Most people have never heard of the Czech (or Czechoslovak) Legion. I have written two articles on this early 20th century band of freedom fighters with the help of research from the Czech Legion Project. The Czech Legion Project is a non-profit historical organization that strives to tell the tale of this incredible group. After years of effort they have put together an insightful 47-minute documentary entitled “The Accidental Army: The Amazing True Story of the Czechoslovak Legion.”
The 2009 independent production utilizes the vast archives amassed by the Czech Legion Project to tell the ‘most amazing story you never heard.” Commentators included Lt Col Mike Maudlin, USA retired (advisor to the Czech Army 2003-2006), and Professor Malynne Sternstein, PhD. The documentary was also assisted by the Czech consulate and included an introduction by Madeleine Albright.
The film covers in great detail the Russian Army’s formation of the Czechoslovak Druzhina (a 12th century word which translates to Legion or "war band") at Kiev on August 14, 1914- only two weeks after the war started. The Legions World War I service and its expansion into a 35,000-man, two-division Corps by October 1917. The Allies convinced the Bolsheviks to withdraw the Czech Legion from their crumbling front and ship them via train 6,000 miles across Russia to Vladivostok where they would be transported to the western front and continue the war there. Some 9300 kilometers (5470 miles) of this trip was across the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to the Pacific Ocean. This final journey was to take nearly three years and toss the luckless Czechs into the middle of the Russian Civil War.
The only issues I had with the documentary were trivial:. There is a gap in coverage from the capture of Yekaterinburg to the Treaty of Versailles. The fall 1918/spring 1919 campaign where the legion assisted in the capture of Perm and Kazan and the advance to the Volga is simply skipped. On July 22, 1918 they captured Simbrisk and the “Lenin”- Bolshevik armored train No. 4, which the Czechs pressed into service as the Orlik (Czech for Eagle). They took Perm in December, followed by Glazov and Kazan just miles from the Volga River and stood within a few hundred miles of Moscow. It was the first army to threaten European Russia from Asia since the tartars in the 12th century. The documentary also further states that the American units that landed in Vladivostok in 1918 were National Guard when in fact the first US troops in town were the 31st Infantry Regiment of regulars from the Philippines.
The most amazing quality of the documentary is the hundreds of amazing photographs from the Russian Civil War in Siberia that make up a priceless collection. I have more than 80 books on the Russian Civil War in three different languages on my bookshelves and I have not seen the majority of these pictures. The secret lies in several Czech family collections that are in private hands that were made available to the project. These coupled with the attention shown this subject that is often relegated to a footnote in history make the documentary worth watching.
Nazadar!
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