The Yanks Are Coming! (35 page)

More than 3,600 miles away, in northwestern Russia, American troops had been sent to guard Allied stores and secure the railway at the port of Archangel. They were thrown into fighting the Bolsheviks much sooner, and with far less restraint. In part, this was because they were under a British commander, Major General Frederick C. Poole; in part it was because a handful of American sailors and Marines who landed in August 1918 had loaded a railway car, chased retreating Soviet forces, and got into a firefight.

Just over 5,700 American soldiers—including engineers, medical staff, and infantry—were sent to Archangel, arriving in September 1918. Poole left a detachment to guard the city while he took a combined force of ten thousand men (British, Americans, and others), divided it into two columns, and plotted an advance four hundred miles to a rail link with the Trans-Siberian Railway. They didn't make it. The lead elements advanced about two hundred miles before they turned back, stymied by bad maps, freezing temperatures, difficult, swampy terrain, running battles against Bolshevik troops, and a casualty rate among the American troops, from start to finish of the northern Russian expedition, of almost fifty percent.
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Poole's army was not the most impressive to have taken the field for the Allies. It was composed largely of British troops deemed unfit for duty on the Western Front, British-officered Slavic forces (some
of whom turned on their commanders), war-weary Frenchmen, a smattering of American sailors and Marines, and mystified American soldiers, the bulk coming from the 339th Infantry, “Detroit's Own,” made up of draftees, mostly from Wisconsin and Michigan, who assumed they would be fighting in France. They had received scant training but were proud enough to resent being placed under British command. Their own American commander, Colonel George Evans Stewart, was nearly as mystified about their mission as they were.

After securing a perimeter around Archangel and advancing along the rail line and the Dvina River against stiff Bolshevik resistance, six hundred Americans, Scots, and Canadians fought a three-day battle at the village of Toulgas, repulsing a Soviet attempt to storm the Allied position. Though the Communists outnumbered the defenders and were supported by river gunboats, a brave and clever American counterthrust drove them back, killing at least five hundred Soviets by battle's end, more than ten times the number of Allied dead. The battle was begun on 11 November 1918. The American troops remembered it sardonically as “The Battle of Armistice Day.”

With winter setting in, there was no chance of advancing farther into Russia. There was also no opportunity to extricate the Allied force, as the port at Archangel had frozen over. American and British troops made fighting retreats in the snow against a Bolshevik army that might lack uniforms but not numbers. In 1919, the Red Army was 3 million strong.

President Wilson did not need much convincing that the American intervention no longer served any useful purpose, if it ever had, and in February 1919 he ordered an American withdrawal from Archangel, effective whenever the weather would allow. The Western forces of the Archangel expedition had no objective now except to
beat back the enemy and survive until they could be evacuated, beginning with the spring thaws of April. By June, the Americans were gone. The British remained until September. The Soviets seized Archangel from the White Russians in February 1920.

Meanwhile the Siberian front devolved from chaos to calamity with the Czech Legion eventually trading White Russian leader Admiral Alexander Kolchak and a train full of gold to the Soviets in exchange for safe passage home. It rapidly became clear that unless the reluctant General Graves was prepared to fight the Communists, the Americans would have to leave as well. Orders to that effect came in January 1920, and the evacuation was completed in April.

Churchill foresaw what would follow. On 14 May 1919, he gave a speech at Dundee, Scotland, where he advised, “Our policy must be directed to prevent a union between German militarism and Russian Bolshevism, for if that occurred these tyrants and tyrannical masses would swiftly crush the little weak States which lie between, and they would then form a combination which would stretch from China to the Rhine, which would be unspeakably unfriendly to Britain and to the United States and France, and to all that those free democracies stand for.”
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Churchill believed that at relatively minimal cost—no more than forty thousand men deployed at Archangel by July 1918—the Russian Civil War could have been tipped to the Whites, and a peaceful and secure postwar world, for which the Allies had fought, could have been achieved. But that would have required a military and a moral commitment that President Wilson and the Western Allies refused to make.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

THE VICTORS AT VERSAILLES

T
he Russian sideshow was but one part of America's introduction to international statecraft. The main stage was Paris and the postwar negotiations that would culminate in the Treaty of Versailles. America's negotiating position had been staked out well before the end of the war. On 8 January 1918, in a speech to a joint session of Congress, President Wilson enunciated his Fourteen Points to guide the postwar world. He announced, before getting down to particulars, that “What we demand in this war, therefore, is nothing peculiar to ourselves. It is that the world be made fit and safe to live in; and particularly that it be made safe for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live
its own life, determine its own institutions, be assured of justice and fair dealing by the other peoples of the world, as against force and selfish aggression.”

The president's tone was resolutely progressive and internationalist: “All the peoples of the world are in effect partners in this interest, and for our own part we see very clearly that unless justice be done to others it will not be done to us.”

“The program of the world's peace, therefore, is our program,” Wilson declared, “and that program, the only possible program,” was of course his Fourteen Points, which were:

          
1.
    
An end to secret diplomacy and treaties. Everything henceforth was to be done in the open so that people knew what their leaders were committing them to as a nation.

          
2.
    
Freedom of the seas, outside of reservations for territorial waters and the enforcement of international covenants.

