America S Siberian Adventure 1918 1920

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America's Siberian Adventure 1918-1920 recounts the covert campaign by the US to stabilize a region plagued by an uprising of multiple conflicts following the end of World War 1. Author General William Graves was the man sent to Siberia to lead an expeditionary force deep into the frozen interior, where Graves and his hardy men had to contend with Russian warlords, the Red Army, a roving brigade of Czechoslovakian troops, the need to protect the Trans-Siberian Railway, extreme weather conditions, and the regular armies of the Japanese and British. The results of the expedition were mixed, but historians agree that the operation materially contributed to bringing peace to the region, the ultimate goal of this important diplomatic mission.

"The authoritative account of the American expedition of 1918-1920, as told by the commanding officer." William L. Langer, Foreign Affairs In Western Europe the First World War continued to rage. Yet, in the East, the Russians had stopped fighting the Germans and had begun to fight each other in a brutal civil war. This left the allied forces with a number of difficulties and so they decided to intervene in the Civil War for three reasons: Firstly, to prevent Allied war material stockpiles in Russia from falling into German or Bolshevik hands. Secondly, to rescue the 50,000 troops in the Czechoslovakian Legion who were stranded along the Trans-Siberian Railroad. And thirdly, to resurrect the Eastern Front by installing a White-backed government. In July 1918, against the advice of the Department of War, Woodrow Wilson agreed to send 5,000 troops as the American North Russia Expeditionary Force and 10,000 troops as the American Expeditionary Force Siberia, the second of which was commanded by William S. Graves. Graves in his book America's Siberian Adventure, 1918-1920 meticulously records the two years that he spent fighting in Russia with his men. Within the book he covers the international relations between the major intervening powers, the incredibly complex nature of the Russian Revolution and its subsequent civil war, the way that the allied forces intervened in the conflict, and the eventual outcome of the war. America's Siberian Adventure, 1918-1920 is a brilliant book for anyone interested in the military history of the United States and the history of one of its less well-known conflicts. "Its value, which is considerable, rests upon the extensive use made by General Graves of his reports to the war department, the portrayal of the methods used in carrying out his instructions, the disclosure of new material relative to the conflict of policy between the departments of state and of war, and his testimony on the ruthless regime of Kolchak, Semeonoff, and Kalmikoff." Paul H. Clyde, Journal of American History "It is a modest narrative, without bitterness or blame, clearly accurate and historic. Gen. Graves, though he didn't intend it so, comes out the shining knight, with the courage, dedication and character that enabled him to perform a great service for his country." G. Russell Evans, Captain, U.S. Coast Guard (Ret.), NEWSMAX Major General William S. Graves was a United States Army Major General. He commanded American forces in Siberia during the Siberian Expedition, part of the Allied Intervention in Russia. His book America's Siberian Adventure 1918-20 was first published in 1931 and he passed away in 1940.

“An intriguing and carefully argued entry into a small and often overlooked discussion of American political maneuvering at the end of World War I.” —Library Journal In a little-known episode at the height of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson dispatched thousands of American soldiers to Siberia. Carl J. Richard convincingly shows that Wilson’s original intent was to enable Czechs and anti-Bolshevik Russians to rebuild the Eastern Front against the Central Powers. But Wilson continued the intervention for a year and a half after the armistice in order to overthrow the Bolsheviks and to prevent the Japanese from absorbing eastern Siberia. As Wilson and the Allies failed to formulate a successful Russian policy at the Paris Peace Conference, American doughboys suffered great hardships on the bleak plains of Siberia. Richard argues that Wilson’s Siberian intervention ironically strengthened the Bolshevik regime it was intended to topple. Its tragic legacy can be found in the seeds of World War II—which began with an alliance between Germany and the Soviet Union, the two nations most aggrieved by Allied treatment after World War I—and in the Cold War, a forty-five year period in which the world held its collective breath over the possibility of nuclear annihilation. One of the earliest U.S. counterinsurgency campaigns outside the Western Hemisphere, the Siberian intervention was a harbinger of policies to come. Richard notes that it teaches invaluable lessons about the extreme difficulties inherent in interventions and about the absolute need to secure widespread support on the ground if such campaigns are to achieve success, knowledge that U.S. policymakers tragically ignored in Vietnam and have later struggled to implement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the final months of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson and many US allies decided to intervene in Siberia in order to protect Allied wartime and business interests, among them the Trans-Siberian Railroad, from the turmoil surrounding the Russian Revolution. American troops would remain until April 1920 with some of our allies keeping troops in Siberia even longer. These soldiers eventually played a role in the Russian revolution while protecting the Trans-Siberian Railroad. This book brings their story to life.

"The pages of history recall scarcely any parallel episode at once so romantic in character and so extensive in scale." -- Winston S. Churchill In 1917, two empires that had dominated much of Europe and Asia teetered on the edge of the abyss, exhausted by the ruinous cost in blood and treasure of the First World War. As Imperial Russia and Habsburg-ruled Austria-Hungary began to succumb, a small group of Czech and Slovak combat veterans stranded in Siberia saw an opportunity to realize their long-held dream of independence. While their plan was audacious and complex, and involved moving their 50,000-strong army by land and sea across three-quarters of the earth's expanse, their commitment to fight for the Allies on the Western Front riveted the attention of Allied London, Paris, and Washington. On their journey across Siberia, a brawl erupted at a remote Trans-Siberian rail station that sparked a wholesale rebellion. The marauding Czecho-Slovak Legion seized control of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, and with it Siberia. In the end, this small band of POWs and deserters, whose strength was seen by Leon Trotsky as the chief threat to Soviet rule, helped destroy the Austro-Hungarian Empire and found Czecho-Slovakia. British prime minister David Lloyd George called their adventure "one of the greatest epics of history," and former US president Teddy Roosevelt declared that their accomplishments were "unparalleled, so far as I know, in ancient or modern warfare."

This work explores the reasons for the Allied intervention into Russia at the end of the Great War and examines the military, diplomatic and political chaos that resulted in the failure of the Allies and White Russians to defeat the Bolshevik Revolution.