[Frontispiece: Sergeant William H. Bowman, 339th United States
Infantry (missing from source book)
ARCHANGEL
THE AMERICAN WAR WITH RUSSIA
By
A Chronicler
(John Cudahy)
_Nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice._--OTHELLO
CHICAGO
A. C. McCLURG & CO.
1924
_Dedicated to the memory_
_of_
SERGEANT WILLIAM H. BOWMAN
who died of wounds
received in the action of
1st March, 1919
near Toulgas, Russia
CONTENTS
Archangel and Gallipoli
Russia and the Vast Unknown
Objects of the Expedition
The Plan of Campaign
The Railway
Onega
Kodish
The River
The Vaga
Pinega
Retreat
ILLUSTRATIONS
Sergeant William H. Bowman, 339th United States Infantry (missing
from source book) ... _Frontispiece_
Archangel, where the East comes abruptly face to face with the West
Patrols with webfoot snowshoes went forth on the snow
Where a mill flaps its awkward wings
The blockhouses where men were crippled and maimed and shell-shocked
so far away from gala Archangel
An outpost on the railway
The fighting Canadians
A Bolshevik scout
The only means of transportation after the rivers were closed
When the snow mounted high the fortifications had been made safe
against any projectile save a six-inch shell
Patrols were often clad in white smocks
Major General Sir William E. Ironside
MAPS
Archangel Province
The Murman and Vologda Railways
Situation Map
ARCHANGEL AND GALLIPOLI
"This war was one of the most unjust ever waged. It was an instance
of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies."
_From Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant._
Commenting on the war with Mexico.
ARCHANGEL
THE AMERICAN WAR WITH RUSSIA
I
ARCHANGEL AND GALLIPOLI
"_Theirs not to reason why;
Theirs but to do and die._"
Many people have asked me about the Russian campaign, why American
soldiers went to Siberia, and what they did after they got there, for
the general notion seems to be that Russia and Siberia are
synonymous, and that the Russian Expedition, whatever its hazy
purpose was, was centered about Vladivostok, and that in this far
eastern port, a few American and Allied soldiers "marked time," while
their comrades on the Western Front fought out, and eventually
conquered, in the greatest of all wars.
One American officer was actually ordered to join his command at
Archangel, "via Vladivostok," and the order was issued by the War
Department of the United States. Six thousand miles of inaccessible
territory separated these two Russian ports, and the average American
soldier who went out from Archangel in the fall of 1918, and, during
the desolate winter months that followed, fought for his life along
the Vologda railway, or far up the Dvina river, or in the snows of
Pinega and Onega valleys, never knew that Brigadier General William
S. Graves of the United States army, with thirteen hundred
eighty-eight regulars and forty-three officers, had landed at
Vladivostok on 4th September, 1918, and remained there after the
Archangel fiasco had terminated. There was no conscious liaison
between this American company of the far East and that of the far
North, each performing burlesque antics in fantastic sideshows, while
in the West, the greatest drama of all time was in its denouement,
and a tense world trembled as it watched.
Whether there was any political connection between the Archangel
Expedition and the Vladivostok Expedition is for the statesmen to
answer. Surely there never was any military connection. Obviously,
there never could be any support or communication between the two
forces, and the American soldier at the Arctic Circle who was not
told the reasons why he faced death and unknown dangers there, and
why he was weakened and broken, and made old by privation and intense
cold, never knew that there was a Siberian Expedition, and does not
know even to this day.
So I have thought it worth while to tell, as faithfully as I could,
the story of this strange war of North Russia, an insignificant
flickering in the glare of the mighty world conflict, but inspiring
in its human significance, its exploits of moral strength and sheer
resolution and godlike courage. I have considered the campaign as a
trial by ordeal of American manhood, that tested our souls to the
depths, like Gallipoli tested the British. It was like Gallipoli in
the hopeless odds encountered at every turn, in the vague outline of
the commitment at the outset; in its distressing losses; its
hardships and privations; its tragical ending.
But it was very vitally unlike Gallipoli, because in the war with
Russia the soldier never knew why. The Australians, in their effort
to force the Dardanelles, were exalted by the belief that theirs was
an important operation in the war, and the British soldier went to
battle the Turks, convinced that if he died, it was to save some
little spot in a Cheshire or Sussex village, which to him meant
England. It was a holy war, and men were fired with the high,
selfless devotion of the Crusaders. An arrogant, brutal power
swaggered abroad, menacing liberty, and the home and all things of
the spirit. If German Imperialism engulfed civilization, there would
be nothing left to live for anyway.
But there were no such reflections to sustain the soldier in Russia.
