Allied intervention in the Russian civil war was not the product of either fervent anti-Bolshevism or a grand military plan. Thus, on 15 January 1920, the Czechs handed Kolchak, his entourage, and the gold over to the revolutionaries at Innoken′tevskaia Station, near Irkutsk, before establishing a formal truce with the pursuing forces of the 5th Red Army (the Kuitun Agreement) and pushing on for Vladivostok.By 2 September 1920, when the last member of the legion had been evacuated from Vladivostok, it is reckoned that 67,739 of its complement (swelled by 1,600 Russian women who had married Legionnaires and some 10,000 civilians) had been dispatched from the Pacific port, bound for Trieste, Marseille, Le Havre, Bremen, and other points of entry into Europe. The retreat of Ober Ost and the collapse of the territorial settlement brokered through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) left a power vacuum that was contested by local nationalist forces and Soviet Russia, although the nationalists also often fought among themselves, such as in the Ukrainian–Polish War and the Polish–Lithuanian War. )Consequently, by early 1919 there were approximately 4,500 U.S. and 8,000 British forces in North Russia, together with smaller contingents of British colonial forces (including Australians, New Zealanders, and Canadians), Serbs, Italians, and others, while in Siberia, in addition to 40,000 men of the Czechoslovak Legion, 9,000 men of the American Expeditionary Force (Siberia), commanded by General William S. Graves, were disembarked, together with 4,000 Canadians; 1,500 British and colonial troops; and several thousand diverse French, Polish, Chinese, and other Allied forces (including the Italian Legion), all of them dwarfed by the 70,000-strong Japanese force. The legion’s 6th Rifle Regiment was assigned to guard the White leader’s train.
The British, French, Japanese, Czechoslovak, and other Allied forces that were sent to Russia, and the matériel and logistical support their governments supplied to the Whites and other forces, may not have been sufficient to enable them to defeat the Bolsheviks, but it can be argued that they were sufficient to have driven the Red Army to the point of exhaustion by 1920 and to have denied Soviet Russia victory in the Soviet–Polish War, which would have enabled it to export the revolution into central Europe.Although it was to assume a counterrevolutionary guise, Allied intervention in the “Russian” Civil Wars had its roots in the various military missions that were dispatched to the Eastern Front during the First World War to offer advice to and to liaise with the tsarist army, as well as to conduct pro-war propaganda. (Attacks on Jewish communities during the conflict form a central motif of Isaak Babel’s collection of short stories, Red Cavalry, which was based on his own experiences in Poland in 1920.) Again the Reds were successful, capturing Wilno/Vil′na on 14 July and Grodno on 19 July 1920 (and thereby sealing the secret military alliance with Lithuania that was an annex to the Soviet–Lithuanian Treaty of Moscow of 12 July 1920). They were soon posing a serious threat to Bolshevik authority. The British launched a series of attacks then retreated, fighting all the way.
In July 1918, against the advice of the After the end of the war in Europe and the defeat of the Central Powers, the Allies openly supported the anti-Bolshevik White forces. They marched under a flag that had the Russian tricolor on one side and the crown of St. Wenceslas in the center of the other side, superimposed on fields of white over red. Thanks!
As Dunlop’s comrades-in-arms on the western front laid down their weapons, the 19-year-old private in 2/10th Battalion, the Royal Scots, was in a vicious firefight with 2,500 Bolsheviks, supported by gunboats.For four days Dunlop’s company, alongside American riflemen and a few Canadian field guns, defended their nondescript piece of Russia. POLISH LEGION. Different nations had different goals: from simply maintaining a …
But the legacy of suspicion caused by the Allies’ military support for the Whites, and their associated spying and sabotage in Moscow and Petrograd, lasted long after the last soldier had left.
To help him, strong reinforcements – the British North Russian Relief Force – arrived in May largely at Churchill’s instigation, commanded by General Sir Henry Rawlinson. POLISH LEGION. Podcast James Morley, The Japanese Thrust into Siberia, 1918 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), 329-331. On 7 January 1920, having already (since 10 December 1919) assigned the supreme ruler’s train to the slow line, as anti-Bolshevik forces and a flood of refugees poured east from Omsk, and then (on 27 December 1919) having had Kolchak’s train detained altogether at Nizhneudinsk, the legion’s commander, General Syrový, formally took charge of Kolchak’s echelon, with instructions from the Allies to afford him (and his accompanying gold reserve) safe passage to the Far East. He was so surprised he just sat there as if he was nailed to the chair…”By now, it was rapidly becoming evident that the British-led force was too small and its Russian allies too unenthusiastic for the intervention to end in anything but failure. Chiefly active in Siberia during the “Russian” Civil Wars, but also a participant in the Soviet–Polish War, this force had its origins in the formation at Samara, from 1 July 1918, of a Polish volunteer unit (formally, the 5th Polish Rifle Division) under Walerian Czuma (1890–1962), a veteran of the Polish Legions (formed by Józef Piłsudski in Austrian Galicia from 1914 to fight against Imperial Russia). The Allied intervention in north Russia was partly intended to link up with Kolchak, but his regime was corrupt and unpopular and he lost the support of his most formidable force of 40,000 former Czech and Slovak prisoners of war and deserters, known as ‘the Czechoslovak Legion’.