The Great War ended on the eleventh of November, 1918. Canada was still fighting in Russia the following June.
Between October 1918 and June 1919, this country deployed almost five thousand soldiers into a nation it was not at war with, to fight an enemy it had never declared war on, for reasons its own Cabinet could not agree on and its own military command had warned against in writing before a single ship sailed.
Two forces went, and they had almost opposite wars.
Four thousand two hundred went to Vladivostok, roughly forty per cent of them conscripts; some marched to the docks at bayonet point. They arrived to find orders forbidding them to fight, and spent fourteen weeks in a Pacific port doing nothing on purpose.
Fewer than five hundred went to Archangel, on the Arctic coast. Every one of them a volunteer, most already veterans of the Western Front. They fought on frozen rivers against artillery that outranged them, and one of the worst days they had was the eleventh of November, 1918.
This episode is the story of both.
In this episode:
Siberia – the Canadian Siberian Expeditionary Force. Based at Vladivostok. Roughly 4,200 men and one woman. About forty per cent conscripts. Commanded by Major-General James Elmsley. Essentially no combat. Twenty-one dead.
North Russia – the 16th Brigade, Canadian Field Artillery. Based at Archangel. Around five hundred gunners. All volunteers, most of them Western Front veterans. Commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Sharman. Action at Tulgas, Kadish, Ust Padenga and Shenkursk. Eight killed, sixteen wounded.
A note on the numbers:
Sources disagree about how many Canadians went to Siberia and how many died there. Where they conflict, this episode says so rather than choosing the tidier figure.
The monument raised on the first of June, 1919, counts nineteen dead. The true total is twenty-one. Men were still dying when the stone was carved. Private Richard Massey died at William Head on the thirtieth of May. Rifleman Peter McMillan died there on the sixth of June, five days after the stone was unveiled in Russia.
Sources:
Primary anchors:
G.W.L. Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914–1919 (Queen’s Printer, 1962), “Intervention in Siberia,” pp. 517–523
Benjamin Isitt, From Victoria to Vladivostok: Canada’s Siberian Expedition, 1917–19 (UBC Press, 2010)
Benjamin Isitt, “Mutiny from Victoria to Vladivostok, December 1918,” Canadian Historical Review 87:2
Benjamin Isitt, “Court-Martial at Vladivostok: Mutiny and Military Justice during the First World War,” in Canadian State Trials, Vol. IV
Canadian Army Historical Section, Report No. 82, “Operations in North Russia, 1918–1919”
Supporting
Mark Osborne Humphries, The Last Plague: Spanish Influenza and the Politics of Public Health in Canada (2012)
Mark Osborne Humphries, “The Horror at Home: The Canadian Military and the ‘Great’ Influenza Pandemic of 1918,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 16:1
J.L. Granatstein, “Gunners on Ice,” Legion Magazine
Patrick Brennan, “‘Completely Worn Out by Service in France’: Combat Stress and Breakdown among Senior Officers in the Canadian Corps,” Canadian Military History 18:2
Gaddis Smith, “Canada and the Siberian Intervention, 1918–1919,” American Historical Review 64:4
Ian Edwards, Our Quarrel with the Foe: Edmonton’s Soldiers, 1914–1918 (Friesen Press, 2020)
John Ward, With the “Die-Hards” in Siberia (Cassell, 1920)
Dawn Fraser, The Mud-Red Volunteers: Songs of Siberia and Rhymes of the Road (Eastern Publishing, c. 1919)
Archival:
Library and Archives Canada — Borden Papers, MG 26, ser. H1(a), vol. 103; RG 24, ser. C-1-A, vols. 1992–1993 and 2557; RG 18 RCMP Collection, vol. 3179; RG 150 service files
Canada, Report of Debates of the House of Commons, 10 June 1919, p. 3298
University of Victoria Special Collections — Military Oral History Collection, SC 141
Commonwealth War Graves Commission
Loyal Edmonton Regiment Military Museum
City of Edmonton Archives
Digital archive
Benjamin Isitt’s Siberian Expedition Virtual Exhibition and Digital Archive: siberianexpedition.ca holds more than two thousand photographs, war diary appendices, court martial material and veteran audio, in English, French and Russian. It is free, and it is the reason this episode was possible.
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