Ex-Doughboy Recalls 1918 Mission to Russia : World War I: George Roger Smith was one of 7,500 to 10,000 U.S. soldiers sent to Siberia to bolster forces opposed to the Bolshevik regime.

The carnage of World War I was in its final days when the handsome doughboy in boots, Russian hat and fur gloves posed for a minute before his barracks in Siberia.

His blond hair now is silver and even standing requires support, but George Roger Smith, who turns 100 today, still can remember his role in one of the most obscure and confused chapters of American military history.

Smith, who lives in Rancho Palos Verdes, may be the last Southern California survivor of the 7,500 to 10,000 U.S. soldiers who were sent in 1918 to Siberia to bolster forces opposed to the fledging Bolshevik regime.

He and his unit, known as the Siberia Wolf Hounds, were quickly forgotten and little honored by the United States, but they have long been vilified in the Soviet Union as another example of the implacable hatred the capitalist system has for communism.

Smith spent almost a year and a half in and around Vladivostok. He then returned, married a California girl who had gone to France with the Overseas Canteen Services during the war, had a career in California real estate and retired.

He has seen Southern California crisscrossed by freeways and noted Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s rise to power.

“By gosh, this is going to be a change,” Smith, an observer of the early Soviet state, said of Gorbachev. “I don’t think (our) people comprehend it. If he can get the people behind him, that is the big thing.”

But if Smith’s commentary on current Soviet affairs deals only in large generalities, an interview at his retirement home and the precise handwriting of his diary provides a glimpse of the daily life of a one-time Iowa farm boy suddenly thrust into history.

He fought no major battles, killed no one, but the experience was a watershed. It led a 28-year-old, cocksure farmer to reassess his life and return home determined to turn his life around.

Smith, who was living on a farm in the Coachella Valley after leaving Iowa, volunteered for the Army in 1918. He trained in Menlo Park for 90 days and was ordered to Vladivostok in eastern Siberia with the 31st Infantry Division, commanded by Maj. Gen. William Graves.

The first entry in his diary records that on Aug. 17, 1918, Smith left San Francisco aboard a transport ship with 2,000 other troops “packed like sardines.” The next day, he was seasick.

On Aug. 19, he noted: “Have my sea legs. Gambling wide open. Seasickness of men awful, ugh.” Officers cut short the gambling the next day.

On Sept. 1, he landed in Vladivostok. It was a world unlike anything Smith had experienced.

Historian Robert J. Maddox, whose book “The Unknown War with Russia” chronicles the Allied intervention against the Bolsheviks, wrote: “When American troops walked down the gangplanks at Vladivostok, they entered a world in which chaos was the normal state of affairs. The city teemed with thousands of military and civilian personnel from more than a dozen nations and no one was in charge.”

Two days after he disembarked, Smith saw for himself: “Very picturesque city, cosmopolitan to a great degree, nationalistic of wrong kind. Dirt and filth predominate, city very immoral. Men overjoyed to have a little liberty, overrun the town.”

On Sept. 6, he was sent 30 miles outside Vladivostok to guard a tunnel on the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

Like many an Army recruit, he complained about the food: “Chow is poor. all canned stuff, bully beef and hardtack,” he wrote.

The diary returns to that theme often. He pines for fresh fruit and vegetables, and he makes much of the few mealtime highlights, noting when chocolate arrived, courtesy of the YMCA, or savoring a dinner of roast goose bought from villagers.

On Sept. 11, Smith, who was involved only in skirmishes throughout his stay in Siberia, got his first news of savage fighting.

His diary notes that a colonel of the 31st Infantry came through his guard post and said that 10,000 Germans and Bolsheviks had been taken prisoner by Japanese and Czech forces and then shot. “They are taking no prisoners,” Smith wrote.

He watched trainloads of Japanese forces “going to the front every day.”

He got a list of Russian words and tried, without much success, to learn them. “Grammar very difficult,” he wrote.

Autumn rains brought mosquitoes and mud, but the trees began changing and Smith rued the idea of returning to Vladivostok.

“We are to move to town,” he lamented Sept. 17. “Would rather stay here. . . . It’s getting very pretty around here now. It’s a pretty spot in the hills anyway. Now the trees and vegetation are putting on their fall dress, gold and russet.”

On Sept. 19, he “got soaking wet on . . . patrol. When I came back, emptied about a cup of water out of each shoe.”

One of the diary’s most detailed entries records Smith’s fascination with villagers, who “come from the hills, with baskets of melons, grapes, hazelnuts, etc. squat down on the ground beside the track and sell to the passengers from the trains. Also sell corn on the cob which seems to sell best of anything.

“(Villagers) filthy and almost naked. Hope to get a picture of them, the children play around them eating the corn and melons and the hogs and chickens follow picking up what they drop. The women carry their babies slung on their hips and fastened there by a cloth twice around their waists. Quarrel among themselves over the spots on the ground they shall occupy.”

A few weeks later a bridge he was guarding caught fire, and the excitement was a welcome change from what had become boring routine. That day a lieutenant told the men they would probably remain at the outpost “all winter.” Smith’s reaction: “Got drunk last night.”

The weather grew colder, and Smith’s unit was quarantined when one man grew ill with spinal meningitis. He returned later to the monotony of patrols.

When the Armistice was declared, he was delighted.

“This terrible carnage has gone on long enough. I am anxious to get back to civil life and amount to something, which I never have, but was so damned conceited I couldn’t see it. I’m almost ashamed to go home. Only hope I can make up somewhat for the foolish things I’ve done,” he wrote.

The diary ends on Jan. 21, with his promotion to corporal, although he stayed on until Nov. 18, 1919.

“Time dragged on and dragged on,” he recalled this week. “It got to be a year after the Armistice was signed, and people in the United States got quite upset about that, about the lack of our outfit being withdrawn from Siberia.”

By the time he got back, the Bolsheviks were winning their civil war and most of the doughboys had been demobilized.

Now, more than 70 years later, Smith says that the 16 months he spent overseas seems like a dream, a lost part of his life.

A group of 150 friends and relatives, including his sons G. Roger Smith Jr. and Charles J. Smith, who also live on the Palos Verde Peninsula, will give him a birthday party Saturday.