ANZACs in Arkhangel Page 4

  With Arkhangel under Bolshevik control, the invasion had been timed to coincide with an anti-Bolshevik coup, led by a swashbuckling Russian captain, Georgi Chaplin.1 Rumours had been spread in Arkhangel of a large-scale British landing and it was hoped the fleet would create the impression of being the vanguard of a larger following force. The bluff succeeded nicely; Bolshevik morale was shaken and their high command fled south towards Vologda.

  The guns on Mudyugsky Island (the author’s son stands beside one in 2008) were Arkhangel’s main seaward defence. American-made, they scored a hit on a British cruiser but failed to prevent the Allied landing. The Whites later established a prison camp on Mudyugsky for captured Bolsheviks. (Michael Challinger)

  To impede the invasion fleet, the Bolsheviks had laid mines and scuttled two icebreakers in the fairway. As the ships negotiated the obstructions, some Bolshevik batteries on Mudyugsky, the delta’s northern-most island, opened fire and took out one of the British cruiser’s four funnels. The invaders returned fire and the Nairana’s seaplanes dropped a few bombs, most of which missed. Resistance ceased. It was said the sight of British planes over Arkhangel panicked the Bolsheviks into withdrawing.

  Modest though it was, the landing has some claim to being one of the earliest fully combined air-sea operations against land forces. Curiously, Admiral Kemp’s flagship, the Nairana, was actually an Australian coastal steamer. On order to a Melbourne company for the Tasmanian run, she had been under construction in a Scottish shipyard when war broke out in 1914. The British Admiralty took her over, added a hangar, crane, workshops and seven aircraft, and commissioned her as a seaplane carrier.

  For the landing force, the fleet carried every man who could be spared from Murmansk, about 1200 in all. The troops consisted of a French battalion, some Poles, some British marines, a few American marines—and a handful of Australians. At least two definitely took part, and probably several more. John Kelly2 was a Lewis-gunner on an armed trawler from the English fishing town of Grimsby; Charlie Hickey was aboard another of the trawlers.

  Aircraft circled the city, dropping leaflets to reassure the inhabitants. The warships tied up and the troops landed. There was some sporadic shooting inland, but the wharves were captured undamaged. The British had hoped to take over the supply dumps intact. They calculated on finding about 300,000 tons of coal and 200,000 tons of other stores, including aircraft, vehicles, armaments and ammunition. But they were disappointed: the Bolsheviks had been busy and the lion’s share had already been removed and taken south.

  By the time Kelly and Hickey got ashore, Arkhangel’s tugs and riverboats were sounding their foghorns and whistles in greeting and the wharf was crowded with cheering Russians. One American wrote of the scene: ‘The people simply went wild with joy to an extent almost beyond imagination’.3 What escaped his notice was that the welcoming crowds were exclusively middle class and that there wasn’t a working man among them. While the well-to-do citizens of Arkhangel were delighted and relieved by the Allied arrival, the working masses were at best apathetic and at worst, hostile.

  The Nairana was actually an Australian ship. She was under construction in Scotland for a Melbourne company when the British Admiralty requisitioned her. After serving as the flagship for the landing at Arkhangel, the Nairana was refitted and sailed the Bass Strait run from 1921. In 1951 she ran aground off Port Melbourne and was broken up. (IWM SP 1292)

  Arkhangel was ‘a filthy, dirty town’ according to most British troops. In fact, it was a real city with trams, electricity and many substantial buildings. It was grossly overcrowded, however, and sanitation was poor. (State Archives of Social-Political Affairs of Arkhangel Province, GAOPDF)

  Unlike Murmansk, Arkhangel was a real city. Founded in 1585, it was developed as a port a century later under Tsar Peter the Great. It was the centre of a flourishing timber industry and its protruding shoreline was lined with docks, warehouses, factories and shipyards. Now, in July 1918, it was a very crowded city. Its pre-war population of 70,000 had more than doubled with the influx of troops and refugees.

