21
Of all the Allied nations Italy played least part in the interventions, but 2,000 French troops landed at the Black Sea port of Odessa – then the largest city in Ukraine – on 18 December 1918, a few days after the Germans had evacuated the city. In addition to French and French colonial troops from North and West Africa, there were also Greek and Romanian contingents.
The most important White general in the region was General Anton Denikin. He was a career soldier who first distinguished himself in the Brusilov offensive, and afterwards became chief of staff to three successive commanders-in-chief: Alekseyev, Brusilov and Kornilov. Imprisoned for supporting Kornilov’s failed coup, he escaped in the chaos of the October Revolution. After Kornilov’s death in April 1918, command of the so-called White Volunteer Army passed to Denikin, who had to retreat to the Don in terrible weather conditions. Regrouping, he led what looked like being a successful drive on Moscow in summer 1919, but was foiled by Trotsky forming a temporary alliance with Nestor Makhno’s Black Army of Ukrainian anarchists. Makhno attacked Denikin’s extended lines of supply and defeated him at Orel, 400 miles south of Moscow, in October 1919. Having weakened the Ukrainians, Trotsky then attacked and defeated Makhno’s force before driving Denikin’s Whites south, where they enforced a White Terror, targeting particularly the Jews with the logic that they were an evil force epitomised by the large percentage of Jewish activists in the Bolshevik movement.
Why the men in the French contingent thought they were there is a mystery. Except during the Crimean war, their country had no connection with this territory and the morale of France’s troops was already low after the massive mutinies in 1917 caused by the appalling slaughter due to bad generalship on the Western Front that had claimed the lives of so many of their comrades.
With the arrival of the other contingents, a total of 90,000 Allied soldiers occupied a 120-mile swathe of territory 50 miles deep along the northern littoral of the Black Sea from the Romanian border to Kherson. In addition to Denikin and the Reds, also active in the area were Ukrainian separatist forces and a motley army of Cossacks under their leader, a former gendarme who had taken the name and style of Ataman Nikifor Grigoriev. Having served as a staff captain in the tsarist army, after Brest-Litovsk he fought at different times and with different ranks both for and against the Reds, Denikin’s Whites, the Green Army and the Black Army, indulging his rabid anti-Semitism in pogroms that claimed more than 6,000 victims.
The Romanians were there to ensure the security of formerly Russian-occupied Moldavia, which bounded the Ukraine on the west. The city of Kherson had been founded as a Greek trading port on the River Dnepr 2,500 years earlier. Whether for historical reasons or not, the Greek force had been allocated the right of the line, based on Kherson, where their main enemies were Grigoriev’s Cossacks. Once the decision to abandon the whole enterprise was taken early in 1919 and the Greeks started to withdraw to the coast, they apparently massacred 500 civilians. In retaliation, Grigoriev decreed that all Greeks taken prisoner should be shot – and they were. By mid-April 1919 Odessa had fallen to the Reds and the Allied forces were busily destroying all their stores and materiel – except for a few tanks that were re-commissioned by the Reds – and embarked the surviving Greeks, some Poles, 10,000 men of Denikin’s army and 30,000 Russian civilians who had reason to fear the Bolshevik take-over.1
Various other evacuations were in train. On 23 April a mixed force of 3,500 French and Greek troops found themselves in a pocket around Sevastopol, facing the advancing Reds with no hope except evacuation by sea. The situation was complicated by a mutiny on board the French destroyer Protêt on 20 April, led by André Marty, an engineer whose name would become infamous when he was the chief commissar of the International Brigades during the civil war in Spain, and was responsible for many executions of loyal Communist comrades whose sole offence was not to toe the Moscow line. His plan in the Crimea was to take over Protêt and hand it over to the Bolshevik navy. Although he was clapped in irons and transferred to another vessel to await trial, a wave of mutinies in the French Black Sea Fleet saw the French flag hauled down on six other ships. The battleship France even displayed the Red Flag, which earned its crew a swift return to Toulon, where twenty-three mutineers were given varying sentences. Marty emerged from prison in 1923 and went on to be elected a Communist député before finding his lethal niche as a murderer in Spain.
