The U.S. troops, highly trained for their mission in the cities and towns of pre-Prohibition America, failed to execute the plan perfectly. As is often the case with large numbers of armed men sharing the same area who don’t speak the same language, actual fighting soon broke out, although it was more fisticuffs than large-scale troop maneuvers. The first U.S. casualties took place on September 16, 1918, after an encounter with the Bolsheviks, who had somehow caught wind of the fact that they were being invaded and teamed up with German and Austrian prisoners to take on the Allies.
Any attempts by Graves to help the Czech legion was soon abandoned when he saw that they were in fact in control of Vladivostok, and controlled many points west along the Trans-Siberian Railroad. A large group still remained west of Omsk, where the Bolsheviks were negotiating with them to try to get the Czechs to leave. They were dragging their feet because they were in fact helping the Whites oust the Bolsheviks in many of the towns along the railroad. Instead of needing to be rescued, the flexible Czechs kept themselves busy fighting the Bolsheviks up and down the railroad line wherever possible. And Graves had noticed that the Allies, despite professing that one of the aims of their mission in Siberia was to evacuate the Czechs, had neglected to send any ships to take them home.
By October more Allied troops had rolled into Vladivostok and spread throughout Siberia. The total now included 9,000 Americans, 1,000 French, 1,600 British, 72,000 Japanese, and the implausible sight of 12,000 Polish soldiers — all invading Russia. The Japanese, perhaps anticipating their Pearl Harbor gambit, glibly told Graves that their troops were there simply to load steel and coal onto ships.
General Graves, his options hampered by his position as the head of an invasion force, continued his desperate battle to not wage a war, against mounting odds. The British and French wanted to exploit the Siberian front to oust the Bolsheviks and replace them with a government that would continue the fight against Germany, as implausible as it was. The Japanese troops continued to occupy land and not give it back.
As one confused U.S. soldier put it, “What in hell are we doing here? After a while, we figured we had come over there to keep the Japanese from taking over, the English came over to keep an eye on us, and the French to check on the English, and so on.”
Meanwhile the fighting in the western front took a dramatic turn during 1918. The German high command, General Erich Ludendorff, knew that the German army had only one more shot left to win the war in 1918. The Allied blockade had by 1918 taken its toll on the Germans, who were facing severe food shortages. Ludendorff shifted manpower from the Russian front to the west, but instead of sending all available divisions, he kept some back to keep an eye on the chaos in Russia, and his western armies gained approximately forty divisions. Ludendorff also planned to use new shock troop tactics that had been successful against the Russians. Ludendorff rushed to knock out the British by cutting them off from the French. The British would be forced to evacuate before the American reinforcements, which were arriving daily, could make their presence felt. But his first two massive German drives in northern France, in March and then in April, despite achieving impressive breakthroughs in places, soon bogged down due to a lack of reinforcements and matériel.
One of the legends that came out of the Siberian affair was this: Of the eight train cars of the tsar’s gold nabbed by the Czech legion, only seven were bartered to the Soviets for the legion’s freedom (along with Kolchak) and free passage out of Russia. What happened to the other trainload of gold?
No one really knows, of course. The Soviets were not scrupulous record keepers, but it’s clear that the amount of gold bullion, inherited by the provisional government from the tsar and which then ended up in Bolshevik hands, was considerably less than the tsar had held. And the Czechs weren’t talking except to refute the story, in 1924, by saying that some of it had been stolen under the noses of the Russian guards. It is indisputable that after World War I the Czech Legion Bank was established in Prague. The bank building features relief scenes of the legion’s retreat through Russia. In a bit of possible payback, the bank was looted by the Soviets in 1945 when they took over the country after World War II.
Ludendorff’s third drive in the center of the line toward Paris in May was spectacularly successful at first, but once again the German troops ran ahead of their supplies. Their attacks were blunted at the tip with the help of fresh American troops thrown into melees at Belleau Wood and Château-Thierry. The Germans, at last poised for victory against the disintegrating French army, eagerly rushed their next assault without disguising their intentions particularly well. The still-formidable French artillery caught the German shock troops as they were forming up for their attack, and despite giving ground, prevented the Germans from breaking through.
