ANZACs in Arkhangel

by Michael Challinger

  When the King of the Belgians appealed for British aid, Britain responded out of self-interest as well as honour. The British issued their own ultimatum to Germany and, when Germany failed to meet it, Britain declared war. She was the only belligerent to declare war on Germany rather than the other way round.

  Britain’s declaration brought the entire British Empire, including Australia, into the war. At the time Australia had no foreign representation of her own and the British government undertook the conduct of all her dealings with other countries. Everyone accepted that once Great Britain was at war then automatically, by the law of nations, Australia was at war too.3

  Australians saw no conflict between this dual loyalty to Britain and Australia. We were enthusiastic believers in the Empire and willing to defend the mother country ‘to our last man and our last shilling’.4 We thought of ourselves as members of the British race, as ‘independent Australian Britons’.5 Indeed, when Australia raised its expeditionary force, these feelings were given expression in the choice of name: the Australian Imperial Force, the AIF.

  Depending on how they saw their national interests, the countries of Europe now lined up on one side or the other—or tried to keep out of the war altogether. As the war progressed, Turkey and Bulgaria joined Germany and Austria–Hungary. Italy swapped sides and joined France, Russia and Britain and their respective empires. Forming the ‘Allied Powers’, these four were joined by Belgium, Serbia and Montenegro and later opportunists Romania, Greece and Portugal.

  Of all the nations at war, Russia loomed largest. She was the biggest country in the world and had the largest army—on paper it was twelve million strong. On the Eastern Front, which stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea, Russia tied up half of Germany’s forces. If her army had not been split between two fronts, Germany would have overwhelmed the French and British in the west.

  Russia was less developed industrially than her allies and Britain shipped war supplies to her on credit. The cargo was landed at Arkhangel or the newly constructed port at Murmansk in Russia’s north, which were Russia’s only European ports not blockaded by the Germans or Turks. The quantities were enormous. In 1916, for example, over 600 ships landed a million tons of coal and a million and a half of munitions to Russia’s northern ports (36 of the ships were sunk by German U-boats in the process).6 In the month of July 1916 alone, Arkhangel took delivery of 50 aircraft, 90 armoured cars, 85,000 rolls of barbed wire, 150 artillery pieces, 500 trench mortars, 2 million hand grenades and 170 million rounds of ammunition.7

  At the outbreak of World War I, Australians thought of themselves as ‘independent Australian Britons’ and felt no inhibitions about waving Union Jacks. This float won first prize in a patriotic parade in Maryborough, Qld, in 1916. The girls wear the national dress of the various Allies. Note the British bulldog. (Australian War Memorial P00221.001)

  Plenty more where these came from. Russia’s army was the biggest in the world and Russian generals believed they could win any war by sheer weight of numbers. Here Russian troops parade in July 1914. (Imperial War Museum Q 81723)

  In return, Russia was a staunch ally. Several times, at the pleading of France and Britain, she mounted offensives to relieve pressure in the west. Indeed, the Gallipoli campaign was launched partly in recompense. One of its objectives was to free up Russia’s southern ports so that munitions could be shipped in and Russian oil and grain could get out. Another was to give heart to the Russians.

  The Russians needed bolstering because the war had gone very badly for them almost from the start. Poorly led and ill-equipped, her armies suffered enormously. Administrative bungling meant that men were sent to the trenches without boots or proper clothing, sometimes even without rifles. Fifteen kilometres of front would have a single machine gun. Batteries of 6-inch guns would find themselves supplied with 4-inch shells. Russian generals mistakenly put their faith in sheer weight of numbers.

  Offensives in 1916 were total failures. Russian troops were shot to pieces for no gain. They lost five men for every German killed. By 1917 Russian casualties exceeded five million, more than the other Allies put together. Losses on such a scale were unsustainable and Russia began to fall apart. The government was corrupt and incompetent, wildcat strikes disrupted war production, food supplies ran perilously low and the railways were on the verge of collapse.

