On this day the Allied Expeditionary Force in northwestern Russia came under attack in a series of events that would lead to its practical defeat at the hands of the Red Army, even though it fought well throughout the ordeal.
The prior summer and fall the Allies, under the command of British General Poole, had advanced south from their bridgehead at Arkhangelsk. The Americans had dispatched the 339th Infantry, a unit made up of Michigan and Wisconsin draftees, to the mission in northwestern Russia without instruction. Upon arrival, their commander, Lt. Col Stewart (MoH from the Philippines) agreed to Gen. Poole's use of American troops and in fact he basically sat the rest of the expedition out from Arkangelsk thereafter. The most successful unit of the campaign, in turn, turned out to be Company A of the 339th which advanced sought of the resort town of Shenkursk that fall.
Shenkursk in 1919. Shenkursk was a pre war restort town and had only come under Allied occupation that previous fall when a British commanded offensive caused Company A of the 339th Infantry to capture it.
Allied Expeditionary forces, in this case American, British and Canadian troops, came under attack in a major battle of the Russian Civil War that's all but forgotten, as in fact is the case for the Allied expedition in the context of being direct combatants itself, on this day in a Red Army effort to regain the ground lost that fall.
The Battle of Shenkursk commenced on this day with a giant Red Army artillery bombardment on Allied, principally American, positions at Nizhnyaya Gora followed by a 1,000 man bayonet charge on a position held only by 47 American troops of the 339th Infantry, and supported by nearby company of White Cossack's. The American force obviously had no choice but to withdraw, but it was ordered to do so only after putting up as much as a delaying action as possible. While they were doing this the Cossack company arrived but withdrew after their commanding officer was wounded, showing the unreliability of White forces. By the time the American retreat was authorized, the streets of the town were covered by Red machine guns so an alternative route under heavy fire and with no artillery support was undertaken at great loss. The artillery, for its part, was White Russian and the cannoneers at first abandoned their posts until they were compelled to return at pistol point by the overall American commander, Cpt. Otto "Viking" Odjard. Unfortunately, they returned to their posts too late to provide covering artillery fire. As a result, only American soldiers, including their commander Lt. Meade, made it through the fire to return to Allied lines.
339th Infantry in Russia in 1918. The majority of the men were conscripts from Michigan, rounded out by conscripts from Wisconsin.
Showing the unreliability of the Red troops next, they failed to followup on their initial success and the Americans were able to return to the field during the day and recover their wounded. By nightfall, only nineteen remained uncovered, of which six were known to be dead. During the night, two of the missing made it through the Red lines back to Allied lines.
Unit crest of the 339th Infantry recalling their Russian service.
Overnight, Canadian field artillery arrived with artillerymen who took over two 3 in. filed artillery pieces that had been abandoned by the White Russians. The Cossack company undertook a strategic withdrawal from Ust Padenga to Vsyokaya Gora without being detected by the Reds. Over the next three days outnumbered Allied forces held on against repeated attacks by a reinforced Red Army. The Allied forces inflicted heavy casualties on the Reds, but were ultimately compelled to withdraw on January 22. By January 24, after fighting a delaying action at Sholosha, they arrived at Shenkursk where they were quickly surrounded by the pursing Red forces.
At Shenkursk Cpt. Odjard requested instructions from his commander, British General Edmund Ironside, who was in Arkangelsk. Ironside ordered the Allied force to withdraw. That withdrawal was commenced at midnight of January 24 by way of an unguarded logging trail. The Allied withdrawal was conducted entirely at night and the Red Army commenced firing artillery on a new empty Shenkursk the morning of the 25th. The retreating men occupied Vystavka on January 27 where they were again engaged by the Reds over several weeks.
The resulting Allied retreat cleared the far north western Russia of Allied forces and therefore constituted an important Red victory. With the Allies marginalized in the north, the only forces opposing the Reds in that region were the Whites, who would prove to be ineffective in the north.
The Allied mission in Russia never had a clear purpose to start with and was seen in strikingly different terms by the different Allied forces committed to it. In the east, the Americans were strictly precluded from engaging in offensive actions. In the north, they'd been given no instructions at all and fell under British command. The British saw their mission as being to directly provide for the defeat of the Reds and to aid the various White forces. The British commanded forces performed well and outfought the Red Army, but they were never committed in sufficient strength to be able to really engage an army the size of their growing opponents and had, in fact, basically outrun their ability to control ground in any event that prior fall.
The German flag under the Weimar Republic . . and again for the Federal Republic of Germany since 1949.
In Germany, proportional voting for the Reichstag, featuring the first election in which women were allowed to vote, took place, although the election was trailed out as German soldiers stationed in the East, where things remained tense, did not vote until February 2. The election is regarded as the first really democratic election in German history.
The results were that the Social Democratic Party took 163 seats out of 421 giving them the largest block in the Reichstag but not a majority. Second position went to the Centre Party, a Christian Democratic Catholic Party, which took 91 seats, with the third position going to the left of center German Democratic Party. The German Communist Party didn't take any seats, but the Independent Socialist, a heavily left of center party took 22 seats. The SDP would add two seats after the soldiers in the east voted in February.
Because the structure of the German government varied from other parliaments, the immediate impact of this is a little difficult to explain. Philipp Scheidemann of the SDP would become the chancellor, but would only take office in February, and would ultimately resign in protest over the terms of the Versailles Treaty.