  In their letters home most foreign soldiers disparaged Arkhangel. This was unfair as the city had some fine buildings in brick and stone—government offices, schools, churches, commercial buildings and a theatre. True, most of the city’s other buildings were of timber, but many were substantial and often attractively decorated with traditional Russian fretwork.

  Arkhangel’s most impressive building was the cathedral, which was later blown up by the communists and still hasn’t been rebuilt. It was visible from much of the city, its blue-green cupolas gilded at the top. Bert Perry thought it a sight ‘never to be forgotten’ in winter moonlight, dusted with snow. Later Australians described it wrongly as a mosque.

  Trinity (Troitsky) Cathedral was completed in 1773 and was the finest building in Arkhangel. Its green cupolas were gilded at the top while the east and west facades sported large murals of biblical scenes. The Soviets blew the cathedral up in 1929 and used the stone to build a ‘Palace of Culture’ on the same site. (GAOPDF)

  The main streets of Arkhangel were paved and there were wooden boardwalks for pedestrians. There was electricity and street lighting. There was a tramway running an 8-kilometre route along the main street, Troitsky Prospect. But there was no reticulated water supply and people drew their water from public wells. Nor was there any proper sanitation and, with the city’s cesspools overflowing, the streets reeked of untreated sewage. Most of the British thought Arkhangel a ‘filthy, dirty town, whose inhabitants smelt horribly’.4

  The brief Bolshevik occupation had not greatly disrupted daily life. Arkhangel’s banks were still open, priests still taught in the schools and restaurants and nightspots thrived. But the shops were poorly stocked and prices very high. Wealth and poverty existed side by side. Women and children begged in the streets and many people were near destitution. One British wireless operator wrote in his diary:

  The people are clad in every conceivable combination of cloth and fur. The women work as hard as the men and can be seen sawing huge logs … there is nothing on sale in the shops and I am told the people are practically starving. Certainly the majority of people are in rags.5

  Arkhangel was crowded with troops and refugees, many of whom were destitute and reduced to begging in the streets. The townspeople in this photograph, which was taken after the Allied withdrawal, seem better off than most. (Krasnogorsk Archive)

  With the Allied arrival, an anti-Bolshevik government was set up: the ‘Supreme Administration of North Russia’. Its president was Nikolai Tchaikovsky, an elderly socialist who was distantly related to the composer, and who had lived for thirty-two years abroad—six of them in Kansas, running a religious cult.

  Tchaikovsky was well-meaning but ineffectual. Real control was in the hands of the high-handed British Army commander, Major General Frederick Poole, a womaniser with a taste for Russian gypsy girls. Poole rode roughshod over Tchaikovsky and offended popular feeling by running Arkhangel as if it were a city under occupation. He requisitioned numerous buildings for his staff and, when he took over the city’s biggest and finest house for himself, the owner’s wife complained she had been better treated under the Bolsheviks!6

  The Australians, meanwhile, were stationed at Solombala, an industrial suburb with sawmills, shipyards, a seminary and a tough reputation.

  General Poole and his Cossack pals. Overbearing and condescending, Poole was said to be the most disliked man in Arkhangel. After meddling in North Russian politics, he was recalled to London in October 1918, only to be sent to South Russia the following month. (US Army Signal Corps collection, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan)

  One British major wrote of it: ‘In this area the riff-raff live. Murders occur nightly without notice, even police are in danger’.7 Solombala was to the north of the city on an island formed by the Kuznechikha, one of the channels of the Dvina. In winter when the river froze, lines were laid across the ice and the
tramway extended into Solombala itself.

  The task of Elope was to organise and train the anti-Bolshevik forces. Besides Russians, these included an assortment of national groups: Finns, Poles, Czechs, Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians. To Kelly, they were the ‘most motley crowd that ever comprised a so-called military force’.8

  Some hapless Chinese were even roped in: about 150 former construction and timber workers who found themselves stranded in North Russia. For some reason a British staff officer thought Kelly spoke Chinese and assigned him to train them! Kelly describes them as inveterate gamblers, forever arguing and brawling among themselves. He thought them ‘barely civilised’, though still easier to manage than half a dozen Diggers. Bert Perry also worked with the Chinese and declared them ‘great fun’.

