1917

by Arthur Herman, PhD

  On May 14, 1918, thousands of released prisoners gathered at the remote Siberian railway station at Chelyabinsk, including soldiers of the Czech Legion. Feelings ran high. When an angry Hungarian POW hurled a chunk of metal at one of the Czechs standing on the Chelyabinsk rail platform, badly wounding him, the Czechs lashed out. In the midst of the pandemonium, the Hungarian assailant was killed by the legionnaires. Ironically, the dead soldier was of Czech descent.24

  When news of the incident at Chelyabinsk reached Moscow, the reaction was extreme. Lenin, Trotsky, and the Soviet commissar for nationality affairs, Joseph Stalin, immediately decided that the Czech Legion now represented a mortal threat to the revolution and ordered the unit disarmed and destroyed.

  But members of the Czech Legion quickly turned the tables on their former captors. Within a matter of weeks, their ranks had swollen to more than sixty thousand as they seized control of the entire Trans-Siberian Railway from Samara to Irkutsk, including its major cities, while the Bolsheviks watched, helpless to stop them.

  It was at this point that the Allies, including a very reluctant Woodrow Wilson, decided they would have to intervene militarily in Russia.

  Various legends surround this extraordinary episode, which ended with more than 180,000 American, British, French, and Japanese troops remaining in Russia for more than a year. The first was the story propagated by Lenin himself, days after the Czech Legion took charge of the Trans-Siberian Railway: that the Czech soldiers had been bought by French and British imperialists for fifteen million rubles to fight against the Soviet regime. It was true that foreign money was given to the Czech Legion, including eighty thousand pounds from the British government and (what Lenin did not know) more than a million rubles from the French War Ministry, before the Bolsheviks seized power. Yet the money had been funneled to the Legion to fight the Habsburgs, not Lenin, and it was done at the behest of Masaryk—the same Masaryk who had raised the Czech Legion to fight for Russia in the first place, and who would carry out a vital mission for President Wilson the following year. Overall, the Czech Legion got far more support from the Bolshevik government than it ever did from the Entente powers. As historian John Bradley states, “It is clear that the Allies had little control over the money paid to the Czechs; in fact they had little control over the Czechs or their movements,” then or later.

  In fact, Trotsky himself had tried to recruit the Czechs to form the core of a reborn Russian army, but the legionnaires had refused. Prior to May 14, they were determined that if they were to do any more fighting, it would be to liberate their homeland from the Austrians.25

  The second legend is that the Allies decided to intervene themselves in order to crush the Bolshevik menace. In fact, the real objective was to help the Bolsheviks fight the Germans, and somehow to keep Russia in the war. In February 1918, there were even noises from various Allied agents in Russia that if the Allies recognized Lenin’s regime, he would join the war effort. All over Russia, French engineers and demolition experts were helping the retreating Russians to blow up railway lines to slow the German advance.

  Then March brought the collision of two traumatic events: the ratification of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and the Ludendorff Offensive. As April dawned, it seemed that Germany was about to win decisively on two fronts at once. The Allies were desperate. Bolshevik control in Siberia was limited, and progressing slowly. If Allied troops could somehow make a stand, perhaps patriotic Russians would rally and prevent the country’s complete capitulation to the German juggernaut. Thus far, the Czech Legion was not even on their agenda.26

  On April 5, the first Allied soldiers—Japanese soldiers, as it happened—disembarked on Russian soil at Vladivostok, while a detachment of British sailors landed from the cruiser HMS Suffolk to guard the British embassy. The operation was the brainchild of the two officers on the scene, Adm. Kato Kanji and the Suffolk’s skipper, Capt. Christopher R. Payne. Their goal was to protect their respective nations’ citizens in the Russian port city: a Japanese civilian had been murdered days before. Yet their presence also reflected the forward direction of Allied policy—that is, until the governments in London and Tokyo ordered the two men to reembark and leave Russian soil.

