ANZACs in Arkhangel Read online

  Miller’s troops were meant to have occupied the British positions along the river. But in their new enthusiasm, instead of taking over at Bereznik as agreed, they moved further south to occupy the forward British posts. The ensuing confusion allowed the Bolos to infiltrate positions the Russians should have held, leaving the barges open to snipers as they moved downriver. This meant shore parties had to pull back in stages to provide cover for the barges. It was a slow process. Arthur Sullivan complained it took seventeen days to travel what should have taken two.9

  Brewster had to do another stint onshore, billeted in a cow shed.10 Two days later he was aboard a pontoon with two guns and ammunition, being towed back upriver above Plos. His party hauled one of the guns 7 kilometres through mud trying to find an open clearing. They fired 150 rounds to frighten off the Bolos, boarded a horse barge at 2 am and slept in the muck till daylight. His barge, he says, was the last to leave for Arkhangel.

  On 15 September the Australians were at Tulgas, where the Americans had fought a pitched battle on the day the Armistice was signed. The Bolsheviks were back in occupation and had to be cleared out. Another Aussie distinguished himself here: Olaf Andersen, a tough, stocky Danish-born former sailor who had signed up in Melbourne in 1917. Held up by barbed wire and heavy machine-gun fire, he rushed the wire, killed the gun crew and gave up only after being wounded three times. He was awarded a DCM.11

  At the confluence of the Dvina and the Vaga, the barge carrying Sadleir-Jackson came under heavy machine-gun fire. Bolos opened up from the bank and an island in the mouth of the Vaga. Bullets shattered the glass of the wheelhouse and the brigadier himself was almost killed. On the following barge, three men were shot dead and twelve were wounded.12

  By 20 September the Aussies were camped at Ust-Pinega, a village they had first passed through shortly after arriving in Russia. Three days later, together with the entire British force, they were positioned inside Arkhangel’s inner defence line.

  In the city the British had feared the local population might turn on them. As late as 9 September a reserve battalion of Highland Light Infantry had been brought in from Murmansk to help maintain order. The Scots looked like a new army arriving and caused a stir when they marched down Troitsky Prospect to drums and the skirl of bagpipes.13

  Ironside’s recommendation not to evacuate Russian civilians had been overruled in London on humanitarian grounds. He was ordered to provide transport for up to 13,500 civilian refugees. The War Office also instructed him to ship ‘one hundred of the most influential Bolshevik prisoners’ to Britain as hostages. They were to be held to ensure British prisoners in Bolshevik hands were properly treated until an exchange could be arranged.14 In fact, the Bolsheviks had treated most Allied prisoners well, if only for propaganda reasons.

  The Americans fought a three-day pitched battle at Tulgas, beginning on Armistice Day, 1918. During the Allied withdrawal the following September, Olaf Andersen won his DCM here by rushing an enemy machine-gun post. In 2007 the village seemed sunk in an atmosphere of isolation and stagnation. (Michael Challinger)

  The British Evacuation Bureau in Arkhangel set about processing the refugee applications. The British, though, were so uncertain of public feeling that the staff kept a Lewis gun handy in their office in case of trouble. Intelligence officers were assigned to verify the bona fides of the refugees, but many lacked identity papers of any kind and others produced false ones. ‘Many queer and unexpected people emerged from the holes in which they had been buried,’ wrote Ironside. ‘Everyone seemed to have adopted different names and everyone lied heartily in putting forward their claims for evacuation.’15 A spate of hasty soldier weddings added war brides to the ranks of the refugees.

  In the event, only about 6500 of the refugee places were actually taken up (5552 Russians; the rest a mixture of nationalities including Americans, French, Serbians, Chinese and even a few Koreans).16 The Russian numbers probably reflected the population’s willingness to accept the return of the Bolsheviks, rather than any faith in Miller’s ability to resist them.

  Ironside had orders from London to leave the Russians his food reserves (except alcohol), but no military stores. Confidence in the White Army was so low it was taken for granted that any munitions would soon fall into Bolshevik hands.

