Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 1917-1921
Ferrell, Robert H.
Hand-to-hand combat, rocket and grenade blasts, and clattering automatic weapons filled the bamboo thickets and shrub brush.... All night long the two [American] companies were raked by NVA heavy...
...ORDERS SHIPPED THROUGHOUT THE U.S...
...Ammunition was airdropped into a large bomb crater near the position's center by helicopters, which were guided in by flashlight...
...In the central sector, the 35th Division began the attack on September 26, suffered over 7,000 casualties in five days, and was relieved by the 1st Division, which incurred equal losses in ten days...
...Throughout his presidency, Wilson's foreign policy typically suffered from the defects of the classic American liberal approach to diplomacystubborn self-righteousness and a narrow moralism...
...He put himself on record in favor of the League, but with reservations designed to protect U.S...
...First obsessed with the peace negotiations, then felled by a stroke that rendered him unfit to discharge the duties of the presidency, he ignored the difficult problems of reconversion to a peacetime economy, cashiered independent in most books on Soviet affairs, a point invariably arrives when the author unveils his Plan...
...As such, his work is one of the earliest histories of the Gulag, wherein the Archipelago consisted of an entire nation to be punished for its opposition to totalitarianism...
...He was indeed partisan, vindictive, and altogether unattractive...
...Unless the West is "able to learn from the Russian people that its true strength lies in its spiritual resources" (and the prospects of this happening, Crozier and his colleagues make clear, are none too bright), we are pretty well done for...
...Mihiel salient and advanced to within twenty miles of the crucial but ill-defended fortress city of Metz...
...One is tempted to say that this was the most terrible aspect of the war, yet in truth it was not...
...dollars...
...The problem lay not with his Fourteen Points as a whole, but with the fourteenth, the League of Nations...
...Human Life in Russia has long been unobtainable...
...as soon as feasible, however, he withdrew them...
...The authors surely are correct, too, in taking issue with much that has passed for Western statesmanship during the past forty years...
...At dawn the NVA withdrew...
...It would lead to war, but the United States appeared to be in no position to make a decisive contribution to the nearly exhausted Allies...
...It was a dreary end to what had been the nation's greatest endeavor...
...It is clear, however, that the issue had passed beyond the realm of choice...
...Professor Ferrell aptly describes it as "a regime that had made peace with the Germans to the immense peril of the Allies, pronounced a curse on capitalism everywhere, and murdered tens of thousands of dissidents among its citizens...
...we make it available with the hope that the lesson of the Ukrainian Famine will not be lost on our times...
...In 1965, for instance, an infantry battalion was ambushed by the Viet Cong near Saigon...
...Even young and inexperienced soldiers proved to be tough...
...The authors are also clear-headed about the nature of the Cold War...
...Its organizer in large measure was Major General Peyton C. March, one of a handful of truly able, decisive general officers in the U.S...
...Instead, the push came to a grinding halt on the orders of Allied commander-in-chief General Ferdinand Foch...
...In common with most writings on the subject, the book's tone is generally apologetic over the intervention...
...In This War Called Peace, Brian Crozier, Drew Middleton, and Jeremy Murray-Brown depart from this bynow traditional approach to their subject...
...For nearly two generations, Woodrow Wilson was the Christ figure of twentieth-century American liberalism, the prophet renounced in his own land, agonizingly crucified, and ultimately embraced by a chastened nation...
...It was once the conventional wisdom that Lodge and the Republicans made World War II inevitable by refusing to follow Wilson's lead into a League of Nations...
...11 Soviet Union has been waging a relentless, pitiless war against the West, and none of the West's leaders, not even so great a figure as Winston Churchill, has proved equal to this epic struggle...
...Publishers 2969 West 25th Street - Cleveland, OH 44113 Phone: 216-241-7640 - - Telex: 298256 ZUBAL UR Please send copy/copies of Human Life in Russia to: NAME: STREET ADDRESS: CITY/STATE/ZIP: My check in the amount of ($13.95 per copy) plus $1.85 postage per copy is enclosed...
