Russian Sideshow

by Robert L Willett

  Edwin Arkins wrote in his journal, “English and American troops on opposite transports get into row. One of our men is hit by bottle thrown from opposite ship.”12

  The troops had mixed emotions watching Russia fade from view as they entered the White Sea. Most were delighted to be going home, but puzzled by their experiences. Again and again, the question was asked: why were we there? No reasonable answer ever came. Some of the thoughts of the departing Americans were expressed by Capt. Joel Moore:

  That night scene with the lowering sun near midnight gleaming gold upon the forest shaded stretches of the Dvina River and casting its mellow melancholy light upon the wrecked churches of a village, is an ineffaceable picture of North Russia. For this is our Russia—a church, a little cluster of log houses, encompassed by unending forests of moaning spruce and pine; low, brooding, sorrowful skies; and over all oppressive stillness, sad, profound, mysterious, yet strangely lovable to our memory.

  Near the shell-gashed and mutilated church are two rows of un-adorned wooden crosses, simple memorial of a soldier burial ground. Come vividly back into the scene the winter funerals of our buddies, brave men, who, loving life, having been laid away there, having died soldier-like for a cause they dimly understood. And the crosses now rise up, mute, eloquent testimony to the cost of this strange, inexplicable war of North Russia.13

  The Americans and French had departed, and the British evacuation plan was left to Ironside; however, he was plagued by a series of mutinies and desertions that sapped both his enthusiasm and his energy. The Russian garrison at Onega abruptly handed the installation over to the Soviets, then a company of Russians deserted at Seletskoye. But the bitterest blow was the mutiny of the Salvo Batallion Allied Legion (SBAL), Dyer’s Battalion, trained and led by British officers and noncoms. On July 7, these Russians turned on their officers, murdered them as they slept, and bolted for the Soviet lines. Four Russian and five British officers died in the mutiny; the event shook Ironside to the core.14 Until that time, Ironside hoped that the Russian White Army could survive after the Allies had gone, but he began to see the impossibility of that expectation. Even his relief officers questioned the reliability of the Russian troops they commanded. Mutinies on a large scale were not frequent, but individual desertions were a daily occurrence. The situation was disheartening for the British general.

  Ironside’s plan was to mount a substantial offensive with his new, fresh replacements to push back the Bolos, then to evacuate his men before a Soviet counterattack could be launched. Ironside even had vague thoughts of taking Kotlas, the elusive target of the 1918 fall campaign, and somehow linking up with the Siberian troops. Any chance that this goal might be realized was dashed when word came from Omsk on July 24 that Kolchak’s Siberian forces were collapsing and there would be no westward movement of his army. Ironside issued orders for his own offensive to begin August 10 on the Dvina, adding that all units would be withdrawn from Russia by month’s end. Right on schedule, the British jumped off on August 10 with a smashing victory, pushing the Bolsheviks back, capturing and sinking their gunboats, and assuring the British that their evacuation would be unhampered by the enemy. Loyal Russian troops were left in the defensive works around Berezenik in case any Soviets showed up, but Ironside breathed a sigh of relief as he returned to Archangel. Casualties in the campaign were 145 killed and wounded.15

  Capping off the disappointments of the past months, Ironside heard indirectly that a new commanding officer was coming to Archangel to be his superior. This news was confirmed by cable on August 1; Lord Rawlinson would arrive soon to take command. Ironside accepted the news stoically:

  For a moment I had a feeling of disappointment that I was not to be allowed to see the business out by myself, but a little thought soon showed me how necessary such an appointment was. Both General Maynard and I were very much taken up in the affairs of our commands, which were not only widely separated but had indifferent communications between them. And the evacuation of all Allied troops undoubtedly required careful co-ordination.16

  Fortunately, Ironside and Rawlinson took an instant liking to each other; Rawlinson accepted Ironside’s plan, and it was only a matter of withdrawing the troops, arranging transport, and returning to England.

