French land at Odessa

On 18 December 1918 units of General Albert Borius’s French 156th Infantry Division landed in the port of Odessa. That same day the French command demanded that the troops of the Ukrainian Directorate leave the city, and the Ukrainians began to withdraw. Most Western and Polish works give 18 December as the date of the landing, while according to Russian and Ukrainian studies the first units were already going ashore on 16 and 17 December. The British chronology of the war records the French landing only under 20 December. A week earlier the Ukrainians had taken Odessa, leaving the Allies only the port and a few seaside quarters.

An expedition to southern Russia

France had been preparing this expedition since the autumn. As early as December 1917 Paris and London had divided the lands of the former Russian Empire into zones of action, and Ukraine and the Crimea fell to France. Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau hoped that control of the Black Sea ports and Ukrainian grain would make it possible to contain Bolshevism and recover at least part of French investments in Russia. After the armistices with Turkey and Germany the way through the Straits lay open. At the end of November Allied warships arrived at Sevastopol, and on 2 December the French battleship Mirabeau entered the Odessa roadstead. The troops were to come from the Salonika front, from the Allied Army of the Orient. The 156th Division belonged to the Army of the Danube, which had been placed at the disposal of General Henri Berthelot.

The fall of the hetman upset the French calculations. They had expected to land in a country ruled by Pavlo Skoropadskyi, allied with the Entente. Instead, on 14 December the hetmanate fell, and almost the whole of Ukraine passed into the hands of the Directorate, which they regarded as a movement close to Bolshevism. Its troops stood in Odessa. The French, however, did not want to fight the Ukrainians themselves.

The fight for the city

The Whites took on the task of attacking the Ukrainians. According to Viktor Savchenko, a Ukrainian historian of Odessa, on the evening of 16 December a volunteer detachment under General Aleksei Grishin-Almazov (PL), former commander of the White Siberian Army, who had come to Odessa as Denikin’s representative, advanced from the port into the city. It was supported by Polish soldiers who had arrived in Odessa at the beginning of December, while French officers directed the fire of the Allied warships. Savchenko puts the White forces at about two thousand men and the Ukrainian garrison of the city at no more than two and a half thousand. The warships shelled the Ukrainian positions for two days. Some Western historians, however, believe that there were only brief skirmishes and that the Ukrainian withdrawal had in essence been agreed with the French.

On 18 December the French command presented the Directorate with an ultimatum: its troops were to leave Odessa. Symon Petliura did not want war with the Entente, whose recognition he was counting on. He ordered the fighting stopped and a withdrawal of about 40 kilometres to the north, where the Directorate formed its southern front. General Borius had orders to occupy only Odessa and did not allow the Whites to pursue the Ukrainians.

The next day, 19 December, the French announced that they were taking Odessa and its surroundings under their protection, and Borius appointed Grishin-Almazov military governor of the city. Grishin-Almazov announced that he would govern in the name of General Anton Denikin’s Volunteer Army.

How many French

The number of soldiers who went ashore at that time is variously given. The French researcher Pascal Fieschi speaks of a first landing of 1,800 men, Savchenko of about 5,000 in the 156th Division, including colonial battalions. In the following weeks further transports arrived, and according to Ukrainian studies the Entente forces in Odessa grew to about 15,000 soldiers; in January General Philippe d’Anselme took command. Polish units were also concentrating in the city, and from them the 4th Polish Rifle Division of General Lucjan Żeligowski was formed.

The French soldiers, weary after four years of war, had no appetite for fighting in Russia, and the intervention did not last long. In the spring of 1919, under pressure from the forces of Otaman Nykyfor Hryhoriv, who had gone over to the Bolsheviks, the Allies evacuated the city at the beginning of April.