ANZACs in Arkhangel

by Michael Challinger

  Parsons, a shoeing smith, served at Gallipoli and represented a second distinct category of adventure-seeking volunteers: experienced soldiers who had spent years on active service. Most had endured many months of hardship in the trenches and almost all had been wounded at least once. One wonders why they hadn’t had their fill of war.

  The explanation seems to be this. They were men who, at an impressionable stage of their lives, had learned to live dangerously. Fighting was the only life they knew and they enjoyed the excitement of operations and the comradeship of the ranks. Their units were their family. In signing on for Russia, Private Leslie Lee of Sydney gave as his reason: ‘My pals have all enlisted’.18

  Men like this felt alarm at the thought of becoming civilians again and dreaded having to find a new livelihood. With peace, the bottom fell out of the dangerous and unsettled life to which they had grown accustomed. Sergeant Sam Pearse seems to have been of this type. He had joined up before he was eighteen and spent nearly four years in the army, almost all on active service overseas. He seems to have been unprepared for peace.

  Though newly married, Pearse even forgot to take writing paper when he left for Russia. Aboard the troopship sailing north he had to borrow from a mate to write to his wife: ‘the chap that owns this writing pad is going crook so I will write again in the morning’. In his next letter he tells excitedly of rumours that machine-gunners are needed in Mexico at £2 a day, adding lamely, ‘Only now I am married I’m not so silly’.19 Plainly, a man not yet ready to settle down.

  One final group of Diggers falls into a special category: Russian-born men who were native speakers of the Russian language. Almost a thousand members of the AIF had been born as Russian subjects—not just ethnic Russians, but Poles, Finns, Jews and Caucasians. Five joined the Relief Force and at least another one20 served as an interpreter with the British Army in South Russia. The attraction to them of a free trip to their homeland is obvious, and some contemplated staying on there.

  Two were Latvian-born: Robert Meerin and Anthony Minkshlin. Meerin, twenty-six, was a naturalised British subject who had joined the AIF in Sydney in 1916. After the Armistice he applied for his discharge in England so as to visit his parents in Russia. The military authorities tended to see subversive inclinations even where none existed and his commanding officer wrote of him: ‘Generally speaking a good soldier but with Bolshevist tendencies. I am of [the] opinion his services could be dispensed with’.21 Meerin was making his own arrangements to travel to Russia when the chance came to get there with the Relief Force.

  Trooper Anthony Minkshlin served almost four years in the AIF, much of it in the Australian Light Horse. Born in Latvia, he spoke fluent Russian and joined the Relief Force as an interpreter. In North Russia he was promoted to sergeant, acted as a scout and earned the Meritorious Service Medal. (IWM 3450 86/86/1 Allfrey)

  Two more served as interpreters in the Middlesex Regiment: Alex Alexandroff and Paul Smirnoff. As native Russian-speakers, these men seem to have been specially sought out by the British authorities. They signed on later than most of the volunteers, something which probably explains their being posted apart from their fellow Australians.

  The last Russian was Private Ivan (‘Jack’) Odliff. A former Russian marine, he had been working as a boilermaker when he signed on in Newcastle, New South Wales. His mates22 called him ‘Russki’ and knew him as a big, pockmarked man who was mild and easygoing when sober. In the AIF that had been far from all the time for his army file records him in constant trouble for drunkenness and breaking camp. Odliff also spent three spells in the venereal hospital, the third time with an infection even the experts couldn’t identify. An early note on his AIF record reads, ‘unlikely to become an efficient soldier’. Yet the British took him on.

