Archangel: The American War with Russia

by John Cudahy

THE VAGA

27th Oct., '18

Dear Colonel Stewart:

I understand you have very little information of the situation up here. I have very little myself, and what I get is usually from rumors unless I go to British Hdqrs and ask for it which I do not care to do.

.... The commander of Force C has my Bn scattered so much there is only one company in a place. Have two companies under my orders Co A is up the river about 25 versts from here Co C is at this place and one Plt of Co A. Co B is over on the Dvina and Co D is with Force D about half way to Archangel between the river and the railroad.

.... Suppose part of us will winter here, but do not know yet....

Excerpts from letter written from Shenkurst on the Vaga, by Lieutenant Colonel John B. Corbley to Colonel George E. Stewart, Commanding Officer, 339th United States Infantry, Archangel, Russia.

"In North Russia, Shenkurst has been abandoned and the Allies are in a precarious position. The country is apt to hear much of these American battalions of North Russia, whether they live or die. If they live, it will be only after an heroic struggle with two fierce enemies—man and nature. If they die, it will only be after they have expended the last ounce of strength and the last cartridge."

The Washington Post, 28th January, 1919.

"Shenkurst has been evacuated and we are greatly outnumbered, but there is not the slightest reason for anxiety. New positions have been occupied a little further north. The Archangel expedition is quite safe, and always has been safe."

The London Times, 28th January, 1919.

IX

THE VAGA

The meagre numbers of the Railway had been irreparably spent by the establishment of the Onega force, on the west, and a like outguard at Seletskoe on the east, with its right and left wings, Kodish and Shred Mekrenga.

Now, as it followed up the Dvina, in the same manner, the dubious, striking power of the River Column was lost by the output along the tenuous, weaving waterway of many communicating posts, that like great drops of heart blood from a mortal hurt, wasted its vitality and drained its strength, until it could go no further.

These posts, like Indian blockhouses of frontier days, were strung along the river course nearly to far Archangel, and in them, insignificant detachments, with the grim, quiet resolution of the frontier men, and the steady, reliant nerve of the frontier men, safeguarded the backward way, where always silent, winter darkness held ceaseless, dire, ominous threats.

In the Shred Mekrenga offensive of January, when the enemy sought to cut off the River Column from its base, he launched a venomous attack at one of these river posts far back at Morjagorskaya, but the British garrison held without flinching and saved the communications by a narrow margin.

By this process of dispatching numerous, guarding detachments throughout the province, the Allied forces, utterly trivial at the outset, became so dispersed that the "offensive war" swiftly degenerated into a disjunctive, raiding excursion, and the invasion, instead of striking the Red Bolos with terror and chasing them like scurrying quail to cover, was regarded by the enemy with contempt, even derision. The Bolshevik soldiers, at first panicky, soon overcame their fear, and when their leaders saw that no reinforcements could come through the frozen north port, they assumed an attitude of aggressive defiance, and were ever conducting raids, ever menacing the long, basal lines, the flanks and rear of the far separated, uncoordinated, unsupported Allied fronts. On the Dvina, hardly had the detached American company taken over the defense of the costly stores at Bereznik, when friendly natives from Shenkurst directed the observation of our Command to the danger of a rear flanking movement from that quarter, so half of the garrison was detailed up the Vaga to take possession of this city of Shenkurst in the name of "friendly intervention."

It must be said that for the most part the city welcomed, with a genuine, welcoming spirit, the coming of the foreign liberators, for many people had fled north to Shenkurst from the violent Reds at Moscow and Petrograd, who hated the intelligencia and everything else that was unproletarian, with a destructive, vehement hatred.

These people were the Russians of literature, cultivated and mannerly in appearance, soft spoken in approach, and accustomed to the niceties, the softer things of life. They wore shoes and stockings, and with a revealing hint of gawkiness, most of the rest of our unimaginative, Western habit; also they had a few of the simple delicacies on their tables that seemed like fairy gifts to the homesick, American soldiers.

