The Last of the Doughboys

by RICHARD RUBIN

  There were actually two AEF actions in Russia. The first was in Arkhangelsk, where there were no Czechs, but lots of American war materiel. And Reds. American troops—some five thousand of them, mostly from Michigan—arrived there in early September, 1918, and almost immediately discovered that the Bolsheviks had already moved the American arms out of the city; the AEFNR (American Expeditionary Force North Russia) went after it. They also went after the Reds, especially along the railroads. But Russia is a very large place, and it soon became apparent to the AEFNR that they were overstretched, at which point they stopped advancing and tried to hold what they had already taken. But Russia is also a very cold place, and the men of the AEFNR didn’t know how to fight in a Russian winter nearly as well as the Russians did. After the Bolsheviks went on the attack, driving the Americans back, pressure from family in America to bring the men of the AEFNR home started to build; the men themselves—cold, besieged, and unsure of their objectives—started grumbling. Fear of mutinies arose. In February, 1919, President Wilson decided to start shutting the mission down. By summer, they were gone. The Bolsheviks had killed more than a hundred of them; disease had killed scores more.

  You’d think the experience would have ended America’s adventurism in Russia. It didn’t. Even as the last of the five-thousand-man AEFNR was sailing out of Arkhangelsk, there were between seven thousand and ten thousand American troops of the AEFS—the American Expeditionary Force Siberia—still on Russian soil way out east. They had been sent across the Pacific, to the port of Vladivostok, with the same objectives as the AEFNR: secure American war materiel, and support the Czech Legion. But if North Russia had been a mess, Siberia was utter chaos. The acronym FUBAR, coined by American troops during the following war, would have fit the situation quite nicely.

  To start with, no one really had control of Siberia at the time; different towns and villages were in different hands. And there were a lot of hands in Siberia: In addition to the Americans, there were Canadian, French, Italian, and even Polish forces there. The British sent a relatively small force, but nevertheless tried to take command of the situation as they had in North Russia (where they had dispatched a much greater number of men), and put a lot of pressure on the American commander, General William S. Graves, to seek out and attack Red forces. And then there were the Japanese, who sent more than seventy thousand troops to Siberia—ten times the number the Allies had requested—ostensibly to protect their borders. I often wonder why anyone bought that argument to begin with—isn’t Japan a series of islands?—but in any event, it soon became evident to Graves and others that Japan’s real objective was to grab up as much land in the area as possible. This meant that, contrary to its stated objective, it was actually in Japan’s interest to keep the state of affairs in Siberia as unstable as possible. The Japanese did this, primarily, by arming, abetting, and supporting a number of roving gangs—“armies” is too dignified a word—of Cossacks.

  That’s right: The guys who had tried to kill young Irving Berlin were in Siberia, too, although, to be fair, they probably weren’t the same men (though you never know). While those earlier Cossacks had been organized mounted units serving (more or less) the czar, the Cossacks who were major players during the Russian Civil War were more akin to Attila’s Huns (with better technology), ranging about the lawless expanse of Siberia, hunting Reds when they felt like it but more often attacking lonely villages unfortunate enough to fall in their path. If such a band were to visit your town, you could expect to be robbed of all you had of value—including, almost always, your young daughters—and quite possibly killed in the bargain. Like the Czech Legion, they advanced on their own armored trains, although it must be said that the Czechs—who did not, as a rule, rape or plunder—had a much better record versus the Reds.

  Add various itinerant elements of the Red Armies, which were not always hostile, and the White Armies, which were not always friendly, and, well: FUBAR. It’s hard not to feel bad for General Graves, an honest and honorable man who had hoped to be given a command in the trenches. Instead, Secretary Baker literally sent him to Siberia, and with little more than this advice: “Watch your step; you will be walking on eggs loaded with dynamite.” Not the sendoff he was hoping for, I imagine. Nevertheless, though it seems he regarded the mission as a mistake from the outset, he did his best, resisting British pressure to go after the Reds—there was nothing about that in his orders, he insisted—and trying to keep the Japanese in check. His best, though, wasn’t nearly good enough; nobody’s could have been. This was Siberia, and it was a terrible, awful, dangerous mess.

