The Atlantic seas took their toll on the traveling troops; seasickness affected many in their crowded quarters. But soon land was sighted, and the troopships slowly entered the waterways leading to the docks at Liverpool, England. It was a welcome sight as the Midwesterners lined the rails, drinking in the green lands of England. They disembarked, some on August 3 and some on August 4, happy to be on land again, still believing they were headed for France and the western front. Again, the Red Cross met them, and gave them their first taste of English cakes. There was another train to ride; some went to Camp Cowshot, and others went to Camp Stoney Castle in Brookwood, some twenty-five miles southwest of London. They found more tents, but no bunks, so many slept on the cold, soggy ground. There they had their first taste of mutton, which would become one of their least favorite, but most plentiful, meats. Companies E and H were bivouacked on an old country estate once occupied by an African explorer, Sir Henry Stanley. Pvt. Donald Carey was moved by the beauty of the countryside: “Though depressed and tired upon arrival I soon appreciated the natural beauty of the place with its grass, excellent drinking water, and rolling country.”8
The 339th Regiment was given the rest of its abbreviated training in the English countryside at Camp Stoney Castle, while the other three regiments of the Eighty-fifth went to other sites, and soon after, to France. The Engineers and the hospital units were sent to different English locations that provided their own training. They often spent their days in long marches toting full packs and rifles, sometimes wearing their gas masks.9 This took place during a hot summer season, complete with English rain and fog.
In the evenings, passes were available, and nearby London kept them busy with its theaters, saloons, restaurants, and sightseeing. It was an exciting time for most of the men, despite their rather rigorous training schedule. Company D’s Pvt. Frank Duoma noted in his almost daily journal how impressed he was with his several visits to London. He did all the tourist things imaginable, making good use of his spare moments. A nighttime visit to London was an eye-opener: “The bartenders were all girls. The women drink in the saloons the same as men and also smoke a great deal.”10
It was while in training that some of the men and officers first learned that the decision had been made to send them on an “intervention” into North Russia. In England Lowell Thomas, a famous author, lecturer, and broadcaster, was one of the first to inform the recently arrived doughboys they would not be going to France as they all expected, but to Russia.11
Gen. John J. Pershing, the American commander of all forces in Europe, selected the 339th to make the Russian expedition. There were several reasons for his choice. Their commander, George Evans Stewart, was a forty-six-year-old, experienced Regular Army major with the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel. He had served in the Philippines for a number of years where he won the Medal of Honor for the river rescue of an enlisted man in November 1899. Since that time he had been in the Engineers, served two years in Alaska, and most recently was in the Quartermaster Corps.12 His service in Arctic Alaska made him a good choice to lead men from the colder northern states. Besides, the regiment was conveniently stationed near London and readily available.”13
The 339th Infantry, joined by the First Battalion 310th Engineers, 337th Field Hospital, and 337th Ambulance Company, was identified as the American Expeditionary Force North Russia (AEFNR). They would be under British command; in addition, they were issued British clothing and winter equipment. Most significantly, they had to trade in their familiar Enfield rifles for older and more cumbersome Moison-Nagant 7.62mm Russian rifles, long, clumsy weapons with corkscrew bayonets. Even though these rifles were American-made weapons, they had been manufactured specifically for the Russian Imperial Army and were far from popular with the Americans. Pvt. Donald Carey of Company E was amazed when he was issued his new weapon: “It was a Russian rifle! No wonder they lost the war. What was the object of equipping American troops with such a rifle? Were we to fight alongside the Russians against the Huns on the broken-down Eastern Front? Certainly no troops would go to France with these worthless weapons.”14
Not only were rifles exchanged, but the machine guns on which the 339th had trained at Custer and in England were taken away and replaced with the British Lewis and Vickers machine guns. The Vickers was a water-cooled gun that took two hands to fire. Russell Hershberger, a machine gunner, wrote that they had no training on these guns before being sent to the front. He added with disgust:
And at night, many times it was three of us slept together, and we’d take them guns between us in the bed to keep them from freezing. . . . Can you imagine using a water-cooled up in that climate where for twelve straight weeks it never got above fifty below zero. And using a water-cooled gun!15
Maj. J. Brooks Nichols, Second Battalion commander, commented on the exchange of rifles. “No two weapons shot the same ammunition and not one shot American ammunition, or was in anywise related to the character of the weapons the men had been trained to use before they reached Russia.”16 The explanation given was that a large cache of ammunition fitting the Russian rifle awaited the troops in Archangel; however, those cartridges had long since been confiscated by the Bolsheviks. The weapons provided were a source of great resentment with the troops; that resentment would be fueled later by the issue of British food rations. It was to be a truly British show.
Since England was suffering through one of its hottest summers in years, the newly issued wool uniforms became an itchy nuisance.17 Another annoyance was the infamous Shackleton boot, a bulky piece of footwear designed by the famous Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton and totally unfit for use by an infantry force. It would come to be as universally hated as the British rations.