The Vaga is noticeably smaller than the Dvina, and seldom exceeds a breadth of a half mile, more often it is five hundred yards, even less, and the soil through which it plows a tumid trail is soft, sandy loam, so that high, commanding bluffs have been eroded by its waters, where the villages group in almost neighborly proximity. On one of these bluff heights, stood effete Shenkurst, a generation removed from moujik poverty and enchaining ignorance, and consciously superior to the humble log huts that below north and south trailed the river. The dominating buildings, a monastery, a barracks of the Tsar, and five conspicuous churches were white as Russia's snows, and in the fall, made Shenkurst flaringly garish in its frame of tenebrious, surrounding forest.

Nearly a week of tranquillity passed with the Americans at Shenkurst, when the Staff, chafing at this prolonged unbelligerency, issued orders "to stir up the enemy," and some one hundred Americans, with fifty Allied Russian soldiers, embarked to reconnoitre the upper river.

All was uneventful, until ten miles out from Shenkurst, when suddenly an unseen fire poured from both high river embankments on the steamer bearing the unsuspecting, scouting party; there was no method of gauging the ambuscade, which judged by the volume of fire, most of which screeched harmlessly high, was far stronger than the Americans; but on the instant, the officer beached his craft on the nearest ground, the eager men scrambled over the side into the water waist deep, and engaged the enemy, who was so taken back by this unexpected action that he wilted into the forest; then, entirely undaunted, the little party moved on down the forest road, which wound south with the river, and into the sinister shadows of an unexplored, uncharted, alien country, where many signs pointed to certain, overpowering resistance, and the law of probabilities pointed to extinction.

The American in command, Captain Odjard, was more an antique Viking than a city-bred modern, and as the intrepid march continued, he never wavered in his purpose to penetrate the heart of the Bolshevik stronghold; for twenty days he kept on, despite distressing hardship, and short, iron rations, and most grievous of all, the utter absence of comforting tobacco. Reports came constantly that the enemy was intent upon the capture or destruction of the little band, Bolsheviks thronged the forward way through the forest, and every day information reached Captain Odjard that the villages in his rear were heavily garrisoned with enemy forces; most serious of all, the fast vanishing ration supplies would soon be all gone. Situations such as this search the innermost fiber of the stuff that makes for leadership. There are no precedents. A man of courage and valiant will would face about and fight his way back and perhaps die fighting. A coward would vacillate and falter in a mortal terror of indecision, and thus perish.

The only means of transportation after the rivers were closed

Stonewall Jackson and Forrest would do the genius born, unexpected thing. The Viking pressed onward, met the hostile Russians, forced them to a savage engagement, in which they lost in killed and wounded twice the number of the entire reconnoitering force, then turned about and backtracked the cleared way to the south, hastily abandoned by the Bolsheviks, in every reasonable fear of meeting the outnumbering reinforcements that surely must be coming up in support of such a bold and confident advance.

But at Ust Padenga, fifteen miles from Shenkurst, the party was stopped by a dispatch from Headquarters. It would go no farther downstream, but would act as an advanced outguard for the main Vaga position, a barricade to serve as a distant, delaying obstacle, and so render the inner post more easily defended.

For when the notion of an offensive war languished with the General Staff, and had nearly expired, it was revived a little by the theory of "an offensive defense," in which the six, widely scattered, battle fronts acted as protective tentacles, each of them in turn establishing an "offensive" outguard for Archangel, since once this virus of the "offensive defense" was inoculated in the Allied Command, it would not rest dormant, but persisted, assertive to the ultimate.

Meanwhile, Nature, flagrantly disrespectful of the military, swung the seasons in their immutable cycle. Fall made her parting courtesy, and winter with dread message and icy breath waited on the threshold.

The hope was not yet dead of the Railway Column gaining Plesetskaya, and the present objective of the Vaga force was to penetrate some eighty miles to Velsk, an important junction point of roads converging from the area of Plesetskaya, from the city of Vologda and from the Dvina.

The Railway got little further than Obozerskaya, and the little River Column, by the end of October, was at bay, fighting for life nearly two hundred miles from Kotlas, its first objective.

But before these forces had been halted, already the Vaga Expedition had gone too far, thrust out nearly one hundred miles from the Railway, and fifty miles further south than the River party, it presented inviting opportunity for enemy encirclement—a dangerous salient, projected midway between the two main Columns, and nearly three hundred miles from Archangel, by the tortuous course of the road.