  As plans for embarkation progressed, Rawlinson moved on to Murmansk, leaving Ironside in Archangel to answer the many Russian petitions, pleas, and protests concerning the imminent British departure, which was now well known. One visitor to Ironside’s office was a prominent Russian colonel who had been honored with the British Distinguished Service Order.

  He entered my office and saluted me. He then threw his DSO on the table between us. For two minutes he told me what he thought of the Allies and their behaviour. He then saluted again and marched out of the room. I sat in silence looking at the discarded Order which he had so gallantly won.17

  To complete the British withdrawal plan, Russian general Miller would attack down the railroad on August 29, aided by two Australian companies and a flight of aging RAF planes. Although the attack was a huge success, Ironside had to tell Miller that the British departure date was September 10 and could not be changed. Miller had hoped that his successful offensive would reenergize the Allies, but it was not to be. The actual withdrawal from the front lines began smoothly on August 20; by August 23, all British forces were within a defensive perimeter outside Archangel. In a complex movement of boats, transports, and tugs, the AEF slowly made its way downriver as Ironside watched from the British admiral’s yacht.

  As General Ironside took his last leave of Archangel and of General Miller and his aide, he was moved:

  The guard turned out again and he was piped over the side. We stood watching them as they walked slowly away. I was half hoping he might turn and wave his hand to us in farewell, but he never once looked back, keeping steadily on till they disappeared behind the buildings once more. He was a very proud and gallant gentleman.18

  From the White Russian standpoint, the Intervention had been a monumental disaster. Disregarding the suffering of thousands caught in the fighting during the Allied effort, some Russians maintained that the Intervention aided the cause of the Bolsheviks by focusing their propaganda on these foreign “invaders.” A Russian professor in Archangel wrote recently, “From our point of view, without the Allied Intervention the anti-Bolshevik struggle in the north could hardly have taken the form of civil war.”19

  Perhaps a more fitting epitaph came from Eugenie Fraser’s household.

  One morning, a chain of ships, half hidden by the early mists, slowly stole past our shores and vanished behind the island on its way to the White Sea. Only a year earlier these ships had been met with rejoicing and now they were slinking away in silence. We watched them from our windows. Only Seryozha passed a bitter comment. “Why did they come at all? We shall pay a bitter price for this.”20

  And they did.

  For a few months the White Army under General Miller managed to hold their ground, but in the bitter winter of 1920, his command began to unravel. In October 1919 the Reds began a slow movement down the Dvina toward Archangel. On February 20, 1920, forces coming up the Vologda Railroad and the Dvina attacked and occupied Archangel. The Red Army also moved up the Murmansk Railroad, taking key cities; Murmansk finally fell on March 20, 1920.21

  There are few records of the terror that swept North Russia as the Bolsheviks took their vengeance on White Russians and Allied supporters. The continual fighting on the six fronts had burned, shelled, or wiped out most of the towns and cities; when the plundering Reds arrived, those who were fortunate enough to elude the execution squads made survival their only goal. Mass executions took place daily.

  Eugenie Fraser, while on an outing picking berries, heard tramping feet behind her and looked back to see a group of guarded prisoners with spades. They passed through a gate into a nearby field, then disappeared into a thicket. Eugenie recognized the school uniform of one of the young prisoners:

 
Suddenly the sound of distant shots broke the silence. A flock of frightened birds flew overhead and vanished. Puzzled, Vera and I looked up.

  Sometime later, with our full baskets, we were winding our way back past the rough fencing, the strange gate, and onto the road to the town. We were again overtaken by the same soldiers, marching briskly back toward the prison. There were no prisoners in their midst, but flung over their shoulders were bundles of clothing, including the gray uniform of the young boy. Everything fell into place. The prisoners, the gate, the shots, the birds flying overhead, the gray uniform.22

  Estimates are that as many as thirty thousand North Russians perished at the hands of the Bolsheviks during the next year.23

  Most of the doughboys had fought bravely and well. There had been unrest, and in a few cases, they had carried out their orders reluctantly, but in spite of many inner feelings, they did their duty. The Canadians and Americans often expressed sympathy for, and even a certain closeness to, the Bolsheviks. “This was not unusual among the Americans and Canadians of the winter army and was so common among the new army that I felt at one time they were more likely to make trouble for the Military Intervention than the Russians were,” wrote Ralph Albertson of the YMCA.24 But Americans and Canadians, unlike the British, French, or Russians, left mutiny to others.

