the Germans in Finland where they menaced Petrograd and where their
extension of three divisions to the northward and eastward seemed to
forecast the establishment of submarine bases on the Murmansk and
perhaps even at Archangel where lay enormous stores of munitions
destined earlier in the war to be used by the Russians and Rumanians
against the Huns. At any rate, the port of Archangel would be one other
inlet for food supplies to reach the tightly blockaded Germans.
Since the autumn of 1914 military supplies of all kinds, chiefly made
in America and England, had been sent to Archangel for the use of the
Russian armies. At the time of the revolution against the old Czar
Nicholas, in 1917, there were immense stores in the warehouses of the
Archangel district and the Archangel-Vologda Railway had been widened
to standard gauge and many big American freight cars supplied to carry
those supplies southward. And these stores had been greatly augmented
during the Kerensky regime, the enthusiastic time immediately
subsequent to the fall of the Czar, when anti-German Russians were
exulting “Now the arch traitor is gone, we can really equip our
armies,” and when the Allies believed that after a few months of
confusion the revolutionary government would become a more trustworthy
ally than the old imperial government had been.
[Illustration: U.S. Official Photo
_Olga Barracks._]
[Illustration: U.S. Official Photo
_Street Car Strike in Archangel._]
[Illustration: U.S. Official Photo
_American Hospitals and Headquarters._]
[Illustration: U.S. Official Photo
_“Supply” C. canteen “Accommodates” Boys._]
[Illustration: U.S. Official Photo
_Red Cross Ambulances, Archangel._]
[Illustration: U.S. Official Photo
_“Cootie Mill” Operating at Smolny Annex of Convalescent Hospital._]
[Illustration: Wisckot
_Single Flat Strip of Iron on Plow point._]
[Illustration: Wagner
_Thankful for What at Home We Feed Pigs._]
Now, although Archangel was the chief port of entry for military
supplies to the new Russian government, the geographical situation of
the northern province, or rather state, of Archangel had left it rather
high and dry in the hands of a local government, which, so distantly
affiliated with Moscow and Petrograd, did not reflect fully either the
strength or weaknesses of the several regimes which succeeded one
another at the capital between the removal of the Czar and the machine
gun assumption of control by the bloody pair of zealots and tricksters,
Lenine and Trotzky. Consequently, when Kerensky disappeared the
government at Archangel did not greatly change in character.
To be sure, it had no army or military force of its own. The central
government sent north certain armed Red Guards, and agents of
government called “commissars,” who were to organize and control
additions to the Red Guards and to supervise also the civil government
of Archangel state, as much as possible. These people of the northern
state were indeed jealous of their rights of local government. And the
work of the Red agents in levying on the property and the man-power of
the North was passively resisted by these intelligent North Russians.
All this was of great interest to the Allied Supreme War Council
because of the danger that the war supplies would be seized by the
rapidly emboldened Bolshevik government and be delivered into the hands
of the Germans for use against the Allies. For since the Brest-Litovsk
treaty it had appeared from many things that the crafty hand of Germany
was inside the Russian Bolshevik glove.
Moreover, there were in North Russia, as in every other part, many
Russians who could not resign themselves to Bolshevik control, even of
the milder sort, nor to any German influence. Those in the Archangel
district banded themselves together secretly and sent repeated calls to
the Allies for help in ridding their territory of the Bolshevik Red
Guards and German agents, using as chief arguments the factors above
mentioned. While the anti-Bolshevists were unwilling to unmask in their
own state, for obvious reason, their call for help was made clear to
the outside world and furnished the Allied Supreme War Council just the
pretext for the expedition which it was planning for a purely military
purpose, namely, to reconstruct the old Eastern fighting front.