The Armistice came, and he remembers the day as one of sanguinary
battle, when his dwindling numbers suffered further grievous losses,
and he was sniped at, stormed with shrapnel and shaken by high
explosive shells. He heard of the cessation of blood-letting in
France and Belgium, but for many desolate, despairing months, he
stood to his guns, witnessing his comrades killed and mutilated, the
wounded lying in crude, dirty huts, makeshifts of dressing stations,
then in sledges, dragged many excruciating miles over the snow to the
rear, where often they got little better attention than at the front
lines. He knew his physical strength was failing under the
unrelieved monotony of the Arctic exploration ration; he saw others
with scabies and disgusting diseases of malnutrition, and wondered
how long before he too would be in the same way. He felt his sanity
reeling in the short-lived, murky, winter days, the ever encircling
menace of impending disaster and annihilation. He asked his officers
why he fought, and why he was facing an enemy vastly superior to him
in strength and equipment and armament, and why he was separated from
his family and home and the ways of life, and when the end would
come. But his officers were silent under this inquisition. They
asked the same questions themselves, and got no reply. The colonel
who commanded this fated regiment told his soldiers that he could
give no reason for them to oppose the enemy other than that their
lives and those of the whole expedition depended upon successful
resistance.
So soldierlike, he "carried on," while the dreary skies above him
menaced death, and death stalked the encompassing forests of the
scattered front lines, and the taint of death was in the air he
breathed.
In the end, and when nearly all hope had fled, he returned homeward,
stricken in health and dazed in spirit, where people moved as before,
and were agitated by the same concerns, as if nothing had occurred to
upset the whole scheme of things and uproot forever the old standards
of values and ambition and morality. They noticed a queer look in
his eyes and that he was customarily silent, often introspective.
They manifested a casual interest in his great adventure. They never
could understand.
Both expeditions were conceived by the British High Command and both
were conducted by the execution of British military orders. Perhaps
therein is the underlying philosophy of North Russia and Gallipoli;
this attachment of the British mind to an astricted faith in England
and her imperial destiny to rule the peoples of the world,
contemptuous of obstacles and difficulties and perils in unknown,
alien lands that appear very real to other than British mental
processes.
"We'll just rush up there and re-establish the great Russian
army--reorganize the vast forces of the Tsar," said an ebullient
officer in England, wearing the red tabs and hatband of the General
Staff. "One good Allied soldier can outfight twenty Bolsheviks," was
the usual boast of the Commanding Officer in the early days of the
fighting.
And it was a boast that was made good in the furious winter combats,
when, standing at bay, the scattered companies, with no place to
retreat, save the open snow, stood off many times their number of the
enemy. In these decisive trials, the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon ever
asserted its superiority, but one to twenty is not a very comfortable
ratio upon which to form an offensive campaign. And the war against
Russia was conceived as an offensive campaign, whatever it turned out
to be.
RUSSIA THE VAST UNKNOWN
"The Emperor fully realized the nature of the task he had before him.
To defend himself in Italy, Germany or even Poland against the Tsar
was one thing; to invade the vast empire of Russia, was another task
altogether--a task colossal, if not appalling. And arrayed against
him were two fearful enemies--the Russian Army and winter."
WATSON'S _Napoleon_.
II
RUSSIA THE VAST UNKNOWN
Sometimes we are amused by foreign littérateurs and commentators, who
come to our great country for a few crowded weeks of teas and
symposia, gatherings of the intelligencia in our metropolis, and
perhaps a dash into the mushroom dilettantism of Chicago, to set sail
and compose screeds and screeds of America, her ways and her people,
their manners and their customs.
Superficial vaporings, but far better composed and built by far on
firmer ground than the idle opinions of those few Americans who have
gone to the vast, far stretching empire of the Slavs, and glibly
vouchsafed their ex cathedra views thereon.
The dominions of Great Russia were spread from the Baltic east to the
Japan Sea, and from above the Arctic Circle far south to the Caspian
and the Black Sea and Lake Baikal in Siberia. They comprised eight
million six hundred and fifty thousand square miles of varied
territory, nearly three times that of the United States, and were
peopled by heterogeneous people, numbering one hundred and eighty
million, as estimated, for no census or even approximate count has
ever been attempted.
There were the Finns and the Letts, the Lithuanians, the Jews, the
Mordvinians, the Estonians, the Siberians, the Great Russians, the
Little Russians, the Red Russians, and the White Russians of the
Central Provinces, the Cossacks of the south, and the Tartars of the
Caucasus; all with no conscious unity, no national identity, not a
single common impulse or purpose or interest. In many instances,
without a communion of language.
The total length of railways in 1917 was thirty-four thousand miles,
or less than one-eighth of that of our country. Of these one hundred
and eighty million Russians, nearly eighty per cent are moujiks,
docile, patient serfs, liberated scarcely sixty years ago by
Alexander II, and still shackled by the shackles of their serfdom,
woeful ignorance, cowed spirit and afflicting poverty.
The remaining twenty per cent are survivors of the fading nobility
and the bourgeoisie, or middle class, who have acquired wealth and
consequent social rank without claim to nobility of birth. These
last are hated with an intense, irrational hatred by the Bolsheviki.