  After Murmansk, the Yanks went to Brest, France, then to Camp Pontanezen near Brest. On June 22, the first units to be sent home boarded the USS Von Steuben, headed west for New York. Aboard, in shackles, was Pvt. Harry Jones of Company E, who had been convicted of the murder of Martin Campbell in October 1918. The ship crossed without event; the various companies were moved to Detroit, where the Army routine broke down as families found each other. Carey wrote, “And how glorious it was for Detroit. Her regiment—Detroit’s Own—was back from a long campaign on foreign soil; back to receive the hospitable welcome of a gracious city, a happy state and a grateful nation.”25 The final move for most men was to Camp Custer, where they were quietly discharged from service. Other units came from Brest a few days later on the President Grant, going first to Boston, then arriving in Detroit on July 15. They were feted and paraded, as the first units had been, and discharged on July 18, 1919, exactly one year after they had left the United States for their unanticipated Arctic experience.

  With this episode concluded, the 339th was deactivated as a unit. It would, however, see war again on the Italian front during World War II.

  The 310th Engineers, one of the last full units remaining in Russia, left on June 26 and proceeded to Brest, then boarded the USS Northern Pacific for the Atlantic crossing to Hoboken, New Jersey. The men were processed at Camp Merritt, New Jersey, and discharged there, so they simply drifted back to their homes without fanfare.

  Finally, the 167th and 168th Transportation Companies left Murmansk on July 30 and were demobilized at Brest. General Richardson’s return completed the official closing of the American North Russian Expeditionary Force on August 5, 1919.26

  The AEFNR veterans had a special bond; they formed their own organization, the Polar Bear Association, which met regularly until 1983, when death and illness thinned its ranks to an aged few. Two Polar Bear chapters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) still exist, one in Detroit and the other in Muskegon, Michigan.

  Although 235 Americans had died in Russia, when the 339th units came home in 1919, they brought only 108 bodies, including those of 5 sailors. More than one hundred bodies lay in marked and unmarked graves throughout the frozen, swampy lands of Russia. But records then, as they often are today, were confused and inaccurate. Pvt. John Westerhof of Grand Rapids, Michigan, is a case in point. Westerhof died on board a barge on the Dvina River on September 11. His body was kept on board until the barge docked at Bereznik, where he was buried in a little churchyard.27 As the Americans were leaving Archangel, more than one hundred bodies were exhumed and put on board the transports. After arrival in the United States, each was sent to his hometown for burial. Before Westerhof was lowered into the ground, his parents opened the casket and found that it was not their son.28 Who it was, no one knows. There is no record that Westerhof’s body was ever recovered, and, on a plaque in the Meuse Argonne National Cemetery in France dedicated to the missing in action, is the name of John T. Westerhof, along with others from the 339th.29

  In one sense, however, the last Polar Bears to return were brought home many years later in what is one of the most unusual ventures ever taken by Americans. In 1929 a group sponsored by the VFW with some State of Michigan funds and some federal funds was able to obtain permission to enter Soviet territory to search for and recover those bodies left behind. In an odyssey that could fill a book, the group managed to discover and identify eighty-six remains, even after ten years in that hostile climate. They were helped by government officials and graves registration personnel in their frustrating and difficult search. Surprisingly, in 1934 the Soviet government shipped to the United States the remains of twelve more Polar Bears. They were the last to come home. But twenty-nine Americans, forever young, still lie somewhere in that strange hostile land just below the Arctic Circle.

