How Going to War Reshaped President Wilson's Thinking

President Wilson at a Preparedness Parade

By Erez Manela

From: The Wilsonian Moment: Self Determination and the International Origins of Anti-colonial Nationalism, Oxford University Press, 2007

The lessons of these failed interventions [in Mexico and Haiti] were not entirely lost on Wilson. Moreover, as the world war itself gradually prompted him to adopt and articulate an expanded conception of America’s world role, it also influenced his stand on U.S. colonial policy. By 1916, as the administration launched its preparedness program and the president began to contemplate the possibility of joining the conflict, colonial policy became even more directly linked in his mind to the larger context and goals of the United States’ growing world role.

1914 Cartoon Depicting Wilson's Patronizing Posture Toward Latin American Governments

In its actions and policies in the Philippines, Wilson declared in February 1916, the United States had to prove its disinterested and benevolent attitude toward peoples of all races and in all regions of the globe. What America had to give the world was of universal value, transcending differences of geography, ancestry, or race. The American flag, he said, ‘‘stands for the rights of mankind, no matter where they be, no matter what their antecedents, no matter what the race involved; it stands for the absolute right to political liberty and free self-government, and wherever it stands for the contrary American traditions have begun to be forgotten.’’ Self-government, then, was a universal right, not a privilege limited to specific geographical regions or racial groups.

The war increasingly led Wilson to imagine American society as a model for the world, one whose internal conflicts and contradictions were being performed before a global audience. This new context prompted Wilson to begin to voice more forceful opposition than he had previously to domestic practices that were in clear breach of the exalted principles for which, he was trying to convince the world, the United States stood. If the United States was to be a light unto the world, the antithesis of the militarism and barbarity that Wilson attributed to the Central Powers, then the stakes involved in American race relations were higher than ever before. No longer were they crucial only for the future of American society but also for the future of the world. Thus, in July 1918, the president delivered a sharp if shamefully belated public denunciation of acts of lynching directed both at African-Americans and, as happened repeatedly during the war, at those deemed ‘‘German sympathizers.’’ The perpetrators of such acts, he charged, were emulating the ‘‘disgraceful example’’ of Germany and harming the war effort by sullying the image of the United States abroad:

We proudly claim to be the champions of democracy [but] every American who takes part in the actions of a mob [is] its betrayer, and does more to discredit her by that single disloyalty to her standards of law and of right than the words of her statesmen or the sacrifices of her heroic boys in the trenches can do to make suffering people believe her to be their savior. How shall we commend democracy to the acceptance of other peoples, if we disgrace our own by proving that it is, after all, no protection to the weak?

Wilson Would Eventually Reverse His Position Against Suffrage

On the long-standing issue of female suffrage, too, Wilson’s wartime conception of America’s global responsibilities seemed to have helped to change his attitude. Initially reluctant to support a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women the vote, he changed his position by 1918, telling the Senate in September that passing the amendment would help the United States to retain the faith and trust of the common people of the world. ‘‘The plain, struggling, workaday folk . . . are looking to the great, powerful, famous Democracy of the West to lead them to the new day for which they have so long waited; and they think, in their logical simplicity, that democracy means that women shall play their part in affairs alongside men.’’ The next day, the amendment came up for a vote in the Senate and fell only two votes short of achieving the requisite two-thirds majority. It finally passed the following summer and was ratified in August 1920.

By mid-1918, then, Wilson had come to view the major social and political issues within American society as intimately connected to the global role he envisioned for it in the postwar world, as a model for the new international society he wanted to build. 

Henri IV: The Strangest Battleship of the Great War

Henri IV Postcard

Henri IV (launched 1899, completed 1903) was a pre-dreadnought battleship of the French Navy built to test some of the ideas of the prominent naval architect Louis-Émile Bertin. She began World War I as guardship at Bizerte. She was sent to reinforce the Allied naval force in the Dardanelles campaign of 1915, although some of her secondary armament had been removed for transfer to Serbia in 1914. Henri IV participated in the fire support for the 25 April landings at Kum Kale on the eastern side of the straits.  Afterward, she was relegated to second-line roles before being sent to Taranto as a depot ship in 1918. She was struck from the navy list in 1920 and scrapped the following year.

Silhouette

Almost everything about Henri IV was out of kilter with the standard naval designs of the turn of the century beginning with its very low stern at only 4-feet freeboard and near-vertical sides. It was also smaller than its predecessors in most European navies. Furthermore, its main battery consisted of only two turrets with one 10.8-in. rifle for each. The secondary armament was seven 5.4-in. guns. The overall appearance and capabilities to many observers seemed to be that of a large monitor rather than a battleship. In operational conditions many problems were uncovered, such as the unanticipated blast effects from the 5.4-in. gun mounted above the rear main turret. There were also problems discovered with the placement of the ship's torpedo room and tubes.  All that said, Henri IV served France honorably  in the war and survived to be scrapped in 1921.

Side View

Sources:  Wikipedia, French and English

Centennial Commemoration of the Signing of the Treaty of Versailles

Commemorative Program Cover
Versailles: 28 June 2019

From Our Correspondent Virginia Dilkes

The evening to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles was filled with as much anticipation as the actual signing a century ago. The event was organized by the Versailles 1919-2019 Steering Committee in collaboration with the Palace of Versailles. U.S. Commissioner Dr. Monique Seefried directed the effort on behalf of the U.S. World War One Centennial Commission, and Madame Catherine Pégard managed the effort for the Palace of Versailles.

