Despite being shot in the face in the trenches, Lt. J. Douglas Winslow wanted to get back to fighting in the First World War. While recovering in hospital, he wrote in a 1917 letter to his mother “taking it all through, I had a pretty good time in France!”
While recovering from his wounds, he saw a mysterious call for volunteers heading to an unknown destination. It read:
“A number of officers are required … for a hazardous enterprise in a foreign theatre of war. These officers must have the following qualifications: the spirit of adventure, undoubted courage, and ability to quickly estimate difficult situations. They must be of strong character, adventurous spirit, especially good stamina, capable of organising, training, and eventually leading irregular troops.”
He, along with a childhood friend, joined up for the mysterious secret mission: the now largely forgotten Canadian military expedition to Siberia.
By September of 1918, 28 year old John Douglas Winslow, standing 5’9 and weighing only 121 lbs, had been fighting in the First World War for four years.
While recovering from being shot in the face at Passchendaele, Winslow’s mother had written him a letter from his hometown of Woodstock, New Brunswick. She begged him to not return to the muddy trenches on the Western Front, and instead take a position far away from danger, in the safety of a military base in England.
Evidently exasperated by his mother’s concern, and annoyed with his life recovering from his wounds on light duty on a base in the safety of England, Winslow wrote back: “Mother, I’ll make it plain right now. I hate this sort of life worse than poison, and simply can’t content myself here. I am not doing myself any good for nothing if I am here too long, and another thing I am not doing anything for my Country hanging around this Camp. I’ve got a job a child could do. Some are satisfied with that sort of thing, but I, for one, am not.”
Determined to return to fighting, when a mysterious call for Canadian volunteers to go on what was described as “a hazardous enterprise in a foreign theatre of war” went out, Winslow eagerly signed up.
It is not entirely clear where he thought he was going, but he breezily prepared for it by going on a shopping spree, buying fine clothes in London. In a late August 1918 letter to his little sister Charlotte, he wrote: “I got a new tunic from my tailor … it is entirely satisfactory. It is of very fine cloth, but my! such things do cost money these days!”
He told her that he would be going on a secret mission in which he would be receiving a danger pay bonus; an extra forty cents a day.
It seemed that rumours must have been circulating about where they were going, because he cryptically wrote in a letter that “From all accounts we won’t be able to spend much where we’re going, so I should soon have quite a bank balance.”
Only when he boarded the ship to an unknown destination and was given heavy winter clothing did it begin to dawn on him that he was being sent to Russia.
John Douglas Winslow was one of 4,192 Canadian soldiers who were sent on the now almost completely forgotten Canadian intervention in the Russian Civil War which lasted from 1918 to 1919.
The vast majority of the Canadians sent to Russia went to Vladivostok, which is next to China, on the Pacific Ocean. For the most part those Canadians were far away from the fighting.
Winslow, however, was aboard a ship with a much smaller group of Canadians being sent to the opposite side of Russia – the High Arctic on Russia’s Northern coast, along the Arctic Sea. The closest nearby country would be Finland, which was about 1000km west of where they were. These Canadians did get caught up in brutal fighting, and some of them never made it home.
As his ship headed to the Russian Arctic, Winslow wrote in a letter to his mother “The trip isn’t very interesting as there is nothing to see but water all around. … I’m commencing to think I’d make a pretty fine sailor as I haven’t been sick yet! A great many of the men were sick for the first three or four days.”
As for his fellow Canadians, he wrote: “We have a very cosmopolitan crowd on board, as you may well imagine.”
Many of them were fellow Maritimers, and he named several men from PEI, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. He was most excited though to learn that his new commanding officer, and roommate aboard the ship, was Captain Alexander Oliver Mowat, from Campbellton, NB. Winslow called him “Ollie.”
Ollie and Winslow’s fathers had been friends since the two were young boys. The working class roots of Mowat, who was 25 years old, contrasted to the more wealthy and privileged upbringing
Winslow had enjoyed. Mowat, who stood 5’7 and weighed 134 lbs, had been a travelling salesman before the First World War, when he had enlisted with all three of his brothers.
