ANZACs in Arkhangel

by Michael Challinger

  They were inoculated and issued with full service kits, including field dressings and gas masks. Both summer and winter clothing was issued and the men were warned to expect summers like the Riviera but winters like the north of Scotland.5 Apart from this hint, they were in the dark as to where they were headed. Among themselves they laid bets, with Vladivostok, Arkhangel and Egypt being equal favourites. Perry made a shrewd guess. A few days before departure, on 11 June 1918, he confided to his diary: ‘I wish I knew where we were off to, but I think it is Russia’.

  Sergeants John Kelly (standing) and Bert Perry. These were the two Australians who left the fullest accounts of their time in Russia with Elope Force. (AWM A05188)

  Of the other Australians, three were officers: Captains Allan Brown, Paul Lohan and Richard Tarrant. Brown was British born but joined the AIF in Toowoomba, Queensland. He was wounded at Gallipoli and again in July 1917 after being commissioned in the field. He was accepted into the unit in spite of having restricted movement in one arm.

  Lohan was a schoolteacher from Maffra, Victoria, while the well-to-do Richard Tarrant ran an orchard in Wyong, New South Wales, and gave his occupation as landholder. Tarrant also suffered a residual disability. His left leg had been shattered at Gallipoli and he had been left with ‘considerable weakness and deformity’.6 A medical board had certified him unfit to return to the front at all, but instead he was sent to Egypt, then to France, where he was again wounded, this time to the head and forearm.

  The remaining men were all sergeants. Charles Hickey, also a veteran of Gallipoli, counted as a West Australian. A survey-hand born in St Kilda in Melbourne, he had signed on in Helena Vale, in Western Australia. Two were South Australians: Claude Wyatt, a commercial traveller from Port Broughton, and Arthur Von Duve, a labourer from Kalangadoo. Von Duve was known as a quiet type—perhaps from growing up as the only boy in a family of seven sisters.

  The oldest of the nine was Robert Graham, aged forty-two. Born in Britain, Graham was a colourful character with a questionable past. On enlisting, he claimed in his Attestation Paper to have served in the British Army, the US cavalry and the armies of Guatemala, Nicaragua and Mexico. Under ‘Distinctive Marks’, he itemised scars from a sabre wound, a bullet wound, a spear thrust and a dagger.

  At first the other men didn’t know quite what to make of Graham. They couldn’t help noticing that if all his stories were true he must have taken part in most of the wars and revolutions of the previous century. They gave him the nickname ‘Rainbow’,7 from his numerous coloured medal ribbons—all but one of which they suspected of being bogus. The genuine one was the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) he had won in 1916 in the trenches at Lone Pine.

  On 15 June, the men in the Tower were told they would be leaving at midnight. Perry scaled a wall and spent two hours seeing the sights of London for the last time. At midnight the troops marched from the Tower to Kings Cross Station and travelled overnight by train to Newcastle. Each was told to have a stamped envelope ready to notify his next of kin of his future address. The men hoped this would disclose their secret destination. All they learned, though, was that their new address was care of ‘Elope’, GPO London.

  ‘Elope’ was the codename for the force which was headed for Arkhangel to organise, instruct and lead Russian units. It wasn’t classified as a fighting unit. It was termed a ‘military mission’, an expression which seemed to preclude actual fighting but was vague enough to cover all contingencies.

  Sailing with Elope was a second group, codenamed ‘Syren’, which had assembled separately at Colchester. This was the British expeditionary force to be stationed at Murmansk. It was six hundred strong and consisted of men unfit for service in France. Most had been wounded at least once, and all were rated B2 (Base Duty Abroad) or B3 (Sedentary Duty Abroad).8 They were very much second-rate troops—one of the officers, for example, was sixty-three, ‘a dear old duffer who was quite useless’.9

  A third force, codenamed ‘Develop’, had also been envisaged, with the aim of advancing east across Russia to join up with White Russian forces in Siberia. Since this plan entailed crossing thousands of kilometres of Bolshevik-held territory, it was never remotely feasible. Develop was a dead letter from the start and its intended personnel were reassigned to Elope or Syren.

