Russian Sideshow
Page 37
How much support Wilson lost in the Senate by not removing the troops from Russia after November 1918 is difficult to measure. But when he badly needed the Senate ratification vote as he campaigned for the League of Nations, he faced public and Senate demands to bring home the troops from Russia.
The original pressure to intervene came from America’s chief allies, France and Britain. The reluctance of the United States to join the Allies in Russia, and President Wilson’s instructions to stay out of internal affairs, gave them little satisfaction. In Siberia, where Graves followed the president’s directions faithfully, there was even more disappointment. The Japanese in Siberia violated their original promise that they had no territorial interest in Siberia, and their goal of territorial expansion became obvious to all the world as the Americans sailed out of Vladivostok.
Japanese-U.S. relations were strained as Japan began an anti-American press campaign that continued throughout the expedition. While Graves and General Otani maintained a certain cordiality, the deep distrust of Japanese troops was obvious, as evidenced especially by Eichelberger’s writings and the vast majority of soldiers’ letters, diaries, and journals.
Continued feelings of hostility would be evident when the Twenty-seventh and Thirty-first Infantry Regiments faced the Japanese Imperial Armed Forces after December 1941. The Twenty-seventh was in Hawaii on December 7, and participated in a number of battles in the steamy South Pacific jungles. The Thirty-first was captured on Bataan and faced more than three years of torture and imprisonment.
Bruce Lockhart, the British consul in Moscow at the time of the Intervention, recorded his thoughts when he first heard of the small force being sent into North Russia:
It was a blunder comparable to the worst mistakes of the Crimean war. . . . It raised hopes which could not be fulfilled. It intensified the civil war and sent thousands of Russians to their deaths. Indirectly, it was responsible for the Terror. Its direct affect was to provide the Bolsheviks with a cheap victory, to give them new confidence and to galvanize them into a strong and ruthless organization.2
Adm. N. A. McCully, commander of naval forces in North Russia, recognized the consequences as the Allies abandoned their mission. “This will leave compromised and hopeless a portion of the Population of Northern Russia, a population which has been encouraged if not incited by Allied Power to war with the Soviet Government, and now exposed to the vengeance of the Bolshevik troops, the character of which is well known.” The admiral determined that in North Russia there would be left unprotected 96,320 Russian military, civilians, and rural peasants.3 Only about six thousand White Russians accompanied the withdrawing British as they left Archangel, and there is no record of any Russians leaving Vladivostok with the Allies.
While there can be various interpretations of the effects of the Intervention on relations between the Soviets and the Allies, there is one undisputed fact: 446 American lives were lost—424 soldiers and 22 sailors, including those killed in action, by accident, or by disease and those missing, who were later classified “killed in action, body not recovered.” North Russia was the deadlier of the two expeditions, with 235 dead out of approximately 5,000 men involved, while the larger Siberian expedition counted 189 dead from all causes. At least twenty-two sailors died supporting the two expeditions. In Siberia no men were listed as missing, but there were large numbers of wounded in both campaigns, some of whom would be disabled for the rest of their lives.
The military action formally known as the Allied Intervention into Russia has been described by historians and its veterans by many titles—the Forgotten War, the Midnight War, the Secret War, the Unknown War, the Winter War, and the Frozen War—but to the 427 Americans who died there, it was the Last War.
While the casualties were not significant in comparison to other conflicts, they were particularly painful when evaluated with the purpose for which they suffered. The Intervention should have taught future politicians and militarists valuable lessons—lessons that, in light of current events, may not have been learned at all.
As the doughboys stood on the decks watching Vladivostok disappear across the ice-filled harbor, Lieutenant Kindall wrote in his journal:
We were out of Siberia—at last. We stood upon the deck and across floes of ice watched fade from our sight the same glittering church domes that had first come into our view many weary months before. Among us there was no cheering and little to be said. In the long months past, perhaps something of the dark, brooding Asiatic spirit had crept into our own lives.4
Epilogue
General Bogomoletz—Captured by Lieutenant Kendall at Posolskaya in January 1920, he later fled to Manchuria, then Japan, and came to the United States in the 1930s. Paul Kendall saw him in Hollywood running a shoe-repair shop in 1941. He was then sixty-six.
