Just the same, I found it hard to believe they were as bad as the stories made out. Early next morning, however—that was the nineteenth—we saw a bunch of Semionoff’s soldiers walking in from the east, carrying long-handled shovels. The boys—I mean Lt. McNutt and Griggs—said they had seen the same kind of a gang come in previous to other killings.
Shortly afterwards we saw them loading soldiers on the prisoners’ train, and taking a machine gun from an armoured car that was standing there, and putting it on the train. They took ten carloads—about a half—of the prisoners and started east from the yards. They left at 9:50.
It was then I decided to find out what I could about the killing, so I footed it east after them. About two versts out, I finally came in sight of the train (I call it the murder train) standing near a curve of the railroad. I kept on, hoping to reach the place, but was stopped by a guard. I was then about a hundred yards from the train, but because of the topography of the country, I couldn’t see anything of the soldiers or the prisoners. I pretended not to understand Russian when the guard stopped me, but he put a shell into his rifle to assist my understanding. I understood; I knew I was near where the killing had been, and I wasn’t quite sure when I walked away whether I’d get one from that guard or not.
I had only been back at the station a few minutes when that train came back empty. It had gone out full. It had been gone just one hour and fifty-five minutes. I noticed they had not brought the machine gun back. Then they loaded the second batch. By the way, Stepanoff, Semionoff’s colonel in charge, just as the first load was leaving, went out and got a rifle for himself. There were Kolchak guards on the train, for they had on British uniforms. The second train was gone one hour and fifty minutes, and brought the machine gun back with it.
I didn’t go out again that day, but the next morning McNutt and Griggs and I, three of us, went out. On the way, we met peasant women carrying boots and socks and clothing. At the place where the train had been standing the day before, we saw that the roadbed had marks of a large number of people getting off and moving about. The ground was littered with torn clothing, worn-out puttees, and papers of all kind, including a Bolsheviki rouble-note. Just a short distance from the track—about fifteen feet—we found one body, shot through the lower jaw, left, and through the cheek. Thirty feet further on we found another body. The weeds and ground by the bodies seemed to indicate struggles. The poor devils had evidently tried to escape. We walked on toward some mounds of fresh earth we saw, and found three large holes, two filled up and covered over, and one only about half filled, with just a little covering of earth over the bodies. I picked up several shells at the edge of the grave: of two different calibres, partly a large calibre, but mostly a smaller one. There was nothing to indicate what they were or where they were made. A short distance eastward, possibly a hundred yards from the three holes, we found another, that had evidently been there much longer. It was filled, but there was such a thin layer of earth on top that dogs or other animals had dragged some of the bodies out. Some had had the feet cut off, one had no head, one had the genitals cut off. Of course, dogs might have done it, but it didn’t look like the work of dogs. At another hole we found just the trunk of a body lying on some fresh earth. It was all black and ugly.
It had been raining for some time, so we turned and went back to Adrianovka. It rained all the next day, but the day after that it cleared up in the afternoon. So at about five o’clock I went out with my camera to see if I could not get some pictures for evidence. The other boys didn’t come with me; they had had enough. When I got there I found that the bodies had been buried. There were some little boys there, digging around after loot, and they told me that the section hands of the railway had done the burying. The boys showed me where six other bodies had been found on the other side of the tracks—shot evidently when they were trying to escape. It seemed to me the big killing had been done by lining the prisoners up along the edge of the hole, and firing at them catercornered across it. An old peasant woman that lived nearby told me they had had to give up getting in their grain because of the stench. . . . I told her they’d better get gas masks and go to it—they might need the grain. But I didn’t get any pictures.
That night Semionoff went thru on his way east. There were a number of Japanese on the train, and women. They stopped at Adrianovka and had a celebration—a big banquet. Stepanoff was there. They had music and plenty of booze. Then Semionoff went on east, to Vladivostok.
“That night we saw the train of Semionoff,” Donovan jotted in his diary on September 1.
