ANZACs in Arkhangel Page 7

  The Australians regretted being separated from each other and not serving under their own officers. They were frequently out of contact, both with each other and their families at home. The mail was irregular and Kelly’s father wrote several times to AIF headquarters complaining about the mail and mix-ups with his pay-book. ‘It appears to me that the few Australians in the North Russian Expeditionary Force receive scant attention from the Authorities.’38

  Allan Brown seems to have moved around more than most. January 1918 had found him in Shenkursk, a strategically important town southwest of Arkhangel, among a mixed force of about a thousand British, Americans and Russian Whites. The Bolsheviks had almost surrounded Shenkursk and the decision was taken to break out. Men were ordered to take only what they could carry but, when the stores of rations and clothing were thrown open for each man to take his pick, the temptation to overload proved irresistible.

  The column moved off at midnight on 24 January along a narrow, little-used logging track. It was 30 degrees below zero and 50 kilometres to safety. The artillery and about a hundred hospital patients were carried on sleighs but the rest of the troops and a column of refugees had to follow on foot.

  The horses and sleighs cut up the track badly and it was too dark to see the ruts and holes. Soon the overloaded men were collapsing from exhaustion in the deep snow and had to be dragged and punched to their feet. By degrees they jettisoned their extra rations, their pistols, belts, personal kit and bundles of cherished letters. Some even shed the fleece-lined overcoats which hung on them like lead weights; others dumped their clumsy Shackleton boots and risked frostbite to struggle on in stockinged feet. Brown escaped with just the clothes on his back, writing to his sister three months later that he still felt depressed by the desperate retreat ‘and other tragic scenes’.39

  In his longish narrative, Kelly mentions the doings of only one of his fellow Australians, Rainbow Graham, who was serving on the Railway Front.40 When the rail traffic became congested a call had gone out for a qualified person to control the line. Graham claimed to know everything about running a railway and got himself commissioned as a captain and appointed Railway Transport Officer. Kelly wasn’t surprised to hear on the bush telegraph that train movements were sometimes chaotic.

  Kelly also recounts Graham’s involvement in a raid on a supposed enemy armoured train. It was standing in a siding, apparently unguarded, and Graham organised an armed party, deployed his men around it and called on the occupants to surrender. In fact, it was a British armoured train whose crew were resting before their next sortie. Among his fellow Australians Graham had trouble living the incident down.

  On the other hand, he charmed the Americans.41 They seem to have accepted all his stories at face value, including how he had rescued a wounded American by driving a locomotive into no-man’s land and pulling him from a swamp, and how he had stolen whisky from the British to exchange for fresh food for the American hospital. The credulous Americans even swallowed his excuse for shooting out the lights in a cafe in Arkhangel, namely that he had married an American nurse in Belgium and wanted to be kicked out of Russia to rejoin her and their baby!

  Kelly ranked Graham as the champion liar of the whole AIF—which is saying something. In the 1920s Graham was written up in the Sydney Morning Herald,42 with a tale of having been captured by the Bolsheviks. According to him, he had escaped by stealing a plane and flying it to Norway! It was pure invention.

  By March 1919 the winter in northern Russia was waning and temperatures had climbed above freezing. In April Allan Brown was describing the weather as splendid, though he wrote of his new posting (possibly Onega): ‘This district is all lake and river, the only “dry land” being marsh! And now the thaw is on us we expect to be out of communication with the rest of the world for quite a long time except by wireless’.43

  With the thaw, the snow melted and the forest tracks turned to slush. In Arkhangel the Eskimos vanished as silently as they had arrived. The railway track across the Dvina was dismantled and during the first week in April the ice in some of the channels was dynamited. Great cracks appeared in the surface of the harbour and jagged ends of ice rose 6 metres in the air, then crashed down again with a noise like an artillery barrage.

  John Kelly describes it as the most awesome sight he had ever seen. As the ice field broke up the movement of water became a torrent. Millions of tons of ice and water raced downstream, carrying everything in its path. Boats and ocean-going ships which had been frozen in were carried like toys before an irresistible force. Kelly saw a pontoon wharf, complete with storage shed, being jostled downstream at breakneck speed. The noise was thunderous and the flow a stupendous million cubic feet a second. It was a spectacle that marked the end of the winter campaign.

