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The North Russian Expeditionary Force consisted of men from America, England, Canada, France, Italy, and Serbia. England sent the largest number of men, America the second largest, the other countries being represented by only a few companies each.
The expedition was under the command of the British War Office, which sent out a large number of unattached British officers to take charge of the Russian armies that were to be formed and to supervise all American and other officers that had been attached to the expedition.
The first landing of troops of the North Russian Expeditionary Force was in August, 1918. The German armistice was signed November 11. Fighting continued all winter. The American troops were withdrawn in June, 1919. A much larger British army landed in June. Our Russian conscripts mutinied against the English in July, making it impossible for the English to remain. The last man of the North Russian Expeditionary Force was withdrawn in September, 1919. The "washout" was complete. England had spent five hundred million dollars and lost thousands of men. The cost to America and the other countries had been less in men and money, but considerable in other ways. The cost to Russia in every way had been incalculable.
When this expedition was sent to Russia the Allies were at war with Germany. Russia was not. She had signed the Brest-Litovsk treaty. We did not declare war on Russia, nor on any section of Russians. We went, it was reasonable to suppose, to guard the military stores we had shipped to Archangel and save them from falling into German hands, and to prevent the Germans from establishing a submarine base at Murmansk. When we got there, however, the Bolshevik Russians, viewing the expedition as one of enmity to them, had removed practically all of the millions of dollars' worth of stores to points far south of Archangel and had themselves left for points of from one to two hundred miles south. We pursued them and war began,--war with the de facto government of Russia, whom indeed we had not recognized and against whom we had made no declaration.
There was no war technically speaking in North Russia. There surely was no legal basis of war. But there was plenty of fighting. News of this fighting does not seem to have reached America very freely. The double English and American censorship was very effective.
First we had declared we would not engage in a military intervention in Russia, then having gotten into it we declared we were not doing it, then we depended on the censorship.
No mention was made of this expedition in the armistice of November. Hence it had in some subtle way ceased to be a part of our war against Germany. It had become a new war, a war against Bolshevik Russia, an unlegalized war, and this it continued to be as long as the expedition lasted. Yet no declaration was forthcoming, either of war or of peace. Particularly wanting was a declaration of purpose. Weary months of stubborn fighting for our men were unrelieved by any single word of definition of the fight from their government.
There consequently was antagonism to the campaign on the part of the soldiers. I do not say loss of morale, because the term would be misunderstood. Our men fought. Our infantry never lost a foot of ground. But they hated the fight, they resented fighting without a cause.
I made a trip in December, speaking to the men in their billets and the Y.M.C.A. huts over a stretch of five hundred versts. Everywhere, on every occasion, I was asked persistently and importunately, "What are we here for?"
"The armistice is signed. Why are we fighting?"
"Did they forget about us in Paris?"
"We don't want Russia. What have we against the Bolsheviki?"
Of course I tried to answer these questions, but I found it easier to convince myself than I did to convince these men. They were not convinced that I knew. The American and Canadian troops were particularly outspoken in their resentment at being at war in a futile fight against nobody and for nothing in particular when the rest of the world had stopped fighting.
A real cause of this grand debacle therefore was the silence of our governments. I could not answer their questions. Nobody who came to them could answer their questions. Their governments would not.
When our governments sent out this expedition the government of Archangel as of all Russia was Bolshevik. It was not a strong government, that is, it did not have a strong and dependable army and navy. It had not been regularly instituted by the people, nor had it been recognized by other governments than those with whom we were at war. We had no dealings with it, except the undeclared war of this expedition. We negotiated with certain individual Russians in London, took them to Archangel with us, and there set up a government to our own taste.
This was a military job. Even the military, however, find it necessary to consider popular opinion to some extent. So this new government was composed of democratic men. Tschaikowsky was made President. The people knew him and trusted him. His government failed to realize at first that it was only the creature of foreign military authority and began to function sincerely. It was kidnaped for discipline and put on an island for a few days of meditation. The allied military did not come to Archangel to set up a pure democracy nor to encourage socialism nor to listen to theories. They came to fight the plans of Germany, to fight the Bolsheviki, to guard stores, to teach Russia to fight. Beyond this the military mind goeth not. So the venerable Tschaikowsky was gradually put aside and ignored and before long sent to London on an important mission, never to return, but still a valuable figurehead, while a Russian military government grew up under the aegis of the British army, composed of monarchists and military men of the old school. The head of this government was General Miller (Mueller) a militarist and monarchist who is without popular Russian support and whose position is entirely due to his standing with the British military establishment.
