Archangel: The American War with Russia

by John Cudahy

KODISH

January 30, 1919.

MEMORANDUM FOR COLONEL HOUSE.

SUBJECT: Withdrawal of American troops from Archangel.

Dear Colonel House:

The 12,000 American, British and French troops at Archangel are no longer serving any useful purpose. Only 3,000 Russians have rallied around this force.

Furthermore, they are in considerable danger of destruction by the Bolsheviki.

The appended memorandum and map which General Churchill has prepared show that unless the ice in the White Sea suddenly becomes thicker, it is possible at present, with the aid of six icebreakers, which are now at Archangel, to move these troops by water to Kem on the Murmansk Railway, whence they may be carried by train to Murmansk.

The situation at Archangel is most serious for the soldiers, but it is also serious for the Governments which seem to have abandoned them. Unless they are saved by prompt action, we shall have another Gallipoli.

Very respectfully yours,
WILLIAM C. BULLITT.

Abridgment of communication from William C. Bullitt of the American State Department, delivered to Colonel E. M. House at the Paris Peace Conference, on 30th January, 1919.

VII

KODISH

Kodish was the epitome of North Russia. Bought with toiling effort, incredible privation and cruel losses, to be lost and won again time following time in the bitter-most winter days with moving heroism and a moral grandeur that at times reached a sublime estate—it was in the end abandoned as "of no especial military significance."

The village lay in the course of the Imperial road from Petrograd that parted from the Vologda railway at Plesetskaya and cut a diagonal lane through the province north-easterly to Emetskoe on the Dvina. Both Commands stressed its importance. In the early days of the campaign the Allied leaders, bent upon conquest, seized upon it as an opportune route to support the railway invasion by surprising the enemy in rear, while the Bolshevik Staff saw a chance to drive a wedge between the two advancing Columns and effectually deny the River forces all communications.

A typical polyglot group of French, British, friendly Russians, and a few American marines, some two hundred in all, had gone out from Archangel in the first days of the Expedition to Seletskoe on the Emtsa river determined to drive south from this subsidiary base along this Petrograd road to Plesetskaya. This group, designated "D Force" to distinguish it from "A Force" on the Railway and "C Force" on the Dvina, and the Vaga, had hardly commenced its daring operation when an urgent call for succor caused British, French and Americans to hurry across a trail through the swamps to Obozerskaya, leaving the loyal Russians as rear guard before Kodish. But the former never reached their goal. Days passed and nothing was heard from them until a relief contingent, out a day's journey from the Railway front in the forest swamps, found in the midst of scattered infantry gear and other signs of desperate encounter the soiled diary of an American sailor with the epitaph of this illfated "B Force" written on 30th August.

The rescue party continued east through the swamps to Seletskoe as the pursuing Bolsheviks closed in on that village, but the Americans, reinforced by a slender garrison, drove them south over the Emtsa, where they stood their ground behind a destroyed bridge. It was suicidal to attempt a passage of the open river in the face of machine guns, so the Americans dug in the cold sodden ground, and in the grim siege that followed the suffering was intense; no doctor was at hand to care for the many casualties who were given crude first aid (when they were reached), and bumped and jolted thirty torturing miles to Seletskoe, yet, in the face of all these things, none at Kodish knew thought of weakening or turning back.

On the ninth day, long awaited supports came up, a crossing was effected at an unexpected point below the Bolshevik position, and Kodish succumbed to a courage that would not be denied. Exposed baldly in a broad clearing and flanked by three dominating hills, this moujik village was helpless against modern artillery. The French colonel pronounced it "strategically untenable," but the worst feature was its opportunity for complete encirclement. This was brought vividly to the consciousness of the Americans soon after their occupation when great Bolshevik bands converged on them from villages to the south and the Shred-Mekrenga trail, and following a four days' battle, they fought for their lives in a night flight nearly two miles along the road back across the river.

There the old familiar siege tactics were resumed. The engineers with a genius of adaptitude built a fortress of blockhouses on the north Emtsa embankment, and in these, one company of Americans, augmented by a few British infantry and a section of Canadian Field Artillery, stood off the Bolsheviks from the crucial Petrograd road. In December, with Plesetskaya the objective of three Allied fronts, this little group, now 450 strong, led by the impetuous "Major Mike" Donaghue forced twenty-seven hundred Bolsheviks out of Kodish, but could make little progress on the road beyond. So the contested village was held as an advanced post for the main Allied force on the Emtsa, and exposed to unremitting bombardment from many superior guns, became an inferno of bursting shells.

Once on a black January night, it was abandoned by the little outpost and set aflame, but before dawn, Donaghue was back with his men to a chaos of charred ruins, like the skeleton of a beast of prey in a desert of snow, through which the bitter, chill winds wailed dolefully. In these deserted Kodish streets of abject desolation, the American soldier knew the uttermost depths of physical misery experienced during the whole winter campaign.

The Commander-in-Chief came to the Kodish front when British soldiers evinced a truant disposition and would not "carry on" unless certain interrogatories concerning this evasive war with Russia were answered. The interrogatories were addressed to Premier Lloyd George and were such as might arise from the mental consciousness of any men who still have well poised, wholesome regard for life and the pursuit of happiness as they understand it. These British soldiers had come from the winter murk of Murmansk, had emerged from four years' hell in France, and saw themselves the hapless forfeit in a confused international melee without wit or reason at a time when all were thoroughly sickened with war and thought they merited restoration to their homes. But when the soldier Ironside, six feet four, with "an eye like Mars to threaten and command" had spoken, the interrogatories were all forgotten and these disgruntled men, who had uttered mutiny, returned to the fight with a matchless valor; with a steadfastness that gave never ceasing wonderment that they could so freely offer all with every instinct and inclination opposed.

