Landing at Vladivostok

At about five in the morning of 5 April 1918 detachments of sailors went ashore from the Japanese warships lying in the roads of Vladivostok and began to patrol the city’s streets. The Japanese consul informed the Russian authorities by letter that the rear admiral commanding the squadron was landing an armed party solely to protect the lives and property of Japanese subjects. In the afternoon the British landed about fifty armed sailors from the cruiser HMS Suffolk to guard their consulate. It was the first armed landing by the Entente powers in the Russian Far East.

Warships in the roads

In 1918 Vladivostok was Russia’s chief port on the Pacific and the terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Hundreds of thousands of tons of arms, ammunition and other supplies, sent to Russia by the Allies during the war and never moved west, lay piled on the quays and in the warehouses. After the Bolsheviks took power and left the war, London, Paris and Tokyo feared that the stocks would fall into the hands of the Germans or of armed German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war, of whom there were tens of thousands in Siberia.

In January 1918 Allied warships arrived at Vladivostok. When the Japanese learned that the British were sending the cruiser Suffolk there from Hong Kong, Prime Minister Masatake Terauchi ordered the navy to reach the city first. The battleship Iwami anchored in the roads on 12 January, two days ahead of the British, and on 17 January she was joined by the battleship Asahi, which became the flagship of Rear Admiral Katō Kanji. On 1 March the American cruiser USS Brooklyn returned to the port. Over the following weeks the powers argued over whether and in what form to intervene. The British and French urged Japan to send troops to Siberia, but the United States was opposed, and the Japanese government assured Washington that it would do nothing without agreement with its allies.

Raid on a shop

On 4 April at about eleven in the morning five armed men, described in some accounts as Russian soldiers, entered a Japanese trading office in the centre of Vladivostok and demanded money. When they did not get it, they started shooting. According to the first report of the American consul, John Caldwell, one Japanese was killed and two were seriously wounded. Secretary of State Robert Lansing repeated in a dispatch that three had been killed, and Japanese and Russian studies usually speak of two dead. The perpetrators were not caught.

The Japanese did not wait for an investigation. The next morning Rear Admiral Katō landed sailors from both his ships, two companies according to Russian sources, and occupied the city with them. On 6 April another 250 men went ashore. The commanders of the British and American warships, as well as Consul Caldwell, received a statement from the admiral that his only concern was the protection of the Japanese. The Americans did not land a party of their own, and Caldwell decided that his consulate did not need a guard. The State Department stressed that the Japanese had acted on their own initiative, and the British likewise on their own account.

Protests and the prospect of intervention

The landing took place without a fight, but it caused a storm. The Vladivostok soviet and the soviet in Khabarovsk protested sharply, and the city authorities and the zemstvo gave the American consul to understand that they would agree to an Allied landing, but not a purely Japanese one. The Soviet government regarded the landing as the beginning of intervention. Vladimir Lenin warned the Vladivostok soviet to have no illusions and to reckon with the Japanese advancing, followed by the other Allies.

For the moment this did not happen. The Japanese and British sailors kept order in the city but did not move inland, and in Tokyo the dispute between supporters and opponents of an expedition to Siberia went on. The situation changed in the summer, when units of the Czechoslovak Legion were moving across Siberia towards Vladivostok. In August 1918 Japan and the United States announced the dispatch of troops, and the Japanese presence in the Russian Far East, begun with the April landing, lasted until the autumn of 1922.