  In March 1917, Petrograd,* Russia’s capital on the Baltic Sea, was racked by strikes and demonstrations. Shops were looted, soldiers disobeyed orders and the streets teemed with aimless mobs. The last meeting of the Tsar’s ministers was abandoned when the electricity failed. The Tsar made no real attempt to assert his authority and, having lost the support of his generals, he abdicated.

  The power vacuum was filled by an alliance of democrats and moderate socialists. They formed a provisional government which resolved that Russia would continue the war, no matter what. Alexander Kerensky, a radical lawyer with a streak of egomania, took over as leader. He dashed from one battle front to the next, haranguing the troops and trying to hold both the army and country together with his feverish eloquence.8 Russia’s allies assumed his regime would give the flagging Russian forces a boost.

  Instead, the opposite happened. War-weariness swept Russia like an epidemic. Troops deserted the front line or simply refused to fight. Army units elected their own committees (which were called ‘soviets’) and voted to abolish saluting and the death penalty. The effect was to wreck the command structure.

  Rumours circulated that the new regime was about to redistribute the land among the peasants. So as not to miss out on their share, Russian soldiers simply abandoned their posts and went home to their villages.

  Alexander Kerensky was Russia’s prime minister from July until November 1917, when his government was overthrown by the Bolsheviks. Forced into exile, Kerensky married an Australian journalist, Lydia ‘Nell’ Tritton, and lived with her briefly in suburban Brisbane. In fear of Bolshevik assassins, he used to sleep on the verandah to allow for a quick getaway. (Russian State Archive of Film and Photographic Documents, Krasnogorsk)

  By 1917 Russian soldiers had lost their enthusiasm for being killed. They abandoned the front lines and headed for home. Western reporters couldn’t believe the Russian army had disintegrated. One London newspaper printed a photo like this with a caption assuring its readers the troops were hastening to the front! (Krasnogorsk Archive)

  The year 1917 saw more than two million men decamp from the army.9 Discipline collapsed. Bands of mutineers and marauders looted behind the lines.

  Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, was living in exile in Switzerland. Of the many émigré Russian revolutionaries whom Germany had been secretly financing, Lenin was the most ruthless and single-minded. Since it suited the Germans’ purpose to add to Russia’s chaos, they arranged for him to return to Russia through German territory. In Churchill’s famous phrase,10 they transported him across Europe in a sealed train, like a plague bacillus.

  After a false start in July, the Bolsheviks seized their moment. On 7 November 1917 (25 October by the old calendar), the Bolshevik Revolution installed Lenin in power. Alone of Russia’s political parties, the Bolsheviks had always promised an immediate end to the war. They acted on that promise the very next day, with Lenin himself moving the resolution. It was passed unanimously by the hundreds crowding the hall of Petrograd’s Smolny Girls’ Institute, where the Soviet Congress was meeting. The American John Reed described the wave of emotion:

  Suddenly, by common impulse, we found ourselves on our feet, mumbling together into the smooth, lifting unison of the ‘Internationale’. A grizzled old soldier was sobbing like a child … The immense sound rolled through the hall, burst windows and doors and soared into the quiet sky. ‘The war is ended! The war is ended!’ said a young workman next to me, his face shining.11

  A Soviet delegation set off within days to meet the Germans in the drab Polish town of Brest–Litovsk. It was headed by Leon Trotsky, the Bolshe
vik Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later for War. On the way to the railway station, it was realised the delegation lacked a representative of the peasantry, so a yokel on the street was nabbed at random and taken along. The fellow’s primitive table manners made him the centre of attention at the lavish diplomatic banquets (on being offered red or white wine, he asked his neighbour, a Prussian prince, ‘Which one is stronger?’), but he proved his worth by drinking the German delegates under the table!12

  A formal ceasefire was arranged on 2 December and the German army paused while negotiations continued. But Trotsky made a major misjudgement.13 He believed Germany was on the verge of a workers’ revolution and that making peace would be easy if he dragged things out long enough. He overplayed his hand and talked interminably.

