Archangel: The American War with Russia

by John Cudahy

RETREAT

"There is no use people raising prejudice against this expedition. Every one knows why it was sent. It was sent as part of our operations against Germany. It was vitally necessary to take every measure in regard to Russia during the war which would keep as many German troops as possible on the Russian front, and reduce that formidable movement of the German armies which carried more than a million men to the Western Front, and which culminated in that immense series of battles which began on the 21st March last year (1918)."

WINSTON CHURCHILL, Secretary of State for War, in the House of Commons, 3rd March, 1919.

XI

RETREAT

When the appeal to patriotism failed, Archangel Province, under British direction, invoked conscription, and by the middle of June, twenty-two thousand Russian soldiers had been assembled by coercive means.

They thronged the backward villages through which the Americans passed on their way to disembarkation, and looked very fresh, like college youths, as they sauntered up and down to an eternal serenade of wheezing accordions, or with sacerdotal, marching chants, went swinging by in platoons and companies, these young conscripts, who knew so little of war and its harrowing disillusionment.

For the moment all breasts were filled with that contagious ardor that springs from every massed effort, no matter its end, but not one in a hundred knew or felt the call of patriotism for the coming conflict of Russian against Russian.

There was cause enough for the fight had it only been revealed to these pliant, guileless, peasant folk. For their country, weakened, helpless and faint from many war wounds, was being debased by vile and vicious poltroons who had stamped out the holy fires of the Revolution, nullified the Constituent Assembly, and stifled every voice of liberty with hands more remorseless than the cruel manacles of the Tsars.

The cause was there, but if their mentors sensed it, they manifested almost incredible obtuseness in failure to impart these moving eloquent reasons for the fight. They were silent about the odious exploitation of the masses under the crafty, artful guise of proletarianism; they said nothing of the wicked violation of sacred property rights, the unprincipled plundering, the trampling down by power maddened feet on all revolutionary enlightenment, the desecration of all things spiritual, the wanton derision of the church which had been the faith of the people and of their venerated, sainted fathers.

Here was reason enough for any Russian with exalted, holy devotion to lay down his life for his stricken country. But instead of such scathing and unequivocal indictment, the British dwelt upon the conduct of the Bolsheviks, shameful and faithless towards the Czecho-Slovaks, and gave out, with venomous vituperation, highly colored stories of enemy atrocities and cruel treatment of prisoners so patently over-extended that they failed to make a convincing impression even on the moujik mind.

So soon as navigation opened, there commenced an exodus of Russian officers to Archangel, sent by the British Command to lead the newly formed native legions. These officers came from the old Imperial Army, many were titled, proud of their high birth, and by every thought and training, and by every instinct, irreconcilably opposed to every notion of social equality; in short, irredentists of that heartless, arrogant, military class which a worn afflicted world had cast off in a travail of four years' agony and afflicting grief, and long suffering Russia had driven forever from her temples.

So the fresh formed conscript ranks were made conveniently vulnerable for Bolshevik propaganda, this new weapon of warfare, invisible and treacherous, that on the Eastern Front had scored such havoc with the boasted discipline of the Germans. Soviet agents were everywhere, mingling with the people on the streets of Archangel, wearing the khaki of the newly organized soldiers, living with them, going through their drills, and fatigue and exercises, and ever with the passionate zeal of fanatics, feeding them the poisonous doctrines of Reddest Moscow, ceaselessly, night and day.

Now the innuendo was very plausible that these aristocrats of the Old School had returned to restore the Romanoffs, and that the British capitalists were leagued with them for the conquest of Russia and the enslavement of the common people. It was easy to argue that the British, always interested in the trading possibilities of Archangel, had come to exploit its resources. Otherwise why should they be so vitally concerned in this civil war of Russians? British officers were freely mingled with these Imperial officers, British Intelligence supervising the staff work and dispositions, and a liberal spreading of reliable British N.C.O.'s among the ranks, to keep a watchful eye on things and bolster the recruits in the stern trial of first battle.

