Imitate the Tiger

About the Book

The rapid dispatch of Olympia to Murmansk in the spring of 1918 was a direct result of not heeding a warning by George Washington. In the First President’s Farewell Address, published at the end of his second and final term in 1796, President Washington cautioned future Americans to beware of entanglements that might result from a too active participation in European affairs. But he also warned his fellow countrymen not to form and put their trust in political parties. They had disregarded that too. Since Russia’s withdrawal from the war against Germany as a result of her Glorious Revolution of 1917, Great Britain publicly worried that war supplies shipped to the Czar by the Allies would be taken by Germany and turned against them. Led by the sometime-First Lord of the Admiralty, sometime infantry battalion commander on the Western Front, and sometime Chancellor of the Exchequer: Winston Churchill, both the U. S. and France had been wheedled into joining the British in sending token forces to guard the military stores at Vladivostok, Murmansk and Archangel. President Woodrow Wilson really wanted none of it. Fighting Germany after U-boats had sunk American ships was one thing; Mister Wilson felt the revolution in Russia was not a threat to, or any of America’s business. France was complying with British wishes more out of respect for the Anglo blood soaked into the battlefields of Gaul, than any real concern for the threat. From this, President Wilson’s Secretary of State urged solidarity. The President grudgingly approved, the Secretary of the Navy was so directed, and the Chief of Naval Operations so ordered. The admiral dispatched the cruiser USS Brooklyn, with a detachment of 75 Marines, to Vladivostok on Siberia’s Pacific Coast; and the cruiser USS Olympia, with what he thought was a like number of Marines to Murmansk, in Northeastern Russia. Their mission: “To guard Allied war supplies, and to cooperate with friendly adjacent forces in maintaining the security of those ports until such supplies can be safely evacuated.” In Vladivostok the Marine Detachment of USS Brooklyn in company with much larger forces of the U. S. Army, British, French, White Russian and even Japanese troops, did that quietly and with no major fighting. But Vladivostok was thousands of miles from Moscow, the hub of the Bolshevik revolution, and more a colony of the old empire than a city of metropolitan Russia. Murmansk, on the other hand, was one of only two Russian seaports with access to the Atlantic not being held by the Reds, and it was only 900 miles from Moscow. Archangel was the other, but 600 miles from the capitol city, connected by an excellent railroad, and threatened by a 100,000-man Red Army of Liberation. In actual matter of fact, the Allied war supplies at all three ports were not worth saving. If Germany had been capable of seizing them this late in the war, the munitions were gauged for odd-sized Russian weapons, and the other equipment was totally unsuitable for German employment. None of it was of any use to the Allies. If they had been able to recover and evacuate it they would have dumped it at sea. All of this was an obvious British ploy. The real Anglo agenda called for getting a joint command of British, French and American armies into Russia to destroy the Communists. When Olympia steamed into Murmansk on a bright May day of 1918, her two Marines hardly constituted an American force ready to destroy communism. Even her Navy company of the landing party, as good as they had become at the manual of arms and shooting their weapons into the sea, really seemed a minor bar to a Red Army advance. But Murmansk, like Vladivostok halfway around the world, was in little danger with its southern moat of the White Sea. Just 300 miles south and east across that gulf, however, Archangel was threatened by the Northern Red Army of Liberation. In fact advance elements of the Bolsheviks had already taken Baka

About the Author

In 1947 Lt. Cody enlisted as a Marine, liked it, and stayed for three decades, for wars in Korea and Vietnam. He was raised by junior N.C.O’.s telling rousing stories of World War II, but he became more interested in the tales of the senior sergeants and warrant officers, veterans of the Banana Wars. They were icons of professional sea soldiers as it came. They were hard men, not nasty, and their words came out like well-aimed shots from M1903 rifles. Cody never forgot them or their stories. He now lives with his wife Carol on a forested acre in the foothills of North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains