ANZACs in Arkhangel Read online

  ANZACS

  IN ARKHANGEL

  ANZACS

  IN ARKHANGEL

  The untold story of Australia

  and the invasion of

  Russia 1918 19

  MICHAEL CHALLINGER

  Published in 2010 by

  Hardie Grant Books

  85 High Street

  Prahran, Victoria 3181, Australia

  www.hardiegrant.com.au

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Copyright © Michael Challinger 2010

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data is available from the National Library of Australia.

  Anzacs in Arkhangel

  ISBN 978 1 74066 751 7

  Edited by Jean Kingett

  Cover design by Glenn Moffatt

  Cover image courtesy of US Library of Congress

  Text design by Patrick Cannon

  Typeset in 11/16 Goudy by Cannon Typesetting

  Printed and bound in China by C & C Offset Printing

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Front cover image: Though said to be an American gun crew, these men are more likely Canadians. The Aussies in North Russia thought well of the Canadians but found the Americans ‘a hopeless lot, really’. (American Red Cross, US Library of Congress)

  Every foreign invasion that has gone deep into Russia

  has been swallowed up …

  Felix Cole, US consul in Arkhangel,

  dispatch to Washington, 1 June 1918

  Contents

  Preface

  Author’s notes

  Introduction

  1 That first shot

  2 The Aussies of Elope Force

  3 The takeover of Arkhangel

  August 1918

  4 The winter campaign

  December 1918 – March 1919

  5 The decision for the relief force

  March 1919

  6 Those who signed up

  April 1919

  7 Aussie strays

  8 The Aussies arrive

  June 1919

  9 The main group

  July 1919

  10 The feeling back home

  11 On the Dvina

  July 1919

  12 The Dvina Offensive

  August 1919

  13 The Railway Offensive

  August 1919

  14 Withdrawal

  September 1919

  15 The loose ends

  16 The medals

  17 That which remains

  Appendix 1: Citations

  Appendix 2: Nominal roll

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Maps

  North Russia 1918

  Arkhangel

  Continental Russia 1918

  Black Sea and the Caucasus

  Dvina Offensive

  Railway Offensive

  Preface

  THIS book is about a strange and little-known chapter of Australia’s military history. Obscure though it is, I cannot remember the time I didn’t know of the Australians who went to fight Bolsheviks in North Russia. I was certainly aware of them when I first visited the USSR as a student in 1969. To look into the subject in Russia at that time, though, was impossible. It was hard enough to get an extra glass of tea at an Intourist hotel, much less ask for a thousand-kilometre detour to a closed city in Russia’s secretive north.

  Following it up in Australia, of course, was always possible. Clearly, there was a story to be told and perhaps I should have started on it forty years ago. Most of the Australian participants were still alive then and could have explained and unravelled much. But I didn’t pursue it and nor did anyone else. What follows is the best we can now piece together.

  Though the men who took part are long gone, in other ways researching their story has become easier. The Diggers’ personal service records are now available online in their entirety. What might once have taken weeks of drudgery in Canberra can now be accessed at home at any time. It is a resource unmatched anywhere else in the world. As yet Britain, New Zealand and the United States have nothing to compare with it.

  The internet has also given me access to much other material, including the fascinating collection on the American involvement in North Russia held by the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan. I have been able to exchange ideas and information with others in a way that was not possible even a few years ago. Finding people and finding books has never been easier.

  North Russia itself is also now accessible. With the collapse of the USSR it has become feasible at last to visit the places where the Diggers fought. This is only a recent development and it fills an important gap. Of books written when most of Russia was still tightly closed to outsiders, not one fails to go amiss with its maps or geography.

  In the contemporary accounts, too, there are mistakes and contradictions. The prisoners were shot; the prisoners were released. The weather was fine; it was blowing a gale. There are ambiguities and lapses of memory, and some of the narrators have an axe to grind. Every book I have read on North Russia contains errors and I fear this one may be no exception. But I have done my best to make sense of the inconsistencies and to piece together as truthful an account as is now possible.

  There is a wealth of material about the British and the Americans and many good histories on the diplomatic machinations behind the scenes. Though the first-hand accounts of the Australian soldiers are limited in number, there is still plenty with which to tell their story. The problem has been to decide what to leave out.

  The first chapter provides an accessible overview of Russia’s role in World War I. Russia was a major actor in the outbreak of World War I and its army was the first to mobilise. My intention is to draw the Russian threads together and make the origins of the Intervention intelligible to those who know little about World War I or Russia’s 1917 revolutions.

  I should also state that I am well aware of the letters ‘N’ and ‘Z’ in the word ‘Anzac’. However, this book is about the Australian Anzacs—those men, wherever born, who fought as Australians. While there is mention of Burke, McCready and Captain Newbould, I leave it to others across the Tasman to fill in the gaps about the role of the New Zealanders.