The great majority of the British officers had no appetite for the business ahead. They were tired and homesick, weary and fed up with war for all time after four racking years of it. Moreover, they disliked everything Russian with a withering aversion, and in their forced association with the Russians, treated them with a disdainful condescension and that impersonal, inhuman lack of tolerance which is British beyond all imitation. Openly they distrusted their allied comrades, and sometimes when tired and irritable and nerve frayed, they said so, which did not make towards the establishment of an enthusiastic and permanent entente, for the educated Slav is an accomplished linguist, and sometimes he understood and did not easily forget when he was abused in English, and vehemently cursed as a "bloody Bolo."

It had been determined before the opening of navigation that all American forces should be withdrawn and the campaign abandoned. The reason for this was not revealed to the troops just as the cause of the Expedition had never been mentioned, and every man in American uniform sensed a gaping moral void on the part of his Country. Certain death from the Bolsheviks awaited those loyal Russians who had placed their trust in the promised salvation of the Allied leaders and the American authorities at least seemed blind to their manifest duty to the Archangel government. It was an awkward situation for the statesmen, but unavoidable under the circumstances—and Archangel was a long distance removed from Washington. Anyway, the British held on—they would have to attend to uncomfortable details. We were going to clear out, and clear out we did.

The problem of evacuation was a disturbing one. There was a clamor in England as insistent as that which echoed from America to get out of Russia and get out without delay. This might have been done, and the British might have abandoned these thousands of Russian people who, trusting in the courage, the steadfastness, and the honor of the Allies, had cast their lot with them for better or for worse. But, instead of deserting the country without ceremony as we did, a frank disclosure of the situation was made to the press in England, and a call was issued for volunteers to rescue British soldiers at Archangel. A mixed brigade of venturesome men who were wearied by peace time tedium and longed again for the thrill of war, and others who were out of work and could get no other employment, was raised by this method, but to muster the full quota for relief it was necessary to add a like number of Regulars, in all approximately eight thousand men. Each brigade had two infantry battalions, units of artillery, airplanes, machine gun corps and engineers, and the first echelon, commanded by Brigadier General G. W. Grogan, Victoria Cross, reached Archangel at the end of May. The rest, under Brigadier L. W. Sadleir Jackson, came on the 10th June, and the ships that brought them carried away the Americans.

To the civil mind an evacuation, especially by sea, seems a simple matter. The civilian thinks of it merely as a packing off to the ships, disregarding the losses involved to make short shift and get away. But in complicated, modern war, there are countless perplexing details in the final movement of an army. Massive, ponderous ordnance and munitions and supplies must be assembled with prodigious labor, transported or destroyed. And it is necessary to hold the enemy off till the last retreating file has mounted the gang plank and put off far to sea. Also, in the case of Archangel, it was an involved problem to attend to the civilian population.

The British government laid open the offer to transport every Archangel resident apprehensive of the Bolsheviks, and to provide employment for them in other lands. It was expected that vast numbers would avail themselves of this opportunity and would flee from the approaching reign of horrors, but when the time came only sixty-five hundred and thirty-five came forward for expatriation, and these were all sent to South Russia and the Baltic States.

When all was in readiness, General Ironside planned to safeguard the retreat by administering a sharp "disengaging blow," like Sir John Moore dealt the French at Corunna one hundred years before, which would shake the enemy's morale and disabuse him of any notion of following the retreating troops to the waterside.

The Czechs had fused with Admiral Kolchak's armies. Under the leadership of General Gaida, they formed his right wing and were beyond Perm, some three hundred miles east of Viatka. It was thought that these friendly Siberian forces could take Viatka, advance up the railway to Kotlas, and join there with the Archangel Russians. Thereupon the British, leisurely and in security, could return down the river to the waiting transports and sail homeward.

So Kotlas, which had been the original objective of the River Column, became the objective once more. The Admiralty dispatched to Archangel a flotilla of gunboats, monitors, mine sweepers and many other craft for the transportation of troops and supplies to act as auxiliaries for the infantry, and again the Dvina became a scene of skeltering preparations for war.