  And freezing.

  Private Warren V. Hileman arrived there on September 6, 1919. He was not quite eighteen years old.

  “The only thing good I seen about it,” he told me when I first asked him about Siberia, “when it got cold, it stayed cold. And I mean cold. People around here complain: ‘Zero? Whoa, it’s so cold!’ I say, ‘Well, what would you do if it was thirty below?’” He cinched his arms and shook his head, mimicking someone shivering pathetically: “Ooh, wub-wub-wub-wub!”

  He went on: “How do you think we did at thirty below zero? And it stayed thirty below zero. And we had from a foot to three and a half, four foot of snow.”

  The cold was a subject he returned to again and again during our conversation, whether I asked about it or not; then again, if you’d been through something like that, I’m sure it would occupy a prominent place in your personal narrative, too. “I slept under nine blankets,” he told me at one point. “I wore nine pair of regular socks. I’d have wore more, but I couldn’t get them on. And over that we had lumberman’s socks, heavy wool, and they come up to below your knees, and had an elastic band, and you’d fasten that. Oh, and I could have wore wool underwear. Well, this, what they issued, it was good, it was good high-quality wool. Now, some wool itches you; this didn’t . . . [we] wore that next to our body. Of course then you add that, uh, wool trousers, and that wool underwear, a wool OD [olive drab] shirt . . . that went all over your body, your arms, over that. And then over your face, you had another wool helmet.” He gestured around his face, then drew a hand across his mouth. “And you had another piece that come across here. That buttoned. And when you walked guard duty, you was on it for two hours. Two hours, and off four.” After a shift on duty, he said, “you would have thought they’d have hot coffee.” He smiled faintly, shook his head. “Not a thing. You got into quarters, then, and start peeling all this stuff off.” He told me he slept in most of it, too.

  Memories of the recent influenza pandemic, coupled with the extreme cold, led the Army to take special steps in an attempt to keep its Siberian doughboys healthy, though sometimes they had unintended consequences. “Every night just before bedtime, we’d spray our throats with some kind of an antiseptic,” Private Hileman recalled eighty-five years later, at the climate-controlled veterans’ home. It worked—sort of. “Nobody had a cold,” he told me, but “one guy, one night, they got their stuff mixed up and he sprayed his with fly spray.” I don’t think I laughed harder at any point in all of my interviews. “He felt a little uncomfortable,” he added, wonderfully deadpan. “But he survived.”

  To hear him tell it, the cold was always the Americans’ biggest concern; it was going to get you one way or another. One time, he said, after several shifts on guard duty as an MP, walking from 4:30 to midnight, “I got to where I couldn’t walk. My legs just quit.” That landed him in the hospital for a spell. And then there was the night he and three other men were on outpost duty. “It was snowing and sleeting . . . miserable,” he recalled. Finally, he said, “we got relieved, more or less, and we got in and they served us supper, in them old aluminum mess kits.” No sooner had they sat down to eat, though, than they were ordered to assemble outside at once. “And they mean at once,” he explained. “And we all lined up . . . Then they said, ‘We called you out just to let you know that somebody come in drunk, and don’t let it happen again. Dismissed.’ Course, I g
ot back and that food was froze solid. I just took that old mess kit over to the garbage can.” He shook his head. “Of course some fool would have to pull a stunt like that.” When they found the guy, Warren Hileman assured me, “first thing they did, they worked him over. And good. He was more or less battered after that.” He seemed satisfied that justice had been done. “There’s always some fool,” he declared.

  An army, as Napoleon (who had his own experience of Russian winter) is reputed to have said, travels on its stomach, and if the food in Siberia sometimes froze—and not just the food; coffee often froze in the cup before you could finish drinking it—at least Private Hileman found it interesting. “The old-timers didn’t like it . . . but I thought it was pretty good!” he told me. “They had cabbage soup, black bread, and vodka.” The Russians were resourceful; “they’d take ten or fifteen medium heads of cabbage and make a hundred gallons of soup,” he recalled. “That black bread . . . you’d smell it going by. It had an odor!” And if vodka wasn’t your thing, “they had another one,” he said, “an alcoholic drink called ‘spud juice,’ made out of a fermented horse potato.” He shook his head. “Boy, that’ll knock your hat off.” There were two brothers, he told me, assigned to the same company, who took it upon themselves to set up a still with a third man and cook up some moonshine. “They went out and they thought they was buying spirits,” he explained, “and they got wood alcohol, and loaded up with that. And one of them died before they could get him back to quarters, and the other two went to the hospital, got them pumped out.” A lot of people would make the same mistake back home a few years later, during Prohibition.

