James Nelson - The Polar Bear Expedition

The stalemate continued, but there was hope for all.

The United States, prodded by German U-boat attacks on its shipping, had finally cast off its isolationism and on April 6, 1917, declared war on Germany. With hardly more than 100,000 American men in uniform and the Allies asking for 1 million men, it would take some time for the United States to get up to speed militarily, and there were great concerns among the French and British, who were just holding on on the Western Front, that all would be lost before American boys could arrive in numbers great enough to tilt the balance of power Over There.

As for the Germans? By design, they faced a two-front war, as Russia by treaty was obligated to strike to the west should France be attacked. German military architects had planned to invade and take France at the war’s outset while the Russians slowly mobilized, then turn east and contend with Russia. Those designs obviously went kaput as the German Army became bogged down on the Western Front.

Russian forces did indeed quickly move west into East Prussia, only to be checked at the Masurian Lakes in August 1914. Unlike in the west, the Eastern Front would thereafter remain fluid, as fighting raged from Lithuania south through Poland, the Ukraine, and Romania, the Germans and their Austro-Hungarian allies and the Russians trading blows, victories, and terrible losses.

But for the Germans, a ray of hope emerged in 1917. While twelve million Russian soldiers had kept eighty German divisions pinned across the Eastern Front, the collapse of Czar Nicholas’s regime in March 1917, and a subsequent disastrous Russian offensive the following June, led to the dissolution of the army.

Many disgruntled Russian soldiers, sick of war and hardships, simply stopped fighting, and in some cases murdered their officers. Much of the army then began drifting away, and many soldiers threw down their weapons and headed home. While Alexander Kerensky’s Provisional Government had supported continuing the fight against Germany and its allies, and the Allies—including the United States—had quickly recognized his government in the belief that Russia would keep its huge army in the fight, all such hope was dashed when the Bolsheviks assumed power in November 1917. On November 8, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, who with the help of Germany had been spirited back into Russia from exile the previous April, issued a Decree for Peace at a Congress of Soviets, asking all warring nations to lay down their arms and negotiate an end to the war. On the same day, he issued a Decree of the Land, announcing that all private ownership of land would be abolished.

Soon after, armistice negotiations began with the German high command, which was eager to end the conflict on the Eastern Front as soon as possible so it could transfer troops to the west for a planned March 1918 offensive. The Germans intended to win the war in the west before the Americans could arrive in numbers large enough to make the difference.

Lenin, too, was eager to quit the fight so his government could focus on the increasing troubles at home, where the economy was in chaos and armed forces loyal to the deposed czar—the so-called Whites—were attempting to undo the Revolution.

After achieving an armistice with Russia on December 15, Germany indeed began moving men west, and according to some estimates one million German soldiers were transferred to France between mid-December and the ultimate March 3, 1918, signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, which besides costing Russia one-quarter of its peoples and farmable land took Russia out of the war once and for all.

For the Allies, the treaty between Germany and Russia was a disaster—one that was only compounded when Germany unleashed its long-planned, huge offensive on March 21. With the Eastern Front gone, more and more German soldiers would be joining the drive on the west, and it seemed all but certain that the Allies would be pushed into the sea. “Things look very bad,” British prime minister David Lloyd George said during the early days of that offensive. “I fear it means disaster.”

Adding to the despair and nervousness of the Allies was the discovery in April 1918 that 55,000 German troops had been sent to Finland, which borders Russia on the northeast and whose eastern boundary is just 150 miles from the Russian port of Murmansk. The port was ice-free in winter, and there were worries that the Germans could easily seize Murmansk, where millions of dollars’ worth of Allied war materiel meant for the Russian Army had been off-loaded, and build a submarine base from which attacks on Allied shipping could be made.

Though there was little or no evidence such plans were being laid, the besieged Allies’ minds ran rampant with all of the ruinous possibilities Russia’s leaving the war could bring them—and by April, a British force of 150 marines had landed at Murmansk, which was followed by another contingent of 370 men at the end of May.

The Bolsheviks had their own concerns about Murmansk and what appeared to be the threatening force of Germans, but Leon Trotsky, Lenin’s minister of war, turned a blind eye to the British landings, and both he and Lenin appeared happy to let someone else deal with the threat on the Kola Peninsula while they were consumed with more pressing matters.

The Allies, too, had more pressing matters that spring of 1918. The great German drive had continued east through April, but by some miracle the target city of Amiens had held, and north of that city French colonials had managed to break the German tide around the villages of Montdidier and Cantigny.

But, even as the American First Division was making its country’s first large-scale assault of the war at Cantigny on May 28, a new German push south of the Aisne that had launched the day before threatened the envelopment of Paris, which by June 1 was only thirty-five miles away from where the German military architect Erich Ludendorff’s storm troopers were surging to the Marne River.

Elements of the American Third Division held the line at the river in the first days of June, and after Ludendorff ordered a southeasterly advance toward Paris, the river of gray uniforms found themselves being stymied by United States Marines at Belleau Wood. Three weeks of savage fighting would leave the marines in possession of the field and the wood, which by the end of June sported little more than a jumble of splintered trees, shell holes, and the detritus—dead bodies, rifles, shattered equipment—of battle.

The great German tide was stemmed for the time being, but the anxiety among the Allies remained at a boiling point—and to some, the only available option to win the war was intervention in Russia and the reestablishment of the Eastern Front. Winston Churchill, the British minister of munitions, was adamant about a Russian solution, saying “the sacrifices of the peoples and the armies” would be in vain if the Allies could not “reconstitute the fighting front in the East.”

The British had attempted to gain support for Russian intervention from the Allied Supreme War Council in early April, and appealed for American help in an intervention not only in the Murmansk-Archangel area to the far north, but at Vladivostok in the far east, where another huge pile of Allied materiel lay, about which there were concerns that they could fall into the hands of the Germans and be transported west along the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

The British appealed over and over to President Woodrow Wilson to approve the sending of troops to Russia, and while he did agree to send a single American ship—the Olympia —to Murmansk, he repeatedly refused to send in the army.

Wilson, who had made the evacuation of “all Russian territory” by alien forces one of his famous Fourteen Points, had the backing of his most influential advisors, among them Secretary of War Newton Baker, Secretary of State Robert Lansing, and Gen. Peyton C. March, who would call the idea of an intervention in northern Russia “nonsense from the beginning.”