  The British therefore set about methodically destroying their stores. Vehicles, artillery pieces, tools and spare parts were dumped into the Dvina in full view of Arkhangel’s inhabitants. ‘It was shocking, the waste,’ wrote one British soldier, who turned a blind eye to any Russian smuggling away an occasional shovel.17 Thousands of shells, the leftover gas equipment and 90 million rounds of small arms ammunition were dumped into the White Sea. So a campaign to preserve war supplies ended with their deliberate destruction!

  On 26 September the city authorities imposed a 24-hour curfew, with lights out from 8 pm. Under cover of darkness six thousand British troops marched to one of nine designated points on the river. Soon after dawn tugs and riverboats started to ferry them out to the troopships.18

  Yeaman and his section were up at 1.30 am and got to Bakaritsa by about six. They loaded their guns and kit onto a tug which took them out to a former P&O liner, the Kalyan, which was fitted up as a hospital ship and stood at anchor at midstream. Guards were posted to look out for anything suspicious as the ship slowly headed for the open sea.

  The other Diggers from the Railway Front were ferried out to the Kildonan Castle, the largest ship in the convoy of forty-five now leaving. The Kildonan Castle had been carrying troops since the Boer War (and had taken away forty-seven of the Bolshevik hostages three weeks earlier). On this final trip she was carrying 2236 British officers and men and a solitary civilian. At last, on her crowded decks, the bulk of the Aussies from the Railway Front found their fellow Australians from the Dvina.

  Once the mist cleared it was a crisp, bright September day with Arkhangel’s trees in their autumn colours. The repair ships, store ships and auxiliaries had already left. The huge transports Czar and Czaritsa slowly followed. The British coastal motorboats which had been patrolling the river were now lifted out of the water on the ships’ derricks. There was no space aboard any of the ships for the last of them, so she was riddled with tracer fire until she sank.19

  Eleven Australian casualties were evacuated aboard the hospital ship Kalyan on 22 August 1919. A month later Yeaman’s group left for England on her when the Relief Force withdrew. This picture shows the ship frozen in over the winter, when wounded men had to be brought in by sleigh or on a railway spur laid across the ice. (US Army Signal Corps, Bentley Historical Library)

  At 9 am tugs went round the embarkation points one last time to check for stragglers. They found a British private sitting forlornly on a pile of baggage, who explained: ‘I am Captain Snodgrass’s servant and he told me to wait here till he came’. Ironside was intrigued to learn the force actually had an officer with such a name.20

  The Australians had been among the last to leave Russian soil and their ship was the last to sail. It glided slowly through the channels of the Dvina towards the White Sea. Gradually the view of the cathedral’s cupolas sank beneath the curtain of trees and disappeared.

  The curfew was still in force and from the decks of the British ships Arkhangel looked deserted. Some Russians, though, were watching. From one riverside house, a well-to-do Scottish–Russian family watched in dismay as the line of ships moved silently past. One of them remarked bitterly: ‘Why did they come at all? We shall pay a heavy price for this’.21

  15

  THE LOOSE ENDS

  IN Arkhangel the year 1920 opened with the Whites still in control. General Miller was holding off the Bolsheviks longer than anyone expected. The respite wasn’t due to the fighting skills of the defenders; it was simply that once the foreigners had gone, the north ceased to be a high priority for the Bolsheviks. Trotsky was being pressed hard by Yudenich at Petrograd and Denikin in the south and he redeployed his forces there. Mille
r was even able to mount successful offensives along the railway and at Pinega. But the end was only a matter of time.

  By February the Bolsheviks had regained the initiative. In Siberia they captured Kolchak and shot him; in the south, Denikin was in full retreat. Trotsky turned his attention to the north again. The Sixth Red Army resumed its advance and the Whites fell back towards Arkhangel.

  The city seethed with rumours.1 Optimists reported the Allies were on their way back. The credulous trusted to the Virgin Mary, who had appeared to some children in a vision and promised to save everyone at the last moment.

  Arkhangel descended into chaos. The trams stopped running, shops closed and gangs of hooligans took advantage of the breakdown in law and order to rob and loot with impunity. Food was desperately short; meat, fish, butter and milk were completely unobtainable. But in spite of the turmoil, Arkhangel high society held a gala theatrical on 15 February, followed by a dance for the benefit of wounded soldiers.