  The men of Elope embarked at Newcastle on 16 June 1918. They boarded the heavily camouflaged troopship, the City of Marseilles, a requisitioned Norwegian liner. No troops had left from Newcastle before and the city gave them a rousing send-off with flags and cheering crowds. Two planes circled overhead, two destroyers provided an escort. Only when the ship was under way were the men told they were bound for Russia.

  The City of Marseilles was crowded and uncomfortable. Kelly called it ‘the nearest approach to a pig boat it would be possible to find’.10 The sea was very rough and waves alternately broke across the bows of the escort destroyers, then lifted them till half their keels were visible. Aboard the pitching troopship many suffered seasickness. Perry succumbed on the first day.

  Worse was to come. Soon after the ship set sail influenza broke out and many aboard fell ill. The outbreak was part of the 1918 pandemic of ‘Spanish influenza’, a serious viral disease which killed ten thousand in Australia and millions worldwide.

  Among the crew of the City of Marseilles were Indian lascars who, at a fraction of the cost, were replacing British merchant seamen who had joined the Royal Navy. The lascars fell victim first and many became too weak to work. Over a dozen of them died (and one Briton) and for lack of stokers the ship was forced to slow to half-speed. Volunteers from among the troops lent a hand at the boilers, officers included. Nobody fancied being a slow-moving target for German submarines.

  In spite of it all, a holiday atmosphere prevailed. Most of the troops had seen heavy fighting in France and viewed the expedition as something of a picnic jaunt. They saw whales at play and watched the escort destroyers drop depth charges on suspected U-boats. They had plenty of time for reading and writing letters, and ample light. Once they were above the Arctic Circle there was little to distinguish between day and night and even at midnight the sun showed well above the horizon.

  A number of Russians also travelled aboard the City of Marseilles. Some were officers (one favourite performed Russian folk songs, accompanying himself on the piano). Others, in civilian dress and with heavy beards, were more mysterious. The troops were never told exactly who they were and some were variously rumoured to be the Tsar’s former tutor, Kerensky in disguise or Count Leo Tolstoy—who had been dead since 1910!

  One remarkable passenger was the celebrated female soldier Maria Bochkarova,11 whose original enlistment in the Imperial Russian army had been authorised by the Tsar himself. When army discipline collapsed in 1917, she had formed a shock battalion of female soldiers called the ‘Women’s Battalion of Death’. She’d intended to shame the men into fighting but her action produced the opposite effect: thinking a women’s unit was evidence of sheer desperation, the troops were strengthened in their resolve not to fight. Following the Revolution in November 1917, Bochkarova made her way to the United States, where she appeared at patriotic and recruiting rallies. Now she was on her way back to Russia, hoping to fight the Bolsheviks.

  Maria Bochkarova showed up in Arkhangel in June 1918, hoping to fight the Bolsheviks. General Ironside remarked unkindly on her ‘broad ugly face, mottled complexion and squat figure’. The Americans fobbed her off onto the Russian Whites. (Wikimedia Commons)

  The ‘Women’s Battalion of Death’ in training. The women fought for Kerensky’s Provisional Government, wearing standard army uniform—except for one who was too fat to fit into trousers and headed for battle in a skirt. In April 1918 the battalion’s founder, Maria Bochkarova, fled to America where she became a minor celebrity at patriotic rallies. (IWM Q 106249)

  The troops studied their newly distributed Russian phrasebooks and attended lectures. Under the heading ‘Russian Character’, an information
sheet explained that ‘Generally speaking the Russian is exactly like a child—inquisitive, easily gulled, easily offended. He is very clever in a theoretical way but is rarely practical’.12 A medical officer lectured the officers as to their personal conduct while in Russia. The gist was that the British race had a high moral code but did not live up to it, while the Russians had low morals which they succeeded in upholding!13

  The Aussies would have been sceptical of stuff like this. Before the war Australians saw the world as a hierarchy with the British at the top, the other white races below them and the ‘coloured races’ at the bottom. Their experience in the war had turned some of these notions upside down.14 The Turks, who were not white, were admired, while those British troops who had sometimes let the Aussies down on the Western Front were despised. The Germans, who were racially closest to the British, were ‘bad’, whereas the Asiatic Japanese were Allies and therefore ‘good’. The Russians, who were white, had been ‘good’ until they pulled out of the war, but were now ‘bad’!

