ANZACs in Arkhangel Page 11

  Near the camp was an airstrip. The air force had been expanded since the winter and planes took off and landed frequently. They flew reconnaissance missions, ferried officers to and from Arkhangel and made bombing and strafing runs on enemy targets. Occasionally planes dropped propaganda leaflets on the Bolos, an unpopular task as the shower of paper sometimes lodged in the control wires and threatened to bring the aircraft to grief.

  On the river was the British flotilla.15 Five monitors, big, powerful gunboats, were supported by minesweepers and auxiliaries, and coastal launches strong enough to tow thousand-ton barges. River gunboats of the ‘Insect’ class provided extra firepower. Fast and with a shallow draught, they carried two 6-inch guns, two 12-pounder field guns plus machine guns. They bore innocuous-sounding names like ‘Cockchafer’, ‘Glow-worm’ and ‘Cricket’, but could inflict a nasty sting.

  At Osinova the Diggers went into strenuous training. Originally they had derided the Fusiliers as the ‘Booziliers’. Now they had to eat their words as the regiment’s sergeant majors ‘bullied, beguiled and bashed us into a highly-trained and efficient composite unit’.16 The machine-gunners were made to repeat their gun drill so often they felt like staging a rebellion, while for all the men the training included many long marches. Within a fortnight the troops were fit enough to cover 30 kilometres in twelve hours, carrying full packs.

  A contemporary postcard from the firm of Abrahams showing part of the British flotilla off Troitsa. The Hyderabad, Humber and Cicala were three of the nine gunboats in the flotilla; the M31 was one of five monitors. (Gordon Smith/ www.naval-history.net)

  Apart from a kind of twilight when the sun briefly set, it was light for twenty-four hours a day. This dictated the men’s routine: they drilled during the ‘night’ hours and slept during the heat of the day. Usually their day began at 8 pm with a meal of bully beef and a parade in cutoff trousers and shirt sleeves. Their second meal was at midnight under mosquito nets, followed by another parade and work until 3 or 4 am, when they were free to rest or while away their time.

  Almost all the British troops complained of the heat, often describing it as tropical. Some claimed the temperature topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) but this was certainly an exaggeration; 31 degrees Celsius is the highest temperature ever officially recorded in Arkhangel. The main trouble for the men was probably the humidity and the unremitting sunlight.

  In addition, there were the mosquitoes. As the sun melted the winter snow the country turned into an enormous swamp. Mosquitoes bred in their millions and no remedy or repellent could keep them at bay. One medical officer had his men smear themselves with a mixture of lard and creosote, but not even this worked.17 The mosquitoes also created a completely unforeseen danger. Having come from Mesopotamia (Ironside says Salonika), some of the British troops were infected with malaria and the Russian mosquitoes in turn became carriers.18 It was sheer luck the disease did not spread widely.

  Mosquito veils were issued and anyone without one was treated as a potential Bolshevik and risked being shot on sight.19 A correspondent for The Times forgot his veil one day and was machine-gunned, though not hit. The incident may not have been entirely accidental as the troops held journalists in low esteem for being too obliging to the censors. Those from The Times were especially scorned; their man in the south with Denikin’s army was considered ‘by far the worst war correspondent in Russia’.20

  The British wore mosquito veils around their caps. Anybody without one was suspected of being a Bolshevik and risked being shot on sight. The correspondent for The Times forgot his one day and was given a burst of machine-gun fire as a reminder. (GAOPDF)

  British and Aussies share a drink. Identical earthenware jars held either rum or lime juice and bore uninformative labels such as ‘2a’. (In the AIF rum had been marked ‘SRD’ for ‘Service Rum Dilute’ but so much was filched in the base areas that wags said the letters really stood for ‘Seldom Reaches Destination’.) (AWM A04888)

  The Bolos held a line astride the Dvina about 40 kilometres south of Osinova. It was fortified with dugouts, trenches, barbed wire and timber blockhouses. The Bolos, it was said, were being pushed back and the Australians grew restless for action.

