One of the toughest journeys in history - the march of the Czechoslovakian Legions

recently I've become rather interested in an extraordinary military campaign that took place at the end of World War one that is the march of the Czech legions now it's possible that you've not even heard of this and I should admit that I hadn't heard of much of it until recently but then I took part in a dramatic reenactment of it and look here are some pictures of me being dramatic and Andrian actually with a load of other people and I'll be telling you more about that in a future video but in this video which has been sponsored by expressvpn more of that later I'm going to telling you about the history behind that reenactment in which I took part now if you are British you know about the Battle of Hastings cause he do it's it's part of a the defining a national story that that makes your country what it was and you know about the Battle of Britain you know Spitfires and the few and all that sort of thing and even if you're not into military or even history at all you know these things because you've been brought up with them they're part of your nation's history well if you are Czech you know about the march of the Czech legions at the end of World War one and they are part of what defined your nation now in order to do I appreciate that the story I think I should start going back quite a bit in time to the medieval period and the relations and so forth and in these periods the middle of Europe wasn't as it is today with modern nation-states with a very definite border and everyone within that border can be reasonably expected to to speak the same language pretty much the same way and use the same currency in weights and measures and be subject to the same laws and to vote in the same elections and all that sort of thing instead there was this extremely complicated patchwork you get little little islands you might have a city here where almost everyone speaks German apart from in this quarter where most of them speak polish and in this quarter where they speak Yiddish and then the people in the countryside around might speak Czech or some version of a Slovak language like check it was all very very complicated and you might have a bit of land here which was part of the state of a particular royal family and another bit of land here quite large bit of land if size of when you're a county say which belonged to that same princeling or Duke or whatever there might be quite a bit of gap of something else in between so there was this blotchy hotchpotch of of regions and some of the regions in Central Europe were Bohemia Moravia and Silesia which are the regions which later were to become Czechoslovakia but Czechoslovakia as a modern nation-state did not exist indeed the concept of the modern nation estate estate was something that was been alien to people's minds people had allegiances to family and to noble houses and so forth and these were constantly shifting alliances and though there were some big empires that would rise and fall and one of these was the Russian Empire which included areas that today we would call Poland and Ukraine but Poland as as a concept as a nation-state didn't exist back then there was just a region of the FEL largely under the influence of the Russian Empire where a lot of people spoke this language which today we call polish although of course in different parts of that area they spoke quite different versions of it you got until 1880 until 1880 only 20% of the population of France spoke French the other spoke gas gone and long barred and Breton and all sorts of other languages so the idea of the nation-state where he will speak one language and so forth was a bit alien but the idea was entering people's heads and in 1848 there are revolutions right the way across Europe now we've witnessed a string of revolutions Emily because there was the Arab Spring quite recently and so we've seen that in some nations there was a sudden dramatic regime train changes in Libya and in other places there was a regime change but then things went back to new enough the way they were like Egypt and then there was the bloody civil war which is still going on in Syria and in other places not all that much happened well again in 1848 there was quite a variation in result some places became unified and so there the modern nation-state of Italy sprang into being but in other places such as Bohemia the uprisings were crushed quite mercilessly with the bayonet so no nation-state came into being in 1848 but the idea of one was there now Slovakia was mostly in the sphere of the austro-hungarian Empire and the austro-hungarian Empire was allied with Germany and these sometimes referred to as the central powers when World War one kicked off so at the start of World War one you've got a lot of people living in this area that later will become Czechoslovakia who sort of owe allegiance to the this Empire but they don't really feel necessarily calm members of it and this Empire is asking them to fight the Russians who are fellow Slavs so a lot of the a lot of the Czechs thinking do we really want to do this is this what we want to do and a lot of them actually join the Russian army including an awful lot of them who were already settled in Russia because the Czar's had been encouraging Czechs to go and settle in Russia because the the Czech area of the world was quite industrialized quite educated quite advanced and so they could recruit good quality engineers and doctors and architects and people like that that their nation needed so they were encouraged to go over there were well treated there was plentiful land and so forth out there and they had a reasonably good life and so when World War one started a lot of these checks many of whom of course were born in Russia it seemed perfectly natural for them to join the great adventure