The air pilots were daring and courageous men, but, besides being hopelessly handicapped by defective machines, they complained that the forests of North Russia made definite discernment of the ground a very difficult thing. The facts are that they dropped several bombs on our own lines, and twice with tragic disaster. There was never any apparent reason to believe that the airplanes caused the enemy even passing uneasiness, but we were always agitated as their menacing drone approached, always grateful when they trailed off to distant skies.
The complete combat command of the Commanding General of the Allied North Russian Expedition at the outset of the campaign was then:
One regiment of American Infantry,
One brigade of British Infantry,
One battalion of French Infantry,
Two sections of French Seventy-Fives,
Two sections of French machine gunners,
One brigade (487 men) Canadian Field Artillery,
One armored train,
One 155 millimetre and
One 77 millimetre Russian howitzers.
There were a few groups of Russian Infantry with the Allied troops, but at the outset these did not number over three hundred men. In all, there were approximately nine thousand five hundred combat troops.
With this force, the Allied Commander proposed to engage in an aggressive campaign, to drive the enemy before him and follow up along the two main ways of ingress to the interior. Troops were at once dispatched down the railway to penetrate as far as the city of Vologda four hundred miles to the south, and other troops were sent by tug and barge up the Dvina River, with Kotlas, three hundred miles southeast, as their immediate objective. From Kotlas, there is a branch railway leading two hundred fifty miles further south to the Trans-Siberian at Viatka.
When their missions were accomplished, the Railway Force at Vologda would be nearly due east of the Dvina Force at Viatka, and distanced four hundred miles across the Trans-Siberian railway.
Beyond this stage, the Allied plan was somewhat hazy. It contemplated rather vagrantly a fusion with the Czecho-slovaks along the Siberian railway, after penetration south to this trunk line.
A volunteer brigade of these adventurous soldiers who had been Austro-Hungarian prisoners, but whose whole-souled sympathy was with the Allies, organized in their native Bohemia and Moravia, and joined General Broussiloff in the spring of 1917 to take part in the victory of Zborow near Lemberg. Moving to the railway between Kiev and Poltava in the Ukraine, the brigade recruited more Czech prisoners in Russia until it had grown to the strength of two divisions.
After the peace of Brest-Litovsk, this army corps pushed forward to the middle Volga in the direction of Kazan and Samara intending to reach Vladivostok and sail from there to join the Allied Command in France.
The Soviet authorities promised them safe convoy over the Siberian railway, but instead, treacherously attacked at Irkutsk in Siberia on 26th May, 1918, and the Czechs then divided into two groups, one determined to fight through to Vladivostok, the other under General Gaida bent upon joining the Allied invasion from Archangel.