of Washington’s excursions of 1945-49 into the Chinese civil war and, more recently, the civil wars of Indo-China.”

But President Wilson, for a complex of reasons that were not altogether clear, created the Siberian Expeditionary Force ( S.E.F. ) as an act of Presidential will. In falling in with the Anglo-French proposals for the venture he seemed (particularly to Lenin) to be disregarding his own Fourteen Points and his assurance that Russia would have an “unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity” to develop in any way she chose.

Late in June, 1918, Wilson was moved toward taking the step when news was received from western Siberia that the Czech legion had been attacked by the Red Guards and would have to fight its way eastward along the Trans-Siberian. That, as British Prime Minister Lloyd George later said, was the “determining factor” in the intervention, but President Wilson had discovered another reason in the stockpile of approximately one billion dollars’ worth of supplies that the United States had sent to Vladivostok to be used by the prerevolutionary Russian armies against the Germans. An expeditionary force could supposedly reclaim those huge supply dumps before they were seized by either the Red or White partisans—or by the Japanese.

On July 6 Wilson announced to his cabinet that he intended to send an expeditionary force to Siberia. Tapping out an aide-mémoire on his own typewriter on July 17, the President formulated the terms on which such a force would operate. The separated Czech detachments would be assisted in linking up and then “get into successful cooperation with their Slavic kinsmen,” by which the President meant the Russians, but which kind of Russians—the Reds, the Whites, the Cossack freebooters who were ravaging Siberia—he didn’t specify. He also ordered the dispatch of a Noah’s ark of civilian helpers including the Y.M.C.A. and the Red Cross, trade experts, agronomists, and labor advisers to work on reviving the Siberian economy.

Wilson completed his plans on August 2, having concluded an agreement with Japan that each country would send seven thousand troops; he ignored the objection of the army chief of staff, General Peyton C. March, that the expedition was a strategic blunder that would provide Japan with a respectable cover for seizing the Russian Far East. The State Department, however, with its strong anti-Bolshevik bias, came down on the side of intervention even after intelligence reports indicated that the Japanese were sending not seven thousand but seventy-two thousand troops into Siberia.

To lead the Siberian Expeditionary Force in operations none could foresee, under circumstances in which the commander’s own judgment would have to be relied upon more than any guidance from Washington, the army wisely chose one of its more intelligent and capable general officers. The Siberian Follies of 1919 could have been disastrous directed by a less cool and calculating man than Major General William Sidney Graves. Scholarlylooking, bespectacled, kindly, and considerate (as his staff described him), anything but a martinet, General

Graves had a saving sense of humor and a strong sense of humanity. He was a curiously American military type that in a later war would be represented by Omar Bradley.

His career, which included the best military education this country could supply, had not been spectacular. Born during the last year of the Civil War, in Mount Calm, Texas, he was the son of a Baptist minister who had become a Confederate colonel. He had taught school before obtaining a West Point appointment. In the forgotten battle of Caloocan (December 31, 1900) during the Philippine insurrection he had been cited for gallantry in action. For many years after that he was secretary of the general staff. Recently he had been assigned to the command of the 8th Division at Camp Fremont, California.

On the morning of August 2, 1919, Graves was ordered to “take the first and fastest train out of San Francisco” and meet Secretary of War Newton D. Baker in Kansas City. At ten o’clock that night—the style of the United States military establishment was much less pretentious during those prePentagon days—he and Baker conferred briefly while seated on crates in the Kansas City railroad station.

The Secretary of War handed Graves a sealed envelope containing two sheets of paper headed “AideMémoire,” saying, “This contains the policy of the United States in Russia which you are to follow. Watch your step; you will be walking on eggs loaded with dynamite,” and then hurried to catch a train back to Washington.

About all that Graves could make of the Presidential directive was that he was to go to Siberia and stay out of trouble. The necessity of helping the Czech legion was emphasized, but he wasn’t supposed to “add to the present sad confusion in Russia.” He was to concern himself with “safeguarding the rear of the Czecho-Slovaks,” but they had no “rear” in the military sense and were simply strung out along the Trans-Siberian. He was further bewildered by a State Department dispatch warning that “Japan’s policy would be to keep the various Russian forces apart and oppose any strong Russian central authority” but offering no advice on how that was to be prevented.

