861.00/3575: Telegram
The Chargé in Russia (Poole) to the Acting Secretary of State
[Received January 4, 6:21 a.m.]
720. To Paris also. Since my 664, December 17th, 5 p.m.1 the situation in Archangel has continued quiet and satisfactory to me.
A small military operation was undertaken early this week designed to straighten out the front and drive the Bolsheviki from one or [omission] points whence they had been inflicting desultory losses on the Allied troops. The operation partly miscarried owing to the failure of certain Russian partisan troops, as well as difficulties encountered by other troops, depth [sic] of advancing through snow. But an American column attained one of the objectives, inflicting heavy losses upon a greatly superior number of Bolsheviki, the Americans having seven killed and 30 other casualties. General Ironside2 commends the American action as very gallant and excellently planned.
Russian partisan troops formed spontaneously by peasants from villages which have been outraged by the Bolsheviki number about 1,500 and had seemed one of the more promising features of the situation. The circumstances of their failure as noted above are not yet fully known.
- Foreign Relations, 1918, Russia, vol. ii, p. 577.↩
- Maj. Gen. Sir William Edmund Ironside, British commander in chief of the Allied forces in northern Russia.↩