Battle of Dukhovskaya

At three in the morning of 24 August 1918 the Japanese 12th Division of Lieutenant-General Ōi Shigemoto attacked the Red forces on the Ussuri front, near the village of Dukhovskoye in the Maritime Province. The village lies on the railway from Ussuriysk (then Nikolsk) to Khabarovsk, north-east of Spassk. In English-language literature the engagement is called the battle of Dukhovskaya. The British chronology dates it to 23 and 24 August: on the evening of 23 August the Reds themselves attacked the Allied line, and the next morning the main attack began.

The Ussuri front

Since July units of the Czechoslovak Legion, which had seized Vladivostok, had been fighting the Reds along the Ussuri and on the railway towards Khabarovsk. On the Soviet side stood the forces of the Far Eastern Council of People’s Commissars, headed by Alexander Krasnoshchekov, under the command of Vladimir Sakovich: Red Guards, demobilised soldiers, some Cossacks and internationalist units of former prisoners of war, largely Hungarians. They had several armoured trains. The British 25th Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment under Lieutenant-Colonel John Ward, a member of the House of Commons, which had landed at Vladivostok on 3 August, was sent to the front, followed by a French colonial battalion. On 18 August the French Major Pichon took command of the sector. The Reds were outflanking the Allied wing, and the promised help of the Japanese, landing from 11 August, did not arrive. Around 20 August the Allies fell back from the Kraevsky passing loop to a new line near Dukhovskoye. It was manned by the Czechoslovaks, two British armoured trains with naval guns, the Middlesex machine guns, the French, a Japanese battalion and the Ussuri Cossacks of Ataman Ivan Kalmykov. From 22 August the Japanese division was deploying behind this screen.

The attack of 24 August

On 23 August armoured trains duelled along the line, and at about seven in the evening the Reds attacked along the whole front. After roughly two hours of fighting they were repulsed. Ōi then ordered an attack for three in the morning. The British, French and Cossacks were to form a reserve under Japanese command. Ward later claimed that he received the order so late that he could not reach his appointed place in time, and that the Japanese forbade his armoured trains to take part in the fighting. Nevertheless he led the Middlesex men along the track into the gap between the Japanese columns. The Japanese swung in a wide arc round the Red left wing. Their battery, pushed forward ahead of the infantry line, hit the track behind the enemy’s two leading armoured trains, cutting off their retreat, and one of them caught fire. Japanese cavalry attacked from the flank and cut down a group that had hoisted a white flag. Ward noted that no prisoners were taken. At about half past eight in the morning the Allies occupied Kraevsky.

Outcome

According to Ward, the Japanese had over six hundred killed and wounded, while his battalion did not lose a single man in the attack. Some studies speak of six hundred Japanese killed, but Ward was writing about losses as a whole. Red losses cannot be established. According to the Japanese staff, on the night of 24 August about 5,000 Reds left on eleven trains, and about 2,000 withdrew on foot. On 26 August the Japanese took Shmakovka and the bridge over the Ussuri, and by 27 August the enemy was already across the river. Soviet studies regard 25 August as the end of the Ussuri front. The Congress of Soviets of the Far East, meeting in Khabarovsk from 25 to 28 August, concluded that the city could not be held and decided to switch to partisan warfare. At the beginning of September Kalmykov’s Cossacks entered Khabarovsk, abandoned by the Reds, followed by the Japanese.

Ward called this small battle one of the most decisive of the whole war, because the Reds offered no further organised resistance east of Baikal. It also showed who was really in charge of the intervention. From mid-August all Allied forces in Siberia were commanded by the Japanese General Ōtani Kikuzō, and on 24 August, the day of the battle, the rest of the 12th Division, about 10,000 men, sailed from Japan. Tokyo was also mobilising the 3rd Division for Manchuria, far beyond the number agreed with the Americans, which aroused growing distrust in Washington.