by taking the oath inand and joining the Russian army now there are about 70,000 Czechs living in the area of Kiev and they took an oath in Kiev and not not a vast number was only 720 men started at all off it's not a vast number 720 men and these are known as the drew Gena the original guys who were there right and started okay we're going to fight for our Tsar and what an oath they took I was thinking of reading out to the oath but it's very long it's about 40 long lines long and it would just take too long so instead I think I'll put it in the description if you're really interested in reading the oath that they took obviously in translation in English anyway so they took this oath and that meant that they were then part of the Russian army but the Russian army didn't make huge amount of use for them at first of course there weren't that many of them and so there were wasn't a vast amount of use they could be put to not not enlarge military engagements but they were used first scouting and they were also used for liaison with other Czech and Slovak speaking peoples and recruiting them which of course was possible because a lot of the austere garyun troops they were fighting against but actually from Bohemia and and Silesia and these these Slovak speaking lands and so they were possibly the right for being persuaded to defect and by 1916 they had a roughly a regiment and by May there's a start and by by May they're up to brigade strength that got 7,500 men and for the first time they were put into battle as a large unit now one of the reasons that they'd not been trusted to fight like this or perhaps trusted not the word may be encouraged to fight this way is that don't forget that Russia was an empire the Czar was ruling it and did he really want to encourage people to fight for a homeland even if our homeland is in somebody else's empire because it sets a dangerous precedent doesn't it I mean the other empire might start encouraging people in his empire to fight for their homeland and and and and incite revolts and it doesn't really it's not very sporting is it if you you are an emperor to start getting people to fight for homeland start employing people in your army to fight for a homeland in someone else's and it yes it did you can see how that would that would wrangle a bit so then they fought the Battle of Zama robb that's right July 1917 now in fact this was the last really big offensive by the Russians against the Central Powers and it was not a success the the Finns and Russians on the flanks ended up falling back but the Czechs distinguished themselves it was almost embarrassing how successful they were as they attacked as oberoth czibor of non tannish writer said sorry depending on which source you read they broke through either three or four or five or all of the defensive lines of the enemy so three to five seems to be the the range and I think you'll agree that even if they broke through only three that's doing pretty well and they took many thousands of prisoners many of which were Czechs and Slovaks and these were then persuaded to join and this was a turning from this point onwards having distinguished themselves in battle and shown how useful they could be they were treated quite differently they're in a much stronger bargaining position and they were given permit permission by the Czar's and the various army authorities to recruit on a grand scale and this they did partly by emptying prisons and now of course a lot of prisoners of war were also Czechs and Slovaks and people like that and they could either work six days a week very long hours hard labor bad conditions not very good food some of them dropping dead diseased all that sort of stuff or they could join the army now getting out of prison I would have thought this explanation enough for why they might join but it seems a lot of historians have to explain why they chose to join other reasons given of course idealistic oh they were fighting for this dream of a homeland they thought maybe we can do our part in the creation of a checklist back in state although actually the Czechs wanted the Czech state but they probably weren't going to get a Czech state so they're a reasonable they were ready to compromise on a Czechoslovak state a lot of the Allied pilot bit countries like Britain and France the big powerful Western Allies were actually against the creation of a Czech State for practical reasons they thought that a Czech state would just be too small to defend itself it would be up against austro-hungarians and Germans these these massive power blocks and it would become a pawn in their political maneuvers and they needed something a bit bigger also they were quite other German speakers in the Czech lands and they were a sizeable minority and there are quite a lot of other speakers of other national languages in the slow back lens so there's another minority there but if you put the two together then the minorities in the two halves which were different minorities wouldn't be so influential and perhaps this would be a more stable state and so they were they were in favor of a Czechoslovakia anyway so they thought well we could fight for that for a Czechoslovakia and now something I've not come across in any of the history books this is just coming from me this is just pure conjecture I have no evidence to back this up but I think another reason that you might want to get out of prison is that perhaps you quite liked being a soldier I think a lot of men do actually quite like being a soldier if you like hiking and camping well there's an awful lot of that if you're on military campaign and some men actually like the danger and they like the camaraderie and all the rest of it and they don't really care that much for whom they're fighting they never see the people in high command and they were gonna meet the Czar who cares you're