In fact, when a survey of the military resources of the European Allies
had disclosed their utter lack of men for such an expedition and it was
found that the only hope lay in drawing the bulk of the needed troops
from the United States forces, and when the statement of the cases in
the usual polite arguments brought from President Wilson a positive
refusal to allow American troops to go into Russia, it was only by the
emphasis, it is said, of the pathetic appeal of the North Russian
anti-Bolshevists, coupled with the stirring appeals of such famous
characters as the one-time leader of the Russian Women’s Battalion of
Death and the direct request of General Foch himself for the use of the
American troops there in Russia as a military necessity to win the war,
that the will of President Wilson was moved and he dubiously consented
to the use of American troops in the expedition.
Even this concession of President Wilson was limited to the one
regiment of infantry with the needed accompaniments of engineer and
medical troops. The bitter irony of this limitation is apparent in the
fact that while it allowed the Supreme War Council to carry out its
scheme of an Allied Expedition with the publicly announced purposes
before outlined, committing America and the other Allies to the
guarding of supplies at Murmansk and Archangel and frustrating the
plans of Germany in North Russia, it did not permit the Allied War
Council sufficient forces to carry out its ultimate and of course
secret purpose of reorganizing the Eastern Front, which naturally was
not to be advertised in advance either to Russians or to anyone. The
vital aim was thus thwarted and the expedition destined to weakness and
to future political and diplomatic troubles both in North Russia and in
Europe and America.
During the months spent in winning the participation of the United
States in an Allied Expedition to North Russia, England took some
preliminary steps which safeguarded the Murmansk Railway as far south
toward Petrograd as Kandalaksha.
Royal Engineers and Marines, together with a few officers and men from
French and American Military Missions, who had worked north with the
diplomatic corps, were thus for a dangerously long period the sole
bulwark of the Allies against complete pro-German domination of the
north of Russia. Some interesting stories could be told of the clever
secret work of the American officers in ferreting out the evidences in
black and white, of the co-operation of the German War Office with
Lenine and Trotsky. And stories of daring and pluck that saved men’s
lives and kept the North Russians from a despairing surrender to the
Bolsheviki.
Meanwhile England was taking measures herself to support these men so
as to form a nucleus for the larger expedition when it should be
inaugurated by the Allied Supreme War Council. But the total number of
British officers and men who could be spared for the purpose, in view
of the critical situation on the Western Front, was less than 1,200.
And these had to be divided between the widely separated areas of
Murmansk and Archangel. And the officers and men sent were nearly all,
to a man, those who had already suffered wounds or physical exhaustion
on the Western Front. This was late in June. About this time the plan
of the Allied Supreme War Council as already stated was, under strict
limitations, acceded to by President Wilson, and the doughboys of the
339th Infantry in July found themselves in England hearing about
Archangel and disgustedly exchanging their Enfields for the Russian
rifles.
For various reasons the command of the expedition was assigned by
General Foch to General Poole, the British officer who had been so
enthusiastic about rolling up a big volunteer army of North Russians to
go south to Petrograd and wipe out the Red dictatorate and re-establish
the old hard-fighting Russian Front on the East. Naturally, American
soldiers who fought that desperate campaign in North Russia now feel
free to criticize the judgment of General Foch in putting General Poole
in command. It appears from the experiences of the soldiers up there
that for military, for diplomatic and for political reasons it would
have been better to put an American general in command of the
expedition. And while we are at it we might as well have our little say
about President Wilson. We think he erred badly in judgment. He either
should have sent a large force of Americans into North Russia—as we did
into Cuba—a force capable of doing up the job quickly and thoroughly,
or sent none at all. He should have known that the American doughboy
fights well for a cause, but that a British general would have a hard
time convincing the Americans of the justice of a mixed cause. This is
confession of a somewhat blind prejudice which the American citizen has
against the aggressive action of British arms wherever on the globe
they may be seen in action, no matter how justifiable the ultimate turn
of events may prove the British military action to have been. We say
that this prejudice should have been taken into account when the
American doughboy was sent to Russia to fight under British command. It
might not be out of order to point out that the North Russian shared
with his American allies in that campaign the same prejudice,
unreasonable at times without doubt, but none the less painful
prejudice against the British command of the expedition. And all this
in spite of the fact that most of the British officers were personally
above reproach, and General Ironside, who soon succeeded the failing
Poole, was every inch of his six foot-four a man and a soldier, par
excellence.