...The Meuse-Argonne was far from the worst campaign of World War I, but it sufficiently illustrated the lunacy of the tactics used throughout the war...
...SAME DAY PAYMENT IS RECEIVED ORDERS TO OTHER COUNTRIES SENT BY POST 45 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 tory over demoralized Germans in the St...
...The tragedy of Wilson's last two years in office was almost total...
...It seems he feared delay of the long-planned Meuse-Argonne offensive...
...at least a year and a half to raise a force capable of having any impact on the European war-assuming its troops survived the submarine gauntlet...
...BY U.P.S...
...freedom of action...
...All night long the two [American] companies were raked by NVA heavy weapons...
...The book, 330 pages in a cloth binding and striking jacket, is well illustrated and documented...
...Human beings are such emotional creatures...
...His nemesis, Henry Cabot Lodge, served as a made-toorder Judas...
...Woodrow Wilson's power to affect events was limited...
...Though there is something ritualistic about this exercise, it is comforting nonetheless...
...As a consequence, in 1941, the Western democracies would be compelled to buy their survival by embracing the Bolshevik power they had failed to eradicate in 1919...
...Robert Ferrell's latest book, a fine study of a period that changed the world, fills that requirement very well...
...If Pershing recognized that machine guns often proved decisive, he believed his troops could rush them with acceptable loss of life...
...If only we rid ourselves of our illusions and grasp the essential truths, if only we do this or refrain from doing that, war can be averted and a just and lasting peace obtained...
...few helicopters to fly them in," writes Stanton, a former Army captain who was wounded in Laos during the war...
...The one glaring failure of his first term had been his intervention in the Mexican revolution...
...Included are such essays as "The History of Freedom in Antiquity, "The History of Freedom in Christianity, and "The Puritan Revolution'.' 558 + xxx pages...
...with the onset of detente in the late sixties?-remains controversial...
...On the other hand, their characterization of Churchill as a "strangely disturbing personality" who became an "accomplice in Stalin's crimes," is most unfair, though it cannot be gainsaid THIS WAR CALLED PEACE Brian Crozier, Drew Middleton, Jeremy Murray-Brown Universe Books/$17.95 Joseph Shattan 47 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985...
...His reward was typical of military organizers whose post of duty is far from the front lines...
...Ammende, a professional humanitarian whose career is markedly similar to that of Raoul Wallenberg a decade later, gathered eyewitness testimony on the Famine as a means of exposing the awful truth of the genocide and terrorism then occurring in Ukraine...
...It is remarkable that the President waited until several American merchant ships had been sent under before he requested a declaration of war, and nearly incomprehensible that fifty congressmen and six senators voted against it...
...The collapse of the Ot LibertyThss LibertyClassws SELECTED WRITINGS OF LORD ACTON VOLUME I ESSAYS IN THE HISTORY OF LIBERTY By John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton Edited by J. Rufus Fears Lord Acton was among the most significant figures in the intellectual life of Victorian England...
...Soldiers grappled in hand-to-hand combat, swinging axes and entrenching tools as ammunition ran out...
...Two themes stand out in his account: The awesome power of an aroused democracy and the tragic disintegration of a great, if flawed, President...
...Forward, index...
...Ferrell gives attention to another issue that hung over the Allied leaders at Versailles, the Bolshevik revolution...
...In September 1918, American and French forces won an unexpectedly easy vic WOODROW WILSON AND WORLD WAR I, 1917-1921 Robert H. Ferrell/Harper & Row/$19.95 Alonzo L. Hamby nnouncing .. . A Major Work on Genocide & Terrorism in Ukraine: HUU A J LIFE IN RUSSIA Ewald Ammende's Human Life in Russia is the long unavailable history of the "Hidden Holocaust" and the cover-up which prevented news of the starvation of nearly 7,000,000 Ukrainians from being reported in the West during 1931-1934...