fighting for the guy next to you and so you get to do more of that oh the war was over for me I'm in a prison camp but oh what's that chance to do more war I'm in I suspect is why some of them joined anyway the ranks swelled and by August they had 40,000 men that they they formed a division event two divisions and there was a Corps one of the visions was known as that the hussite division which is its significance the Hussites were the followers of a chap called HUS you may have heard of him in the 15th century he put together an anti papal it was a sort of early luthier in style Protestant revolution against the papacy and this new version of Christianity was quite successful for a while and then was was crushed and there's a whole war it's actually got a lot of it gotten a lot of interesting history with it with the houselights but anyway you can see that when they called themselves that already they're thinking about national identity and the flags that they designed for their units were quite definitely check and they had heraldry in the corners which reflected the various areas of the world that they were from so these military units were quite nationalistic in that sense now this was all very fine and pleasant the wars carrying on as wars do I'm not saying the wars are pleasant but the fact is that they were they were they had a esprit de corps the morale was high they had all these chaps together with a common purpose and they had arms and had a command structure and they they felt they knew what they were doing but then the situation train changed very dramatically because in November the October Revolution happened that's the Gregorian calendar for you and so the the Bolsheviks had done their work they had incited revolt behind the lines in Russia now Germany had deliberately sent people both of its like Lenin into what would later become the Soviet Union into Russia to ferment revolution behind the lines and destabilized the enemy so since this was known about a lot of the Czechs saw these Bolsheviks as just working for the enemy they were just bit like more Germans and that they were doing the work of the enemy the Germans wanted to destabilize Russia to check legions didn't want their own the country that they were fighting with destabilized why would they so they didn't feel like joining this this red rebellion they'd felt it had next to nothing to do with them those who had sworn the oath in Kiev had sworn it personally to the Tsar himself and they didn't want to break their oath so they didn't most of them didn't join the Reds okay there were some defections for the Reds but not many not many got caught up in this this revolutionary fever so they then had a difficult time what would you do in this situation because it very rapidly disintegrated into chaos because after the Russian Revolution that was course the Russian Civil War and you have the whites and the Reds now when I say the whites I'd say White's plural and Reds plural there are many many different Reds they were they were quite moderate socialist regimes that were trying to be the official government of Russia and there were the Bolsheviks and some very very hardline communists and these of course all having different and rival ambitions and all insisting that they be the one in charge and that they are the official proper government of the whole of Russia and ever all should only to them they all hate of each other and so they are fighting each other and meanwhile the whites that there are several factions many different local warlords and Cossacks and so forth yes later on they did become a bit more unified but certainly earlier on it's loads and loads of whites popping up here and there and they're supposedly fighting for the Czar but they have lots of other things to fight for and again as I said before you tend to just fight for the man next to you whatever unit whatever faction your unit joins you tend to just go with that and fight with the men that you've been fighting alongside for the cause okay so the situation is now the chaotic at some point the Ukraine which they've been doing their fighting got ceded to the Ostrow to the Central Powers the kfl actually largely under the the the influence of Germany in return for peace so there you go as long as you stop fighting us you can go have Ukraine so it is Ukraine now part of Germany and all these German troops these columns of German troops are still around and austro-hungarian troops around are they hostiles now have we made peace with them because there's still a lot of them around and they've still got guns so you've got to watch out for them and some of them of course are also getting involved in the revolution some of them are themselves quite keen on from being Reds and communism and so forth they've quite taken up with that idea and so that some people are defecting in that direction and units are being recruited of the previous enemy so there are there are red units now being recruited largely consisting of some of them up to about 80 percent of austro-hungarians and Germans and the Czechs don't want to have anything to do with those units sorry you want us to join you and fight with you but you're recruiting units made up of people who there are enemies that we were just fighting so no we don't trust you so which way should they turn well they thought that maybe we just get out of here and they thought we could go to the port of Archangel but why would anyone come and pick us up in Archangel they came up with the Wiis they joined the French army yes they were nowhere near France and between where they were and France there was an awful lot of war as well as miles but it was a politically astute move because by joining the French army they then were officially allies fighting against the Central Powers which meant that those allies were then obliged to help them