Perhaps the lack of enthusiasm for the Intervention by senior U.S. Army officers led to the equipment exchange. Army chief of staff Gen. Peyton March related:
The President, on July 17, decided to authorize the sending of an American force as part of the proposed North Russian Expedition, and I then washed my hands of the whole matter. I told the Secretary that we could furnish from America neither transportation nor supplies for the proposed expedition.18
On the whole the men enjoyed England and they were reluctant to leave. Nevertheless, on August 25, amid persistent rumors concerning their destination—back to the United States to fight Mexico or to Italy, India via the Suez, or Siberia—the regiment marched in orderly ranks from their various locations to the trains in London. There they took a ten-hour ride to the docks at Newcastle-on-Tyne, 270 miles north of London, for the final leg of their overseas journey. While they traveled across England, they were sometimes cheered and stared at by the women and older men left in the English countryside, but sometimes jeered at by Britishers saying, “You’re finally here—what took you so long?” The recent citizens-turned-soldiers from the American Midwest were less than enthusiastic as they entrained for the docks at Newcastle.
On their way to the docks one of the Yanks, a lumberjack from northern Michigan, had a problem. He had been severely constipated for days and finally went to the medics, who obliged him with a supply of #9 pills, which in some cases had the same effect as an internal hand grenade. On a troop train, without sanitary facilities, the Michigander began to feel the effects of the medication, growing more and more panicky as the train moved slowly north, meandering through, and stopping frequently at, the little towns dotting the landscape. Finally, as the train paused in a tiny station, panic overtook pride and he jumped off the train, dropped his olive-drab pants and squatted on the platform. “People looked disgusted and shocked. He didn’t look right or left. His face was red, as he was busy making a big pancake that almost touched his shoes. We yelled at him, ‘Mac, your shoes, your shoes!’ He looked down and moved his feet farther apart.”19 His traveling companions, all of Company G, helped him back in the car, but were having a hard time, watching Mac with his pants still at half mast, trying to get through the tiny door. After he was safely a
board, he reached in his pocket and pulled out the welcome card from King George issued to them as they landed in England. Mac read the card, then said, “I wasn’t going to shit in my pants for no King George.” His bunkmate John Toornman, writing about the incident, said, “I wonder what the English people thought of us, and what you or I would have done in this predicament.”20
On the docks at Newcastle, just south of the Scottish border, waited four British troopships whose mission it was to carry the Americans, plus a contingent of Italian infantry, to Murmansk, Russia. Tragically, these ships carried more than their assigned troops to the northern Russian port. They also carried the deadly Spanish influenza.
4
The Americans Land in Archangel
Down the gangplank we went and I stepped on the blood-cursed soil of the despotic Tsars.
—Donald E. Carey
WITH their training in England finished, on August 27, 1918, the American troops were marched down to the Newcastle dock to greet their transports. Three British transport ships waited for the Americans, the Nagoya, the Somali, and the Tydeus, while the Tsar boarded Italian troops also headed north. The voyage was reasonably pleasant, although the weather became increasingly colder as they moved north. The barracks bags that held their winter clothing were stowed in the holds, unavailable to the doughboys, who wished they had the warm gear as they headed up the Norwegian coast into the Barents and White Seas. Originally, the plan was to send the Americans to Murmansk, but as they sailed north, the word went out to the little fleet to go directly to Archangel to rescue the endangered Force B with its American sailors, lost in the Russian interior.
As there was still concern about roaming German U-boats, the ships steered a zigzag course, hoping to elude any lurking submarines, but there was no mention of submarine sightings. The northern waters had been heavily mined, too, so there was a constant watch for mines that might have broken loose from charted mine fields. On the ships, long lines formed at the canteens, which opened to sell chocolate and sweets to the men, who had recently been paid.1 Several escort vessels busied themselves around the troopships, and their presence was both reassuring and entertaining. At night there was the midnight sun, a strange experience for the Midwesterners; the sun would barely dip below the horizon, and there was daylight almost twenty-four hours a day.
Somehow, the killer Spanish Flu had been brought aboard the vessels; the incubation period ended four days out of Newcastle, and the men began to drop like flies. (The deadly Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918 turned out to be a killer of more citizens worldwide than the Great War itself.2) The Tsar, carrying the Italians, was especially hard hit. Several soldiers reported seeing burials at sea taking place on the Tsar; it left the little convoy to dock in Murmansk. In the cramped quarters of the ship, unsanitary conditions prevailed and the disease took hold in its worst form. Men slept in hammocks, virtually touching each other; there was little ventilation due to the increasingly cold weather; and the ships themselves were disgusting. One description of the Nagoya read, “She had formerly been employed as a Pacific and Oriental trade ship and since that time had not been properly cleaned. The ever-present cootie, and a number of other species of vermin repellant to men were present in force.”3 Descriptions of the other ships were no more flattering.
A few of the men were seasick on the nine-day boat trip, but that condition was mild compared with the flu epidemic. Of the three remaining ships, the flu hit the men on the Somali the hardest. The official medical report listed no deaths at sea on board the three American troopships; however, some soldiers wrote of burials at sea. Charles Simpson wrote that he witnessed burials at sea on his ship, the Somali: “The large plank is raised to the side-rail, your Buddy, draped in the American flag, slides from the plank into the ocean and the ship sails on. . . . Thank goodness there were but few funerals at sea.”4 That vivid description seems a rather strong indication of shipboard deaths, yet the official medical reports and records of bodies brought back after the expedition, state that this was not the case.
