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To Russia

Doughboys who were posted to Siberia in 1918 and the following years found a cornucopia of fleshly pleasures awaiting them, Including these women of a Vladivostok brothel.

While hundreds of thousands of Americans were fighting for the liberation of Belgium and France, machinations were going on in Washington to send some of them even further afield - to Russia, which by the middle of 1918 was partly under the control of the Bolsheviks. On 6 July 1918 the citizens of Vladivostok, one of the world's least accessible spots, woke to find themselves under yet another new administration. On this morning they found themselves being governed by the oddest bunch yet, the 'Allied Powers'. Copies of a proclamation were pasted up around the city, informing its inhabitants that, as the activities of 'Austro-German agents' were threatening calm and peaceful business, they were now 'under the provisional protection of the Allied Powers'. The proclamation was signed by Captain Badiura of the Czechoslovak army; Colonel Pons, chief of the French military mission attached to the Czechs; Captain Paine of the British Royal Navy; Vice-Admiral Kato of the Japanese Imperial Fleet; and Admiral Knight of the United States Navy. Thus began one of the more bizarre episodes of the First World War, the opening round of Allied intervention in the internal affairs of Russia. None of the Allied powers who took this high-handed action emerged from it with any glory. Some, including the United States, thrashed about with little or no idea as to what they were even trying to achieve. The best that can be said about the doughboy contingent sent to various parts of Siberia - 'a witch's cauldron of blood, politics, pillaging and intrigue' - as part of this Allied intervention is that it abused its power rather less than any of the other participants.

As many as 15,000 American soldiers were at different times during 1918-22 part of this de facto army of occupation, spread out across some 4,000 miles of north and east Russia at the height of the early days of the Russian Revolution. President Wilson's decision to join this expedition was one of his most ill-judged moves, and cast a pall over US-Russian relations for many years to come. As always, it was much easier to send troops in than it was to get them out. This particular policing adventure left an extremely bitter taste in the mouths of many Americans back home.

Following the March 1917 revolution, which established the Provisional Government, and the revolution of October, which brought the Bolsheviks to power, Russia was no longer a dependable ally for the British and French. On 12 February 1918 the Bolsheviks declared that Russia would no longer continue the war against the Central Powers. Russia's collapse signified a huge disaster for the Allies, who almost overnight lost some 12 million Russian soldiers fighting in their cause. More than seventy German divisions, or almost 2 million soldiers, were freed to join the fight in France. Moreover, Germany gained the vital wheat, coal and iron reserves of the Ukraine.

The origins of Allied intervention in Russia arose in a note sent on 20 February 1918 by the military representatives at Versailles to the Supreme War Council, recommending the occupation by the Allies, the United States and the Japanese of the stretch of the Siberian railway which ran from Vladivostok to Harbin and its terminal, a distance of 780 miles. The eventual agreement placed a ceiling of no more than 10,000 troops from each of the participants, a figure adhered to by everyone except the Japanese, who rapidly sent as many as 80,000 soldiers to Siberia.

Brigadier-General Johnson Hagood, one of the AEF's senior officers, ridiculed the Siberian adventure of the AEF as 'a superduper example of what is called "civilian control of the army"'. Other US generals were equally scathing, believing it would do nothing but damage army morale and national interests. General March believed the sending of US soldiers to Russia was a monumental folly; it diluted the army's manpower, stretched the already seriously depleted shipping fleets to snapping point, and involved America in a theatre of war where, even at the time, it was patently evident that mutual treachery was lying in wait for the unwary. Pershing, however, always the loyal, obedient servant to his political master, supported Wilson's decision to send a token force.

Most of the doughboys who went to Russia survived, but many were traumatized by the climate, the living conditions, and the almost complete inability to tell who was the enemy, who the friend. Although the Allies ended bitter enemies of the Bolsheviks, confusingly enough they also occasionally fought alongside some elements of the Bolshevik forces. On 6 July 1918 a treaty was signed between the Murmansk Soviet and representatives of Britain, France and the United States in which the two sides agreed to take coordinated action against the Germans and Finland (Finland had thrown in its lot with Germany in opposition to Russian domination). This treaty remained in force throughout the Allied occupation of Murmansk. British troops fought alongside Russian communist troops against a Finnish White Army.

The US government was well aware, as were the other participants, that it was engaged in blatant interference in the internal affairs of another country, though at least their commanding officer, unlike others, did his best to ensure that there was no systematic policy of intervention.