  One day it was announced that General Ironside was coming to inspect the brigade and the British troops set about polishing their equipment. The Aussies, not wanting to set a precedent, resisted efforts to make them do likewise—and got away with it. Attiwill pointed out that Australians had fought through the whole war ‘pretty well’ without having shiny buttons.21 At that stage, of course, he and some of his mates had yet to see any action. In spite of this, they shared completely the veteran Diggers’ high opinion of themselves, and took it for granted that they too would live up to the Anzac reputation.

  Attiwill writes of his comrades:

  Every one of them, was full of guts. Not a man jack of them had the slightest interest in the showy side, the ceremonial frills, of soldiering. They simply refused to take the army seriously or restrict themselves to the limitations of ordinary discipline—until they went into action, and then they were a soldier and a half, every one of them.22

  Attiwill describes Ironside as one of the largest men he had ever seen, a man who radiated personality and power and made a deep impression on the troops. When he addressed them, every sentence was direct and to the point. He told them they were going to administer a smashing blow, then link up with Kolchak in the east and Denikin in the south and march on Moscow.

  In fact, things didn’t go like that at all. A very different event took place which brought the Australians unexpectedly into action. On 7 July, while the Aussies were loafing and playing cards, a launch appeared around a bend of the river, its siren hooting urgently. A man on board shouted, ‘Dyer’s Battalion has mutinied!’

  The battalion, still known by its founder’s name, had been camped at Troitsa, about 30 kilometres upstream. Commanded now by a Colonel Wells, it had been regarded as the great hope of the Slavo–British Legion. Having completed its training, it had been deployed for the first time and was detailed to go into action very soon.

  Now, however, the battalion had turned on the British in a well-planned mutiny. One company had shot and bayoneted their officers, killing four Russians and four British and wounding two more of each. About two hundred men had then fled into the woods and joined the Bolsheviks.

  There are differing versions of the incident, but it seems the officers were taken by surprise as they slept in the house they used as orderly room and billet. The mutineers had first swept the building with a volley of bullets, then rushed in and stabbed the officers with bayonets.

  Though mortally wounded, one of the Britons managed to reach the river. He swam to a British boat offshore and raised the alarm. According to different reports he suffered six, ten or twenty-two separate wounds. Whatever the number, he died the following day.

  The Aussies were among the party which rushed to Troitsa on Sadleir-Jackson’s launch, with the brigadier himself in command. The Bolsheviks were still in occupation of the village so Sadleir-Jackson got one of the 18-pounder guns on the riverbank into action. When an enemy party appeared on the crest of the hill, he fired into them point blank and wiped them out. His group then held their position till reinforcements arrived the following morning.

  One British account probably overstates the role of the Australians. It has the mutineers creeping into the officers’ tents (not a house) and shooting them. According to this version,23 the officer who got away dived into the river and swam down to the Australians who were in reserve. As soon as they heard, they dashed to the front without orders and finding the mutineers celebrating, ‘mopped them up in proper “Digger” fashion’.

  The Australians then manned the lines. The next day they were amazed to see a mass of Bolos advancing, waving and shouting, many clearly unarmed. Here was the pre-arranged attack—zero hour gone wrong.

  Some of Dyer’s battalion had refused t
o mutiny, so the Australians persuaded these fellows to stand on the parapets and wave to the advancing Bolos. Great was the joy of the enemy when they saw their ‘comrades’. The Australians allowed the mob (no other term applies) to get within two hundred yards of our lines. They then opened fire and mowed them down as corn before a reaper.