U.S. Commissioner Monique Seefried (R) and Versailles President
Madame Catherine Pégard Arriving at the Palace
Greeted by Flag Bearers Carrying American and French Flags 
from World War I

The American Contingent Arriving, Sabin Howard, WWI Memorial Sculptor on Left and U.S. Commissioner Jerry Hester on Right

“The evening began with a grand entrance across a red carpet bordered by flags of nations involved in the bloody conflict including those from France and the United States.” We were welcomed by the honor guard in the Cour d’Honneur. The welcome was organized by l’Office National des Anciens Combattants et Victimes de Guerre.  Once inside the palace we were offered a glass of champagne and then led to the Salon d’Hercule where a string quartet dressed in 17th-century attire played while Louis XIV and his wife danced the minuet. We strolled through the Royal Apartments and other salons where we were entertained by a brass quartet or a harpist in period dress.

We entered the Hall of Mirrors and could only reflect on what took place in this Hall 100 years ago. The Treaty of Versailles was over seven months in the making. During the negotiations there were bitter arguments not only among the negotiators but also within the Allied constituency.  The acrimonious deliberations took their toll on the health of the participants. So much has been written about the intentions and misunderstandings of the Armistice of 11 November 1918 and what ultimately evolved as the Treaty of Versailles. So much has been written about the role the Treaty of Versailles has had or may have had on world events that transpired within the 20 years after the treaty. These thoughts would go through the minds of the invited guests as we strolled through the Hall of Mirrors to the Salle du Sacre.

Our Correspondent, Virginia Dilkes, in the Hall of Mirrors

We were served cocktails in the Salle du Sacre. We were then shown into the Hall of Battles where dinner was served. The elegance of the banquet was everywhere—from the table settings to the Dîner menu, to the listed program, to the care in which the executive chef designed the evening service. I was impressed with how Executive Chef Alex Hitz (from Atlanta, Georgia) with extensive travels in France researched the traditions and foods of the WWI era, which he served to us this evening. A note in the program described his family’s active involvement in WWI with both of his grandfathers serving in the Great War.

Dinner at the Hall of Battles

Place Settings for the Evening

We were welcomed by General Jean-Louis Georgelin, former Chief of Staff of the French Armies, and the Honorable Jamie D. McCourt, Ambassador of the United States to France, and by Colonel Jennifer Pritzker, the presenting sponsor of the commemoration. The highlight of the evening was the presentation of the Versailles Award for American Philanthropy by Madame Catherine Pégard, President of the Palace of Versailles, to David Rockefeller, Jr., who represented the Rockefeller family. The award was to acknowledge the philanthropy of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who worked to rebuild France after WWI. M. Pégard wrote he “rescued the Palace of Versailles from dereliction after the First World War, and understood not only the universal significance of this great palace, but also its importance for his own country.” A plaque recognizing the work of John D. Rockefeller from 1924–1936 was hung in the Palace on 30 June 1936, the 17th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

David Rockefeller, Jr.,  Accepting the Award for Philanthropy 
on Behalf of His Family

Before concluding, some well-organized events held on 28 June, preceding the banquet,  should be mentioned.  A day-long seminar on the Versailles Treaty and American Philanthropy was held on the palace grounds, and a commemorative event took place afterward at the now completed Pershing-Lafayette Monument on the Avenue des Etats Unis at the entrance to the village of Versailles. More on these events will be posted in future editions of Roads to the Great War.

Seminar Opening

Wreath Laying at the Pershing-Lafayette Monument
Commissioner Monique Seefried Representing the United States

The 28th of June 2019 ended with firework, just as it did one hundred years ago. We were led back to the Hall of Mirrors where we watched the fireworks over the Grande Perspective.  Cognac was served in the Salon d’Hercule as a final tribute to the evening. Congratulations to the Versailles 1919–2019 Steering Committee led by Commissioner Dr. Monique Seefried and Ambassador (ret.) Louise V. Oliver for a meaningful commemoration to the treaty that ended the war that changed the world.

The “Evening at Versailles” not only commemorated the signing of the treaty but was also a fundraiser for the U.S. WWI Memorial in Washington, DC, and the restoration of the Queen’s Grove in the Palace of Versailles gardens. The National World War I Memorial, which tells the story of “A Soldier’s Journey,” will be located next to the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue.  It is the story of the over four million American men and women who participated in the war effort; the two million who went overseas; and the 116,516 who gave their lives to keep the world free from tyranny. Its construction is being supported by the generosity of people from all over the world.  

The Queen’s Grove is an ornamental garden designed for Queen Marie-Antoinette, wife of Louis XVI. When it was created in 1776, this flower garden contained many North American varieties newly introduced into France, such as the Virginia tulip tree. The grove will be replenished with diverse botanical species including tulip trees from Virginia.

To help with the construction of the National World War I Memorial in Washington, DC, one can help raise the remaining needed funds. A check made out to the “U.S. Foundation for the Commemoration of the World Wars” can be mailed to:

U.S. Foundation for the Commemoration of the World Wars
Donation Dept.
701 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW #123
Washington, D.C. 20004

To help with the Restoration of the Queen’s Grove in the Palace of Versailles, one can adopt a Virginia tulip tree.  A check made out to “L’agent comptable de l’EPV” can be mailed to:

Chateau de Versailles
Service Mécénat
RP 834 – 78008 Versailles cedex

Kortrijk, Belgium: Surprise Photos of an Occupied City

One hundred and one years ago Kortrijk was still an occupied city. The Germans exploited the inhabitants. Allied bombs sowed fear and destruction. Thousands of Kortrijk locals lived in terror. All those who could tell us about it have now passed away. Kortrijk was the first major city behind the front line, and this made it extremely important to the Germans. It is no wonder that there are a great many places in our city that conjure up memories of the First World War. For example, the station was used to transport prisoners of war to Germany, to serve as forced labor. 

