A “company size” deployment of U.S. Army paratroopers
recently arrived in Latvia, following a similar deployment in Poland. This is
clearly in response to the concerns of these countries in regard to Russia’s
bald-faced annexation of the Crimea and attempts to undermine Ukrainian
sovereignty in the eastern portion of its own country. Being members of NATO,
an attack on Latvia and Poland by Russia will trigger Article 5 of the NATO
treaty:
The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or
more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against
them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each
of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense
recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or
Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the
other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed
force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
Unfortunately for the Ukraine, Russia worked immediately to
forestall the possibility that its neighbor might also seek NATO alliance,
following the overthrow of the pro-Russian puppet government. The Kremlin’s
propaganda arm in the U.S., the cable “news” channel RT, recently allowed
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to all but confirm future Russian
military “intervention” in eastern
Ukraine, when everyone outside of Russia knows that Russian agents and
military have already infiltrated the region to undermine Ukrainian authority.
Yet Lavrov (like Vladimir Putin) continues to insult our
intelligence by claiming that the U.S. is “running the show” in the Ukraine, as
if that country has no right to protect its own sovereignty without being told,
just as Russia alleges it is doing itself. The reality, of course, is that
Russia would not be escalating matters unless it had a better reason than they
are giving. In the Crimea, it was to regain control over the Sevastopol naval
complex; in eastern Ukraine, it is to take control of its industrial areas. The
cynicism of the Russians is quite remarkable.
At any rate, it has been a long time since U.S. forces have
deployed in an adversarial posture so close to Russia itself in Latvia
(Belarus—often regarded as Russia’s puppet—forms a “buffer” state between
Poland and Russia). And longer still since the U.S. actually engaged Russian
forces in direct combat. That occurred soon after the overthrow of the Czarist
government in 1917, and lasted from the summer of 1918 to late winter 1920 in
what would be called the “North Russian Intervention.”
Very few Americans even know about this, which is not
surprising considering the fact that it was never mentioned in any American
history book I’ve ever had to read. It went something like this: The
provisional anti-Bolshevik Russian government that gained power after the
overthrow of the Romanov dynasty agreed to continue the war against Germany,
contingent upon receiving money and military aid from the Allies. To that
purpose, the Americans and British landed significant stockpiles of military
equipment at the ports of Archangel and Murmansk in northern Russia, and in the
east in Vladivostok.
But despite the aid, a subsequent Russian offensive against
the Germans was crushed. With the armies in mutiny, and rioting in the streets,
the Bolsheviks were able to overthrow the provisional government, and Lenin
signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, for all practical purposes
ending the eastern phase of World War I. More problems developed between the
Bolsheviks and the Allies when the former broke a free passage agreement with
the Czechoslovak Legion—originally fighting in the employ of the Russians
against the Germans, in the hopes of gaining favor with the Allies and then
independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire—and leaving them stranded in eastern
Russia.
The Allies, sensing the likelihood that their stockpiles of
military hardware would fall into the hands of either the Germans (who had
landed a small force in Finland) or the apparently hostile Bolsheviks with the
war still raging in the West, decided to launch a military expedition to regain
control of these stockpiles, revive White Russian resistance against the
Bolsheviks, and together with the counter-revolutionaries and the Legion
“strangle” the Bolshevik revolution “at
birth”—or so said Winston Churchill—and restore an active front in the east.
The northern intervention in the regions around Murmansk and
Archangel included approximately 14,000 U.S., British and other Allied troops.
The campaign was plagued from the start by the unwillingness of troops to fight
in near Arctic conditions, for a cause few understood the necessity for when
the main conflict was still in the West. Mini-mutinies among American and British
troops was rampant. Greater Russian resourcefulness on their own ground also
stymied Allied operational success. The Allies did manage a brief success along
the Northern Dvina river, and a small U.S, contingent reached as far as Shenkursk
(still far from anywhere, particularly in the vast expanses of Russia). The
Bolsheviks under Leon Trotsky decided to make a “surprise” counterattack on the
American-British forces hold-up in a village called Tulgas but were repulsed.
But the U.S. force of less than fifty men in Shenkursk was attacked by 1,000
Red Army troops, and all but seven were eventually killed.
For the most part, both Allied and Bolshevik forces tended
to remain on the defensive, but with White Russian forces deserting in droves
and the Red Army holding its reserves in the ready, and Allied (particularly
the British) soldiers angry and confused about why they were fighting in Russia
even after the war in the West was over, there was no chance of “success” of overthrowing
the Bolshevik regime; despite the fact that the new Russian regime was seen as
a rogue and dangerous force that was increasingly anti-West in its rhetoric and
actions, the West remained uncertain and divided on how to deal with them.
Meanwhile, the American Expeditionary Force Siberia arrived
in Vladivostok with 8,000 men around the same time, mainly to protect American
property, and did little or no fighting despite pressure from other Allies.
Most of the nearly 200 U.S. soldiers died during that “campaign did so from
being unprepared for the Arctic conditions, and the rest would eventually leave
by April, 1920.
In the end, as many as 120,000 foreign troops were in
Russia—13,000 from the U.S.—supporting the supposedly democratic White Russian
(or at least anti-Bolshevik) cause. They accomplished almost nothing, largely
because there was no consensus on the practicality of military intervention,
the narrow objectives of some intervening countries, the low morale of troops
and the disintegration of White forces in the face of a more dedicated-to-their
cause enemy. All that remains in the memory today from that “war” are “souvenir”
photographs of American soldiers posing with dead Bolshevik soldiers as if from
the Old West, while the Russians have their “trophies” of left behind British
Mark V tanks.
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