Other developments in 1918
- Also called:
- First World War or Great War
- Date:
- July 28, 1914 - November 11, 1918
- Participants:
- Bulgaria
- France
- Germany
- Italy
- Japan
- Ottoman Empire
- Portugal
- Russia
- United Kingdom
- United States
News •
Czechs, Yugoslavs, and Poles
Something must now be said about the growth of the national movements, which, under the eventual protection of the Allies, were to result in the foundation of new states or the resurrection of long-defunct ones at the end of the war. There were three such movements: that of the Czechs, with the more backward Slovaks in tow; that of the South Slavs, or Yugoslavs (Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes); and that of the Poles. The Czech country, namely Bohemia and Moravia, belonged in 1914 to the Austrian half of the Habsburg monarchy, the Slovak to the Hungarian half. The Yugoslavs had already been represented in 1914 by two independent kingdoms, Serbia and Montenegro, but they were also predominantly numerous in territories still under Habsburg rule: Serbs in Bosnia and Hercegovina (an Austro-Hungarian condominium) and in Dalmatia (an Austrian possession); Croats in Croatia (Hungarian), in Istria (Austrian), and in Dalmatia; Slovenes in Istria and in Illyria (Austrian likewise). Poland was divided into three parts: Germany had the north and the west as provinces of the Kingdom of Prussia; Austria had Galicia (including an ethnically Ukrainian extension to the east); Russia had the rest.
The Czechs had long been restless under the Austrian regime, and one of their leading intellectual spokesmen, Tomáš Masaryk (in fact a Slovak), had already envisaged the carving of Czechoslovak and Yugoslav states out of Austria-Hungary in December 1914. In 1916 he and a fellow émigré, Edvard Beneš, based respectively in London and in Paris, organized a Czechoslovak National Council. The western Allies committed themselves to the Czechoslovak idea from 1917 onward, when Russia’s imminent defection from the war made them ready to exploit any means at hand for the disabling of Austria-Hungary; and Wilson’s sympathy was implicit in his successive peace pronouncements of 1918.
For the South Slavs of Austria-Hungary the Yugoslav Committee, with representatives in Paris and in London, was founded in April 1915. On July 20, 1917, this committee and the Serbian government in exile made the joint Corfu Declaration forecasting a South Slav state to comprise Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.
The Polish nationalist leaders in the first years of the war were uncertain whether to rely on the Central Powers or on the Allies for a restoration of Poland’s independence. So long as the western Allies hesitated to encourage Polish nationalism for fear of offending imperial Russia, the Central Powers seemed to be the most likely sponsors; and Austria at least allowed Józef Piłsudski, from 1914, to organize his volunteer Polish legions to serve with Austrian forces against the Russians. Austria’s benevolence, however, was not reflected by Germany; and when the Two Emperors’ Manifesto of November 5, 1916, provided for the constitution of an independent Polish kingdom, it was clear that this kingdom would consist only of Polish territory conquered from Russia, not of any German or Austrian territory. When, after the March Revolution of 1917, the Russian provisional government had recognized Poland’s right to independence, Roman Dmowski’s Polish National Committee, which from 1914 had been functioning in a limited way under Russian protection, could at last count seriously on the sympathy of the western Allies. While Piłsudski declined to raise a Polish army to fight on against the new Russia, a Polish army was formed in France, as well as two army corps in Belorussia and in Ukraine, to fight against the Central Powers. The Bolshevik Revolution and Wilson’s Fourteen Points together consummated the alignment of the Poles on the side of the western powers.
Eastern Europe and the Russian periphery, March–November 1918
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 3, 1918) gave Germany a free hand to do what it liked with Russia’s former possessions in eastern Europe. While they pursued their plan of 1916 for a kingdom of Poland, the Germans took new measures for the other countries. Lithuania, recognized as independent, was to be a kingdom under some German prince. Latvia and Estonia were to be merged into a grand duchy of the Baltikum under the hereditary rule of Prussia. An expeditionary force of 12,000 men, under General Graf Rüdiger von der Goltz, was sent to Finland to uphold the Finnish general C.G.E. Mannerheim’s nationalist forces against the Red Guards, whom the Bolsheviks, despite their recognition of Finland’s independence, were now promoting there. And finally, the Ukrainian nationalist government, which had already been challenged by a Communist one before its separate peace with the Central Powers (Brest-Litovsk, February 9), was promptly displaced by a new regime after the advance of German and Austro-Hungarian troops into its territory.
The Romanian armistice of December 1917 was converted into the Treaty of Bucharest on May 7, 1918. Under this treaty’s terms, southern Dobruja was ceded to Bulgaria; northern Dobruja was put under the joint administration of the Central Powers; and the latter obtained virtual control of Romania’s oil fields and communications. Romania, on the other hand, had some consolation from Bessarabia, whose nationalists, after receiving Romanian assistance against the Bolsheviks, had voted in March 1918 for their country’s conditional union with Romania.