The French were able to send only part of a regiment, one battalion of
Colonial troops and a machine gun company, who reached the Murmansk
late in July about the time the Americans were sailing from England.
They were soon sent on to Archangel, where political things were now
come to a head.
The Serbian battalion which had left Odessa at the time of the summer
collapse of the Russian armies in 1917 had gradually worked its way
northward from Petrograd on the Petrograd-Kola Railroad with the
intention of shipping for the Western fighting front by way of England.
They had been of potential aid to the Allied military missions during
the summer and now were permitted by the Serbian government to be
joined to the Allied expedition. They were accordingly put into
position along the Kola Railroad. These troops, of course, as well as
thousands of British troops which were stationed in the Murmansk and by
the British War Office were numbered in the North Russian Expeditionary
forces, were of no account whatever in the military activities of that
long fall and winter and spring campaign in the far away Archangel area
where the American doughboys for months, supported here and there by a
few British and French and Russians, stood at bay before the swarming
Bolos and battled for their lives in snow and ice.
The battalion of Italian troops with its company of skii troops which
sailed from England with the American convoy also went to the Murmansk
and all the American doughboy saw of Italians in the fighting area of
Archangel, North Russia, was the little handful of well dressed Italian
officers and batmen in the city of Archangel. Of course, we had plenty
of representation of Italian fighting blood right in our own ranks.
They were in the O. D. uniform and were American citizens. And of
course the same thing could be said of many another nationality that
was represented in the ranks of American doughboys and whose bravery in
battle and fortitude in hardships of cold and hunger gave evidence that
no one nationality has a corner on courage and “guts” and manhood. To
call the roll of one of those heroic fighting companies of doughboys or
engineers or medical or hospital companies in the olive drab would
evidence by the names of the men and officers that the best bloods of
Europe and of Asia were all pulsing in the American ranks.
The presence of British, French and American war vessels and the first
small bodies of troops encouraged the Murmansk Russian authorities to
declare their independence of the Red Moscow crowd and to throw in
their lot with the Allies in the work of combatting the agents of the
German War Office in the North. In return the Allies were to furnish
money, food and supplies. Early in July written agreement to this
effect had been signed by the Murmansk Russian authorities and all the
Allies represented, including the United States. It will be recalled
that Ambassador Francis had been obliged to leave Petrograd by the
Bolshevik rulers, and he had gone north into Murmansk.
The result of this agreement with the Murmansk and the arrival of
further troops at the Murmansk coast, together with the promise of more
to follow immediately, was to influence the Russian local government of
the state of Archangel to break with the hated Reds. And so, on August
1st, a quiet _coup d’etat_ was effected. The anti-Bolshevists came out
into the open. The Provisional North Russian Government was organized.
The people were promised an election and they accepted the situation
agreeably for they had detested the Red government. Two cargoes of food
had no little also to do with the heartiness of their acceptance of the
Allied military forces and the overturn of the Bolshevik government.
Within forty-eight hours came the military forces already mentioned,
the advance forces of the British that preceded the Allied expedition,
consisting of a huge British staff, a few British soldiers, a few
French and a detachment of fifty American sailors from the “Olympia.”
In a few days the battalion of French colonials sailed in from
Murmansk.
The coming of the troops prevented the counter _coup_ of the Reds. They
could only make feeble resistance. The passage up the delta of the
Dvina River and the actual landing while exciting to the jackies met
with little opposition. Truth to tell, the wily Bolsheviks had for many
weeks seen the trend of affairs, and, expecting a very much larger
expedition, had sent or prepared for hasty sending south by rail toward
Vologda or by river to Kotlas of all the military supplies and
munitions and movable equipment as well as large stores of loot and
plunder from the city of Archangel and suburbs. Count von Mirbach, the
German ambassador at Moscow, threatened Lenine and Trotsky that the
German army then glowering in Finland, across the way, would march on
Petrograd unless the military stores were brought out of Archangel.