  Although strikes and left-wing demonstrations were breaking out in Germany, no revolution took place. By mid-February the Germans had lost patience with Trotsky. They resumed their advance and swept through the Ukraine and the Baltic, threatening to take Petrograd itself. The Soviets hurriedly moved their capital from Petrograd to Moscow, deep in Russia’s interior, and slunk back to the negotiating table to seek peace at any price. Powerless to resist the Germans, they were left with no bargaining power at all. The Germans summed up the Bolshevik position this way: ‘The only choice they have is as to what sauce they shall be eaten with’.14

  In March 1918 Trotsky signed the ignominious Treaty of Brest– Litovsk. In effect he surrendered the Ukraine, Poland, Finland and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Though their populations were not ethnic Russians, these countries had all been possessions of the Russian Empire for over a century. The Soviets thereby lost a third of their population, half their industry and more than two million square kilometres of territory.

  Russia’s Western allies were appalled. The Germans were now able to move huge forces to the west: seventy-five enemy infantry divisions were withdrawn from Russia.15 The Germans occupied the Ukraine and gained access to its grain and fodder, as well as oil from the Caspian. The West forgot about Russia’s earlier sacrifices and saw only betrayal.

  Meanwhile, the vast Russian Empire began to disintegrate. Anti-Bolshevik armies formed in Siberia and the Far East. Cossacks resisted Bolshevik power on the Don and the Volga. Nationalists seized their chance in the Ukraine and the Caucasus. A force of former Czech prisoners of war was marooned in the middle of Siberia and drawn into the maelstrom of revolution and civil war, an epic in itself.

  Most importantly for our story, the former Russian province of Finland declared its independence. Civil war broke out there and the Finnish population divided into communist Reds and anti-communist Whites. Germany offered military support to the White Finns and by early 1918 it was rumoured that a joint German–Finnish army of 50,000 was poised to attack Murmansk in the very north of Russia.

  Alarm bells rang in Britain. If the Germans took Murmansk they would certainly develop it as a base for submarines. Germany could then evade the blockade of the North Sea and sink the troopships bringing the much-needed Americans into the war. Even worse, the Germans could seize the huge Allied stores at Murmansk and threaten the even bigger ones at Arkhangel. Such losses would spell the end to any prospect of re-establishing the Eastern Front.

  To intervene, of course, entailed occupying the territory of an erstwhile ally. Britain, especially, felt no qualms. The demands of the war were felt to justify any step. In any event, the Bolsheviks were anathema to the West and it was blithely assumed that ordinary, decent Russians would welcome the arrival of the Western forces.

  In fact, a British naval squadron was already based at Murmansk. It consisted of an ageing battleship with some of its guns removed and twelve armed trawlers. Under its excitable British commander, Admiral Kemp, it had been guarding the northern sea lanes against U-boats and German mine-layers.

  Murmansk was controlled by a left-wing town soviet (council) whose members took fright at the rumoured German–Finnish army across the border. Fearing the Germans might arrive at any moment, the soviet asked permission from Trotsky to accept help from Kemp’s naval squadron.

  At the time Trotsky believed the Brest–Litovsk talks had again broken down and that the Germans would resume their advance. He therefore authorised the soviet to accept Allied help. In fact, the talks had not broken down; Trotsky had simply received two telegrams out of order. By the time he realised his mistake, the Murmansk authorities had already acted.16

  So had the British. With great ceremony, on 6 March 1918, Admiral Kemp had landed 130 marines, marched them to the town barracks and made ready to repel any Germans or Finns. It was intervention by invitation. The British even fired a salute to the Red Flag.17

  The next day a British cruiser arrived, quickly followed by a French warship, then an American one. It was good timing, for Murmansk was home to two thousand militant Russian sailors who had very mixed feelings about the Allied presence. They were the crews of several Russian warships which lay aground and semi-derelict near Murmansk. One of them was the celebrated cruiser Askold, whose idle and restless crew lived on board with their girlfriends and spent their time carousing and holding political meetings.

