EARLY in 1918, President Wilson told me that he was being urged to contribute American military forces to combined Allied expeditions to North Russia and Siberia, and asked me to consider what reply he should make to the French and British representations in that behalf. The reasons given him, and by him to me, for these proposals were, with regard to North Russia, that vast accumulations of military stores had been made in the neighbourhood of Archangel which would fall into German hands unless they were protected by the Allies and that there were great bodies of North Russian people loyal to the Allied cause and eager to form themselves about an Allied military nucleus for the purpose of reestablishing an Eastern military front or at least obliging the Germans to retain great bodies of troops in the East. With regard to Siberia one reason was that a large body of Czech soldiers had broken away from the Austrian Armies on the Russian Front and were making their way over-land to Vladivostok with the intention of going by sea from that port to France and reentering the War on the Allied side. These Czechs were said to be inadequately armed and without subsistence, exce such as they could gather on the march, and to be in need of protection from organized bodies of German and Austrian prisoners who, after the November Revolution in Russia, had been released from the restraints of their prison camps and organized, by German officers, into effective military units for the purpose of making Russian resources available to Germany and Austria, and, where possible, harassing Russians favourable to the Allied cause. In addition to this it was urged that Russian sacrifices in the War entitled her people to whatever sympathetic aid the Allies could give in the maintenance of internal order while they were engaged in the establishment of their new institutions. This consideration had already led to the dispatch of the so-called Stevens Commission to Siberia to assist in the rehabilitation and operation of the railroads upon which the life of the country depended.
Some days later, the President and I discussed the matter very fully. I urged the view of my military associates that the War had to be won on the Western Front, that every effort should be made to concentrate there the overwhelming force necessary to early success, and that all diversions of force to other theatres of action merely delayed final success without the possibility of accomplishing any relatively important result elsewhere. The President was impressed with this view to such an extent that he sent for the Chief of Staff and discussed with him both the possibility of reestablishing any effective Eastern Front and the effect of the proposed expeditions upon the strength of the Allied Armies on the Western Front. At a third conference the President told me that he was satisfied with the soundness of the War Department's view but that, for other than military reasons, he felt obliged to cooper-ate in a limited way in both proposed expeditions. The reasons moving the President to this determination were diplomatic and I refrain from discussing them. The circumstances, as represented to him, seemed to me then and seem to me now to have justified the decision, although subsequent events, in both instances, completely vindicated the soundness of the military opinion of the General Staff.
The Siberian Expedition described in America's Siberian Adventure by Major General William S. Graves, who commanded the American Forces there, was the more important of these two undertakings and it presented, almost daily, situations of the greatest delicacy and danger. To some extent, though I must confess not fully, these possibilities were foreseen, and the selection of General Graves to command the American contingent, suggested by General March, Chief of Staff, met with my instant and complete approval. General Graves was Secretary of the General Staff when I became Secretary of War and I was thus brought into constant contact with him. From this con-tact I knew him to be a self-reliant, educated, and highly trained soldier, endowed with common sense and self-effacing loyalty, the two qualities which would be most needed to meet the many difficulties I could foresee. Now that this strange adventure is over, I am more than ever satisfied with the choice of the American Commander. A temperamental, rash, or erratic officer in command of the American force in Siberia might well have created situations demanding impossible military exertions on the part of the Allies, and particularly of the United States, and involved our country in complications of a most unfortunate kind. These possibilities are suggested on every page of the straightforward narrative in this book.
President Wilson personally wrote the so-called Aide Memoire which General Graves sets out on page five of his story, a copy of which I personally delivered to the General, as he says, in the railroad station in Kansas City. As I was thoroughly aware of the limitations imposed by the President upon American participation in the Siberian venture, and of the whole purpose and policy of our Government in joining it, I was unwilling to have General Graves leave the country without a personal interview in which I could impress upon him some of the difficulties he was likely to meet and the firmness with which the President expected him to adhere to the policy outlined in advance. I, therefore, made a trip of inspection to the Leaven-worth Disciplinary Barracks and directed General Graves to meet me in Kansas City, thus saving part of the delay in his preparation which would have arisen if he had come all the way to Washington. Unfortunately, his train was late and our interview was briefer than I had planned, but it was long enough. From that hour until the Siberian Expedition returned to the United States, General Graves carried out the policy of his Government without deviation, under circumstances always perplexing and often irritating. Frequently in Washington I heard from Allied military attaches, and sometimes from the State Department, criticism to the effect that General Graves would not cooperate, but when I asked for a bill of particulars, I invariably found that the General's alleged failure was a refusal on his part to depart from the letter and spirit of his instructions. In June, 1919, I saw President Wilson in Paris and he discussed with me representations made to him from French and British sources to the effect that General Graves was an obstinate, difficult, and uncooperative Commander. When I recalled to the President the policy laid down in the Aide Memoire and gave him the details of similar complaints made to me in Washington, I was able to reassure him of the complete fidelity of General Graves to his policy, in the face of every invitation and inducement on the part of the Allied Commanders to convert the Siberian Expedition into a military intervention in Russia's affairs against which the President had set his face from the first. At the conclusion of our interview, the President smiled and said, " I suppose it is the old story, Baker, men often get the reputation of being stubborn merely because they are everlastingly right." At all events, the President then and later gave his full approval to the conduct of General Graves, and if the Siberian Expedition was in fact unjustified and if it really failed to accomplish substantially helpful results, this much is true of it - it was justified by conditions as they appeared to be at the time, it refrained from militaristic adventures of its own, it restrained such adventures on the part of others, and it created a situation which made necessary the withdrawal of all Allied forces from Siberian soil when it was withdrawn, thus making impossible territorial conquests and acquisitions on Russian soil by other nations whose interests in the Far East might easily have induced them to take over for pacification, and ultimately for permanent colonial administration, vast areas of Russia's Far East.