The noble class, the Russian of Turgenev, supersensitive, highstrung,
supercultivated, almost to the point of degeneration, is fast
vanishing with the passing of the last vestige of the Romanoff
regime, and soon will be a thing of the past. This intolerant caste
for centuries had dwelt in idleness on great landed estates. It was
as alien to the poor moujik as if of an entirely distinct race. I
met a few of these highborn on the streets of Archangel, whence they
had fled from the murderous Reds in the cities of Moscow and
Petrograd. Elegant gentlemen they were, in all the glittering
panoply of Imperial army officers, and manners the extreme in
politesse; very pompous, extremely impressive. They did not conceal
their contempt of the crawling moujik; he was a swine, and when the
word was hissed in Russian, it sounded very swinish.
The serf and the highborn, the swaggering, objectionable bourgeoisie,
the moujik and his animal ignorance, the intelligencia, and his
superculture, each separated from the other by an abysmal unspanable
gulf; and the various Russian races so dissimilar in thought and
living, in customs, even in language, all nevertheless were kept in
some semblance of cohesion by the brutal, disciplinary methods of the
Tsar and the cooperating spiritual guidance of the Russian State
Catholic Church, of which the Tsar was the Little Father.
San Francisco is as acutely conscious of national affairs in
Washington, as New York, and more so. But this is because the finest
transportation system in the world makes it possible to journey from
one city to the other in a few days, and because every American is an
ardent disciple of our great public press.
But Vladivostok knows nothing of Petrograd, and Petrograd knows
little of Archangel, and in the little villages, where the people
live, the world beyond is clothed in impenetrable mystery; for there
are no railways to these villages. No news comes in, and if news
came, there are few among the moujiks who could read it.
It is well to keep these things in mind when men speak of Russia, as
if overnight it could formulate a concerted policy and engage in a
purpose backed by preponderant control of the Russian people. Russia
is not a nation, it is an immense, unwieldy empire, a giant of
tremendous strength, with undreamt-of potentialities, capable of
colossal deeds, but without authoritative, united control or
direction; entirely unconscious of any national entity.
When Nicholas abdicated in March, 1917, it was an anxious world that
viewed the experimental government of Prince Lvoff. Russia was an
important ally, but she had made heroic sacrifices and had lost five
millions of men; if she faltered now, the world might be lost. And
there were rumors of a separate peace.
A few months after the downfall of the Tsar, Kerensky, as Premier,
issued a manifesto expressing undying allegiance to the sacred cause
of the Allied Nations, and shortly delivered to the army his famous
Prikaz, which:
a. Abolished the penalty of death for disobedience of essential
military discipline.
b. Abolished soldierly courtesy and the salute. Officers were
henceforth to be known as tvarishi, comrades, and all social
distinctions between them and the common soldier were abrogated.
c. Meetings of soldiers to discuss the conduct of military affairs
were permitted.
Officers were simply unmanned of any effective authority. They were
permitted to administer and instruct their organization, but all
disciplinary measures were passed upon by a committee of soldiers,
and so obedience to any order was a matter for ultimate ruling by
such a soldier committee and not by an officer. This was democracy
run riot, individual liberty gone stark mad. A few weeks after
Kerensky took command, one million five hundred thousand Russian
soldiers, grown weary of the tedium and the hazards of the front,
quit the army and returned to their homes.
Thus by one foolhardy, ill-advised measure, an army became a rabble.
Discipline, as essential to the military as blood is essential to
sustain a physical body, vanished, and the collapse of Russia began
with Kerensky.
[Illustration: Archangel, where the East comes abruptly face to face
with the West]
After the entry of the United States into the war in April, 1917,
President Wilson was uneasy about Russia and her future course
against the common enemy. Emissaries were therefore sent to learn of
conditions first hand. Headed by the Honorable Elihu Root, as
Ambassador Extraordinary, these reached Petrograd on the 13th June,
1917. Charles P. Crane, Cyrus H. McCormick of Illinois, and General
Scott, the American Chief of Staff, accompanied Mr. Root. The
emissaries met Kerensky, talked with several military and labor
leaders, attended many banquets, made as many good speeches, and
reported to the President in Washington on 12th August of the same
year.
This report was made in confidence to the President, and even at the
late date of the present writing, all requests to examine it have
been denied by the State Department, on the grounds that "Divulgence
is incompatible with the public interests."
But shortly afterwards, Mr. Root gave out an interview, which
purported to express the views of the delegation: that they had come
back with faith in Russia; faith in Russian qualities of character
that are essential tests of competency and self government; faith in
the purpose, the persistence and the power of the Russian people to
keep themselves free.
Many American bankers, believing in Mr. Root, manifested kindred
faith by the exchange of good American dollars for Russian rubles,
despite the fact that the Russian government was hopelessly bankrupt
and was showing an operating deficit of milliards of rubles.
General Scott visited the Russian front and witnessed the offensive
which resulted in the taking of Kovel and Lemberg. He conferred with
Generals Brussiloff, Korniloff, and Erdeli and their staffs, and
reported to the American Secretary of War that Russia would stay in
the war "if given even a part of the aid she asks."