  The mutiny of Dyer’s Battalion proved to be a turning point. Doubts about the Russians’ reliability turned into complete distrust. Sadleir-Jackson ‘conceived an immense disgust and distrust for everything Russian’24 and was quite open in wanting to disarm the Russians and have done with them entirely. This was contrary to the whole enterprise, which was to help the Russians not supplant them, and it took hours for General Ironside to talk his brigadier round. But Ironside himself was also shattered. ‘[It] caused me greater shock than I liked to admit even in my innermost thought. I now felt a distinct urge to extricate myself and my troops as quickly as I could.’25

  Reprisals against the mutineers were a grisly fiasco. Forty alleged ringleaders were held, whom Captain Allfrey of A Company wanted to shoot out of hand. To his disappointment, a formal court martial condemned only twelve of them to death. They were to be shot by machine-gunners of their former unit who, in case they decided to turn their guns on the British, were issued with only five rounds each.

  A thousand Russians were paraded to watch the executions while Allfrey’s men, fully armed and with fixed bayonets, kept the scene covered. The condemned men were already blindfolded and tied to stakes when a large group of off-duty British turned up to watch. (Allfrey thought this ‘in awfully bad taste’.26 ) Next, a stray dog ambled onto the scene and further delayed proceedings.

  Finally the order to fire was given. The machine guns shot off their five rounds, but only four of the condemned men were killed outright. One hadn’t even been hit; the gunner must have deliberately aimed to miss him. While British officers finished off the wounded men with revolvers, the last man tore his blindfold off and cried ‘Long live the Bolsheviks!’ Allfrey wrote: ‘I was glad when somebody fired at him and killed him, for he was uncannily cool and collected’.27

  As if this mutiny wasn’t enough, another blow fell on 20 July when Russian troops mutinied at Onega. Strategically, this was much more serious because Onega was essential for land communication between Arkhangel and Murmansk and its loss split the two fronts. Here the mutineers murdered their Russian commander and most of his officers and handed over their positions to the Bolsheviks.

  Some British had been attached as liaison officers at Onega and three were taken captive. As they were being led away a British gunboat standing offshore loosed off a few rounds from her gun more or less at random. By chance, the shells fell quite close to the group and as their escort bolted in one direction the British made off in the other, eventually reaching the gunboat and safety.28

  One Allied officer at Onega was not so lucky. Captain Allan Brown, formerly of the 49th Battalion, AIF, and one of the original members of Elope Force, fell victim to the mutineers on 20 July. He was the first Australian to lose his life in North Russia and rumours circulated as to the manner of his death. His comrade from Elope, John Kelly, wrote: ‘The first to go down was one of our well-liked Aussie officers, Captain Brown. Before they got him, though, he accounted for six of the Bolshies’.29 This version may be consoling, but since Kelly was back in England by then, it carries little authority.

  Brown was buried in Onega where the site of his grave is now unknown.30 He is commemorated in the Commonwealth War Cemetery in Arkhangel where a plaque in his honour is the only one to mention Australia. He was twenty-eight.

  Intelligence reports later established that rather than joining the Bolshevik forces, most of the Onega mutineers simply dispersed. In his memoirs, Ironside belittles them for not taking tactical advantage of the mutiny, but unlike him, the Russians were not professional soldiers; they were conscripted men who just wanted to go home. They made for their villages and promptly burned their uniforms and anything else that connected them with the Whites or the British.

  To Ironside the Onega mutiny was the last straw. The idea that the White Army could ever take over from the Allies and defeat the Bolsheviks was wishful thinking. It was clear to most of the troops on the spot in North Russia that the game was up and they were fighting a lost cause. This included the main body of the Australians who had arrived in Arkhangel just a week earlier.

  * Strictly, its name is actually the North Dvina, to distinguish it from the West Dvina, a completely different river which rises west of Moscow and flows into the Baltic Sea as the Daugava.