During the mutinies, disaffected sailors came ashore looking for trouble. Some were shot by Greek troops using live ammunition to disperse a pro-Bolshevik demonstration in Sevastopol. The crews of the other French ships returned to duty after being promised that they would not be involved in active operations, and would very shortly be repatriated in any case. The final decision of Admiral Jean-François Amet was further complicated by the accidental grounding of a French battleship which needed considerable repairs and could not be abandoned. He spun out negotiations with the Bolshevik commanders to gain time for the ship to be made seaworthy. Meanwhile Vice Admiral Somerset Calthorpe, the Royal Navy Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean and High Commissioner in Constantinople, arrived in the battleship HMS Iron Duke.
Uncompromised by Amet’s negotiations, RN ships and the Greek battleship Lemnos shelled Bolshevik positions on the peninsula and RN personnel set about sabotaging the entire fleet of Russian battleships, cruisers and destroyers in the harbour, scuttling fifteen submersibles at sea. At one point relations between the French sailors and the Greeks deteriorated to the point where they were only prevented from opening fire on Lemnos at point-blank range by their officers removing the firing mechanism from the French ships’ guns. Admiral Amet finally agreed a cease-fire on 26 April, gaining two more days, so that the last Allied troops in Sevastopol were evacuated on 28 April, together with 33,000 Russian civilians.
In June, Denikin’s forces broke through the Red positions hemming them in on the Kerch peninsula, which separates the the north-eastern corner of the Black Sea from the Sea of Azov. This local success was largely due to Trotsky withdrawing forces to fight off Kolchak’s advance that had reached within 400 miles of Moscow. With some help from RAF aircraft and fliers, Denikin reached Sevastopol and pressed on to Kiev and Odessa, pressing further north to Orel – at which moment they were only 250 miles south of Moscow – in mid-October. Had it been possible to concert this advance with Kolchak’s, and squeeze the Red Army from two directions, the whole course of the civil war might have been different.
Instead, the turn of the year saw Denikin routed and pushed back into the Ukraine. By early February it was obvious that another major evacuation by sea was the only way to save lives. Royal Navy, British merchant ships and other vessels headed for Odessa, to find scenes of panic as thousands of civilians and soldiers fought to gain access to the jetties, severely encumbered by the abandoned cars, carriages and baggage of the fortunate ones already embarked. The SS Rio Negro under a British captain could normally accommodate 750 passengers, but took on board 1,500 hungry and sick refugees, many of them suffering from the bitter winter weather, but grabbing literally their last chance of escape. The RN sentries enforcing discipline at the gangway had to run for their lives as Bolshevik machine guns opened up on them after Rio Negro cast off.
Denikin, meanwhile, was being pushed further and further east. In abandoning Novorossisk – which had been his army’s main port of entry for arms, ammunition and even a half-million British uniforms – at the end of March, the panic evacuation by sea was accompanied by wholesale destruction ashore of stores before the British Military Mission was withdrawn. In addition to Royal Navy and British military presence, USS Biddle of the American Black Sea Squadron landed Rear Admiral Newton McCully for a fact-finding tour to advise President Wilson what should be done. After meeting both Denikin and one of the Red Army commanders, he decided the situation was too fraught to get involved in, even had domestic American opinion favoured another intervention. His brief from the White House was merely to protect the lives of American dependents but, to McCully’s eternal credit, appreciating what was going to happen after the Bolshevik take-over, he disregarded his orders and used the cruiser USS Galveston, three destroyers and a merchant vessel to evacuate 70,000 civilian refugees on the night of 26–27 March as the Bolsheviks took the city and port. On 1 April a less spectacular American and British naval evacuation saved more civilians and White soldiers by evacuation from the nearby port of Tuapse.
In April 1920 General Denikin handed command of what was left of his army to General Pyotr Wrangel, leaving Russia to settle in France and write his memoirs, which spread over five volumes. As his name implies, Wrangel was a Balt of German origin. He had had severe differences of opinion over strategy with Denikin, who forced his resignation in February 1920. A month later, Denikin was forced to resign and Wrangel was begged by the other White commanders to return from his brief exile in Constantinople. After succeeding Denikin, Wrangel had a stroke of luck in the shape of the simultaneous three-way war between Poland, Ukraine and the Bolsheviks, which obliged Trotsky once again to take the pressure off the Crimean front. Wrangel’s strict but fair rule in the White-occupied territory made it briefly seem that he was there to stay, but the Reds eventually drove his rump army into a pocket on the Crimean peninsula.