And the War Department, on its part, rose to new heights of ineptness in assigning the components of his expedition. A patchwork brigade of units that had been chasing Filipino guerillas through the tropical jungle was organized in the Philippines and sent to shiver through the sub-zero winters on the Siberian tundra. Those unfortunates in tropical-weight khaki included the 27th and 3ist infantry regiments, a company of telegraphers from the Signal Corps, an ambulance company, and a field hospital. The Philippine regiments were so undermanned they had to be fleshed out with five thousand men from Graves’s division in California.

Graves and his headquarters staff landed at Vladivostok on September 1 —”pitchforked,” as he put it,

“into the melee.” It was a formerly prosperous European-style city with Victorian architecture and trolley lines, now swarming with adventurers, spies, ex-czarist government officials in their double-breasted frock coats with brass buttons, and thousands of refugees. The cafés and cabarets were thronged with the “scourings of the Far East,” and the only saint on the scene was a prostitute named Dizzy Marie who specialized in getting sailors back on their ships.

On the day of Graves’s arrival the eastern and western echelons of the Czech legion linked up at Chita on the Trans-Siberian, and the primary stated objective of the S.E.F. appeared to be obviated. Graves’s force could have turned around and sailed back to Manila, but Washington felt that other good works might be undertaken— the railroads kept running and the Siberian economy revived.

Graves quickly realized that he had been pitchforked into a situation completely different from the Washington view of what was happening in Siberia. A complex and confusing struggle for power had developed. The Japanese aimed to keep the various contenders at one another’s throats while attaining dominance over as much of northeastern Asia as possible. The French and British military missions were busily promoting the White counterrevolution. The Czechs were settling down in garrisons along the TransSiberian and showing no great disposition to return to Europe. Various Cossack desperadoes, most of them subsidized by the Japanese, were carving out bandit empires and occasionally riding out against the growing number of Bolshevik partisan bands. Further to the west, at Irkutsk, Admiral Kolchak had been installed as titular head of a White regime that claimed the right to administer the Siberian provinces.

The American commander knew there was going to be interallied friction the moment he presented himself to General Otani, who announced that he was not only commanding the Japanese forces but was “commander-in-chief of the Allied armies.” Graves politely declined to regard Otani as his superior. He had already decided that the only way to stay out of trouble was to maintain a posture of absolute neutrality—no military adventures such as urged by his allies (not only the Japanese but the French and British), no intrigues to promote one political faction or the other.

During his first few days in Siberia Graves learned that the supposedly helpless Czechs had established a “capital” in Irkutsk and were proposing to govern large sections of Siberia under a self-supplied mandate and with Anglo-French encouragement to engage in a war against the Soviet forces along the Volga far to the west. Intelligence officers informed Graves there were twenty-four separate “governments” claiming sovereignty over Siberia, with nothing in common but enmity for the Bolshevik regime in Moscow. Shortly before his arrival a plebiscite had been held in Vladivostok with the majority voting, to the embarrassment of the Allies and the various factions they supported, for the Bolsheviks. That vote apparently was an expression of resentment against the old czarist officials who were, as Graves observed,

“reaping their revenge on Russians who had dared to act contrary to their beliefs.”

United States headquarters were established in a building formerly occupied by a German trading firm, and Graves made an inspection tour of the eastern end of the Trans-Siberian to determine where American troops would be garrisoned. The luckier doughboys occupied a former czarist barracks in Vladivostok, but most were assigned to guarding bridges and depots along the Trans-Siberian and living in boxcars with the wheels removed. Their privations in the fortybelow winter temperatures were merely a footnote to the general Siberian agony.

Back home their plight, and the dangerous exposure of American interests in the Siberian intervention, were attracting little attention except among liberal intellectuals fascinated by the possibilities of the Russian revolution. National attention was riveted on the climactic battles in northern France and the ensuing armistice. Walter Lippmann as editor of the New Republic did warn the President that he should stick to his original position of “no interference in Russia’s internal affairs.” The Nation and other liberal journals, joined in that warning, and Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote to a friend that Wilson “should be judged by what he was and did prior to August 4th, 1918, the date of the paper justifying the attack on Russia. That was the first of his acts which was unlike him; and I am sure the beginning of the sad end.”

Although American and Soviet soldiers were indeed killing one another in north Russia, in Siberia, there was no “attack on Russia.” An intervention, yes, but otherwise the Americans there presented themselves as peace-keepers and held aloof from the political struggle. General Graves favored neither the Reds nor the Whites. His troops, he told allied officers who tried to pressure him into joining the campaign against the Bolshevik partisan bands, would venture no farther west than Lake Baikal and take part in no “crusade” against Bolshevism.