An outpost on the Railway

It was at Kodish that the Bolsheviks strove their uttermost with propaganda, that insidious, warring weapon of which so often they have revealed themselves the masters. Thousands and thousands of pamphlets, leaflets, circulars, manifestoes, announcements, proclamations, appeals—an amazing collection of vitriolic, eloquent literature, were left along the patrol routes in the snow forests. This was true at all fronts, but especially at Kodish, where these persuasive methods were concentrated like a great verbal bombardment, a veritable war of scarifying words, Russian, French, German and English. Many messages of hate and fire, with frank artlessness, urged the Allied soldier to desert and join the Soviet; others, more subtle, displayed a masterful knowledge of human weakness and human passions and prejudices.

The following is taken from The Call published in Moscow and printed in English:

Do you British working men know what your capitalists expect you to do about the war? They expect you to go home and pay in taxes figured into the price of your food and clothing, eight thousand millions of English pounds or forty thousand millions of American dollars. If you have any manhood, don't you think it would be fair to call all these debts off? If you think this is fair, then join the Russian Bolsheviks in repudiating all war debts....

Do you realize that the principal reason the British-American financiers have sent you to fight us for, is because we were sensible enough and courageous enough to repudiate the war debts of the bloody, corrupt old Tsar?...

You soldiers are fighting on the side of the employers against us, the working people of Russia. All this talk about intervention to "save" Russia amounts to this, that the capitalists of your countries are trying to take back from us what we won from their fellow capitalists in Russia. Can't you realize that this is the same war that you have been carrying on in England and America against the master class? You hold the rifles, you work the guns to shoot us with, and you are playing the contemptible part of the scab. Comrade, don't do it!...

You are kidding yourself that you are fighting for your country. The capitalist class places arms in your hands. Let the workers cease using these weapons against each other, and turn them on their sweaters. The capitalists themselves have given you the means to overthrow them, if you had but the sense and the courage to use them. There is only one thing that you can do: Arrest your officers. Send a committee of your common soldiers to meet our own workingmen, and find out yourselves what we stand for.

The following is from the same publication:

The Bolshevik Revolution marked the culmination of the world struggle to set us all free. Strike off your shackles, comrades, we are your friends not enemies, and the only reason we seek to stamp out the parasitical capitalists by force is because force is the only language they can understand. This is the beginning of a great world revolution which knows no national limitations. It will set the producers free. Join the Soviet Party. We are fighting your fight against the unprincipled capitalistic class. Comrades, you know the meaning of "scab," well, that is the part you are acting in Russia. For shame, comrades! Kill your officers, then shoulder your rifles and come over to our lines which are your own.

These extracts have been taken at random from a hundred others of like incendiary tenor, most of which had little effect on the Americans except to impress them with the coincidence of a striking similarity in style and sentiment between them and many public addresses of American politicians printed in the newspapers that came from home, where a soft going government tolerated perversions of free speech, as hostile to American soldiers in Russia as the most violent preachments from the enemy.

A huge bulletin board was erected on the Bolshevik bank of the Emtsa river, which conducted daily classes in doctrines of International Revolution, and the first confirmation of the Armistice news came in a weird preternatural voice which startled the night stillness of Kodish by announcing in sonorous tones the cessation of infamous war and the restoration of peace to the afflicted peoples of earth. There on the Emtsa bridge, a Bolshevik orator, shrouded by the phantom shadow of a waning moon, delivered in excellent English, almost academic in polish, a rhetorical harangue on the glories of communism, the injustice of soldiers suffering in cold swamps while others sat back in Archangel in soft ease. Also the speaker described most persuasively the abundant, bountiful hospitality awaiting all within the Soviet lines. It was all very diverting, but nevertheless gave audible utterance to many of the disquieting reflections which rankled deep in the heart of every man in the Allied ranks and did not go towards helping Allied morale. Later that same night, when this extraordinary speech was ended, two captives, a Scot and an American, came out on the bridge to tell their comrades of benevolent treatment at the hands of the unspeakable enemy; in the darkness their voices were like those from the grave, for many soldiers were led to believe that the barbarous Bolos killed all prisoners after torturing them with frightful savagery.

In the first stages of the campaign, the French on the Railway killed those that could not be carried off the field to spare them the grewsome horrors which would have been visited upon them by the enemy, yet at Ust Padenga, volunteers brought in wounded not a hundred yards in front of Bolshevik machine guns, and at Toulgas, after a disastrous ambush, the enemy mysteriously withheld his fire from a relief party that was entirely exposed. There was, in fact, only one recorded instance of atrocity. This was on the Vaga where the bodies of an officer and several Americans were found hacked and mutilated with hideous debauchery, but there was nothing to show that this barbarism was approved by the Bolshevik leaders, and it may have been only an uncontrollable manifestation of primal cruelty which underlies all war.

Several months after the last troops left Archangel, a number of Americans "missing in action" were expatriated through the efforts of the Red Cross by way of Finland, and these men spoke very favorably of their considerate treatment in Moscow.