This Day in World War 1 History: JULY 06, 1918 : CZECH TROOPS TAKE RUSSIAN PORT OF VLADIVOSTOK FOR ALLIES

On July 6, 1918, troops of the Czech Legion, fighting on behalf of the Allies during World War I and for the cause of their own independent Czecho-Slovak state, declare the Russian port of Vladivostok, on the Pacific Ocean, to be an Allied protectorate, having gained control of the port and overthrown the local Bolshevik administration a week earlier.

When World War I broke out in the summer of 1914, the countries now known as the Czech Republic and Slovakia were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now fighting with Germany against the Allies—Russia, France and Great Britain. Czechs who enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian army found themselves fighting against their countrymen—many Czechs had emigrated to Russia near the turn of the century, mostly settling in and around Kiev, the capital of Ukraine—and began to bristle under Austro-Hungarian rule and in many cases to surrender voluntarily to the Russian enemy. In 1917, Thomas Masaryk, a professor of philosophy, pan-Slavist and ardent Czech nationalist, began lobbying the Russian government to let him raise a full Czecho-Slovak army in Russia to fight against the Central Powers. After the abdication of Czar Nicholas II in March, the provisional government allowed Masaryk to go ahead with his plan, and the Czech Legion was formed.

Over the next year, however, the Russian war effort collapsed, amid crushing losses to Germany on the Eastern Front and inner turmoil, culminating in November, when the radical socialist Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, seized power from the provisional government and almost immediately called for an armistice with the Central Powers. The Czech Legion, finding itself abandoned by its Russian comrades, decided to keep up the fight. Blocked by German forces from joining the other Allies on the Western Front in France, they headed east, coming into conflict with Bolshevik forces along the way.

By the summer of 1918, the Czech Legion had reached the Russian Pacific port of Vladivostok, where they overthrew the local Bolshevik administration on June 29. On July 6, the legion declared the port to be an Allied protectorate. That same day, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson lauded the Czecho-Slovak contribution to the war effort, suggesting that some 12,000 Japanese troops be dispatched to Vladivostok in order to relieve the Czech Legion and allow them to proceed to the battlefields of France, a suggestion the Japanese accepted. On the following day, more Czech troops toppled Red army units and occupied the city of Irkutsk, in Siberia, spreading Allied control of the Russian Far East and Siberia just as Germany was consolidating its holds in southern Russia and the Caucasus.

In a statement issued on July 27, 1918, Masaryk, in his position as chairman of the Czecho-Slovak National Council, pointed to his countrymen currently fighting in Russia as a further argument for Allied recognition of their independence. In Masaryk’s words: The Czecho-Slovak Army is one of the allied armies, and it is as much under the orders of the Versailles War Council as the French or American Army. No doubt the Czecho-Slovak boys in Russia are anxious to avoid participation in a possible civil war in Russia, but they realize at the same time that by staying where they are they may be able to render far greater services, both to Russia and the Allied cause, than if they were transported to France. They are at the orders of the Supreme War Council of the Allies.

The following September, with World War I in its last months, U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing declared de facto recognition of the Czecho-Slovak republic as an independent state, with Masaryk as its leader. Based on the fighting in Russia by Czecho-Slovak forces against the Central Powers, Lansing wrote that The Government of the United States further declares that it is prepared to enter formally into relations with the de facto government thus recognized for the purpose of prosecuting the war against the common enemy, the empires of Germany and Austria-Hungary. The republic of Czechoslovakia—made up of the former Austro-Hungarian territories of Bohemia, Moravia, part of Silesia, Slovakia and sub-Carpathian Ruthenia—was subsequently proclaimed at Prague in October 1918.

Article Details:

July 06, 1918 : Czech troops take Russian port of Vladivostok for Allies

• Author

  History.com Staff

• Website Name

  History.com

• Year Published

  2009

• Title

  July 06, 1918 : Czech troops take Russian port of Vladivostok for Allies

• URL

  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/czech-troops-take-russian-port-of-vladivostok-for-allies

• Access Date

  July 06, 2015

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  A+E Networks

This Day in World War 1 History: JULY 03, 1918 : MOHAMMED V (Mehmed V Reshad), SULTAN OF TURKEY, DIES

On this day in 1918, with Turkish forces in the final months of fighting against the Allied powers during World War I, Mohammed V (Mehmed V Reshad), sultan of the Ottoman Empire, dies at the age of 73.

Born in 1844 in Constantinople, Mohammed ascended to the throne in 1909 after the forced abdication of his elder brother, Abdul Hamid, under pressure from the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), a rising political party known as the Young Turkey Party, or the Young Turks. Bent on modernizing the fading Ottoman Empire and stopping European powers from taking Ottoman territory, the Young Turks fomented a rebellion within the Ottoman Third Army in 1908 and forced the sultan to meet their demands and restore the Turkish constitution. The army, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal (later known as Ataturk, he became the first president of Turkey) consolidated power for the CUP the following year, forcing the sultan to abdicate in favor of his brother Mohammed.

