Author: KETTLE, MICHAEL
Title: The Road to Intervention: March-November 1918 (Russia and the Allies 1917-1920, Volume Two)
Description: London: Routledge, 1988. First Edition; First Edition. Original Boards. ISBN: 0415003717. 401 pages. With maps and plates. Former owner's name on front free endpaper. Occasional annotation or underlining in pencil. Slight wear to spine, covers, corners & dustjacket. ; Hardback; Octavo (standard book size); The Road to Intervention. March-November 1918By the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (with which the first volume in this series ended) , Russia went out of the Great War. For the Western Allies, convinced that a huge German offensive in France was imminent, the unthinkable had happened. The Eastern Front had finally been closed down. They had a fortnight to consider their new plight. On March 21st, the German offensive, designed to win the war, opened in France. From then on, as the huge battle swayed to and fro, Allied leaders, under immense pressure, had to take major decisions on Russian policy, with desperately tired minds. This is the context in which the Allied, and especially the British road to intervention in Russia must be judged. British policy was surprisingly coherent. Their overriding concern, in their attempt to re-open the Eastern Front, was the critical lack of manpower. The Japanese alone were in a position to intervene in Siberia in force, but only with American consent. Thus the key to intervention lay in Washington. If this period does not reflect well on any of the Allies, it is perhaps least creditable to the American Government. Rightly considering real intervention not to be a practical military proposition, President Wilson dithered as ever more pressing demands arrived from London. The joint American-Japanese force that he finally allowed to be sent was too small and too late. Its final arrival virtually coincided with the final breaking of German military power on the Western Front. Had British plans been adopted, decisive Allied intervention might have occurred six to eight weeks earlier. Michael Kettle has had access to British Government papers never before seen by historians, which reveal how this might have come about. Whilst the Germans dealt directly with the new Bolshevik Government in Moscow, they as openly supported the Don Cossacks in South Russia, ready to take over if the Bolsheviks collapsed. Trotsky, anxious to play off the British against the Germans, thus approved British plans to make use of the Czech Legion, then on its way out of Russia, to save the north Russian ports from the Germans, and for the Russian Fleets to be sabotaged to prevent German seizure. (In fact, the British . Were really thinking of using the Czechs to start up intervention) . In mid-May, when President Wilson had finally rejected all British proposals for using Japan in the Far East, the War Cabinet in London decided (because of a crucial change in German policy in Russia) that they must now force the issue, and use the Czechs to start off intervention, without Trotsky+s consent. Trotsky, aware that he had nearly been drawn into an Allied trap, hastily drew back. He denounced the Czech Legion, causing them to revolt against the Bolsheviks. In the fearful confusion of the moment, this was not known in the Allied capitals for some weeks; and when it was, it was initially misunderstood. By a supreme irony, virtually as the Czech revolt took place, the French forbad the British use of +their+ Czechs (the French claimed nominal control over the Czech Legion) to force President Wilson+s hand, arguing that it would prove fatal to obtaining his agreement to real intervention. There was an angry lull. Six weeks later (by when news of the Czech revolt had been assimilated in Washington) , President Wilson finally agreed to limited intervention - solely because of the Czechs. Some twenty five years ago, Professor Richard H. Ullman wrote a trilogy on Anglo- Soviet relations during this period. In his first volume: +Intervention and the War+, Ullman relied mainly on the papers of Lord Milner (Secretary of State for War in 1918) . In his preface, he wrote: +I am convinced that when British archives for this period are eventually opened to the historian, they will be found to contain no information which will appreciably alter the substance of the present account. + A quarter of a century later, this claim can be seen to be untrue. Previously a war correspondent, Michael Kettle covered the Algerian civil war, the Angolan civil war, and the troubles in the Congo, for leading British and American newspapers. He thus has first-hand knowledge of revolution and civil war in the field. He is now an Associate Fellow of the Russian Research Centre at Harvard; and in 1983, was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for International Studies at the London School of Economics.. Very Good in Very Good dust jacket .

Keywords: 0415003717 1st World Ww1


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