On the 20th June, the disengaging offensive began; the British and Archangel troops attacked across the river from the Allied position at Toulgas, and gained complete victory, capturing two hundred prisoners, many machine guns and three field guns. But now word came from the south that the Bolsheviks there had concentrated in great forces against Kolchak and had utterly routed him, that he was fleeing east, had already retired as far as Yetakerinburg, and all hope would have to be given up of effecting a junction with the Siberian army.

So the importance of taking Kotlas waned, but even if Kolchak had not failed the advance could have gone little further, for it was found that due to the light snowfall of the previous winter, the waters of Dvina were low, beyond all precedent, and the British flotilla could follow no farther upstream.

Most discouraging of all, treachery broke out in all quarters from the allied Russian troops. On the 7th July a battalion held in reserve on the river mutinied in the night and murdered three British and four Russian officers as they slept; four other officers were seriously wounded. On the 22nd July the whole Onega detachment went over to the Bolsheviks, and the safety of Archangel became seriously jeopardized from this west port. Nearly at the same time British firing squads suppressed a revolt on the Railway front before the Russian mutineers gained the upper hand.

Many of the British officers had passed through all the harrowing fires of France, but here was a form of peril new in the experience of the most hardened ones—base betrayal by the sentinel who kept the black watches of the night, and treachery in the heart of the citadel from hands stretched forth in friendship. The brave man, standing on his feet and facing the end, does not fear advancing death; but now it lurked in hiding, it descended in the night and struck from the dark upon unconscious sleep, so that tired soldiers dared not rest, and the strain snapped nerves of steel.

A few weeks before these outrages, Toulgas was given over to a defense that was entirely Russian. Shortly afterward, in the uncertain light of early morning, on the 25th April, there was a wild commotion, and, following interminable confused firing that sounded from all quarters of the village streets, a lamp message flashed across the Dvina to the Allied position at Kurgoman: "We are completely surrounded; the Bolos are attacking in five places." Shortly thereafter, through a fusillade of bullets, a Russian officer, with two men, effected a passage of the river in a small boat, and told the shameful story of how nine officers had been murdered as they slept and bloody Toulgas delivered by faithless Russian soldiers to the waiting Bolsheviks in the woods. Through a prodigy of bravery by a handful of loyal artillery men, the guns were pulled back to Shusiga, ten miles downstream, but it was not until the middle of May that Toulgas was retaken, and while it stayed in enemy hands, the Allied position was alarmingly critical with the right flank over the Dvina completely turned.

Major-General Sir William E. Ironside

Thus, with mutiny breaking out in all quarters, the virulent propaganda of the Bolsheviks bore malignant fruit beyond their most sanguine hopes, and the situation was menacing enough to alarm the most conservative in Allied Councils. Had it not been for the two splendid reinforcing brigades, the often imperiled life of the Expedition would have been destroyed at last. The British War Office for once became thoroughly apprehensive. General, Lord Rawlinson was sent to preside over the leavetaking, and fresh reinforcements, two battalions of infantry, two machine gun companies, two batteries of Royal Field Artillery, one engineer company, and five tanks were rushed to Archangel from England.

The intention had been to complete the evacuation just before the closing of navigation in late October, but now it was seen that this might be too late, and in the present urgency no time could be lost. "The disengaging blow" was delivered on the 10th August by Jackson's sterling brigade, a little beyond Seltzo, the furthermost south achieved on the Dvina by the little River Column almost a year before. Two thousand prisoners were captured, eighteen guns and many machine guns, and the rout was complete. With the enemy now safely at bay, the British turned the defenses over to the Archangel authorities, who persisted in staying, although they were advised that it was suicidal to do so, and "friendly intervention" was brought to an inglorious, albeit an unbloody, close on the 27th September, eleven months after the Armistice that had outlawed the rule of warring strife as the arbitrament of discordant nations.

When the last troop ships trailed off to drooping skies, a bearded moujik sat in the stern of a flat boat directing four broad backed women at the oars. The recumbent coxswain waved a languid gesture across Archangel Bay where tiny ships were bearing off to the north; and four oars poised in mid-air as the laboring crew turned with dull Slavic contemplation to regard the parting foreigners, and the end of their peculiar expedition. But only for a moment, there was more important business in hand than idle gazing at Englishskis, however queer they might be. A gruff command, and the freighted craft continued its slow toiling course to the market place, the overlord resumed his interrupted smoke of good Allied cigarettes and the Englishskis were dismissed from memory. This was the leave-taking.

