In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  Since the war, in his view, was coming to a swift end, Straight was despondent. He had not distinguished himself in the conflict, and there was no more time in which to do so. He had served throughout as a staff officer, not as a commander in battle, and he asked his wife, “… what do I take to you? A record of performance, something of which you can be proud? No—nothing.”

  He despaired for his country, too, and for the American ideals that alone, in his view, justified Wilson’s decision to bring the United States into the war. Walter Lippmann, his friend and one of his original band of editors at The New Republic, now serving as an intelligence officer interrogating German prisoners taken by the AEF, was at army headquarters in France with Straight the last weeks of the war, and recalled that “I was closer to Willard than ever before. Up at the First Army we talked far into the night.…” Mixed with hope the two earnestly idealistic young leaders of liberal opinion felt “a fear that what we had meant, and what alone could justify it all, was not going to be in the minds of the decisionmakers.”

  WILSON’S DRIFT INTO CONFLICT with Bolshevik Russia was what most disturbed William Bullitt, House’s man at the European desk of the State Department. The enormous land mass that had been the tsar’s empire had over the centuries swallowed up some of the greatest invading armies in history, and there was no reason to believe that American troops sent to occupy Russia would fare any better.

  Wilson, who at first resisted French and British proposals to send an expedition to take possession of Russia’s northern ports, argued as he always had that no forces should be diverted from the western front. He always had feared that the Allies would try to send American armies to far-off theaters of war to serve French and British national or imperial ambitions; indeed, one of the reasons that he had insisted that Americans serve in their own army under Pershing’s command had been to prevent that from happening. And it could well be suspected in 1918 that the Allied proposal to intervene in Russia was animated at least as much by political as by purely military motives.

  Nonetheless Wilson, fearing, he claimed, that he had opposed Allied proposals too often, finally gave his consent. British and French leaders saw their plan (or at any rate presented it) in the context of the war against Germany. Although Bolshevik Russia had made peace with Germany in March 1918, the war in a sense continued on what once had been tsarist soil. The Russian empire had disintegrated, and in the fluid, volatile, confusing situation that followed, dozens of leaders, parties, and nationalities aspired to rule some or all of it. Rival tsarist officers in various parts of the former empire, aiming at a future position on or behind the throne, led armies that regarded themselves as still at war against Germany, while German forces remained active in the Caucasus and Ukraine.

  At stake were vast quantities of supplies in many parts of the former empire that might fall into the hands of the Germans. Even more important were various armed groups of former soldiers—some from prison camps that had broken down as a result of the Russian revolutions—who moved across the chaotic sixth of the earth’s land surface that had been the Romanov domains in an attempt to rejoin the German or Allied armies.

  What Wilson allowed himself to be persuaded to do was send an American expedition under British command to occupy the ports of Murmansk and Archangel in the far north of Russia. It was argued that supplies of military importance would thus be protected from seizure by German or pro-German forces operating from nearby Finland. Wilson claimed he was using the troops “to guard the military stores” and, puzzlingly, “to make it safe for Russian forces to come together in organized bodies in the north.” He did not identify the forces he had in mind.

  Britain and France also pressed America to organize, with Japan, an intervention in Siberia. Again, Wilson at first refused. Then the situation changed suddenly. A corps of pro-Ally Czech soldiers, stranded within Russia and blocked by Germany and Ukraine from moving west, seized control of the Trans-Siberian Railroad and traveled east on it to its terminus, the Pacific coast port city of Vladivostok, taking possession of the town.

  Wilson, one of the many admirers of the Czech liberal leader Tomáš Masaryk, met at the White House with advisers on July 6, 1918, and decided to dispatch forces “on sentimental grounds” to help the Czechs. He decided that “in view of the inability of the United States to furnish any considerable force within a short time,” he would request the government of Japan to provide 7,000 troops to match the 7,000 troops he could send.