evacuate get out of that now unfortunately for them there was a complication again because the the Western Allies were quite keen on the the Czechs in Russia tying up all these Germans and austro-hungarians so that they didn't end up moving west and joining the fight on the on the Western Front and to this end they started sending forces the first to arrive with the British and a few months later Japanese troops turned up in in Russia and then awhile later American troops than the wild later Canadians and French and some of them hung around quite a long time the last troops to leave with the Japanese didn't leave until October 1922 anyway but when they arrived they didn't seem to help with the heat the Czechs all that much they had an awful lot of concerns of their own if you turn up in a very complicated war zone you you quickly find that you've got plenty of problems to deal with anyways some of the Czechs were able to escape through Archangel but quickly it became obviously this was not a practical prospect so what else could you do well the the Reds and the Central Powers were united in the both of them wanted these checks disarmed and would whenever the Czechs went to try to go somewhere they'll go to a railway station can we get on the train and go over there ah yes just leave your your weapons there in a pile and they were having to hand in more and more and more of their weapons they were they were allowed to keep fewer and fewer and every time they'd gone gone down to the number of weapons they were supposedly allowed to keep then the rules would change at the next place and could you hand in more of your rifles and and every time of course they do this they feel less safe more vulnerable less trusted and less trusting and this came to a head at the cipa gate that's right check Chelyabinsk Chelyabinsk I think it's called Chelyabinsk anyway that there the Chelyabinsk railway station incident now there had been quite a few railway incidents for instance there are a number of tales I've read where trains that were going along the tracks on parallel lines like that just passing each other would exchange small arms fire as they went past because one lot would diss that the other train was full of undesirable types well out to Chelyabinsk the story goes and you can never with these sort of stories take them at face value you got to imagine that no one really knows exactly what happened I'm sure an awful lot of he said I said and and twisted words coming to the pool anyway the story goes that there was a trainload of austro-hungarian troops and a trainload of czech troops at the station and one of the austro-hungarians who in some versions of the tale was ironically actually of Czech origin he threw something in some versions it's a stone sometimes a shard of metal sometimes of bayonet he threw a thing and supposedly this hit one of the Czechs in the head injuring him very badly and in retaliation some Czechs shot him and then the local authorities turned up arrested the Czechs and threw them into prison and this was if you like the straw that broke the camel's back the Czechs thought right that's it there is no rule of law here no one's on our side and no one is going to get those guys out of prison for doing what frankly you know they should have done we were just defending ourselves we're trying to move on if we all leave now those guys will be left by right let's get what rifles we've got together and let's go and rescue them come on let's do this let's take matters into our own hands let's take the law into our hands own hands we can't anymore kowtow to this suppose a door thority are these authorities anyway I mean everywhere we go the authority is a different lot and they all claim to be the ones in control and that we should obey their laws but they keep making up a lot right let's just do this so they took up arms and they rescued their fellows and this was reported to the high command of the Bolsheviks as a full-scale revolt which it wasn't really but as I say it was if you like the the straw that broke the camel's back it was the moment when the Czechs thought right we're on our own now and a few days later they overwhelmed the garrison at Penza and were able to recapture almost all the arms that they'd hand it in so they're now a big armed unit in this sea of chaos around them so what should they do well the the Czech legions I used the word legions a few times actually during the World War one they were almost never referred to as the legions they were the brothers they were the the they had a number of other type of the légion came into being right at the end of World War one and was used thereafter but anyway these these Czech soldiers its ex Russian army Czech soldiers what did they do that well they were a democracy and so they they had some meetings and and took votes now they could try again to get to Archangel that was one option they could have to stay where they are they could hand in their arms give up and say okay yeah we will play nicely with all the various authorities they could try to get back to their homeland and of course for some of them they'd never been to their homeland before because they were born in Russia but they could try to get back to bohemia' but there's an awful lot of war in the way not only are there war is there war that we've got to go through here with all the whites and the Reds fighting each other and the Reds fighting the red and the whites fighting the whites but they're also those Germans and austria-hungary Hungarians and as soon as the the the proposed Czechoslovakia came into existence Poland and Hungary were immediately fighting border wars to try to change those agreed on borders so there's a huge amount of war between where they were and where they needed to get to so they thought we're never gonna make it you can't walk through three wars saying