When Hell Froze Over - E.M. Halliday

Halliday explains in the foreword that he published this book once before, 40 years earlier, as The Ignorant Armies. Then, as now, the book details the time in 1918 that Britain, France, and the United States sent troops into Northern Russia. Just why they did that, is a little muddled. Ostensibly, there was a desire to reopen the Eastern Front, so as to divert German troops who had been freed up when the czar was overthrown and the Treaty of Brest-Litvok signed. Of course, that was going to require getting the Russians to get back into the war, and Lenin and Trotsky weren't about to do that. They were too busy just trying to get a firm grip on the country. Of course, France and Britain wouldn't have shed any tears if this mission destabilized that government, because autocratic governments are fine, just so long as the rulers are inbred, I mean anachronistic, I mean aristocratic. Sorry.

So about 5,000 U.S. troops wound up spending roughly 9 months freezing their butts off alongside the French, British, and some Russian troops, fighting against the Red Army. It didn't start out too badly, but the size of the force was wholly insufficient for any of the ideas the leaders had (there was an idea about linking up with a force of 40 thousand or so Czechoslovakian troops held up between Bolsheviks on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, but it was going to require covering something like 600 miles), and the Red Army grew steadily better trained, under the leadership of Trotsky himself. There simply aren't enough troops, because each position they grab (to secure ones already held) required grabbing more territory to support them. Except Russia is a big country, and there's a limit to how much can be taken and held by a force of the size present.

More critically, the plan to build an army of Russians to help - and eventually take over for - the Allies failed utterly. In large part, I think this was because they failed to demonstrate how the government that would arise if the Bolsheviks fell (considering World War I ended while this was going on, they couldn't continue to argue this was about opening a second front) was actually going to be better for the peasants in the countryside, or the workers in Archangel. Most of the Provisional Governments that tried to get going in the city were completely ineffectual, lead by people with no conception of how to actually run things, or by those who had been loyal to the czar, and the Russian people wanted nothing to do with that. The whole thing was doomed from the start, another of those campaigns started by politicos without any clear idea of how to accomplish what they want, or the backbone to see it through.

I wound up feeling a little sorry for Woodrow Wilson. He kind of comes off as an idealistic fool, which is not the best thing to be, but not the worst. He didn't like the Bolsheviks, but he also wasn't comfortable interfering in another country's right to determine their own government. He tried to justify it by claiming the troops were only there to protect stores of ammunition and weapons that had been shipped to Russia earlier in the war, which the Germans were getting uncomfortably close to. In other words, the soldiers were there for defensive purposes only. Yet he allowed the British to supply the supreme commander, even though they clearly had more aggressive designs. Which is how you get GIs out in the frozen expanses, trying to take villages from the Red Army. Though Halliday noted that the American troops and the Russians mostly got along very well. Too bad none of those people on either side were involved in their countries' foreign policy.

Halliday takes the time to add some interesting information to the story. He spends a couple of pages describing the design of houses the Russians used in the small villages, which was relevant considering a lot of troops ended up in those houses as well. He discusses the struggle to teach the Allied soldiers how to use skis, as well as snowshoes, and the problems with the Shackleton boots provided (not designed for slick, packed down ice apparently). He praises the Canadian artillery, which is frequently outmatched in the size of their guns by the Russians, and overworked (they seem to be everywhere), but bails out the infantry on multiple occasions. There's even a section at the end about work done to retrieve the bodies of American soldiers buried there. The book probably could have used more focus on the view from the other side of things, but I'd imagine it's not always easy to get records from Soviet archives. Although Halliday refers more than once to a speech made by Khruschev that made clear the Soviets had not forgotten that early attempt to, as Churchill put it, strangle them in their crib.

'When the total pattern of Soviet warfare in 1919 is examined, it thus appears that Trotsky's strategy was to strike at the Allies in North Russia precisely whenever Kolchak was pressing him hard enough to make the plan of junction between the two anti-Soviet forces look feasible. Despite tremendous losses, the Red army opposing Ironside had such a commanding numerical superiority by the end of 1918 that from then on it was able to push the Allies back almost at will and keep the gap between them and Kolchak approximately constant.'