and
fifty feet square and eighty feet high, with a small court in the
centre. The outside walls of brick and stone are nearly four feet
thick, and their external surface is covered by pink-tinted plaster
which catches the thin light of the low-lying winter sun and causes the
building to seem to glow. On the front of the building there are huge
pillars rising from the second story balcony to the great Grecian gable
facing the river.
Inside, this great building is simple and severe, but rather pleasing.
Windows open into the court from a corridor running around the building
on each floor, and on the other side of the corridor are the doors of
the rooms once used as recitation and lecture halls, laboratories,
manual training shops, offices, etc. Outside, it was one of the city’s
imposing buildings; inside, it was well-appointed. To the people of the
city it was a building of great importance. It was worthy to offer the
Commander of the American troops.
Here Colonel Stewart set up his Headquarters. The British Commanding
General had his headquarters, the G. H. Q., N. R. E. F., in another
school building in the centre of the city, within close reach of the
Archangel State Capitol Building. Colonel Stewart’s headquarters were
conveniently near the two buildings which afterward were occupied and
fitted up for a receiving hospital and for a convalescent hospital
respectively, as related elsewhere, and not far either from the
protection of the regimental Headquarters Company quartered in Olga
Barracks.
Here the Commanding Officer of this expeditionary force of Americans
off up here near the North Pole on the strangest fighting mission ever
undertaken by an American force, tried vainly to keep track of his
widely dispersed forces. Up the railroad he had seen his third
battalion, under command of Major C. G. Young, go with General
Finlayson whom General Poole had ordered to take Vologda, four hundred
miles to the south. His first battalion, under Lieutenant Colonel
Corbley he had seen hurried off up the Dvina River under another
British Brigadier-General to take Kotlas hundreds of miles up the
river. His second battalion under Major J. Brooks Nichols was on duty
in Archangel and the nearby suburbs. These forces, and his 310th
Engineer Battalion and his Ambulance and Hospital Units were shifted
about by the British Generals and Colonels and Majors often without any
information whatever to Colonel Stewart, the American commanding
officer. He lost touch with his battalion and company commanders.
He had a discouraging time even in getting his few general orders
distributed to the American troops. No wonder that often an American
officer or soldier reporting in from a front by order or permission of
a British field officer, did not feel that American Headquarters was
his real headquarters and in pure ignorance was guilty of omitting some
duty or of failure to comply with some Archangel restriction that had
been ordered by American Headquarters. As to general orders from
American Headquarters dealing with the action of troops in the field,
those were so few and of so little impressiveness that they have been
forgotten. We must say candidly that the doughboy came to look upon
American Headquarters in Archangel as of very trifling importance in
the strange game he was up against. He knew that the strategy was all
planned at British G. H. Q., that the battle orders were written in the
British field officer’s headquarters, that the transportation and
supplies of food were under control of the British that altogether too
much of the hospital service was under control of the British. Somehow
the doughboy felt that the very limited and much complained about
service of his own American Supply Unit, that lived for the most part
on the fat of the land in Bakaritza, should have been corrected by his
commanding officer who sat in American Headquarters. And they felt,
whether correctly or not, that the court-martial sentences of Major C.
G. Young, who acted as summary court officer at Smolny after he was
relieved of his command in the field, were unnecessarily harsh. And
they blamed their commanding officer, Colonel Stewart, for not taking
note of that fact when he reviewed and approved them. The writers of
this history of the expedition think the doughboy had much to justify
his feeling.
V
WHY AMERICAN TROOPS WERE SENT TO RUSSIA
This Was A Much Mooted Question Among Soldiers—Partisan Politicians
Attacked With Vitriol—Partisan Explanations Did Not Explain—Red
Propaganda Helped Confuse The Case—Russians Of Archangel, Too, Were
Concerned—We Who Were There Think Of Those Pitiable Folk And Their
Hopeless Military And Political Situation That Tried Our Patience And
That Of The Directors Of The Expedition Who Undoubtedly Knew No Better
Than We Did.
To many people in America and England and France the North Russian
Expedition appears to have been an unwarrantable invasion of the land
of an ally, an ally whose land was torn by internal upheavals. It has
been charged that commercial cupidity conceived the campaign. Men
declare that certain members of the cabinet of Lloyd George and of
President Wilson were desirous of protecting their industrial holdings
in North Russia.
The editors of this work can not prove or disprove these allegations
nor prove or disprove the replies made to the allegations. We have not
the time or means to do so even if our interests, political or
otherwise, should prompt us to try it. From discussion of the partisan
attacks on and defense of the administration’s course of action toward
Russia in 1918-19, both of which are erratic and acrimonious, we plead
to be excused.
We shall tell the story of the genesis of the expedition as well as we
can. We do not profess to know all about it. It will be some time
before the calm historian can possess himself of all the facts. Till
such time we hope that this brief statement will stand. We offer it
hesitatingly with keen consciousness of the danger that it will
probably suit neither of the two parties in controversy over the
sending of troops to North Russia.
But we offer this straightforward story confidently to our late
comrades. They have entrusted us with the duty of writing the history
of what they did in North Russia as their bit in the Great World War.
And we know our comrades, at least, and we hope the general reader,
too, will credit us with writing in sincerity and good faith.
Early in 1918, for the Allied forces, it looked dark. The Germans were
able to neglect the crumbled-in Eastern Front and concentrate a tornado
drive on the Western Front. It was at last realized that the
controlling Bolshevik faction in Russia was bent on preventing the
resumption of the war on the Eastern Front and possibly might play its
feeble remnants of military forces on the side of the Germans. The
Allied Supreme Council at Versailles decided that the other allies must
go to the aid of their old ally Russia who had done such great service
in the earlier years of the war. On the Russian war front Germany must
be made again to feel pressure of arms. Organization of that front
would have to be made by efforts of the Allied Supreme War Council.
They had some forces to build on. Several thousand Czecho-Slovak troops
formerly on the Eastern Front had been held together after the
dissolution of the last Russian offensive in 1917. Their commander had
led them into Siberia. Some at that time even went as far as
Vladivostok. These troops had desired to go back to their own country
or to France and take part in the final campaign against the Germans.
There was no transportation by way of the United States. Negotiations
with the Bolshevist rulers of Russia, the story runs, brought promises
of safe passage westward across central Russia and then northward to
Archangel, thence by ship to France.
This situation in mind the Allied Supreme War Council urged a plan
whereby an Allied expedition of respectable size would be sent to
Archangel with many extra officers for staff and instruction work, to
meet the Czechs and reorganize and re-equip them, rally about them a
large Northern Russian Army, and proceed rapidly southward to
reorganize the Eastern Front and thus draw off German troops from the
hard pressed Western Front. This plan was presented to the Allied
Supreme War Council by a British officer and politician fresh from
Moscow and Petrograd and Archangel, enthusiastic in his belief in the
project.
The expedition was to be large enough to proceed southward without the
Czechs, sending them back to the West by the returning ships if their
morale should prove to be too low for the stern task to be essayed on
the restored Eastern Front. General Poole, the aforementioned British
officer in command, seems to have been very sure that the Bolsheviks
who had so blandly agreed to the passage of the Czechs through the
country would not object to the passage of the expedition southward
from Archangel, via Vologda, Petrograd and Riga to fight the Germans
with whom they, the Bolsheviki, had compacted the infamous
Brest-Litovsk treaty.
All this while, remember, the old allies of Russia had preserved a
studied neutrality toward the factional fight in Russia. They steadily
refused to recognize the Bolshevik government of Lenine and Trotsky.