John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

The general went to a hotel, locked himself in his room and read the document in the sealed envelope. It was President Wilson’s aide memoire. So far as can be discovered, these were the only instructions he ever had from Washington.

“After carefully reading the document and feeling that I understood the policy,” the general wrote in the account he published years later, “I went to bed but I could not sleep and kept wondering what other nations were doing and why I was not given some information about what was going on in Siberia.”

If General Graves was a puzzled man reading President Wilson’s aide memoire in that hotel room in Kansas City, he was an even more puzzled man when he arrived in Vladivostok. He disembarked from the transport Thomas with a force of about two thousand men, and found there two regiments awaiting his command, which had been shipped up from the Philippines with a field hospital and transport units. The morning he landed Graves discovered, on making what he thought was a courtesy call on the ranking Japanese general, that General Otani expected the American force to serve under his orders.

Instead of the seven thousand Japanese the War Department had informed Graves were to cooperate with his expedition, he found seventy-two thousand Japanese soldiers busily engaged in taking over the Chinese Eastern Railroad and preparing for Japanese colonization of the rich soyabean regions of Manchuria.

The Czechoslovaks, he discovered, instead of retiring to Vladivostok for evacuation to Europe, had taken Irkutsk and were being encouraged by the French and British to engage in a career of conquest along the Volga. Instead of being shipped out the Legion was being used to back anticommunist movements in the civil war.

General Graves’ instructions were to help the Czechoslovaks consolidate their forces. The British and French were ahead of him on that.

As for “getting into successful cooperation with their slavic kinsmen,” there were now twentyfour warring governments on Russian soil with little in common except hatred of the Communists.

As for “efforts at self-government” the only election to take place in Vladivostok, supervised by the Czechs and the Allied marines, had resulted, to everyone’s chagrin, in a victory for the Communists.

As for assisting the Russians in “self-defense” the problem, as Lenin succinctly stated it, was: “What Russians?”

While, in consequence of President Wilson’s “thinking through of the processes,” General Graves and his puzzled doughboys were set to patrolling the eastern end of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in furtherance of international intrigues loaded with a sort of dynamite of which they were but dimly aware, another group of young Americans found themselves, with some astonishment, joining in the invasion of northwestern Russia.

At Stoney Castle in England the 339th Infantry, recruited from mechanics, clerks and factory workers mostly out of Milwaukee and Detroit, was training for service in France, when all at once the men were ordered to turn in their Enfields and instead were issued oddlooking long rifles which had been manufactured in the United States for the Imperial Russian Army. Before they had a chance to target these unfamiliar weapons they found themselves huddling in three small British transports, headed it was thought for Murmansk.

A few days out from Newcastle the violent influenza then epidemic broke out. There were no medical kits along. Without assistance from the army medics some recovered and many died. The colonel in command had orders to report to the British General Poole in Murmansk to assist in guarding stores. A few days out of Murmansk he received orders over the wireless to proceed instead to Archangel, four hundred miles to the southeast in the inner reaches of the White Sea.

Two days after Graves landed in Vladivostok the survivors and convalescents from the flu epidemic found themselves being disembarked under a chill drizzle in the outlandish arctic city, overtopped by the onion domes of its outlandish cathedral that had a huge vividly colored fresco of the Last Judgment emblazoned on its outside wall.

“The troopships Somali, Tydeus and Nagoya rubbed the Bakarita and Smolny quays sullenly and listed heavily to port,” wrote an officer of the regiment. “The American doughboys grimly marched down the gangplanks and set their feet on the soil of Russia.” The recollection stirred him to a certain eloquence: “The dark waters of the Dvina River were beaten into fury by the opposing north wind and ocean tide, and the lowering clouds of the Arctic sky added their dismal bit to this introduction to the dreadful conflict which the American sons of liberty were to wage with the Bolsheviki during the year’s campaign.”

One lucky battalion was detailed to patrol the town and at one point found themselves operating its streetcars. The other two were shipped immediately, one batch in boxcars and another in open barges towed up the Dvina, to the fighting front. General Poole, the British officer in command, found his French and British troops hardpressed in their scattered outposts where they were fighting to keep open communications up the Dvina and down the railroad to Vologda.

The Allied contingents, hitherto content with protecting Murmansk against the German and the Finnish Whites, had moved into Archangel, just a month before the arrival of the American infantry, in the wake of a revolution against the Communists carried out by a group calling themselves popular socialists. They were joined by the refugee embassies from Vologda, including American Ambassador Francis, who by this time had lashed himself into a holy frenzy of detestation of the Communists. General Poole, their enthusiastic commander, with the support of the Allied diplomats, was implementing the plan which had first been formulated by the French: his forces would move down the railroad to Vologda to meet the Czechoslovaks advancing west from Ekaterinburg and the Urals. He laughed off the idea that the Red Army might interfere with this strategy of cutting European Russia in two. The Legion had just captured Kazan. The Reds seemed everywhere in flight. In mid August General Poole cabled the War Office: “I am quite cheerfully taking great risks.”

General Poole was a sanguine man. The exploit of a bunch of American sailors made him particularly sanguine about the use of American troops.

One of the Allied flotilla anchored in the river off Murmansk was the ancient cruiser Olympia , which had been Admiral Dewey’s flagship at the battle of Manila Bay. Tired of months cooped up on board under the leaden arctic sky, fifty gobs from the Olympia under an ensign volunteered to join in the landing at Archangel.

They wanted a chance to fight the Bolos. Among the rank and file of the Allied expedition there was no nonsense about helping “to steady any effort at self-government or self-defense” in Russia. The Tommies called the Communists Bolos and that was who they were there to fight.

Finding that instead of Bolo rifles, Archangel resounded with popular socialist speeches, the gobs decided to go look for the enemy. Searching among the ruined engines of the railroad yards, some of their number found an antique woodburning locomotive with a funnel stack that would run. They stoked it up, hitched it to a couple of flatcars and set off to see the country.

They went rattling off down the track in pursuit of the last Red train to pull out. They stoked so merrily that the Bolos didn’t dare stop to burn the bridges until, about thirty miles south, the gobs had a hotbox. The time it took to repair the hotbox gave the Bolos time to burn the next bridge and to deploy their machinegun squad. They put up a lively resistance against any further advance. The ensign got a wound in the leg and the gobs dug themselves in around their train to wait for relief from General Poole’s infantry.