Ollie’s older brother, named Morton Maxwell Mowat, had been killed two years earlier. He had been a pilot who was shot down above Germany.
The tragedy of Ollie's brother's death was made worse by bureaucratic bumbling. First, his family was told by the Army that his plane had been shot down, but that he was safe and healthy in a German prisoner of war camp. Two months later, his family received a letter with what it called a correction; Morton Maxwell Mowat had actually been killed in the initial plane crash.
Ollie had been wounded three times during the war and decorated twice. His most recent wound had been severe – a bomb dropped by an airplane had landed right at his feet. He was sent home to Campbellton where he had spent six months re-learning how to walk again. The Army offered him command of a training base in New Brunswick but he declined. Just like Winslow, he too chose to instead go on a mysterious secret mission to an unknown destination.
The ship that they were aboard landed in a Russian port which was already controlled by Allied forces.
Winslow wrote a letter to his little sister that he was surprised to find that: “The town looks rather nice. All wooden buildings. The Public Buildings and Churches all seem to have a dome shaped roof with many minarets, quite different from any style of architecture I have ever seen before.”
However, from the very moment he set foot on Russian soil he immediately sensed that the Canadians were not wanted there by the local people, writing: “I don’t think the inhabitants of these parts are what one might call pleased over much at our arrival…”
If the Russian citizens were confused about what exactly Canadians were doing there, Ollie and Winslow were probably equally, if not more confused.
At the time, Canada was a British colony, and didn’t have much control over where its troops were sent. The Canadian government had actually not wanted their troops to participate in this Russian expedition, but were overruled. The British were insistent in sending Canadians for the simple reason that they figured that both Canada and Russia were cold countries.
It seems that Winslow would have agreed with that logic, because he wrote in a letter that “the climate is very similar to what we have at home.”
What the British (and by extension the Canadians) were actually doing in Russia was less clear though, both looking back in hindsight, and actually even at the time.
The mission had been planned in faraway London as Russia teetered on revolution, with the intent of propping up their allies the Russian government which was on the brink of collapse.
A massive multinational Allied army called the Siberian Expedition comprising some 15,000 troops was assembled, including soldiers from Britain, Finland, Poland, Canada, Australia, Serbia, France, Italy, Czechoslovakia, the United States, and China.
However, by the time this Siberian Expedition actually got there, that friendly Russian government had been swept away by revolution, and the country was rapidly descending into the Russian Civil War, a horrifically brutal conflict that would ultimately cost around 6 million people their lives.
And so this multinational group of soldiers –including Canadians– was now occupying a large portion of Siberian wilderness, while their leaders back home debated about what they should do. Should they just stay and somehow fight against the communist revolution, or should they just go home.
Winslow wasn’t concerned with these overall geopolitical issues though, more focussed on getting news from the First World War in Europe, which was going on at the same time, but rapidly nearing its end. He wrote in a letter to his sister: “from what we hear over the wireless, how well the Allies are doing, I don’t think the war will last much longer.”
On October 1st, 1918, a small group of 25 Canadian soldiers, including Ollie and Winslow, were ordered to go downriver, deeper into Russia.
Winslow warned his little sister: “When we get inland, mails may not be regular, … but don’t let Mother worry if you don’t hear from me often, for no news is good news, remember.”
They boarded a barge to head down a river towards the heart of Siberia, Winslow wrote: “The river is really pretty and quite a bit larger than the St. John.” … “This country is quite different to what I had imagined, not nearly so wild and uninhabited … and what surprises one the most is the good looking houses. They look very much like the buildings at home.”
As they moved deeper into the heart of Siberia, the Canadians would likely have noticed that there was little or no actual fighting.
Their main opponents were supposed to be the largest and most powerful communist faction called the Bolsheviks.
Their military was led by a man named Leon Trotsky who had almost single handedly built them from a chaotic and disorganised rabble into the formidable Red Army.
If he had any lingering hard feelings against Canadians about his unwanted time spent in Nova Scotia it didn’t show. Trotsky ordered his Red Army to more or less leave the Siberian Expedition alone. He figured that the public back home would demand the soldiers be brought home from Russia soon enough.
