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January 2011
In the summer of 1918, with Russia removed from World War I as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution, the United States sent troops into Russia at two points. It did so only after the greatest soul-searching on the part of President Wilson, who had said that “the treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations … will be the acid test of their good will …” Two factors influenced the decision. In the Far East, Japan had made a move to occupy Siberia, apparently threatening America’s “open door” policy for China. In North Russia, English and French leaders had hopes of reviving the eastern front against Germany. In addition, large stores of Allied war supplies had been left at the port of Archangel. The expedition to North Russia resulted in fierce combat between American and Soviet soldiers and throws significant light on the forty years of difficult relations between the United States and the Soviet Union that were to follow.
One of the things that made the first part of this century so bewildering and complicated for those Americans who had to live through it was the fact that the nation had just concluded a war with Spain: one of the most significant and consequential things that the country ever did, for all that the struggle itself was only of pint size, in a military sense, and was loftily dubbed “a splendid little war” by the complacent John Hay. Neither Roosevelt himself nor the era to which he gave his name can quite be understood without reference to the Spanish-American War and what came out of it, and a very good companion volume to Professor Mowry’s book is Frank Freidel’s The Splendid Little War , which follows the course of that war with sprightly text and a huge number of pictures.
That the United States Army came to the war with Spain poorly prepared for that conflict was only natural, because its background and tradition were unique. For the better part of a century it had had a special job to do, and it had done it very well. The nation had not needed an integrated force constantly ready for a fight with a regular European power, and so in 1898 it did not have one. What it did have was an army adapted to the special needs of the innocent age which ended with the nineteenth century.
An understanding of the special circumstances which had shaped the Army can be gained from a meaty little book called Army Life on the Western Frontier , put together by Francis Paul Prucha. This book is largely made up of extracts from the reports of Colonel George Croghan, an Army inspector general from 1826 to 1845, who spent those years touring the western military posts and telling the War Department how its frontier service was getting along.