This battalion was called upon for a great diversity of work, which it would have been impossible to do had not the men been carefully selected in the United States. Company “C” was called upon to help operate the Archangel power plant and street railway system the day they arrived. This they were able to do very successfully.
Shortly afterwards they raised and spliced a submerged power cable, used for conducting electricity under the river; one platoon was on railroad maintenance and construction work; and one platoon operated the saw mill. All the companies have been in action and have done construction work under fire.
Two main features have governed all our construction work; first, the large supply of timber, and second, the very cold climate. All of our barracks, washhouses, latrines, blockhouses, and stables, were designed to use available timber stocks. For a form of rapid construction we used double walls six inches apart and filled the spaces with sawdust. This proved very satisfactory and much faster than the local method which calls for a solid log construction.
The supply of engineer material has presented many problems of difficulty and interest. The distance to the nearest home base, England, was two to three weeks voyage. The port was not opened to supplies until after the 1st of June. Coupled with the necessary reshipment to the various fronts by barge and railway before the freeze-up, this caused a tremendous over-crowding of the dockage and warehouse facilities. The congestion and inevitable confusion at the port and warehouses has sometimes made it impossible to ever ascertain what had arrived.
The local stocks of engineer materials are limited to what can be found in Archangel itself and in the subsidiary ports of Economia and Bakaritza. In 1916 and 1917, tremendous stocks of all sorts of war material were to be found here, mostly brought from England and destined for the Rumanian and Russian fronts. In the spring of 1918, the Bolsheviks, anticipating the Allies landing, moved out to Vologda and Kotlas as much as they could rush out by the railway and river, and on the arrival of the first troops here not more than five per cent of the military material still remained.
The materials of most use to the engineers, which still remained, were forty thousand reels of barb wire and cable. A large amount of heavy machinery was also left behind, from which we have been able to locate and put in use a considerable number of various sized electric generators. A dozen complete searchlight sets, somewhat damaged by weather, were among this equipment. We overhauled these and used them for night construction work and also used several of the generator units of these sets to illuminate the headquarters train, work train, and hospital trains employed on the railway front.
The problem of transportation was one of the most difficult for us to contend with. The rail and road situations have already been explained. The country is very short of horses, the best specimens having long since been mobilized in the old Russian Army.
With motor transportation, the situation is no better. The Bolsheviks evacuated the best cars to Vologda before the arrival of the expedition and it is alleged that most of those they did not get away, were run into the Dvina River. The few trucks that did remain behind were in wretched condition. The British turned over two Seabrook trucks to us. We made all repairs and furnished our own drivers. In addition to these two trucks, the battalion supply officer secured five more, four independently. The owners were willing to give them to us, without cost, in order to forestall their being requisitioned by the Russian Motor Battalion. The condition of these trucks was poor. During the construction of the “Michigan” Barracks, the transportation was so inadequate that we were compelled to run both night and day. Through our control of the Makaroff sawmill, we had two tug-boats belonging to the mill, but it was only rarely that we could use them for other purposes.
It was a fine record our comrades, the engineers, made in the expedition. As the ribald old marching song goes:
“Oh, the infantry, the infantry, with dirt behind their ears,
The infantry, the infantry, that drink their weight in beers,
Artillery, the cavalry, the doggoned engineers,
They could never lick the infantry in a hundred thousand years.”