American Soldiers in Siberia

By Sylvian G. Kindall

American Soldiers in Siberia by U.S. Army officer Sylvian G. Kindall (first published in 1945), recounts his experiences as a member of the American Expeditionary Force Siberia from 1918 to 1920. AEF Siberia was involved in the Russian Civil War in and around Vladivostok at the end of World War I following the October Revolution. The futility and unpreparedness of the mission is apparent throughout the book, as is the author’s intense disdain for the Japanese troops, who were witnessed in repeated acts of violence against an unarmed citizenry. President Woodrow Wilson’s claimed objectives for sending troops to Siberia were both diplomatic and military: (1) rescue the 40,000 men of the Czechoslovak Legions, who were being harassed by Bolshevik forces as they attempted to make their way along the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Vladivostok; (2) to protect the large quantities of military supplies and railroad rolling stock that the United States had sent to the Russian Far East in support of the prior Russian government’s war efforts on the Eastern Front; (3) the need to “steady any efforts at self-government or self defense in which the Russians themselves may be willing to accept assistance.” At the time, Bolshevik forces controlled only small pockets in Siberia and Wilson wanted to ensure that neither Cossack marauders nor the Japanese military would take advantage of the unstable political environment along the strategically important railroad line located in this resource-rich region. For similar reasons, about 5,000 American soldiers were also sent to Arkhangelsk (Archangel), Russia by President Wilson as part of the separate Polar Bear Expedition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Burtyrki Books
• Release date: Jan 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839742545

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Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

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AMERICAN SOLDIERS IN SIBERIA

The Forgotten War

Sylvian G. Kindall

American Soldiers in Siberia was originally published by Richard R. Smith, New York, in 1945.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

FOREWORD 6

Chapter One — INTRODUCTION 8

Chapter Two — NO ARMISTICE FOR SIBERIA 11

Chapter Three — WINTER AND SPRING AT SPASSKOE 25

Chapter Four — A FIGHT AT KRAEFSKI 36

Chapter Five — EXPEDITION TO A BOLSHEVIK STRONGHOLD 50

Chapter Six — TROUBLES GUARDING THE TRANS-SIBERIAN 63

Chapter Seven — CAPTURING A BOLSHEVIK OUT-GUARD 73

Chapter Eight — AMERICANS MEET AMERICANS 80

Chapter Nine — SOME JAPANESE METHODS 92

Chapter Ten — WHEN COSSACKS GO TO WAR 100

Chapter Eleven — A FIGHT WITH HENCHMEN OF THE JAPANESE 109

Chapter Twelve — AFFAIR AT IMAN 117

Chapter Thirteen — AFTER A BOLSHEVIK CHIEF 124

Chapter Fourteen — SPASSKOE AGAIN 132

Chapter Fifteen — LAST DAYS 139

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 149

DEDICATION

* * *

DEDICATED

TO

THE FIGHTING FORCES IN THE PACIFIC

by one whose only distinction is that he happened to be the first American to qualify for the award of the Purple Heart for a wound received in a fight with the Japanese.

—Sylvian G. Kindall

FOREWORD

American Soldiers in Siberia, by U.S. Army officer Sylvian G. Kindall recounts his experiences as a member of the American Expeditionary Force Siberia from 1918 to 1920. AEF Siberia was involved in the Russian Civil War in Vladivostok, Russian Empire, at the end of World War I following the October Revolution. The futility and unpreparedness of the mission is apparent throughout the book, as is the author’s intense disdain for the Japanese troops, who were witnessed in repeated acts of violence against an unarmed citizenry.

President Woodrow Wilson’s claimed objectives for sending troops to Siberia were both diplomatic and military. One major reason was to rescue the 40,000 men of the Czechoslovak Legions, who were being harassed by Bolshevik forces as they attempted to make their way along the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Vladivostok, and it was hoped, eventually to the Western Front. Another major reason was to protect the large quantities of military supplies and railroad rolling stock that the United States had sent to the Russian Far East in support of the prior Russian government’s war efforts on the Eastern Front. Another stated reason was the need to steady any efforts at self-government or self defense in which the Russians themselves may be willing to accept assistance. At the time, Bolshevik forces controlled only small pockets in Siberia and Wilson wanted to ensure that neither Cossack marauders nor the Japanese military would take advantage of the unstable political environment along the strategically important railroad line located in this resource-rich region.