The British are a bold people and it did not seem to weigh heavily with them that Shenkurst, the base of this Vaga Column, was flanked by hostile villages, where vain attempts had been made to drive out the Bolsheviks, that the city was garrisoned by locally recruited Russians, who had been tried and found wanting under fire, and whose loyalty might wane when the tide of Allied fortunes ebbed low, as soon it did.

Shenkurst must be held, and so the reconnaissance patrol, which had eluded doom only by the splendid dash of the men and brilliant leadership, stayed at Ust Padenga as an advanced outpost, and the theorists of the "offensive defense" were satisfied.

Captain Odjard took main station in a village on a precipitous cliff, that reared high from the river, and posted his Russian retainers in huts that clustered on the flat bank of the Vaga, nearly midway down the long valley that spread south to the forest.

Quartering from this second village, and much further down the valley was a third, conspicuous on another abrupt bluff, which when seen from the distance of the main post, the house tops had the picturesque appearance of toy roofs, sculptured on a pedestal.

The houses on the flat river bank stood out naked on the snow, and in case of attack, could be supported from the main position, for they were well within effective shooting range; but the other, the elevated village, was nearly a mile away, and beside it, on the west, the forest crowded perilously near; gullies were at the base of the bluff which made "dead ground" there, a series of natural trenches for an attacking party. It was a hazardous spot, the Russians would not stay in this distant, treacherous "Death's snare" on the heights; and they wagged their heads lugubriously over the few Americans who persisted in holding it. From the steep side of Headquarters' cliff, the usual wagon road descended, sent offshoots to the two south villages, and trailed off to the concealment of the lower forest.

Week succeeded week in lonely Ust Padenga, where the sad disgarnishment of this tragical, little war was seared vivid in the living consciousness of American soldiers. The Armistice came, but with it no word of enlightenment, until they were led to believe that in the general rejoicing, the stirring movement of momentous events, no heed could be given to the trifling performances of their fantastic, Arctic side show, long since forgotten in France.

Yet strange, the soldiers did not grow deeply embittered, a stoic calm came over all and they became worshippers of the Russian philosophy, nitchevoo, votaries of the Fates, burning frankincense at their shrine, praying favor, yet unmoved by their displeasure, indifferent to their whimsical caprice. They became atrophied men, asking nothing of the future and expecting nothing. The doctors said many were cases of neurotic disorder, and others suffered from enteritis and scabies, and ordered rest and the hospital, but the Staff waved the medical men brusquely aside and sarcastically asked who was to hold off the Bolsheviks.

During November, and shortly following the Armistice, two patrols "seeking contact," were waylaid in ambush, and from the first, only one man came back. The officer of the second might have escaped, but to do so he would have had to leave a detachment in distress, surrounded in the forest. He rather chose the hazard of death, and leading the fight, he laid down his life for his friends.

During the weeks of December and January, with their bitter cold and dismal, somber days, trees were felled about the defenses to widen the field of fire, and long, intersecting lanes were laid through the forest like swaths through a standing grain field, so that the machine guns and the automatics might hurl their spray of death at longer range, where skulked shadowed and grisly, white forms. When in the dead and quiet of the night, rockets burst from unknown quarters, flared with ghostly glare and faded in mystery behind inky, plumose silhouettes.

In the cold and the long darkness of winter, there was time for reflection for any one who would be so idle, on the defenselessness of the position, the remoteness from the base, the hordes that were massing on the road north to Shenkurst and meant soon to make "the big push."

Our Intelligence reported that in January the Sixth Bolshevik Army of the north numbered forty-five thousand seven hundred, and the dribbling replenishment of our forces that had come down the railway from open Murmansk, had far from kept pace with attrition by sickness and gunshot wounds. Disregarding our Russian Allies, we did not have six thousand men at all fronts.

By the middle of January, a blighting influence, a devastating, nether presence filled the air, like the spell of an evil spirit, and as capable of being finitely recorded as the testimony of eyes and ears. There was in the atmosphere something closely akin to that heavy, stifling calm, that in the summertime hangs over all, before the wind swoops down and the first, big, pelting raindrops fall from blackened thunder clouds, the advance guard of the drenching storm that descends to earth in howling, unrestrained fury.