Maria Botchkareva—Last seen in Archangel in 1919, she was arrested by Soviets in Omsk and was executed there on May 15, 1920. She was posthumously “rehabilitated.”
Lawrence Butler—He was evacuated to the United States and treated at Letterman General Hospital for more than a year. He was married to his nurse, Sylvia, in October 1920; one of his fellow Wolf-hounds, who visited him in the hospital, remarked that he looked wonderful after his many surgeries. He was awarded the DSC (U.S.), Military Cross (British), and the Croix de Guerro (Italian). His youngest son, Reed Butler, was killed in World War II.
Robert Eichelberger—He remained in the Army and in World War II became a lieutenant general in General MacArthur’s Pacific campaign. He was a significant factor in the Japanese occupation. He was awarded the DSC for Suchan. He retired in 1948, but came back as an advisor during the Korean War and died in 1961.
Rudolf Gaida—He left Siberia after the November revolt and returned to Czechoslovakia to become Army chief of staff, but was demoted in 1926. He led an unsuccessful revolt by Czech fascists in 1933. He formed the Czech Fascist Party, but broke with Hitler and supported the republic against the Nazis. Still seen as a Nazi, he was imprisoned briefly after World War II. He died in 1948, in Czechoslovakia, at age fifty-six.
General William S. Graves—He was haunted by his Siberian assignment and was labeled a Bolshevik sympathizer when he came home. He retired as a major general in 1928, but complained that he was hounded by the FBI as a security risk after that time. He died in New Jersey in 1940.
Sam Johnson—He was decorated by eleven nations, including the United States. He received the DSC for his role as head of International Police in Vladivostok and was wounded during Gaida’s revolt. He became a Prohibition officer after the war and retired in 1926.
Ataman Kalmykof—He fled Russia when the Japanese left, going to China where he was captured and shot while trying to escape.
Anton Karachun—He was captured in February 1920 while trying to steal supplies from a Vladivostok warehouse. He was taken to the Philippines, court-martialed, and sentenced to be hanged. His death sentence was commuted, and with ACLU assistance, he was paroled on condition he return to Russia. From Russia he continued to hound the ACLU to help him return to the United States. In Russia he was penniless, unemployed, and miserable. He was last heard from in 1927, living in Vladivostok, trying to emigrate to Canada.
Paul Kendall—He remained in the Army and in World War II became a major general commanding the Eighty-eighth Division.
Kenneth Roberts—He became the editor of the Saturday Evening Post and a prolific novelist. His most famous historical novels were Northwest Passage, Lydia Bailey, and Arundel. Several of his novels were made into movies. His stay in Siberia was brief; he returned home in January 1919.
Ataman Semenov—He survived the revolution and moved to Japan, becoming a Japanese officer in World War II. He was caught by the Russians in 1945 and hanged in 1946.
NOTES
Preface
1. Carol Wilcox Melton, Between War and Peace: Woodrow Wilson and the American Expeditionary Force in Siberia, 1918–1921 (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2001), 94.<
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Introduction
1. Carol Wilcox Melton, Between War and Peace: Woodrow Wilson and the American Expeditionary Force in Siberia, 1918–1921 (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2001), 211; and David S. Fogelsong, America’s Secret War against Bolshevism (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 12.
2. Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed., Vol. 19, “World Wars,” 957.
3. Norman E. Saul, War and Revolution: The United States and Russia, 1914–1921 (Lawrence, Kans.: University of Kansas Press, 2001), 95.
4. Saul, War, 98–99.
5. Saul, War, 99.
6. B. O. Johnson, “American Railway Engineers in Siberia,” The Military Engineer, Vol. 15, No. 81 (May–June 1923): 187–192.
7. George F. Kennan, The Decision to Intervene. Vol. 2, Soviet-American Relations, 1917–1920 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), 166–189.
8. Richard Abraham, Alexander Kerensky: The First Love of the Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 216.
9. There is a thirteen-day difference between the Western (Gregorian) calendar and the Russian (Julian) calendar in use in Russia until February 1918. Some calendars mark the revolution in October, some thirteen days later in November.
10. Richard Luckett, The White Generals (New York: The Viking Press, 1971), 93; and Brian Moynahan, Claws of the Bear (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1989), 32.