...P104 Indianapolis, IN 46250 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 toman Empire necessarily entailed either chaos or colonialism in the Middle East...
...Alas, this reviewer is not one of those people...
...The long-range alternative, given that such a course would Alonzo L. Hamby is professor of history at Ohio University and author, most recently, of Liberalism and Its Challengers...
...Doubtless there are some people in the West who find this viewpoint both congenial and persuasive, especially when it is propounded by so powerful an advocate as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whom Crozier and his co-authors often cite...
...it belongs in every collection of books on the U.S.S.R...
...Wilson's postwar successors showed no greater diplomatic vision...
...Too bad their superiors in Washington weren't a little bold and reckless, too...
...At the end of the log were two more NVA, one of them an officer who still clutched a captured M16 rifle taken from one of the Americans...
...He placed his trust in individual marksmanship...
...The German government had served notice that it would wage indiscriminate submarine warfare against any American shipping bound for Great Britain or France...
...Nonetheless, the author leaves one with questions about Pershing's grasp of the sort of war he was fighting: "The AEF was not well prepared for gas war...
...Germany estimated that it would take the U.S...
...CLIP AND MAIL TO: John T. Zubal, Inc...
...Recalled from France in early 1918 to become Army Chief of Staff, March relentlessly purged incompetents from the military bureaucracy, gave it a new sense of purpose, and quite possibly provided the margin of victory...
...To order, or for a copy of our catalogue, write: LibertyPress/LibertyClassics 7440 North Shadeland, Dept...
...Americans, many of them businessmen in peacetime, rebuilt and reorganized French port facilities and railroads...
...But why...
...He did everything he could to appease the Russian dictator `Uncle Joeand all that...
...A lasting reminder of the carnage is the American cemetery at Romagne with its 16,000 graves, more than half again the number at Omaha Beach...
...Meeting the enemy on ground of his choosing, the offensive was a classic cannon-fodder operation, chewing up the infantry regiments of one division after another, trading lives for territory at a ghastly cost...
...The message in all this is that the American military can still fight...
...The nation heaped honors, including the unprecedented rank of General of the Armies, on the Commander of the American Expeditionary Force, John J. Pershing...
...Professor Ferrell recites what has become the routine critique of Wilson...
...There remained confusion and inefficiency aplenty, but the whole of the accomplishment was greater than the sum of its parts...
...To the Army's surprise, these young soldiers-who often possessed no college background or career aspirations, but only the desire to fly-proved to be just the answer," Stanton says...
...Such fierce fighting was commonplace in Vietnam...
...His one idea was to play up to Stalin, and oil up to him as much as he possibly could...
...And though his handling of the Paris negotiations was by contrast masterful, its outcome was far worse than anything that had yet happened south of the border...
...Consider, to begin with, the book's grim characterization of Soviet Communism as "a system of power which of necessity has to spread itself or die...
...His French and British counterparts were hardly as flexible...
...NOTE: Ohio residents must add .91 sales tax per copy...
...Crozier and his co-authors, however, bluntly point out that an "undeclared state of hostilities, largely though not entirely falling short of military confrontation between the Soviet Union and the Western powers," is a permanent feature of the Soviet system...
...Those who have witnessed the sad history of the United Nations must admit that he was also right...
...Ever since Yalta, they aver, the Joseph Shattan, a frequent contributor, is a writer living in Washington, D.C minded advisers, isolated himself from public opinion, persisted in stubborn insistence upon his League of Nations rather than Lodge's, received neither, and clung to unrealistic hopes of a third-term nomination...
...0 surely lead to the defeat of the Allies, would be to accept the loss of the protective shield that the British navy long had provided and to live in a world dominated by an expansionist military power...
...Even more terrible was the way the Allies, aided and abetted by the President of the United States, promptly lost the peace...
...there were too Both the intelligent reading public and the harried graduate student in American history have long needed a readable, scholarly account of Woodrow Wilson's last four years as President...
