America and the Great War by Margaret E. Wagner

Author:Margaret E. Wagner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620409831
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

Lieutenant James Europe leads the celebrated band of the U.S. 369th Infantry during a concert in a Paris hospital courtyard, providing wounded doughboys with a welcome transfusion of genuine American jazz. U.S. Army Signal Corps photograph, 1918.

While the 369th Infantry band was still touring, about 49,000 more American troops had arrived in France (as both the Forty-second Division and the Twenty-sixth, whose roster included “Stubby,” a soon-to-be-famous canine, assumed front-line duties). By the end of February the AEF’s strength was 252,000, appreciably less than the estimated number of British casualties from the 1917 Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele). This slow progress, the need to train and equip the Americans once they landed, and the continuing buildup of German forces on the Western Front moved the Allied high command to consider ways of reactivating the Eastern Front in order to stop, or at least retard, the transfer of German troops to France. In February, the Allied Supreme War Council began developing plans for a movement into Siberia by the United States’ Far East rival, Japan. Those in the Wilson administration who most distrusted Japan spoke out against such an incursion unless U.S. troops also participated and there were some guarantee that the Japanese would later withdraw. President Wilson countered that there were no ships to send an American force to Siberia. Moreover, he told his cabinet, “If we invade Russia, will not Germany say we are doing exactly what she is doing? We will lose our moral position.” There the matter rested, at least in Washington. Yet the Wilson administration took careful note when, on March 6, the British warship Hood landed 130 Royal Marines in the northwest Russian port city of Murmansk to protect the large cache of supplies the Allies and the United States had shipped there while Russia was still actively at war. This action, taken with the full cooperation of both local and national Bolshevik authorities, would later be regarded as a precedent for further Allied action in both north and southeastern Russia (Siberia), as various Russian factions were organizing to oppose Bolshevik rule.11

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