This Day in World War 1 History: SEPTEMBER 04, 1918 : AMERICAN TROOPS LAND AT ARCHANGEL

On September 4, 1918, United States troops land at Archangel, in northern Russia. The landing was part of an Allied intervention in the civil war raging in that country after revolution in 1917 led to the abdication of Czar Nicholas II in favor of a provisional government; the seizure of power by Vladimir Lenin and his radical socialist Bolshevik Party; and, finally, Russia’s withdrawal from participation alongside the Allies in World War I.

By the spring of 1918, after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ended Russia’s war effort against the Central Powers, the country was embroiled in a heated internal conflict. Supporters of the Bolsheviks—known as the Reds—faced off against the Whites, anti-Bolshevik forces loyal to the provisional government, in a power struggle aimed at defining the future course of the Russian state. In this struggle, the leaders of Britain, France and the United States definitively favored the Whites, harboring as they did an intense fear and misunderstanding of Lenin and his forces of radical socialism. With some hesitation, they determined to launch an intervention into the Russian civil war, aimed at defeating the Bolsheviks and installing the Whites in power again, hoping this eventuality would draw Russia back into the war against the Central Powers.

A document issued by the U.S. State Department in July 1918 set the terms by which the U.S. would participate alongside the other Allied powers in the so-called “interventions” in Russia: three infantry battalions and three companies of army engineers would be sent to Archangel to join the British troops already there. A small force would also be sent to Vladivostok, where a force of Czecho-Slovak troops bent on continuing the fight against the Central Powers had claimed the Russian city as an Allied protectorate early in July. According to the State Department, Allied responsibilities in Russia were clear: “…Each of the associated powers has the single object of affording such aid as shall be acceptable, and only such aid as shall be acceptable, to the Russian people in their endeavor to regain control of their own affairs, their own territory, and their own destiny.”

The Allied intervention in Russia would continue throughout the end of World War I and the peace negotiations at Versailles, from which the Russian Bolsheviks were excluded. By October 1919, White Russian forces were in full retreat in the south, and Lenin and his Bolsheviks had effectively consolidated power for their regime. Recognizing the futility of their intervention in the costly and distant conflict in Russia, Allied forces began to withdraw. By the time the American troops completed their evacuation of Vladivostok and Archangel, 174 of them had been killed in action or died of wounds incurred over the course of the intervention.

Article Details:

September 04, 1918 : American troops land at Archangel

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  History.com Staff

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  History.com

• Year Published

  2009

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  September 04, 1918 : American troops land at Archangel

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  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/american-troops-land-at-archangel

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  September 03, 2015

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  A+E Networks

This Day in World War 1 History: SEPTEMBER 03, 1914 : POPE BENEDICT XV NAMED TO PAPACY

On September 3, 1914, barely a month after the outbreak of World War I, Giacomo della Chiesa is elected to the papacy of the Roman Catholic Church, becoming Pope Benedict XV.

An aristocratic native of Genoa, Italy, who had served as a cardinal since the previous May, Benedict succeeded Pius X, who died on August 20, 1914. He was elected by a constituency made up of cardinals from countries on both sides of the battle lines, because he professed strict neutrality in the conflict. Calling the Great War “the suicide of Europe,” Benedict became an insistent voice for peace from the beginning of his reign, though his calls were roundly ignored by the belligerent powers.

After proposing the idea of a general Christmas truce in 1914 without success—although some pauses in the fighting did occur spontaneously in various places along the Western Front that Christmas, initiated by the soldiers—Benedict began to lose influence even within Italy as that nation readied itself to join the war effort. In the months preceding Italy’s declaration of war on Austria-Hungary in May 1915, Benedict’s steady urging for peace was seen as interfering with the national will to fight. In the Treaty of London, which set the conditions for Italy’s participation in the war, the Allies agreed with Italy that any peace overtures from the Vatican to the Central Powers should be ignored.

On August 1, 1917, Benedict issued a seven-point peace proposal addressed to “the heads of the belligerent peoples.” In it, he expressed the need for a cessation of hostilities, general reduction of armaments, freedom of the seas and international arbitration of any territorial questions among the warring nations. The proposal was widely rejected by all the warring powers, which were by this point dedicated to an absolute victory and would not consider compromise. To make matters worse, both sides saw the Vatican as prejudiced in favor of the other and refused to accept the pope’s terms. This situation continued in the immediate post-armistice period, when despite its entreaties to be involved in the determination of the peace settlement, Benedict’s Vatican was excluded from the Paris Peace Conference, held at Versailles in 1919.

Article Details:

September 03, 1914 : Pope Benedict XV named to papacy

• Author

  History.com Staff

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  History.com

• Year Published

  2009

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  September 03, 1914 : Pope Benedict XV named to papacy

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  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/pope-benedict-xv-named-to-papacy

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  September 03, 2015

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This Day in World War 1 History: SEPTEMBER 02, 1917 : FATHERLAND PARTY FORMALLY LAUNCHED IN GERMANY

On September 2, 1917, militarist conservatives within Germany formally launch a new political party, the Vaterlandspartei or Fatherland Party, a move that reflects the growing hold of the army over all aspects of German society during the First World War.

By 1917, with mutinies flaring within the German navy and hungry workers striking on the home front, Germany’s Reichstag government was internally divided and struggling to maintain control. Its administrative structures were limited—Germany lacked, for example, the equivalent of the British Munitions Ministry, which organized and regulated Britain’s war production. As a result, the army’s general staff had expanded to fill in the gaps, however inadequately. The Supreme War Command, led by Generals Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, had since 1916 exerted ever more control over Germany’s affairs, both on and away from the battlefield.

As the army’s power expanded, that of the Reichstag and especially that of Kaiser Wilhelm II shrank, and Hindenburg rose in the minds of the German people to become the supreme warlord. The Fatherland Party—formally launched on September 2, 1917, the anniversary of Prussia’s defeat of France at Sedan during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870—reflected this reality politically. Its founders were two military conservatives with relatively aggressive war aims, Wolfgang Kapp and Alfred von Tirpitz, the former naval minister. In direct response to the peace resolution introduced by the moderate German politician Matthias Erzberger and debated during the summer of 1917 in the Reichstag parliament, the Fatherland Party aimed to reignite the “spirit of 1914″ and rededicate the country to the cause of a German victory in the war.

Tirpitz and Kapp—who was later to lead the notorious failed putsch against Germany’s Weimar government in 1920—drew their support from a conservative base that included schoolteachers, the clergy and the professional middle class. The army expressed its own support through its press agency, as well as through the censorship of the party’s political opponents. By 1918, the Fatherland Party numbered 1.25 million members. Its strength, in turn, encouraged Hindenburg and Ludendorff to disregard any pretense of defensive warfare and pursue an aggressive policy during the final year of the war, which included a new program of annexation that promised to vastly increase Germany’s post-war influence.

Article Details:

September 02, 1917 : Fatherland Party formally launched in Germany

• Author

  History.com Staff

• Website Name

  History.com

• Year Published

  2009

• Title

  September 02, 1917 : Fatherland Party formally launched in Germany

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  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/fatherland-party-formally-launched-in-germany

• Access Date

  September 02, 2015

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  A+E Networks