It was a British show. The British were in absolute command. Whole shiploads of British officers were sent there to perform all possible functions of management and to cover all possible needs. The Americans, Russians, French, Italians, and Serbians all obeyed the British officers, and found British officers duplicating their own at every juncture. Even at that there was a surplus, and I have had several of them, from a colonel down, tell me that they were hanging around Archangel waiting for something to do.
It was British responsibility to decide where we should stand, when we should move, and who should do what. They never neglected this responsibility in any detail. If they could avoid it, they never delegated any detail of authority to any officer of any other nationality. If they took counsel with their associates of other nationalities it was never heard of in the ranks. I have heard an American officer of high rank speak very bitterly of the fact that the British never consulted him except to give him orders, and made him feel quite useless.
As our ships rode into the mouth of the Dvina River with the first troops of the expedition, and the last train pulled out of Archangel Preestyn bearing the last of the Bolsheviki away to the south, the people of Archangel came out to the river bank and the docks to see the incoming fleet and to welcome their deliverers from Bolshevist proletariat tyranny and prolonged political and industrial unrest. The Russians were tired of war, and as they lined up on the river banks in front of the hundreds of peasant villages bordering a thousand versts of rivers to express their welcome it was Peace and Prosperity that they thought they were welcoming.
In fact, however, it was war, war such as that part of Russia had never known before, and most expensive war.
The expedition had been sent "to guard stores at Archangel." Since these stores had been taken by those whom we assumed to be friends of Germany we must pursue them. We did. We took guns along. We found them, with guns also, at several points about a hundred miles from the city. Their forces were weak. So were ours. But we drove them, or they led us, down the Murmansk railroad past Kem, down the Vologda railroad beyond Obozerskaya, up the Onega River to Chekuevo, up the Pinega River, up the Emtza River, up the Dvina River past Toulgas, and up the Vaga River to Ustpadenga.
We did not capture our enemy nor the stores we had come to guard. The early Russian winter came and found us thrown out to seven points in a form that was like a seven-fingered hand with one finger three hundred miles long and with no lateral communication between the fingers. In driving these lines out there was some fighting, mostly of a guerrilla type. We lost a number of men, but our casualties were comparatively small. We had been on the offensive and had followed lines of not very great resistance. The positions in which winter found us may not have been planned by the Bolsheviki, but I doubt if any English record exists of such a plan or if any officer will confess to having made such a plan. We just happened to be there. We were scattered as far as possible. Each position was practically isolated from all the others. Our lines of communication were weak and inefficient. The only protection to our flanks and our rears was the hoped-for snow which came early and abundantly.
The winter was spent on the defensive. The Bolsheviki at first attempted to cut us off at Yemetskoye by using his excellent communication on the Vologda railroad and attacked Kodish and Shredn Makrenga. He was held here by the Americans and Canadians, who did not know when they were defeated and who now fully realized the desperate character of the fight that they were launched upon. He also attacked on the Murmansk railroad, where he was met by seasoned Serbians against whom he shattered himself in vain. He attacked at Pinega and at Chekuevo also without success. We were fighting at Toulgas on Armistice Day, and with Kotlas as his base the Bolshevik managed to keep up his attack here practically all winter while Co. B, 339th Infantry, U.S.A., took the brunt of the work of holding him off.
The most serious fighting of the winter, however, was on the Vaga River. Our forward position at Ustpadenga was held by one company of American infantry, one platoon of American engineers, three eighteen-pounder guns manned by Canadians, and occasional units of Russian conscripts. The position had no peculiar advantages, and all the disadvantages of isolation and exposure that could make it a bad choice. It is doubtful whether it had been chosen. We got there and we stayed there. We were there because we were there. So we entrenched and built block houses and strung wire and chopped away a clearing a few hundred feet from our billets and laid in such stores and ammunition as a few ponies could pull down, and waited. This was twenty-seven versts south of Shenkursk, and Shenkursk was one hundred versts south of Bereznik, and Bereznik was three hundred versts south of Archangel.
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