The rearguard of the Bolshevik armed forces was disappearing over the
horizon when the American jackies seized engines and cars at Archangel
Preestin and Bakaritza, which had been saved by the hindering
activities of anti-Bolshevik trainmen, and dashed south in pursuit.
There is a heroic little tale of an American Naval Reserve lieutenant
who with a few sailors took a lame locomotive and two cars with a few
rifles and two machine guns, mounted on a flat car, and hotly gave
chase to the retreating Red Guards, routing them in their stand at
Issaka Gorka where they were trying to destroy or run off locomotives
and cars, and then keeping their rear train moving southward at such a
rate that the Reds never had time to blow the rails or burn a bridge
till he had chased them seventy-five miles. There a hot box on his
improvised armored train stopped his pursuit. He tore loose his machine
guns and on foot reached the bridge in time to see the Reds burn it and
exchange fire with them, receiving at the end a wound in the leg for
his great gallantry.
The Red Guards were able to throw up defenses and to bring up
supporting troops. A few days later the French battalion fought a
spirited, but indecisive, engagement with the Reds. It was seen that he
intended to fight the Allies. He retreated southward a few miles at a
time, and during the latter part of August succeeded in severely
punishing a force of British and French and American sailors, who had
sought to attack the Reds in flank. And it was this episode in the
early fighting that caused the frantic radiogram to reach us on the
Arctic Ocean urging the American ships to speed on to Archangel to save
the handful of Allied men threatened with annihilation on the railroad
and up the Dvina River. And we were to go into it wholehearted to save
them, and later find ourselves split up into many detachments and
cornered up in many another just such perilous position but with no
forces coming to support us.
The inability of the Allied Supreme War Council to furnish sufficient
troops for the North Russian expedition, and the delay of the United
States to furnish the part of troops asked of her, very nearly
condemned the undertaking to failure before it was fairly under way.
However, as the ultimate success of the expedition depended in any
event on the success of the Allied operations in far off Siberia in
getting the Czecho-Slovak veterans and Siberian Russian allies through
to Kotlas, toward which they were apparently fighting their way under
their gallant leader and with the aid of Admiral Kolchak, and because
there was a strong hope that General Poole’s prediction of a hearty
rallying of North Russians to the standards of the Allies to fight the
Germans and Bolsheviki at one and the same time, the decision of the
Supreme War Council was, in spite of President Wilson’s opposition to
the plan, to continue the expedition and strengthen it as fast as
possible. To the American soldier at this distance it looks as though
the French and British, perhaps in all good faith, planned to muddle
along till the American authorities could be shown the fitness or the
necessity of supporting the expedition with proper forces. But this was
playing with a handful of Americans and other Allied troops a great
game of hazard. Only those who went through it can appreciate the peril
and the hazard.
To the credit of the American doughboys and Tommies and Poilus and
others who went into North Russia in the fall of 1918 let it be said
that they smashed in with vim and gallant action, thinking that they
were going to do a small bit away up there in the north to frustrate
the military and political plans of the Germans. And although they were
not all interested in the Russian civil war at the beginning, they did
learn that the North Russian people’s ideal of government was the
representative government of the Americans, while the Red Guards whom
they were fighting stood for a government which on paper at its own
face value represented only one class and offered hatred to all other
classes. When it tried to put into effect its so-called constitution
that had been dreamed out of a nightmare of oppression and hate, it
failed completely. Machine gun beginning begot cruel offspring of
provisional courts of justice and sword-revised soviets of the people
so that packed soviets and Lenine-picked delegates and Trotsky-ridden
ministers made the actual soviet government as much resemble the ideal
soviet government as a wild-cat mining stock board of directors
resembles a municipal board of public works. And the world knows now,
if it did not in 1918-19, that the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet
Republic was, and is, a highly centralized tyranny, frankly called by
its own leaders “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” The Russian
people prayed for “a fish and received a serpent.”
