No Man's Land by John Toland

Author:John Toland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-11-22T05:00:00+00:00

The next minute Wilson compounded ambiguity with outright confusion by agreeing to establish a small American force in Murmansk “to guard military stores at Kola and to make it safe for Russian forces to come together in organized bodies in the north.” Did he mean White Russian or Bolshevik forces? Not in the entire document had he mentioned the apparently unmentionable word Bolshevik. “But it owes it to frank counsel to say that it can go no further than these modest and experimental plans. It is not in a position, and has no expectation of being in a position, to take part in organized intervention in adequate force from either Vladivostok or Murmansk or Archangel.” A little bit of intervention, like a little lack of virtue, seemed to be acceptable.

To soften the blow to Anglo-French hopes and sensibilities, Wilson then stressed that none of the above conclusions were meant as any criticism of the Allies or Japan. “All that is intended is a perfectly frank and definite statement of policy which the United States feels obliged to adopt for herself and in the use of her military forces.” She had no intention at all of limiting the action or defining the policies of her associates.

But such pious protestation could not hide the fact that the aide-mémoire would probably bring about the very thing it professed to renounce. At the same time it was a flat rebuff of the Supreme War Council and the Allies. What the President had belatedly offered on July 9 with his right hand he was now taking away with his left. Although he had bowed to powerful Allied pressure momentarily, he appeared to be back to his original Fourteen Points. Or did he really know where he was? The British Military Representative in Washington perceptively cabled London that he thought it probable that the President would be forced into full-fledged intervention by events and, until then, Britain “should accept the situation and make no further representations” until the troops were “on the spot”

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