On the evening of 12th October, 1919, the last of the Allied forces set sail from Murmansk for England; four months afterward, on the 20th February, the Bolsheviks recaptured Archangel.

Nearly four months earlier the last of the Americans set sail on the 26th day of June, 1919, and as the paling shores mingled with the distant sky line and faded from sight, so too the fever of this troublous, little war with Russia abated, yielding to the gentle ministrations of memory's cooling twilight.

With the Americans, at least, there remained no shred of illusion. When Winston Churchill told the Commons that Archangel, with one lone American regiment, the few battle retrieved soldiers of England, and a single battalion of disaffected Frenchmen, had kept many German divisions in the East, and played an important part in the last battles, he laid a flattering unction to the soul of British statescraft; but his insincere words did not deceive the American soldier, for the American soldier was mentally and emotionally paralyzed beyond deception, and a conviction of blunder was only strengthened by this and other clumsy explanations vouchsafed by Allied statesmen; by the guilt-laden silence of America.

Germany was never concerned with Archangel. There was no evidence of German participation in the campaign; no evidence that our petty hostilities with the Bolsheviks had ever benefited Foch on the Western theater.

We had waged war upon Russia. Whether willfully or unwillingly, our country had engaged in an unprovoked intensive, inglorious, little armed conflict which had ended in disaster and disgrace. Perhaps this was a laudable thing to do. Perhaps it is always idealistic and praiseworthy to intervene for self-conceived righteousness in the internal affairs of another nation, as England might have done in the case of the American Confederacy, and as we did in the case of this civil war among the Russians. It is easy enough to enter the battle lists, but, once in, it is not so easy to withdraw from the fight with self-respect unsullied and honor undefiled.

So Archangel proved, with its sullied record to blight forever the good name of America when soldiers gather to tell of the Great War, and, great as the cost of the campaign had been with 2,485 casualties[[1]] of killed and wounded and sickened men, its financial loss, over ten times the price paid Russia for the vast dominions of Alaska, there was not a man in the ranks who did not sense the disgrace in our ignoble desertion, there was not an American officer who would not have chosen to have left his bones bleaching white beneath Archangel snows, than been a living witness to the ignominious way in which his country quit and slunk away.

[[1]] Chief Surgeon's Report.

All felt a personal sense of poignant shame for the failure to see the game through to its uttermost bitter end, or else seek expiation by honest avowal of wrong and humble contrition. It was an inexorable dilemma, one that took the staunchest courage, no matter which course was followed. Perhaps the higher courage would have been the admission of culpable fault. But we took neither course. We merely wilted from Archangel and came away.

On the homeward troopships, among the ice floes of the White Sea, the taunting unspoken reproach galled most bitterly of all, for we left our British allies to extricate themselves from the miserable mess as best they could, and with no explanation and never a sustaining word we left them.

Many trying things in the campaign had aroused the Americans to intemperate speech, which now to recall they would have surrendered all they possessed. Incompetence and tactlessness, and seeming lack of understanding and sympathy by those in power, to which the soldiers of England appeared indifferent, never failed to draw the intense, iconoclastic fire of the Americans. The difference lay in the national atmosphere of the two countries, the divergence in character and traditions, born and nurtured under the republican and the older order. They are a different people from us, the British, though the blood strain be the same. The glory of baseball is lost on them; they play the tedious cricket; but, when the fight is on, the quality of the bulldog, once at grips to hang on with set teeth till death, is British; blinded to all save the solid grimness of the task in hand, their brains seem dull to those imaginative flights which are the curse of the Western soldier.

Thus ended America's share of the war with Russia. At Brest the "mutinous" regiment was shunted in fragments over the seas to America, and in the homeland, these soldiers who had borne arms in conflict six months after the Armistice, were shooed off to civilian life, and the whole embarrassing matter was expunged from the war record.