The city of Archangel lies on the Dvina River some twenty-five miles south of its mouth. It flows north, carrying silt and fallings hundreds of miles, broadening and turning as it swings by Archangel. It finally empties into the White Sea, a sea named not for its clarity, but for its winter coating of snow and ice. The Dvina is roughly one mile wide at its widest point at Archangel.
On September 4, the transport fleet moved into the harbor area, passing Economie Point, a number of lumber mills, Solombola, then Archangel itself, docking at Bakharitza on the west side of the river.
The city normally housed about forty thousand people, but the war had doubled its size with refugees and military. The first impression was of masts and boats, docks and warehouses lining the river, but beyond the riverfront areas were scores of multistory buildings with chimneys and church spires with their colorful domes. The city itself was only a few blocks wide, running along the crescent-shaped harbor, from the Bakharitza area on the south end with its warehouses and docks, up to Economie in the north with its industry, sawmills, and shipyards, where there was a huge split in the river. While it was generally referred to as gray and dismal, some saw it in a better light. Capt. Joel Moore wrote:
Prominently rises the impressive magnitudinous structure of the reverenced cathedral there, its dome of the hue of heaven’s blue and set with stars of solid gold. And when all else in the landscape is bathed in morning purple or evening gloaming-grey, the leveled rays of the coming or departing sun with a brilliantly striking effect glisten these white and gold structures.5
Unfortunately, closer inspection revealed some basic flaws: streets were unpaved and always churned into foot-sucking mud; sidewalks were planks laid endwise and constantly in need of repair; sanitation was almost nonexistent, so that any fresh air that appeared was almost immediately fouled; and a distressing poverty was everywhere.
As soon as the regiment landed, the first priority was the treatment of the sick. Commander of American medical personnel Maj. Dr. Jonas Longley reported:
On the 5th day of September, 1918, arrived at Archangel, with more than one hundred cases of Influenza on the S.S. Somali, seventy-five cases on the S.S. Nagoya, and on the S.S. Tideus [sic], none. The Deputy Director of Medical Services of the British Army was immediately notified of our epidemic and we attempted to obtain accommodations for the patients at the 53d Stationary Hospital (British) but they were able to take only about twenty-five; and then their consent to accommodate this number was not received until the transports had moved up the river to Bakharitza, some five versts distance. For want of better hospital treatment and under great difficulties, as the mode of transportation was very poor, the worst cases were transferred.6
The official report indicated that the first flu-related death, Pvt. Albert F. Rickert of Mt. Clemens, Michigan, took place only hours after the ships docked in Archangel.7
Diaries written during those early days in Archangel, particularly of the Second Battalion assigned to the city, tell of an almost daily funeral detail. Charles Lewis, adjutant of the regiment, wrote of the death of Pvt. Joseph Brieve of Company E on September 8, then on September 9, of funerals for one American and two French, on September 10, of funerals for nine Americans, and the same on September 11, and so on.8
The British hospital was the only hospital open at the time; the lack of concern by British medics for the dangerously ill Americans was one reason British-American relations began badly and grew steadily worse during the expedition. As rudimentary medical housing was made available using sailors’ housing—old, filthy barracks—American men of the 337th Field Hospital strained their capacities to the limit. There were few supplies and virtually no medication. Medicine had been forgotten, according to some reports, or replaced with British whiskey rations, forty thousand cases of it.9 G. J. Anderson, of the 337th Field Hospital, wrote:
They lay on stretchers without mattress or pillow, lying in their O.D. unifor
ms, with only a simple blanket for covering. The place was a bedlam of sinister sounds of rasping, stertorous breathing, coughings, hackings, moans, and incoherent cries. All we could do was stand and watch some poor fellow gasping, burning with fever and dripping with sweat, then a sudden rigidity, a silence, and the staring eyes becoming fixed. . . . Whenever a patient died one of us would wake the other [orderly] and together would carry out the corpse and store him in the hallway.10
Major Longley was at Bakharitza where the sick were unloaded. He sought help from the Red Cross who willingly shared what expertise and supplies they had. The British felt that the Americans should not set up a hospital in Archangel since it was deemed that they were lacking in equipment and experienced personnel. But Major Longley, with Red Cross help, scrubbed and cleaned space in an available warehouse to administer to his sick, and when he was finished, he raised the American flag at his new hospital. The British orders were to fly only the Union Jack; it took two armed sentries on twenty-four-hour watches to keep the Stars and Stripes flying.
Despite the care offered the sick, many succumbed to the deadly flu. So one of the first assignments for the 310th Engineers was the layout of an American cemetery in Archangel. By September 30, it would have sixty-three American graves, all flu victims. Miraculously, only four more would die of disease during the rest of their stay in Russia.11 That was the good news: death by disease was controlled; the bad news was that death in combat was not.
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