  The reason was President Woodrow Wilson. He considered military intervention in Russia as distasteful as the British and French considered it necessary. To Wilson, it smacked of the kind of imperialism that his Fourteen Points had relegated to the historical garbage heap. In fact, when the Japanese had tried the same thing back in December 1917, again ostensibly to protect Japanese citizens in Vladivostok, Secretary Lansing read them the riot act, and an American warship appeared in Vladivostok Harbor to warn the Japanese off, much to the relief of the Russian inhabitants.

  Four months later, in April 1918, Wilson’s anger was palpable when he learned what Tokyo and London were up to. On March 14, he had told the Bolsheviks that no Japanese intervention would happen as long as he was president. In April, his displeasure nipped the joint British-Japanese action in the bud. In less than a month, the Japanese were gone from the streets of Vladivostok, and the Japanese foreign minister who had sanctioned the move was fired. “The US government holds the key to the situation,” Wilson bluntly told the British diplomat Sir William Wiseman. “The Japanese government will not intervene” again unless Washington (meaning Wilson) gave the go-ahead.27

  An urgent problem remained, however: how to persuade or cajole Lenin and Trotsky into reversing themselves on war with Germany. Trotsky and Lenin were by no means unequivocal on that point; Trotsky himself had indicated that the government would rather go down fighting than have Japanese occupying Russian territory. Wilson took that as an opening. For several weeks, he and Trotsky engaged in a peculiar Kabuki dance in which both worked to keep Japan out of Russia—Trotsky because he feared and loathed Japan’s imperial ambitions, Wilson because he hoped keeping the Japanese out would encourage Moscow to bring in the other Allies instead. A note from Trotsky at the end of April indicating that Moscow would indeed welcome Allied intervention put Wilson in a jubilant mood. He declared that the invitation had “changed everything.”

  The truth was that it had changed nothing. On May 4, Trotsky made it clear he never intended to invite the Allies for a major operation. He said Moscow was prepared to accept Allied troops landing at Murmansk, Archangel, and remote corners of the Far East if the Allies pledged that those troops would never be used to topple the Bolshevik regime.28

  The “invitation” clearly had been a bluff, to forestall any Japanese landing. But the clarification did help Wilson make up his mind. He was still opposed to any landing in Siberia, but if Allied troops in Murmansk and Archangel could prevent valuable war matériel from falling into German hands, he was prepared to endorse taking action. Wilson’s last reservation against Allied intervention had been removed. Now it was just a question of when London and Paris were prepared to redeem the offer.

  Meanwhile, Lenin approached the Americans with a bizarre offer of his own. He had had a conversation with the Red Cross’s representative in Moscow, Col. Raymond Robins, who had been a keen advocate of a U.S.-Bolshevik rapprochement for months. Now Lenin told him that Germany’s own domestic problems meant that after the war it could never be Russia’s primary industrial partner, as it had been before the war.

  “Only America can become that country,” Lenin declared to an astonished Robins. Russia would need new railway equipment, mining and farm machinery, and a host of infrastructure projects, including electricity generation. In exchange, the United States could be looking at three billion in annual exports from Russia, including oil, manganese, platinum, and access to Russia’s huge fur industry. His mouth watering, Robins shot back to Washington that Russia’s reconstruction would be the “largest economic and cultural enterprise remaining [in] the world,” and warned that if the Americans did not get in there first, the Germans would.29

  For a few tantalizing days in May, then, the world rocked on its hinges at th
e prospect of a future U.S.-Russian consortium dominating the postwar world. Yet Wilson said no. He stated that Robins was someone “in whom I have no confidence whatever,” and refused to meet him, then or later. So, Wilson once again missed a historic opportunity to change the future direction of Russia: the first time was when he abandoned Kerensky and the Provisional Government to their fate, and the second was now, when he bypassed the chance to turn American industry and ingenuity loose on the development of Russia’s vast resources.

  How sincere Lenin’s offer to Wilson was is anyone’s guess. On the other hand, with German troops in Kiev and German and Finnish armies only a few miles from Petrograd, the Bolsheviks’ situation was just desperate enough that it might have been worth a try.