11. Saul, War, 234–244.
12. Saul, War, 237–240.
13. Saul, War, 302.
14. Rudolf Medek, The Czechoslovak Anabasis across Russia and Siberia! (London: The Czech Society, 1929), 9.
15. John Albert White, The Siberian Intervention (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950), 252.
16. Kennan, Decision, 152.
17. Kennan, Decision, 150.
18. Richard Goldhurst, The Midnight War: The American Intervention in Russia, 1918–1920 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978), 75
19. William S. Graves, America’s Siberian Adventure (New York: Peter Smith, 1941), 72.
20. John Bradley, Allied Intervention into Russia, 1917–1920 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), 104.
21. Gustav Becvar, The Lost Legion (London: Stanley Paul & Co., 1939), 195.
22. Becvar, Legion, 196.
23. Becvar, Legion, 199.
24. National Archives, Washington, D.C., Log of the USS Brooklyn, April 4–5, 1918, Naval Records, RG 24.
25. Kennan, Decision, 364.
26. Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, October 7, 1993.
27. Murray Oliver Roe, American Military Intervention in Russia, 1918–1920 (San Diego: University of San Diego, 1969), 31.
28. Betty Miller Unterberger, America’s Siberian Expedition, 1918–1920: A Study of National Policy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1956), 30.
29. Graves, America’s Siberian Adventure, 5–10.
Chapter 1
1. George F. Kennan, The Decision to Intervene. Vol. 2, Soviet-American Relations, 1917–1920 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), 22.
2. Today, Murmansk has a population of 450,000 and is the largest city above the Arctic Circle.
3. Kennan, Decision, 43.
4. Kennan, Decision, 56.
5. Rear Adm. Kemp Tolley, “Our Russian War of 1918–1919,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings (February 1969): 62; and NADC, Telegram, R. A. Murmansk to U.S. Force Commander, May 10, 1918, Naval Records, RG 45.
6. Kennan, Decision, 45.
7. Kennan, Decision, 46.
8. Christopher Dobson and John Miller, The Day They Almost Bombed Moscow (New York: Atheneum, 1986), 39.
9. Maj. Gen. Sir C. Maynard, The Murmansk Venture (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1928), 14.
10. Kennan, Decision, 372.
11. Maynard, Murmansk, 19.
12. E. M. Halliday, The Ignorant Armies (New York: Harper, 1960), 22.
13. Halliday, Armies, 22.
14. Leonid I. Strakhovsky, The Origins of American Intervention in North Russia, 1918 (New York: Howard Fertig, 1972), 67.
15. Kennan, Decision, 376; and Dennis Gordon, Quartered in Hell (Missoula, Mont.: Doughboy Historical Society, 1982), 7.
16. UMBHL, J. A Ruggles, Chief of American Military Mission to Russia, No. 1366, “Reports Concerning American Morale,” February 27, 1919, AEFNR, RG 120.
17. Maynard, Murmansk, 117, 120.
18. Maynard, Murmansk, 110–111.
Chapter 2
1. Richard Goldhurst, The Midnight War: The American Intervention in Russia, 1918–1920 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978), 86.
2. National Archives, Washington, D.C. (NADC), Cable, Washington from Sims, August 13, 1918, Naval Records, RG 45.
3. NADC, War Diary, USS Olympia, Capt. B. B. Bierer, August 1, 1918, Naval Records, RG 45.
4. Goldhurst, War, 93.
5. NADC, War Diary, USS Olympia, August 1, 1918.
6. National Archives, College Park, Maryland (NACP), War Diary, British HQ Archangel, AEFNR, RG 120.
7. Olga Melikoff Collection, Montreal, Leslie Lawes to Mr. W. A. H. Hulton, July 27, 1918.
8. Olga Melikoff Collection, Montreal, Leslie Lawes to his mother, August 8, 1918.
9. Rear Adm. Kemp Tolley, “Our Russian War of 1918–1919,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings (February 1969): 64.