All at lone Ust Padenga knew the storm was coming, it was only a question of where it would strike. On the 19th day of January, the dispositions were these: a platoon of Americans held the village on the pedestal, fifty-four allied Russians were in the village on the flat below, and the main body of Americans, some two hundred strong, two Field Pieces, one One Pounder of Russian design, one Pom Pom and forty Russian artillerymen (who funked in the first fight and were relieved by Canadians), were in the backward village on the high bluff.

At dawn, for one hour, enemy batteries from across the Vaga shelled the foremost position on the elevated ground, then suddenly ceased firing, and like grotesque Jacks in the Box, swarms of white-clad Bolsheviks arose by magic from the concealment of the ravines. A succession of long, white lines came from the close forest, and across the open snow of the Vaga came still more advancing, white-clothed men.

Against such bulked masses, resistance was impossible. Three machine guns, burst after burst, tore rending gaps in the coming lines, but they merely welded and kept on.

When the last pannier of ammunition was gone, word was given to blaze a path through to the rear—and double time! And now down the steep hillside the trapped company charged, tumbling and fighting like maddened, cornered animals, until they gained a foothold on the road which stretched out bleak and coverless eight hundred yards to the main village. Some tried to make a run of it over the bottomless, intervening snows, where they struggled piteously like hobbled animals and were killed. But in most part, they dashed in frantic relays down the open road, sprinting forward a score of yards, then flattening on the ground, and so on, rushing and sprawling flat, until the fatal course was run, while every rifle from the abandoned village on the height, and the flanking forest and across the Vaga spurted death, and machine guns rattled rasping death, and bullets lashed the air with the furious cracking of ten thousand whips, or sped fluttering through the snow, and went off whimpering into space, or felled men with sledgelike blows, until the doomed way was strewn, end to end, with the prostrate forms of the fallen ones, and a pitiful few, by some fluke of luck, had gained the shielding hill.

Not ten minutes had been taken in that terrible dash through that valley of Death's shadow, and of the forty-seven who began the journey, six reached the goal of the main village. In the fearful sub-zero temperature, all of the wounded would have perished by freezing, had not a volunteer party, braving the unspeakable, barbarous Bolos (who for some reason held their fire), gone out in the open snow and brought them to shelter. Fifteen were thus accounted for, and the rest lay somewhere beyond sight, "missing in action," that ambiguous, impersonal expression of the War Department, so fraught with mingled hope and dread, harrowing fear.

When the snow mounted high the fortifications had been made safe
against any projectile save a six-inch shell

When night screened the battle scene, the Allied Russians, upon their own inspiration, evacuated the village on the flat, and the next day, the unwitting Bolsheviks began the second phase of their investment of Ust Padenga. Again the artillery, even more violently than the first day, flung hurtling blasts at the deserted village, and late at day, the infantry, grotesque, bobbing objects out on the wide snow stretches, stormed the uncontested position. It was like rifle practice to shoot down those living targets, glaringly open on the white snow, and they were downed by tattering bursts of shrapnel, downed by musketry, downed by awful devastating bursts from machine guns, that moved them row upon row, until the last man had passed to the cover of this village of costly folly, and the snow was dotted with dead and wounded, which, from the distant hill, looked grotesquely like raisins stuck in an immense rice pudding.

On the third day, the surviving village, lying bare on the unsheltered top of the cliff, was the target of a barrage that searched it house to house, until many of the moujik homes were wrecks of smashed timbers, and the trail of human wreckage was a ghastly, unsightly thing. The American doctor went to death, a victim of the shells, because he would not have his wounds bound up while a single, private soldier was not relieved, but he lives with Vaga men as long as life endures, a symbol of moral grandeur and noblest self abnegation, that will ever inspire faith in the immortal, spiritual entity of man.

It was not the Viking Captain who ordered retreat from Ust Padenga. Half of his little company was gone, but he had no thought of yielding. He would have held on until the last dog was hung, if superior directions had not come from Shenkurst. He loved a fight, this antique Norseman, loved the wild, esoteric fury of it. Three times, his men threw back the Bolsheviks, and caught in a contagion of blood lust, they craved still more, maddened by battle, they took hilarious delight in seeing "the Bolos bite the snow banks."