  At the White House meeting, observing Army Chief of Staff General Peyton C. March, Wilson asked, “Why are you shaking your head, General?” and then, answering himself, said, “You are opposed to this because you do not think Japan will limit herself to 7,000 men, and that this decision will further her schemes for territorial aggrandizement.… Well, we will have to take that chance.”

  Wilson’s decision brought the United States into conflict with the Allies, with Japan, and with Russia—indeed, with everyone except the actual enemy, Germany.

  The Allies were furious at not being consulted or even informed. Britain replied in kind by unilaterally ordering forces to Vladivostok from nearby Hong Kong, followed by a British military mission and then a British high commissioner. So with no coordination, British troops moved into town alongside units of the American and Japanese armies.

  Japan pushed aside the limitations Wilson sought to impose upon her and pursued her own ambitions for expansion on the mainland by sending 72,000 troops instead of the proposed maximum of 7,000.

  By not clarifying what the American forces were going to help the Czechs do, Wilson also brought the United States into collision with Lenin’s regime: perhaps without meaning to, he allowed America to be sucked into aiding the opposition White armies in the first stages of the Russian Civil War. The President ignored the role the Czechs were playing in fighting against the Reds. By not transporting the Czechs back to Europe, but instead supporting them inside Russia in their battle against the Bolsheviks, the United States was entering that conflict, too—but not doing so effectively enough to defeat the communists.

  In a statement made public in August in which he justified the military landings in Russia, the President claimed that his government had no intention of interfering with “the Russian people in their endeavor to regain control of their own affairs, their own territory, and their own destiny.” He did not explain why he thought that occupying Russian territory in order to help one side against another in a Russian civil war was not a form of interference.

  As always, the President purported to be acting in the service of high ideals. One might have imagined that his decision had been to send out to Russian lands not military or political missions, but charitable and educational ones. “It is the hope and purpose of the Government of the United States,” Wilson wrote in outlining his policy, “to send to Siberia a commission of merchants, agricultural experts, labor advisers, Red Cross representatives, and agents of the Young Men’s Christian Association.…”

  These decisions distressed the President’s liberal supporters. In June William Bullitt wrote to Edward House that he was “sick at heart because I feel we are about to make one of the most tragic blunders in the history of mankind” by intervening in Russia against Lenin’s government. Bullitt still believed that the Bolsheviks might be won over to the Allied and American cause, and pleaded with House to change sides in policy toward Russia: “Let us join the Soviets,” he wrote.

  In September, after the American intervention, Bullitt feared that Wilson’s policy might drive Soviet Russia into alliance with Germany. “One year ago today,” he wrote House, “Russia was fighting by our side against Germany.… Today we are fighting Great Russia, and it is possible that before summer one million Russians will be acting as German depot and supply troops on the western front. This is the year’s achievement of our Russian diplomacy. When the men charged with aircraft production failed, the President threw them out.…” Those in charge of America’s policy to
ward Russia should be thrown out too, Bullitt argued.

  WILSON’S OUTSTANDING ADVISER when he sought his first term as President had been Louis D. Brandeis, the intellectual and spiritual giant of the Progressive movement who had been appointed by Wilson to the Supreme Court, but retained his interest in the foreign and other policies of the administration. Several years after the events recounted here, Brandeis remarked that President Wilson “should be judged by what he was and did prior to August 4, 1918, the date of the paper justifying the attack on Russia. That was the first of his acts which was unlike him; and I am sure the beginning of the sad end.”