  Compared with even the smallest offensive in France, operations in North Russia were ‘nothing more than a prolonged military picnic’.44 Kelly called it a bow-and-arrow affair compared with France or Gallipoli. He summed it up as sporadic machine-gun and rifle fire, some grenades and mortars, and a little artillery fire. But, as he pointed out, it still took only a single bullet or random shell fragment to spell a soldier’s end.

  By June it was summer. The snow had melted into bogs, the sun shone for twenty-four hours a day and the entire country swarmed with mosquitoes. Kelly had been fighting for four years and had had enough. Perry had been away even longer, almost five years. His feelings were mixed. On 17 June 1919, his last day in Russia, he wrote, ‘In one way I regret leaving but it’s lovely to be going home’.

  Two of the Aussies stayed on in Russia—Captains Brown and Lohan. Three—Wyatt, Hickey45 and Tarrant—had already left. Tarrant’s service record indicates he was evacuated due to osteomyelitis, an after-effect of his wounds at Gallipoli. He had reached Britain in October 1918 and within two months had got himself married there.

  The remaining Australians of Elope embarked at Arkhangel on 17 June 1919. It was twelve months to the day since they had left England. By then the first Australians of the Relief Force were on their way.

  5

  THE DECISION FOR

  THE RELIEF FORCE

  MARCH 1919

  IT wasn’t just in the north of Russia that foreigners had intervened. By Soviet count, no fewer than sixteen separate countries invaded Russian soil after the Bolshevik Revolution.1 Each national government gave its force different instructions—except for those which gave them none at all. Apart from wanting to be rid of the Bolsheviks, the foreigners didn’t know quite what they were aiming to achieve. They committed their forces in the vague hope that something good would come out of it.

  Civil war raged throughout the whole of Russia. Anti-Bolshevik White armies formed in different parts of the country, as did bands of Cossacks, nationalists, anarchists and out-and-out brigands. More than thirty ‘governments’ claimed authority over all or part of Russian territory. Outside powers latched onto the various Whites and sent troops and war supplies to support them.

  Besides Marushevsky in the north, there were three main White armies. One was headed by Admiral Kolchak, a naval man who had once sailed on the Askold. Kolchak controlled much of Siberia and was advancing westwards from there. Another White Army under General Denikin was based in the south-east of European Russia. It cooperated with the Cossacks of the Don and the Kuban who were fighting for autonomy for their own regions. A third White Army was headed by General Yudenich in the Baltic. Yudenich was another reactionary former Tsarist general and was so obese he had to be lifted out of his staff car.

  Government in White-controlled areas was corrupt, brutal and, especially in Denikin’s case, anti-Semitic. Politically, the Whites were disunited; while there was much talk about aims and means there was little agreement. In any case the White armies were separated from each other by hundreds of kilometres, making military coordination between them well nigh impossible. The ultimate plan was for Kolchak to link up with Marushevsky at Kotlas and with Denikin in Central Russia. Yude
nich was to join them both at Petrograd. None of it happened.

  The Whites broke almost every accepted military precept. They had no unity of command. They were unable to concentrate their forces at a single time and place. They failed to secure their rear, which seethed with bandits, insurgents and, especially in the Ukraine, separatists. The Whites’ administration was so poor that any advance petered out through lack of supplies.

  Most importantly, the Whites alienated those who would have been their natural allies. Finland, the Baltic states, Poland and the Ukraine would all have thrown their weight behind the anti-Bolshevik cause if only the Whites had recognised their aspirations to independence. In this, however, the Whites were more obdurate than the Bolsheviks themselves. They refused to countenance the secession of even an inch of the motherland.

