You want your former ally to come back into the war, but their new government wants none
of it. Well, you could attack them with your armies and try to force them to join you,
or maybe you could bribe their government’s guards to murder their leaders and then install
the government of your choice.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week the Canadians, the British, the French, and the Americans all made headway
on the Western Front, as the Germans effected a general but limited retreat, finally acknowledging
that their positions were untenable. Sir Douglas Haig was making new plans for a big offensive
there, over in Baku the Ottomans were beating the British by force of numbers, and the Allies
were by now in both Murmansk and Siberia.
This definitely worried Russia’s Bolshevik leaders.
Back in July, Lenin told an audience that Soviet Russia had reached its direst period.
This was maybe true, since after the events so far this year, Russia was now only about
the size of 16th century Muscovy and the civil war was growing and growing. He had reason
to worry, since on the 31st, the Allies took Bolshevik position 75 mi. south of Archangel
on the Volgoda railway, and also this week the Japanese captured Khabarovsk, north of
Vladivostok. It was an important regional base.
On the morning of September 3rd, Pravda and Isvestia ran sensational front-page stories
announcing that the police had discovered and broken a huge Anglo-French conspiracy
designed to overthrow Soviet leadership and install a new government that would bring
Russia back into the war. The papers alleged that the plot- known afterward as the Lockhart
Plot- was based in Moscow under the direction of Robert Bruce Lockhart, Chief of the British
Diplomatic Mission to Moscow, and French Consul-General Fernand Grenard. There was also a certain
Sidney Reilly, the Ace of Spies who we did a whole special episode about, who had spent
over a million roubles to suborn the Red Army troops that guarded the Kremlin.
Over the rest of the week, the papers added details: it was specifically the Latvian Rifles
who were to be “bought”, and the plan was to arrest the entire Council of People’s
Commissars, shoot Lenin and Trotsky, and install a military dictatorship, but the Latvian Rifles
turned out to be un-bribable. Okay, that’s one version of the story. However, in “Spies
and Commissars”, Robert Service says the plot was anything but “alleged”, and that
French newspaper Le Figaro correspondent Rene Marchand - who wrote to French president Raymond
Poincaré about the plot, a letter the Russian press also eventually published - also went
to the communist authorities and told them of the plot. The Cheka, the secret police,
already knew, though. And after Lenin was shot and badly wounded August 30th, and the
Chief of the Petrograd Cheka was assassinated the 31st, hundreds of Allied officials and
residents were taken into custody. The British Naval Attaché in Petrograd was murdered by
the Bolsheviks in the embassy building,
Lockhart was arrested, and Reilly fled the country. The Cheka claimed that under interrogation,
Lockhart said that London sanctioned the assassinations. Lockhart denied this, was freed from prison
- he had supposed diplomatic immunity - and was exchanged for Maxim Litvinov, held by
the British along with several other Bolsheviks as guarantees for the safety of British subjects
in Russia. The main result of all of this was that the Cheka proclaimed a Red Terror,
to root out other “opposition”, and officially reinstated the death penalty. This week, 5,000
Socialist Revolutionaries were sentenced to death by the Bolsheviks (Chronology), and
a woman named Dora Kaplan was executed, believed to have been the person who just shot Lenin.
In Lockhart’s memoirs, written in the 1930s, he categorically denied having any part in
an assassination attempt on Lenin, and blamed the whole thing on Reilly. Reilly by then
was long dead.
The Allies weren’t only advancing in Russia; they still were on the western front.
On the 2nd, spearheaded by the Canadians, the British army broke through the German
lines on a 37 km front. This was at the Drocourt-Queant “Switch” Line, called the Wotan Stellung
by the Germans, and it had been a vital cog in their defenses.
Two Canadian divisions and one British, with 59 tanks attacked at 0500. The switch was
made up of two lines of trenches with concrete shelters and machine gun posts. The wire belt
was apparently 100 meters wide and parts of it had to be cut by hand, but the Germans
surrendered in large numbers. British Commander Sir Douglas Haig would comment (Stevenson)
that many of them did so without a fight and that they seemed to be running away. His strategy
of endless attacks up and down the front was working.
