It was the war that never was. No medals were struck, no official history ever written, and it cost the UK almost £50 million. The money was wasted, according to many in the know; the gesture proved fruitless, a triumph of hope over experience.

The North Russian Expeditionary Force was led by Lieut-Colonel Edmund Ironside, who was recalled from the Western Front by War Secretary Winston Churchill and appointed Chief of the General Staff to the commander in chief of the Allied Forces, North Russia, whose headquarters were in Archangel.

“Your business in North Russia is to hold the fort until the local Russians can take the field,“ he was told. “You are to prepare for a winter campaign.”

Ironside inherited anything but a cut-and-dried theatre of operations. At the time of the evacuation in spring 1919, when the Siberian forces of Admiral Koltchak failed to link up with the North Russia Expeditionary Force to sweep to victory, he was in charge of 13,000 British, 4000 American and 2000 French troops.

With a lesser man in command than Ironside, the Archangel venture could have ended in catastrophe. Instead, the usefulness of the Allied army in Archangel in stabilising the North Russian government was called into question and he, along with Lord Rawlinson, oversaw a successful withdrawal.

Ironside might have seen it coming, despite the bravery of his troops. Of arrival on the scene in May 1918, he recalled: “The coming winter campaign might have daunted anyone. We were proposing to occupy a great area with very few troops, none of whom had any experience of Arctic weather, with the exception of the Canadians.

“There were no troops trained to run on skis or snow shoes, The whole country was one vast forest, a swamp in early and late summer, deep in snow in winter. There were no roads, so that mechanical transport could not be used. Countless tracks ran in every direction and no existing maps showed where they ran.”

Nevertheless, Ironside and his force soldiered on, and with armaments, aircraft and Royal Navy ships supplied by Great Britain, the struggle see-sawed, a Bolshevik gain here, an allied victory there.

Royal naval personnel played a key role, with a dozen awards for services in Russia later made to officers and men, plus nine mentions in despatches. Allied ships suffered significantly at the hands of the Bolsheviks, no less than three sunk or mined on the North Dvina River, including HMS Sword Dance, HMS Cicala, and HMS Monitor.

But the naval battle in which they were involved had been a much-needed morale booster, a message to all ranks and White Russians from General Ironside reading: “Best congratulations on brilliant & complete victory.”

The victory was a minor affair in the political affairs pre-occupying the heads of state, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. They had signalled their naked ambition by overthrowing the government of Alexander Kerensky in November 1917, thus beginning a reign of terror throughout Russia. The Bolsheviks (known as ‘Bolos’ to their enemies) needed support to carry out the propaganda which would make their campaign successful. For this, they turned to Germany, which readily supplied it, eyes on seeing Russia disorganised as it would become easy prey for exploitation of its vast resources.

Russia paid dearly. Under the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk the country lost control of Finland, the Ukraine and Southern Russia and had to pay £300 million in gold. Outrage among true Russians at the signing of the Treaty led to the Bolsheviks setting about the extermination of all educated people. Wholesale arrests were made, churches closed, and thousands of innocent people were thrown into jail or executed.

The Commissar in Petrograd was shot by an officer. As a reprisal, the Bolos immediately arrested 5,000 White Russian officers and while they were being transported to Kronstadt, their barges were blown up with a great loss of life. Further outrages included the decapitation of a mother and her children while they were having dinner, and an unbelievable decree by the Association of Anarchists in the town of Savator. In compliance with decisions of the Soviet of Peasants, Soldiers and Workers of Kronstadt, this proclaimed the abolition of the private possession of women.

“The social inequalities and legitimate marriage having been an instrument in the hands of the bourgeoisie,“ the proclamation went on, “all the best species of beautiful women have been the property of the bourgeoisie.”

The right to possess women of ages 17 to 32 was abolished. Former husbands could retain the right of ‘using’ their wives for three hours three times a week. The sickening document also decreed that appropriated women would become the property of the state, would receive a bonus of £20 for giving birth to twins, and could apply to the Soviet for a pension if they became ill.

The decree finished with an admonition. This read: “All citizens are obliged to watch themselves carefully and those who are guilty of spreading venereal disease will be held responsible and severely punished.”

Against this horrendous background the day-to-day existence of the Expeditionary Force continued – and there were also rare opportunities for relaxation. Chief Yeoman of Signals George Smith (see box) kept a note of one such occasion in his diary when he was as part of a three-ship force stuck fast in ice 183 miles from Archangel.

“The temperature was about 10C, the cold beginning to penetrate through our thick furs and Shackleton boots,“ he wrote. “My nose got frost-bitten. Also, my left hand, which I had taken out of its glove for a minute.”

Two ice-breakers preceded the force but with the ice seven-feet deep and getting thicker, the ships creaking and groaning, no further progress was possible, and the crews were given the chance to go seal hunting.

“Parties were organised, each with a broom handle and a length of rope with a slip knot and loop,“ Smith wrote in his diary. Instructions on how to kill the seals were given by an officer who had been with Scott and Shackleton in the arctic and 16 were bagged. Then the sailors heard a siren summoning them back to their ships. Some ate the catch, with a mess man cooking seals’ liver and heart for supper.

Slow progress was made but they were able to steam at 10 knots back to Archangel, without further incident after being in the ice field for six days. Found among George Smith’s mementoes was the translation of a letter on a stick floated down stream on a spar of wood and picked up by an Allied ship. This painted a desperate picture of life behind the Bolshevik lines.

Obviously written by a peasant, it read: “Greetings to Dear Brothers from the Red trenches. We acquaint you of the conditions of the mobilised men from the Samara Region. All mobilised and even volunteers refuse to fight for the commune and we the mobilised even more so. Soon, very soon, we will bayonet our Commissars and commanders. Our comrade, the chief of Communists Trotsky, has disappeared, nobody knows where. Now the game of the Communists is played out. Soon there will be an end to the commune. Long live liberty – you dear brothers don’t shoot us. We are all enemies of the Soviet rule.”

It would take more than 70 years, symbolised by the fall of the Berlin Wall, to effectively end Communism, with the contribution of the North Russian Expeditionary Force a mere footnote in the margins of history.

Indeed, the only memorial to the heroics of the men of the Allied force who fired the first shots against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution is in Portsmouth Cathedral. This simply but poignantly commemorates 112 British servicemen who died in the snows of Northern Russia.

Further research
Did your ancestors serve during the Russian intervention 100 years ago? The National Archives keeps naval records – see discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk and nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/firstworldwar/spotlights/allies.htm