There Wrangel held out long enough for 150,000 soldiers, family members and civilian sympathisers to be evacuated in French, American and Russian warships and merchant vessels from Sevastopol across the Black Sea to Turkey and onward to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and elsewhere. As historian Michael Wilson comments: ‘Forbidden by their government to help (in this evacuation), it was a distressing time for the men of the Royal Navy, especially as the British government had on many occasions been the strongest supporter of the White cause of all the Allied governments.’2 London was here exploiting the technicality that it had not formally recognised Wrangel’s regime, but it was a distasteful episode.
The last military and civilian evacuees left with Wrangel on board the General Kornilov on 14 November. Wrangel then retired to live on his yacht moored at Constantinople. This was rammed and sunk by an Italian steamer that had sailed from Soviet-held Batum. Being ashore at the time of the sinking, Wrangel was unharmed by what was regarded as a Bolshevik assassination plot. In the Russian diaspora he was regarded by many as the most likely figurehead for any revanchist adventure – which never took place. In 1928 his sudden death in Brussels led to rumours that he had been poisoned by an agent of Smersh, the Soviet assassination network.3 Other politically or militarily important émigrés were definitely assassinated in this way, an exception being Anton Denikin, who lived through the Second World War in German-occupied France. For the last two years of his life, he moved to New York City, dying in 1947 at the age of seventy-four.
Several hundred of the White officers and NCOs stranded without money or even food in Constantinople accepted free passage on French ships that took them to Tunisia, where the experienced Cossack, Polish and Russian cavalrymen were recruited to form the 1st Cavalry Regiment of the French Foreign Legion. Because so many of these men had titles of nobility, it was dubbed ‘le Royal Etranger’. A joke of the time has Lt Col Frédéric Rollet – later to be the Legion’s commanding general – inspecting a new intake and asking a new recruit the usual question about what he had done before enlisting. The reply was: ‘I was a general, colonel.’4
During the First World War the Baltic had been a no-go area for the Royal Navy, except for the small number of submersibles that were able to sneak in. However, two days after the cease-fire on the Western Front, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour chaired a meeting to discuss an oblique way of possibly weakening Lenin’s Bolshevik government – by preventing it from recovering all the territory of the imperial Russian empire. It was no secret that the Baltic states had long been yearning for independence from Russian hegemony, and they were now easily accessible from Britain, so the meeting explored whether the three states could use some of the now surplus materiel stockpiled for use against the Central Powers. With much of the eastern Baltic territory still occupied by German forces – whose arrival had been welcomed by the large German-speaking population there – and in considerable disarray, it was decided not to make a military intervention with ground forces.
The better option seemed to be to detach to the Baltic 6th Light Cruiser Squadron commanded by Rear Admiral Edwin Alexander-Sinclair together with a destroyer screen, both to land supplies and support by naval bombardment, if necessary, action by the Baltic states to secure their independence. Since the sea was dotted with German and Russian mines, many of which had broken loose from their moorings and drifted far from the charted minefields, minesweepers were included as part of this force. The complications were twofold: there was a problem supplying coal for them, which did not apply to the larger, oil-fired ships; secondly they had to turn back early as the northern Baltic iced over, leaving the larger ships vulnerable to this menace.
Under the terms of the Armistice, Germany agreed to evacuate its troops and had done so in Estonia, after which the Red Army invaded. Prime Minister Konstantin Pats requested British help. The first form this took was the delivery of arms and ammunition to the Latvian and Estonian governments, but with the warning that no British ground troops would be sent. The RN vessels then continued north to blockade the Soviet naval base on Kronstadt Island and prevent the fleet there from sailing to bombard targets in Estonia and Latvia. Although it was debatable whether the unrest in the Russian fleet would permit ships to be readied for sea, this was a prudent measure in any case.