City Hall Was the Headquarters of the German Occupying Force.  In the Chaire Is Oberstleutnant Günther, Etappenkommandant of the Etappenkommandantur Kortrijk

A visit by the Kaiser (in the limousine) in 1915

Pigeon Prison:  Kortrjik's  pigeons were kept under strict military guard because the Germans feared they would be used for espionage. The owners had to contribute financially to the pigeons’ upkeep.

Eleven military hospitals were located in the area.  The former cloth hall, which was a museum and theatre before the war, was taken over and used as a hospital.

A German troop formation on Handboogstraat, a street with a popular brothel

When the Germans were forced to retreat from Kortrijk on 16 October 1918, they set off no less than 750 kg of explosives under the Broelbrug. The Broel Towers were left badly damaged as a result.

Manfred von Richthofen was wounded when stationed nearby 

British and Scottish prisoners of war passing through

An air raid shelter under construction

Liberation ceremony at the Grote Markt, 28 October 1918

Source: Memories of the Great War in Kortrijk

Recommended: What America Looked Like—Collecting Peach Pits for WWI Gas Masks

By BRIAN RESNICK

Originally presented in the Atlantic magazine blog, 1 February 2012

In this photo, taken on a September 1918 day in Boston, a proud military officer stands tall on top of a pile of something that would save thousands of lives on European battle fronts—peach pits. Yes, peach pits.

During World War I, the Germans blindsided the Allies with chlorine gas, a hellishly toxic chemical weapon. Once in the body, the yellow-green gas tortured and killed at the same time, causing asphyxiation, convulsions, panic, and a slow death. When the wind was just right, the Germans would release the gas and it would creep slowly over battlefields, finding its way into trench crevices and soldiers' lungs. It was something to be feared, but as American chemist James Bert Garner discovered in 1915, it could be subdued with activated charcoal, made from natural fibers such as those found in peach pits. 

As explained in a passage from A History of the World War, here's how the gas masks worked:

The perfected gas masks used by both sides contained a chamber filled with a specially prepared charcoal. Peach puts were collected by the millions in all the belligerent countries to make this charcoal, and other vegetable substances of similar density were also used. Anti-gas chemicals were mixed with the charcoal. The wearer of the mask breathed entirely thorough the mouth, gripping a rubber mouthpiece while his nose was pinched shut by a clamp attached to the mask. 

In training, soldiers were required to hold their breath for six seconds while the mask was being adjusted. It was explained to them that four breaths of the deadly chlorine gas was sufficient to kill; the first breath produced a spasm of the glottis; the second brought mental confusion and delirium; the third produced unconsciousness; and the fourth, death.

The chemical warfare spurred a nationwide call for peach pits and walnut shells, as the New York Times reported that same September. "A campaign will be launched here this week, and by holding contests in the schools, the Red Cross expects that every peach pit found by the children will be thrown at the Kaiser... In each state, several centers will be established for the reception of parcel post packages of seeds from Red Cross agents in smaller towns or from farmers and other persons who are unable to forward the seeds to their own chapters."

World War I was the first war to involve chemical warfare, and approximately 90,000 soldiers were killed by toxic gas alone. A recent RadioLab show chronicled the dark story of chlorine gas and its inventor, Fritz Haber, a German Jew who had earlier won a Nobel prize for synthesizing ammonia. After the war, he was also inadvertently involved in the creation of Zyklon-B—the poison used in Nazi gas chambers. (He invented it to be used as pesticide, and by the time the Nazis came around, he had left Germany for England.) His science created life, as ammonia became the basis for a boom in agricultural production, but his death gases also killed millions. And he, arguably, is the reason these women are posing throwing peach pits onto a pile beside an enormous American flag. 

Rebels: The Irish Rising of 1916

By Peter de Rosa

Ballantine Books, 1990

James M. Gallen, Reviewer

Proclamation of the Irish Republic

The Great War story is not exclusively found on the Western and Eastern Fronts or on pitched battlefields across the globe. It is also found in the latent social movements that sprouted in the swirling currents it created. Rebels is one of those stories.

As was long the saying, "England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity." The Irish quest for freedom and independence, though often quenched, always smoldered, awaiting turbulent breezes wafting across the Irish Sea to fan it into a raging flame. The Great War unleashed such breezes. The Easter Rising of 1916 is often depicted as a Quixotic failure that succeeded only through the backlash of opinion against the British suppression that followed. While there is truth in that, the Rising was much more complex and was intertwined within the Great War.

Rebels Fighting During the Uprising

The characters are many and well developed. Sir Roger Casement was both unique and typical of the Irish Rebel. A son of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, this humanitarian advocate for the downtrodden natives of the Belgian Congo and the Putamayo region of Brazil worked the halls of wartime Berlin seeking the aid that would make the Irish rebels a legitimate fighting force. It was he who convinced the Germans to send 20,000 captured Russians rifles on a German ship flying under a Norwegian flag until it was scuttled after being found by a Royal Navy vessel.

The ridicule that met Casement's appeals to Irishmen held in prisoner of war camps demonstrated the division in Irish opinion. While proclaiming no treason to his country, he would suffer the fate of other Rising leaders: execution at the hands of his British captors. Patrick Pearse, the headmaster of St. Enda's Irish-speaking school, thought Ireland's freedom could only be won through a blood sacrifice. Joseph Plunkett, the tubercular poet who left his sick bed to answer the call to General Post Office, died by firing squad, but only after marrying his fiancée, Grace Gifford, in Kilmainham Gaol the night before his execution. James Connolly, the Marxist trade unionist, saw all capitalists as enemies but especially those of the British empire who had enslaved Ireland. Tom Clarke, the tobacconist, had been a member of the underground Irish Republican Brotherhood since 1878.