  22

  A STAB IN THE BACK

  THE FINAL ACT in the drama of 1914–18 began in an unexpected corner of Europe and followed a script that had been submitted and rejected long before. On New Year’s Day 1915 David Lloyd George, then chancellor of the exchequer, had circulated to the British cabinet a proposal to launch an attack from the Greek port of Salonika (Thessaloníki) through the Balkans and Austria-Hungary directed at Germany’s vulnerable southern flank. Britain’s generals vetoed the plan and year after year had argued against such “Eastern” projects. But in the summer of 1918 French general Louis-Félix-François Franchet d’Esperey, newly appointed Allied commander in Salonika, won permission to launch an offensive in the Balkans against Bulgaria, the smallest of the Central Powers. His plan of attack was based on one formulated earlier in the war by a general in the army of Serbia, the Balkan kingdom whose rivalry with Austria-Hungary had led to the outbreak of hostilities in 1914.

  Franchet d’Esperey’s forces attacked on the morning of September 15 and smashed through Bulgarian lines. Racing forward against an enemy who had lost all will to fight, the Serbian, Greek, French, and British troops of the Salonika command advanced at rates of twenty and twenty-five miles a day. They knocked Bulgaria out of the war in two weeks. On September 26 the Bulgarians asked for an armistice, and on September 28 they accepted unconditionally the terms of one dictated to them by Franchet d’Esperey; they signed it the next day.

  Talaat, the grand vizier of the Ottoman Empire, was stopping for a few days in Bulgaria on his way back from a conference in Berlin when the Bulgarians sued for an armistice. Bulgaria was the land bridge between Germany and Turkey, and now that it was collapsing, the Turks would be cut off from all sources of supply and reinforcement from Germany. Talaat hastened back to Constantinople to tell the members of his cabinet that Ottoman Turkey must ask for peace. He informed them that Germany was going to do so, too. Talaat and his cabinet then resigned, on the theory that a new Ottoman government less guilty in the eyes of the Allies might be able to obtain from them more generous terms.

  Ludendorff, on receiving the news of Bulgaria’s capitulation, came to the same conclusions. He told Hindenburg, the kaiser, and Chancellor Hertling that Germany must sue for an armistice immediately; that an approach should be made to the United States, not the Allies; that Germany should sue for peace on the basis of the terms Wilson had outlined to Congress; and that like the Turks, the Germans should change their government to make it more acceptable to the other side and therefore more likely to be able to obtain generous terms. Adopting this program advocated by Ludendorff and also by Foreign Minister Admiral Paul von Hintze, the Germans swiftly carried out a revolution from above. In less than a week commencing the night of September 28–29, they introduced fundamental constitutional changes subordinating military to civilian authority, and installed a new chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, sustained in the parliament by the Socialist party. Prince Max on the night of October 4–5 dispatched a note to Wilson asking him to help in arranging an armistice and in initiating peace negotiations on the basis of the Fourteen Points and the other principles the President had articulated since then.

  So in a matter of days, Germany had changed from a de facto military dictatorship supported by the parties of the Right and determined to fight on, into a civilian democracy supported by the Left, and in search of a liberal Wilsonian peace. And it all had been done on orders from Ludendorff.

  The dark genius of the German army had lost his nerve on the western front in the face of British advances during the summer. But he had pulled back to a strong defensive position, and his professionalism kept him going. It was possible that he could have held out behind his fortified lines until the AEF was fully ready to mount an offensive. But against an attack from Bulgaria through Austria-Hungary, Germany was defenseless.

  The coming into existence of the AEF had doomed Germany, but only in the sense that it had set some sort of time limit within which she had to bring the war to an end. On the other side, the creation of the AEF provided the Allies with a guarantee that if the war continued long enough, Germany would be defeated someday by somebody—even if not by them. But in the autumn of 1918 it turned out that the Allies would not need to call upon that guarantee. They had won the war on their own. They had won it in a campaign in which the Americans took no part; indeed, the United States never had declared war on Bulgaria.

  For Germany, which otherwise might have had until the spring or summer of 1919 to negotiate a compromise peace—or until sometime thereafter to surrender to an AEF that would impose terms that were generous—the success of Franchet d’Esperey’s thrust through the Balkans meant that time had run out unexpectedly soon. Hence, in Berlin, Ludendorff’s stage-managed coup d’état against his own regime.

