British land at Vladivostok

On the morning of 3 August 1918 the steamer Ping Suey, led into the harbour of Vladivostok by two Japanese destroyers, came alongside the quay, passing the dressed warships of the Allied powers. On board, from Hong Kong, came the 25th Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment, about 800 men strong according to American reports. It was the first unit of Entente land forces to arrive in Siberia after the Japanese declaration of the previous day. Until then the only Allied troops ashore had been sailors from the warships in the roadstead, among them British sailors from the cruiser Suffolk, who had already landed in April. The American consul John Caldwell reported the same day that eight hundred British soldiers had arrived that morning. Some publications, among them the New York monthly Current History, later gave the date as 4 August.

A battalion of labourers

The battalion’s commander, Lieutenant-Colonel John Ward, was an unusual figure. The son of a plasterer, he had worked from the age of twelve as a navvy building railways and canals, in 1889 he founded a union of navvies, and from 1906 he sat in the House of Commons as a Lib-Lab member for Stoke-upon-Trent. In 1915 he raised a pioneer battalion of the Middlesex Regiment from labourers. His soldiers, however, were graded B1, that is, unfit for front-line service, and served as a garrison in Hong Kong and Singapore. Ward recalled that he had received orders to prepare an expedition to Vladivostok as early as November 1917, but they were cancelled in January. Only in June 1918 was he ordered to bring to Hong Kong the half of the battalion stationed in Singapore, and in July the whole battalion embarked on the Ping Suey.

At ten in the morning the British were awaited on the quay by a Czechoslovak battalion with a band, a guard of honour from the Suffolk, the British consul, representatives of the zemstvo and the Allied commanders. The battalion marched through the town past the Czechoslovak headquarters and then occupied neglected barracks in a suburb. The same day General Dmitri Horvat, who since July had styled himself Provisional Ruler, arrived in Vladivostok from Harbin with about fifty armed officers. Consul Caldwell wrote that his arrival had angered the workers, and the zemstvo threatened a general strike. The town was divided, and the Bolsheviks had won a majority in the recent elections to the town council.

To the Ussuri front

The British were to guard Vladivostok, but the situation in the north was bad. On the Ussuri front about 3,000 poorly armed Czechoslovaks and Cossacks were falling back before the Reds, who were supported by armed prisoners of war. According to Ward, on the day he arrived they lost another battle and had to withdraw to positions a dozen or so kilometres behind Kraevsky station. The American admiral Austin Knight reported that the British battalion would be sent to the front at once rather than left in the town. On 5 August, at a conference of Allied commanders, General Mikhail Diterikhs, commander of the Czechoslovaks in Vladivostok, described the position on the Ussuri as critical. Ward noted that only about 2,000 defenders were left, while their opponents, including Germans and Hungarians from the prisoner-of-war camps, were said to number 18,000 to 20,000. The conference asked London for permission to send the British to the front, and that same day the War Office authorised sending half the battalion there. On the night of 5–6 August 500 infantrymen and 43 men serving four heavy machine guns set off by train through Nikolsk to Spassk, and on 7 August Ward took command of the sector near Kraevsky station. On 9 August the French Siberian Colonial Battalion landed at Vladivostok, and on 18 August its officer, Major Pichon, took over command of this sector of the front.

Ward remained in Russia for more than a year and led his battalion all the way to Omsk. His memoirs, published in 1920 as With the “Die-Hards” in Siberia, are still one of the main sources for the history of British participation in the Siberian intervention.