Month: March 2019

Prior to the publication of Churchill’s Abandoned Prisoners, I have written an article on Churchill’s Siberian Strategy in March 1919, for Dan Snow’s History Hit website, which can be read here:

https://www.historyhit.com/british-intervention-in-the-russian-civil-war/

 

With a month to go before the Waterstones’ launch of Churchill’s Abandoned Prisoners, I was delighted to be interviewed by Faisal Islam on Sky News morning programme, All Out Politics.

We discussed Winston Churchill’s role in the story on the anniversary of his “Sinews of Peace” speech in Missouri, which for many people marked the beginning of the Cold War.

 

…to the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George about the Government’s policy on Russia.

The War Secretary confirmed that the Prime Minister had: “decided that Colonel John Ward and the two British battalions at Omsk are to be withdrawn”.  One week later, he sent Major Leonard Vining and Warrant Officer Emerson MacMillan to Siberia on the SS Stentor.

Little did he know that they would be captured by the Red Army and not released from their Moscow prisons until November 1920.

Read about their amazing story in Churchill’s Abandoned Prisoners: The British Soldiers Deceived in the Russian Civil War, available from Waterstones and independent bookshops later this month.

https://www.casematepublishing.co.uk/churchill-039-s-abandoned-prisoners.html

The Ivanovsky monastery in Moscow where the British were imprisoned in July 1920