Certainly from the American viewpoint the anti-Bolshevik Russians were the best propaganda anyone could have devised for Bolshevism. General Gregori Semenov, the commander of an “independent” force based on Chita and largely operating from armored trains, presented himself at United States headquarters. A former Cossack colonel, Semenov was an Asiatic Russian with broad cheekbones, tigerish yellow eyes, and a carefully combed Napoleonic forelock. Early in 1918 he had captured the Soviet garrison at Manchuli and sent its members, beaten half to death, to the nearest Red headquarters; since then his methods had been less for-bearing. “A murderer, robber and a most dissolute scoundrel” was Graves’s opinion.

With his subsidy of a hundred thousand dollars from the Japanese, Semenov ranged the Trans-Siberian in an armored train called The Destroyer . His private car was fitted out with Oriental rugs, silk bed sheets, and several mistresses. With members of his Savage Division, Semenov would steam into a settlement and order his Mongol cavalrymen to round up all the inhabitants. The male villagers were mowed

down with machine guns and most of the nubile women raped. Then the train would roll on to another helpless village. His brain fevered with vodka and cocaine and flashing with apocalyptic visions, Semenov aimed to establish a new Mongol empire, carved out of Manchuria, Mongolia, and eastern Siberia. Meanwhile he presented himself as an American ally, one, as it turned out, whom the Americans would be eager to disavow when he executed sixteen hundred persons in Adrianoka one day and late in 1918 killed a Swedish physician attached to the International Red Cross.

Semenov, however, was a proper gentleman compared to two of his collaborators who had served in Semenov’s regiment on the Caucasian front against the Germans and Turks. Ivan Kalmikov, ataman of the Ussuri Cossacks, had established himself as “dictator” of Khabarovsk, which was an American garrison town. Soon after the Americans arrived, Kalmikov, who was also on the Japanese payroll, captured a United States patrol and held them on charges of not having Russian passports. They were rescued by another American detachment but not before the prisoners had been severely beaten with Cossack knouts. “The worst scoundrel I ever saw or heard of” was General Graves’s verdict. “Kalmikov murdered with his own hands, where Semenov ordered others to kill, and therein lies the difference between Kalmikov and Semenov.”

The other Semenov collaborator was a psychopathic sprig of the Baltic nobility named Alexander von Ungern-Sternberg, whom the czar had promoted to major general for his service on the Galician front. Since then the baron had declared himself the reincarnation of Genghis Khan, gathered a following of Mongol horsemen, Cossack adventurers, and Chinese deserters, and seized the Dauria province of Manchuria. A convert to Buddhism, he misconstrued his new religion and sincerely believed that when he killed all Jews he could lay hands on and all people suffering from disease or who were disabled or elderly, he was doing them a favor.

General Graves was so outraged at being forced to witness the depredations of Semenov, Kalmikov, and Ungern-Sternberg that he could only angrily disavow them as collaborators or comrades in arms. The world, he wrote, believed the Siberian massacres were conducted by Bolshevik partisans, but “the anti-Bolsheviks killed one hundred people in eastern Siberia to every one killed by the Bolsheviks.”

It was all the more galling that an anti-Bolshevik campaign was being mounted in the United States, and many of his countrymen were urging that he join the White partisans. Wilson’s Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, was imprisoning or deporting thousands suspected of carrying the Communist virus, and many American newspapers, besides supporting those measures, reprinted the statement of Kolchak’s liaison officer in Vladivostok that “the United States soldiers are infected with Bolshevism … most of them are Jews from the East Side of New York City. …” This was, to say the least, a gross exaggeration.

Graves, far from being influenced by the journalistic tom-toms, protested against two incidents that seemed to epitomize

the unselective attitude of his government. A representative of the newly organized Siberian cooperatives, which were nonpolitical attempts to revive the Siberian economy, was sent to the United States with his blessing. The Siberian was refused entry by United States immigration authorities, who labelled him a Bolshevik. A few weeks later one of Semenov’s lieutenants made the same journey, without Graves’s blessing, and was warmly received in Washington.”… One can only assume,” Graves wrote, “that character was ignored and political classification alone considered, in determining whether a Russian should be permitted to enter the United States.”

As early as November, 1918, the War Department was urging withdrawal of the S.E.F. , but President Wilson was preoccupied by the coming peace conference and felt he could not take unilateral action without endangering his plans for the League of Nations; meanwhile dominant elements in the State Department were urging that the S.E.F. support Admiral Kolchak in his expected march on Moscow.