  Captain Paul Lohan was appointed adjutant at Solombala, and later at a training barracks for Russian officers in Arkhangel proper. The other Australians were soon dispersed, some training new recruits, others attached to units in the field. Much of the time they didn’t know each other’s whereabouts, and their movements are now impossible to trace. According to Kelly, ‘It was often a source of wonderment to some of the fresh troops upon arrival at an outlying post to find a solitary Aussie firmly established amongst the inhabitants’.9

  Captain Allan Brown was sent upriver and lived on a barge on the Dvina.10 The tug pulling the barge carried a crew of fifty, even though only one man could stoke at a time—the rest had sneaked aboard just to be fed! Brown himself ate well because the barge captain and his wife kept him supplied with eggs and fresh vegetables. He wrote home for coffee, cocoa, milk and biscuits—and for Russian grammar books.

  Of all the Australians, Brown seems to have been the most attuned to Russia. He took an intelligent interest in the language and in Russian customs, he photographed the churches and sent home a series of picture postcards of Arkhangel which, as he pointed out, made the city look much better than it really was. He also displayed more respect and appreciation of the Russian people themselves than was common among the British. He wrote:

  So many of the people out here do not recognise … the splendid qualities of the Russians. These qualities I admit are not on the surface but are nevertheless there.11

  John Kelly moved around. He spent several weeks attached to a French regiment, finding the men as wild and rough as any he had ever met, but ‘good fellows for all that’. He also helped organise and train the Finnish Legion, who were disciplined and skilful fighters. Over winter he had dealings with ‘Siberian Eskimos’ who helped with transport. Their sleighs were pulled by reindeer, harnessed by a single length of leather round their necks. The Eskimos controlled the animals by prodding them with long rods. Allan Brown also tried using reindeer but gave them up as they were too slow and upset the horses.

  One of General Poole’s pet projects was the ‘Slavo-British Legion’, which recruited Russians to fight in British uniforms under British command. (The French matched it by setting up a recruiting office for the Foreign Legion.) Volunteers were issued with equipment and rations and were paid 100 roubles a month, equal to £2 sterling at the official rate though only £1 on the black market. Considering that a bath at the public bathhouse cost 14 roubles, the pay wasn’t high. It was the prospect of being properly fed that was the attraction and at first Elope Force was overwhelmed with recruits, ‘all the strays and misfits of the north’, according to Kelly.12

  After the first rush of entrants, however, recruiting dried up. The British decided to draw extra manpower from the city’s gaols, which were full to bursting with hundreds of undocumented prisoners. Sergeant Dyer, a likeable Canadian, was given the job of sorting them out. In the absence of any records, he classified them as the ‘Bads’, the ‘Less Bads’ and the ‘Probably Harmless’ and used them at first as a labour squad on the docks.13

  A camp of the Slavo–British Legion. With British equipment and British officers, the Legion’s Russian recruits seemed to show great promise. However, many of them were former Bolsheviks, and Allied troops on the ground thought the project a forlorn hope. (IWM Q 16222)

  Soon Dyer was given a commission and ordered to make soldiers of his rabble. He seemed to do well. The men appeared devoted to him and carried his picture on parade like an icon, marching to a band drawn from the previously mutinous sailors from the Askold. Dyer’s adjutant was Pat Burke, an Australian from the New Zealand army, who was later himself made a captain and given a battalion of his own.

  During the winter, Dyer fell ill after a long sleigh journey and died, probably from influenza. The unit continued to be called Dyer’s Battalion in his memory. It contained many men who had formerly fought for the Bolsheviks and had changed sides on the principle that it was better to be a member of a force than its prisoner. If and when these former Bolsheviks were sent into action, there was a distinct possibility they would desert and rejoin their original side. Absorbing them into the Slavo-British Legion was a calculated risk. Kelly thought it a forlorn hope to make soldiers out of ‘a thousand criminals’ and later events proved him right.

  On 5 September 1918, two important events took place in Arkhangel. The first was a coup against Tchaikovsky’s government. The second was the arrival of American troops.