Three months before the debacle, the Secretary of State, Mr. Lansing,
assured the American people that Russia was stronger than she had
been for some time, both from the government point of view and the
military point of view.
The government point of view? The outstanding feature of the Russian
Government "point of view" has always been the venal disposition of
the High Command; the shameful, heartless, conscienceless corruption
of persons in authority. Everyone knew this who knew Imperial
Russia. At the trial of General Sukhomlinov, Minister for War,
General Yanushkevitch, former Chief of Russian General Staff,
testified that in the retreat from Galicia, during the summer of
1915, there was only one rifle for every ten soldiers. The soldiers
in the rear had to wait until their comrades on the firing line were
killed so that they might have their rifles. The Russians had no
shells, and the Germans knowing this, set their guns two thousand
yards off and shot down one helpless regiment after the other.
Many other examples of pitiful defenselessness could be cited at a
time when the Allies loaned hundreds of millions of dollars to Russia
for arms and military equipment, and Russia had these munitions, but
far back of the front lines.
We have viewed Russian affairs as we have viewed Mexico, with
American provincial eyes instead of attempting to judge from a
Russian angle. Gladstone said that a nation guided by provincial
statesmen was doomed for perdition, and, by reason of our
provincialism, American statecraft striving to cope with Russia was
hopelessly handicapped at the outset. This wholesale scandal and
shameless corruption in high circles was typically Russian, an
essential premise upon which to form a judgment of the Russian
situation, but a premise totally unknown to persons unfamiliar with
Russian character and Russian conditions.
Democracy assumes intelligence, but most important of all,
self-control. Had we been familiar with the Russian people, is it
likely that our State Department would have given such unstinted
confidence to the dreamer, Kerensky? For like all countries where
ignorance stifles the progress of struggling national life a strong
unhesitant hand was needed to guide the nascent Russian democracy,
and instead of resolution Kerensky presented oratory and by his
Prikaz and vacillating policies rapidly lost his grip upon the army.
General Korniloff attempted to rally the demoralized forces, restored
the death penalty and strove to bring out of the chaos created by
Kerensky, some likeness of coordination, but there was a division in
adherence to the Premier and the General, and in the end both
Korniloff and Kerensky failed. Probably no man could have succeeded;
the seeds of destruction had germinated and struck root. It was too
late.
The revolution of the Bolsheviks took place on 7th November, 1917,
and in February following was announced the Peace Treaty of
Brest-Litovsk, whereby the provinces of Russian Poland, Courland,
Lithuania, and Estonia came under German control, giving Germany an
important Baltic littoral. Turkey, the ally of Germany, was to
receive back all territory in Asia Minor occupied since the war, and
in addition the districts of Kars and Erivan and Batum. Germany and
Turkey controlled the Caucasus, the boundaries of which were to be
restored as they existed before the Russian-Turkish War of 1877.
During the civil war that followed in the Ukraine, the Germans
occupied the port of Sevastopol, and the Austrians took Odessa.
Germany got vast stores of guns and war material, thirteen thousand
three hundred fifty miles of railway, more than one-third of the
entire Russian rail system, a large amount of rolling stock,
seventy-three per cent of Russian iron fields and eighty-nine per
cent of her coal.
The war in the East was over, one hundred and forty-seven German and
Austrian Divisions were released for the Western Front.
OBJECTS OF THE EXPEDITION
"Shall the military power of any nation or group of nations be
suffered to determine the fortunes of peoples over whom they have no
right to rule except the right of force?"
WOODROW WILSON--27th September, 1918.
III
OBJECTS OF THE EXPEDITION
It is said of the Bolsheviks, that they are a terrorist, minority
party, rode to power by the seizure of every available machine gun in
Russia and maintain their sway by the same forceful persuasion.
One of the _intelligencia_ once told me, that of every hundred
Russians, only two were Bolsheviks, and the remaining ninety-eight
were cowed into submission by the methods of the desperado.
This, to enlightened, high-spirited America is a preposterous
statement, but Russia is not America. Nor has she America's schools,
nor America's great railways, nor the public press of America.
At Brest-Litovsk, Russia was stripped of nearly all war supply and
munitions by the unsparing Germans, and what was left was seized by
the belligerent Soviets.
Now, even in proud America, a resolute man back of a six shooter has
been known to hold up an entire train load of people. And whether
the Soviets are backed by the sanction of the masses, or whether as
the Imperialists would have us believe, they are an unprincipled,
bullying minority, they are in truth and fact the de facto government
and represent the sovereignty of Russia in the comity of nations.
For six years Lenine and Trotsky have ruled, while the ministries of
America, France, England and Italy have undergone complete
transformation with the changing judgments of these troublous times,
and now, begrudgingly, Russia; Russia of the Soviet Party,
proletarian Russia, anarchistic, "nihilistic" Russia is given a seat
at the international conference table of Lausanne, Great Britain has
officially recognized the Soviets, and clamorous politicians in this
country (even one statesman), are emphatically demanding recognition
by the United States.
