In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Appendix: A Word on Sources The end of the Soviet Union led to the opening of Russia’s military and naval archives. Being unfamiliar with these sources, I inquired about access and the like. Given the confusion that results from any military retreat, the loss of the islands, and the overthrow of the Russian Provisional Government by the Bolsheviks a scant two weeks after the Baltic Islands campaign, followed by years of subsequent revolutionary turmoil, I feared the worst, namely that little or nothing would be available. David Glantz, expert on World War II, provided encouragement. The Russians, he said, are inveterate record keepers. The records will be there, and Westerners can now use them for research purposes. I engaged a research assistant, Ms. Elizaveta Zheganina, then a graduate student at St. Petersburg State University and now a Ph.D. candidate at Kansas State University. After preliminary inquiries , she advised me to write on letterhead to the administration at the Russian State Naval Archive, explaining my research interests and purpose and authorizing her to work on my behalf. While I followed her guidance, I did so with some trepidation. “It just can’t be this easy,” I thought, especially when the Russians see “The Military College of South Carolina” on the letterhead. But it was, and within a week she began to send me materials from the Naval Archive and later the corresponding army one in Moscow. She did the translations; the responsibility for accuracy and correct use is nevertheless mine. To my knowledge, this book is the first non-Soviet account to make use of this copious material. David Glantz was correct. The Russians indeed are dutiful record keepers. The navy, which had responsibility for the defense of the islands, has fairly complete records. A great deal of essential material from the 242 Operation Albion headquarters of the Baltic Fleet, the Chief of the Naval Defenses of the Gulf of Riga, and the Chief of the Defenses of the Baltic Islands Archipelago survived. I was not so lucky with army records. The largest army units involved, the 107th Infantry Division and elements of the 118th, were captured along with their records by the Germans. The Germans repatriated the prisoners after the war, but they kept the records they had captured. After the war ended, the Soviets had little interest in writing about it, and no official history was produced. High-ranking tsarist officers became persona non grata, and many fled or were executed by the Soviet regime. Vice Admiral Mikhail Bakhirev did write a short memoir in 1918 or 1919, but it was not available in the West until recently. Former naval officers living abroad found it difficult to find publishers. They did form an association , and its members in 1958 produced a rebuttal to a Soviet historian’s account that challenged their conduct, accusing them of having lost the battle through cowardice. Ironically, the situation with German military records parallels that of the Russians. The German navy files are in good shape; the army’s are almost nonexistent. The army kept its records at the Reichsarchiv in Potsdam. Unfortunately, in November 1944 a bomb raid destroyed the Reichsarchiv and most material inside it. The records of the majority of the senior headquarters along with most units (to include those that had participated in Albion) were lost. The captured Russian records from the First World War also went up in flames. Fortuitously, however, in the 1920s the United States Army had an arrangement with the Germans to permit a small team of two–three officers to travel to Berlin to copy the files of the German units that had fought against the Americans on the western front. Both of the major German army units in Albion, the XXIII Reserve Corps and the Forty-second Infantry Division, participated in the 1918 Spring Offensive. An enterprising but unknown American officer, when going through these records, had his interest piqued by the operation and made typescript copies of the materials relating to Albion. These files were incorporated into Record Group 165 of the U.S. National Archives. While the records are only those of the top-level headquarters, they nonetheless are invaluable. Surprisingly, the German memoir literature on Albion is scanty. Colonel (later Lieutenant General) Erich von Tschischwitz, the chief of staff of the XXIII Reserve Corps, wrote two memoirs, which are listed in the bibliography. Both are invaluable for study of this topic. After the operation, [3.19.31.73] Project...

Share