  9

  THE MAIN GROUP

  JULY 1919

  THE main group of Australians had left Southampton on 3 July 1919. They sailed aboard the Czar, a Russian steamer which had formerly operated a service between Arkhangel and New York. In a letter to his mother, Bill Baverstock tried to write the ship’s name in Russian script and got three of the four letters wrong.1 So much for the language instruction at Sandling! Charlie Oliver arrived so late he was left behind on the wharf and had to be taken out by a tug. Otherwise the voyage followed the pattern of earlier ones. There was a big send-off by the mayor and aldermen. The men saw a trawler towing a captured German submarine. The days lengthened until it was light all the time, with Baverstock noting that ‘some of the mob read nearly all night’.2

  After three days the Czar was in sight of the coast of Norway and its snow-clad mountains. Wilfred Yeaman simply recorded: ‘Everybody gambling all day as usual’.3 Baverstock, though, was impressed with the scenery. ‘The coast is about thirty miles away but the mountains are tremendous, the biggest I have ever seen, they beat Cape Town hollow.’4

  The ship dropped off some naval crew at Murmansk, then continued to Arkhangel. She berthed there on 11 July 1919 and the men disembarked the next morning. They were billeted at the Michigan Barracks which had been built by the Americans over the winter. They noticed how well constructed the timber buildings were for the cold, with the gaps between the double walls filled with sawdust for insulation. Now, though, the men complained of the heat—worse, they thought, than anywhere since Egypt.

  News of the mutiny of Dyer’s Battalion reached the Diggers at once, together with alarming rumours of more treachery to come. Despite the unsettled atmosphere, however, they enjoyed the sights of Arkhangel over several days. They visited the cathedral, attended a band concert in the gardens and went to the circus.

  There was also the ‘exotic pastime’ of spying on women bathing naked in the Dvina. Russians had always set aside beaches specially for women, and Russian men respected their privacy. The custom was now disturbed by Allied troops, who jostled at the railings for a better view and whistled and catcalled the bathers. Eventually a sentry was posted to stand with his back to the river and move the spectators on.5

  Mostly the men complained of the summer heat. An unusually late snowfall gives these Aussies their only chance to throw snowballs. The one on the left, again, is probably ‘Chilla’ Hill, who was later badly wounded in the attack on Yemtsa. (AWM A4889)

  The men had been severely cautioned against fraternising with Russian girls, but not everyone heeded the warning. One of the Aussies spent his very first night in Arkhangel out of camp.6 Asked to account for his absence, his mates ventured that wherever he had gone, it wasn’t for conversation!

  The newly married Sam Pearse wrote to his wife from Arkhangel. His letter seems carefully calculated to avoid any hint that he was actually enjoying himself.

  This is just about the worst country I have ever been in or ever hope to be in …

  Things are not as you think them over there. There is any amount of money over here but you can’t spend it as there is nothing to buy. There is no drink at all except some sweetened water and that is 2s. 6d. a bottle …

  The women here are about the rottenest lot I have ever seen and if I live to be a hundred I will never be able to talk the lingo.

  We walk around wi
th guns as we don’t know who the hell is which so far. I expect to be home before the winter sets in thank goodness.7

  The Australians were expecting to join their comrades on the Dvina, but the river was now too low for the barges to get through. So, after four days in Arkhangel, the men were allocated to the Railway Front. They were ferried across the river to the railhead where they boarded a train for Obozerskaya.

  The railway from Vologda to Arkhangel had been completed in 1898. Built in a severe climate over swampy terrain, it was hailed as a major engineering achievement. Although a single line, it had sidings every 5 kilometres or so where trains could pass. The timber stations were built to a standard design, the larger ones featuring tall mansard roofs and decorative Russian motifs around the windows. The landscape, though, was flat and monotonous and the line itself ran pretty well due south through kilometres of dense, gloomy forest.

  The Bolsheviks had taken the best rolling stock when they withdrew from Arkhangel the previous July. Of the sixty engines they left behind, eighteen were beyond repair and ten, built in 1868, were virtually museum pieces.8 Since the Russian railway gauge was wider than Britain’s, spare locomotives and carriages could not readily be imported. A number of passenger carriages, however, were still in service so, unlike the Americans in their louse-infested wagons, the Australians travelled comfortably in proper carriages with nine-berth compartments.9

  An American infantry company sets off on a patrol along the railway. The Australians were less inclined to stick to the rails; they raided and patrolled aggressively along the forest tracks, often far behind enemy lines. (US Army Signal Corps, Bentley Historical Library)