  IN LIFE AS IN CHESS, the endgame usually is the treacherous one. The minor pieces that provide cover and slow down the action by standing in the way have been eliminated long since. The play is swift, and there are no more chances to recover from mistakes. No matter how far ahead a survivor appears to be, one false step can bring sudden death, resulting in a forfeit of all winnings and undoing all advantage gained since the very beginning.

  It was because the end was approaching with all its dangers, and because their faith in the President had been so shaken, that Americans—not just the Allies—were disquieted when Wilson engaged in a public correspondence with the new German chancellor, Prince Max, on the subject of peace terms. In reply to the chancellor’s note sent October 4–5, Wilson posed questions as to Germany’s intentions, to which Prince Max in turn replied.

  Joseph Grew, head of the State Department’s European desk, recorded in his diary the effect produced by this public exchange of notes: “The country from coast to coast was afraid the President would take the German bait, that he would let himself be drawn into the quibble of words, a repetition of the Lusitania notes, that the war would end in an inconclusive peace and that all our sacrifices were in danger of going for nothing. The country was unable to fathom the President’s purpose in asking the German Government questions when it felt that there was only one answer to give to the original peace offer—a perfectly straightforward ‘complete surrender or nothing.’ ”

  But according to Grew, this was because the American people failed to understand that the President was addressing the German public and attempting to persuade it to stop supporting a militarist regime. In Grew’s view, America’s doubts about the President’s course of conduct—if not the doubts of the Allied leaders, who were unhappy about his not consulting them when corresponding with Germany—disappeared after October 14 when Wilson sent a second note to Berlin, this time taking a hard line.

  After consultations and reflections, Wilson had concluded (as he informed Prince Max) that the constitutional changes in Germany did not go far enough. Moreover, the sinking of a British liner on October 12, killing about 600 people, focused the President’s attention on the need to stop German atrocities. And a message from the Allied prime ministers had reminded him that the terms of any armistice would have to be such as to preserve the military supremacy of the Allies. America’s terms for an armistice stiffened.

  WITH MATTERS COMING to a head, Wilson sent House to Europe to meet with the various military and Allied leaders and coordinate a response to Germany’s overtures. House brought a
long with him his son-in-law and secretary, Gordon Auchincloss, a young lawyer who had served for a year as assistant to the State Department’s counselor, and Joseph Grew.

  Aboard ship October 18 Grew wrote in his diary: “A great piece of good fortune has come my way, for Colonel House has asked me to accompany him to the Supreme War Council in Paris, and, if things work out as we now hope and expect, to the final Peace Conference of the war. I had hardly dared let myself hope for this, but now that it has come it is agreeable to think how trivial everything else in the world seems.… [G]reat events have come … yet through it all we have looked forward to the Peace Conference as the greatest event of all. It will indeed be the great event of this age or of any age, just as this war has been the greatest war in history, and so Dame Fortune is smiling kindly on those who are to be in at the death.”

  He wrote that the “army of officials who will attend the final Peace Conference have not yet … been chosen except in the minds of two men, the President and Colonel House, in whose hands their selection will lie.” Contemplating himself and his few shipmates on October 18, Grew exulted that “this little group which now starts for France are the trail blazers, the pioneers who go forward … and their leader, Colonel House, is the confidential adviser and official representative of the man who now, above all others, is directing and will direct the destiny of the world.”

  GERMANY’S LEADERS WERE DIVIDED about how to respond to Wilson’s new and harder line. The navy wanted to continue its unrestricted submarine warfare. The army was prepared to fight on; Ludendorff had regained his nerve. But Prince Max, with the support of his cabinet, won the backing of the kaiser for a note to Wilson on October 20 that went far toward meeting the President’s terms. It promised to end submarine warfare, assured the United States that Germany now had a parliamentary government, and agreed that armistice terms would reflect “the actual standard of power on both sides of the field.”