At the same time, and for similar reasons, about 5,000 American soldiers were sent to Arkhangelsk (Archangel), Russia by President Wilson as part of the separate Polar Bear Expedition.

The American Expeditionary Force Siberia was commanded by Major-General William S. Graves and eventually totaled 7,950 officers and enlisted men. AEF Siberia included the U.S. Army’s 27th and 31st Infantry Regiments, plus large numbers of volunteers from the 13th, 62nd Infantry Regiments and 12th Infantry Regiments of the 8th Division, Graves’ former division command.

Armament included M1918 Browning Automatic Rifles (BAR) and Auto-5 shotguns/trench clearers, M1903 Springfield rifles and M1911 .45 caliber pistols, depending on their duties.

Although General Graves did not arrive in Siberia until September 4, 1918, the first 3,000 American troops disembarked in Vladivostok between August 15 and August 21, 1918. They were quickly assigned guard duty along segments of the railway between Vladivostok and Nikolsk-Ussuriski in the north.

Unlike his Allied counterparts, General Graves believed their mission in Siberia was to provide protection for American-supplied property and to help the Czechoslovak Legions evacuate Russia, and that it did not include fighting against the Bolsheviks. Repeatedly calling for restraint, Graves often clashed with commanders of British, French and Japanese forces, who also had troops in the region and who wanted him to take a more active part in the military intervention in Siberia.

The experience in Siberia for the soldiers was miserable. Problems with fuel, ammunition, supplies and food were widespread. Horses accustomed to temperate climates were unable to function in sub-zero Russia. Water-cooled machine guns froze and became useless.

The last American soldiers left Siberia on April 1, 1920. During their 19 months in Siberia, 189 soldiers of the American Expeditionary Force Siberia died from a variety of natural and battle-related causes. In comparison, the smaller American North Russia Expeditionary Force experienced 235 deaths during their 9 months of fighting near Arkhangelsk.

Chapter One — INTRODUCTION

In Siberia the ten thousand soldiers serving in the American Expeditionary Force learned what Japanese treachery was like. This was more than twenty years before the sneak attack upon Pearl Harbor. In Siberia, too, these American soldiers often were the unhappy witnesses to outrageous brutality practiced by the Japanese soldiers upon the then helpless Russian peasants. The short fact is that in Siberia the typical combatant Japanese in his treatment of the Russians was the same gloating, sadistic, bloodthirsty brute that Americans have found him in the Pacific War. But, it seems, the experiences of American soldiers with Japanese treachery and bestiality in Siberia seldom have been heard about in the United States. This is mainly true, no doubt, because the Siberian expedition itself has always been something of a mystery—the army that the United States forgot to bring home, as it has been called. The quip is almost correct, for the Siberian force never returned as a body to the continental United States. The 31st Infantry sailed down from Vladivostok to the Philippine Islands, and there remained. The 27th Infantry likewise went to the Philippines, but later found a permanent home in Hawaii. The only other American groups in Siberia were a few service units. These were brought down to Manila and broken up, their personnel eventually drifting back to the United States or elsewhere as casuals.

But destiny has determined that the return from Siberia was not the end of experiences with the Japanese for either the 31st or the 27th Infantry. Fateful December 7,1941, found the first of these two regiments still on duty in the Philippines. All in haste it prepared to meet the brown hordes that soon were pouring ashore, transport-load after transport-load, along the beaches of Luzon. Later, it withdrew with the larger part of MacArthur’s army into the high, jungle-grown mountains of Bataan Peninsula overlooking Manila Bay. All know the heartbreaking story that then followed—weeks of heroic fighting against hopeless odds from the battered foxholes of Bataan, sickness, starvation, empty cartridge belts, and, then, despair and bitter surrender and the long death march down from the mountains to the prison camps outside Manila.