  The coup was again headed by Captain Georgi Chaplin who had now decided that the regime he’d helped put in place was too left-wing. He abducted Tchaikovsky and five of his ministers and dumped them on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea. The local population believed, probably correctly, that General Poole was behind the coup, and the coincidental arrival of the Americans cast suspicion on them too. A general strike was called and American troops took over the running of the trams. Though the Americans collected no fares and thereby gave the citizens of Arkhangel free tram travel, they were seen as strike-breakers and their standing was seriously compromised.

  American troops disembark at Bakaritsa Wharf, Arkhangel. Many were sick from influenza and most were bewildered to find themselves fighting Russians instead of Germans. Sent straight to the front, they received little gratitude from the British. General Ironside wrote: ‘I have never seen anything quite so bad as this regiment ... [It] has received no training and the officers are, one and all, of the lowest quality imaginable.’ (US Army Signal Corps, Bentley Historical Library)

  Under political pressure from the American Ambassador, General Poole was made to rescue the castaways and reinstate them. Chaplin was reprimanded but remained unrepentant. He remarked, ‘I see no use for any government here anyway’.14

  Though British reinforcements had arrived soon after the original landing, the American troops were desperately needed. Arkhangel province was huge—at 850,000 square kilometres, it was bigger than New South Wales—and, emboldened by his easy takeover in Arkhangel, Poole had sent his meagre forces deep into it in pursuit of the retreating enemy. Indeed, Poole’s first cable from North Russia to the War Office had boasted, ‘cheerfully taking great risks’.15 By now the Bolsheviks realised that the Allied strength was much less than had first appeared. Their resistance was strengthening and the British were in danger of being forced back or, even worse, cut off.

  More than five thousand American troops disembarked in Arkhangel on 5 and 6 September. They were part of the US 339th Infantry Regiment, supported by engineers, an ambulance company and a field hospital. They were not outdoor types, but clerks and factory workers from Detroit and Milwaukee. Like the British in Murmansk, they were of low classification and considered fit only for base duty. Unlike the British, they were without experience of battle. They were also poorly armed, having been equipped with Russian rifles on the assumption that Russian ammunition was plentiful. The rifles were inaccurate and jammed easily, and the men had fired only ten practice rounds apiece with them.

  The Americans were bewildered to find themselves in Russia. They had expected to go to France to fight Germans. Instead, both their destination and enemy had suddenly changed. They had been despatched first to Murma
nsk for ‘guard duties’, then diverted en route to Arkhangel. Furthermore, they landed in terrible condition. Influenza had swept two of the three overcrowded British troopships on which they had arrived. By the time the Americans reached Arkhangel hundreds were seriously ill; seventy-two of them ultimately died.

  The Americans were commanded by a Colonel George E Stewart. His terms of reference from President Wilson put him in an impossible position. First, the American troops were not to be used in combat; second, Stewart was to be subordinate to General Poole—who immediately ordered the men into action.

  In fact, Poole considered the situation so serious that as soon as the Americans disembarked they were despatched to the front. One battalion was herded into railway boxcars and sent south to Obozerskaya while a second boarded coal barges to be towed upriver to the Dvina Front. The deployments were flatly contrary to President Wilson’s intention.

  Strangely enough, Stewart had been born in Kiama, New South Wales. Now forty-six, he had migrated to the United States as a boy with his parents,16 joined the US army and risen through the ranks to his present command. Australia, though, would not be anxious to claim him as a native son. Stewart’s troops thought him weak, torpid and indifferent to their hardships and, except for General Poole, he was said to be the most unpopular man in Arkhangel. Besides his personal shortcomings, Stewart was overburdened with paperwork and totally out of his depth politically.17 From the American point of view, he let himself be hoodwinked by the British; from the British standpoint, both he and his troops were substandard.

  Australian-born Colonel George E Stewart was the second most disliked man in Arkhangel. As commander of the American contingent, he was uninspiring and ineffective. Stewart was well aware his men held him in low esteem and was invalided out of Russia in April 1919 with stress-related stomach ulcers and eczema. (US Military Academy Library, West Point)