Fighting at Chamovo

The British chronology of the war records fighting at Chamovo on the Archangel front between 12 and 14 September 1918. Chamovo is a village on the left bank of the Dvina, upstream from Bereznik, where the Vaga flows into the Dvina. Ever since the Allies entered Archangel, General Frederick Poole had been sending small detachments up the Dvina in river steamers, supported by Royal Navy vessels. On 31 August Commander Edward Altham took over the flotilla, and at the turn of August and September a battalion of the Scottish regiment the Royal Scots and a newly arrived battalion of the American 339th Infantry Regiment were sent to the river. As the British official history of the war at sea writes, Poole then abandoned the idea of reaching Kotlas before winter. He chose Bereznik for winter quarters, but first wanted to clear the Reds out of the wedge of land between the two rivers.

According to that history the operation began on 14 September. One column moved along the right bank of the Vaga, the other along the left bank of the Dvina towards Chamovo. The British history puts the distance from Bereznik at about 15 miles, or 24 kilometres, while American participants wrote of about 50 versts. The infantry was supported by the monitor M25, two gunboats, two motor launches and a tug. The vessels steamed in thick fog, along a winding channel between islands and sandbanks. About two miles short of Chamovo they surprised the armed Bolshevik steamer Moguchy, moored by the bank. The same vessel had attacked the Allies near Bereznik in August. The steamer was faster and could have escaped, but two well-aimed shells from the monitor’s guns put it out of action. The crew jumped into the water and were fished out by the British. When the fog lifted, other Red vessels could be seen fleeing upriver.

The village was surrounded by dense forest, and the infantry was several hours late, because the fog had slowed it down even more than the ships. Altham therefore landed a party of sailors to hold Chamovo until the troops arrived. Halfway through the village the sailors came under heavy fire and had to fall back to the river so that the ships could fire. The fire from the bank died down, but there was still no infantry, and shells from hidden guns were raining down on the ships. Altham judged that the ships alone could not hold the village and turned back to Bereznik. In the evening soldiers of the Royal Scots entered Chamovo without a fight. American soldiers of the 339th Regiment recalled that the Scots had met stiff resistance near Chamovo and called for help, and that the regiment’s first battalion set out from Bereznik around 15 September.

The fighting did not end with the capture of the village. The next day Altham sent the monitor upriver, and it sank a Red steamer that was attacking a post on the bank. Americans from a company that had reached Chamovo during the night described how at dawn Reds from a gunboat killed two Scots who had mistaken it for a supply boat. As the whole flotilla was moving to Chamovo, the motor launch with Altham on board struck a mine. The explosion blew off its stern and killed two members of the crew, while the commander himself escaped with only bruises. By the end of the month his minesweepers had destroyed 24 mines and cleared the channel as far as Pushega, about 80 kilometres from Bereznik.

The discrepant dates in the sources probably arise because the fighting on the Dvina was continuous at the time, and the accounts describe different phases of the same operations. The British naval history judged that the operation achieved more than merely sinking one gunboat. From then on the Red vessels avoided combat with the flotilla and used their superior speed only to escape. On the Soviet side, on 11 September the scattered units in the north were combined into the 6th Army. In the second half of September the Allies advanced several dozen kilometres further up the Dvina, but when before winter the ships had to leave ahead of the ice, the troops on the river were left without their support against a more numerous enemy.