  I have refrained from pointing out the obvious parallels between the North Russia campaign and later foreign entanglements. In 1919 there was a coalition of the willing, there were muddled aims, an invasion by subterfuge, an escalation in numbers. There was optimism and reassurance, then a sudden announcement that the situation was untenable. The similarities to Vietnam, Iraq and now Afghanistan are striking.

  North Russia offered some obvious lessons. Take care before you intervene in a civil war. Make sure your allies have the same aims. Have a political plan to put in place before you engage in ‘regime change’. Don’t embark on military action without firm support at home. Make sure you have enough reserves in case things go wrong. Readers may judge for themselves how well—if at all—these lessons have been learned.

  In writing this book I have received help from many sources, including the families of several of the volunteers. I would like to express my thanks to the Attiwill, Baverstock, Heathcote, Pearse, Von Duve and Yeaman families and especially to Vicky Christen, the daughter of Sam Pearse VC.

  In addition, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Mike Irwin and Peter Quinlivian, the biographers of Sam Pearse VC and Arthur Sullivan VC respectively. Both have shared their knowledge and sources unstintingly. Mike
has been a wonderful source of information and enthusiasm, while Peter has put me onto several leads which I might otherwise have missed. Peter’s own researches have been so thorough that I have relied on his book often where we cover the same ground.

  In England, Foster Summerson has given me generous help at long distance and I am very grateful to him. His searches at the Imperial War Museum and the British National Archives were at least as meticulous as any I could have made in person.

  In the north of Russia I have three times enjoyed the hospitality and gruff kindness of both friends and strangers. On the last occasion I stayed with Alexey Suhanovsky and his delightful family. Without Alexey I would never have visited Mudyugsky Island nor stayed at his forest camp at Verst 445. I sincerely thank him and our companion Aleksandr Orlov for their friendship, knowledge and assistance.

  Closer to home, it has been a pleasure to work with helpful and competent editors in Sharon Mullins, Jean Kingett and Jane Winning.

  Above all, I would like to thank my wife for her help, love, tolerance and unwavering support.

  Michael Challinger

  Author’s notes

  Russian names

  The Cyrillic alphabet does not always correspond neatly to the Latin alphabet. I have transliterated Russian names phonetically, except where there is a more familiar spelling—for example Tchaikovsky not Chaikovsky, Arkhangel not Arkhangel’sk.

  Some place names have alternative forms in Russian. The village of Sluda is also called by its diminutive, Sludka. Obozerskaya is sometimes Obozersky: the first, grammatically feminine, refers to the station, the second is masculine and refers to the town.

  In many books on North Russia the village of Yemtsa is rendered as Emtsa. This is wrong. The letter ‘e’ in Russian corresponds, not to the vowel ‘e’ in English, but to the sound ‘ye’ as in ‘yet’. Hence (Boris) Yeltsin, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and so on.

  Lastly, although Ukraine is now an independent country, I refer in this book to ‘the’ Ukraine. My use of the definite article reflects common practice in 1914 to 1919 and the fact that the Ukraine at that time formed part of Russia.

  Dates

  Tsarist Russia used the Julian calendar, which lags thirteen days behind the Western, Gregorian, calendar. The country changed over in 1918 when, to catch up, the day after 31 January became 14 February. While all dates in this book are given according to the Western calendar, the change explains why the ‘October Revolution’ of 25 October 1917 actually took place on 7 November.

  ‘Reds’ and ‘Whites’

  After the October Revolution, Russia’s population divided into ‘Reds’, who later came to be called communists, and those who opposed them, the ‘Whites’.

  In this book I also refer to the Reds as Bolsheviks or Bolos. The term ‘Bolshevik’ derives from the Russian word meaning majority, and dates from a 1903 political congress at which Lenin’s faction secured a narrow majority of delegates.

  The anti-communists are referred to as Whites, loyal Russians (in the sense of loyal to the former regime) or, in the context of the Northern army, simply Russians. The political expression ‘Russian Whites’ should not be confused with ‘White Russians’, a geographical term referring to people from the area of present-day Belarus.

  Introduction

  THE railway junction of Obozerskaya is only 300 kilometres short of the Arctic Circle. By train, it is twenty-two hours north of Moscow. Though it is a sizeable dot on the map, at two in the morning just a single light glimmers in the darkness. With its eighteen carriages, the train is far too long for the platform. I clamber down onto the ballast. I am the only passenger getting off.

  The light proves to be a vodka stall—unattended. I start to walk the length of the train. Halfway along I meet a railway worker who is checking the couplings before the train moves off again. I ask him how to cross the tracks.

  ‘Cross the tracks? What for?’ he asks.

  ‘To reach the town.’

  ‘Town!’ he exclaims. ‘There is no town. This is just a pasyolok.’ He uses the Russian word that means settlement.

  He can tell I’m a foreigner, of course, and must be wondering what I’m doing here. Obozerskaya isn’t that far north of the closed city of Mirny, a secret centre for Russian space flights. Possibly he suspects my interests are military. If so, he’s dead right.