VI
ON THE FAMOUS KODISH FRONT IN THE FALL
“K” Company Hurries To Save Force “B”—Importance Of Kodish
Front—Hazelden’s Force Destroyed—First Fight At Seletskoe—Both Sides
Burn Bridges—Desperate Fighting At Emtsa River—Capture Of
Kodish—Digging In—We Lose Village After Days Of Hard Fighting—Trenches
And Blockhouses.
Nowhere did the Yanks in North Russia find the fighting fiercer than
did those who were battling their way toward Plesetskaya on the famous
Kodish front. Woven into their story is that of the most picturesque
American fighter and doughtiest soldier of the many dauntless officers
and men who struggled and bled in that strange campaign. This man was
Captain Michael Donoghue, commanding officer of “K” Company, 339th
Infantry. He afterward was promoted in the field to rank of major and
his old outfit of Detroit boys proudly remember that “K” stands for
Kodish where they and their commander earned the plaudits of the
regiment.
It will be remembered that the third battalion was hurried from
troopship to troop train and steamed south as fast as the rickety
Russki locomotives of the 1880 type could wobble, and it will be
remembered that Captain Donoghue, the senior captain of that battalion,
was chosen to go with half of his “K” Company to the relief of a mixed
force of American sailors and British Royal Scots and French infantry
who had been surrounded, it was rumored, and were in imminent danger of
annihilation.
With his little force of one hundred and twenty men, including a
medical officer with eight enlisted medical men, transporting his
rations and extra munitions on the dumpy little Russki _droskie_, the
American officer led out of Obozerskaya at three o’clock in the
afternoon, bivouacked for the night somewhere on the trail in a cold
drizzle, and reached Volshenitsa, the juncture of the trails from
Seletskoe and Emtsa, about noon of the 8th of September.
Four versts beyond Volshenitsa the column passed the scene of the
battle between the Bolos and “B” Force. Gear and carts scattered around
and two or three fresh graves told that this was serious business. A
diary of an American sailor and the memoranda of a British officer,
broken off suddenly on the 30th of August, that were picked up told of
the adventures of the handful of men we were going to hunt. More
explanations of the genesis of this Kodish front is now in order.
Consideration of the map will show that Kodish was of great strategic
Importance. Truth to tell it was of more importance than our High
Command at first estimated. The Bolshevik strategists were always aware
of its value and never permitted themselves to be neglectful of it.
Trotsky knew that the strategy and tactics of the winter campaign would
make good use of the Kodish road. Indeed it was seen in the fall by
General Poole that a Red column from Plesetskaya up the Kodish road was
a wedge between the railroad forces and the river forces, always
imperiling the Vaga and Dvina forces with being cut off if the Reds
came strong enough.
The first movement on Kodish by the Allied troops had been made by “B”
force under the command of Col. Hazelden of the British army. With
about two hundred men composed of French soldiers, a few English
soldiers, American sailors from the Olympic, and some local Russian
volunteers, he had pushed up the Dvina and Vaga to Seletskoe and
operating from there had sent a party of French even as far as Emtsa
River, a few miles north of Kodish.
But before he could attack Kodish, Hazelden was ordered to strike
across the forest area and attack the Reds in the rear near Obozerskaya
where the Bolshevik rear guard with its excellent artillery strategist
was stubbornly holding the Allied Force “A.” Passing through Seletskoe
he left the Russian volunteers to oppose the Reds in Kodish, and guard
his rear. But these uncertain troops fled upon approach of the Bolos
and about the first of September Col. Hazelden instead of being in a
position to demoralize the Reds on the railroad by a swift blow from
behind, found himself in desperate defense, both front and rear, and
beleagured in the woods and swamps some twenty-seven versts east of
Obozerskaya.