10. NADC, War Diary, USS Olympia, August 10, 1918. Several histories report that Ensign Hicks, immediately upon landing, commandeered a Russian locomotive and led his men on a railroad chase, trailing the retreating Bolsheviks anywhere from thirty to seventy-five miles down the railroad. These histories indicated that they were finally repulsed by the Bolos, returning August 9 withfifty-four prisoners; Goldhurst, War, 94; E. M. Halliday, The Ignorant Armies (New York: Harper, 1960), 35; George F. Kennan, The Decision to Intervene. Vol. 2, Soviet-American Relations, 1917–1920 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), 425; Joel R. Moore, Harry H. Meade, and Lewis Jahns, The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki: Campaigning in North Russia (Detroit: Polar Bear Publishing Co., 1920), 53; and others. These all indicate that Hicks was wounded, which is not correct. Neither Hicks’s own report, nor a diary of one of his sailors, nor the log of the Olympia makes any mention of this raid; however, it may have taken place.
11. NACP, War Diary, British HQ Archangel.
12. Andrew Soutar, With Ironside in North Russia (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1940), 155.
13. The Russian verst equals roughly two thirds of a mile.
14. NADC, Lt. Henry F. Floyd, Weekly Report (quoting Hicks’s report), September 7, 1918, Naval Records, RG 45.
15. Christopher Dobson and John Miller, The Day They Almost Bombed Moscow (New York: Atheneum, 1986), 66.
16. NADC, Lt. Henry F. Floyd, Weekly Report, September 7, 1918.
17. NADC, Lt. Henry F. Floyd, Weekly Report, September 7, 1918.
18. Dennis Gordon, Quartered in Hell (Missoula, Mont.: Doughboy Historical Society, 1982), 55.
19. NADC, Lt. Henry F. Floyd, Weekly Report, September 7, 1918.
20. Gordon, Quartered, 55.
21. Gordon, Quartered, 56.
22. Except for the quotes by Seaman Gunness, the narrative of the Force B expedition is taken from the official record of Hicks as quoted in Lieutenant Floyd’s weekly report. Gunness’s version, as set forth in Gordon’s Quartered, differs slightly on the dates involved.
23. NACP, War Diary, British HQ Archangel.
24. NADC, Lt. Henry F. Floyd, Weekly Report, September 7, 1918.
25. The numerous citations referring to American Marines as participants in various activities of the Olympia would seem to be in error, as the roster of the cruiser shows no complement of Marines aboard during the AEFNR campaign.
Chapter 3
1. Trench and Camp Newspaper, Battle Creek Enquirer. Willard Library, Battle Creek, Michigan, July 4, 1918.
2. The last draft would include men up to forty-five, but the war en
ded before any of them were actually inducted.
3. Trench and Camp Newspaper, July 4, 1918. The beautiful cemetery across from the present Fort Custer was not opened until World War II; all World War I bodies were shipped to the hometown of the soldier.
4. University of Michigan, Bentley Historical Library (UMBHL), Gordon Smith, Diary.
5. Donald E. Carey, Fighting the Bolsheviks (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1997), 26.
6. UMBHL, Charles Simpson, Diary.
7. Joint Archives, Hope College, Holland, Michigan, James Siplon, Diary.
8. Carey, Fighting, 31.
9. UMBHL, Roy Rasmussen, Diary.
10. UMBHL, Douma Collection, Frank Douma, Journal.
11. E. M. Halliday, The Ignorant Armies (New York: Harper, 1960), 37.
12. U.S. Military Academy Museum (USMAM), Stewart Papers.
13. Richard Goldhurst, The Midnight War: The American Intervention in Russia, 1918–1920 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978), 96.
14. Carey, Fighting, 34.
15. Joint Archives, Hope College, Holland, Michigan, Russell Hershberger, Memoirs.
16. Stanley Bozich and John Bozich, Detroit’s Own Polar Bears (Frankenmuth, Mich.: Polar Bear Publishing Co., 1985), 21.
17. Bozich and Bozich, Polar Bears, 21.
18. Peyton C. March, The Nation at War (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1932), 139.
19. Dennis Gordon, Quartered in Hell (Missoula, Mont.: Doughboy Historical Society, 1982), 47.
20. Gordon, Quartered, 48.
Chapter 4
1. Donald E. Carey, Fighting the Bolsheviks (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1997), 38.
2. Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 15th ed., s. v. 15, “Diseases of the Respiratory System,” 745. Encyclopedia Britannica puts the number of deaths at 20 million worldwide and 850,000 in the United States. It names the epidemic as one of the world’s worst catastrophes.