An astonishing ‘battle’ that earned a VC for Lieutenant Augustus Agar took place there. Several 60ft high-speed coastal motor boats (CMBs) were based just inside Finnish territory and used in agent-landing-and-recovery missions of considerable danger. Lieutenant Agar also led a two-boat attack on the Bolshevik cruiser Oleg inside the Kronstadt anchorage and sank it with a torpedo. When one realises that the torpedo had to be dropped into the water stern-first so that a tug on the control wire could activate the engine – after which the CMB had to get out of the way fast! – it becomes clear that his courage, let alone his achievement, merited the award. A warrior with writing talent, Agar left a very readable account of his operations in the Baltic.5
The first casualty of Alexander-Sinclair’s force was the cruiser HMS Cassandra, sunk by a drifting mine on 5 December. The weather was also against the navy. The cruiser HMS Calypso grounded on a sunken wreck in Libau and two of the destroyers also had to return for repairs after colliding in fog. Naval commanders seemed to be particularly good at interpreting positively the sometimes Delphic instructions from their political masters. Alexander-Sinclair took on board in the metaphorical sense the real risk of a pro-Bolshevik rising in Estonia in concert with the Russian incursions that had already reached within 40 miles of the capital. With two cruisers and five destroyers, he therefore bombarded targets in the rear of the Bolshevik advance, destroying their lines of communication before leaving two cruisers off the coast of Estonia and departing with the rest to Libau in Latvia, also threatened by a Red advance.
On Boxing Day many of the British officers and men were being feted ashore in Reval when they found themselves the target of shells from a Russian destroyer standing offshore, which ran aground due to incompetent seamanship and was taken as prize by the destroyer HMS Wakeful. Another Soviet ship standing offshore was also captured and handed over to Estonia, which re-commissioned both vessels under Estonian names in its own navy.
Alexander-Sinclair faced an even more knotty problem in Latvia, where the strongest support for anti-Bolshevik Prime Minister Karlis Ulmanis was in the hinterland and therefore could not be supported from the sea. The coastal regions were pro-Bolshevik and in some areas where Baltic Germans predominated the population wanted the German troops to remain. Two cruisers and two destroyers were despatched to Riga, where HMS Princess Margaret took on board 350 very relieved Allied and neutral refugees before her captain put on a diplomatic hat and attempted to persuade the German Commander-in-Chief and the High Commissioner to comply with the terms of the armistice and withdraw their occupation forces to the west. They retorted that they had an obligation to remain and impede the arrival of Bolshevik forces but also, paradoxically, that their officers and men – like the Allied officers and men still in uniform – wanted simply to return home. The captain then showed the spirit of the White Ensign when two Lettish regiments mutinied in barracks at Riga. He opened fire on the barracks, ending the mutiny in minutes, although it was plain that the Reds would very shortly take the capital.6
With RN shore patrols policing the harbour area, Alexander-Sinclair arrived and embarked Ulmanis and the ministers of his provisional government, conveying them to Libau, where they hoped to continue the struggle for independence. The British cruisers and destroyers then set course for home ports as winter was closing down the north Baltic but in London the First Sea Lord was pressing the Cabinet for a more positive stance in the following year. Before the British government had come down firmly on one side or the other, a new element entered the equation with the posting to the German Baltic Command of General Gustav Graf Rüdiger von der Golz. Far from a stranger to the Baltic and its tangled ethnic and political scene, he had commanded a German Expeditionary Force in 1918 that supported the Finnish White troops and drove the Reds out of Helsingfors. Since the Inter-Allied Control Commission overseeing the implementation of the Armistice by Germany had originally required German occupation troops in the Baltic states to remain there and prevent the Red Army taking over, Golz decided to exceed his brief and turn the three states with their different roots and languages into German satellites.
Although unsuccessful in this grand design, in 1919 he was to play an important part in defeating the Reds in Latvia and installing a German-biased provisional government that found itself enlisting Estonian occupation forces in northern Latvia to fight both German and Red forces. Instead of fulfilling his mandate to halt the Reds, Golz then attacked the Estonian-Latvian forces, who drove the Germans back. After the peace treaty was signed at Versailles in June 1919, Golz finally ordered a formal withdrawal of all his forces that wished to return home and handed nominal control of the others over to the White Cossack General Pavel Bermont-Avalov, commanding the so-called West Russian Volunteer Army. Despite the name, it was a German cover for a stay-behind force to continue Golz’s policy of Germanising the Baltic. The Latvians drove the Volunteer Army into Lithuania, where it was defeated, after which the survivors finally staggered home to Germany.
NOTES
1. Wilson, pp. 80–1.
2. In his book For Them the War Was Not Over: The Royal Navy in Russia 1918–1920.
3. The name is a contraction of schmert shpionam, meaning ‘death to spies’.
4. D. Boyd, The French Foreign Legion (Hersham: Ian Allan, 2010), pp. 313–4.
5. A.W.S. Agar, Baltic Episode (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1963).
6. Wilson, pp. 93–5.