What do you do when you can’t get food?
When you can’t afford to buy even the food that’s available?
When working conditions are intolerable?
Well, if you’re the Russians, you hit the streets.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week French General Robert Nivelle proposed to take control of the British armies on the
Western Front.
The British were advancing there as the Germans fell back to the Hindenburg Line.
They also advanced on the Tigris, taking Kut-al-Amara and setting their sights on Baghdad.
The Serbian rebellion in Bulgarian occupied Balkan territory continued, as did major U-Boat
sinkings at sea.
The US public found out about a German plot against them, and Austrian Army Chief of Staff
Conrad von Hötzendorf lost his job.
That was a busy week.
Well, they’re all busy weeks and this is no exception.
There was more turmoil in Russia, for starters.
This week, a strike began in the Putilov munitions works, which was the Russian army’s main
provider of ammunition.
Also in Petrograd, food riots began that continued for days, with citizens in the streets demanding bread.
By the 8th there were 90,000 factory workers on strike.
There were, in fact, food shortages in all the major cities; agricultural production
was down from so many farm workers being called to the army and there were colossal distribution
problems on the overstretched railway system.
Inflation had soared, but wages remained the same, so the poor were being priced out of
the market for any food that was available.
The results were hunger, which caused food riots, and open political dissent that all
blamed the Tsar for the suffering.
More and more military units began to go over to the revolutionaries.
A decade ago the military had put down a revolution, but in 1917 the army had no enthusiasm or
desire to fire on the people.
The 8th was also International Women’s Day and the strikers were joined by those celebrating
that occasion, so by the end of the week, 200,000 protesters were in the streets of Petrograd.
The Tsar was completely isolated from all this and totally out of touch; this week he
wrote to his wife that he was going to take up dominoes again, and in his diary that he
was reading a French book about Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul.
It was the beginning of the end.
A side note here - a while back I talked about Interior Minister Alexander Protopopov and
it was a bit controversial.
I will certainly bow to superior knowledge of the events and circumstances in Russia
at this time, particularly about Protopopov and what he did or did not do.
Many of you know far more about the subject than I do.
I will say one thing further about him here, though.
Now, I only have this from one source, “The Story of the Great War”, make of that what you will.
They claim that he deliberately had food trains to Petrograd halted in the provinces, and
when everybody was on strike, the two labor leaders who supported the Duma made an appeal
for the workers to go back to work, but he had the appeal censored.
That source claims Protopopov was deliberately fomenting revolution so that during the crisis
a peace with the Central Powers could be made and the revolution put down by the army.
Many of you have written that Protopopov was not capable of this kind of machination, and
even I have described him as “laughably incompetent”, I’m just putting this out there.
There is one source that claims this is so.
I’m curious to hear your thoughts.
There was action in the Middle East this week as well.
The British were pursuing the Ottomans up the Tigris River, heading for Baghdad.
On the 6th, British cavalry was 20km from the goal.
On the 8th, the Tigris was bridged and the Ottomans driven from positions 10km from the city.
The British also made a surprise crossing of the Diyala River.
The Ottomans were actually also retreating en masse from Persia toward Baghdad, with
the Russians in pursuit.
This week the Russians occupied Kangavar, South of Hamadan.
In the Balkans, the Serbs’ Toplica Rebellion continued occupations of its own.
The rebels took half a dozen small towns and were threatening the town of Vranje, which
would be a big blow to the Central Powers if it fell.
So the alarmed Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian commands began to organize a counter attack.
It would begin soon.
And something else that could signal another beginning was the possibility that the US
might join the war.
It’s now been a month since diplomatic relations between the US and Germany were severed.
This week, President Woodrow Wilson took the oath of office to begin his second term as
President.
His inaugural speech reaffirms his commitment to armed neutrality.
This is primarily in response to Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare policy, which
had sunk 500,000 tons of food for Britain in February alone.
We’ve talked a lot about stuff dealing with the US over the past few weeks and I’d like
to talk about something I haven’t had time for yet, the Great Call Up.
In June 1916 there had been a real possibility of war between the USA and Mexico.
The US army had put together around 12,000 troops for its cross-border campaign, but
they’d need a lot more to show how serious the US was about protecting the border.
So they mobilized the entire National Guard.
There was a plan for orderly mobilization, but rushing as many guardsmen to the border
as quickly as possible was the order of the day, and by the end of July there were 110,957
national guardsmen at the border.
There was a lot of confusion and a lot of problems, and I’ll just briefly mention
some of them here.
Reluctance to serve was a big problem and the physical condition of the men another.
The Surgeon General said, “The large percentage of rejections at the muster-in physical examination...
appears to the department surgeon as the most disappointing... feature of the mobilization,
indicating that the enlistment examinations had been nominal and superficial.”
And the army’s logistical system was overwhelmed.
There weren’t enough supplies for the guardsmen, and since there had been no prearranged plans
for border mobilization, 100,000 inexperienced men suddenly there needed to be trained, so
the regular army was stripped of officers to do so.
The red tape was colossal, and I love this quote about the staggering problems with requisition
forms just to get basic equipment, “There was not only a shortage of blank forms, but
a shortage of the forms needed to requisition the blank forms.”
The National Guard blamed the army for all the shortages, and the army blamed Congress.
Let’s not even get into the overload issues for the railways that had to move all the
men, and the economic issues at the border once 100,000 men arrived in border towns.
Still, by Christmas, 156,414 guardsmen had been transported to the border, even though
three quarters of them were untrained men led by officers of limited experience.
And reports, like one in the excellent book “The Great Call-Up”, read like this, “Under
most favorable conditions... the regiment might be made available for field service
against an inferior enemy in six months, against trained troops it will require two years.”
You can see why the Central Powers were not especially worried about American intervention
if they could bring the war to a conclusion in 1917.
Thing is, America learned a lot from the Great Call up; the mobilization problems were all
highlighted on display, including things like the army’s reliance on animals instead of
cars and trucks, and steps were made to correct all of this mess.
So the period from June 1916 to now was one of intense training and troubleshooting.
Why it’s important here is that it really served as a dress rehearsal for American mobilization.
“The Great Call up transformed the National Guard into a much more effective fighting
force, for it was as close as the United States came to the large scale military maneuvers
in which European armies traditionally engaged.”
The idea that the US would join the war was, for Germany, offset by the news from Russia,
where things looked bad militarily as well as politically.
British Military Attaché Colonel Knox had sent London a note saying that a million men
had been killed, two million were either missing - dead - or prisoners, half a million were
in hospital, a million and a half more were on leave or had been excused from more service,
and another million had deserted.
Knox said that the number of the troops at the front was not enough to continue the war
as it was.
But that’s how things stood at the end of the week.
The British on the move in Mesopotamia, the Russians in Persia, rebel success in the Balkans,
Chaos in Petrograd, and the US saying yet again that it would remain neutral.
Armed neutrality.
So ships could defend themselves from the U-boat menace.
But that’s not neutral, is it?
The Germans sinking ships with American civilians aboard is an act of war.
American civilians firing on German subs is an act of war.
You can get as technical with the terminology as you liked but that is war.
And how long do you think the American public would put up with reading about drowned American civilians.
And how long would the Russians put up with starvation and intolerable working conditions?
I’m gonna guess not very long.
If you want to learn more about the defenses against submarines, check out our special
about that right here.
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