That summer both armies were attacked by the Spanish influenza, killing thousands, but the hungry German army took the hit harder. Their morale started to crack, made worse by the growing presence of the corn-fed Americans. Ludendorff, still wishing to make one more diversionary thrust against the French before knocking out the British, cranked up his fifth assault on July 15. The French again learned of the hour of attack and scattered the Germans with a well-timed artillery barrage. The Germans, without tanks, were initially successful, but with American, Italian, and British support the French line held; a counterattack, with Americans and French colonial troops in the lead, hit the Germans in the flank. The Germans were forced to retreat, and the Allies, now building momentum, never slowed down.
Ludendorff, stressed by the failure of his last grand offensive, turned on the Kaiser in October 1918 and insisted that he negotiate peace, long after the Kaiser had come to the same conclusion. The Germans skillfully conducted a fighting retreat across their entire western front. Ludendorff quit at the end of October, and by the beginning of November the Kaiser had fled. The fledgling German republic, practically stillborn, signed the Armistice, ending the fighting on November 11, 1918.
A week after the end of the war-to-end-all-wars, things were starting to look up for the Allies in Siberia. On November 17, Admiral Kolchak took over the White Russian government in the landlocked Siberian city of Omsk and appointed himself Supreme Ruler of all the Russias. The Allies, casting about for a strongman to grab power from the Reds, took a liking to the Supreme Ruler and started feeding him supplies down the Trans-Siberian Railroad. While a ruthless reactionary, tsarishly untroubled about ordering the deaths of those who opposed him, the former head of the Russian Black Sea Fleet convinced the Allies he was an enlightened leader, and Wilson was ready to recognize him as the legitimate head of Russia. Despite losing the obvious rationale that had been conveniently provided by the war, the Allies remained stubbornly undeterred in their position — the noninvasion invasion must go on.
Graves pressed on, continuing his brilliant strategy of doing absolutely nothing amid the growing tumult of the Russian Civil War. The White armies, filled with Cossacks, made initial gains against the Bolsheviks. The Czech freelancers, unimpressed with Kolchak and realizing the writing was on the wall for anyone opposing the Bolsheviks, decided to finally take advantage of the fact that the war was over and just go home. Now they found themselves trapped in the growing chaos of the civil war.
In the spring of 1919, the Kolchak government gave its dubious stamp of approval to the Allies’s plan to run the decrepit Siberian railroads. Graves, happy to have his soldiers actually doing something that didn’t involve boozing and whoring in Vladivostok, moved his forces out of the city and took control of a section of the railroad in support of the Kolchak government. The American troops, however, quickly got into a confrontation with a local White Russian Cossack leader, Grigori Semenov, who was nominally part of Kolchak’s forces but was backed by the invasion-practicing Japanese. By this time, Graves had started to receive thousands of rifles meant for the Kolchak forces, but he refused to hand them over to Semenov because his wild Cossacks had been taking potshots at American troops (and anyone else who got in their way) whenever possible.
Semenov stopped a train of weapons bound for Kolchak in Omsk and demanded 15,000 rifles. After a two- day standoff, Semenov backed off and the train chugged on to Omsk. So, in this noninvasion invasion, designed to shorten a war that had already ended, the United States had confronted a friend of a friend that was backed by yet another friend, natch. This was just one of the many scenarios Graves faced in Siberia on which Wilson’s memo provided no guidance.
In July 1919 Graves was instructed by Washington to visit Kolchak in Omsk, as the American government and the Allies had the month earlier promised to provide his government with munitions and food. Graves arrived in Omsk after a long train ride through Siberia, past Lake Baikal, deep in the interior… in time for the collapse of Kolchak’s government. He came away unimpressed with the Land Admiral.
Kolchak, without support of the Czech legion and realizing that the bulk of his army was in fact an unruly