The initial German election offered some hope for the future as holding an election, for a country that had never had fully fair elections before, right after a major defeat in war and during the midst of a civil war is a difficult feat. Under the circumstances, the election was a triumph for German democracy and, moreover, for the SDP which, while it did not obtain a majority of seats, acquired more than any other party and essentially had its views ratified by the majority of Germans, including a majority of serving soldiers. Democracy in Germany would prove to be fragile, however, and the Germans would hold four more elections prior to the Great Depression really setting in. In that last pre Great Depression election the German National People's Party, a right wing nationalist party, took second position demonstrating the rise of German nationalism even before that time. In that same election the Centre Party and the Communist Party, in third and fourth places, were not far behind the SDP, although all were fairly far behind it. In the next election, 1930, the Nazi Party was in second place with 107 seats to the SDP's 143 and the Communist Party in third with 77. In the last democratic election prior to World War Two the Nazi's supplanted the SDP as being in first position, taking 196 seats to the SDP's 121 while the Communist took an even 100. Oddly enough, even under the Nazi's first election in 1933, the last election in which other parties appeared, the Communist took 88 and the SDP took 120. No party ever had over 50% of the German vote in any election.
In Washington state the Knights of Columbus dedicated a hut for returning servicemen on this Sunday, January 19, 1919. The Knights had been one of the really active service organizations of the Great War, which is remarkable in that the country remained, at that time, very much a Protestant country in spite of having a significant Catholic minority.
Closer to home, and in-spite of ongoing combat involving American troops in Russia, and no official peace in Europe, troops were pouring home. Service organizations were turning their attention on that in an era in which the support for soldiers did not have the infrastructure it later would, as this "yard long" photograph of a dedication of a Knights of Columbus hut in Washington state demonstrates.
Like all service religion based service organizations of World War One, the Knights hut served everyone, not just Catholics.
I've talked about the Knights of Columbus a little bit, but not much, in my threads about service and fraternal organizations I've posted here. The Knights were formed for a variety of reasons, including the fact that fraternal organizations were huge in the United States in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. So huge, that membership in one was practically necessary for people in certain lines of work. Some of those organizations were Protestant or at least Anti Catholic in nature and therefore Catholics could not join them, or they were secret societies which Catholics are precluded by their faith from joining. So, as a reaction, the Knights were founded.
I've seen it claimed, and indeed in a state journal run by one of the various Knights of Columbus state organizations, that World War One abated anti Catholicism in the United States but I don't think that's really true. Indeed, Al Smith would loose the Presidential election of 1928 principally because he was a Catholic. It would take World War Two and the GI Bill to mainstream Catholics into American society and it would take the Presidency of John F. Kennedy to really blend them into the American fabric to such an extent that their distinctiveness was substantially lost, in no small part due to their own accommodations with American life that they had up until then not acquiesced to. Interestingly enough, in spite of notable Catholics rising to high position in American life, including the featuring of some of them absolutely abandoning the positions of their faith, a strong element of prejudice remains, as exhibited during the 2016 Presidential election in which a Clinton staffer insulted the entire faith. Recently, interestingly enough, liberal commentator Jill Filipovic called the Knights of Columbus an extremist group for holding traditional Catholic opinions on such things as abortion and the nature of marriage, which would also put the Knights in tune with the bulk of human history and nature. If it were any other group other than a Christian one, and more particularly a Catholic one, there'd be cries of outrage over that. But as is often noted, anti Catholicism is the last acceptable prejudice in American life.
Another anti Christian prejudice hit the movie screens on this Sunday, January 19, 1919, that being the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks, which was both ethnic and religious in character, the Armenians being ancient residents in the region in which the Turks were originally an invader and also a people that had remained faithful to their faith, the Armenian Apostolic Church. That church in fact one of the Apostolic Churches and today is in the Oriental Orthodox branch of the Apostolic faiths. The Ottoman Turks were of course Muslims. But to be fair they were also aggressive against all non Turkic people in their empire.
Ravished Armenia, also known as the Auction of Souls is a film for which only twenty minutes survives but it is a powerful film even at that. The film, perhaps partially because some of it is original footage (I'm not certain), or perhaps because it appears to be, is nearly a documentary in character. What's so additionally remarkable about this is that the Turkish atrocities were well known almost at the very moment they were committed, and yet Turkey continues to deny they occurred to this very day. The film was based on a book by an Armenian survivor of Turkish atrocities who also stared in the film, Aurora Mardiganian, who was only 18 years old at the time the film was released. At that time, she was recalling events of just a few years earlier, and she had herself escaped death by being sold into slavery and then escaping.
Armenian stamp honoring Mardiganian.
The film, not surprisingly, was subject to some censorship because it includes nudity, in the form of Armenian women being crucified nude by Turks. Mardiganian somewhat objected to the portrayal, however, not because it was cruel or because of the nudity, but rather because she maintained that the Turks raped Armenian women and then impaled them through their vaginas in a particularly masochistic fashion that the film makers determined not to portray as it was so barbarous. The film itself used many Armenian extras living in Southern California, which has a large Armenian population even today. Sadly, over twenty of the extras died due being exposed to the Spanish Flu during the film.
Mardiganian herself lived to old age and died in Californian in 1994.
If that film was too heavy of content, and it likely was for many, a comedy entitled Here Comes The Bride oped that weekend as well.
It doesn't survive, but frankly, it sounds like a typical pre Hayes Code cheesy comedy.
The Dub also opened that Sunday.
It was a comedy too, and it's also a lost film.
Or maybe it'd just be more entertaining, sort of, to read the paper that day. Russian revolutionaries who were "spry" and had "sass", discharged soldiers shaving off the mustaches of NCO's., bad beer in the UK and radicalism in Cheyenne. . . .
