The Allies evacuate Archangel

On the morning of 27 September 1919 the last British units left their positions on the Dvina near the village of Lyavlya and, covered by two monitors, sailed down to Archangel, where transports were waiting for them. That day General Edmund Ironside and his staff also went on board. The British Blue Book on the evacuation says that the embarkation was carried through “without any hitch”, and Rear-Admiral John Green, commanding the ships in the White Sea, reported that some 8,000 British troops were embarked in the final evacuation of Archangel. So ended the Allied presence in Archangel, which they had entered in August 1918. Only the Russian troops of General Yevgeny Miller remained at the front. The last British troops sailed from Murmansk on 12 October.

The decision to leave

The war for which the troops had been sent north had ended in November 1918, and at home weariness with the intervention was growing. According to a later statement in the House of Commons by the Secretary of State for War, Winston Churchill, the War Cabinet had decided as early as the first week of March 1919 that Archangel and Murmansk should be evacuated before another winter set in. To withdraw the troops safely, a volunteer relief force was raised in Britain. The first brigade, under General Grogan, arrived at Archangel on 26 May, and the second, under General Sadleir-Jackson, at the beginning of June. It also included some 200–300 Australians who had been waiting in England to go home. From then on the units that had spent the winter in Russia were sent home one after another. The Americans and the French were the first to leave. The last American infantry left Archangel in June.

London was still considering an advance up the Dvina to Kotlas to join hands with the armies of Admiral Alexander Kolchak. The plan fell through when, after the failure of his spring offensive, Kolchak was retreating beyond the Urals and the low water in the Dvina prevented the flotilla from going further. Trust in the Russian allies was undermined in July by mutinies in several White units. In one of them the soldiers killed their British officers, and on 20 July a mutinous garrison handed the town of Onega on the White Sea over to the Reds.

A parting blow

General Henry Rawlinson, the former commander of the Fourth Army in France, was sent to direct the evacuation of both ports and arrived at Archangel on 12 August. Two days earlier, on 10 August, Sadleir-Jackson’s brigade and Russian troops attacked the Reds on the Dvina to push them back before the withdrawal. According to the Blue Book, more than 2,000 prisoners and 18 guns were taken, and the front moved forward about 30 kilometres. Two soldiers from the Australian companies of the 45th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, received the Victoria Cross for the August fighting.

Rawlinson and Ironside believed that once the British had left, the Russians would not hold Archangel. Rawlinson urged Miller to move his best troops to the Murmansk front, but the general, backed by an order from Kolchak to hold Archangel to the last, refused. The British therefore left him food, arms, ammunition and coal for the winter.

Who sailed

The evacuation did not cover only the troops. Any Russian who feared Bolshevik revenge could apply to leave. In August Ironside estimated that there would be some 8,000 civilians wishing to go. Fewer came forward. According to the Blue Book, 6,535 Russians and people of other nationalities were taken away from Archangel, mostly to the Baltic states and South Russia. Ironside planned that the first ships would carry people bound for the Baltic states and Poland, and a Polish contingent of 300 was to be among the last to leave. From June to 12 October almost 49,000 people in all were taken out of northern Russia, among them nearly 29,000 British officers and men.

The Blue Book states that from the spring of 1918 to October 1919 the British lost 983 men killed, died, wounded and missing in northern Russia, including 327 killed. Miller held out through the winter. When the front collapsed, he fled Archangel on an icebreaker in February 1920, and on 21 February the Red Army entered the city.