  The Russian venture was common knowledge among Australians in Britain and one army news-sheet speculated on how the Diggers would fare under British command and without their ‘pally’ AIF officers.23 On leave in London, Private Wilfred Yeaman of Montrose, Victoria, was constantly stopped by fellow Aussies and quizzed about his new colour patch and his impending trip to Russia. The rest of his leave he spent looking for somewhere to store his excess baggage—and with tens of thousands of transient soldiers in the same boat, was knocked back by everyone, even the Salvation Army.24

  The Aussies reported to a military camp at Sandling, near Folkestone in Kent, where they occupied huts and parade grounds which had once held Canadian troops. The men recorded little of their training at Sandling. Bill Baverstock was earmarked for the machine-gunners and had written to his mum: ‘Of course I know nothing about Vickers machine-guns except a very hazy idea that I have picked up by fooling about with them in the salvage dumps of France, but they will put us through a course’.25 This is what happened, for his mate Yeaman records sessions learning to mount, load and unload the Vickers machine guns. Yeaman, in his diary, also records, on 20 June, ‘Had an hour on the Russian language’.

  Keith Attiwill couldn’t recall doing any drill at Sandling. Years later all he remembered was scandalising the citizens of nearby Folkestone with bawdy songs and feats of beer-drinking.

  They must have been glad to see the last of us. Every night we got lit-up and indulged in various crude forms of amusement. Pubs became bedlam. Women were chased and, I am credibly informed, were occasionally caught. We made a shambles of the skating rink, and it became out of bounds. The local constabulary were called out every night to a pub or a picture palace or a bawdy-house but none of us ever got locked up.26

  With the exception of two of the interpreters, the Aussies were assigned to one of two units. About a third went into the 201st Company of the Machine Gun Corps.27 (At the time machine-gunners were part of a separate specialist corps, with one company attached to each infantry brigade.) Almost all of the rest joined the 45th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, a regiment with which Australia already had two curious connections.

  The first was that before migrating to Australia, Prime Minister Billy Hughes himself had served in a volunteer battalion of the Royal Fusiliers in 1880. The second was that an Australian had fought with the regiment in East Africa and won a posthumous VC there. William Dartnell of Collingwood, Victoria, was in South Africa at the outbreak of war in 1914 and enlisted in the British Army. Posted to Kenya, Dartnell was wounded in 1915 in an ambush by German forces from across the Tanganyikan border. When his unit was forced to withdraw, he insisted on remaining behind to defend those worse wounded than himself. He met his death as a lieutenant in the 25th Battalion (‘the Frontiersmen’) of the Royal Fusiliers.

  The regiment was one of the biggest in the British Army. During the course of the war over 200,000 men had passed through it (compared with 300,000 in the entire AIF). Some of its battalions had been formed when colleagues or like-minded friends volunteered together. So the Fusiliers had fielded battalions called ‘the Stockbrokers’, ‘the Bankers’, ‘the Sportsman’s’ (two battalions) and ‘the Public Schools’ (four).28

  The 45th and 46th battalions were raised specially for North Russia and officially came into existence on 8 April 1919. Of course they had no regimental history or battle honours and indeed barely existed except on paper. They started as skeleton battalions with nothing more than a staff. But now the need had arisen, men had been enlisted into them. By the time of embarkation the skeletons had come fully to life.

  7

  AUSSIE STRAYS

  IT was only in the north of Russia that the British committed actual fighting troops. Elsewhere, though, they kept a finger in as many different pies as they could. They sent liaison officers, advisers, instructors and agents (including the famous Sydney Reilly, the ‘Ace of Spies’). British experts helped keep the Trans-Siberian Railway running. A British naval squadron blockaded the Baltic. British agents intrigued in Central Asia to prevent the cotton crop reaching Germany for use as gun cotton.

  Among the British military in Russia there were certainly more Australians th
an we can now pin down. In the north were the three unnamed pilots mentioned in Chapter 4. In the south, several Australians are said to have served in the British Military Mission to General Denikin, which supervised the delivery of British supplies to the Whites and advised on their use. One Aussie apparently commanded a company of 7th Battalion, Royal Berkshire Regiment, though neither he nor the others can now be identified.1 Most British battalions in Russia were composite units, made up of volunteers from many regiments. This fact, plus the destruction of British records during World War II, makes them impossible to trace. We do know, however, of a few stray Aussies in unlikely places whose activities merit a brief digression.

  One place was the Caucasus, on the southern fringe of the Russian Empire. A turbulent, mountainous region, it was home to many different ethnic groups, each speaking its own language and following its own customs. Most of the area had been a Russian possession for over a century and a Russian sphere of interest for long before then.