  Two days later, with gunfire from the south audible in the city, General Miller made arrangements to withdraw through Onega to Murmansk on a convoy of sleighs. Just as he was about to get under way, he changed his mind and accepted an offer to escape on a large, powerful icebreaker which had turned up in Arkhangel harbour.

  The armed icebreaker, the Kozma Minin, was commanded by none other than Captain Georgi Chaplin, still the man of action and intrigue. On 20 February, Miller and a select group of officers, officials and wealthy merchants, all with their families, set sail for Norway. A motor yacht, packed with more White officers and the last desperate refugees followed, trying to keep close behind before the channel froze solid again.

  A second icebreaker, the Kanada, was expected to join them but instead she hoisted the red flag and made ready to give chase. First, though, she needed to raise steam, then move down to the artillery wharf at Solombala for two field guns to be mounted on her forecastle. The delay of several hours gave Miller’s two ships a fighting chance to get away.

  The yacht, however, proved unable to keep up. The Kozma Minin had to pull alongside her while her passengers were transferred and the yacht then abandoned in the ice field. The Kozma Minin was now crowded with over a thousand passengers and when she came across three other refugee ships inching their way through the White Sea there was a further delay while passengers were redistributed among them.

  By now the Kanada had caught up and opened fire. A running gun battle ensued between the two icebreakers. Shells ricocheted across the ice hummocks and clouds of frost billowed where they blasted holes through the ice. Eventually, with snow falling, the Kozma Minin reached open water, extinguished her lights and got away.2 The three other ships became jammed in the ice and were forced to give themselves up to the Reds.

  On 21 February the 154th Red Infantry Regiment marched unopposed into Arkhangel. Cheering crowds lined Troitsky Prospect, just as they had eighteen months earlier when they greeted the arriving Allies. The struggle against Soviet power in North Russia was over.

  The Allied Intervention had only delayed the inevitable. It had put off the collapse of the Whites but had prolonged the suffering. The cost in human terms can never be known. On both sides, Red and White, untold thousands of Russians, mostly conscripted peasants, lost their lives. Among the Allies the campaign in the north cost 244 American dead (144 killed in action, the rest from other causes, including influenza), 327 British3 and lesser numbers of Poles and French. American wounded numbered 305 and British (including Canadians and Australians) 656.

  Two Australians lost their lives in North Russia: Allan Brown of Elope Force and Sam Pearse of the Relief Force. Probably fewer than twenty Australians were wounded or fell seriously ill. Eleven are listed as having been evacuated aboard the Kalyan on 22 August. One of them was Keith Attiwill, suffering badly from ulcerated boils. He had been carried out of the forest to the river’s edge and ‘passed from coracle to mine-sweeper to paddle-steamer to hospital ship’.4

  Private Joseph Purdue receives his DCM at Netley Military Hospital in Hampshire, England. He earned it in August 1919 by carrying a wounded officer on his back during the retreat from the Sheika River. During the Allied withdrawal a month later he was wounded himself. (AWM A05011)

  The material cost of the Intervention is also impossible to calculate. The British government published three separate White Papers on the subject, each giving different figures.5 For political reasons Churchill tried to minimise the expense and by the second revision most of the stores and munitions had been reclassified as war surplus. This meant they were no longer valued at the cost of production, but by a hypothetical estimate of the price they might fetch in 1920, provided a buyer could be found. So supplies worth £5.77 million in the first White Paper were valued a year later at only £244,000!

  Commentators argued over the true cost and various figures were bandied about. Eventually a round figure of £100 million came to be broadly accepted, even by Churchill himself. That amount covered expenditure for the whole of Russia and equates to about £10 billion (say A$22 billion) in today’s values. North Russia’s share was less than half, but was still a colossal amount of money.

  In spite of the huge sums outlaid, the British were not above bureaucratic meanness to those who had served them. The War Office had authorised a special Arctic allowance to be paid to members of Elope Force and it was actually entered into their pay books. As some wags pointed out, since Arkhangel was also east of Suez, the men should have qualified for 3 shillings a day hot climate allowance too!