Similarly, on the Seventh of December the 27th Infantry was at its own island station, Hawaii, and on the morning of that day from the porches of its barracks heard the beginning of the new war dropping down from the skies onto the area of Pearl Harbor, in the near distance. Some months later this regiment moved from its island home, and in steaming jungle places somewhere in the South Pacific it met with again and hunted down the same buck-toothed, yellow-bellied, stump-legged, slant-eyed, idiotic-grinning, wind-sucking, belly-grunting, skunk-stinking animal that, years before, it had learned to despise in Siberia. And now, as these lines are written, press dispatches mention the return of this regiment to the Philippines with the gallant forces of MacArthur’s, from which place it was that both this regiment and the 31st Infantry had sailed in 1918 upon the Siberian adventure.

After the empire of Japan, as we now know it, has been mopped from the map, and Hirohito, the mikado of the she-apes thrown, let us pray, into his carp pond, and left there for the Royal carp to decide the what-about of his being the Son of Heaven, and Shirayuki, his snow-white horse, ridden down Tokyo’s streets by Admiral Halsey, who has expressed this wish, there will then be a time to gather and tell all the horrible facts of the Pacific War. In that day there will be, of course, stories of Japanese bestiality and treachery surpassing anything within the experiences of the Siberian Expeditionary Force of twenty-five years ago. In the interval of waiting, however, it is hoped that the reader will find interest in hearing something about the earlier encounters of American soldiers with Japanese methods, and find interest as well in other fortunes of the strange, bygone odyssey of our forgotten army in Siberia.

The book itself is a personal narrative, dealing almost entirely with events which I took part in myself, or saw with my own eyes, or heard about directly from others. Being a personal narrative, it cannot aim at being a history of the American Expeditionary Force in Siberia, nor is it intended in any way as constituting the views of our government upon any phase of the Siberian adventure. At the same time, it is believed that the experiences of all who served in Siberia were so similar on the whole that a narrative from any one person should give a fair picture of what many others saw and did there, and the impressions which they formed. It must be admitted that many of us arrived in Siberia expecting to find there a cruel, frost-blasted land, with sleighs bounding from dark forests chased by packs of hungry wolves, polar bears riding around on chunks of ice, and salt mines deep underground where exiles toiled at forced labor—all as pictured in the old geography of our schooldays. But left there with memories of a country of great natural beauty and potential wealth, resembling in these particulars and many others the region of our West. We arrived there, too, I regret to say, considerably misled by insidious propaganda about the Russian people, the sources of which probably will never be completely uncovered. But left there, most of us, I am glad to believe, filled with appreciation of the hospitality and the general decency of the Russian people. Above all, we learned in Siberia about the courage and endurance of the Russian soldier, and sometimes said that, given good arms and equipment, probably no one could surpass him as a fighter. As recently as four years ago when the Wehrmacht, one hundred and seventy divisions strong, started clanking its way across the Ukraine, one heard on every hand our war soothsayers predicting that Russia could last only three or four months. Some were even putting the time down to six weeks. But events have discredited these prophets. True, all were not so recklessly sure of their crystal balls as to risk decisive statements, and it is not difficult now to find individuals who seem to think that they must have believed all along that Hitler was having a little trouble with his precious intuition when he decided upon an invasion of Russia. But I like to remember that four years ago it was only from among persons who had served in the Siberian expedition that I heard unequivocally the prediction that the Russians would be able to withstand the first great shocks of the invasion of their homeland, and ultimately would give the Germans the mauling of their lives.

The manuscript for this book is not a new one. Actually it was completed not many years after the events and experiences which it attempts to describe took place. But the time was a period when, having some few years before at the Washington Disarmament Conference talked our national selves into scuttling a good part of our navy and abandoning the right to fortify our outpost of strategic islands, we were looking across the Pacific through the wrong end of the telescope and insisting that no danger to our shores could come from Japan. In consequence of this national complacency concerning Japan, and because my employment happened to be in government service, there was no immediate hope of my being permitted to offer to the public a book in which my hatred of the Japanese was spread upon almost every page. The manuscript was left to wait, therefore, until there would no longer exist any reason of state against its publication. Such a time did eventually arrive, and all of a sudden, with Pearl Harbor. If I were now to revise the manuscript to match the seriousness of the current world, I probably would be inclined to say less about the many frivolous things which happened among American soldiers in Siberia twenty-five years ago. Certainly, I would deal at greater length with the grand scheme the Japanese then had for annexing eastern Siberia to their empire. I probably, too, should want to give more space to interesting facts about the Russian people. But I have preferred to let revision rest. It is true that the change in a word or a phrase, sometimes a sentence, has been necessary here and there in order to give the book an aspect of time from the present, but essentially it remains as when written many years ago.

