RED DAWN

At 6 o’clock on the evening of June 24, 1919, a train pulled into the small town of Romanovka, Russia. When the cars came to a halt, 33-year-old Lt. Col. Robert L. Eichelberger stepped lightly onto the station platform. The U.S. Army intelligence officer was en route from Vladivostok to Suchan (present-day Partizansk), a coal mining hub some 35 miles farther east as the crow flies. Eichelberger would later serve with distinction under General of the Army Douglas MacArthur in the Pacific theater of World War II. But on that warm, still evening seven months after the end of World War I he’d been sent to negotiate the release of five American soldiers taken captive while fishing along the Suchan River and to investigate why U.S. troops in the region had been suffering frequent attacks by Bolsheviks—the communist followers of Soviet Chairman Vladimir Lenin then engaged in a brutal civil war against monarchist supporters of the executed czar, Nicholas II.

Though Eichelberger found Romanovka generally quiet the evening of his visit, the next day it was the scene of a bloody fight some historians consider the last battle of World War I.

into Russia in the fall of 1918 to secure the thousands of tons of arms, munitions and other war materiel provided to imperial Russia before the communist revolution that deposed Nicholas in March 1917. Troops from a dozen nations—including the United States,