          
3.
    
Free trade, long the liberal shibboleth for establishing perpetual peace.

          
4.
    
International arms reductions to the barest of minimums.

          
5.
    
A liberal adjustment of colonial claims, taking into equal consideration the interests of the colonial powers and the interests of the native populations. Wilson used the word “imperialist” as a condemnation, applying it frequently to Germany, though Britain had by far the larger empire—the largest in world history in fact, which reached its zenith immediately after the Great War.

          
6.
    
Ironically, given his future dispatch of troops to Russia, he called for all foreign powers (meaning most especially the Central Powers) to leave Russia alone to determine her own destiny, taking an optimistic view that if greeted with good will and disinterested assistance, Russia would gravitate in a liberal direction. Like many a liberal before and after him, Wilson believed that revolts against reactionary monarchies tend naturally toward the triumph of liberal values.

          
7.
    
The restoration of an independent Belgium.

          
8.
    
The restoration of France's territorial integrity, plus the return of Alsace-Lorraine to French sovereignty.

          
9.
    
An adjustment of Italy's frontiers to incorporate neighboring ethnic Italians within Italy's borders.

          
10.
  
“The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity of autonomous development.” In other words, the collapsed Habsburg Empire should be divided among its constituent nationalities on the grounds of “national self-determination,” another liberal shibboleth. In practice, it meant the forcible, violent shifting of peoples into ethnic safe havens.
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11.
  
This point built on the previous one with a few particulars, including that Serbia's borders should allow it access to the sea, and that the Balkan states should work in “friendly counsel” while protected by “international guarantees.”

          
12.
  
The Ottoman Empire was to be carved up. The Turks would have their state, but their other territories
should be granted national self-determination. In addition, “the Dardanelles should be permanently opened as a free passage to the ships and commerce of all nations under international guarantees.”

          
13.
  
Something that had not existed for more than a hundred years—an independent Poland—was to be recreated, with borders that gave it territorial access to the sea. Its “political and economic independence and territorial integrity” was to be “guaranteed by international covenant.”

          
14.
  
The creation of a League of Nations, which would develop the international agreements for the Fourteen Points to become effective, provide the many necessary international guarantees, and perpetuate a liberal world order.

As for Germany, Wilson said, “We wish her only to accept a place of equality among the peoples of the world—the new world in which we now live—instead of a place of mastery.” He closed with a rousing, or, according to taste, ridiculous peroration:

           
An evident principle runs through the whole program I have outlined. It is the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak.

               
Unless this principle be made its foundation, no part of the structure of international justice can stand. The people of the United States could act upon no other principle, and to the vindication of this principle they are ready
to devote their lives, their honor, and everything that they possess. The moral climax of this, the culminating and final war for human liberty has come, and they are ready to put their own strength, their own highest purpose, their own integrity and devotion to the test.
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The “final war for human liberty,” presaged the end, in Wilson's mind, of the corrupt old order. He was a prophet of the world to come, a new world order for a Europe that had nearly destroyed itself. For many Europeans, Wilson's idealism vindicated their sacrifices. They regarded him as a moral hero. Aside from the Bolsheviks with their rhetoric of world revolution, he was the only statesman whose thinking and proclamations were not grounded in national interest. Or, as Wilson himself preferred to think, America had been the only disinterested party in the world conflict and would be the only disinterested party in the making of the peace.

THE PARIS PEACE CONFERENCE

It seemed as if the man and his moment were met as delegates from around the world descended on Paris in December 1918. Through the first six months of 1919, they asserted nationalist aspirations, progressive nostrums, and hopes for new republics—and Wilson was at the center of the negotiations. The other two of the “big three” statesmen at the conference were regarded, in comparison, as representing European cynicism and
Realpolitik
, though they were hardly defenders of the old order. They were, in fact, men of the political Left. Georges Clemenceau, the prime minister of France, was an anti-clerical radical and nationalist; David Lloyd George, prime minister of Great Britain, was a Welshman, a Liberal, and an
architect of Britain's nascent welfare state. Neither Wilson nor Clemenceau nor Lloyd George had any interest in re-creating the Congress of Vienna of a hundred years before, playing the roles of the conservative statesmen Castlereagh, Wellington, and Metternich, and effecting a world restored; they wanted a world remade. Truth be told, though, the reactionaries of 1814–1815 did their job better, preserving a longer peace, than did the liberals of 1919.

Of course Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Wilson faced a daunting task. Even as they and all the other delegates sat down to their deliberations, borders and governments were being decided in tumult, anarchy, and armed conflict. Most of the crowned heads of Europe had been deposed. The Czar and his family had been murdered. The Kaiser was in exile in the Netherlands. Bavarian king Ludwig III had given way to a socialist revolt. Austria and Hungary had declared themselves republics, making Charles I an emperor without an empire (he would eventually go into exile in Switzerland, and later Madeira).
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The states of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland were reemerging from the past. Communist red flags popped up, however briefly, at points in the heart of Europe. German mercenary armies, the Freikorps, fought Bolsheviks in Germany, saving the secular, socialist Weimar Republic—and even tried to annex the Baltic States, in secular emulation of the Teutonic Knights.