Detached from its world implications, the Siberian adventure seems mystifying. Indeed, even General Graves himself has " never been able to come to any satisfying conclusions as to why the United States ever engaged in such intervention." But if one looks at the world situation, the explanation is adequate if not simple. The world was at war. The major focus of the terrific military impact was on the Western Front, from the English Channel to the Swiss Frontier, but the shock of the conflict reached throughout the world, and in outlying places, everywhere, strange collateral ad-ventures were had. All of these " side shows " were, in one way or another, peripheral spasms from the pro-found disturbance at the centre of the world's nervous system. Some of them were deliberately planned to distract enemy concentrations of force or to interru the flow of enemy supplies. Some of them were designed to sustain Allied morale, during the stagnation of the long-drawn-out stalemate on the Western Front, with the thrill of romance, as when Allenby caured Jerusalem and swe the infidel from the holy places of Palestine. Some of them were mere surgings of re-strained feeling, in semi-civilized populations, due to the withdrawal of customary restraints by remote governments which were centring their efforts on the battle in Europe and had neither time nor strength to police far-away places. The successive revolutions in Russia had withdrawn effective authority from Moscow over the Far East and had given free rein to the ambitions of predatory Cossack chieftains like Semeonoff and Kalmikoff. The fringes of Siberia had long been the scene of commercial and military adventure and conflict by the Germans, English, French, and Japanese. Siberia itself was inhabited in part by semi-civilized natives and in part by political exiles and there were now added great bodies of liberated prisoners of war. The changing governments at Moscow had changing attitudes toward the World War, and toward Russia's part in it, and these conflicting opinions, but dimly understood in remote Siberia, confused there the already faint sense of Russia's national purpose. On, the Western Front the nations engaged were dominated by a single objective, but in places like Siberia both the comprehension and concentration of European opinion was absent. Siberia was like Sergeant Grischa, who had no conception of what it was all about but knew that the once orderly world was in a state of complete and baffling disorder.
The intervention of an Allied military force, under such conditions as have been described, was not unnaturally beset by the difficulties which belong to such situations. It was very easy for the nations interested to find, from day to day, new circumstances inviting if not requiring changes in their policy. Most of the nations having armed forces in Siberia were too much occupied at home to pay very much attention to what went on around Lake Baikal. As a consequence, their military commanders were left largely free to deter-mine questions of political policy and if General Oi or General Knox conceived the notion that, by taking ad-vantage of some new development, they could make a bold stroke in behalf of the Allied cause, and, incidentally, further the commercial and territorial aspirations which their governments ought, in their opinion, to entertain, it is not to be wondered at. Indeed, there is evidence in General Graves' book that even in the United States similar ideas every now and then took root in official minds. I cannot even guess at the ex-planation of the apparent conflict between the War Department and the State Department of the United States with regard to the Siberian venture, nor can I understand why the State Department undertook to convey its ideas on Siberian policy, as it seems occasionally to have done, directly to General Graves. Perhaps the State Department was more impressed than I was with some of the Allied views as to the desirability of cooperation beyond the scope of the Aide Memoire. Possibly some of these comments were mere reflections of Allied criticism, forwarded for what they were worth, but without being first presented to the Secretary of State or considered by him as affecting the maturely formulated policy of the United States in the adventure. No doubt some day all this will be care-fully studied and research scholarship will find documents and papers, reports of conversations and invitations to new policies, based upon supposed new facts, but when all has been disclosed that can be, Siberia will remain Sergeant Grischa. The Siberian situation will always illustrate the eccentricities of a remote and irrational emanation from the central madness of a war-ring world.
I cannot close this foreword, however, without ex-pressing, so far as I properly may, the gratitude of our common country to those soldiers who uncomplainingly and bravely bore, in that remote and mystifying place, their part of their country's burden. Even the soldiers of a Democracy cannot always understand the reasons back of strategic situations. Political and military reasons are worked out in cabinets and general staffs and. soldiers obey orders. Thus those on the White and Yellow Seas did their part equally with those on the Marne and the Meuse. And if it should turn out that there is wanting some detail of justification, from the nation's point of view, for the Siberian adventure, nevertheless, those who took part in it can have the satisfaction of knowing that the American force in Siberia bore itself humanely and bravely under the orders of a Commander who lived up to the high purpose which led their country to attem to establish a stabilizing and helpful influence in remote wastes inhabited by a confused and pityful but friendly people. They can too, I think, have the reassurance that if there was a defect of affirmative achievement, history will find benefits from the negative results of American participation in Siberia.; things which might have happened, had there been no American soldiers in the Allied force, but which did not happen because they were there; would have complicated the whole Russian problem and affected seriously the future peace of the world.
NEWTON D. BAKER