LEST We Forget has a strange meaning these days in both Britain and Australia. For, in a remote part of Russia, there are 14 lost graves of Australian war veterans.
They lie not in hallowed ground, but in undignified circumstances, buried only a few feet down under a modern, if contaminated, scrapyard in Obozerskaya.
Only one body has ever been recovered and identified. It is of Victoria Cross winner Sergeant Sam Pearse who died on August 29, 1919. His body has lain for six years in a plastic bag inside a blue plastic storage crate in a morgue in the Russian city of Archangel.
But there are no plans by governments to repatriate the body of Pearse, or any others, to Australia despite family pleas and a major RSL campaign now under way. The move has been labelled a national disgrace by Pearse supporters.
So, how did this situation arise? In popular opinion, the 1950s Korean War is probably our nation's most forgotten conflict. Another contender, however, is the time Britain invaded Soviet Russia with a force of 5000 men, including between 120 and about 150 Australian volunteer soldiers. A few of these Aussies may have been from the Hunter. Later they usually never spoke about their experiences, even to their families.
Never heard of the Allied military intervention in Russia in 1919? Little wonder as it's been shunted into the sidelines of history for most of us. Officially it was called the North Russia Expeditionary Force (NREF) and this failed British-controlled military campaign's aim was to defeat Russian Bolsheviks (later called Soviets) after the Russian revolutions of 1917. The Allied relief force actually began in the late stages of the First World War (1914-1918) and continued long after the Armistice.
The first Allied troops to set foot in Russia were a handful of Royal Marines landing at Murmansk Harbour in March 1918 to seize tons of war stores given to then Imperial Russia to fight the Germany enemy. Russia by then appeared to be on the verge of disintegration.
By mid-1917, more than two million Russian soldiers were dead and five million wounded fighting the Germans. The radical Russian revolutionaries known as 'Reds' or Bolsheviks then took over and withdrew Russia from WWI much to the dismay of the Allies. The number of Anzacs soon involved in this Russian civil war was small, but they were all volunteers, hence the current complications over their fate.
After WWI ended in late 1918, large numbers of bored Australian soldiers were in camps in England awaiting a troopship home. Following British advertisements for a Russian relief force, and lured by better pay rates, scores of Aussies signed up for further duty. A condition for their extra war service was that they had to be discharged from the Australian Army first, then re-enlist in the British Army to fight against the Bolsheviks. The soldiers removed any Australian insignia on their AIF uniforms but were allowed to retain their distinctive slouch hats. The North Russia relief force was finally evacuated in October 1919.
Overall, the total number of forgotten British and Empire forces killed in all areas during the Russian Civil War of 1918-20 has been estimated at 900. The total number of recorded British and Empire casualties who died in North Russia alone from March 1918 to October 1919 is estimated at 502.
America was also a reluctant participant in military intervention in North Russia. The troops were known as the 'Polar Bears'. Although committed to drag Russia back into the war, the US didn't support the restoration of the former Imperial or Tsarist government. But at least two US presidents were later blissfully ignorant of its soldiers ever being on Russian soil. Both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan made erroneous claims that Americans and Russians had never fought each other.
Australian military historian Damien Wright has written a gripping book on the saga titled Australia's Lost Heroes - Anzacs in the Russian Civil War 1919 revealing the little-known story of our Diggers fighting the Red Army in Russia. His excellent book also includes his odyssey 100 years later to locate the lost body of VC hero Sam Pearse, and the treachery and mutiny of the Allies' so-called comrades, the White Russians.
After researching for years, Wright said he finally reached the damp forest location of the Emtsa battlefield, about 170kms south of Archangel, in 2019. It was here that Sgt Pearse died in 1919 after successfully attacking a Red Army log blockhouse hurling grenades. He was only 22. (His body was later taken to a distant war cemetery, now long neglected).
Guided by a Russian battlefield archaeologist, author Wright says he and others felt privileged to be the first Australians to visit the site in 100 years. The battle scene was virtually untouched with the forest floor littered with rusty barbed wire, visible trench lines and a trail of British .303 rifle cartridges found with a metal detector.
Meanwhile, Weekender believes at least three North Russian Anzacs may have settled in the Hunter, some seeking work at Kurri Kurri's Richmond Main Colliery. They never spoke about their bizarre Russian adventure. Northern Coalfields mining leader the late Jim Comerford, once told The Herald he'd known two of them, but they remained tight-lipped. Comerford also remembered seeing a rare souvenir from the largely forgotten foreign conflict. It was a "Bolshevik machine gun pistol" on display at the temporary Australian war museum in Sydney's Belmore Park before the museum shifted permanently to Canberra.
One person who was in North Russia unusually early, and spoke about his war experience back in 1979, was the late John Kelly, a former sergeant, then aged 85, of Kandos, near Mudgee. He was one of nine original Australians who volunteered for a secret mission in 1918. The Diggers thought they were off to fight Germans in Russia, but instead went into combat with the Bolsheviks.
Kelly's group, codenamed Elope, fought in the vanguard of about 600 Allied troops in the Murmansk and Archangel regions from June 1918. He spent a year in northern Russia and remembered the campaign as a tragedy, marked by failures, treachery and hardships.
"We were all of the opinion that the revolution was a civil thing. None of us had any heart for it, I can assure you," Kelly said in a last interview.