  Wilson, however, did not bite—and days later, he would make a third fateful choice regarding Russia, when Professor Masaryk arrived in Washington on May 9. Masaryk had been in contact with the rebels of the Czech Legion, who still held a commanding position in central Siberia. He told Wilson he was willing to convince the legion’s leaders to abandon their march to Vladivostok and ports home, and to remain astride the Trans-Siberian Railway in order to support Allied efforts to secure Murmansk and Archangel. He stressed that the goal was to keep Russians fighting Germans, not fighting the Bolsheviks. Indeed, he urged the president to recognize Lenin’s regime.

  But in exchange for resurrecting the Eastern Front, Masaryk wanted a favor: Wilson’s endorsement of the nationalist aspirations of the peoples of the Habsburg Empire, including the Czechs and Slovaks. Wilson agreed. Secretary Lansing had been urging America to support the stranded Czech Legion, both against the Germans and as a standard-bearer for the Czech and Slovak cause. On June 26, Wilson replied, “I agree with you that we can no longer respect or regard the integrity of the artificial Austrian Empire.” At one stroke, he had linked Allied intervention in Russia to the fate of the Czech Legion, and vice versa, and had pulled apart the four-hundred-year-old “artificial” Habsburg Empire.30

  In this way, two former professors, one American and one Czech, managed to set in motion the machinery for intervention in Russia—and distantly to set the stage for the Cold War.

  Britain and France endorsed Czech independence on June 30. They recognized Professor Masaryk and his National Council “as trustee of the future Czechoslovak government,” and cited the “sentiments and high ideals expressed by President Wilson” as their inspiration—which had now unexpectedly committed him to the move he had been putting off for months. One week later, on July 6, Wilson announced that the Allied intervention in support of the Czech Legion would take place in Siberia and involve two contingents of seven thousand troops, to be supplied by the United States and Japan.

  Official American recognition of Czechoslovakia did not come until September 3, but by then the die had already been cast. Together with Italy’s recognition in April of the South Slav independence movement (the future founding fathers of the new nation of Yugoslavia), Wilson had ensured that a new constellation of nations would arise from the wreckage of the Habsburg Empire—ones that would become the cockpit of turmoil and instability over the next two decades.31

  The United States (in the person of Wilson) was now in the habit of dictating unilaterally what happened in the world without asking anyone’s consent, and then letting its Allies catch up. Wilson added another condition: that intervention would take place to allow the Czech Legion to pass unmolested to Vladivostok, nothing more. There would be no effort to intervene against the Germans, let alone topple Lenin’s Bolsheviks as Germany’s de facto puppet regime. The aim was entirely humanitarian; any effect on the strategic balance in the east was purely coincidental.32

  No one was more furious at Wilson’s decision than British prime minister Lloyd George. He realized at once that the intervention would be just enough to provoke the Bolsheviks into hostile action, but not enough to do them any significant damage. Lloyd George was more and more convinced that leaving Lenin in power would be a mistake. Under Lenin and his increasingly repressive regime, Russia was bound to be reduced to a German satellite. The future of the entire postwar order hovered in the balance.

  “Unless by the end of war Russia is settled on liberal, progressive and democratic lines,” he prophesied, “the peace of the world” would be forever in doubt. But, he added bitterly, “we can do nothing without the U.S.”33

  Here Lloyd George was admitting nothing more than reality. As another saddened British observer, Bruce Lockhart, later put it, Wilson’s decision “was a paralytic half-measure, which in the circumstances amounted to a crime.”34 Yet the time had passed when other nations could check Woodrow Wilson if he decided to commit a crime or a major folly on the grounds that it adhered to his Fourteen Points.

  Meanwhile, Lenin had raised the stakes again. On July 14, he ordered the murder of the deposed czar and his entire family in their dacha in Siberia, where they were living in quiet retirement. Lenin was taking no chances that a living Nicholas would be a rallying point for a growing anti-Bolshevik insurgency. He also made sure there were no physical remains to be treated as relics and ordered the bodies burned before they were buried in an abandoned gold mine outside Kipriaki, a village north of Ekaterinburg. Stories circulated later that the czar’s four daughters were raped before being killed. These seem to have been untrue, but there was physical evidence that their bodies, and that of the czarina, were ghoulishly groped by their killers before they were immolated and then dumped in their mineshaft resting place.35

  Lenin also began calling for a “merciless mass terror against kulaks [landowning peasants], priests, and White guards,” with “concentration camps” for rounding up “unreliable elements”—the first glimmerings of the Soviet gulag. He was now also positioning the Bolshevik regime firmly in the German camp, against the intervening Allies. Worried about British and American intentions, Lenin’s personal envoy asked the German ambassador for German troops to cordon off the Allies in Murmansk.36

  In short, the die had been cast by both sides, and the Allies had no choice but to go where it landed.

