Battle of Volochayevka
볼로차옙카 전투
The battle of February 1922 near Volochayevka station on the Amur Railway, west of Khabarovsk, in which the Far Eastern Republic’s People’s Revolutionary Army under Vasily Blyukher broke through the White positions held by Viktorin Molchanov. The first assault on 10 February failed, but a second on the 12th took Iyun-Koran hill, and the Whites abandoned Khabarovsk and fell back into Primorye. The victory passed the strategic initiative to the People’s Revolutionary Army.
In depth
In November 1921 White forces backed by Japan advanced north from Vladivostok along the railway and the Ussuri River and took Khabarovsk. Checked for the first time on 28 December, 110 kilometres west of Khabarovsk, they fell back to Volochayevka and dug in. The 18-kilometre line between the Amur and Tunguska rivers centred on Iyun-Koran hill, which commanded the open plain, and was fortified with full-depth trenches, ice ramparts, hidden machine-gun nests and five or six rows of barbed wire. Before the attack the People’s Revolutionary Army was reinforced with local partisans and 1,000 Communists. English sources give it 7,600 men with hundreds of machine guns, 30 field guns and two light tanks, against 4,950 Whites with 13 guns. Russian sources describe a plan in which the Inskaya group stormed the hill while the Transbaikal group swung south to threaten the White rear.
The first assault, launched on 10 February in −30 °C cold and deep snow, failed. The infantry attacked on foot with only the two tanks in support, unable to use the armoured trains and with the artillery left behind, and with too few tools the men cut the wire with bayonets and sabres and beat it down with rifle butts. According to Russian sources the People’s Revolutionary Army lost 480 men killed, wounded and frozen, and both tanks. Blyukher regrouped for a day and attacked again along the railway at 8 a.m. on the 12th, and with armoured-train support Volochayevka was fully taken by about noon. The same day the Transbaikal group routed Molchanov’s reserve. The exhausted Reds could not encircle the Whites, and Khabarovsk fell without a fight on 13 February according to English sources, or the 14th according to Russian ones. The battle is remembered in the civil-war song "Through Valleys and over Hills" with the line "the storming nights of Spassk, the days of Volochayevka", and a memorial and museum were opened on the battlefield in 1928.