Japanese Offensive against Russia, 1920 (Part II)
By Jamie Bisher
Captain Harold Fay, the American Observer
On April 1, 1920 Major General William S. Graves and the American Expeditionary Force-Siberia (A.E.F.S.) gladly departed Vladivostok after 20 frustrating months of safeguarding Russian docks, warehouses and railroad tracks, punctuated by infrequent skirmishes against both Reds and Whites. An undetermined number of discharged doughboys and deserters stayed behind to tend to their new Russian brides, join the partisans, or try their hands in civilian trades. One of the latter was a recently discharged captain from Graves' intelligence department, Harold Van Vechten Fay, who remained in Nikolsk-Ussuriisk with a typewriter and an aspiration to write about the continuing revolution for foreign newspapers.
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On April 1, 1920 Major General William S. Graves and the American Expeditionary Force-Siberia (A.E.F.S.) gladly departed Vladivostok after 20 frustrating months of safeguarding Russian docks, warehouses and railroad tracks, punctuated by infrequent skirmishes against both Reds and Whites. An undetermined number of discharged doughboys and deserters stayed behind to tend to their new Russian brides, join the partisans, or try their hands in civilian trades. One of the latter was a recently discharged captain from Graves' intelligence department, Harold Van Vechten Fay, who remained in Nikolsk-Ussuriisk with a typewriter and an aspiration to write about the continuing revolution for foreign newspapers.
Harold Van Vechten Fay was born in June 1890 to a wealthy family in the small city of Auburn, a very prosperous, socially conscious community in central New York that was home to more than one state governor and numerous civic leaders of regional and national prominence, including U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward (mastermind of the 1867 Alaska purchase) and abolitionist Harriett Tubman. Fay’s paternal grandfather had grown prosperous as a merchant of gloves and mitts, and his father became a successful lawyer and banker who was rich enough to employ four servants. Harold Fay was well traveled, having visited Germany at least twice before the Great War erupted. He arrived in Vladivostok in 1918 as a captain of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, but adapted easily to his assignment as the overt A.E.F.S. Intelligence Officer in Harbin, China, a thriving regional hub of international commerce, transportation and political intrigue. During the next several months he became an expert on Russia's Civil War as he traveled about observing, interviewing and reporting to Major General Graves' headquarters in Vladivostok. Captain Fay certainly did not stay in Russia because he needed money, but to launch a career in journalism by chronicling the country's clumsy steps out of centuries of autocracy and six years of bloody turmoil. White territory had shrunk to a slippery foothold along the Trans-Siberian Railroad in Transbaikalia, and to Fay and most other observers the Russian Far East appeared to be poised on the threshold of a bright new revolutionary era.
Suddenly, just three nights after the last American Army transport sailed out of Vladivostok in April 1920, the Japanese launched a major offensive to disarm all revolutionary forces and occupy the Maritime Province. In doing so, the Japanese militarists pursued multiple purposes: to improve their negotiating position with the Allies over the future balance of power in the Pacific, to weaken Russia further, to expand Japanese commercial and military inroads into northern Manchuria, and to line their pockets with cash from the monopolies, sweetheart deals, and other opportunities for illicit gain that presented themselves in the legal vacuum of a military occupation. Ironically, although Japanese generals had been gearing up to launch their military occupation of the Russian Far East for several months, growing public opposition in Japan to the army's prolonged Siberian adventure had been threatening to restrain--if not derail--it, until the shocking news of a humiliating military defeat to Red partisans at Nikolaevsk-na-Amure actually strengthened the generals' hands, giving them license to retaliate.
Harold Van Vechten Fay was born in June 1890 to a wealthy family in the small city of Auburn, a very prosperous, socially conscious community in central New York that was home to more than one state governor and numerous civic leaders of regional and national prominence, including U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward (mastermind of the 1867 Alaska purchase) and abolitionist Harriett Tubman. Fay’s paternal grandfather had grown prosperous as a merchant of gloves and mitts, and his father became a successful lawyer and banker who was rich enough to employ four servants. Harold Fay was well traveled, having visited Germany at least twice before the Great War erupted. He arrived in Vladivostok in 1918 as a captain of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, but adapted easily to his assignment as the overt A.E.F.S. Intelligence Officer in Harbin, China, a thriving regional hub of international commerce, transportation and political intrigue. During the next several months he became an expert on Russia's Civil War as he traveled about observing, interviewing and reporting to Major General Graves' headquarters in Vladivostok. Captain Fay certainly did not stay in Russia because he needed money, but to launch a career in journalism by chronicling the country's clumsy steps out of centuries of autocracy and six years of bloody turmoil. White territory had shrunk to a slippery foothold along the Trans-Siberian Railroad in Transbaikalia, and to Fay and most other observers the Russian Far East appeared to be poised on the threshold of a bright new revolutionary era.