...There was, as the author demonstrates, folly aplenty in the making of the peace, much of it beyond the control of statesmen...
...If the nations and leaders of Europe deserved most of the blame, Wilson and America had done their part to bring about a world in which the probability of a general war within a generation was actually greater than it had been in 1914...
...His enormous erudition won him the admiration of Gladstone and led to his election to the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Cambridge...
...The immediate alternative to war was to hand over control of American commerce to the Kaiser's government...
...Full of zeal, and bold to the point of recklessness, young and unmarried, they became the best helicopter pilots in the business...
...It may well be that the West was too exhausted by the war to deal with the Bolsheviks, but it is puzzling that so many historians feel it was illegitimate to try...
...Professor Ferrell moves in that direction, albeit haltingly...
...But while I am out of sympathy with much of the book's tone, many of the political arguments developed in This War Called Peace seem tome quite sound...
...But I would argue that his greatest mistakes were substantive products of his worldview...
...As Lord Gladwyn, a key member of the British delegation to Yalta, recently put it, "I had a most deplorable impression of Roosevelt...
...All orders from outside the United States must be prepaid in U.S...
...wanting to bring the blessings of democracy to a downtrodden people, he managed the effort so maladroitly that it angered all sides and nearly led to a full-scale war that would have been disastrous .-both countries...
...The peoples of the victorious nations were obsessed with the notion of punishing Germany rather than rehabilitating it, whatever the ultimate political and economic cost to the entire continent...
...Both sides tried to recover their wounded comrades from the fringes of the battle line, and more dead were added in the thin space separating the two forces...
...What happened instead was that the U.S...
...Hardcover $15.00, 0-86597-046-7 Softcover $ 7.50, 0-86597-047-5 Prepayment is required on all orders not for resale...
...By then the Allies would have been forced to surrender...
...The shift was a nightmare of jammed traffic, forced night marches, and horses, dead from exhaustion, pulled to the side of dusty roads...
...Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur and Colonel George C. Marshall both urged the Allied command to capitalize on the German rout, and Pershing apparently concurred...
...To those who follow the writings of the contemporary Russian nationalist ("Russophile") opposition, much of this indictment will sound familiar...
...We pay book rate postage on prepaid orders...
...Acton's famous aphorism "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely" may be juxtaposed with another Acton line "the development of liberty is the soul of history...'.' Acton wrote many essays, reviews and letters which reflect his great learning and his deep concern with liberty as the central concept for the understanding of history...
...The President acquiesced in an Allied request for American troops as part of a larger antirevolutionary force...
...Historians are wont to observe that it was wise to deny Theodore Roosevelt a command in France, for he would have sent men to their deaths in withering machine gun and artillery fire...
...Its army was even smaller than Portugal's and ridden with deadwood at the top...
...Although the authors seem a bit uncertain about why this should be so-at one point they say that "ideology commands expansionism abroad," but elsewhere they discount ideology and emphasize "power for power's sake alone" as the motivating force behind Soviet policy-at least they are fully alert to the built-in imperialistic drive of the Soviet system...
...Pershing himself receives generally deserved accolades from Professor Ferrell for his management of the American army in France, especially his refusal to disperse it among units of the French army...
...and Ukraine...
...LibertyClassics is publishing a three volume series of Selected Writings of Lord Acton under the editorship of Professor J. Rufus Fears...
...The Cold War has never ended because the Soviet ruling elite, the all-powerful Nomenklatura, knows no other way to conduct foreign policy except by waging cold war...
...One did not have to wait for Stalin's example to discern in 1919 that here was a new force in world politics determined to destroy those humane values of Western civilization that Wilson loved dearly...
...It possessed almost no understanding of tanks, and had few...
...Most historians of this conflict take the view that it was an extremely dangerous episode which, happily, is behind us, though just how and when it endedwith Stalin's death in 1953...
...Please allow 4 to 6 weeks for delivery...