Donovan’s train reached Vladivostok on September 6, 1919, and his first intelligence mission was at an end. He helped Morris draft a report, which recommended against American support for the Kolchak government. Donovan and Morris found themselves forced to wait in Vladivostok to satisfy the Japanese quarantine regulations against cholera before they could continue on to Japan. Donovan also had trouble getting steamer space, but at last he sailed for Japan. He brought with him a copy of the Tokyo Shimbun of August 25, which accused Roland Morris of negotiating with Admiral Kolchak for an American base on the Kamchatka Peninsula.
The Japanese correspondent quoted “a certain report” as saying, “Ostensibly a lease on the coast of Kamchatka is for the acquisition of fishing rights. That, however, is a pretext. For naval purposes the United States is not satisfied with the Aleutian Islands. Again, to secure Petropavlovsk Bay on the southern coast of Kamchatka which is highly suitable for a naval base is undoubtedly the intention of the United States. This is without doubt the first step in the coercion of Japan by the United States. Japan cannot be indifferent.”
In Tokyo, Donovan found that the Japanese talked about little but the American plot to establish a naval base on Kamchatka, while in reality there had been no negotiations whatsoever between Ambassador Morris and Admiral Kolchak on that question. On the other hand, the Japanese government was plotting in the most cynical way to take eastern Siberia away from Russia while the Russians were preoccupied with their bloody civil war. The western Allies had sent token forces into Siberia, but there were at least 120,000 Japanese troops in the country, and Japanese intrigue was pervasive.
At the request of Ambassador Morris, then Lt. Col. Robert L. Eichelberger, General Graves’s intelligence officer, had completed an exhaustive study of Japanese actions and plans in Siberia. “The Japanese High Command managed to achieve for itself a record of complete perfidy, of the blackest and most heinous double-dealing,” Eichelberger wrote.
Donovan was of the same opinion. He was very disturbed by what he had learned in Siberia and alarmed by the mounting anti-American attitude of the Japanese militarists. He made another entry in his Siberian journal: “There are those who believe that there can be no permanent and helpful solution to the Far Eastern tangle so long as Japan preserves the ideals of Germany and remains an aristocracy. You cannot name a single salient feature of Germany’s psychology and method that cannot be duplicated in Japan.
“The sooner there takes place a radical change in Japan and the ideals of democracy come to the front of that country, the better for the Far East and for the whole world.”
President Wilson did not send men into the field to find out the facts and then disregard their reports. He ordered American troops out of Siberia and exerted pressure on America’s allies to remove their troops as well. On December 31, 1919, America’s Siberian Expeditionary Force received orders to withdraw. The withdrawal began on January 17, 1920, and by April 1, the last American soldier had sailed from Vladivostok. The Russians were to solve their problems by themselves without foreign interference. Even the Japanese belatedly and reluctantly withdrew from Siberia. Admiral Kolchak’s forces were defeated before the Allies left. In the spring of 1920, he was captured by the Bolsheviks and put to death.
Thirty years afterward, seated at his desk in his law office at 2 Wall Street in New York, Bill Donovan reminisced about his train ride across Siberia, and h
is impressions of the Kolchak government. “Admiral Kolchak was an honest and patriotic Russian,” he said, “and it was a pity that he surrounded himself with men whose attitude toward the Russian people was little more than criminal. How could America help Kolchak when to do so would not help the Russian people?”
11
Fact-Finding in Europe
ONCE BACK IN the United States, Donovan took a train to Washington to report to John Lord O’Brian and to Secretary of War Baker. He wrote to Roland Morris, who was in Tokyo, “I dodged all the newspapermen until I was able to reach Washington and then passed through various departments.”
