Chapter 2
SIBERIA 1918-1920
On August 9, 1918, Colonel Sargent received a confidential letter of
instruction from Headquarters, Philippine Department ordering him to prepare the
31st Infantry (then totaling 43 officers and 1346 enlisted men) for movement.
Rather than going to France to fight Germans, the 31st was being sent to Siberia, a
place few Americans knew much about. The situation there was chaotic. Russia
had suffered the heaviest casualties of any participant in the First World War and
after three years of poor leadership, mind-numbing hardship, and one defeat after
another, its army had fallen apart. Many Russian units shot or abandoned their
officers and simply went home. For most, going home was short-lived because few
could survive outside the warring factions in Russia’s civil war. Ill-disciplined
soldiers led by Bolshevik revolutionaries, Czarist officers, and Cossack warlords
roamed the land, forcibly recruiting new members and looting the country to feed and equip themselves.
By the summer of 1918, the opponents had coalesced into two main factions, Bolshevik "Reds" and
monarchist "Whites."
The Western Allies feared Russia's proletarian revolution would sweep across Europe, but they
could not stop Bolshevism's advance in Russia without weakening themselves at home where war-weary
people had become susceptible to revolutionary influences. Russia's new leaders pledged to reenter the
war against Germany, but their ability to do so was practically nil with civil war raging across their
country, German troops occupying nearly a third of their territory, and anti-war Bolsheviks controlling
Moscow and St Petersburg.
When the revolution came, supplies that had been sent to aid Russia's war effort were left
unguarded on the docks at Murmansk and Vladivostok. Vladivostok alone accumulated 725,000 tons,
valued at $750,000,000. Allies wanted the supplies protected because Siberia teemed with former
German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war who had no way