Eamon deValera, the New York born mathematics teacher, would escape execution, probably because of his U.S. citizenship. Countess Markievicz, the upper class convert to socialism, Irish nationalism and Catholicism took her place at St. Stephen's Green but was denied her chance to die for Ireland due to her gender and social standing. Their tales are tragically brutal and comically civilized. Among the latter are the Volunteers who commandeered a tram at gun-point, and then paid their fare to Dublin and a truce to permit the superintendent of St. Stephen's Green to feed the ducks. The persuasiveness of religious fervor among the rebels is a devotion not ordinarily associated with revolutionaries. Students of The Great War will be interested in the interplay between German conspirators and Irish rebels attracted to each other by their common enemy, Britain.

Dublin After the Uprising; 450 Died

The Germans were looking for any disruption that would distract the British and depress the combat effectiveness of the thousands of Irish fighting in British uniforms on the Western Front. The Irish rebels, who cared nothing for Germany, sought weapons and ammunition from the Germans and volunteers from among the Irish POWs. Just as the Germans hoped that Irish troops on the Western Front would lay down their arms in sympathy with the rebels on their home island, the Irish rebels relied on German pressure to prevent the British from withdrawing troops from the Western Front to fight in Ireland. The POWs did not respond, the weapons were lost, and the rising was a disorganized failure limited to Dublin.

The rebels had plans to seize positions in Dublin while other units took over key cities across Ireland to prevent British reinforcements and solidify their positions to the point that the British would have no choice but to grant independence.

As this work demonstrates, the Dublin rising was only a fraction of what had been planned. It amazes me to realize that the Irish had thousands of troops throughout Ireland, many in uniform, ready to spark risings across the isle. The loss of the German rifles and ammunition caused the rising to be delayed a day, then canceled, and finally restarted by a fragment of the leadership with a remnant of those who got the call and reported to their stations. These stations included the General Post Office (GPO), the communications center of Dublin, and St. Stephen's Green which controlled several routes into the city. These groups lasted only until the hopelessness of their plight forced their surrender.

Rebels is a well written tragedy that seizes the reader's attention and holds it from page to page. It presents the rising not as an unsullied heroic national movement but, as it was, an idealistic coalition of nationalists, socialists, intellectuals, and other discontents who united in one cause for Irish independence immersed in the milieu of the Great War. It is supplemented by maps that help position the battle scenes in the Dublin landscape. Rebels is an essential read for any interested in this side segment of the Great War.

James M. Gallen

Nestor Makhno, Anarchist – Another Side of the Russian Civil War, Part 2

Russian Dramatization of Makhno Exhorting His Troops

By Michael Kintopf

(Continued from yesterday on Roads to the Great War)

Petliura’s army was entrenched around the city and supported by artillery. Makhno’s plan of assault used ideas from previous attacks. Some of his group infiltrated the city as workers and took control of the railway station. Then, on 26 December, Makhno sent an empty train toward the city to draw fire.  The nationalists took the bait and concentrated on destroying the empty train. Too late, they realized it was a diversion. A second armored train full of assault troops came from another direction.  Ambushed by the infiltrators and attacked from without, Petliura’s men nevertheless continued the fight. Even when the nationalist artillery contingent changed sides, the fighting went unabated from street to street and house to house for two days. In the evening of the second day, the nationalists left the town to regroup. Their counterattack drove the Anarchists-Bolsheviks back through the streets and houses that were left. Casualties among the Anarchists-Bolsheviks were high. Out of 1000, only 400 managed to escape. Makhno’s men pulled back to the Sinel’nikovo region where they organized a defense. Sadly for them, the location placed them between the nationalist to the west and the White army to the southeast.  

In early January 1919, the Whites began to move. Makhno was unable to hold Hulyai Pola, Orikhiv, Polohy, and Haichur. At Hryshyne, the Anarchist-Bolshevik force consolidated a 150-mile front with 15,000 soldiers, 1000 cavalry, and 40 machine guns. Luckily, the Directory’s soldiers had withdrawn toward Zhitomir after a second invading Russian Red army had seized Kharkov. For three months the front seesawed. In April, Denikin’s army attacked at the juncture of the Red Thirteenth Army and Makhno’s Anarchists. The brunt of the attack fell on the Red 9th Division. They panicked and broke while the anarchists remained firm. The Whites took Mariupil and Luhansk. The losses became seeds of distrust between the Reds and the Anarchists. Red Army leaders called for an evaluation of the anarchist leaders in an effort to shift blame.  The Cheka, or secret police, was sent to find the defeatist culprits. Makhno saw this as an affront to his authority. He viewed his force as an ally to the Reds and not a part of the Bolshevik movement. The Cheka agents were rounded up and sent back with a heated message stating that they had no authority over the Anarchists. The Bolsheviks reacted by sending soldiers. Facing the Whites in the front and a new enemy in the rear, Makhno’s men folded and allowed Denikin’s soldiers to advance 37 kilometers. The salient that was created separated the Anarchists from the Red Army. Makhno’s men retreated unmolested by either side toward their homes in the remains of the Anarchist enclave. There, Makhno resigned his command and broke up his army; however, his non-involvement was very short lived.

Perhaps heralding later rock group styles, these
Makhnoists take time for a camaraderie photo.

