prisoners in our determination to punish these murderers. And when we caught the Commissioner of Borok, a sergeant tells me, we left his body in the street, stripped, with sixteen bayonet wounds.”38
According to Lt. John Cudahy, U.S. soldiers let loose their firepower upon the “massed Bolsheviks, felling them like cattle in a slaughter pen.” On the day of the First World War armistice, Toulgas, on the Northern Dvina river, where Leon Trotsky led the Bolshevik defense, was turned into a “smoking, dirty smudge upon the plain,” as Capt. Joel Moore, Lt. Harry Meade, and Lt. Lewis H. Jahns described it in an eyewitness account.
Given three hours to vacate, the authors describe a “pitiful sight” in which the inhabitants of Toulgas turned “out of the dwellings where most had spent their whole simple, not unhappy lives, their meagre possessions scattered awry on the grounds.” With their houses engulfed by roaring flames, “the women sat upon hand-fashioned crates wherein were all their most prized household goods, and abandoned themselves to a paroxysm of weeping despair, while the children shrieked stridently, victim of all the realistic horrors that only childhood can conjure.” Sad as the situation was, the authors wrote, when “we thought of the brave chaps whose lives had been taken from those flaming homes, for our casualties had been very heavy, nearly one hundred men killed and wounded, we stifled our compassion and looked on the blazing scene as a jubilant bonfire.”39
Such dehumanization in war and desire for revenge would go on to spawn the ‘atrocity producing environment” that characterized the war in Vietnam and other Cold War conflicts.40 Moore, Meade, and Jahns’s history spotlights the “enormous” and “terrific” Red Army losses under bursts of “murderous” shelling and “dreadful trench mortars” that could shower the enemy at eight hundred yards with a “new kind of hell.” The British contingent had many First World War vets who had been gassed or wounded and were prone to “homicidal excesses,” as were the Japanese.41 A Canadian platoon from rural Saskatchewan included “unpremeditated murderers who had learned well the nice lessons of war and looked upon killing as the climax of a day’s adventure.” They committed gratuitous acts with Americans such as closing a school for the storage of whiskey, and threw peasants out of their homes, looted personal property, stole rubles from dead Bolsheviks, and ransacked churches.42
British General Edmund Ironside said he was “overpowered by the smell” upon visiting the Archangel prison; suspected Bolsheviks were crowded into dank cells sometimes sixty to a room, with the windows sealed and baths closed.43 Ralph Albertson concluded that the
spoliation of scores of Russian villages and thousands of little farms and the utter disorganization of the life and industry of a great section of the country with the attendant wanderings and sufferings of thousands of peasant folk who had lost everything but life, was but the natural and necessary results of an especially weak and unsuccessful military operation such as this one was.44
In southern Soviet Russia, the British deployed tanks and bombed enemy transport vehicles, bridges, towns, and villages. For the first time, they deployed gas bombs that caused respiratory illnesses (one victim had his eyes and mouth turn yellow and then died). The British were supporting viciously anti-Semitic White Russians under the command of General Anton Denikin. Winston Churchill, then a minister in Lloyd George’s government, urged Denikin to prevent the massacre of Jews in “liberated” districts—not out of concern for the Jews but because they were powerful in England and could impinge on his political career. He stated in 1953 that the day would yet come when “it will be recognized … throughout the civilized world that the strangling of bolshevism at birth would have been an untold blessing to the human race.”45
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