  WESTERN FRONT, AUGUST 8–NOVEMBER 11

  IF IT WAS Lenin who had enabled Germany’s triumph in the east, it was Wilson who secured its doom in the west.

  On July 22, Ludendorff had ordered a pullback from the Marne Salient. From that day until the end of the war, Germany found itself permanently on the defensive. Two days later, Foch unveiled his master strategy for encircling the German line. The British would strike from the north, operating out of the Ypres Salient; the Americans, who now numbered over one million men, would move from the south from Verdun. The French would apply steady pressure along the center, which would tie down the bulk of German forces while the other two closed the circle.

  The German army would be steadily squeezed to death.

  The British attack got under way on the morning of August 8, 1918. The main thrust would be through Amiens and was led by the British Fourth Army under the command of Sir Henry Rawlinson. Only 20,000 men guarded the Germans’ main defensive positions; they were outnumbered six to one. The British, backed by Australian and Canadian divisions, used 465 tanks in the attack, along with more than 2,000 artillery pieces and some 800 aircraft. The lesson of Cambrai had been learned at last. The British advanced six miles in what Ludendorff later said was “the blackest day of the German army,” not because the army was routed or its spirit broken, but because after suffering some 175,000 casualties during the entire offensive since March, it was back virtually to where it had started.

  Before the sun had set, the Allies had punctured German lines around the Somme with a fifteen-mile-long gap. Of the 27,000 German casualties, an unprecedented proportion (12,000) had surrendered to the enemy. Though the Allies at Amiens failed to continue their impressive success in the days following August 8, the damage had been done. “We have reached the limits of our capacity,” Kaiser Wilhelm II told Ludendorff on that “black day.” “The war must be ended.
”37

  A badly shaken Ludendorff had to agree. Negotiation was the only way out of complete collapse now. The one remaining mission of the German army was holding on until the last possible minute, in order to gain the best possible advantage at the bargaining table. It was no longer going to be easy holding on, however. The Germans were about to be hit by a series of short, sharp shock attacks, one after another, that left what was the most professional and feared military force in the world reeling like a battered prizefighter trying desperately to stay on his feet.

  On August 10, the French Third Army struck at the German lines; on August 17, it was the turn of France’s Tenth Army. Fresh British attacks came on August 21 and 26. Then, on September 12, the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) launched its first independent operation. It had proved its worth in earlier operations—for instance, in June, when American marines fought a savage and costly battle at Belleau Wood. When the French local commander telephoned the colonel in charge of the Marine Corps brigade, Wendell C. Neville, to ask why his men were dropping back—the French general was misinformed—Neville gave an answer that passed into legend: “Retreat? Hell, we just got here.”

  No one doubted the bravery of American troops. Haig’s view was that the average American soldier was “keen and eager to learn,” although he thought his senior officers were “ignorant of their duties.”38 But that September, the Americans showed they had learned from the French and British, and could do them one better. Their September 12 operation at Saint-Mihiel pitted nine American divisions against seven German; the AEF made its objectives in less than twenty-four hours.

  On September 26, the fighting got fiercer. In the Argonne Forest, the Americans hit some of the Germans’ most heavily fortified points, which had layer after layer of staked barbed wire and concrete-reinforced entrenchments studded with machine-gun nests. The Americans came on in the old style, and were repelled in the old style—with horrific results. By October 4, the AEF had suffered more than seventy-five thousand combat casualties, a grim harvest highlighted by individual acts of bravery, but one that did not suggest that the Americans would do any better than their allies unless they abandoned the failed tactics of the past.39