  Opposing them, the Red Army enjoyed three great advantages. First, despite their own brutality the Bolsheviks had the acquiescence, if not the support, of most of the population. The Bolsheviks promised land reform and a new social order, whereas the Whites offered nothing but a return to the old regime. Second, the Reds had internal lines of communication centred in Moscow and could move troops from one front to another as needed. Third, they had a centralised command under the ruthless genius of Trotsky.

  Trotsky was a brilliant organiser whose energy and leadership were crucial to the Red Army’s success. His armoured train sped him from one front to another to rally his troops. Time and again his sudden arrival helped avert enemy breakthroughs. Here, in 1919, Trotsky addresses troops from the roof of a train called ‘The Watchguard of the Revolution’. (Bogdanov collection)

  The fighting, as Churchill later described,2 was nothing like that of the world war just ended. There were raids and massacres but few real battles. Natural barriers like the River Volga or the Ural mountains presented no great obstacle and their loss or gain seemed to bring no strategic advantage. Huge areas changed hands until the armies spread their forces so thinly that eventually the limit was reached—and the enemy pressed them back into headlong retreat. Cities changed hands many times and, with every change, the inhabitants found it expedient to swap allegiance. Wise householders secretly kept both red and Tsarist flags and flew one or the other according to which army was in temporary occupation.

  On the map, the Whites appeared to make progress. Whole swathes of Russia seemed to be conquered and occupied. In the capitals of Europe the politicians were deceived. Much of what the press reported was sheer fantasy. For example, days before Denikin’s army was routed, the correspondent for The Times was writing that the position at the front was ‘steadily improving’ and that Denikin was so adored that the women of Kharkov kissed the mudguards of his car as he drove past!3 Honest observers on the spot knew it was all nonsense.

  After the Armistice the Allies convened a peace conference, meeting at Paris and Versailles. The turmoil in Russia was only one of many problems facing the post-war world, but the Supreme Allied War Council wanted to agree on a unified stance. On 19 February 1919, the day Russia was on the agenda, President Clemenceau of France was wounded in an assassination attempt. The subject of Russia was shelved and not taken up again. No joint decision was ever made.

  Absurdly, Russia was not represented at the peace conference. No foreign country recognised the Bolshevik regime, so there was no Russian government to invite. Furthermore, France adamantly refused to let Russia take part on the grounds she had ‘betrayed’ the Allies by coming to terms with Germany in 1917. France forgot how Russia had spared her several times from the full might of the German army.

  When the Treaty of Versailles finally came to be signed, Russia, the country which had lost more lives in the war than any other, was not a signatory. Thirty-two other nations were—including such mighty belligerents as Bolivia, Haiti, Liberia and Siam!4

  The treaty was signed on 28 June 1919, bringing the Great War formally to an end. Ironically, it was five years to the day after the fateful shots were fired in Sarajevo. On Australia’s behalf Prime Minister Billy Hughes signed the treaty, then sealed it using the impression of an AIF tunic badge.

  But long before then decisions about Russia had already been taken. In the absence of a single policy, each of the Allies had acted separately. France had earlier intervened in the Ukraine, trying unsuccessfully to fill the vacuum created when the Germans withdrew. The move had ended in disaster. Undisciplined French troops had alienated the local Ukrainian nationalists and proved no match for a Bolshevik army supported by Cossack partisans. France abandoned Odessa in chaos, leaving thousands of panic-stricken refugees to their fate. She decided to withdraw her troops from the north too.

  In the United States, the public had been clamouring over the winter for their boys to come home. It was even proposed they be withdrawn by icebreaker. Their mandate had been to perform only guard duty, yet they were fighting and dying far into the interior. Senator Cabot Lodge in the US Senate declared ‘it is the duty of the United States to take these troops out. They are too many to be sacrificed wantonly and uselessly and they are too few to be effective.’5 While maintaining a pretence of Allied consensus, President Wilson had actually decided by February to withdraw US troops as soon as Arkhangel was open to shipping.6

  The French and American decisions forced the hand of the British War Cabinet. On 4 March 1919 it followed suit and resolved to withdraw British forces before the coming winter. Responsibility for carrying out the decision fell to Winston Churchill, the British Secretary of State for War, and a man who hated Bolshevism.

