Fifteen Flags

Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1968. Possible book club edition. Hardcover. Good. ix, [1], 597, [1] pages, No dust jacket present. Cast of Characters. Ex-library with some of the usual markings. Part of DJ flap pasted inside of the front board. Somewhat shaken. This is a novel about the American Siberian Expeditionary Force of 1918-1920 which joined the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. Given the task of protecting the Trans-Siberian Railroad, men of the American 27th and 31st Infantry were inevitably drawn into the bitter conflicts of an epic revolution. Ric Hardman was, a writer of screenplays, TV scripts and novels, mostly in the western genre. For the big screen, Hardman wrote "Gunman's Walk," a 1958 western starring Van Heflin and Tab Hunter, and "The Rare Breed," another western from 1966 featuring James Stewart. In the early 1960s, Hardman wrote for the western TV series "Lawman" using his name as well as a pen name, Bronson Howitzer. He later turned to writing novels, including "Fifteen Flags," a 1968 story about American troops fighting in Siberia during the Russian Civil War of 1919-20, and "Sunshine Rider," a 1998 novel that Hardman called the first vegetarian western and a Boston Globe reviewer called "delicious whimsy." Richard Hardman was born Nov. 8, 1924, in Seattle. He served in the Marines during World War II and studied at the University of Washington and UCLA's film school before starting his writing career. Fifteen Flags re-creates the American military intervention into Siberia during the Russian Civil war, one of America's earlier failed attempts to control the fate of nations. This epic novel focuses on company commander Captain "Hunkpapa" Jack Carlisle and his second in command, Lt. Ira Leverett, known to their men as the Sioux and the Jew. Their mission was to maintain neutrality on an isolated sector of the Trans-Siberian railway which was targeted by Bolshevik and Czarist troops, by roving bands of Cossacks and by the forces of a dozen other nations which sought to control Siberia. In 1920 when they received orders to withdraw Lt. Leverett deserted the company to find Maryenka Austin, widow of an American sergeant who died in action. Captain Carlisle and his men, riding two rail wagons behind an erratic wood burning switching engine, beat their way East toward Vladivostok trying to outrun an armored train commanded by a rogue White officer, Colonel Sipialef, who has stolen the Czarist gold reserves. When Leverett locates Maryenka with a band of Partisans and learns she is pregnant, he convinces her and the Partisan leader that Maryenka should be evacuated with the American forces so that her child can be born in the United States.