  After a week at sea, the City of Marseilles turned into the Kola Inlet towards Murmansk. Lying 300 kilometres inside the Arctic Circle, Murmansk is roughly level with the northern coastline of Alaska. In spite of its latitude it receives the last of the warming waters of the Gulf Stream and, with the help of icebreakers, can be kept open all winter. In contrast, Arkhangel, though further south, is ice-bound for five to six months of the year.

  Until World War I, Murmansk had been a tiny, run-down fishing village. In 1915, at British instigation and largely with British funds, it was hastily developed into a proper, if jerry-built, port. Vast quantities of war material poured through it, as well as through the existing port at Arkhangel. All told, the Allies landed about five million tons of stores at Murmansk and Arkhangel during World War I, a million more than in the famous Arctic convoys of World War II.

  Nobody had a good word for Murmansk. Built at British instigation to provide an ice-free port for the importation of war supplies, it had no paved streets and little sanitation. One visitor described it as ‘a handful of log huts, a landing stage and snow’. (AWM A02552)

  To transport Murmansk’s share south to the Russian army, a makeshift single-track railway had been built, linking Murmansk with Petrograd. Imported in sections from Britain, it was laid by German prisoners of war in conditions of appalling hardship. The terrain was extremely difficult and hundreds of streams needed to be crossed by means of rough timber bridges. Although the subsoil in many places is permanently frozen, in summer the surface melts to form vast areas of swamp. Over much of the route trains had to slow to walking pace as anything faster risked derailing the engine. Even then they swayed alarmingly as the tracks sank into the thawing marsh.15 To cover the 1300 kilometres to Petrograd took a passenger train between five and nine days, and freight trains even longer.

  From the decks of the City of Marseilles, the Russian coastline looked barren and inhospitable. Brown, treeless hills rose to about 200 metres. The vegetation was largely moss, grass, short heather and stunted shrubs. There was no sign of cultivation.

  Murmansk itself was a wretched place, consisting of wooden jetties, some barracks, rail yards and storage sheds and a cluster of drab, wooden huts. The town had only one real street, with not a single building of brick or stone. The huts were built of interlocking logs, the gaps between them filled with moss. ‘Litter and rubbish were heaped on the foreshore and alongside the unkempt tracks that served as roads. Outside many of the huts was … a conglomeration of unsavoury rubbish.’16

  The inhabitants were equally unappealing. To one British observer they were a disreputable lot in fur caps, loose coats, baggy trousers and leather knee boots. The women, ‘some of them monstrously ugly’,17 were dressed in gaudy, multi-coloured skirts. The children were urchins and more numerous than the flies.

  When the City of Marseilles berthed, no accommodation was available for the arriving troops. Some were housed in railway carriages, while others pitched tents in a camp among sandhills infested with flies and mosquitoes. The Australians struck lucky and kept the troopship as their base.

  The military situation was delicate and the earlier cooperation of the Murmansk authorities had evaporated. At one point, the town soviet demanded that all foreign personnel leave within ten days. The British responded by surrounding the Russian barracks. Kelly wrote: ‘[We] explained the position and invited them to come outside and try to push us off the peninsula. There was no response to the invitation’.18 The British remained on high alert for twenty-four hours, then erected a barbed wire fence across the wharf where their ship was berthed.

  With the civil war in Finland spilling over into Russia, the political situation was also complicated. Finnish Reds fought anti-communist Finnish Whites, while both detested the Russians. The Russians were similarly divided into Reds and Whites, while the native Karelians of the Kola Peninsula aspired to independence and opposed both Russians and Finns. In back-to-front writing, Bert Perry recorded in his diary on 16 October 1918: ‘The Finns etah naissur’. The Finns hate the Russian[s]. While writing back to front was often just a boyish prank, this time Perry may have wanted to keep his thoughts safe from prying Russian eyes.

  Elope Force was due to move on to Arkhangel but there was a delay. Normally Arkhangel was open to shipping by the middle of June, but in 1918 the thaw was late and the British had to wait for the ice to break up. They also needed to wait on the political climate. In Arkhangel the Bolsheviks were in firm control and nobody knew whether or not they would resist the Allied arrival.

