British troops reach Omsk

On 18 October 1918 the British 25th Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment under Lieutenant-Colonel John Ward arrived by train in Omsk in western Siberia. The date of arrival is given by Ward himself in his memoir With the “Die-Hards” in Siberia. The battalion, which had landed at Vladivostok on 3 August and fought on the Ussuri, had travelled several thousand kilometres by rail through Manchuria and Siberia. The British chronology of the war records that a few days earlier, on 14 October, the British had reached Irkutsk, which the Czechoslovaks and Siberian volunteers had taken in July.

Across Siberia

Ward received the order to move to Omsk when the battalion was already settling into winter quarters at Spassk. After a conference in Vladivostok with General Alfred Knox, head of the British military mission in Siberia, he set off west. Ward recalled that while still in Vladivostok Japanese officers had questioned the British right to fly the British flag on the train. At the stations delegations of local people greeted the battalion with bread and salt. In Irkutsk a banquet was held, officially in honour of Pyotr Vologodsky, chairman of the Siberian Council of Ministers, but in practice to welcome the first British regiment in Siberia. Ward remarked that along the whole route from Vladivostok to Irkutsk he had not seen a single Russian flag, and said so openly in a speech. When he promised that his band would play “God Save the King” the next day, the hall gave him an ovation.

Omsk welcomed the British with ceremony. The station was decorated with the flags of all the Allied countries, among which, according to Ward, Russian ones predominated for the first time. On the platform waited the commander of the military district, the deputy foreign minister and representatives of the city authorities, and women offered the soldiers bread and salt. Ward wrote that the presence of about 800 British soldiers gave the inhabitants a sense of security, and a general’s wife confessed to him that for the first time in a long while she could sleep in peace. The battalion was, however, a garrison unit. Its men were not fit for front-line service.

Politics in Omsk

The British arrived in Omsk just as the city was becoming the capital of anti-Bolshevik Russia. Less than two weeks earlier, on 9 October, the Provisional All-Russian Government, known as the Directory, had moved here from Ufa, which was threatened by the Reds. It had been formed in September by merging the Socialist Revolutionary Komuch of Samara, the Siberian government and other regional governments. The British High Commissioner, Sir Charles Eliot, and French diplomats tried to reconcile the socialists of the Directory with the conservative Siberian government, which was backed by officers and Cossacks. Ward doubted from the start that these efforts would succeed. On 13 October Vice-Admiral Alexander Kolchak, former commander of the Black Sea Fleet, arrived in Omsk. At the beginning of November he became minister of war, and on the night of 17–18 November Cossack officers arrested the Socialist Revolutionary members of the Directory, after which the Council of Ministers proclaimed Kolchak Supreme Ruler of Russia. Ward was in the city and witnessed this coup. Later the British 1/9th Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment, sent from India via Vladivostok, also reached Omsk.