excuse me do you want just just I know we're trying I know they're on yours it could use lettuce true just be nice no that wasn't going to happen so they voted to do something pretty extraordinary they voted to go to Vladivostok and get a ship and from there head east get to the west coast of the USA go across the USA get another ship and go to Europe yeah they voted to go all the way around the world to get home that way now Vladivostok it's quite no it's not quite a long way away if I were to say that Vlad Lee Vostok is quite a long way away that would really be lying to you frankly it's that inaccurate um there's have a look at a map okay so here's Paris Maps know where that is in France then there's and so they've got the Western Front and you've got to there's Berlin there let's keep going and some Petersburg became Moscow that there's Archangel up there so that was the port and Vladivostok is there yeah it's all the way six thousand miles away through the frozen wastes of Siberia it's it's up and right a bit of North Korea it's just about as far away as it was possible for anywhere to be that you could conceivably get to on foot and they thought our best chance of getting out of here is to go there and I think perhaps before going any further I should tell you a little bit about my sponsor expressvpn now what does what does VPN sound for well it stands for 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opposition that was quite fractured and the whites hadn't got it together the Reds hadn't got it together so they were able to get off the mark fairly quickly and capture a load of trains including six armoured trains fairly early on so that there was one advantage they had I suppose just the general amount of chaos around there was one of the biggest advantages they had throughout the entire journey all 6,000 miles they were substantially outnumbered by enemy forces several several to one pretty a pretty much the whole time and for one stage of the journey if they had to get through tunnels really really long tunnels through mountains and that was a significant campaign you might think how the hell do you fight your way through a tunnel well with great difficulty but one ways is you try to get control of the mountain above the tunnel and yes their enemies did try to blow the tunnels and they did bring the ceiling down but never completely and permanently closing the tunnels off it's a week sometimes of digging to get through the rock but they were able to get through the rock and to secure these tunnels now when they made the decision to go to Vladivostok they were not all in one lump at that point they were they were scattered in pockets and I should say and Chelyabinsk is one of the cities on the the trans-siberian railway and they took possession of several cities along the along the railway so this was a not insignificant military operation they had to control a huge amount of of land and hang on to it as a war went both ways across them because the whites actually got together and the whites started doing quite well against the red and of course the whites were constantly saying you should fight for us you should fight for us against these all four Bolsheviks you hate the Bolsheviks don't you come on fight for us and get some of them joined in but most of them just thought now you're a load of weirdos and you're a load of out for yourselves Warlord's are all fighting each other all the time and we can't trust you and then a bit the the white advance stalled and the Reds countered and started pushing the whites back at which point the whites were extra keen to have the use of the railway because it would have helped them quite a lot in their retreat but unfortunately the the Czechs decided that now actually if it's all right with you we'd like to hang onto it we went to quite a bit of effort to get it one thing that made it a lot easier to get ahead was that in a daring raid they managed to capture and what a story this is on its own they managed to capture almost the entire Russian Imperial Dold reserve yeah quite a bargaining chip but there was a bargaining chip that they did end up needing now another bargaining chip they had was the leader of the whites a chap called Admiral Kolchak now he was but he actually abdicated he was the leader of white Russia for a while when you knew the whites were about as unified as they ever got but he saw that the game was up and he abdicated his ruler or onboard a train and he was handed over to the Czechs for for safekeeping and you can see how that was perhaps an astute move because for a lot of people to be given him as a hostage as a prisoner would've been quite a poisoned chalice but the Czechs well they could at least be trusted not to shoot him right but as the the Czechs moved to the east they came across opposition from a comparatively moderate regime of socialists who said oh yes hand him over to us he'll be a prisoner he'll be given a trial that'll all be fine hand him over to us or we won't let you pass so what you do you are tens of thousands of people you've got loads of civilians travelling with you you've got wounded you've got an awfully long way to go you could fight your way through in which case how many people are going to die die for this one guy or you could hand him over or you could give up what you gonna do well what they did was they handed him over and I suppose you can guess what happened a load of much much keener Reds if they came along and said all we'll have him thank you very much and they killed him the cost from that point onwards the reputation of the checks was stained and a lot of the white said you were traitors you you betrayed him and well yeah they did but he was one guy and there were an awful lot of them and isn't in portable isn't it what should they have done I'm not I'm not going to pretend that I know