The leaders of the CUP, particularly Enver Pasha, effectively dictated the course of events over the next decade, as the new sultan, a gentle man, was little able to exert much of his own will on the throne. The results were not good for the empire: over the course of 1912-13, it lost virtually all of its remaining European territory during the two Balkan Wars and an unsuccessful war with Italy over Tripoli. In November 1914, Turkey entered the First World War on the side of the Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary, against Britain, France and Russia. Though he had initially opposed his country’s participation in the war, Sultan Mohammed now exhorted his army–as well as all Muslims, including those living in Allied countries–to fight exhaustively against the empire’s enemies, proclaiming that “Right and loyalty are on our side, and hatred and tyranny on the side of our enemies, and therefore there is no doubt that the Divine help and assistance of the just God and the moral support of our glorious Prophet will be on our side to encourage us. I feel convinced that from this struggle we shall emerge as an empire that has made good the losses of the past and is once more glorious and powerful.”

By the time Mohammed V died, on July 3, 1918, Turkish forces had endured nearly four exhausting years of war, including a full-scale Allied land invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula and aggressive Allied incursions into Mesopotamia, and were teetering on the brink of defeat. Within six months of the sultan’s death (he was succeeded by his brother, Mohammed VI), Constantinople itself was occupied by the Allies, and the once-great Ottoman Empire was in shambles.

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July 03, 1918 : Mohammed V, sultan of Turkey, dies

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  History.com Staff

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  History.com

• Year Published

  2009

• Title

  July 03, 1918 : Mohammed V, sultan of Turkey, dies

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  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/mohammed-v-sultan-of-turkey-dies

• Access Date

  July 03, 2015

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  A+E Networks

This Day in World War 1 History: JULY 01, 1916 : BATTLE OF THE SOMME BEGINS

At 7:30 a.m., the British launch a massive offensive against German forces in the Somme River region of France. During the preceding week, 250,000 Allied shells had pounded German positions near the Somme, and 100,000 British soldiers poured out of their trenches and into no-man’s-land on July 1, expecting to find the way cleared for them. However, scores of heavy German machine guns had survived the artillery onslaught, and the infantry were massacred. By the end of the day, 20,000 British soldiers were dead and 40,000 wounded. It was the single heaviest day of casualties in British military history. The disastrous Battle of the Somme stretched on for more than four months, with the Allies advancing a total of just five miles.

When World War I broke out in August 1914, great throngs of British men lined up to enlist in the war effort. At the time, it was generally thought that the war would be over within six months. However, by the end of 1914 well over a million soldiers of various nationalities had been killed on the battlefields of Europe, and a final victory was not in sight for either the Allies or the Central Powers. On the Western Front–the battle line that stretched across northern France and Belgium–the combatants had settled down in the trenches for a terrible war of attrition. Maimed and shell-shocked troops returning to Britain with tales of machine guns, artillery barrages, and poison gas seriously dampened the enthusiasm of potential new volunteers.

With the aim of raising enough men to launch a decisive offensive against Germany, Britain replaced voluntary service with conscription in January 1916, when it passed an act calling for the enlistment of all unmarried men between the ages of 18 and 41. After Germany launched a massive offensive of its own against Verdun in February, Britain expanded the Military Service Act, calling for the conscription of all men, married and unmarried, between the ages of 18 and 41. Near the end of June, with the Battle of Verdun still raging, Britain prepared for its major offensive along a 21-mile stretch of the Western Front north of the Somme River.

For a week, the British bombarded the German trenches as a prelude to the attack. British Field Marshal Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, thought the artillery would decimate the German defenses and allow a British breakthrough; in fact, it served primarily to remove the element of surprise. When the bombardment died down on the morning of July 1, the German machine crews emerged from their fortified trenches and set up their weapons. At 7:30 a.m., 11 British divisions attacked at once, and the majority of them were gunned down. The soldiers optimistically carried heavy supplies for a long march, but few made it more than a couple of hundred yards. Five French divisions that attacked south of the Somme at the same time fared a little better, but without British success little could be done to exploit their gains.

After the initial disaster, Haig resigned himself to smaller but equally ineffectual advances, and more than 1,000 Allied lives were extinguished for every 100 yards gained on the Germans. Even Britain’s September 15 introduction of tanks into warfare for the first time in history failed to break the deadlock in the Battle of the Somme. In October, heavy rains turned the battlefield into a sea of mud, and on November 18 Haig called off the Somme offensive after more than four months of mass slaughter.

Except for its effect of diverting German troops from the Battle of Verdun, the offensive was a miserable disaster. It amounted to a total gain of just 125 square miles for the Allies, with more than 600,000 British and French soldiers killed, wounded, or missing in the action. German casualties were more than 650,000. Although Haig was severely criticised for the costly battle, his willingness to commit massive amounts of men and resources to the stalemate along the Western Front did eventually contribute to the collapse of an exhausted Germany in 1918.

Article Details:

July 01, 1916 : Battle of the Somme begins

• Author

  History.com Staff

• Website Name

  History.com

• Year Published

  2010

• Title

  July 01, 1916 : Battle of the Somme begins

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  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/battle-of-the-somme-begins

• Access Date

  July 01, 2015

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  A+E Networks