  But it isn’t Vostok rockets I’m interested in. Something further back in time has brought me here to the most northerly place Australians have ever fought. For Australian soldiers—about 150 of them—made it here ninety years ago. Guns in hand, they came in 1919 to take part in an almost forgotten episode in Australian military history.

  In fact, two of them won the Victoria Cross here. One, Sam Pearse, died doing so. Pearse is buried in Obozerskaya and I’m hoping to find his grave. If I succeed, I have an errand to perform. From a suburban garden in Sydney I’ve brought a small posy of flowers to lay beside the grave. Pearse’s posthumous daughter, an old lady now, has entrusted it to me.

  There’s no hotel in Obozerskaya so the fettler takes me to a shabby station building and makes a phone call. Then he leads me through a wasteland of puddles and wooden duckboards to a drab cement-block building: Railwayman’s Hostel Number 6. The place has that dismal Soviet feel to it, but inside they have tried to make it cheerful with flowered wallpaper and a 1992 calendar. In the morning the canteen serves beer and rissoles for breakfast.

  Obozerskaya in 2007 still has a frontier atmosphere. The buildings are mostly of rough unpainted timber, weathered dark brown in a climate where the winters are six months long and the temperature falls to minus 40. The chemist shop is a log cabin, there’s a communal water pump and the roadsides, like everywhere in Russia, are untidy and overgrown.

  So what were Diggers doing here in the far north of Russia in 1918 and 1919? Towards the end of their time they wondered that themselves.

  In fact, they were taking part in an invasion. While not on the scale of Napoleon or Hitler, it was still an invasion—one in which more than a dozen foreign countries took part and in which the Aussies formed one small contingent of a large British force. The invaders aimed to overthrow Russia’s Bolshevik government and destroy the Soviet regime. By putting an end to the world’s first communist state, they hoped to rid mankind of the threat of world revolution. They failed.

  Only two Victoria Crosses were awarded during the entire campaign. Though the Australians were few in number, Diggers won them both. Sam Pearse VC and Arthur Sullivan VC must be our most neglected heroes in our least-known war. Their story and that of their mates deserves to be told.

  Anzacs in Arkhangel is an account of the Australians who came to North Russia in 1918 and 1919. It isn’t a history of the entire campaign, nor a study of the politics and wishful thinking that lay behind it—of which there are now some excellent books. This book is simply about the Diggers. It seeks to tell who they were, why they came and what they did.

  1

  THAT FIRST SHOT

  ONE morning in late June 1914, a teenage student fired two shots from a revolver. The first shot killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the crown of the Austro–Hungarian Empire, the second killed his wife Sophie. The murders, famously, were the spark that ignited World War I.

  The place was Sarajevo in Bosnia and the student was Gavrilo Princip, a self-obsessed nineteen-year-old from a middle-class family. Bosnia was a backward province of the Austro–Hungarian Empire and Princip and his fellow Slav conspirators yearned for it to unite with neighbouring Serbia.

  Austria–Hungary believed the Serbian government was behind the assassinations but at first took no action. Her ally, Germany, was powerful and assertive and Austria–Hungary waited until the German government had assured her she could count on German support.1 Only then, a month later, did she issue Serbia with an ultimatum. The Serbians complied almost completely but Austria–Hungary followed up with a declaration of war. It was intended more as an angry gesture than as the star
t of a real war.2

  But Russia, the self-appointed protector of the Balkan Slavs, came to Serbia’s side. She responded to Austria–Hungary’s bullying with some sabre-rattling of her own. She announced the mobilisation of the Russian army. If Princip’s revolver was the starter’s pistol in the race to destruction, then the Russian army was first to the starting line.

  Europe at the time was divided between rival military alliances. Germany, together with Austria–Hungary and Italy, formed the Triple Alliance. Opposing them were France and Russia, who were bound by treaty to come to each other’s aid in time of war. All these countries were heavily armed and all had conscript armies, millions strong, which could be mobilised within a matter of weeks.

  Military thinking at that time held that attack was the only successful strategy. If one country mobilised, its adversary had to follow suit or face defeat from a knockout blow. Germany therefore demanded that the Russians step back and demobilise. In an earlier crisis over Bosnia in 1908 Russia had backed down. This time she refused. The very system of alliances which had helped maintain the balance of power multiplied the risks. Russia’s refusal started a chain reaction which took Europe into an unintended war.

  Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August 1914. Two days later, in the knowledge that France would come to Russia’s aid, she declared war on France. Her plan was to strike first and annihilate the French defences before tackling the huge Russian army. To get at France, Germany demanded the right of free passage through neutral Belgium. But Belgium refused.

  Great Britain was now drawn in. Though she had an understanding, an ‘entente’, with the French and Russians, she was not a party to any military alliance with them and not obliged to join their quarrels. However, Britain had guaranteed Belgian neutrality. In theory, all the major European powers had done so back in 1839, soon after Belgium first gained independence from Holland. Britain, though, took Belgian neutrality seriously. Since a hostile power could use Belgium to mount a seaborne invasion across the English Channel, Britain’s firm policy was that the Belgian coast should never be in the hands of any other Great Power.