In early June, Denikin sent the Kuban Cossacks against Makhno’s enclave. With a thousand of his followers, Makhno led the resistance. The White forces easily routed the anarchists, but a spirited rearguard action delayed a rapid advance. The compression of the Anarchist stronghold exposed the Red Army’s flank. To strengthen their numbers, Bolshevik commanders quickly forgave Makhno’s past transgressions and once again asked for his cooperation against Denikin. Makhno accepted.  Mobilizing the peasants and workers, Makhno brought 15,000 to the field. The combined manpower was still not enough to stem the Whites' advance. The Anarchists became part of the Bolsheviks’ westward retreat. The Russians soon split from the Anarchists preferring to retreat toward Russia rather than remain in Ukraine.  

Nearing Uman, Makhno’s army entered an area controlled by the Ukrainian nationalist forces of Petliura. Makhno saw a chance to gain a respite. Appealing to Petliura as a brother revolutionary, Makhno asked him to keep his Ukrainian army neutral and allow the Anarchists time to rest within his sphere of control. He surmised that the Whites would not risk facing the Ukrainians and the Anarchists at the same time. Petliura allowed Makhno’s army to settle near Tekuche. Ukrainian combat patrols covered a front to the north and west of the area. But Makhno’s previous transgressions were not forgiven by Petliura, who saw an opportunity to exterminate the Anarchists in this truce. Discreetly, the Ukrainian patrols allowed five of Denikin’s regiments, detached from the main thrust at Moscow, to outflank their line and come up in the rear of Makhno’s force. Petliura’s soldiers watched from their “neutrality” as the Whites slowly surrounded the Anarchists. Makhno became aware of the encirclement on 24 September, but rather than prepare defenses, he commanded his men to attack the Whites near Kruten’koe.  

The Anarchists opened the attack at 3:00 in the morning against a weak forward guard. The Whites had to give ground but, amazingly, the Anarchists did not press their advantage. Instead, they broke off the attack and returned to their former lines. Within a few hours, the main body of the Whites had arrived and they went on the offensive smashing into the Anarchist lines. Makhno’s defenses began to fold by 9:00. The Whites, in their zealousness, created an inward bulge in the Anarchists’ line, which exposed their own flanks and rear. At that moment, Makhno, at the head of his cavalry, miraculously appeared. He had taken his horsemen around the Whites’ flanks in a perilous, desperate night march and brought them up just in time as his line had given ground. Leading his saber wielding horsemen, he charged into the First Officers Regiment of Simferopol and the Second Labzinki Regiment.  Denikin’s regiments broke into flight toward the Sinyukha River where they hoped to cross and make a stand. At the fords they found an additional Anarchist cavalry group. The Whites were caught between the two, which took no prisoners.

Red Army commander Pavel Dybenko and Nestor Makhno, 1919

The battle over, Makhno found that the five regiments he had destroyed were the only tangible force between himself and Denikin’s rear echelons. Makhno turned his retreat into a counteroffensive. By 6 October, the Anarchists were threatening Denikin’s supply ports and bases on the Azov Sea.  To counter the anarchists, Denikin withdrew two divisions from the Moscow march and a Cossack brigade from the defense of Tsaritsyn. This redeployment probably contributed to Denikin’s defeat at Oryol as well as the loss of the Volga River city. Within a few months, Denikin’s counterrevolutionary movement was reduced to a collection of broken units which were evacuated from Black Sea ports.

Makhno withdrew from the conflict and returned to Hulyai Pola as the White movement collapsed.  The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, switched their priorities toward bringing the Anarchists into political line. Anticipating a war with the new nation of Poland, the Revolutionary Military Council of the XIV Corps ordered Makhno’s Insurrectionary Army to the Polish border on 19 December 1919. Makhno saw the order for what it was and resisted it. According to the last agreement he had with the Red Army, his soldiers were not to be deployed outside Ukraine or to fight any other forces but Denikin’s. The Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky had expected Makhno’s reaction. In reprisal, he sent Red Army units to disarm and arrest the Anarchists. What should have been an easy mopping-up action proved to be very costly. Safely entrenched around Hulyai Pola, the Anarchists withstood numerous attacks, but they were not invulnerable. They were close to capitulation when the Red Army’s interest shifted first to the Poles, who launched an invasion of Ukraine accompanied by Petliura’s nationalists, and secondly by the resurgence of the White Army in the Crimea. Once again, the Bolsheviks turned to Makhno for help in keeping the Whites in check while they dealt with the Polish threat. Makhno accepted.

The Anarchists proved that they had a greater hatred for the Whites than they did for the Bolsheviks.  After a year’s fighting, the Whites were isolated on the Crimea and the Anarchists were pushing toward victory. Makhno’s cavalry and a machine gun company crossed the ice on the Sivash Strait on 6 November 1920 and set up a bridgehead that the Red Army used to pour more soldiers into the Crimea. Simferopol, the Whites' Crimean capital, fell to the Anarchists on 14 November. But there were no celebrations. While the fighting had been raging, Trotsky had sent Red Army units to infiltrate the Anarchist conclave. With the proclamation that the White forces were finally defeated came a declaration against the Anarchists. Calling them threats to the revolution, Trotsky called for their disarming and arrest. In the Crimea about 1500 men were rounded up; 250 escaped. In Hulyai Pola, a pre-positioned Red Army attacked the trenches and took the town. Makhno managed to escape to the steppe, where he raised nearly 1000 horsemen and 1500 infantry. Seven days later he returned to his town to capture 6000 Red Army soldiers, 2000 of which joined his ranks. The others were released to return home.  

After the Fighting
Makhno in Paris

Despite his successes, Makhno decided to evacuate the area and go northeasterly toward the Don Cossack regions, where an autonomous government existed. The Reds chased after him but were defeated again at Andreevka, where the Anarchists allegedly captured 8000 to 10,000 soldiers. Still Makhno did not attempt to consolidate an area.  