They did not know that pitted against them was the vanguard of an army that by every objective rule of warfare should have crushed this rash, little group to utter destruction; but if Ust Padenga did not know, all at Shenkurst were fully alert to the gravity of the situation. This was the much proclaimed Bolshevik offensive, with its object, the annihilation of the Allied North Russian Expedition; and now as the full fury of the gigantic, impending assault unfolded, the "offensive defensive" theory found vindication, for at the Ust Padenga, little more than one company had stood off a regiment of the enemy.

There seemed small hope of escape for the valiant Vaga men who remained after the fourth night of the attack, when an incendiary shell fell upon the village, sending hungry, devouring flames athwart the curtain of the Russian night, till naught was left of the moujik homes save the gray ashes of "friendly intervention"; but in the confusion of concentration, the assemblage of large numbers and numerous troop movements, the retreating company glided in darkness down the center of the frozen, white covered Vaga, through the very midst of unsuspecting, enemy hosts, and two nights later, reported at Headquarters tired and half starved, the Viking leader among the casualties with a serious wound.

In Shenkurst, the beleaguered city, in point of numbers, the Slavic Battalion, nearly twelve hundred strong, was the mainstay of the garrison, but on trial in a previous attack for one of the two flanking villages, it had made a sorry showing, and in a last stand, was estimated as of uncertain, staying quality. Besides these Russians, there was one full company of American Infantry, the exhausted half company from Ust Padenga, one section of the Thirty-Eighth Canadian Field Artillery, four Two Point Nine mountain pieces, and three trench mortars.

The Bolsheviks had surrounded Shenkurst in an immense, unnumbered multitude. They had mounted one nine inch gun, two six inch guns, four Four Point Sevens and a Battery of Field Artillery, and from three-quarters of the forest commenced to batter down the buildings.

It could be only a brief time before the city would be in ruins, but even more serious was the question of provisions. They were already limited, and in case of siege, no new supply could be brought up until the breaking of the river in May.

The Bolsheviks, confident that the garrison would try to escape from Shenkurst, waited in great masses on the main north road, eager for the coming slaughter; but a native had informed the Allied Command of a secret path through the deep, snow covered swamps, and at midnight, along this unknown route, evacuation was silently effected.

Before the retreat, the Allied Russians were sent as a protective screen along a flanking trail, but scarce had the retiring movement begun, when what remained of them came rushing back in frantic haste, that was altogether unsoldierly, gasping an excited, incoherent story of how two entire companies had deserted to the enemy lines and the rest had fled in desperate fear for their lives.

Many civilians joined this bizarre, midnight march through the snow forest and swamps, and made the retreat a spectacle of wantonous disorder, as stoical men and wailing women strove heavily on, bent under the torturing weight of bundled treasures, which, under duress of fatigue, one by one were reluctantly abandoned, leaving a pathetic havoc of cluttering waste in the trail; and soldiers, weakened by much fasting and sleepless battle nights, lurched in the darkness, fell and lay in the cold snow, and had to be struck and urged on by violent means, so grateful was any surcease from further excruciating effort.

Late the next day, a merciful halt for the night was made at Shaguvari, where a rear detached outpost of Shenkurst had been maintained, and which outnumbering, advance enemy patrols had vainly striven to dislodge. But the disheartening march was resumed in the morning, when the Bolsheviks were reported collecting in force to cut off retreat downstream. So Shaguvari was added to the sum of Russian villages fed to fires of the Allied cause and became another charred ruin on the Vaga.

At villages outside of Kitsa, twenty miles further, trenches were dug in the snow, and barricades improvised of trees, in order that the driven troops might catch their breath. And on the Dvina, now only a few miles away, new positions were taken, where the imperiled River Column could be drawn back, and the consolidated Allied forces stand embattled in a desperate last defense of Bereznik, for if Bereznik fell, all knew it meant the beginning of the siege of unfortified Archangel.

But the delaying action was prolonged beyond the most sanguine dream of hope, and at Vistafka and Yeveevskaya, Maximofskaya and Ignatevskaya, the neighboring villages of Kitsa, the Americans held out, relieved in turns by British troops, and the remaining Slavic allies, who atoned for much by a heaven bestowed blunder that saved a surrounded post of the Americans.

These places, with their unpronounceable Slavic names, will be remembered always by the Vaga men, for here during Arctic February and March days, they fought savage, bloody fights in the mounting snowdrifts, and performed deeds of sublime sacrifice and courage, that will never be known save by those who were there.