Chapter Two — NO ARMISTICE FOR SIBERIA

In August 1918 the 27th and 31st regiments of U.S. Infantry sailed from Philippine stations, out past Corregidor and Batman, north through the China Seas and the Sea of Japan. A week from Manila they rode into the sheltered waters of the Golden Horn and disembarked along the littered inside shore of the bay. Before the troops, beyond an idle waterfront piled with rotting war materials, spread in view the Lord of the East, Siberia’s once aspiring city, with its imposing stone edifices and glittering church domes faced upon a background of overtopping hills.

British, French, and Japanese troops had landed at Vladivostok a few days in advance of these two regiments of Americans. But before any of these others, a vanguard of Czechoslovaks coming overland out of Europe, with rifles and machine guns captured along the way, had entered from the land side, fought an army of Red Guards from street to street, and driven them from the city.

The city had not yet recovered from this fighting. All public utilities were still out of order. The air reeked from ruin and neglect. Beneath bullet-riddled fronts along broad Svetlandskaya, piles of chipped stone and splintered glass still lay unswept from the streets. Meanwhile, White Russians by the trainloads had begun pouring back into the relieved city. Everywhere new leaders were proclaiming themselves. A dozen new White governments to replace the recently collapsed Kerensky regime were being talked up and shouted up.

Into the midst of this scene of disorder and excitement the American Expeditionary Force to Siberia dumped itself from the transports, to enter upon what was to become perhaps the strangest adventure in our country’s history. Perplexity characterized its actions from the beginning. On the very first day the astonishing fact developed that there was not a single person among the arriving army who had been entrusted with any information from anywhere as to what the army was expected to do after getting ashore at Vladivostok. Rumors soon took the place of definite orders and directions. Some heard that the expeditionary force would aid the Czechoslovaks, whose wandering army was scattered from one end of Siberia to the other, and currently was supposed to be trying to fight its way out of the country. Some heard that it would be used in an effort to recapture numerous bands of American and Austrian prisoners of war that had been running loose ever since the downfall of the old Russian army in Siberia, and now were reported to be gathering arms and moving back toward Germany. Some heard that from Vladivostok this American army would move westward by railroad across Siberia and Russia and lend its assistance in the re-establishment of an Eastern Front against the Central Powers. Lastly, many heard and let themselves believe that the American army had been sent to Siberia to crusade against Bolshevism.

To add to the confusion of ideas, the commanding general of the Japanese forces at Vladivostok issued an order misrepresenting himself as having been named by the unanimous consent of the Allied governments to command all Allied forces in Siberia. His bold order called upon the other forces to join his own and work together for the common aim. But American officers were not willing to believe that anyone in authority at Washington had intended that the command of the American army was to be turned over to a Japanese officer. In consequence, the senior American officer promptly cabled to Washington for a verification of the Japanese order. Instead of an answer to the important question raised, the reply from Washington was a message of vague information that Major-General William Sidney Graves soon would arrive at Vladivostok from the United States with instructions about what was to be done. Unwilling to be idle in the meantime, the senior officer consented to combine some of his troops with the Japanese for the time being and work with them for the common aim they were insisting upon. But what was meant by the common aim, no one pretended to say.

