Poole in Murmansk

On 24 May 1918 the American cruiser USS Olympia, a veteran of the Battle of Manila Bay of 1898, sailed into Murmansk. According to the history of the American navy, among her passengers was the British Major-General Frederick Poole, appointed commander of the Allied forces in northern Russia. Poole, who had earlier spent two years in Russia, wrote in his first report to the Secretary of State for War that he had gone ashore at Murmansk precisely on 24 May to take up command. On that day, he stressed, the North Russian Expeditionary Force was born. The British chronology of the war records under the same date that Poole landed at Murmansk “to organise” this force.

Murmansk, an ice-free port on the Barents Sea founded during the war, mattered to the Allies for two reasons. Huge stocks of war materials delivered for the Russian army lay there, and the Murmansk railway linked it with Petrograd. After the Peace of Brest-Litovsk and the German landing in Finland it was feared that the Germans or the Finnish Whites would seize the railway and the port, take the stocks and set up a submarine base there. Paradoxically, the first Allied troops came here at the invitation of the Bolsheviks. On 1 March, while the fate of the peace hung in the balance at Brest, the Commissar for Foreign Affairs Leon Trotsky instructed the Murmansk soviet to accept “any assistance from the Allied missions”. The chairman of the soviet, Aleksei Yuryev, concluded an oral agreement with the representatives of the Entente, and at the beginning of March about 170 marines went ashore from the British ship HMS Glory. Later they were joined by detachments from the British cruiser Cochrane and the French Amiral Aube. At the beginning of May sailors from Cochrane clashed at Pechenga with a detachment of Finnish White volunteers who wanted to annex this strip of coast to Finland, and forced them to retreat.

According to his orders from the War Office, Poole was to base his force on soldiers of the Czechoslovak Corps, about 20,000 of whom were to travel across Russia to Archangel and Murmansk and sail from there to France, together with local volunteers and a few thousand Allied soldiers. Reality looked different. The Czechs did not come, because, according to Poole, the Soviet government had stopped them under German pressure, and soon fighting broke out between them and the Bolsheviks. Poole counted about 500 sailors from the ships’ landing parties, about 300 Frenchmen, mostly invalids, scattered along the railway, about 1,400 Serbs, many of whom were sick and half of whom had no rifles, about 1,200 Russian Red Guards guarding the railway, of doubtful value and attitude towards the Allies, and about 500 Finnish Red Guards, refugees after the lost civil war, two hundred of whom were suffering from scurvy and hunger. The Allies held Murmansk with a detachment at Kandalaksha, and intelligence warned of a possible attack by the Finnish Whites on the railway. The main defence, as Poole himself admitted, was the marshes and the lack of roads, along with the guns of the ships in the port.

Over the following weeks Poole’s force began to grow. On 29 May 400 Royal Marines arrived, and further reinforcements came in June. Relations with Moscow, which under pressure from Berlin demanded the withdrawal of the Allies, quickly deteriorated, and the local soviet finally broke with Lenin’s government and sided with the Entente. At the beginning of August Poole led an expedition to Archangel. His arrival in Murmansk is regarded as the beginning of the Allied intervention in northern Russia, which was to last until the autumn of 1919.