(Generals) “The effect on the German forces facing this pressure was like a dam moving
under the weight of floodwater; the wall shifts, almost imperceptibly at first, then a small
breach appears, and then, if the pressure is maintained, the whole edifice - in this
case the entire German line - is in danger of being swept away.
German Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff called the order to fully withdraw the 25
odd kilometers to the Hindenburg Line. This happened at night for the rest of the week.
He has now decided on a purely defensive strategy. The Hindenburg Line must hold at all costs.
The Germans had already been withdrawing from the west of the River Somme and were of course
using the river as a protective barrier. But on the 31st and 1st, in an operation designed
by John Monash, the capture of Peronne by Australian forces Germans to abandon fortified
position on Mont St. Quentin.
A lot of the British attacks now, disproportionally many, were led by the Anzacs or Canadians
as battering rams. This was both a testament to the soldiers themselves, still potent after
four years hard fighting, and to their leaders, John Monash and Arthur Currie.
And the top Allied brass was busy making new plans.
Last week I talked a bit about the big combined Allied offensive to kick off at the end of
the month, specifically the American part of it to attack to the north, west of the
River Meuse. As for the French attack, it would be the French 4th Army under Henri Gouraud
to the left of the Americans. They would attack west of the Argonne and their job was to reach
Mezieres. Much like the defenses facing the Americans, the ones facing the French would
be pretty tough.
But this was going to involve a lot of transportation of men and materiel. A couple hundred thousand
French troops would have to come out of the Meuse-Argonne sector and over half a million
men into it - mainly Americans. There were just three roads that covered the 100km between
the two impending battle zones. The movement would happen at night, but of course you still
had to set up all the other stuff - the airfields, the hospitals, some railways, all of that.
Some numbers now from David Stevenson’s “with our backs to the wall”. By the beginning
of September, the French estimated that the Germans had 44 reserve divisions in the west.
The Allies had 75. This is a huge shift in the balance of power over just, like, 6 weeks.
The German army on the Western Front took 228,000 casualties in August 1918, but only
got 130,000 replacements. G. J. Meyer points out that of those 228,000, 110,000 were listed
as missing, which is a nice way of saying that they - or most of them - deserted.
(World Undone), “When newly captured troops arrived at the holding pens created by the
Allies for their growing hordes of prisoners, those already inside welcomed them with cheers...
The impossibility of a German victory had become clear to all the senior commanders
on the Allied side and to most of their German counterparts. Germany’s only hope, if any
hope remained, was to take action on the diplomatic front before it, like Austria-Hungary, had
nothing left to offer.”
But the Germans in the west weren’t the only ones thinking that victory was impossible.
The Ottomans attacked the British outside of Baku again the 31st, and again the British
were mauled by superior numbers of infantry and artillery. The Armenian reserve battalions
refused to go into battle, though, which caused British commander Lionel Dunsterville to decide
that future defense of the oil city was a waste of time and lives. He told the five
dictators of the Centro-Caspian Dictatorship that he and his men were soon going to evacuate
the city since nothing could stop the Ottomans from taking it.
And down in Africa, German General Von Lettow-Vorbeck’s forces were attacked on the Upper Lurio River
near Anguros by two British columns. He retreats after heavy losses in killed and captured.
And that’s the week- ever further advances on the Western Front as the Germans retreat
to their mightiest defenses, Ottoman success in the Caucasus and Allied success in Russia,
even as an Allied plot sparks a wave of official terror.
Officially declared by the government. Like, they said, “now we’re going to have a
terror campaign and kill lots of people who probably did nothing and we’ll consolidate
power by fear.” And that sounds like something genuinely diabolical, but compared to what
else was going on, it really wasn’t. Just one of those things that happens in 1918;
madmen and butchers lead new nations, relics of a long ago age lead the old ones, tens
of thousands of people die pretty much daily from influenza, and hundreds of thousands
of people die monthly from the Great War. Same old same old.
If you want to learn more about Sidney Rilley, the Ace of Spies, you can click right here
for our episode about that.
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