  The alcohol served more as a source of warmth than as a social lubricant. “We didn’t fraternize too much,” he told me, with the Russians. “They didn’t encourage that fraternization.” By “they,” he meant the United States Army.

  “Did you encounter any Japanese soldiers in Siberia?” I asked him.

  “Well, plenty!” he replied. In one area, he explained, “the Russians were first in the head of the valley. Then the Japanese. Then us. The Russians had a cemetery up on their end of it. When they had a body, they’d take it up, to the Japanese. And then you stopped.” He jabbed an extended finger straight down, to signify how abruptly one would have to halt. “The Japs wouldn’t let ’em across.”

  “Did you encounter any Bolsheviks in Siberia?” I asked him.

  “Everybody was a Bolshevik,” he said with a grin. Apparently, they didn’t much trust the Russians, either; in truth, there wasn’t much of a Bolshevik presence in that part of Siberia at that time. General Graves later testified that there had been none at all, though that seems rather unlikely.

  I asked Mr. Hileman what he had done in Siberia. “We was on that Trans-Siberian Railway,” he replied. “We was eighteen hundred miles in the northerly direction—we landed at Vladivostok, and then we went up to Lake Baikal. It was eighteen hundred miles from Vladivostok. We was on that Trans-Siberian.” Protecting American property and the Czech Legion meant protecting that railroad. It was the central artery of the entire region, and everyone was scheming, maneuvering, and often fighting to control it: Reds, Whites, Czechs, Allies, Cossacks. When the men of the AEFS ran into trouble, it usually involved the railroad somehow or other. And it usually involved not the Reds, or the Whites, nor even the Japanese; but the Cossacks. “The Cossacks,” Warren Hileman said, pronouncing the word “Coe-Sacks.” “They wasn’t supposed to be armed, but they had sabers—in addition to machine guns—about, oh, three to four and a half feet, about that broad”—he measured off a section of his hand about four inches wide—“and a cutting edge.”

  “Did you encounter any Cossacks?” I asked him.

  “Any Cossacks?” He laughed. “Plenty of them . . . The Cossacks machine-gunned that troop train when I was on it. But I didn’t get hit.” He was referring to a deadly encounter on January 20, 1920, between soldiers of the AEFS and Cossacks, the latter subservient to the notorious warlord (or ataman) Grigoriy Semyonov. That incident is known today in certain circles as the Battle of Posolskaya. Sometimes spelled Posol’skaya. Or, in the case of Mr. Hileman’s discharge papers, “Posloraya.”

  In a time and place that saw more than its share of unsavory characters, Ataman Semyonov was one of the most unsavory of all. He was also one of the most powerful; the supreme commander of a heavily armed and violent horde, he knew just how to play the Whites and Japanese for maximum personal gain, which was his primary—perhaps only—concern. Semyonov’s Cossacks marauded through Siberia in a fleet of armored trains, at least one of which was said to contain an entire car full of girls they’d forcibly taken from their families for, well, personal use. They were known to shoot men in large groups and leave the bodies where they fell, to be consumed by wild animals. Semyonov was too brutal even for some of his own men, who were no sweethearts themselves. At one point, according to Lieutenant Colonel Charles H. Morrow, commander of the 27th Infantry Regiment, five hundred of the ataman’s Cossacks fled to Morrow’s camp, outside the city of Khabarovsk, seeking refuge and bearing tales. Among those Colonel Morrow shared with a committee of the United States Senate in 1922: “Sixteen Austrian musicians who were playing in the Chaska Chai [a teashop] were executed in the public gardens in full daylight and the remains left there for public show. These musicians had not committed any crime deserving such bestial treatment.” And: “By order of Ataman Kalmykov [Ivan Kalmykov, one of Semyonov’s top generals] some employees of the Swedish Red Cross, among them one lady, have been shot. Ataman Kalmykov wanted to rectify this murder by charging them with espionage, but the real reason was that he got a chance to get hold of 3,000,000 rubles and of a large stock of different goods.” And: “Prisoners of war who are detailed to work in town have been forced to deal the last death-bringing stroke to wounded citizens for Cossacks.”