Graves and his troops were increasingly revolted by the activities of Kolchak’s forces and their GossackMongol allies; even the hardened veterans of Philippine razzias, in which villages were razed and Moro tribes decimated, found the excesses of Semenov and Kalmikov hard to bear. The populace in and around Khabarovsk repeatedly complained to the American garrison that Kalmikov was kidnaping and murdering everyone he suspected of sympathizing with the Bolsheviks. Just one case in which Graves ordered an investigation involved two miners arrested by the ataman. Graves demanded their release, but Kalmikov’s Japanese “military adviser” replied that they had escaped. Actually Kalmikov had tied stones around the prisoners’ necks and thrown them into a lake. They were among an estimated three hundred persons killed during one of Kalmikov’s experiments in terror.

The ataman flogged his own Cossacks in wholesale lots when they rebelled at his liquidation program. Early in 1919 seven hundred of his troopers deserted en masse, about three hundred fleeing into the countryside and three hundred and ninety-eight of them marching in a body to the headquarters of the ayth Infantry in Khabarovsk, where they begged for sanctuary, which was given to them. The Japanese demanded that the deserters be returned to “little father Kalmikov” for paternal correction, but Graves refused and several weeks later released them to go where they pleased.

Aside from demoralization and the threat of political infection of one kind or another, the Americans in Siberia were prey to epidemics raging in a land where the drinking water came from surface wells. The S.E.F.’S chief surgeon reported to Washington that hundreds had been stricken by “plague, typhus, relapsing fever, typhoid fever, scarlet fever and malignant sore throat.”

With each passing month General Graves became more acquainted with the truth of Oscar Wilde’s epigram about the pleasures of feasting with panthers: “the danger was half the excitement.” The anti-Bolshevik front, he was convinced, was terrorizing the Siberian peasantry in hopes of provoking resistance and

thereby “justify calling for more Allied troops to put down the Bolsheviks.” The appointment of the old czarist General Ivanoff-Rinoff to organize White forces in the eastern provinces of Amur, Primorskaya, Sakhalin, and Kamchatka seemed an attempt to reimpose czarism without the czar, thereby “delaying the settlement of the Russian question by the Russian people,” as Graves put it. General Ivanoff-RinofFs brutal procedures convinced him that Semenov and Kalmikov were not atypical representatives of the White cause. In March, 1919, American intelligence learned that Ivanoff-Rinoff’s troops had dispatched a press gang to the village of Gordyekva. The younger men of the village fled into the forest rather than be forcibly recruited, and ten of the elders were tortured and killed in reprisal. Graves sent one of his staff to investigate. The officer found that the survivors in Gordyekva had armed themselves with old hunting rifles and were prepared to fight to the end if the Ivanoff-Rinoff troops ever reappeared. “General,” the officer told Graves on his return to headquarters, “never send me on another expedition like this. I came within an ace of pulling off my uniform, joining those poor people, and helping them as best I could.”

Such atrocities the Americans attributed not only to the predictable savagery of a civil war but to the encouragement of the Japanese paymasters. The more trouble the Japanese could foment through their hirelings and the longer the outcome of the Red-White struggle could be delayed, the easier it would be for Imperial Japan to move into the Russian coastal provinces and northern Manchuria. Bolshevik partisans evidently came to the same conclusion as United States intelligence and began ambushing Japanese patrols around Khabarovsk. In February, 1919, two Japanese infantry companies and a battery of field artillery—about four hundred men in all—were attacked by the Bolshevik guerillas. Only three escaped with their lives. The Japanese liaison officer begged Graves to send a company of United States infantry, but the latter refused with the statement that he would need proof the Japanese had been attacked by partisans rather than Siberian peasants fighting in selfdefense. The more violent antiCommunist newspapers in the United States reprinted charges in the Japanese press that Graves had acquiesced in the slaughter of his ally’s troops. “Why,” Graves effectively replied, “didn’t the Japanese send their own troops to the assistance of their men? They had an entire division in Khabarovsk and vicinity, while the Americans had but two battalions.”

Graves’s resistance to the idea of committing American troops to a shooting war with the Bolsheviks was causing concern among some elements in the State Department and likeminded foreign ministries, but his superior, General March, cabled from Washington, “I am going to stand by you until hell freezes over.” The army stood firm against involvement even as the State Department was sending its ambassador to Tokyo, Roland S. Morris, over to Vladivostok to investigate the possibility of American participation in driving the Reds back over the Urals.