Along the Ussuri valley to the north of Vladivostok still clung a succession of Red defensive lines thrown athwart the railroad. The Czechoslovaks and a battalion of British infantry were attacking. Daily trains bore their dead and wounded down from the battle zone. To this front soon moved a Japanese division, while one regiment of American troops, the 27th Infantry, tagged at its rear. The Bolsheviks were swiftly driven from the Ussuri valley, and on September 7 the advance guard of the Japanese-American force entered the city of Habarovsk on the Amur River, and lifted the flag of the rising sun and the star spangled banner side by side over the railroad station. Meanwhile, the harried Bolshevik army had passed beyond the city and was in flight up the north bank of the Amur.

From Habarovsk a part of the Japanese force and Companies C and E of the 27th Infantry continued in pursuit of the Bolsheviks. In a far north country, somewhere beyond a small log-built town by the name of Ushuman, a thousand miles by route from Vladivostok, this pursuit came to an end. The Bolsheviks were left in a scattered retreat up the Zeya, a northern tributary of the Amur River which emerges from a vast region of impenetrable forests, known in Siberia as the taiga. The two American companies rested from the chase at Ushuman and Alekseyevsk and later, on October 11, rejoined their regiment at Habarovsk.

General Graves arrived at Vladivostok from the United States in September to assume command of the American Expeditionary Force in Siberia. With him the general brought a shipload of casuals to be assigned to the two regiments already in the field. A month before this time the general and most of the casuals accompanying him were waiting at Camp Fremont, California, and were expecting orders which would send them abroad for service in France. But, such strange fortunes dealt the World War, they now found themselves upon the other side of the wrong ocean, five thousand miles farther from the Western Front than they were when war with Germany was begun.

Contrary to expectations, the arrival of General Graves did not remove any of the mystery which hitherto had surrounded the American Expeditionary Force in Siberia. The fact turned out to be that the general himself, although he had been sent direct from the United States to assume command, had not been entrusted with any information which could be construed to define what had been the real purpose in sending American troops to Siberia.

One of the first acts of General Graves after taking command, however, was to announce a strictly neutral policy for his troops. The natural consequence of this policy was a period of inactivity, which only heightened the strangeness of the Siberian situation. With the armies of the world locked elsewhere at the time in one gigantic, far-extending struggle, with American soldiers fighting their great days at St. Mihiel and Argonne, here in remote Siberia were ten thousand American soldiers sitting about, as idle as hobos, asking each other what their part of the war was supposed to be.

It was during this period of enforced idleness that a message came one day from across the seas that an armistice had been signed in France and the Great War was at an end. This Armistice, ending the World War, also properly marks the end of the uneventful first phase of the intervention of American troops in Siberia.

If these troops had been returned to the base at Vladivostok immediately after the armistice, put aboard transports, and returned to the United States or to former stations in the Philippine Islands, the American expedition into Siberia very likely would have passed into history as a mere episode of the great war. But these troops were not immediately withdrawn. Instead, they were left to shift almost forgotten in Siberia until the snows of one long dreary winter, and then another, had come and gone. During the years 1919 and 1920 they became involved, in one way or another, with many serious situations in Siberia that were only distantly, if at all, connected with the World War. Many were killed and many others wounded. It was the rise of new and grave events in Siberia after the fighting in Europe had ceased that now sets America’s Siberian adventure apart as a distinct chapter in our military history. With some of the fights and skirmishes and incidents that happened there during the strange years our army stayed on and on after the World War was over, this personal narrative is mostly concerned.

In the week that the Armistice was signed four American companies followed the first snow of the oncoming winter into the city of Spasskoe, three hundred miles to the south of Haborovsk, and took up winter quarters inside an immense board wall enclosure, called a compound. A block away from this compound was another, into which a battalion of Japanese troops had already moved.

At the Spasskoe garrison Lieutenants Paolo Sperati, Montgomery Rice, Richard Sandusky, and I joined Company C, 27th Infantry. The four of us shared a set of upstairs rooms in brick quarters formerly occupied by officers of the old Russian army. Built to withstand the Siberian winters, the walls of this building were three feet thick and its windows fitted with double thicknesses of panes. In a corner of each room, reaching to the ceiling, stood a huge round stove, like a water tank set upon end. From the top of the stairway an entrance reached our set of rooms through a dark tunnel-like hallway with a padded door at each end. Our front windows looked across a