The Savage Wars of Peace by Max Boot

Author:Max Boot [Boot, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780465038664
Publisher: Basic Books

“Filth and Cooties”

The irony of the Battle of Tulgas is that it began on the day the World War ended—November 11, 1918. “It was hard for our men to realize,” wrote General Ironside, “why they, of all the great armies which had fought so well and so long, should have to go on fighting in a cause which they understood so little.”

There was no good answer. The original objectives that had led to the sending of expeditionary forces to Russia—saving the Czechs, reviving the Eastern Front, preserving war supplies—no longer applied. The Allies decided to retain their forces mainly because they were loath to abandon their White Russian allies. By mid-November, retreat was impossible in any case. Archangel was iced in.

Spirits sank among the troops when they realized that they would be trapped in Russia for the winter. French colonial troops chanted “the war is over” and refused to fight, as did portions of the Slavo-British Legion and the White Army. All these mutinies were put down at gunpoint, but clearly morale was plunging, along with the thermometer.

The north Russian winter did not help. In December and January, there were no more than four hours of daylight. Life seemed to be enveloped in a cold, gloomy twilight, with temperatures frequently plunging to 40 or 50 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. “The wind howled and blew,” wrote U.S. Private Donald E. Carey, a 25-year-old school teacher from rural Michigan. “It caught one’s breath; chilling through in almost no time, shooting its intense cold to the very marrow.”

The extreme cold made it difficult to perform even the simplest task outdoors. Frostbite was a constant menace, and anyone who touched a gun barrel with his bare hand felt as if he were holding red hot metal. But the extreme cold also had its positive aspects: Sanitation was good and wounds were antiseptic since anything outside froze instantly.

The men stationed in Archangel had a relatively easy time of it, frequenting the town’s cafés, theaters, and bordellos and getting plenty of rations, even if they had to steal them from the warehouses that they were supposed to be guarding. Next down the hardship scale were troops on the railroad front; they were quartered in relative luxury inside railroad cars. Those on the river front had the hardest time; they had to make do in Russian peasant huts.

Relations between Americans and Russians were generally good, but the doughboys did not enjoy being quartered in these primitive dwellings. “Our small, dingy, unventilated room was overrun with cockroaches and harbored a stench. . . . ” Private Carey complained. “The filth and cooties produced such irritation that at times it seemed I would become insane.”

Another major irritation to the Yanks was the British officer corps, the hearty Tiny Ironside excepted (the Americans applauded him as “the soldier’s type of commanding officer”). Stories spread that the British were hoarding medical supplies and shipping crates of Scotch to their officers instead of food to the doughboys. The Americans were thoroughly irritated

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