This meant that Winslow and Ollie would be sent to a Russian town, where they would wait; unsure of what would happen; not particularly clear on why they were even there in the first place, and with no idea how long they would be there for.
On October 21st their boat arrived at their destination, a large and wealthy town called Shenkursk.
Winslow wrote to his Mother that “We are in the town of Shenkursk just getting settled. It is a fairly large place and we have good Billets. [Ollie] and I have a large comfortable room in a nice house next to the convent. The house is as neat as a pin, as you would say and spotlessly clean. … The people we have seen so far look to be much more prosperous and intelligent than we have seen up to the present.”
With Trotsky’s Red Army seemingly leaving them alone, they explored Shenkursk.
They quickly discovered that the economy had completely collapsed, and people had simply stopped using money. Locals had reverted to a barter system of trading goods instead, and they discovered that cigarettes were a highly sought after commodity:
“One can’t buy a thing for money. They will only part with their eggs, potatoes, and birds for cigarettes and tobacco. … This morning [Ollie] and I went through the village and managed to procure two partridges, two chickens, a quantity of potatoes, and a dozen eggs for 30 cigarettes and a small tin of issue tobacco. [I haven’t received any letters] from Canada. [Ollie] got one containing some very delicious cake, a large sample of which I enjoyed very much. Tonight we had roast chicken, mashed potatoes, cabbage, pudding, cake and coffee. ”
Winslow wrote separate letters to his little sister Charlotte, his mother, and his father. While his letters to his mother and sister remained upbeat, on November 1st Winslow penned a letter to his father which hinted that he was becoming increasingly worried:
“The days are getting very short now. It gets dark at 4:15 PM. [Ollie] went up the line today with some of the Russian officers. [He said] there were quite a few Cossacks and some Russian infantry in the District, but [I’m sure] our little force can show them all up.”
Ollie and Winslow’s position in Shenkursk was boosted by a group of reinforcements; several hundred American troops had come to relieve them.
On November 8th, Winslow wrote in a letter to his mother that the Americans had arrived, saying: “Yesterday I had dinner with the Yank officers. We had roast partridge, mashed potatoes, turnips, cranberry sauce, and cranberry sauce and coffee for dessert. Nothing much wrong with that, eh? I went over to the American hospital today there is a very nice Russian nurse there … I am having a hard time to write this letter as [Ollie] is playing the gramophone and trying to sing.”
However, in a letter to his father he confessed that he was concerned about the Americans: “They seem like a decent crowd but they don’t know much about fighting. I can’t understand why they sent raw troops up here.”
He was shocked to discover that the newly arrived Americans were kids from Wisconsin and Michigan who had been enlisted through selective service – the draft. Many were farmers who had never before even left their home state. They were young, poorly trained, and didn’t even have proper clothing for the coming Russian winter.
The ominous tone of Winslow’s letter to his father darkened: “… It is getting quite cold now. … The Bolsheviks roam around in large bands. They have no established lines. [Ollie] is going out tomorrow to investigate reports of them only 12 miles from here. The peasants can’t be trusted. It is a peculiar kind of war we are fighting.”
Three days after he wrote that letter, on November 11th at 11 o’clock, the First World War ended.
His next letter takes a much darker tone:
“I am alive and well. I am present at the Outpost line. … I was to have gone back yesterday but the American Captain has asked Head Quarters to allow us to stay as he hasn’t much faith in [our] Russian [allies] for some reason or another. We have lost all desire to do more fighting now that the war is over everywhere else. I guess we drew the wrong number when we decided to come to Russia.”
The American leadership who were supposed to relieve the Canadians and let them go home were well aware of how unprepared their troops were for any serious battle. They requested the Canadian soldiers, including Winslow and Ollie, stay in Shenkursk.
Winslow added “I may be kept here some days longer.”
That Christmas, Canada was in a buoyant mood. The exuberance of winning the long gruelling First World War, led to an outpouring of joy and festive spirits that holiday season.
However, for the thousands of Canadian soldiers in Russia, the war had not ended.
Winslow wrote in a letter to his little sister Charlotte: “Just think this will be my third Xmas away. We hardly thought such a thing possible when I left home did we? I would love to go out and get the Xmas tree with you just like we used to. It wouldn’t be Xmas without it.”