  The collapse of the Russian army in 1917 created a power vacuum in the Caucasus which the Germans and Turks threatened to fill. To forestall them, a British force (‘Dunsterforce’) was despatched from Baghdad in April 1918 under British Major General Dunsterville. Its plan was to secure the oil wells of Baku in Russian Azerbaijan, then move on to occupy Tiflis (now Tbilisi) in Russian Georgia.

  Dunsterforce insisted on the very best officers and NCOs and was given the pick of the armies in Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Western Front. It included men from all the dominions, but Australians were especially well represented because its second-in-command, Colonel John Byron, valued them highly. Byron had lived in Australia before the Boer War and had once commanded the Queensland Artillery. Of the roughly one thousand men of Dunsterforce, twenty-two officers and twenty-five sergeants were Australian.

  In early 1918 a British taskforce was raised under Major-General LC Dunsterville to secure the oilfields at Baku in Russian Azerbaijan. About fifty Australians joined it and their full story has yet to be told. This still from a documentary film shows Sergeant Charles Doherty of Bingara, NSW, trying to instil some military backbone into a group of Persian recruits. (AWM B03572)

  One of them was Captain Percy Lay from Ballan in Victoria. He was plucked from the front line in France and despatched to Baghdad. Diaries were strictly forbidden, but Lay broke the rules and kept one.2 In it he records taking lessons in Russian and Persian on the passage out—as well as being given sword practice!

  From Baghdad, Dunsterforce’s convoy of Ford trucks headed northeast through famine-stricken Persia. Dunsterville hoped to reach the Caspian seaport of Enzeli, seize some ships and sail to Baku. But local opposition, rugged terrain and bad weather combined to frustrate the plan. For nine months, Dunsterforce was stuck in Persia. There it tried to rally and train groups of Persian levies, none of whom really wanted to fight anyone, except occasionally each other.

  The political situation in Persia was complicated in the extreme. Russian troops had been occupying part of Persia and, following the Revolution, they divided into White and Bolshevik factions and made for home in disorder. Also in the mix were Persian nationalists, Armenians, Azeris, Cossacks, Kurds and an ethnic group called the Jangali, who inhabited the Caspian littoral around Enzeli.

  Captain Percy Lay from Ballan, Victoria, served with Dunsterforce for nine months. Though most of the force eventually reached Baku, Lay himself didn’t make it. He spent most of his time stuck in famine-stricken Persia where he adopted and fed these two lads. (AWM CO4427)

  Always greatly outnumbered, Dunsterforce learned to rely on bluff and boldness. When the governor of Hamadan was found to be a Turkish spy, Percy Lay was among those detailed to arrest him.3 In hot pursuit of one of the governor’s henchmen, Lay scaled a 15-foot wall only to find himself in ‘a regular harem’!

  Australians and New Zealanders provided the force with an Anzac wireless section, while a small detachment led by Australian Captain Stanley Savige chalked up one definite achievement. His group was assigned to create a diversion at Sain Kala in Western Iran but ended up protecting 80,000 Christian refugees from certain massacre by Turks and Kurds.4

  Dunsterforce didn’t succeed in reaching Georgia. The main contingent briefly occupied the oil city of Baku but lacked the numbers to hold it against an attacking Turkish force ten times its size. Baku’s Armenian army had pledged itself to help defend the city to the last drop of their blood, but proved useless. Cowardice and indiscipline were rampant. The Baku Armenians, Dunsterville decided, weren’t soldiers at all but just ‘ill-fed, undersized factory hands’.5

  Neither Savige nor Lay actually reached Baku but two Australians who did were New Zealand-born Major Harold Suttor and English-born Sergeant Arthur Bullen. Dunsterville records how when his force evacuated aboard a commandeered steamer, he was dismayed to find the two had been left behind. With commendable initiative, however, they posed as refugees and later escaped across the Caspian to Krasnovodsk (now Turkmenbashi in Turkmenistan).6

  Another Australian in Dunsterforce who definitely made it onto Russian territory was Captain Ernest Latchford. When Dunsterforce was disbanded in October 1918, its officers were offered the choice of staying on in Persia, returning to their original units or going to Russia on another mission. Latchford took the third option and volunteered to join the British Military Mission in Siberia.