  During the wait Claude Wyatt was detached from Elope for some reason and transferred to Syren Force stationed at Murmansk. Though Murmansk was a miserable spot, its port remained open over winter, so it was less cut-off. It was also kept better garrisoned, even after the Armistice was signed and the mythical German threat disappeared entirely. Wyatt was to stay on in Murmansk and lose contact with the other Australians.

  While the rest of Elope cooled their heels, Perry and Arthur Von Duve were assigned to a scouting expedition.19 Their task was to check on possible infiltration by Germans and White Finns along the Tuloma River and investigate any trouble brewing there. The two Aussies were joined by an English captain and a Scottish sergeant, Bill Winning, who had been in business in Russia and who spoke Russian.

  It was the Aussies’ first venture into the hinterland and Perry expressed some apprehension. Scare stories about the Bolsheviks had circulated among the troops: tales of forced labour, mutilation and torture, of eyes being gouged out, tongues slit and men put naked in the snow to freeze to death. Though Perry wasn’t expecting to encounter Bolsheviks, he records hearing tales in Murmansk ‘to make a man’s hair stand on end’.20

  The four men left Murmansk at midnight in full daylight. Their first destination was Restikent, an outpost so tiny it wasn’t on any map. They travelled the first 40 kilometres on a motor launch until steep hills rose up on each side and the river narrowed. For the next 100 kilometres they transferred to a smaller boat resembling a canoe, which they had to haul over two sets of rapids. They shot seals and duck for sport and met only three people the whole way. The mosquitoes nearly drove them mad.

  Some of the men of Elope Force. The Australians are Bert Perry (standing, back left), Arthur Von Duve (seated, far left), John Kelly (seated, far right) and Charles Hickey (lying, left). Standing beside Perry is Robert McCready, an Australian-born New Zealander. The others in this group are two Canadians and four Britons, including Bill Winning (lying, right), a Scot who had lived in Russia for years and had acquired a taste for vodka. (AWM A00251)

  Restikent was isolated and primitive but the village headman was well disposed towards the British. He lent them a hut, ‘an absolute godsend’ as a refuge from the mosquitoes. The villagers were hospitable but very curious and a crowd gathered to watch the visitors’ ablutions. Von Duve had suffered facial injuries from a shrapnel burst in France and had received dental treatment there. When h
e flicked out his upper denture, the spectators fled in consternation.

  At Restikent the party ran into an American Finn who told them he had been accused of being a ‘capitalist’; upriver later, they learned he had been shot dead. They paddled 60 kilometres around the edge of a lake looking for the murderers but without success. Finns and Russians were at daggers drawn and both sides clamoured for rifles with which to defend themselves.

  The trip was full of adventure. The party were caught in a bushfire, but survived it by lying on a stone in the river. They bought themselves a new canoe for two and a half bags of flour. They found gold-bearing quartz and spent time extracting gold. They shot Arctic hares and fished for salmon by dropping grenades. On 21 July Perry records that Winning, ‘like a fool, got drunk on vodka. One smell [is] enough for me.’

  The next day the men received an urgent message to return to Murmansk to join the fleet setting out for Arkhangel. They made a dash for it but one of their boats overturned in the rapids and they arrived too late. It was the following week before they reached Arkhangel aboard the Askold. By then the Russian cruiser had been taken over by the British and renamed the HMS Glory IV.

  3

  THE TAKEOVER

  OF ARKHANGEL

  AUGUST 1918

  THE invasion fleet had sailed from Murmansk on 30 July 1918. It comprised a British light cruiser, a French heavy cruiser, two Russian destroyers, five armed trawlers and a late addition, the seaplane carrier HMS Nairana. As the fleet entered the White Sea, a fog descended and the French cruiser hit a submerged wreck and ran aground.

  Two days later the task force (minus the French ship which caught up later) approached the mouth of the Dvina River. Arkhangel stands about 40 kilometres from the open sea and the river there forms a delta with many channels and islands. As the ships slowed to enter the navigable channel, seaplanes from the Nairana scouted for opposition.