  After careful analysis and processing, seventy-five of the eighty-six bodies recovered in the search were returned to the United States on board the SS President Roosevelt in zinc-lined coffins. The ship docked at Hoboken, New Jersey, on November 28, 1929, greeted not by the cheering crowds of ten years ago, but by a seventeen-gun salute and funeral dirges played by the Army Sixteenth Infantry Band. With dignity and respect, the seventy-five flag-draped caskets were boarded on a black-creped funeral train that would take them to their final resting place. Three families requested burial in Arlington, eleven families asked that their loved ones be buried in Europe, and sixteen Polar Bears were delivered to their hometowns as the train wound slowly west.

  The train stopped in every town or city of any size in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan. Taps was played at each station even in the dead of night, the plaintive notes registering on silent crowds of citizens and VFW honor guards. Nothing like it had been seen since the train bearing the body of assassinated President Abraham Lincoln made its sad journey to Illinois in 1865.30

  On December 1, the train made its last stop at Detroit’s Union Station, where thousands gathered in the falling snow to witness the somber procession of fifty-six hearses wind its way to White Chapel Cemetery in Troy. There the bodies would remain in state until Memorial Day 1930, when a proper ceremony could dedicate the new Polar Bear monument and consign the dead to their place of honor. More Polar Bears would join their comrades in 1934, when the Soviets chose to return the remains of twelve soldiers, who would lie in the company of their friends at White Chapel.31

  There would be no closure for the twenty-nine families left without further knowledge of their missing sons, husbands, or brothers.

  While it was a bitter and frustrating winter for the 339th Infantry Regiment, there was a fierce pride in most of them as they came home to live with their memories and wounds and to resume their civilian lives. Lt. John Commons of Company K summed it up not just for the men of Company K returning from the horrors of Kodish, but for all men of the regiment:

  So they stuck and fought, suffering through the bitter months of winter just below the Arctic Circle, where the winter day is in minutes and the night seems a week. And there is not one who is not proud that he was once a “sidekicker” and a “buddy” to some of those fine fellows of the various units who unselfishly and gladly gave the last a man has to give for any cause at all.32

  14

  Aftermath

  ABOUT many of the principal players little is known. President Chaikovsky was a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference and stayed on to live in the French capital.

  Cpl. Earl Collins died in a Bolshevik hospital. In a surprising move, the Soviet government released his body with eleven others in 1934. His family elected to have him interred in Europe, and he remains the only member of the 339th
Infantry Regiment buried in England.

  Ambassador David Francis recovered from his prostate surgery and plagued President Wilson for years, pleading for massive troop reinforcements.

  Eugenie Fraser left Russia in 1920 and moved to her Scottish mother’s house in Scotland. She married and lived most her life in Australia, but, widowed, she now lives in Edinburgh.

  Gen. Edmund Ironside prospered in his military career, becoming Chief of the Imperial General Staff at the outbreak of World War II, but retired in 1942 and died in 1959 at the age of seventy-nine.

  Gen. E. Miller, who stuck with his troops until the disintegration of the northern White Army, sailed out of Archangel with the mysterious George Chaplin just before the Reds took over the city. Reportedly, he lived in Paris, but was abducted and murdered by Red agents years later.

  George Stewart passed from sight into an undistinguished Army career. He did make colonel, but never received any recognition for Archangel. He retired on disability in 1931 and died March 2, 1946.

  credit: Richard Barber

  PART II

  Siberia

  The American Expeditionary Force Siberia, 1918–1920

  15

  The Russian Railroad Story

  Anyway, will risk saying that things are looking brighter for the old R.R.S. Corps and we are coming to life, and every man Jack will soon have something to do.

  —Lt. Fayette Keeler, RRSC

  AT the same time the AEFNR was engaged in North Russia, another American force found itself on the opposite end of Russia, four thousand miles from the 339th Infantry. However, the Siberian expedition was remarkably different from the North Russian expedition. In August 1918, Maj. Gen. William S. Graves, still in Camp Fremont, California, took command of the American Expeditionary Forces Siberia (AEFS), consisting of two infantry regiments sent from the Philippines and bolstered by five thousand replacements from the Eighth Division at Camp Fremont. However, as in North Russia, there were other American forces already involved in Siberia: the Russian Railroad Service Corps (RRSC), and the Navy.