Historian John T. Smith reports on the bombing of Grozny on February 5, 1919, with incendiaries that ignited a large fire. He later discusses the RAF’s bombing of Tsaritsyn (Stalingrad) on the Volga, which had been defended by a Soviet committee led by the future dictator Joseph Stalin and Marshal Georgy Zhukov, deputy supreme commander during the Second World War. Allegedly a British DH9 dropped a huge missile on a building where eighty Soviet commissars were meeting, all of whom were killed.46 Such incidents would remain seared in the minds of Soviet leaders, shaping a deep distrust for the West as the Cold War developed.
Coming mostly from Michigan (“Detroit’s Own”) and rural Wisconsin, American soldiers had to fight in frigid temperatures (40 below zero) without proper clothing or boots and against a motivated and disciplined enemy that adopted effective camouflages in the snow. Over four hundred “doughboys” died, hundreds more were wounded, and one committed suicide. Most U.S. forces were disdainful of Soviet society and culture. They considered Soviet Russia a “great international dump” and “land of infernal order … and national smell.” One wrote that he would “rather be quartered in hell.”47
Tommy Thompson told a reporter in the 1950s that he remembered Siberia as a cold and dirty place where he did not know whom to trust.48 Capt. Joel Moore stated that “every peasant could be a Bolshevik. Who knew? In fact, we had reason to believe that many of them were Bolshevik in sympathy.”49 Lt. Montgomery Rice pointed out that the Bolsheviks were “inspired men even if their rifles were foul with rust, their clothing worn to rags, their bodies sour with filth, or their cheeks sunken from malnutrition.”50 Fighting with U.S. munitions captured from the tsar’s armies, they adopted guerrilla methods centered on disrupting the local infrastructure and cultivating popular support in villages, from which guerrillas could carry out ambushes and sneak attacks on invading forces at night.51 According to Moore, the Bolsheviks were assisted by “a system of espionage of which we could never hope to cope.”52
“The Battle Hymn of the Republic” sung by U.S. troops, adapted to the Russian conflict, made a joke of the quagmire:
“We came from Vladivostok, to catch the Bolshevik; We chased them o’er the mountains and we chased them through the creek; We chased them every Sunday and we chased them through the week; But we couldn’t catch a gosh darn one.” The song continued: “The bullets may whistle, the cannons may roar, don’t want to go to the trenches no more. Take me over the sea, where the Bolsheviks can’t get me, Oh my, I don’t want to die, I want to go home.”53
Another poem, “In Russia’s Fields,” was modeled after the famous First World War poem “Flanders Field”:
In Russia’s fields, no poppies grow
There are no crosses row on row
To mark the places where we lie
No larks so grayly singing fly
As in the fields of Flanders.
We are the dead. Not long ago
We fought beside you in the snow
And gave our lives, and here we lie
Though scarcely knowing reason why
Like those who died in Flanders.54
At least fifty American soldiers deserted, including Anton Karachun, a coal miner originally from Minsk who had emigrated to the United States. After he deserted, he took up a post with the Red Army in Sunchon.55 A Judge Advocate General report cited by Albertson specified that an unusually large number American soldiers were convicted by court-martial of having been guilty of self-inflicted wounds.56 Lt. John Cudahy of the 339th regiment noted: “War shears from a people much that is gross in nature, as the merciless test of war exposes naked, virtues and weaknesses alike. But the American war with Russia had no idealism. It was not a war at all. It was a freebooter’s excursion, depraved and lawless. A felonious undertaking for it had not the sanction of the American people.”57
In February 1919, the British 13th Yorkshire Regiment under a Colonel Lavoi refused orders to fight, which inspired mutiny in a French company in Archangel. On March 30, I-Company in the 339th American infantry followed suit in refusing orders, asserting they had accomplished their mission defeating Germany and were by now “interfering in the affairs of the Russian people with whom we have no quarrel.” Col. George Stewart allegedly responded that he had “never been supplied with an answer as to why they were there himself, but that the reds were trying to push them into the white sea and that they were hence fighting for their lives.”58 Though apparently satisfying, this response ran counter to the lies of the Wilson administration that the United States was only in Soviet Russia for defensive purposes and to safeguard war material and property.
Peter Kropotkin, the celebrated Russian writer, told a British labor delegation that progressive elements in the “civilized nations” should “bring an end to support given to the adversaries of the revolution” and refuse to continue playing the “shameful role to which England, Prussia, Austria and Russia sank during the Russian Revolution.” Kropotkin was an anarchist opposed to the Soviet undermining of the worker and peasant councils that initially supported the revolution, but noted that “all armed intervention by a foreign power necessarily results in an increase in the dictatorial tendencies of the rulers.… The natural evils of state communism have been multiplied tenfold under the pretext that the distress of our existence is due to the intervention of foreigners.”59
In the United States, critics of the intervention were prosecuted under the Alien and Sedition Acts passed under the Wilson administration that made it a crime to “willfully utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the U.S. form of government, constitution, military or naval force or flag.” Radical journalist John Reed and New York State Assemblyman Abraham Shiplacoff (the “Jewish Eugene V. Debs”), who said American troops were perceived by Russians as “hired murderers and Hessians,” were among those jailed. Also imprisoned were six Socialist-anarchist activists—Jacob Abrams, Jacob Schwartz, Hyman Rosansky, Samuel Lipman, Mollie Steimer, and Hyman Lachowsky—who were beaten, given long sentences, and deported for distributing antiwar leaflets condemning Wilson’s hypocrisy and urging strikes in munitions plants. The jailings and deportations were upheld in a Supreme Court ruling.60 This case shows how intervention in Soviet Russia not only helped sow conflict abroad, but also resulted in the suppression of domestic civil liberties in a pattern that would extend through the Cold War.
It is ironic that we in the United States have always been led to fear a Russian invasion when Americans were in fact the original invaders. In May 1972 on a visit to the Soviet Union promoting détente, President Richard Nixon boasted to his hosts about having never fought one another in a war, a line repeated by Ronald Reagan in his 1984 State of the Union address. A New York Times poll the next year found that only 14 percent of Americans said they were aware that in 1918 the United States had landed troops in northern and eastern Soviet Russia, a percentage probably even lower today.61
James Loewen in Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong found that none of twelve high school history textbooks he surveyed mentioned the “Midnight War.” In two cases, the U.S. troop presence in Russia was mentioned but only as part of U.S. war strategy and not as an effort to roll back the Russian Revolution. The National World War I Museum in Kansas City meanwhile has only a tiny backroom display, which claims that U.S. soldiers in Archangel “found themselves fighting the Bolshevik Red Guards as well as the anti-Bolshevists,” which is inaccurate. A separate discussion of Siberia claims that U.S. soldiers performed guard duty and protected the railways from Bolshevik forces and that they “followed Wilson’s policy of non-aggression closely, only fighting when provoked small-scale but fierce actions resulting in 170 American dead.” These comments do not properly capture the nature of the war, with no mention at all of atrocities, the soldiers’ poems, mutiny, nor General Graves’s dissent.62
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