The Foreign Service Journal, February 2008

U.S. Army uniforms that corre- sponded to their new military ranks. Henderson decided to drop out of graduate school and volunteer for the American Red Cross in the summer of 1918. This fateful deci- sion would forever link Loy’s life to the Baltic region and lead to a long and successful career with the U.S. Foreign Service. (Roy Henderson, however, would never make it to Europe — one of his kidneys was damaged during training and had to be removed.) Arriving in France in late November 1918, after the armis- tice had been declared, First Lieutenant Loy Henderson helped prepare wounded American sol- diers for the trip home. Promoted in March 1919, Capt. Henderson was then assigned to Berlin to help with the repatriation of soldiers from the Russian Imperial Army held in German prisoner-of-war camps. Among the soldiers he and his ARC colleagues helped send home were 1,758 Estonians, 9,970 Lithuanians and about 1,500 Latvians, in addition to 24,753 Russians. While arranging for the return home of these new Baltic nationals, Capt. Henderson traveled to Lithuan- ia for the first time in April 1919 and to Latvia in August of that same year. When he saw firsthand how badly the Baltic states needed help, Henderson volunteered to join the new American Red Cross Commission to Western Russia and the Baltic States in Octo- ber 1919, rather than return home to the United States. Over the next two years, Capt. Henderson would see service in all three new Baltic nations. He would also meet an American diplomat for the first time: John Gade, the first U.S. commissioner to the Baltic states. Gade was appointed in October 1919, almost three years before Washington established formal relations with the three countries on July 28, 1922. Risking His Life for Estonia A total of 60 ARC colleagues, including field officers, doctors, nurs- es and other support staff, were sta- tioned in Estonia. Capt. Henderson was assigned to Narva, arriving at his new assignment in February 1920, not long after Soviet Russia and Estonia signed the Treaty of Tartu that ended hostilities and established their new border. While Estonia’s War of Independence was technically over, the new country was still trying to deal with its aftermath. When General Nikolai Yudenich’s White Russian Army had retreated into Estonia after their defeat near Petrograd in November 1919, they carried typhus to their base in Narva. The Estonian government put the American Red Cross in charge of all sanitary measures as the epidemic threatened to spread, and Capt. Henderson and three of his fellow ARC officers — Capt. Wilbur F. Howell, 2nd Lt. Clifford A. Blanton and 1st Lt. George W. Winfield — volunteered to oversee the quaran- tine around Narva. This was an extremely dangerous job. Before the first vaccine was developed in 1930, the mortality rate for those infected with typhus was between 10 and 60 percent. The disease thrives during disasters and is thought to have killed at least three million citizens of the Russian Empire in the wake of the Great War. As the Red Army was being ex- pelled from Narva in February 1919, the Russian soldiers had stripped the Krenholm textile facto- ry of all its equipment. That struc- ture’s empty shell, along with the castles of Narva and Ivangorod, became the ARC’s main field hospi- tals. Complicating the situation fur- ther, White Russian officers and their men refused to take orders from their Estonian counterparts, so Capt. Henderson assumed full command of all White Army field hos- pitals in and around Narva. It was exactly for situations like this that the U.S. government had commissioned ARC members as U.S. Army officers. Henderson was appalled by the conditions he found among the ap- proximately 30,000 defeated and de- moralized troops of the White Army. In his memoirs, he describes his first visit to Krenholm: “Lying on the floor in disorderly rows were several hun- dred men clothed in remnants of old uniforms, tattered overcoats, or mere- ly piles of rags. Some were lying on, or were wrapped in, dirty pieces of blankets. Through the long hair that covered their heads and faces we could see their eyes, frequently bright with fever, peering at us, some angri- ly, some pleadingly, some without any emotions at all.” Capt. Henderson continued: “Por- tions of the hair and beards of many of 40 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 8 Loy Henderson