The result of this agreement with the Murmansk and the arrival of further troops at the Murmansk coast, together with the promise of more to follow immediately, was to influence the Russian local government of the state of Archangel to break with the hated Reds. And so, on August 1st, a quiet coup d’etat was effected. The anti-Bolshevists came out into the open. The Provisional North Russian Government was organized. The people were promised an election and they accepted the situation agreeably for they had detested the Red government. Two cargoes of food had no little also to do with the heartiness of their acceptance of the Allied military forces and the overturn of the Bolshevik government.
Within forty-eight hours came the military forces already mentioned, the advance forces of the British that preceded the Allied expedition, consisting of a huge British staff, a few British soldiers, a few French and a detachment of fifty American sailors from the “Olympia.” In a few days the battalion of French colonials sailed in from Murmansk.
The coming of the troops prevented the counter coup of the Reds. They could only make feeble resistance. The passage up the delta of the Dvina River and the actual landing while exciting to the jackies met with little opposition. Truth to tell, the wily Bolsheviks had for many weeks seen the trend of affairs, and, expecting a very much larger expedition, had sent or prepared for hasty sending south by rail toward Vologda or by river to Kotlas of all the military supplies and munitions and movable equipment as well as large stores of loot and plunder from the city of Archangel and suburbs. Count von Mirbach, the German ambassador at Moscow, threatened Lenine and Trotsky that the German army then glowering in Finland, across the way, would march on Petrograd unless the military stores were brought out of Archangel.
The rearguard of the Bolshevik armed forces was disappearing over the horizon when the American jackies seized engines and cars at Archangel Preestin and Bakaritza, which had been saved by the hindering activities of anti-Bolshevik trainmen, and dashed south in pursuit. There is a heroic little tale of an American Naval Reserve lieutenant who with a few sailors took a lame locomotive and two cars with a few rifles and two machine guns, mounted on a flat car, and hotly gave chase to the retreating Red Guards, routing them in their stand at Issaka Gorka where they were trying to destroy or run off locomotives and cars, and then keeping their rear train moving southward at such a rate that the Reds never had time to blow the rails or burn a bridge till he had chased them seventy-five miles. There a hot box on his improvised armored train stopped his pursuit. He tore loose his machine guns and on foot reached the bridge in time to see the Reds burn it and exchange fire with them, receiving at the end a wound in the leg for his great gallantry.
The Red Guards were able to throw up defenses and to bring up supporting troops. A few days later the French battalion fought a spirited, but indecisive, engagement with the Reds. It was seen that he intended to fight the Allies. He retreated southward a few miles at a time, and during the latter part of August succeeded in severely punishing a force of British and French and American sailors, who had sought to attack the Reds in flank. And it was this episode in the early fighting that caused the frantic radiogram to reach us on the Arctic Ocean urging the American ships to speed on to Archangel to save the handful of Allied men threatened with annihilation on the railroad and up the Dvina River. And we were to go into it wholehearted to save them, and later find ourselves split up into many detachments and cornered up in many another just such perilous position but with no forces coming to support us.
The inability of the Allied Supreme War Council to furnish sufficient troops for the North Russian expedition, and the delay of the United States to furnish the part of troops asked of her, very nearly condemned the undertaking to failure before it was fairly under way. However, as the ultimate success of the expedition depended in any event on the success of the Allied operations in far off Siberia in getting the Czecho-Slovak veterans and Siberian Russian allies through to Kotlas, toward which they were apparently fighting their way under their gallant leader and with the aid of Admiral Kolchak, and because there was a strong hope that General Poole’s prediction of a hearty rallying of North Russians to the standards of the Allies to fight the Germans and Bolsheviki at one and the same time, the decision of the Supreme War Council was, in spite of President Wilson’s opposition to the plan, to continue the expedition and strengthen it as fast as possible. To the American soldier at this distance it looks as though the French and British, perhaps in all good faith, planned to muddle along till the American authorities could be shown the fitness or the necessity of supporting the expedition with proper forces. But this was playing with a handful of Americans and other Allied troops a great game of hazard. Only those who went through it can appreciate the peril and the hazard.
To the credit of the American doughboys and Tommies and Poilus and others who went into North Russia in the fall of 1918 let it be said that they smashed in with vim and gallant action, thinking that they were going to do a small bit away up there in the north to frustrate the military and political plans of the Germans. And although they were not all interested in the Russian civil war at the beginning, they did learn that the North Russian people’s ideal of government was the representative government of the Americans, while the Red Guards whom they were fighting stood for a government which on paper at its own face value represented only one class and offered hatred to all other classes. When it tried to put into effect its so-called constitution that had been dreamed out of a nightmare of oppression and hate, it failed completely. Machine gun beginning begot cruel offspring of provisional courts of justice and sword-revised soviets of the people so that packed soviets and Lenine-picked delegates and Trotsky-ridden ministers made the actual soviet government as much resemble the ideal soviet government as a wild-cat mining stock board of directors resembles a municipal board of public works. And the world knows now, if it did not in 1918-19, that the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic was, and is, a highly centralized tyranny, frankly called by its own leaders “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” The Russian people prayed for “a fish and received a serpent.”
VI
ON THE FAMOUS KODISH FRONT IN THE FALL
“K” Company Hurries To Save Force “B”—Importance Of Kodish Front—Hazelden’s Force Destroyed—First Fight At Seletskoe—Both Sides Burn Bridges—Desperate Fighting At Emtsa River—Capture Of Kodish—Digging In—We Lose Village After Days Of Hard Fighting—Trenches And Blockhouses.
Nowhere did the Yanks in North Russia find the fighting fiercer than did those who were battling their way toward Plesetskaya on the famous Kodish front. Woven into their story is that of the most picturesque American fighter and doughtiest soldier of the many dauntless officers and men who struggled and bled in that strange campaign. This man was Captain Michael Donoghue, commanding officer of “K” Company, 339th Infantry. He afterward was promoted in the field to rank of major and his old outfit of Detroit boys proudly remember that “K” stands for Kodish where they and their commander earned the plaudits of the regiment.