Capture of Mudyug Island

On 1 August 1918 an Allied squadron captured Mudyug Island, which guarded the approach to Archangel. The city lies on the main arm of the Dvina, about 40 kilometres from its mouth on the White Sea. The only practicable channel across the bar at the river mouth ran along the long, narrow Mudyug Island, on which the Bolsheviks had placed batteries of guns. The British Admiralty considered a landing at Archangel in the face of organised resistance almost impossible. A few machine guns on the banks of the winding channel or mines hidden in the river current could stop any expedition. The commander of the Allied forces in northern Russia, General Frederick Poole, and the commander in the White Sea, Rear-Admiral Thomas Kemp, therefore decided to attack the fort only a few hours before the arrival of the troop transports, so as not to give the city’s defenders time to prepare.

The expedition was to sail from Murmansk on 3 August, but on 30 July word came that the conspirators in Archangel could wait no longer. That same evening, as the British official naval history relates, the cruiser Attentive, the seaplane carrier Nairana and the French armoured cruiser Amiral Aube put to sea. Each of them carried part of a French colonial battalion, and Amiral Aube also a hundred British Royal Marines. In thick fog in the throat of the White Sea the ships became separated, and Amiral Aube ran onto an obstruction, which later turned out to be an old wreck. It was her guns that were to silence the fort and she was carrying most of the landing force. Kemp and the commander of the land forces, General R. G. Finlayson, decided to attack without her nonetheless.

At about 3 a.m. on 1 August Attentive approached the lightship at the entrance to the channel. Her commanding officer, Captain Edward Altham, demanded by telephone that the fort’s commandant surrender unconditionally within half an hour, threatening him with bombardment from the ships and from the air. The commandant at first agreed, but as the soldiers were preparing to land he sent a message by tug that he would fight. Kemp shifted the attack to the northern end of the island. At about 10 a.m. Attentive opened fire at a range of about 4.5 kilometres, and seaplanes from Nairana began bombing the batteries. According to the British official history the defenders had two batteries of four 152 mm guns each and one with four 102 mm guns. Their fire was mostly inaccurate, but one shell struck at the base of Attentive’s forward funnel and put two boilers out of action. After about ten minutes of shelling the batteries fell silent.

Captain Alliez’s Frenchmen went ashore. They met weak resistance from rifles and machine guns, and by evening the remnants of the garrison had fled upriver by boat. According to Russian sources, six of the battery’s eight guns were damaged, several defenders, including the battery commander, were killed by shrapnel, and a powder magazine was set on fire by a bomb dropped from a seaplane. The Allies, according to various accounts, had only two or three wounded. In the southern part of the island a post was found from which a minefield could be detonated, so the mines ceased to be a danger. In the afternoon Amiral Aube, now freed, joined the squadron, and at about 4 p.m. the yacht Salvator arrived with General Poole. Altham later wrote that a strong position, which could easily have repulsed so weak a force, had been taken by “sheer bluff”.

During the night the Bolsheviks scuttled two icebreakers in the channel to block the way to the city, and began evacuating Archangel. On the morning of 2 August the squadron squeezed between the wrecks and sailed up the Dvina. Mudyug Island later gained grim notoriety. At the end of August the interventionists set up a prisoner camp there, which in the following years became a prison for opponents of the new government, known in Soviet tradition as the “island of death”.