  Churchill declared Bolshevism the worst tyranny in history—far worse, he said, than German militarism—and its atrocities ‘incomparably more hideous, on a larger scale and more numerous than any for which the Kaiser is responsible’.7 Indeed, Churchill even tentatively suggested the Germans could atone for their war guilt by sending troops to help fight the Bolsheviks!8

  The vehemence of Churchill’s public statements was remarkable. At different times he likened the Bolsheviks to blood-sucking vampires, to plagues of locusts, to a phial of typhoid or cholera, and Lenin to a plague bacillus. One speech included this extravagant passage:

  Russia is rapidly being reduced by the Bolsheviks to an animal form of barbarism … The Bolsheviks maintain themselves by bloody and wholesale butcheries and murders, carried out to a large extent by Chinese executioners and armoured cars … Civilisation is being extinguished over gigantic areas while Bolsheviks hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of cities and the corpses of their victims.9

  Lloyd George, the British prime minister, was aware of Churchill’s rabid anti-communism. He confided to close friends: ‘In certain moods he is dangerous … He has Bolshevism on the brain … he is mad for operations in Russia.’10 It was no exaggeration.

  Whatever the government’s intention, Churchill himself was still itching to destroy the Bolsheviks. To this end he began to extend and circumvent the Cabinet’s decision. While the Cabinet had only empowered him ‘to make whatever preliminary arrangements he judged necessary to bring about a safe evacuation’, he interpreted this as authorising the despatch of a new force.11

  Churchill justified this step by emphasising the risks of withdrawing in the face of an undefeated enemy. The British government was desperate to avoid a debacle such as the French had just experienced in Odessa, and he played on those fears. He argued that fresh troops were needed, men unaffected by the rigours of the harsh winter and impervious to Bolshevik propaganda.

  Winston Churchill already had a reputation for rash military schemes. Here, on the lookout for men for his Russian venture, the ‘Gambler of Gallipoli’ inspects soldiers of the Army of Occupation in Germany. One Australian taker was Colonel Charles Davies, who was so fed up in Germany he jumped at the chance. (IWM Q 34659)

  To get his way, Churchill enlisted the help of the establishment press. The Times cooperated by reporting a Bolshevik plan to drive the Allies into the sea. It ran headlines:

&
nbsp; OUR DANGER IN N. RUSSIA—URGENT HELP NEEDED ARCHANGEL DANGER—TIRED AND ISOLATED FORCES— REINFORCEMENTS WANTED12

  It followed up three days later with:

  NORTH RUSSIA CAMPAIGN—BRITISH RELIEF FORCE— WILL IT ARRIVE IN TIME?

  Other papers followed suit, joining the call for reinforcements. Gradually, the press created a sense of looming catastrophe.

  An official government report also helped. Churchill had been nagging the Foreign Office to produce a report on Bolshevik atrocities and it was finally presented to Parliament, perfectly timed, on 3 April 1919.13 It consisted of eyewitness accounts, all unsigned and undated, plus second- and third-hand stories from anti-Bolshevik Russians. Details included wholesale murder by imported gangs of Chinese, fiendish oriental tortures and the conversion of churches into brothels. It was wildly hysterical propaganda and ‘one of the most absurd documents ever to appear in the United Kingdom as an official government paper’.14 To ensure its wide circulation the government brought out several printings for sale at newsstands at twopence a copy, less than cost price.

  In Parliament the Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, drew a helpful analogy. He argued that if your fingers were caught in a door, you needed to punch the door open to pull them free.15 To do so in Russia, Churchill insisted, a relief force was needed. The Cabinet was lukewarm, but gave way.

  The British public, though, was sick of war and it was out of the question to send conscripts. The new force was therefore to consist of volunteers. In a letter to the prime minister, Churchill wrote: ‘It will be made clear to these men that they are only going to extricate their comrades and not for a long occupation of North Russia’.16 Privately, though, he intended that they would press south and link up with Kolchak. The troops were to be sent on the pretext of ensuring a safe withdrawal, then quietly transformed into an offensive task force.