but I do know that it's a it would be no pretty horrible decision to have to make and with that massive amount of gold bullion they were able to bribe their way east and yes they did eventually get to Vladivostok in the end they managed to control 6,000 miles of of railway and they managed to capture 259 trains which is the impressive achievement I would say and they did this under most appalling conditions it's Siberia in winter the the temperatures dropped down to minus 30 quite commonly loads of them lost fingers and toes and ears and noses to frostbite particularly in January 1919 which was especially bitter so these columns of bedraggled people had to make their way against overwhelming odds over a vast vast distance but astoundingly they actually managed to do it and they were able to get ships from the Allies that came to came to Vladivostok and took them away and in all sixty-seven thousand seven hundred and thirty of them made it back of which eleven thousand two hundred and seventy-one were civilians but unfortunately four thousand one hundred and twelve of them were in graves left behind although out of 70 ish thousand people four thousand dead it's a pretty I find it amazing that they were actually so few of them who died if you consider how many of them could have died there are a number of what-if scenarios one of them is that when they were surrounded by chaos and the the Eastern Front collapsed and there were no really well organized forces in Russia they were actually in quite a strong position at that one moment they could have if they voted differently they could have perhaps marched on Moscow some of have suggested and they could have taken Moscow and then perhaps they could have dictated terms on and set up their own little rule within Moscow and then negotiated with various other powers who knows what could have happened it's one of those amazing what-if scenarios but anyway they didn't they decided that they'd had quite enough of this mad mad Russian politics and they just wanted to go home they wanted to go home to this new place and of course by the time they got there two years later there was a checklist of akhiya and when they got there they found that it was a liberal democracy which I imagined that please most of them and that they were welcomed as heroes there and for a while everything well and not everything there's still lots of troubles I mean one trouble for instance was that they were immediately involved with as I've mentioned before with the border disputes with with Hungary and Poland and other neighboring countries but they actually did pretty well in those in those border wars and were able to preserve that their country and in 1939 of course things changed because you perhaps do know what happens in 1939 is that Czechoslovakia gets annexed by Germany and becomes part of the Axis powers in world war ii and this this nation which the people like the British and French had hoped would be big enough to defend itself in the end was even though it was large and had quite a quite an impressive military force the tanks of the checklist Eclair Czechoslovakian army in 1939 we were pretty formidable force so unfortunately they all ended up getting used by the Germans against the Allies including the Russians of course they did ended up being just a political pawn and they got annexed without a shot with hardly a shot fired I say hardly shot actually 13,000 of the Czech legionaries did actually die either fighting the Nazis or in concentrate concentration camps having been imprisoned by the Nazis others of them escaped to places like England and then joined Allied armies and fought against the Germans that way but unfortunately of course they didn't get their homeland back at the end of World War two because Czechoslovakia was liberated not by the Western Allies but by the Soviets and so it fell in under the Soviet sphere and that was definitely the worst of the two possibilities there was a false hope in 1968 when there was the Prague Spring but that was crushed and the people to check us back you had to wait until nineteen No yeah 1989 for the Berlin Wall to come down to get their freedom from Soviet oppression and the things move pretty quickly after that in 1993 the two countries of Czech Republic and Slovakia split apart and created their two new nation-states by 1999 they joined NATO and the very last of the the Czech legionaries of World War one and had a head of a life he died in 2003 aged 107 and one light beam had just think about what a life he'd had he'd seen his nation born then he'd seen it annexed and come under the sphere of one tyranny then it got there's world war two and then it came under well firstly he fought World War one then as well bore two and then it fell under another Soviet domination and if you were one of the Czech legendaries under the Nazis and Soviets both you were not treated well because the Nazis and the Soviets they did not see you as a hero one of you're one of the people who fought for the founding of your of your nation they were a lot of them were jailed dismissed from jobs and yeah and their story was suppressed they were not allowed in public you'd talk about this this heroic tale when anyway and so that last Legion who died in 2003 as I say he got to see the full circle he got to see his nation come right away back to a modern liberal democracy again so I think you'll agree it's quite the tale [Music] the man you

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Keywords: czech, legion, druzhina, slovaks, czechoslovakia, ww1, world, war, one, wwi, siberia, russia, russian, revolution, march, vladivostok, reds, whites, civil, great, battalions, front, eastern, journey, escape, evacuation, trek, history, national, nation, founding

Id: nASMUMDaWyg

Length: 39min 56sec (2396 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2019