  Relying on bluff and the naval reinforcements, Kemp managed to disarm the Russian sailors. To consolidate his hold, however, he needed more troops and he asked London for six thousand. With men desperately needed to withstand a threatened German offensive in France, such numbers were out of the question. Kemp was promised six hundred.

  The Russian cruiser, Askold. Because of her five funnels, the British called her the ‘packet of Woodbines’ after a brand of cigarettes that sold in packets of five. The Askold helped escort the first AIF convoy to Egypt and was later sent to Gallipoli in the hope of taking part in a great Allied victory. By 1918 she was aground at Murmansk where her mutinous crew passed their time holding political meetings and carousing with their girlfriends. (Wikimedia Commons)

  In addition, though, the British War Cabinet decided to despatch a military mission of 560 men. Their task would be to train Russians loyal to the former Provisional government to defend themselves against both Germans and Bolsheviks and, hopefully, to re-establish the Eastern Front. It was this decision that brought the first Australian soldiers to North Russia.

  * The name had been changed in 1914 because ‘St Petersburg’ sounded too German.

  2

  THE AUSSIES OF

  ELOPE FORCE

  IN March 1918 British military depots in England were asked to provide volunteers for a secret mission abroad. Canada and Australia were also asked for men—experienced warrant officers and senior noncommissioned officers (NCOs) especially. From those Australians who put their names down, two dozen were nominated by AIF headquarters.

  One, Sergeant Bertram Perry,1 kept a diary of his time in Russia. Perry, from Horsham in Victoria, had been among the first from his town to volunteer for the war, and had landed at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915, the very first day of the campaign. In July 1915 he fell down a cliff, injured his left ankle and was invalided back to Australia. He recovered sufficiently to serve later in France where he won the Military Medal (MM). Indeed, his record includes two citations for the MM. The first, in April 1917, was for bringing back a wounded soldier from a patrol; the second, in July the same year, was for bombing a communication trench at Bullecourt in France.

  When Perry heard of the secret mission he was at a training camp on Salisbury Plain. Fed up with the work he was on, he volunteered. At short notice he was ordered to report to London by midnight on 3 June 1918. There, he and several other Australians were quizzed by a British colonel as to their ‘readiness to proceed anywhere and do any work asked’.2 One Aussie refused and was struck off; others were eliminated when they sought some indication of what they were getting themselves into. An unquestioning attitude seemed to suit the British authorities best and, in the end, nine Australians were chosen, of whom Perry was one.

  Another was Sergeant John K
elly from Glen Innes in northern New South Wales. He had joined the AIF in 1915, stating he belonged to a rifle club and also knew how to drive a car. He was put into the artillery as a driver and spent six months in Egypt where he was promoted to corporal. In July 1917 in France, he was wounded (‘gunshot wound, mild’) and in December promoted to sergeant. Years later, Kelly wrote a long account of his experiences in Russia.3 In it, he claimed he didn’t know why he was selected for special duty there and couldn’t think of any attribute that particularly qualified him.

  The mission was shrouded in secrecy. The volunteers were specifically told that once they had agreed, they could not withdraw. The Australians stuck to their guns. Kelly, for one, reasoned that nothing could be worse than France.

  The nine Australians were detailed to report to the Tower of London, where the authorities thought the mobilisation of a secret unit would attract the least attention.4 They joined several hundred British troops, twenty-one Canadians and four New Zealanders. In fact, two of the Kiwis were Australian born: Sergeant Robert McCready came from Goulburn, New South Wales; Sergeant Allan ‘Pat’ Burke had been born in Bordertown, South Australia, but was in New Zealand at the outbreak of the war and so had enlisted there.

  The men were billeted in disused and hastily cleaned rooms. Perry spent over a week in the Tower, during which time stragglers drifted in, singly or in pairs, from different units all over Britain. He recalled there was no training, no briefing and no drills and described the atmosphere as a cross between a rest camp and a prison. To pass the time the men kicked footballs, played cards, chatted and slept.