The capitulation of the Don Cossacks just a few days later made him change direction toward Kiev, where he had heard that Petliura’s nationals were still offering resistance. The long trek toward a perceived safe zone was arduous. Casualties were left behind, as were horses, artillery, and transport vehicles. Petliura’s resistance proved to be a myth, and the Anarchists were forced to flee even farther westward. The last fight with the Bolsheviks took place on 28 August 1921 near the Dniester River. The Anarchists were pushed up against the river and in the melee; Makhno was wounded in the neck and unable to rally his men. His lieutenants got him across the river into Romania. There he was interred for a number of months. Once released, he made his way to Paris, where he died of tuberculosis in 1934.

Nestor Makhno, Anarchist—Another Side of the Russian Civil War, Part 1

By Michael Kintopf

On 24 September 1919, the Insurrectionary Army of the Ukraine, an organization of 15,000 anarchists, faced annihilation at the hands of Anton Denikin’s Russian counterrevolutionary or White Army.  Five regiments of the White Army had slipped around the anarchists’ flanks as they rested from a previous battle and grueling retreat. The Whites were slowly encircling their camp.  But rather than prepare defenses, the anarchists attacked.  Strangely, their leader, Nestor Makhno, always in the forefront of any assault, was nowhere to be found. 

Nestor Makhno is in the center, surrounded by some of
his most trusted men in various uniform states

Ukraine had long been a breeding ground for peasant uprisings.  Into this insurgent atmosphere in 1889, in the small city of Hulyai Pola, Nestor Ivanovich Makhno was born. Nestor was the fifth child, his father dying just ten months later, leaving his wife to raise the family.  At age seven, he went to work as a shepherd, attending school when he could.  Later, better paying-jobs on Polish-owned estates or in the German colonies, lured him away from education altogether.  Through those jobs he learned how much of a difference there was between a Ukrainian peasant’s lot and a rich landowner. 

At 17, while working at the iron foundry in Hulyai Pola, Makhno became an anarchist. It was natural for a person born on the steppe and in contact with the free society of the Cossacks to identify with a concept of little or no government. Two years later he was arrested and convicted after a police informant implicated him in an attack against the government. The initial sentence was death, but, because of his age, the sentence was commuted to life in Moscow’s Butyrki prison. There, he endured repeated beatings and solitary confinement, but even bad dreams have some good to them. 

Butiyki prison held many political prisoners among who were fellow anarchists. These men schooled Makhno in anarchistic ideals and supplemented his meager primary education. The years stretched out and Makhno grew in maturity and political awareness. The beginning and first years of the Great War slipped by with little notice; however, the storm of the February 1917 revolution came with lightning flashes that broke the locks of the prison and set numerous political dissidents free. Among them was Makhno, who saw himself as an organizer to the people’s revolution. 

Makhno returned to Hulyai Pola where he formed a Peasants’ and Workers’ Soviet.  As a survivor of the prison system, and somewhat of a hero because of it, he assumed the chairmanship of the Soviet.  Makhno began putting his anarchistic ideas into practice.  The property of the rich Polish and German landlords was appropriated and all titles abolished. It was amid this social restructuring that Makhno learned that Central Powers’ soldiers had invaded southern Russia.

Nestor Makhno in 1907 with His Local Anarchist Group

A Ukrainian nationalistic movement with socialist tendencies had surfaced in Kiev shortly after the February Revolution. Calling itself the Rada, its delegates had appealed to the Russian Provisional government for some autonomy. Before the government could act on the appeal, Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized control. The Rada reacted to the Petrograd coup by declaring Ukrainian independence. The Bolsheviks, not willing to lose nearly a third of Russia’s resources, sent an invasion force to quell the independence movement. Without an army of their own, the Rada saw that their only salvation lay in asking the Central Powers of Austria-Hungary and Germany for help. Rada agents offered the Central Powers huge shipments of foodstuffs and coal in exchange for political recognition and help against the Bolsheviks. An agreement was signed on 9 February. Ten days later, 450,000 Central Powers soldiers marched into the Ukraine to support the Rada’s authority against the Russians and Ukrainian Bolsheviks.

Makhno was not a Bolshevik, but his revolutionary ideals were more in line with them than with the Rada’s concepts. His Soviet agreed to help the Bolsheviks. Makhno organized about 800 peasants into a military contingent, armed them, and sent them to help in the defense of nearby Ekaterinoslav and Kharkov; few of them returned home. Makhno had those who had remained behind dig trenches and set defenses. He hoped to put up a stiff resistance with weapons supplied by the Bolsheviks; however, bursting artillery shells and clattering machine guns shattered those dreams. Hulyai Pola fell. Makhno was briefly detained but managed to escape and join a Bolshevik artillery base train at Tsaritsyn. In July 1918 he returned to the Hulyai Pola area to find that the Germans had replaced the Rada with a puppet government headed by Hetman Pavel Skoropadsky.

Makhno organized the peasants and workers and orchestrated raids against Skoropadsky’s police force, called the Varta, and the occupying Central Powers soldiers. Makhno’s raiders were so effective that by early September he felt confident enough to attack a large objective. On 26 September 1918 he called together 50 guerrillas and led them in an attack on Hulyai Pola. The surprise attack stampeded the occupying Austro-Hungarian barrack and Varta who fled to Pokroski, 20 miles to the north.  Anticipating that his enemies would soon return, Makhno’s men seized abandoned arms and equipment and planned for a defense. Makhno gave rifles and pistols to many of the trusted citizens and told them that he would withdraw to the outskirts of the town as soon as the occupiers returned. He knew that his enemies would not follow him.  When they had settled into cleaning up the mess, he told the citizens, his men would launch a counter-strike. As his assault started, he asked that the armed citizens within the town attack also.  The encirclement would capture the Varta and Austro-Hungarians in a vice. Four hours after the police and occupiers took the town, the plan went into effect and the result was as Makhno had predicted. However, the long-term outcome was questionable. The anarchists had no way of taking care of prisoners. Shooting them all would have brought heavy reprisals on the citizens so Makhno turned the prisoners loose after making them promise to spread revolutionary ideals among their ranks. He then withdrew to Dibrivki Forest 40 kilometers away, where his men had built tunnels and strongpoints that would shield them for awhile.  

