Re: [DS] 10,000 Xenophon's Anabasis and Czech Legion

From: "K.H.Ranitzsch" <KH.Ranitzsch@t-online.de>

> From: "Brian Burger" <yh728@victoria.tc.ca>
> > You know, this could be a pretty cool campaign. I've read (and
enjoyed)
> > Xenophon's "The Ten Thousand", wished that real world politics
allowed
me
> > to re-trace the route myself (eastern Turkey, Syria & Iraq - not a
happy
> > region...) but never thought about it for a campaign, SF or
otherwise.
>
> Harold Coyle's "The Ten Thousand" is a retelling of the story as a
> modern-era campaign - quite readable.

Also see:
Henry Baerlein, The March of the Seventy Thousand D558 B3
Ernest Dupuy, Perish by the Sword: the Czechoslovakian Anabasis and Our
Supporting Campaigns in North Russia and Siberia 1918-1920

>From http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/notebooks/czech-legions.html
"When the Great War began, of course, the Czechs were part of the
Austro-Hungarian empire, and consequently got drafted to fight the
Russians.
In an unusually shrewd move, the Russians realized that many Czechs
didn't
like being Austro-Hungarian, so they organized their Czech prisoners of
war
into a unit, called the Czech legion, to fight Austria-Hungary, with
promises of securing independence when they won. (I've not been able to
find
out if Slovaks were included in this.) It started out with about 600
men:
and then there was the Revolution, and the peace of Brest-Litovsk, and
no
way to head west. So the Czech legion (by now a few thousand strong)
decided
to go east. By the time they reached Siberia and the Allies, there were
sixty thousand of them. The Whites weren't too happy about them, but the
Americans --- especially the American Press --- loved them, and their
reputation helped make sure that Czechoslovakia did get independence
after
all. They eventually made it to Vladivostok, at the time in the hands of
the
Japanese, and thence back to Europe --- a story which deserves to be
much
better known than it is."

Picture of a Czech Legion Armoured train "somewhere in Siberia"
including
more MGs than you can poke a stick at.