The Bolsheviks derived their inspiration from the Russian anarchist,
Bakunin, an apostle of terror and violence. Bolshevik comes from the
Russian word _bolshinstvo_, the majority. The name was used for the
first time in 1903, when Nicolai Lenine split the Social Democratic
party in two and assumed leadership of the majority. Lenine's real
name was Zederblum, that of Trotsky, Bronstein.
The moving purpose of Bolshevism is to organize a great international
revolution, affecting all countries. A revolution that will
eradicate forever the hated capitalist class, and the despised small
proprietors and entrepreneurs, known as bourgeoisie. Bolshevism is
openly an enemy of democracy. It has no tolerance for any class save
the proletarian. In the Bolshevik era, only the proletariat has any
claim. Bolshevism is autocracy, autocracy of the proletariat. A
ruthless autocracy that would utterly destroy every social group
except this favored one.
Directly he assumed power, Lenine put into effect the Land Decree,
which abolished the title of landlords to real estate and confiscated
all landed estates, except the small holdings of the peasants. All
employers of labor were suppressed, the six-hour day was established
in industrial enterprises, and all employees were to have a voice in
the management.
There is naught in this program which can be reconciled with German
Imperialism, yet many statesmen and soldiers in Allied councils were
convinced that an alliance existed between the Bolsheviks and
Germany. But it is impossible to conceive of two more extreme
opponents in political philosophy, for the Prussian Junkers believed
devoutly in the divine commission of kings, as enunciated by the
Kaiser himself; and the Bolsheviks, hating every suggestion of
imperialism with an intense, raging hatred, threatened death to every
king, and recognized, as qualified to rule or govern, none save the
proletariat.
Only one tenet did Bolshevism and Prussian militarism have in common,
i.e., they were both invincibly opposed to democracy. Both
archenemies of political justice, as we Americans understand
political justice.
The military leaders and statesmen at Berlin beheld with serious
alarm the Revolution of November, 1917. They loathed the Bolsheviks
and feared the effect of their insidious propaganda on the German
masses. The German Chancellor, Von Bethmann, was obsessed with the
fear of Bolshevism, and Ludendorff writes bitterly of the grave error
in failing to crush the Soviet Party and to openly take sides with
its opponents in Russia. He speaks of the lowered morale of the
Eastern German Divisions; how several of them proved utterly
worthless in the battles of France, as a consequence of coming in
contact with the Bolsheviks; how the Bolshevik revolutionary ideas
corroded the spirit of the people at home, and had more to do, than
the military defeat, with the downfall of the German Government.
And the Soviet leaders returned the venom of Berlin with even greater
virulency. They denounced the Brest-Litovsk agreement, stigmatizing
it as: "The rape of Russia," and in their propaganda repeatedly
expressed imperishable hatred of the German Imperialists. Lenine
withdrew from the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk on 11th February,
1918, and refused to accede to the harsh demands of Germany.
Thereupon, the Ukraine was immediately invaded, and on 1st March, the
Germans occupied Kiev, the capital, holding a line to Reval on the
Gulf of Finland, through Estonia, Pskov, Vilebsk and Mogilev. The
helpless Russians could do nothing but submit, and under duress
signed the treaty on 3rd March, 1918.
Still has it been affirmed by Allied statesmen time and repeatedly
that the Bolsheviks were a willing party to the Brest-Litovsk pact,
and that Moscow and Berlin were conspiring for the destruction of all
Western civilization.
In his Fourteen Point address to Congress on 8th January, 1918,
President Wilson expressed deep sympathy with Russia and enunciated
Point VI as one of the cardinal principles for which the Allies
fought:
VI. The evacuation of all Russian territory and such a settlement of
all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest
cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her an
unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent
determination of her own political development and national policy,
and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations
under institutions of her own choosing; and, more than a welcome,
assistance also of every kind that she may need and may herself
desire. The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the
months to come will be the acid test of their good will, of their
comprehension of her needs as distinguished from their own interests.
[Illustration: Archangel Province]
On 11th March, 1918, on the eve of its meeting to pass upon the
question of the acceptance or rejection of the Brest-Litovsk terms,
the President sent a message of friendship to the all Russian
Congress of Soviets, which contained this pledge:
Although the government of the United States is unhappily not now in
a position to render the direct and effective aid it would wish to
render, I beg to assure the people of Russia, through the Congress,
that it will avail itself of every opportunity to secure for Russia
once more complete sovereignty and independence in her own affairs
and full restoration in her great role in the life of Europe and the
modern world. The whole heart of the people of the United States is
with the people of Russia in the attempt to free themselves forever
from autocratic government and become masters of their own life.
Many contend that if the Allies had stood by the de facto government
of Russia, as President Wilson's words gave promise of doing, the
disastrous treaty would never have been accepted.
Questions have been addressed to the then American Secretary of State
asking: Did the administration know at the time of the Brest-Litovsk
negotiations:
1. That the Soviet government represented by Lenine and Trotsky was
opposed to the projected treaty and signed it only because of the
physical impossibility of resisting German demands unless some of the
Allies came to its aid?