Donovan experienced his first inquisition at the hands of the Washington press corps, which had sensed that the army officer who was so famed for his bravery and leadership in France was now the bearer of confidential information. “Baker first gave out an interview,” he told Morris, “and then I asked them how far they wanted me to talk, and they replied I could state what I felt should be said.” Donovan met with the press at the War Department and answered the questions put by the reporters with apparent candor. He told them only what it was in the national interest to say. It may have been his maiden performance before the press at the end of a fact-finding trip overseas, but he proved to be both compelling and effective.
The reports Donovan made to official Washington were received somewhat less enthusiastically. John Lord O’Brian and, through him, President Wilson might understand, but other government officers were less likely to listen. “I know you would have been greatly disappointed in the attitude of the State Department,” he told Morris.
There is a feeling there that the troops would be withdrawn, and that we would take no further action in Siberia excepting simply to say that Japan had been a naughty boy. They said they appreciated the position you had taken in regard to the Japanese menace in eastern Siberia but felt they could do nothing further, because they could not be backed by public opinion. I asked them how they could ever be backed unless they set out to enlighten public opinion.
There has been in the last two months a great access of interest in the entire Eastern question, and if the administration were only wise enough even politically it could in its turn at least bring the great mass of the people behind it. I am afraid that the great trouble with both parties now is that they are pussy-footing. The election is too near.
The propensity for American political leaders to play domestic politics with even the most critical international issues was already apparent to Donovan. The timidity and indecision he found in the Wilson administration depressed him. Was Japan to be given a free hand in Siberia? Was nothing to be done about the suffering Russian people?
Donovan left for Buffalo, where he was disturbed to find crowds demonstrating in downtown streets in support of Russian Bolsheviks. “There is undoubtedly a sympathy, even though an unreasonable sympathy for the Bolsheviks, among a great many of the well-to-do pseudo-intellectual group,” he wrote to Morris.
Pro- and anti-Bolsheviks alike went to see Donovan in Buffalo because, unlike most people interested in the Russian question, he had seen the civil war. He spoke with an authority that grew out of field experience. This was to become the hallmark of Donovan’s approach to future foreign issues. Others might talk about the situation abroad, but he would base his views on observations he himself had made in the field.
Donovan, now living comfortably with Ruth and the children on Delaware Avenue and practicing law with the firm of O’Brian, Donovan, Goodyear, and Hellings, took an active interest in what was happening in Western Europe. On November 15, he met with a trade mission from Italy, Belgium, France, and England. The mission was headed by a Mr. Seiner, a French steel man whose factories had made the vaunted 75s and 155s, artillery pieces that had played such an important role in defeating Germany. Seiner informed Donovan that American banks must give huge credits to the devastated European nations or else they would be obliged to deal with their erstwhile enemy Germany. Conger Goodyear, brother of Donovan’s law partner Bradley Goodyear, had just returned from Europe and had observed that Germany was “to his mind the strongest country economically on the continent.”
Goodyear also reported a formidable pro-Kaiser group that, judging from its public acceptance, indicated that the new German Republic would not last very long. Goodyear had also visited Vienna, Prague, and Warsaw, and he informed Donovan that “conditions were pitiful in Vienna and Austria generally, that the people there seemed to have no hope, that the Czechs, while ignorant in the establishment of government, had enough capable men to really put their program through, and the Poles had a tremendous project and much of its success would be dependent upon the character of [Ignace] Paderewski.” Cardinal Mercier, whom Donovan had met in 1916 when he was in Belgium for the War Relief Commission, stayed with Donovan for two days at the big house on Delaware Avenue and shared his views on the social and political situation in his own country.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Donovan was to keep himself informed about what was taking place outside his country’s boundaries. He made dozens of trips abroad. He talked with every foreign visitor or American traveler he could find who was capable of making useful observations on events. Just as he had once prepared himself for the practice of the law and military leadership, he now was preparing himself for a career in intelligence and foreign affairs. When John Lord O’Brian asked Donovan to go to Siberia, he had brought him into the informal circle of men who learned what they could about what was going on behind the scenes in the world and kept one another up-to-date. They also kept responsible officials of the American government informed. They were motivated by patriotism and by the conviction that the American government, which had virtually no intelligence service, must have accurate information and insight into the complicated world beyond the nation’s boundaries.