They were still at Kitsa, and had not given ground, when the first redolence of spring softened the rasping, winter winds, and made the Bolshevik Commander draw back his artillery in fear of being mired in the yielding snow roads.

Not one of the Vaga men, in the innermost counsel of his heart, had ever expected to live through that winter onslaught, and when all with quiet courage stood ready for the end, lo, the enemy abandoned the field where victory awaited, and left the battle when it had been won. This petty, strange and inexplicable war was freighted deep with countless things of mystery, but none so beyond understanding as the failure of the Bolshevik Command to follow up the capture of Shenkurst.

The feeble, Allied remanent on the Vaga was reeling from the stunning blows of the massed attack, and thought of resistance all hung on the hope of saving Archangel and the life of the Expedition; but when all tensed themselves for the crucial shock, it did not come, the Bolshevik advance weakened and faltered and held back, so that the defenders, panting in terrible exhaustion, were able to suck in the air of reviving strength and hold on. When later the attacks of February and March came, they were sporadic, and lacked the fury, the sustained and vehement driving power of the first assault. Now in spring, it was too late, for Nature with sun and gentle breath had definitely won the battle for the Vaga men, and they crossed the river to safety, leaving in the black, despairing night, two villages flaming, a recessional of ill-will and destruction.

The first boast of "one Allied soldier against twenty Bolsheviks" had been made good, and the Expedition was saved, but by a precariously close margin. In no respect did the Allied Command so underestimate the enemy as in his power of military organization. The miserable "Bolo brigands" that were to have disbanded with the first punishment of Arctic cold, had raised an enormous army, which now, in late winter, exceeded one million soldiers, and the regiments that took Shenkurst must have laughed contemptuously at the undisciplined, untrained troops of the early days of the campaign.

Perhaps it will never be known why the Allies were not destroyed by these Vaga attacks. There were many villages capable of housing great numbers of soldiers south of Shenkurst, and probably in the January thrust, seven thousand five hundred to eight thousand hostile troops were quartered in them, a force that should have swept the Vaga Column before it like chaff in the storming wind, but it did not do so, and one may conjecture that the reason was because Trotsky did not care to hazard the risk of stirring the American people and the British people to an avenging and genuine war by the annihilation of the lone Allied battalions. Greater wars have been brought about by more trivial causes; but the stronger probability is that the Bolshevik soldiers revolted at the staggering slaughter of the attacks over the deep snows.

"Our losses are terrible," said one of the prisoners, "the commissars cannot understand your resistance. We are twenty to one and have many guns. Our Commander expected to take Bereznik in three days, but the soldiers will not attack any more over the snow against your awful machine guns."

The troops at the Vaga battles could not be compared with the unruly, Bolo rabble of the early days. They shot low and were well officered by officers, mostly Letts, who had been trained in Trotsky's military schools at Moscow.

Another explanation might have been in the story of some of the prisoners, but which was never confirmed, that the soldiers had met in a solemn, protest meeting, following the last costly, Vaga offensive, and shot their Commander for his persistence in pushing on, despite the heavy casualties. The fatal potion of Kerensky's Order still poisoned the blood of the Russian army, and although the Soviet soldiers gave exhibition of great bravery, and were well led, they were not great soldiers; they failed in the ultimate trial, and did not go through to victory when stamina and resilience for the last lap would have won.

As the Vaga men had gone furthest in fulfillment of a vain and futile mission, had parried the heart thrust, and beat back its violence, so were they the last to leave, and were still in battle at Malo Bereznik at the close of May, six months after the Armistice, that proclaimed Peace to an afflicted World, and poured cooling balm on a million wounds, so far from feverish, strife torn Russia.

Not until June did they meet their regimental comrades, coming from every compass point of the wide province, save the seabound, impassable north, to assemble at Economia for the homegoing. There the battles of Kodish and the Railway, Onega, the Vaga and Dvina and Pinega Valley were fought again, until the white, Russian snows were hued rose red with blood of recounted slain, until American soldiers sailed away, bewildered still at this gambling murder game, and sacred life—the most contemptible stake in the mad lottery.

Not the Vaga men to idly speculate on causes! They knew full well the colonel's words, and were exalted still by the fervor of their sacrificial avowal, the noblest of mankind—to lay down life for a friend.