Even Transcaucasia began to slide into the German camp. The short-lived federal republic was dissolved by its three members’ individual declarations of independence—Georgia’s on May 26, Armenia’s and Azerbaijan’s on May 28. Treaties of friendship were promptly signed between Georgia and Germany and between Armenia and Turkey, and Turkish troops advanced into Azerbaijan, where they occupied Baku on September 15. The western Allies, meanwhile, were hoping that some new semblance of an Eastern Front could be conjured up if they supported the various and growing forces in Russia that were opposed to the peacemaking Bolsheviks. Since the Black Sea and the Baltic were closed to them, the Allies could land troops only on Russia’s Arctic and Pacific shores. Thus, the Allied “intervention” in Russia on the side of the anti-Bolshevik (“White”) forces, long to be execrated by Soviet historians, began with an Anglo-French landing at Murmansk, in the far north, on March 9, 1918. The subsequent reinforcement of Murmansk made possible the occupation of the Murmansk railway as far south as Soroka (now Belomorsk); and a further landing at Arkhangelsk in the summer raised the total Allied strength in northern Russia to some 48,000 (including 20,000 Russian “Whites”). By this time, moreover, there were some 85,000 interventionist troops in Siberia, where a strong Japanese landing at Vladivostok in April had been followed by British, French, Italian, and U.S. contingents. A “White” provisional government of Russia was set up at Omsk, with Admiral A.V. Kolchak as its dominant personality. The “White” resistance in the south of European Russia, which had been growing since November 1917, was put under the supreme command of General A.I. Denikin in April 1918.
The Balkan front, 1918
At Salonika the Allies’ politically ambitious but militarily ineffective commander in chief, General Sarrail, was replaced at the end of 1917 by General Guillaumat, who was in turn succeeded in July 1918 by General L.-F.-F. Franchet d’Esperey, who launched a major offensive in September with six Serbian and two French divisions against a seven-mile front held by only one Bulgarian division.
The initial assault, preceded by heavy bombardment at night, began in the morning of September 15, 1918, and a five-mile penetration was achieved by nightfall on September 16. The next day the Serbs advanced 20 miles forward, while French and Greek forces on their flanks widened the breach to 25 miles. A British attack, launched on September 18 on the front between the Vardar and Lake Doiran, prevented the Bulgars from transferring troops westward against the right flank of the penetration; and by September 19 the Serbian cavalry had reached Kavadarci, at the apex of the Crna–Vardar triangle. Two days later the whole Bulgarian front west of the Vardar had collapsed.
While Italian forces in the extreme west advanced on Prilep, the elated Serbs, with the French beside them, pressed on up the Vardar Valley. The British in the east now made such headway as to take Strumica, across the old Bulgarian frontier, on September 26. The Bulgars then sued for an armistice; and on September 29, when a bold French cavalry thrust up the Vardar from Veles (Titov Veles) took Skopje, key to the whole system of communications for the Balkan front, Bulgarian delegates signed the Armistice of Salonika, accepting the Allies’ terms unreservedly.
The Turkish fronts, 1918
The British–Turkish front in Palestine in the summer of 1918 ran from the Jordan River westward north of Jericho and Lydda to the Mediterranean just north of Jaffa. North of this front there were three Turkish “armies” (in fact, barely stronger than divisions): one to the east of the Jordan, two to the west. These armies depended for their supplies on the Hejaz Railway, the main line of which ran from Damascus southward, east of the Jordan, and which was joined at Déraa (Darʿā) by a branch line serving Palestine.
Liman von Sanders, Falkenhayn’s successor as commander of the Turkish forces in Syria–Palestine, was convinced that the British would make their main effort east of the Jordan. Allenby, however, was really interested in taking a straight northerly direction, reckoning that the Palestine branch rail line at ʿAfula and Beisān, some 60 miles behind the Turkish front, could be reached by a strategic “bound” of his cavalry and that their fall would isolate the two Turkish armies in the west.
Having by ruse and diversion induced the Turks to reduce their strength in the west, Allenby struck there on September 19, 1918, with a numerical superiority of 10 to one. In this Battle of Megiddo, a British infantry attack swept the astonished defenders aside and opened the way for the cavalry, which rode 30 miles north up the coastal corridor before swinging inland to cut the Turks’ northward lines of retreat. ʿAfula, Beisān, and even Nazareth, farther north, were in British hands the next day.
When the Turks east of the Jordan River began to retreat on September 22, the Arabs had already severed the railway line and were lying in wait for them; and a British cavalry division from Beisān was also about to push eastward to intercept their withdrawal. Simultaneously, two more British divisions and another force of Arabs were racing on toward Damascus, which fell on October 1. The campaign ended with the capture of Aleppo and the junction of the Baghdad Railway. In 38 days Allenby’s forces had advanced 350 miles and taken 75,000 prisoners at a cost of less than 5,000 casualties.
In Mesopotamia, meanwhile, the British had taken Kifrī, north of the Diyālā left-bank tributary of the Tigris, in January 1918, and Khān al-Baghdāẖī, up the Euphrates, in March. Pressing northward from Kifrī, they took Kirkūk in May but soon evacuated it.
The British centre in Mesopotamia, advancing up the Tigris in October, was about to capture Mosul when the hostilities were suspended. The Ottoman government, seeing eastern Turkey defenseless and fearing an Allied advance against Istanbul from the west now that Bulgaria had collapsed, decided to capitulate. On October 30 the Armistice of Mudros was signed, on a British cruiser off Lemnos. The Turks, by its terms, were to open the Straits to the Allies; demobilize their forces; allow the Allies to occupy any strategic point that they might require and to use all Turkey’s ports and railways; and order the surrender of their remaining garrisons in Arabia, Syria, and Mesopotamia. The centuries-old Ottoman Empire had come to an end.