At the same time Bill Donovan studied America’s domestic affairs. He wanted to know such things as why the steel strike earlier in 1919 had been a failure. What effect was the coal strike then going on in December likely to have on the economy? He wondered whether American unions were going to be controlled by a radical element or by leaders with more traditional views. He wrote that “too many of our businessmen are attributing all of the trouble to the reaction after the emotional stimulus of the war and will not realize that a great economic change is being effected all over the world.” He found his fellow Buffalo Club members to be singularly obtuse about economic and social issues.
Donovan took an interest in politics. The presidential sweepstakes was on, and he first supported Republican Gov. Frank Lowden of Illinois, “the businessman governor.” Later he switched his allegiance to Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood, with whom he entered into a correspondence. It seemed to Donovan that Leonard Wood would make the best Republican candidate. He further believed that the Democrats would be well advised to nominate William McAdoo, who as Wilson’s secretary of the treasury had done a remarkable job of financing the war through Liberty Loan drives and who had been director general of the nation’s railroads when the government took them over during the war emergency.
Whenever Donovan’s law practice took him to New York or Washington, he looked up men active in public affairs in his spare time, so that he soon became acquainted with such people as Bernard Baruch, “the adviser of presidents,” who listened with interest to the lawyer from Buffalo. Donovan lamented that there was a dearth of leadership in the nation. “Everyone is talking, but no one seems to be thinking,” he complained.
Donovan also took the leadership in organizing the first American Legion post in Buffalo. He became the first member in New York State of the national executive committee and in December chaired the New York delegation to the founding national convention in Minneapolis. Donovan was, in short, a very busy man—exuberant, fascinated by the world around him, his mind digging deep into all manner of subjects. Still he found time to remember Father Duffy, who had become very much involved in Irish politics. That year h
e sent Father Duffy a Christmas check. “Will you buy yourself the most vivid green pyjamas for Christmas, and think of me when you wear them,” he wrote.
On New Year’s Day, 1920, Bill Donovan was 37 years old. He was approaching middle age. Everybody who wished him a happy New Year at a party on New Year’s Eve was impressed with what the young Irishman from the Buffalo waterfront had accomplished in the world, and many said so. But he was dissatisfied. Precious years had slipped away from him, and there was so much to be done in a world that had been turned topsy-turvy by the war.
The new year began happily for Bill and Ruth Donovan and their children, who were together at last. Ruth and Bill went everywhere in Buffalo society, their views were asked on everything, their opinions quoted, their social leadership followed. At the same time, Bill Donovan did not forget his old friends in the First Ward. Buffalo’s mayor, James D. Griffin, grew up in the Irish First, and he remembered his father playing baseball for the Willdon Club, which William Donovan’s old neighbors had named for the Irish boy who had made good. Sometimes Bill Donovan would saunter down from his law office in the Iroquois Building to the sandlot at Hayward and Elk, where the boys played ball. He also turned up in the old neighborhood to shoot off a blank pistol to start the annual footraces for the young boys. The boys always ran their best when they saw Buffalo’s war hero holding the starting gun and eyeing them with a look of kind attention that seemed to single out each and every one. Donovan also judged the frequent horsemanship competitions held at the armory by his old Troop I. In February 1920 he became secretary of the District Republican Club.
In March Donovan sailed for Europe on a fact-finding mission. He traveled through the Low Countries, Germany, Poland, France, and Italy to observe conditions. He looked up old German friends from his 1916 stay in Berlin. He found the defeated Germans in a mood of self-pity; many felt deserted by their leaders, who had surrendered an army that was still unbeaten. Politicians, particularly those who were trying to make the new republic function, were scorned, and the military caste was praised as the last hope of the German people. The economy was in chaos, but already many Germans were talking about rearming.
Donovan Page 18