  After serving with Dunsterforce, Captain Ernest Latchford volunteered to go to Russia proper. Latchford spent ten months in Siberia and, though he grew tired of eating caviar, would willingly have stayed longer. (AWM A01089)

  Latchford was a Victorian who had made a career in the regular army. He entered Russia through Vladivostok, where he found almost every Allied country represented, all watching each other closely, especially the Japanese. He spent ten months in towns across the breadth of Siberia and his cheerful recollections are full of anecdotes about cunning Chinese, marathon drinking bouts and extreme cold.

  Before heading inland, Latchford received three separate ‘Comforts Fund’ parcels. The first, from a charity run by Chinese ladies, contained a set of silk underwear. The second, from a Scottish Women’s League, enclosed the thickest woollen underwear he had ever seen. The third was from the Christian Scientists of California, with the thinnest he had ever seen—and which, in spite of the Siberian cold, he liked the best.7

  With his British colleagues, Latchford headed west along the Trans-Siberian Railway. Most of the British took Chinese servants, who boarded the train loaded down with enormous packages. Once in the interior, the ‘Chinks’ disappeared, having used their employment simply as a ruse to get their stocks of silk and tea into the country duty-free, where they could be sold for fabulous prices.

  At Harbin in Manchuria, Latchford saw the armoured train of the warlord Ivan Kalmykov, a renegade Cossack general8 whose private army plundered and terrorised a huge area centred on Khabarovsk. The train’s chief interest to Latchford was that every officer on board seemed to be provided with a female companion. He suggested the AIF would have been over-recruited had they adopted the same idea.

  Latchford’s group headed for Omsk in charge of forty-eight wagons of 5-inch shells. They put a Union Jack on their boxcar and made themselves comfortable. The railway was the only line of communication and fighting took place along the scattered line of habitation that clung to it: trains were derailed, stations shelled, outposts raided.

  The initial plan in Siberia had been to raise an Anglo-Russian brigade with British officers and Russian troops. Once news filtered down of the mutinies in North Russia, the idea was scrapped. Instead, the members of the mission were attached solely as advisers and without actual command of Russian troops. Latchford was given a Finnish interpreter, and he marvelled that through a Finn he, an Australian, was teaching a British system of musketry to Russians armed with Japanese rifles!

  Latchford found the Chinese ‘likeable coves’ and full of fun, the Japanese arrogant but highly efficient, and the Amer
icans unpopular because President Wilson’s instructions precluded them from taking any active military role. There were many Jewish soldiers among the Americans and this too, Latchford thought, added to the Americans’ unpopularity with the Russians. His opinion of the Bolsheviks seemed to moderate over time. Though always abhorring them, he sometimes felt so exasperated with the Whites that he wrote: ‘No wonder they have Bolshevism in this country’.9

  Latchford thought the ordinary Russian soldier ‘a splendid chap’: cheerful, long-suffering, responsive to good treatment, and ‘certainly not a dope’.10 The Russian officers were callous and autocratic, though some among them were courageous as individuals. One elderly retired officer Latchford met had very old-fashioned notions of honour. Cut off in Bolshevik territory, the old chap was ordered to report to the local centre to be shot. He duly reported but after an hour’s wait found everyone too busy to shoot him, and only then made himself scarce!

  Another White officer, a former instructor at the Petrograd Military Academy, was intrigued to meet Latchford. He told him that whenever his students in the academy had misbehaved, he had ordered them to write an essay on the Australian armed forces. ‘It was a most effective punishment because nobody knew anything of your country, not even I.’11 Latchford’s presence proved illuminating and his shorts and slouch hat in the summer created a sensation.

  The British indulged their sporting pursuits. In summer they played impromptu cricket games during the long hours and days when the trains were halted. In winter they had snowball fights on the roofs of the railway wagons. Near Irkutsk, the water in Lake Baikal froze 5 metres thick and Latchford and his mates played football on it.