All inquiry concerning the Expedition has been met by specious pleas in evasive avoidance. No peace was ever made with Russia, as no state of war had ever been recognized, and the legalists might well contend that all who engaged in it are open to indictment for manslaughter, for the enterprise will always remain a depraved one with status of a freebooters' excursion.

At Corbela sat an aged woman with ghastly face, gray as the dirty platok that framed it, her gaunt chin resting on a hand, bony and hideous from relentless toil. With failing despairing eyes, she saw in the dwindling snows only the dissolution of winter, quite blinded to buoyant spring that with tufts of brown turf bursts boisterously through the southern hill slopes, like heedless youth that with surging, eager, passionate desire presses on the reluctant heels of death to life's fulfillment.

Outside the hut a young moujik, with the handsome physique of first unsullied manhood, and the credulous eyes of a child, curiously watching the north marching Americans; a giant of masked strength, needing only the key of trained intelligence to unloose immeasurable dynamic force that might some day rule the world.

Kindle the liberating torch of enlightenment in the nether regions of the Slavs, strike from the millions the shackles of serfdom ignorance, and from the pestilential ashes of present degrading Bolshevism, Russia, the giant, in stupendous power, rises phoenixlike to Jupiter.

To the Russian people we owe a debt that can never be paid except in deepest and very humble gratitude; for, when those gray hosts swept over Belgium and Northern France, Russia invaded Prussia, threatened the gates of Koenigsberg, routed the Austrians in a smashing blow at Lemberg, and, when the German aggressive movement was at its culminating height, drew off to the east two Army Corps and a Cavalry Division from von Kluck's right wing, a fatal diversion of the German forces which enabled Joffre, closing in the breach at the Marne, to save Paris and turn the advance into a complete retirement.

This great battle of the Marne marked the initial phase of the war, and completely frustrated the cherished Berlin plan of gaining quick victory by tactics of overwhelming surprise.

Many anxious months followed as England slowly transformed her energies from peaceful pursuits to those of war, and during this prolonged, crucial time the Russians never wavered from the attack. They massed for repeated hammering offensives in Poland, in Masturia and east of the Vistula in Galicia, so that the German Imperial Staff could never develop full strength, but had to be content with a holding campaign in the West while marshalling most forces to oppose the menacing East.

Not until the beginning of 1916, because of the Russians, could another effort of masses be made. Then every available man was concentrated with the Crown Prince's army as he smashed at Verdun to bring France to her knees, but when the assault was at its height, again obedient to her trust, and faithful, Russia sprang to the attack with such heroism and such devoted and reckless courage, that the controlling German combat divisions which might have gained the fortress had to be diverted from Verdun to Galicia.

Yet again at the commencement of 1917, at Mitau, and, in the summer of that year, when the British Empire assembled its legions at the Somme, Brussiloff struck south to the Carpathian passes, and it was only when Russia collapsed exhausted, and ghoulish Bolshevism looted the prostrate stricken gladiator, that the united German armies marshalled in full strength for a crushing blow. Only then did Germany have numerical superiority in the West.

We can gain an impression of what might have happened from the fury of that La Fere-Arras offensive, which shocked the world by its blighting trail of spectral horrors; hardly a British Division was left intact, and France reeled and staggered in a nausea of mortal weakness until Clemenceau in agony cried out to the Allies for sustaining support.

All might have ended then, had it not been for America, but America could never have come, had it not been for the Russian sacrifice in the early days, when the German Divisions, fresh and recklessly rash, were filled with the lust of battle conquest, and the German leaders, careless of casualties, flung their men to death with a high and free hand.

It is well to remember these things when we boast (a little noisily) that American arms won the great war. No one nation won this appalling contest of the nations embattled at Esdraelon, and, great as our offering was, how small it was and how feebly comparable to that of Russia who laid down the lives of more men than all we sent to France, and paid a ghastly toll in crippled, maimed and battle losses, a million souls beyond the sum of our whole military effort!

A joint Resolution, providing for any needed explanations and reparations which may be due from this country for our invasion of Russian territory was introduced in the United States Senate at the second session Sixty-sixth Congress by Senator France, 27th February, 1920.