![]() ![]() ![]() On the Trans-Baikal Railway, one of the major links of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the Cossacks routinely commandeered railway cars and locomotives. Graves and his men would face off against not German military leaders schooled in combat much the way he had been at West Point, but with the likes of Grigori Semenoff, a Cossack leader, or ataman, of a surly band of marauders whose sole joy in life was to rape, plunder, and steal among the local populations of the Trans-Baikal region of Siberia. ![]() It would be the first, and only, time American troops were on Russian soil. At the same time, the American North Russian Expeditionary Force arrived in Archangel. There, Graves would engage not in the kind of structured combat he had expected in Europe but in a wily contest of nerves, with Cossacks, Bolshevik guerrilla forces, and even Japanese army troops looking to bring Siberia into Japan's sphere of influence. Wilson had approved the dispatch of eight thousand men to Siberia-that cold, forbidding part of Russia-and he had chosen Graves as their commander. It had nearly a billion dollars' worth of American guns and equipment strewn along a segment of the Trans-Siberian Railway between Vladivostok and Nikolsk. President Woodrow Wilson had decided that the United States, still at war in Europe, must intervene in another part of the world to protect its investments. The next evening, he was met at the Kansas City train station by Secretary of War Newton Baker, who informed Graves that his career was taking a new turn. On August 2, however, Graves got a specially coded message at Camp Fremont in California, ordering him to a meeting in Kansas City. Army's Eighth Division, which would soon go to France to fight the Germans in the Great War. He had just been promoted to major general and assigned command of the U.S. American troops parade in Vladivostok, August 1918. ![]()
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