2. That Lenine and Trotsky gave a note to Colonel Raymond Robbins of
the Red Cross, stating to the President of the United States that
they were opposed to the treaty and would not sign if the United
States would give food and arms to the Russians?
The reply of Mr. Lansing was that answers to these questions were not
compatible with the public interest.
On 12th December, 1918, Senator Johnson asked this question in the
United States Senate:
Is it true that the British High Commissioner, sent to Russia after
the Bolsheviki revolution because of his knowledge and experience in
the Russian situation, after four months in Russia, stated over his
signature that the Soviet government had cooperated in aiding the
Allies, and that he believed that _intervention in cooperation with
the Soviet government was feasible as late as the fifth of May, 1918_?
No spokesman for the administration, or anyone else, ever answered or
attempted to answer this question.
After Brest-Litovsk, it was generally believed that the ambitions of
Germany in Russia were:
1. To recruit her war wasted divisions from the great number of
Austrian and German prisoners in Russia.
2. To exploit the great natural resources of the Ukraine, Courland,
Lithuania and Estonia.
3. To align on her eastern frontier buffer states from Finland to
the Caucasus with Persia as the last link in the chain.
4. To seize great stores of war munitions at Archangel and
Vladivostok.
There was also some credence in the rumor that Germany sought to
establish submarine bases at Murmansk and Petchenga in Finland.
Murmansk, on the Kola Peninsula, is the only port of North Russia not
closed for nearly half the year. During the months of winter, from
December until the middle of June, Archangel, Kem, Onega and
Kandalaksh on the White Sea are sealed by effective barriers of ice,
and even Petrograd, several hundred miles further south on the
Baltic, is closed until late in April. But the Cape current of the
Gulf Stream swings around the northern coast of the Kola Peninsula,
and at Murmansk there is an excellent natural harbor, which is always
open, with thirty-two feet of water in shore, and a high coast line,
giving splendid protection against storm. From this valuable ice
free port, the Murman railway extends three hundred miles to Kem and
continues through Petrozavodsk on the west shore of Lake Onega, six
hundred miles further to Petrograd.
The completion of this, the most northern railroad, is a triumph of
imagination and courage and invincible resolution. The Russian
engineer, Goriatchkovshy, inspired by the necessity of his country
having a means of inlet for munitions and supplies during the war
(for the Trans-Siberian railway could carry only about one-seventh of
such supplies), laid the tracks over seemingly bottomless tundra and
conquered in the face of most disheartening discouragements.
A great number of German prisoners and one hundred thousand Russian
laborers worked to complete the heroic enterprise. Experts predicted
that with the melting of the ice in spring, the tracks would
disappear in the marshes, but Goriatchkovshy had reckoned with the
elements. The Murman railway is operating today. It has a hauling
capacity of thirty-five hundred tons a day, the maximum handling
facilities of Murmansk port, and many a lonely soldier, snowbound in
North Russia, during the tragic winter of 1919, has the Murman
railway and its creator, Goriatchkovshy, to thank for the messages
from far off America, that came to Murmansk and were brought to
Archangel by Obozerskaya on the Vologda railway, and then relayed by
droshky and the faithful Russian pony to a solitary sentinel post
somewhere in the great white reaches of the interior.
Very close to the Murman road is Finland, which, because of its
remoteness from the Russian capital, had always exercised a limited
autonomy, and following the Kerensky Revolution of March, 1917,
announced by the action of the Finnish Diet, its complete
independence.
A civil war between Red Guards and White Guards for the control of
the government followed. It was no secret that from the beginning of
the European war the sympathies of the Finns were with Germany, and
now at the outbreak of this internal conflict in Finland, Germany
aligned with the White Guards against the revolutionary Reds who were
supported by the Bolsheviks.
At the beginning of April, 1918, three regiments of German rifles,
two batteries and three battalions of Jagers, under General von der
Goltz, landed at Hanko, and, cooperating with the White Finns,
suppressed the revolutionists, took possession of the port Viborg and
were in control of railway communication to Petrograd. But this
small expeditionary force never left the southern part of Finland,
and in August, when every German was needed in France, the greater
part of it left for the Western Front.
The campaign in Finland had no effect on the course of the war. Its
significance was unduly magnified by both sides.
It was a firm conviction in Allied Councils that the Germans had
immense forces in Finland, while the German Imperial Staff thought
that the insignificant hundreds that the British landed at Murmansk
in April, almost at the same time that the Germans entered the south
of Finland, were in large numbers, perhaps several Divisions.
Thus there existed a blindman's buff in Finland; both Commands in
startling ignorance of enemy salient facts, which is often the case
in the game of war where "uncertainty is the essence"; each supposed
the other was actively engaged in "recreating an Eastern Front,"
which, in concrete application, meant the recruiting of hundreds of
thousands of Russians to press on from the East and fill in the
war-wasted gaping ranks of Germany or the Allies.