The ordinary doughboy was forced by the situation to take sides and make judgements, and they generally tended to be anti-Bolshevik. Throughout the winter of 1918-19 the Murmansk front was a more or less constant flashpoint, with Allied troops continually clashing with Bolshevik forces. The first US casualties there were sustained on 116 September, with four deaths and four wounded in two separate gunfights.

Semenoff controlled the area around Chita by operating a fleet of heavily armoured trains, each of which had a suitably unpleasant name. His flagship was called 'The Merciless'; others were 'The Destroyer' (which had a crew of fifty-seven and was protected by half an inch of armour plate over eighteen inches of concrete), and 'The Terrible'.

American troops were fired on by 'The Destroyer', which they captured, after the death of two of their number and the wounding of others. But diplomatic pressure brought to bear via Kolchak's Washington supporters forced General Graves to return the train.

Kalmykoff, a Cossack, was equally brutal; his men had the habit of whipping any Russian women they discovered frequenting the company of US soldiers, and of throwing dead horses into American camps from their passing trains. Both enjoyed the backing, financial and with weapons, of the Japanese: 'Semenof [sic] and Kalmykoff could not have existed but for Japan. Unprincipled bandits, robbers, murderers and paid Japanese agents, their primary duties were to bait and to harass the Americans.’

Not only were Japan, Britain and France ranged against General Graves over the issue of supporting Admiral Kolchak (though all of them had pledged their neutrality before arriving in Siberia) but so too was the US Consul-General in Vladivostok and many elements in the War Department in Washington, particularly in the person of Brigadier General Marlborough Churchill, head of the military intelligence service, the Military Information Division. General Graves's own chief of intelligence, Major David P. Barrows (who went on to become president of the University of California), received reports from around the country, some of which were highly tendentious, including this from Captain Montgomery Schuyler, who had just returned from a visit to Omsk, where Kolchak had established his headquarters.

Boredom and loneliness were the two big problems facing American soldiers stationed in Siberia. 'Drinking and chasing women seemed to be the most prevalent' off-duty recreations. What in hell were we doing there? We had come there to keep the Japs from taking over, the English came over to keep an eye on us, the French to check on the English, and so on. The only real friends we had were the Czechs.

The war might have ended for the doughboys in France, but for those unfortunate souls marooned in Russia there were many more months of hardship and risk. Towards the end of 1918 much of the Trans-Siberian railway line was under the control of Czechoslovak soldiers. The British, French, Japanese and Americans drew up an Inter-Allied Railway Agreement designed to allocate zones of control; in November 1918 the United States set up a plan for a commission, with representatives from each Allied government participating in the Siberian intervention. This commission would operate the Trans-Siberian railway until a settled Russian authority could take over. Under the eventual Railway Agreement of March 1919 the Czechs were given the long section between Omsk and Lake Baikal; the Chinese took over the Chinese Eastern; the Japanese received the Amur section; the United States got two sections close to Vladivostok and a third 1,500 miles to the west, in the Trans-Baikal region. But the rule of law had long ended in Russia. In April 1919 Admiral Kolchak decreed that all captured Red soldiers or deserters would be forcibly incorporated into his White army. In practice, he thereby gave carte blanche for mass executions, torture, and cruelties of all description, under a system of summary justice without trial or appeal. Some doughboys found to their surprise that the most honest and straightforward relationships in this appalling place were not with their supposed allies but former enemies - the German prisoners-of-war held in the vicinity.

Into this turbulent political nightmare were pitched several thousand young American males, including Major Sidney C. Graves, the general's son, who volunteered for duty in Siberia after earning himself an American DSC, a British DSO, and a French Croix de Guerre for his efforts on the Western Front as an infantry captain. The already hopelessly tumultuous political and social conditions inside Russia were rapidly deteriorating. The mood of the doughboys began to sour as they entered their first Siberian winter, still without proper clothing.

The Czech Legion began to abandon their sector of the railway and to show greater determination to leave Siberia; Kolchak's army was smashed on the Volga front; typhus became endemic, and the unburied dead lay in their thousands across the Russian steppes. Pressure began to build on the Wilson administration to extricate the US troops from what was clearly an impossible position.