Suddenly, just three nights after the last American Army transport sailed out of Vladivostok in April 1920, the Japanese launched a major offensive to disarm all revolutionary forces and occupy the Maritime Province. In doing so, the Japanese militarists pursued multiple purposes: to improve their negotiating position with the Allies over the future balance of power in the Pacific, to weaken Russia further, to expand Japanese commercial and military inroads into northern Manchuria, and to line their pockets with cash from the monopolies, sweetheart deals, and other opportunities for illicit gain that presented themselves in the legal vacuum of a military occupation. Ironically, although Japanese generals had been gearing up to launch their military occupation of the Russian Far East for several months, growing public opposition in Japan to the army's prolonged Siberian adventure had been threatening to restrain--if not derail--it, until the shocking news of a humiliating military defeat to Red partisans at Nikolaevsk-na-Amure actually strengthened the generals' hands, giving them license to retaliate.
Fay's testimony of events at Nikolsk-Ussuriisk exposes the Japanese charade that had begun two years earlier, when the Japanese General Staff piously declared that its soldiers had come to liberate Russians from the radical Red terror, support the Allied cause, evacuate the Czechoslovak Legion, and restore law, order and a seedling of democratic government. The 1920 Japanese offensive eclipsed the revolutionary dawn in the Russian Far East, prolonged the civil war for several months more, and consumed several hundred lives, but gave the White movement one last chance to seed a non-Communist government on Russian soil. Fay's account reaffirms the fact‑‑disputed at the time by the Japanese‑‑that the offensive and subsequent occupation were premeditated ventures. His description of the Japanese slaughter of Russian prisoners lends weight to Soviet accusations of similar incidents prior to and after the Nikolsk-Ussuriisk battle. However, the most surprising revelation in Fay's account was the degree to which the White military, including officers, had already been integrated into the local Red garrison, with the exception of reactionary extremists--the kalmykovtsy, who had sought refuge with their Japanese Army sponsors. Almost equally surprising was Fay’s cordiality with the Red military establishment, demonstrated by the ease with which the American could saunter through Red military positions as well as the headquarters.
H. Van Vechten Fay wrote the following eye-witness account of the Japanese offensive as it transpired in the small, yet strategic city of Nikolsk-Ussuriisk. He immediately typed his detailed report of the battle, and, obviously intending to submit it for publication, entitled it: "The Taking of Nikolsk, Siberia By the Japanese, April 5, 1920, By H. Van Vechten Fay, Former Captain, Intelligence Dept., U.S. Army, Now a Newspaper Correspondent." Whether his story was ever published is unknown. However, he apparently gave a copy of his manuscript to an officer of the Russian Railway Service Corps (R.R.S.C.), the small group of American technical advisors then working on the Trans-Siberian and Chinese Eastern railroads, undoubtedly to provide them with fresh intelligence about Japanese activities. R.R.S.C. personnel were regularly harassed, and occasionally even attacked, by Japanese soldiers. When the R.R.S.C. terminated its mission and closed its Harbin office soon after, Fay's report was haphazardly boxed up among a jumble of other reports, messages, and miscellaneous papers, which disappeared into federal warehouses for the next seven decades. It surfaced in the U.S. National Archives, amidst Records of International Conferences, Commissions, and Expositions, the unlikely resting place of the R.R.S.C.'s disordered papers.
H. Van Vechten Fay wrote the following eye-witness account of the Japanese offensive as it transpired in the small, yet strategic city of Nikolsk-Ussuriisk. He immediately typed his detailed report of the battle, and, obviously intending to submit it for publication, entitled it: "The Taking of Nikolsk, Siberia By the Japanese, April 5, 1920, By H. Van Vechten Fay, Former Captain, Intelligence Dept., U.S. Army, Now a Newspaper Correspondent." Whether his story was ever published is unknown. However, he apparently gave a copy of his manuscript to an officer of the Russian Railway Service Corps (R.R.S.C.), the small group of American technical advisors then working on the Trans-Siberian and Chinese Eastern railroads, undoubtedly to provide them with fresh intelligence about Japanese activities. R.R.S.C. personnel were regularly harassed, and occasionally even attacked, by Japanese soldiers. When the R.R.S.C. terminated its mission and closed its Harbin office soon after, Fay's report was haphazardly boxed up among a jumble of other reports, messages, and miscellaneous papers, which disappeared into federal warehouses for the next seven decades. It surfaced in the U.S. National Archives, amidst Records of International Conferences, Commissions, and Expositions, the unlikely resting place of the R.R.S.C.'s disordered papers.
Copyright 2018, Jamie Bisher