Ollie and Winslow made the most of it though. In order to try to forget their own homesickness they went out to the forests and cut down a large tree. They dragged it to the centre of Shenkursk and the Canadian soldiers got together to decorate it, much to the delight of Russian civilians – adult and children alike.
There were two Christmasses celebrated in Shenkursk that year; the Canadians and Americans celebrated it on December 25th, by organising a large feast for soldiers and local civilians alike in the town square.
Russians use a different calendar though, and they celebrate Christmas on January 7th.
On the Russian Christmas, the people of Shenkursk organised celebrations for the Canadians. They presented the Canadians an elaborate Christmas feast which included soup, wild fowl, beef, plum pudding, beer, candy, and cigars.
While the Canadians and the Russian civilians celebrated in Shenkursk, little did they know that events were occurring hundreds of miles away that would soon affect them.
In short, their allies launched a large scale attack on the communists, which changed the Red Army’s leader Trotsky’s plans to wait out the Siberian Expedition, instead deciding that it must go.
Three weeks later, Ollie was off on yet another shadowy mission investigating reports of unusual activity in the area around Shenkursk. Reports had been flowing in of large movements of men, but it had been difficult to verify their accuracy or even who these mysterious people dressed in white were, and what they were up to.
At this time Winslow was at a tiny and isolated advanced base on a hilltop overlooking a large ravine named Ust Pandega – which he had nicknamed simply The Outpost.
On the night of January 22nd, 700 Red Army soldiers dressed in long white winter clothing, attacked the Outpost.
According to the book Gunners of Canada, “The dogged heroism of a Canadian officer, Lieut. J. Douglas Winslow of Woodstock New Brunswick and 8 gunners who were rushed forward. In temperatures dropping to 45 below zero, the detachment was instrumental in slowing the attack, Winslow at times threatening his White Russian allies with his pistol to stop them from fleeing. … From their position on a high bluff, the Canadian gunners for two days checked the advances of waves of infantry attacking the American Outpost, their shrapnel horribly effective against the Soviet soldiers attempting to cross the valley below.”
However, the attackers were unphased, and kept coming. Exhausted by the seemingly endless numbers of attackers, Winslow ordered a retreat.
Winslow and only a handful of Canadians retreated to another small village called Visorka Gora. As they prepared to defend it, a group of warplanes passed them, dropping bombs on the Red Army that was pursuing them.
As the friendly bombers passed by Winslow and his men as they returned home, one of them dropped a note to Winslow’s little band of defenders. It read that even more enemies were sneaking up on them through the woods, and to escape now before they were surrounded..
Winslow and the Canadians retreated back towards Shenkursk, the city they had called home for the past few months, and where they had celebrated Christmas only a matter of weeks earlier.
Only three days after the events in Shenkursk, Winslow wrote a raw and emotional letter home confessing that he had just been through “a very trying experience. … I think it was a much worse experience than anything I ran up against in France, and that’s saying a great deal.”
Shenkursk was in the woods, and only had one road into and out of it. The Red Army already controlled the road in, and more were approaching through the forests trying to cut off the only road out of town. Rather than risk getting surrounded, the American commanders ordered a hasty retreat.
The thousands of American troops defending the town were already in the middle of a panicked withdrawal. Winslow wrote that: “Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow had nothing on this one.”
“We had to evacuate that night before we were entirely surrounded. There was only one road open and it was an even chance we would have to cut our way out. Word we had to evacuate was kept secret until 9 o’clock and at 11 PM we were lined up ready to leave. We left everything behind, so I lost all my kit, walking out with only my haversack and the clothes that were on my back. It was a pitiful sight, those [Russians] who were our friends running around well nigh in despair, some trying to get sleds to escape, others starting for the woods, and others taking refuge in the Convent. All the wounded had to be evacuated.”
As the American soldiers and Russian civilians desperately tried to escape, Winslow and a small group of eight Canadian machine gunners took position along the one road to try and hold off the attackers to buy the rest more time to get to safety.