In the second week of December 1919 there were food riots in Vladivostok. The city's normal population of about 80,000 was swollen to more than 300,000 by the influx of refugees fleeing the Bolsheviks as the Kolchak regime began to crumble. MacMorland wrote: 'There is practically no fuel and no food - the suffering this winter is going to be terrible. When I came here two months ago the ruble exchange was 85 for $1.00. Today you can get 320 for $1.00. Normally a rubles equal $1.00.'

It was time for the doughboys to get out while they still could. The 339th Regiment, which had been stationed in Murmansk as part of the North Russian expedition, returned to the States via Europe in the summer of 1919, the last to leave being their commanding officer, Brigadier General W. P. Richardson, who sailed on 23 August 1919. By 1 April 1920 the last of the doughboys had sailed from Vladivostok; most of the Czechs were out by August; the Japanese held on in Vladivostok for another two years but finally left in October 1922, as the Red Army relentlessly pushed through. The last US personnel to leave Russian soil - intelligence officers, diplomatic staff, some guards looking after the German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners, and radio operators - evacuated Russian Island on 19 November 1922.

Woodrow Wilson made a clumsy error by intervening in Siberia, but at least he got one thing right: in January 1920 he ordered the final evacuation of the American forces. Did all the doughboys who lived come home safely from Russia? It is not certain. In 1930 the US Justice Department took an affidavit from an anonymous Russian seaman who claimed to have met several American former doughboys, including four officers and fifteen enlisted men.

In April 1921, the New York Times reported that the American prisoners held by the Soviet government of Russia had been told by the Bolsheviks that they were held because the US government had failed to make strong demands for their release." The Soviet government attempted to barter US prisoners-of-war held in their prisons for US diplomatic recognition and trade relations with their regime. The United States refused, even though the New York Times article reported that the Soviets were threatening that 'Americans held by the Soviet government would be put to death'. In August 1921 America signed the Riga Agreement with the Soviet Union, which offered humanitarian relief in exchange for US POWs. The US government was expecting no more than twenty prisoners to be sent home, but was astonished when on 1 September more than 100 Americans were freed.

The official casualty figures for the Siberian side-show stated that 137 doughboys had been killed in action (including 28 presumed killed); 43 died from their wounds; 122 died from disease; 46 died from accidental causes; and 5 committed suicide, giving a total death toll of 353. But these figures are controversial in that they conceal the fact that out of the 144 combat deaths of American soldiers officially reported in 1919 in Northern Russia, 127 of those deaths, or 88 per cent of those official combat death figures were made up of some 70 MIAs declared dead, and another 57 soldiers who were declared KIA-BNR.

In other words, 127 men were never properly accounted for; in I929, eighty-six sets of human remains were identified by a US Graves Registration expedition, though how well the task was carried out, given the contemporary forensic skills and the lapse of a decade, is open to question. Equally controversially, when US soldiers in this theatre were declared missing in action it was simultaneously registered in their service record that they were killed in action, even if there had been no evidence in support of this. There lingers a suspicion that some doughboys who were taken prisoner by Bolshevik partisans never made it back to the United States. Certainly the Bolsheviks used their American captives as bargaining chips.

There was plenty of scope for individuals simply to disappear in such a vast landscape, where such principles as habeas corpus were mere chimeras. Among the captured partisan documents was one which gave a report into conditions in the Suchan district in June 1919, which mentioned that on 22 June 'five Americans were captured, two of which are officers'. Did they ever make it back to their homes or were they simply reported as KIA-BNR?

As for those doughboys who managed to escape with their lives, they were happy to leave behind that grisly, surreal world in which distance was measured in hundreds of miles, where any idea of a front line was a fantasy, and where their greatest achievement was perhaps the successful repatriation of the Czechoslovak soldiers.

In January 1919 a by now broken Admiral Kolchak placed himself and the Russian imperial treasure trove - estimated to have been worth at the time $325 million (perhaps twenty times that today) - in the care of the Czechs, who fled eastwards from Omsk to Irkutsk. On 13 January the miners in the city of Cheremkhovo demanded that the Czechs surrender the admiral to them. The Czechs promised to hand him over to the authorities next day in Irkutsk, where the Czechs bartered Kolchak and his treasure for their freedom. After a show trial and a death sentence, Kolchak's brains were blown out by an automatic pistol on 7 February 1920. Two weeks later Irkutsk was in the hands of the Red Army.

Gary Mead. . The Overlook Press, New York. 2000.

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