The Varta and Central Powers soldiers followed the anarchists to the forest where they began an encirclement of the area in which they suspected the insurgents were. Their plan was to deny escape, bring up artillery, and pound the area into match wood. With only 30 men left, Makhno knew that resistance was futile. His spirits were buoyed for a time when he discovered a group of 50 to 60 men who had been hiding in the forest from the Varta. They agreed to join Makhno, but as the pursuers closed in the new allies dwindled to seven. Makhno realized that making a stand would be futile. He told his men to make their escape as individuals through the many gaps that existed in the encirclement and head. Most succeeded in evading capture and over the next few days searched for an area where they could lick their wounds and gain strength. They finally settled around Velyka Mykhailivka. The village was ideal for continuing his guerrilla operations.    During the next month, Makhno’s guerrillas raided as far as Ekaterinoslav and the Tavria mainland with success from this base. The attracted many recruits. Makhno rebuilt his force by coercing the German and Polish estate owners into paying them to stay away and confiscating weapons from demobilized soldiers and deserters who had come home with everything from rifles to machine guns. By October 1918 Makhno felt confident enough to try another campaign.

Click on Map to Enlarge

The Theater of Operations for the Anarchists

Southeast of Hulyai Pola, the guerrillas ambushed an Austro-Hungarian supply train. The guards put up little resistance and were captured with few casualties. Makhno’s men took as much of the supplies as they could and insisted on shooting the prisoners. Makhno interceded and got them to spare the enlisted men, but four officers were executed. The act brought reprisals. A large force of Austro-Hungarians went after the guerrillas finally corralling them at Temyrivka.  The village was blasted off the face of the map. Nearly half of Makhno’s men were killed, while the others, with a wounded Makhno, escaped toward Russia.

Makhno returned to Ukraine in early November just as the Austro-German soldiers were beginning to leave for home in accordance with their own wishes and because of the terms of the armistice ending the Great War. Skoropadsky and his government departed with them, leaving the country in the hands of a government called the Directory. It consisted of former Rada members and was chaired by Simon Petliura. The Directory began to assert itself by a military campaign. Opposing them was a new Russian-Ukrainian Bolshevik invasion and a counterrevolutionary White movement under the command of former tsarist general Anton Denikin which had formed along the Don River.  Makhno allied himself and his guerillas with the Bolsheviks, rejecting Petliura’s nationalism as counterrevolutionary. There was never any thought of reaching an accord with the White movement. Denikin viewed the Directory, the Bolsheviks, and the anarchists as his enemies.

Makhno made this home town the center of an anarchistic enclave as the Austro-Hungarians left and the Varta crumbled. The guerrillas organized themselves into a standing 500-man army to protect the enclave and work in conjunction with Ukrainian Bolsheviks toward securing the eastern portion of Ukraine from Petliura’s Directory. The first confrontation between the two adversaries occurred at Ekaterinoslav. 

(Continued tomorrow on Roads to the Great War)

Map Series #8: The Great War in East Africa

According to Wikipedia, this beautiful, annotated map was created in 2008 by University of Minnesota cartography student Mehmet Berker. It is highly informative and most professional. Mehmet won first place in NACIS Student Map Poster Competition that year for this work. He currently is cartography, GIS, and graphic design consultant in Los Angeles. Fully expanded it is 24 x 30 inches and is 1.2 megs.

Click on Image to Enlarge

Nationalism After the Armistice

Greek and Armenian Refugees Fleeing Smyrna, September 1919

By Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manelo

The abrupt break-up of Europe’s land empires and the inability of the successor states to agree on borders with their neighbors certainly played a prominent role in triggering postwar violence. All national movements in the former land empires took inspiration from U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s promise, manifested most famously in the “Fourteen Points” of January 1918, that the nations of East-Central Europe should have an opportunity for “autonomous development” as well as from the Bolsheviks’ insistent advocacy of the principle of “national self-determination.”  

But while the slogan of “self-determination” provided a powerful rallying cry for the mobilization of anti-imperial emotions and people both within and outside Europe, the nascent national movements of Eastern Europe quickly encountered opposition from various camps. In Estonia and Latvia, where national movements seized the opportunity of the Bolshevik coup to declare their independence, the legitimacy of the new national assemblies was swiftly called into question.  The situation became more confusing in the spring when a German offensive led to the occupation of all of Latvia, Estonia, Belorussia, and Ukraine, only to be reversed when the German war effort collapsed in November that year, and was followed by a Red Army advance toward Minsk and Vilnius.  In Poland, too, the attempt to restore a powerful nation-state in the heart of Europe encountered severe problems—by the spring of 1919, Jozef Piłsudski’s reorganized Polish armed forces were engaged on four fronts: in Upper Silesia against strong German volunteer forces, in Teschen/Teshyn against the Czechs, in Galicia against Ukrainian forces, and against the Soviets threatening to invade from the West.