To effect this object and gain access to the interior of Russia, the
Murman railway, therefore, assumed a momentous significance; but in
truth the "Eastern Front" remained a figment of the military
imagination. Russia had poured out the life blood of her sons in the
Allied defense till she staggered weak and exhausted, so spent that
she swayed in a moral lethargy from which nothing on earth could
arouse her, and those Russian soldiers who survived returned to their
villages or else were conscripted for the Red army by the amazingly
effective methods of Trotsky.
Still, in the spring of the year 1918, the situation in Finland
appeared so fraught with grave potentialities of decisive
consequence, that on 27th May, the Allied military attaches of Italy,
France, England and the United States met at Moscow and unanimously
agreed that these nations should intervene in the affairs of Russia.
Shortly after this, the Supreme War Council at Versailles decided in
favor of intervention in the northern Russian ports, and the United
States gave its consent.
Brigadier General F. C. Poole had been in Petrograd in command of the
technical war mission of the British in Russia. Thoroughly familiar
with Russian character and Russian conditions, he was chosen to
command the Northern Expedition.
The advance party of the Americans landed in Archangel on 3rd August,
1918. On the same day, this statement was cabled to the Russian
Ambassador from the State Department at Washington:
In the judgment of the government of the United States, a judgment
arrived at after repeated and very searching considerations of the
whole situation, military intervention in Russia would be more likely
to add to the present sad confusion there than to cure it, and would
confuse rather than help her out of her distresses, as the government
of the United States sees the present circumstances, therefore
military action is admissible in Russia now only to render such
protection and help as is possible to the Czecho-Slovaks against the
armed Austrian and German prisoners who are attacking them, and to
steady any efforts at self-government or self-defense in which
Russians themselves may be willing to accept assistance. Whether
from Vladivostok or from Murmansk and Archangel, the _only present
object for which American troops will be employed will be to guard
military stores_ which may be subsequently needed by Russian forces,
and to render such aid as may be acceptable to the Russians in the
organization of their own defense.
The importance of guarding the Arctic ports from the Germans passed
with the signing of the Armistice, but armed intervention continued,
and the most sanguinary battles in North Russia were fought in the
dark winter months that followed.
When the last battalion set sail from Archangel, not a soldier knew,
no, not even vaguely, why he had fought or why he was going now, and
why his comrades were left behind--so many of them beneath the wooden
crosses. The little churchyards and the white churches and the
whiter snow! Life will always be a crazy thing to the soldier of
North Russia; the color and the taste of living have gone from the
soldier of North Russia; and the glory of youth has forever gone from
him.
It is a fearful thing to contemplate the deliberate taking of a life.
All consciousness recoils at the dreadful, irretrievable consequences
of murder; yet when nations engage in extensive killing, there is no
malice in the act on the part of individuals. Killing then has an
impersonal character and becomes an heroic contemplation.
In Western trenches, the enemy was called "Jerry" in a spirit of
grotesque comradery and sportsmanship, and the finest soldiers had
little hatred in their hearts for those across the twisted, shell
gashed acres, who sought to maim and kill them, but with no malice
aforethought.
The mildest men, and men of highest culture and intelligence,
recently made a profession of killing, and could practice their newly
found profession with keen, cold, ghoulish precision and the
comprehensive analysis of trained minds. War is not murder, and the
business of killing loses its infamy and much of its obscenity by the
united impulse of millions striving with selfless purpose, pure
devotion and heroic sacrifice for a nation's goal. War shears from a
people much that is gross in nature, as the merciless test of war
exposes naked, virtues and weaknesses alike. But the American war
with Russia had no idealism. It was not a war at all. It was a
free-booter's excursion, depraved and lawless. A felonious
undertaking, for it had not the sanction of the American people.
During the winter of 1919, American soldiers, in the uniform of their
country, killed Russians and were killed by Russians, yet the
Congress of the United States never declared war upon Russia. Our
war was with Germany, but no German prisoners were ever taken in this
lawless conflict of North Russia, nor, among the bodies of the enemy
killed, was there ever found any evidence that Germans fought in
their ranks or sat in the councils of their Command. And in the
conduct of the whole campaign there was no visible sign of connection
between the Bolsheviks and the Central Powers.
The war was with the Bolsheviki, the existing Government of Russia,
and a few weeks after the arrival of American troops in Archangel,
Tchitcherine, Soviet Commissioner for Foreign Affairs, handed a note
to Mr. Christiansen, Norwegian diplomatic attache, which was
delivered to President Wilson, in which the Bolsheviks offered to
conclude an armistice upon the removal of American troops from
Murmansk, Archangel and Siberia.
This note was ignored. The Soviets had no recognition as the
government of Russia, and there was no "war" in Archangel or Murmansk
or Siberia.
No war, but in the province of Archangel, on six scattered
battlefronts, American soldiers, under British command, were
"standing to" behind snow trenches and improvised barricades, while
soldiers of the Soviet cause crashed Pom Pom projectiles at them, and
shook them with high explosive and shrapnel, blasted them with
machine guns, and sniped at any reckless head that showed from cover.