  But when John Kelly presented his claim for pay in London on his return, he was bluntly informed the Arctic allowance did not apply to Australians. ‘We were good enough … to carry out the political machinations of the British Government but when it came to payment for our services we were deemed no better than White Russians.’6

  The Intervention produced some perverse and unintended results. Despite the frantic efforts to destroy leftover war material, enormous quantities were seized by the Bolsheviks. So the Red Army was able to equip itself handsomely with the latest weapons, courtesy of the British taxpayer. Murmansk, the port built with British money to forestall the submarine threat, became a naval base. Nearby Severomorsk is today the home port of Russia’s nuclear submarine fleet.

  By allowing the Bolsheviks to portray their struggle as one against foreign invaders, the Intervention actually helped them consolidate Soviet power. It also created a legacy of distrust that had ramifications for years into the future. During World War II the Soviets were acutely aware of Churchill’s personal role in invading their country and the knowledge impinged on their uneasy wartime alliance.

  The Cold War resharpened Soviet memories. On his visit to the United States in 1957, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev reminded Americans how they had tried to strangle the Soviet state at birth. ‘Never have any of our soldiers been on American soil, but your soldiers were on Russian soil. Those are the facts.’7 Most Americans didn’t know what he was talking about.

  Americans had forgotten—if they ever knew—that the Intervention had happened, and wondered why the Soviets were so prickly. On a visit to the USSR in 1972, President Nixon appeared on television to assure Russians: ‘Most important of all. We have never fought one another in war’.8 From ignorance or design, President Reagan made the same point during his presidency. Both were wrong.

  Of course, some Americans knew all too well. John Cudahy, who later became a US ambassador, fought in North Russia with the 339th Infantry Regiment. He went as far as describing the American expedition as ‘a depraved one with [the] status of a free-booter’s excursion’.

  Whether wilfully or unwilfully, our country had engaged in an unprovoked, intensive, inglorious little armed conflict which had ended in disaster and disgrace.9

  For the Whites, the Intervention produced only tragedy. The main actors fled to the West and lived out their lives in thankless exile. In 1920 Tchaikovsky settled in London where he busied himself in freema
sonry. The Soviets declared him an enemy of the people in absentia but he was out of Soviet reach and died in 1926 of natural causes. Marushevsky settled in Yugoslavia and died in Zagreb in 1952. Chaplin also escaped to the West but, true to form, covered his tracks. He eventually surfaced as a lecturer at a military college in Britain, where he died in 1950.

  General Miller lived as an émigré in Paris and for years intrigued and agitated against the Soviet regime. In 1937, three days before his seventieth birthday, he was lured to a mysterious meeting by men he believed were German spies, but who were in fact Soviet agents. He never returned. He had suspected the meeting might be a trap and had left a note which was found after his disappearance. In spite of a manhunt by the French police, Miller was not found. He had been drugged, stuffed into a steamer trunk and smuggled out of France aboard a Soviet ship. He was taken to Moscow, tortured and eventually shot in May 1939.

  On the Soviet side, his adversary Kedrov ended up no better. Known and feared for his cruelty, Kedrov was appointed in 1920 to head a special section of the dreaded Cheka, a forerunner of the KGB, and responsible for combating sabotage and counter-revolution. His impeccable Bolshevik credentials were no protection when he fell foul of Stalin’s secret police chief, Beria. He was shot on Beria’s personal order in 1941, though posthumously rehabilitated in 1953. A plaque in Kedrov’s honour is mounted beneath a window at Obozerskaya railway station, which he used for a time as his headquarters.

  In Britain, Ironside was at first relegated to retirement on half-pay. Rawlinson pulled some strings and wangled him a series of appointments in Turkey, Persia, India and Gibraltar. In World War II Ironside served briefly in France and then, when Britain faced invasion in 1940, became Commander-in-Chief of Home Forces. Like Churchill, he symbolised British pluck and determination. The Intervention, though, remained the defining experience of his career. Raised to the peerage in 1941, he chose the title ‘Baron of Archangel and of Ironside’. He died in 1959 of complications after he fell and broke a leg.