  What Semyonov wanted most of all was control of the railroad. Morrow’s men—among them, Private Hileman—were there to protect it. It was just a matter of time before something unpleasant happened between the two forces. Reports of intimidation and violence against railroad employees reached Colonel Morrow regularly; several tense encounters between the Americans and the Cossacks very nearly escalated to violence. Finally, the AEFS banned Semyonov’s armored trains—there were believed to be nine in all, with such endearing names as Terrible, Horrible, Merciless, and Destroyer—from its sectors entirely. Things calmed down a bit, at least until several armored trains requested permission to pass through the sector, and Colonel Morrow consented. One of these trains was the Destroyer, which, Colonel Morrow later testified, had fifty-seven men and officers aboard, ten machine guns, and four small artillery pieces; its cars were clad in steel armor reinforced with eighteen inches of concrete. On the evening of January 10, 1920, it pulled into the station at Verkhne-Udinsk, where Colonel Morrow happened to be stationed. The Cossacks, Morrow later testified, “arrested the station-master, robbing him all of his prop- erty, including all the clothing of his wife, broke up the furniture in his house, and took him aboard.” Someone sent word to Colonel Morrow, who boarded the Destroyer and confronted the general in charge, Nikolai Bogomolets. After “a rather heated argument,” Bogomolets released the stationmaster (he had at first told the colonel he planned to execute the man), and the general, humiliated and very angry, ordered the Destroyer to move on.

  Sixty miles up the line, it pulled into the station at Posolskaya. Colonel Morrow’s testimony tells the next part of the story thus:

  A lieutenant named Paul Kendall was posted at Posolskaya with a detachment of 38 men. They were sleeping in box cars. The armored train, Destroyer, moved into Posolskaya . . . moved back from the American box cars and opened fire. This was between 12 and 1 o’clock at night. It was about 40 or 50 degrees below zero and there was about 8 inches of snow on the ground.

  Kendall and his men turned out with hand grenades and rifles and began the battle against the armored train. They threw a hand grenade into the
engine, very seriously damaging it, so that it could only move down the track about five versts. Here Captain Ramsay closed in on it from the east and the armored train was captured in the morning.

  During the fighting that occurred Sergeant Robins was killed, Private Montgomery died later of wounds, and Private Towney was knocked from the armored train when he attempted to board it, and his foot was cut off. . . .

  General Bogomoletz [sic] and his officers and men were brought under guard and placed in the guardhouse by my command.

  Shortly thereafter, though, Colonel Morrow was ordered to leave Siberia, at which point he had no choice but to free the man who had caused the deaths of two doughboys. By April 1, all of the Americans in Siberia, including Colonel Morrow, had left.

  The Cossacks, though, didn’t have much time to revel in their absence. Less than two months after Posolskaya, with the Reds closing in on him, Kalmykov fled to China; the Chinese Army quickly arrested him and held him for six months, trying to figure out what to do with him, until he attempted to escape and they shot him. Ataman Semyonov fled Russia a year later—first to Korea, then Japan, and then to Shanghai, where a team of Bolshevik assassins tried to kill him. They failed, but Semyonov figured he’d better leave China, anyway, and landed in, of all places, the city of New York. He was not warmly received in Gotham; actually, he was arrested as soon as he stepped off the train. General Graves and Colonel Morrow testified at his deportation hearings. Not content to wait for the ruling, Semyonov jumped bail and fled, first to Canada and then the Far East. He eventually ended up in Manchuria, where the Soviets caught up with him at the end of the Second World War. Despite the passage of a quarter century, there were no bygones; they hanged him.