Funeral for a Polish Officer During the 1919 Fighting

The fate of territorial dismemberment also affected another defeated state, the Ottoman Empire, which lost all of its Arab possessions and was threatened in Western Anatolia by an initially successful Greek advance into Asia Minor shortly after the Ottoman defeat in October 1918 as well as an Armenian insurgency and a Kurdish independence movement in the east.  What the Young Turks and nationalist historians in Turkey to this day refer to as the “War of Liberation” (İstiklal Harbi, 1919–1923) was in essence a form of violent nation-state formation that combined mass killing, expulsion, and suppression and represented a continuation of wartime ethnic unmixing and exclusion of Ottoman Greeks and Armenians from Anatolia—a process that began long before the proclamation of a Turkish nation-state on 29 October 1923.

Here, as elsewhere, the nation-building process came at a high price, paid in particular by the minorities of the country. When Smyrna (Izmir) was re-conquered by Turkish troops in 1922, some 30,000 Greek residents were massacred and many more expelled in what became the largest population transfer in European history before the Second World War. All in all, some 70,000 people died violent deaths in Turkey during the decade after the war’s end, while approximately 900,000 Ottoman Christians and 400,000 Greek Muslims were forcibly resettled in a “homeland” most of them had never visited before. 

In imperial domains beyond Europe, postwar violence, while not nearly as massive as it was on the continent, was nevertheless widespread; even where there was little violence, the imperial edifice was often knocked off balance. Indeed, by the time of the Paris Peace Conference, the relationship between the white dominions and the British Empire had fundamentally changed. The dominions claimed a place at the conference in their own right and fought for their own interests. Australian Prime Minister “Billy” Hughes was a particularly disruptive force, driving U.S. President Woodrow Wilson (who referred to Hughes as a “pestiferous varmint”) to exasperation, antagonizing the Japanese delegation with his fierce opposition to the inclusion of a “racial equality clause” in the League of Nations covenant, and irritating everyone with his incessant demands that Australia be granted mandated territorial control over the former German New Guinea.  

Fighting Billy Hughes with Aussie Troops on Armistice Day

Nonetheless, the form of postwar nationalism in the settler dominions varied. For Canada and South Africa the pressing problem of appeasing large, disgruntled non-British ethnic communities, further embittered by the war, drove the mobilization of nationalist sentiment as the ideological glue to keep these fragile polities together in the immediate postwar years. In both these dominions, nationalism was articulated around moving away from the empire— more republican, self-sufficient, and grounded in a sense of cultural difference from the British.  In Australia and New Zealand, however, postwar nationalism was equally strong but in contrast oriented around the twin themes of national maturity and empire loyalty. Far from nationalism being the antithesis of empire, as in other settler dominions, in Australia and New Zealand nation and empire were inextricably linked. The bloodshed of Anzac troops at Gallipoli, in particular, maintains its central position in Australian and New Zealand collective memory as the violent passage to nationhood but also as proof of the bond between “Anglo-Saxon” settlers and the imperial motherland.

Source:  "The Great War as a Global War: Imperial Conflict and the Reconfiguration of World Order, 1911–1923," Imperial Conflict and the Reconfiguration of World Order,  Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manelo

Alan Seeger's "The Aisne"

Alan Seeger, American expatriate serving in the French Foreign Legion, wrote movingly of his service around the River Aisne in his diary. He wrote evocatively in this poem of the beauty of the region and the battlefields therein, including the destined-to-be-legendary Craonne. 

Typical Aisne Valley Village
Many of These Became Battlefields in 1914–18

The Aisne

We first saw fire on the tragic slopes
Where the flood-tide of France’s early gain,
Big with wrecked promise and abandoned hopes,
Broke in a surf of blood along the Aisne.

The charge her heroes left us, we assumed,
What, dying, they reconquered, we preserved,
In the chill trenches, harried, shelled, entombed,
Winter came down on us, but no man swerved.

Winter came down on us. The low clouds, torn
In the stark branches of the riven pines,
Blurred the white rockets that from dusk till morn
Traced the wide curve of the close-grappling lines.

In rain, and fog that on the withered hill
Froze before dawn, the lurking foe drew down;
Or light snows fell that made forlorner still
The ravaged country and the ruined town;

Or the long clouds would end. Intensely fair,
The winter constellations blazing forth –
Perseus, the Twins, Orion, the Great Bear –
Gleamed on our bayonets pointing to the north.

And the lone sentinel would start and soar
On wings of strong emotion as he knew
That kinship with the stars that only War
Is great enough to lift man’s spirit to.

And ever down the curving front, aglow
With the pale rockets’ intermittent light,
He heard, like distant thunder, growl and grow
The rumble of far battles in the night, –

Rumors, reverberant, indistinct, remote,
Borne from red fields whose martial names have won
The power to thrill like a far trumpet-note, –
Vic, Vailly, Soupir, Hurtebise, Craonne . . .

Craonne, before thy cannon-swept plateau,
Where like sere leaves lay strewn September’s dead,
I found for all dear things I forfeited
A recompense I would not now forego.

Craonne, Devastated After the Fighting

For that high fellowship was ours then
With those who, championing another’s good,
More than dull Peace or its poor votaries could,
Taught us the dignity of being men.

There we drained deeper the deep cup of life,
And on sublime summits came to learn,
After soft things, the terrible and stern,
After sweet Love, the majesty of Strife;

There where we faced under those frowning heights
The blast that maims, the hurricane that kills;
There where the watchlights on the winter hills
Flickered like balefire through inclement nights;

There where, firm links in the unyielding chain,
Where fell the long-planned blow and fell in vain –
Hearts worthy of the honor and the trial,
We helped to hold the lines along the Aisne.

Alan Seeger (in 1914/1915) 

Drone Reconnaissance of Vimy Ridge

Another great video battlefield survey from Steven Upton: