British occupy Kem

On 7 June 1918 alarming reports reached Murmansk from Kem, a small town on the White Sea. The Finnish White Guard was said to be marching on the town, and its patrols had reportedly been seen only about 40 versts (more than 40 kilometres) away. The commander of the Allied forces in northern Russia, the British General Frederick Poole, who had been based in Murmansk since the end of May, decided to act. As he related in his later report, he sent 150 Royal Marines to Kandalaksha under Lieutenant-Colonel Thornhill, his head of intelligence. There Thornhill was to pick up an armoured train and a detachment of Serbs and marines, move south and drive the Finns out of Kem. The detachment occupied the town without resistance. Poole’s report does not give the exact date of the entry into Kem. The British chronology of the war records the occupation of the town under 7 June, although according to Poole that was only the day the decision to send the expedition was taken.

Kem lay on the Murmansk railway, where the line reached the White Sea, about 670 kilometres south of Murmansk. It had a good harbour, and the river Kem led far inland, towards the Finnish border. As General Charles Maynard later wrote, this made it one of the two places, together with Kandalaksha, where the Germans and Finns could strike at the railway, and at the same time one of the two pillars of the defence of the line. The threat was not imaginary. Since March Finnish volunteers under Lieutenant-Colonel Carl Wilhelm Malm had been active in East Karelia, wanting to join that country to Finland. On 10 April they attacked Kem but were driven off, and withdrew inland, where they formed their own self-defence units in Karelian villages. After the victory of the German-backed Whites in the civil war, the Allies feared another, stronger attack.

Poole admitted that he was not guided by military considerations alone. He had been assured that at least a thousand volunteers to fight the Germans could be recruited in Kem, and a show of force was meant to reassure the local population and convince waverers that the Allies took the defence of the country seriously. According to the American naval history, the advance south of Kandalaksha, until then the furthest point reached by foreign troops, was agreed with the Murmansk Regional Council. To guard Murmansk in place of the troops sent south, a hundred sailors from the American cruiser Olympia came ashore on 9 June.

The forces at Kem grew quickly. When General Maynard arrived in Murmansk on 23 June, Poole listed 250 marines and 250 Serbs at Kem, and at the end of June the captain of the British cruiser Attentive found newly arrived troops there which, according to Newbolt, were holding the town “in a friendly way”. Russian and Soviet historians date the occupation of Kem by the interventionists only to the beginning of July. It was then, after the break between Moscow and the Allies, that the British and Serbs disarmed the Red Guards in the town and took power from the local soviet, and several of its members were shot. The June expedition still took place with the consent of the local Soviet authorities and was directed against the Finns, not the Bolsheviks.