North Russia intervention force (1918-19), international US, British, French, and Canadian force of all three services inserted into north Russia through Archangel and Murmansk as part of the muddled and unsuccessful intervention in the 1917-20 Russian civil war by the WW I Allies. The Russian Revolution of November 1917 and the Peace of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918 removed Russia from the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Russian army's contribution to the Allied war effort against the Central Powers had been immense, holding down, even at the end, 160 German and Austro-Hungarian divisions. Now there was nothing to prevent the Germans flinging them against the western front. Nor was there much to keep Germany out of Russia with its vast resources of wheat, oil, coal, and iron. The enormity of Russia's ‘defection’ from the war helps explain the Allied reaction. On 23 December the British and French agreed to divide south Russia into ‘spheres of influence’ for activity against Germany. At the same time, the first flames of civil war flared at Rostov on the Don, in December, with action by the Volunteer Army, the ‘Whites’, or counter-revolutionaries, against the ‘Red’ forces of the Bolshevik government.
The Allies' first concern was a huge dump of 600, 000 tons of war supplies which had been poured into Vladivostok in the Far East as aid, mainly American, to the imperial Russian army, including vast quantities of ammunition and 1, 000 motor vehicles. The thought of this falling into the hands of German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners wandering around chaotic Russia and being passed to Germany focused Allied attention on Vladivostok, leading to the landing of US and Japanese troops in Siberia, where 70, 000 Japanese and 9, 000 US troops were ultimately deployed.
The port of Murmansk had been created in 1915 to bring Allied aid to Russia. Murmansk and Archangel had been the only European Russian ports open to the Allies and here, too, there were thousands of tons of war supplies. By February 1918 the Bolsheviks had taken control of Archangel and were removing them. The British sent a force under Adm Kemp, since Russia was not yet at peace with Germany. On 28 February Trotsky, believing the peace negotiations had failed, ordered the Murmansk Soviet to do everything to protect the Murmansk railway against the Germans. They did, and on 6 March 130 Royal Marines landed at Murmansk, the first of the North Russian intervention force, at the invitation of Trotsky, a charge Stalin later held against him.
The importance of the north Russian ports was increased by the presence, somewhere in Russia, of the so-called Czechoslovak Legion. This was 70, 000 Czechs and Slovaks, originally Austro-Hungarian POWs taken by the Russians, who had then been organized, using Allied money, into a force to fight against the Central Powers in order to obtain national independence. The plan was to extract the force, well armed, along the trans-Siberian railway to Vladivostok and then ship it to the western front. In March the French asked their representative at Murmansk if the Czechs and Slovaks could be extracted via that northern port, instead of making the long trek to Vladivostok with the risk that on the way the Bolsheviks would dissuade them from fighting for the Allies. Then, as the force trickled east, the British thought of splitting it. Those already east of the Urals would carry on to Vladivostok; those west of them would travel north. When the Czechs and Slovaks received the order, they thought they were being split to weaken them and, on 14 May, they rebelled and took over Chelyabinsk. Trotsky ordered ‘every armed Czech’ to be shot, and on 26 May clashes between Czechs and local Bolsheviks broke out all along 3, 000 miles (4, 827 km) of the trans-Siberian railway. These competent soldiers found themselves the foci of numerous anti-Bolshevik risings, and were the catalyst that really set off the Russian civil war. The Bolsheviks believed they had been paid by the Allies to start the insurrection: in fact, it was just an accident.
The Allies hoped the Czechs were making their way north, and may not have realized they were busily fighting the Bolsheviks. In May Maj Gen F. Poole arrived in Murmansk as ‘British Military representative in Russia’. A month later Maj Gen Maynard arrived with 600 men, and completed securing Murmansk. Then they turned to the other port, Archangel.