The objects of the Expedition, as defined in a pamphlet of
information given out by British General Headquarters, in the early
days of the campaign, were:
1. To form a military barrier inside which the Russians could
reorganize themselves to drive out the German invader.
2. To assist the Russians to reorganize their army by instruction,
supervision and example on more reasonable principles than the old
regime autocratic discipline.
3. To reorganize the food supplies, making up the deficiencies from
Allied countries. To obtain for export the surplus supplies of
goods, such as flax, timber, etc. To fill store ships bringing food,
"thus maintaining the economical shipping policy."
The Bolshevik government is entirely in the hands of the Germans, who
have backed this party against all others in Russia owing to the
simplicity of maintaining anarchy in a totally disorganized country.
Therefore, we are definitely opposed to the Bolshevik-cum-German
party. In regard to other parties, we express no criticism and will
accept them as we find them, provided they are for Russia, and
therefore "out for the Boche." Briefly, we do not meddle in internal
affairs. It must be realized that we are not invaders, but guests,
and that we have not any intention of attempting to occupy any
Russian territory.
Later, this proclamation was issued to the troops by the military
authorities:
Proclamation: There seems to be among the troops a very indistinct
idea of what we are fighting for here in North Russia. This can be
explained in a few words. We are up against Bolshevism, which means
anarchy pure and simple. Look at Russia at the present moment. The
power is in the hands of a few men, mostly Jews, who have succeeded
in bringing the country to such a state that order is non-existent.
Bolshevism has grown upon the uneducated masses to such an extent
that Russia is disintegrated and helpless, and therefore we have come
to help her get rid of the disease that is eating her up. We are not
here to conquer Russia, but we want to help her and see her a great
power. When order is restored here, we shall clear out, but only
when we have attained our object, and that is the restoration of
Russia.
At about the same time that this proclamation was spread among
British soldiers in Russia, the Inter-Allied Labor Conference met in
London and sent an expression "of deepest sympathy to the labor and
socialist organizations of Russia, which having destroyed their own
imperialism, continue an unremitting struggle against German
Imperialism."
Still later, there was broadcasted among the soldiers, headed "Honour
Forbids," an exposition of the campaign by Lord Milner, British
Secretary of State for War, who defined its objects:
1. To save the Czecho-Slovaks. Several thousand of which under
command of General Gaida were believed to be strung along the
Siberian railway from Pensa to Vladivostok.
2. To prevent the Germans from exploiting the resources of
Southeastern Russia.
3. To prevent the northern ports of European Russia from becoming
bases for German submarines.
When these objects were accomplished, the British statesman declared
that to leave Russia to the unspeakable horrors of the Bolshevik rule
would be an abominable betrayal of that country, and contrary to
every British instinct of honor and humanity.
During the winter months of 1919, when Senator Johnson was demanding
in the United States Senate the reasons for the American war with
Russia, Senator Swanson, of Virginia, of the Foreign Relations
Committee, and one of the spokesmen of the administration replied
that American troops were needed to protect great stores of Allied
ammunition at Archangel, and to hold the port until terms of peace
were signed with Germany. That Germany wanted Archangel to establish
a submarine base there, and it would be cowardly to forsake Russia.
During the peace negotiations at a meeting of the Council of Ten at
Quai D'Orsay, on 21st January, 1919, President Wilson, in discussing
the Russian problem, stated that by opposing Bolshevism with arms the
Allies were serving the cause of Bolshevism, making it possible for
the Bolsheviks to argue that imperialistic, capitalistic governments
were seeking to give the land back to the landlords and favor the
ends of the monarchists. The allegation that the Allies were against
the people and wanted to control their affairs provided the argument
which enabled them to raise armies. If, on the other hand, the
Allies could swallow their pride and the natural repulsion which they
felt for the Bolsheviks, and see the representatives of all organized
groups in one place, the President thought it would bring about a
marked reaction against Bolshevism.
Mr. Lloyd George, earlier in the discussion, said that _the mere idea
of crushing Bolshevism by a military force was pure madness_. Even
admitting that it could be done, who would occupy Russia? If he
proposed to send a thousand British troops to Russia for that
purpose, the armies would mutiny.
It was agreed by the Council of Ten, then Four, that President Wilson
should draft a proclamation inviting all organized parties in Russia
to attend a meeting in order to discuss with the representatives of
the Allied and Associated Great Powers the means of restoring order
and peace in Russia. Participation should be conditional on a
cessation of hostilities. This meeting was to take place on
Prinkipos Island in the Sea of Marmora.
The President issued the proclamation, but the French were opposed to
it and communicated with the Ukrainians and the other anti-Soviet
groups in Russia, to whom, as well as to the Bolsheviks, the proposal
was addressed, telling them that if they refused to consider the
proposal, the French would support them and continue to support them,
and not allow the Allies, if they could prevent it, to make peace
with the Russian Soviet government. The time set for the gathering
at Prinkipos was on 15th February, 1919, but no party acted in a
definite way and it never took place.