WITH THE "DIE-HARDS" IN SIBERIA

Account of Britain’s doomed attempt to reverse Russia’s Bolshevik revolution in Siberia in 1918-19. Written by the C-in-C of the British expeditionary force at Omsk, this is an interesting sidelight on the Allied Intervention on the White side in Russia‘s Civil War. Colonel John Ward, author of this account, commanded one of the heroic but doomed attempts by the British and other Western allies to aid the White forces and defeat the Bolsheviks in 1918-1919, during the Russian Civil War that followed the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. Ward's account tells a tale, in the words of military historian Cyril Falls, "of gallantry and endurance in frightful conditions". The conditions in question, the wintry and barren landscape of Siberia in wartime, were bleak beyond belief. The efforts of Ward's "Die-Hards", in alliance with their Russian, Czech and Polish anti-Bolshevik allies, were fatally undermined, in his view, by the Allied failure to make good their promises to support Admiral Kolchak, the White Commander in Siberia who set up a White Government in Omsk. In a bitter foreword to his account, Ward particularly blames the Americans and the Japanese for failing to recognise the peril posed by the Bolsheviks and acting to prevent it. Reprint of the 1920 original edition.