Here, on 2 August Poole landed a force of 1, 500 men in one of the most complex operations in military history. The main elements were a British battalion, a French colonial battalion, some Royal Marines, and 50 US sailors. The British battalion consisted entirely of men unfit for service in France. The three services, including the new RAF, were involved. The British sent seaplanes, which had belonged to the Royal Naval Air Service but now belonged to the RAF, and the seaplane tender Nairana. Because Poole's force was not strong enough to take the town by storm, an anti-Bolshevik rising had to be organized in the town and co-ordinated with the landing. In spite of all the complexities, which make it a remarkable early example of a ‘combined joint task force’ intervening in the chaos of a collapsed state, it worked. But Poole now had 1, 500 men to defend an area six times the size of England.
News of the landing reached Moscow on 4 August. No one had any idea how big it was and some estimates put it at 100, 000. Like later interventions, the landing provoked increased repression and terror by the Bolsheviks. Foreigners, including diplomats, were arrested, and the landing achieved precisely what it was designed to prevent: an alliance between the Germans and the Bolsheviks.
Murmansk and Archangel remained separate commands, as the Allied strength was built up to 30, 000 US, British, French, Canadians, Italians, Russians, Finns, Poles, and Serbs. Half of these (4, 000 US, 6, 000 British, 2, 000 French, and 3, 000 Russians) were at Archangel, the rest at Murmansk under Maynard. At Archangel, the seat of the White regime in north Russia, a new commander was appointed, Ironside, who was also COS to Poole. He arrived on 1 October, in time for the terrible winter campaign of 1918/19. In the summer, the weather was hot; in winter the temperature dropped to -30 °C or -40 °C. The few locals effectively hibernated for the winter; the soldiers had to fight. An American officer, John Cudahy, wrote of the ‘vast stretches of cheerless snow reaching far across the river to the murky, brooding skies and the encompassing sheeted forests, so ghostly and so still, where death prowled in the shadows … strong men were made cowards by the cumulative depression of the unbroken night’. The troops were often of poor quality and with large supplies of whisky, sold on to the Russians at exorbitant prices, drunkenness was a problem. Ironside confirmed several death sentences.
The irony was that the 11 November Armistice should have made this intervention, designed to guard against Germany, unnecessary. But it was only after it that intervention in Russia seriously got underway. The main focus for Allied intervention was in south Russia. In Transcaucasia and on the Caspian Sea the British, with their interests in the Middle East and India, and with an eye on the Baku oilfields, intervened. The French intervened in the Ukraine, and were trapped in Odessa by the Bolsheviks. Meanwhile, the north Russian force fought off Bolshevik attacks and sent patrols down the railways and rivers into the endless forests, some of which did not return.
Churchill was acutely aware of the vulnerability of the force. The US resolved to pull its troops out in February, although because of the ice this would not be possible until June. On 4 March 1919 the British cabinet also resolved to withdraw their forces in June, but to keep them properly reinforced and supplied in the meantime. The main effort of the intervention would be shifted to support Kolchak and later Denikin.
The force's departure was delayed. In June, Ironside was ordered to march south from Archangel to link up with one of Kolchak's armies advancing from the east. Ironside launched a number of successful operations, the last on 10 August, but British politicians were increasingly concerned about casualties in a war which seemed to have no coherent aim. As one Labour MP said, echoing Bismarck on the subject of the Balkans, ‘there is nothing in the political and … economic condition of Russia that justifies the sacrifice of another British soldier’.
On 1 September 1919 the evacuation began. The troops were withdrawn in a leapfrogging operation, which ended on 27 September, leaving the head of the Archangel government, a White Russian general called Miller, to his fate. They offered to take Russian refugees, but only 6, 000 wanted to go. They also destroyed all the military supplies, in case they fell into Bolshevik hands, to the White Russians' dismay. On 12 October the last transport left Murmansk. British casualties in the campaign were 327 killed and 615 wounded, to no purpose.
Bibliography
- Ironside, FM Lord, Archangel 1918-1919 (London, 1953).
- Silverlight, John, The Victors' Dilemma (London, 1970)
— Christopher Bellamy