As the Bolshevik Red Army advanced on Shenkursk, according to the book Gunners of Canada: “Douglas Winslow and his exhausted gunners were joined by Capt. Oliver A. Mowat of Campbellton, New Brunswick with one eighteen pounder to help cover the withdrawal of the Americans. The Bolos were soon on their heels coming from the east and west, as well as from the South.”
Piecing together exactly what happened next is difficult.
Winslow’s letter ended by simply saying: “… I fought a rearguard action. I won’t go into details. It was dreadful.”
Winslow’s letter penned three days after the events of that night, is obviously still raw with emotion and quite disjointed. According to his little sister Charlotte, he never told the story of what happened that night again.
Decades later, in 1980, Charlotte, who was by then an old woman, tried to piece together what happened to her brother that night based on her memories of little snippets of comments he had mentioned over the years.
Charlotte suggested that as Ollie and the eight gunners held off the attackers, Winslow had scrambled back down the streets of Shenkursk during the chaos of the panicked evacuation in a desperate last ditch effort to find someone.
Charlotte recalled that occasionally he occasionally mentioned a young Russian nurse. She had spoken English, and had gotten a job working for the Americans in their field hospital. She remembered her brother telling stories about how he had taken a Russian nurse on for rides on a droshky, which is a low four wheeled Russian horse drawn carriage, in the peaceful Christmas times around Shenkursk.
Charlotte wondered if the person Winslow had mentioned searching for during the evacuation of Shenkursk and the Russian nurse he talked about were the same person.
Amid the chaos of the evacuation Winslow never found her. He raced back to rejoin Ollie and the gunners had been holding off the attack.
The Canadians had been betrayed by their Russian allies, who defected to join the Red Army.
A gunfight broke out between the Canadians and their former allies.
Ollie was shot. The bullet passed through the thigh. He survived, but was losing blood quickly.
Winslow and the few surviving Canadians loaded their wounded Captain onto a sled and dragged him into the woods, where they slipped away amid the darkness.
Ollie was badly wounded, and needed immediate attention. They somehow had to catch up to the retreating Americans, who had a portable field hospital.
With their treacherous former allies controlling the one road, they had to make their way through the unfamiliar Siberian forests, in minus 42 degree Celsius weather, while being hunted by the Red Army.
Things must have been unbelievably bleak that night. But with dawn’s rays came hope in the form of an airplane flown by Frank Schriver of Hamilton, ON.
He spotted the beleaguered Canadian survivors below him in the cold and snowy forest. He looped above them, and flew away.
Scriver then flew his plane back past them, rapidly turning his plane around and flying off again in the same direction only 300 feet above the tree tops. It became clear to Winslow what he was trying to tell them: to follow his plane to safety.
From the air the pilot kept an eye on enemy movements, leading the Canadians below zig zagging away from their pursuers.
They followed a lone little aeroplane that was leading them on a path to safety, dragging the sled with Ollie on it, until they linked up with the Americans, and brought him to the field hospital.
In his letter, Winslow wrote:
“He lived til he got to the hospital which is [26 miles] behind where we are now. … He was in such weak condition.
Winslow used the Americans telephone network to contact a Canadian General and get special permission to give him a medal before he passed away.
“By special permission of the General the Military Cross [for bravery] was pinned on him. …"
Winslow continued: "… I think he would have recovered right enough if it had not been for the long, cold, journey by sled the very evening he was wounded. … Poor Ollie died of his wounds. It was a very sad blow to all of us.”
Winslow and the other Canadians built Ollie a makeshift coffin out of tin biscuit boxes, and buried him.
Shortly after, The Siberian Expedition received new order: they were going home.
Before leaving, Winslow and the Canadians dug up Captain Oliver Mowat’s body, and brought it with them on the long retreat to the coast.
They brought his body with them on the boat home to Canada, back to his hometown in Campbellton.
More than 66,000 Canadians died in the First World War, and it was exceptionally unusual for any of their bodies to make it home. The return of Captain Oliver Mowat’s body only a year after the end of that war, was met by a collective outpouring of grief for all those who had never made it back.
His burial in the Campbellton Rural Cemetery became an occasion to commemorate not only him making the ultimate sacrifice, but the deaths of so many more Canadians who died in uniform.
