Legions
Immediately after his capture, Geidl switched sides and was commissioned as a captain in the Montenegrin Army. Having some experience as an apothecary, he pretended to be a physician. Following the collapse of the Montenegrin Army in 1916, Gajda escaped into Russia where he joined a Serbian battalion as a physician.
At the end of 1916 the battalion was destroyed and Gajda joined the Czechoslovak Legions (January 30, 1917) as a staff captain. Gajda proved himself as an able commander in the Battle of Zborov and quickly rose through the military hierarchy.
During the evacuation of the Legion in 1918 via the Trans-Siberian railway violence erupted between the Legion and the Bolsheviks. Czechoslovak soldiers quickly occupied large tracts of the railway east of the Volga. Gajda commanded the area from Novonikolayevsk (Novosibirsk) north to Irkutsk. Aggressive tactics, sometimes against the orders of his superiors, helped to defeat the Bolshevik forces and connect all units of the Legion. This contributed to his conflict with Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, who wanted the Legions to stay neutral in the Russian civil war.
The most successful operation was the capture of Perm (December 24, 1918) where the Legion took 20,000 prisoners and seized 5,000 railway cars, 60 cannon, 1,000 machine guns and the fleet frozen in the Kama River. Gajda's enjoyed widespread popularity amongst his troops and throughout the White movement. He was promoted to Major-General and nicknamed "the Siberian Ataman" and "the Siberian Tiger." He later accepted an invitation from Aleksandr Kolchak to become a commander in his army.
His career with Kolchak was less successful—the Red Army had begun to take the initiative while Kolchak's forces dwindled away. Gajda, out of Kolchak's favor, was dismissed on July 5, 1919. After involving himself in the unsuccessful mutiny of Esers against Kolchak (17 November 1919) he escaped from Siberia and took ship to Europe.
Read more about this topic: Radola Gajda
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