Poole’s charge, as Sims understood it, was “to organize the Czech, Serbian and other units” for the effort to keep alive the war in the east against Germany. Poole (British Army), the most prominent, took passage to North Russia to assume command of all Allied forces there. Bierer, was under orders to proceed to the far side of Scotland and then to Murmansk, Russia.Īt Kirkwall, in the Orkney Islands, Olympia took on several important passengers. 6) departed from Charleston, South Carolina, on 28 April 1918. Ill-equipped, inexperienced, and misguided, American military personnel were trapped in the maelstrom. military personnel be allowed to participate “in operations away from the port.”Īnd yet, come winter, nearly 5,000 American servicemen would find themselves in Russia’s subarctic interior-cold, lost, hungry, and under attack by the Red Army, the Bolsheviks’ increasingly potent and terrifying weapon in what turned out to be the bloodiest conflict in Russia since the Mongol invasions of the 13th century. There was one huge caveat, however: Under no circumstances would U.S. Navy vessels “to stiffen local resistance against the Germans.”

“Use the crews” of Olympia and any subsequent arriving U.S.

“Assist in the recovery” of “Allied stores” of materiel at Archangel.

“Protect and further” the interests of the Allies “generally” in a defeated Russia vulnerable to further German incursions on its sovereignty.

President Wilson, heretofore reluctant to intervene in the Russian Revolution, now supported limited action by the U.S. In the meantime, the Germans had mounted their first successful offensive on the Western Front since trench warfare had brought on a stalemate in 1914. Three weeks later, however, Benson changed his response regarding the Russia situation. Navy was still struggling with a mobilization crisis: how to get American troops to Europe in numbers that could possibly make a difference.

At this point in early 1918, although the United States had been at war with Germany for 11 months, the U.S. That very day, the Bolsheviks had concluded a separate peace with the Central Powers (the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, 3 March 1918) and handed a stunning victory to the Germans, who might soon be able to divert troops from the war against Russia, now finished, to the war against the western Allies, including the United States. The CNO had weightier matters on his mind than the security of Murmansk and Archangel, Russia’s principal Arctic ports. Would Benson authorize the dispatch of a Navy ship to Russia’s Arctic coast? Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral William S.

Navy’s representative in London, forwarded a request to the U.S. Navy ship to North Russia appears in Navy Department sources for 3 March 1918, when Vice Admiral William S. The first inkling of a plan to send a U.S. The best way to do that, it seemed, would be to send in the navies of Britain, France, and the United States to protect stores of Allied supplies and materiel and, where possible, help the Bolsheviks’ enemies to overthrow the regime and reenter the war against Germany. They got to work immediately on plans to get Russia back into the war against the Central Powers, especially Germany. When a group of radical Russian revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks, seized power in Russia and pulled out of World War I, Russia’s allies, including the Americans, were horrified. By early March 1918, the world war was over for the Russians, but the civil war was just getting started. In late 1917, they sued for peace, just as the forces of counterrevolution-supporters of the old regime, certain peasant groups, and national separatist movements-began military assaults on the Bolshevik central government. One of their more popular platforms was “peace at any cost”-a Russian exit from World War I. The most radical and least democratic of these socialists-the Bolsheviks-seized power in November 1917. Meanwhile, a grassroots socialist movement also claimed authority. In place of that autocracy, the new government tried-all at once-to manage new elections, a new constitution, and Russia’s part in the world war. In response to shortages and other economic dislocations, as well as the general mismanagement of the war effort, the Russian people overthrew Tsar Nicholas II and ended four centuries of tsarist rule. Russia was the first of the empires to collapse, in March 1917. World War I pitted Europe’s great powers against each other: Russia, France, and Britain versus Germany and Austria-Hungary. Historical Background: World War I and the Russian Revolution Navy’s role in the operations, and the ultimate failure of U.S. This essay explores the decision to intervene at Murmansk and then Archangel, the U.S. In 1918 the United States entered the Russian Civil War on the side of the so-called “Whites,” anti-Bolshevik counterrevolutionaries.

Maelstrom archangel