...The author devotes only passing attention to the circumstances that impelled the United States to declare war on Germany and its allies in April 1917...
...There he became the organizer and first editor of the Cambridge Modern History...
...It argues that his errors were primarily tactical-that he should have appointed prominent Republicans to the peace commission, stayed in the United States, delegated authority better than he did, and compromised on key points...
...with Khrushchev's announcement of "peaceful co-existence" in the midfifties...
...To the extent that any lessons were learned from the experience of World War I, Professor Ferrell concludes, they were learned during the Great Depression and World War II...
...March went into retirement and died barely remembered in 1956...
...While they do not quite come out and say that we are doomed, the frequent comparisons they draw between the modern West and the late Roman Empire hardly suggest a spirit of optimism...
...nevertheless, he used what power he had poorly...
...It is to the everlasting credit of the United States that it managed through herculean effort to provide the margin of victory in World War I; we did so, however, not by providing new ideas or weapons but simply by transporting across the Atlantic a fresh supply of bodies, inexperienced and eager to fight, at a time when the other combatants had exhausted their reserves and their morale...
...Army at the beginning of the war...
...Then came the 42nd Division, which lost 4,000 men in five days while taking the Romagne heights, and finally the 2nd Division, which pushed steadily ahead for the final three weeks of the war...
...No one really could have prevented the disintegration of the Hapsburg empire and the consequent Balkanization of much of central Europe...
...Reinforcements were impossible...
...In the end, wornout Americans faced elite German troops entrenched in a nearly impregnable series of defense lines aptly named for Wagnerian witches...
...No doubt...
...Today's world requires a re-evaluation...
...Somehow he believed that if all nations adhered to a world organization structured democratically and empowered to apply sanctions, including armed force, against aggressors, the result would be a lasting peace...
...When the need for helicopter pilots grew desperate, the Army turned to troops still in the late stages of their initial training...
...The first volume contains material related to three of Acton's leading interests: the history of liberty, the particular contribution made by England and America to the course of liberty, and the effect on liberty of contemporary European political developments...
...Leaderless, the country careened through a boom-andbust economic cycle, a hysterical Red Scare, rejection of the Treaty of Versailles, and an electoral debacle for the Democratic party in 1920...
...Their characterization of FDR, for example, as Stalin's "appeaser-in-chief" will seem unduly harsh only to those who are unfamiliar with his behavior at the Yalta Conference...
...put two million men under arms, transported them to France with insignificant losses, and began to make a difference as early as mid-1918...
...A supply force headed by Charles Dawes accomplished miracles...
...No flares were fired for fear of silhouetting positions...
...But he would have only been following the tactics of Foch, Haig, and, ultimately, Pershing...
...Foch and his generals also pleaded logistical difficulties, but it is hard to see how the logistics of the movement toward Metz could have been worse than what followed: a weekand-a-half movement of most of the AEF from a position twenty miles southeast of Verdun to one nearly twenty miles to the west of the city...
...With a blind faith in the universal goodness of the common man and in the principle of majority rule, Wilson made full adherence to the League the keystone of his peace plans...
...At the time, Germany's announcement seemed a splendid example of Teutonic rationalism...
...But at least Pershing understood that offensive action was necessary for victory...
...In particular, the belief that suffering has purified the Russian nation, making it spiritually superior to the decadent West, is a central tenet of the Russophile school of thought...
...Lodge, by contrast, argued from a perspective of realism and self-interest appropriate to the world of power politics, if not to the utopia that Wilson hoped to create...
...The fighting had been so intense that one log was found in the morning with six dead paratroopers on one side and four dead NVA soldiers sprawled out on -the other side...
...Moreover, Western civilization itself is in grave disarray: Its people have been corrupted by materialism, its intellectuals are arrogant and deluded, and a basically irresponsible media calls the shots...
...Tell us that war is inevitable and that we are likely to lose, and we are apt to become quite depressed...
Vol. 18 • December 1985 • No. 12
