Review of "The Czech and Slovak Legion in Siberia, 1917-1922," by Joan McGuire Mohr

 Review of

The Czech and Slovak Legion in Siberia, 1917-1922, by Joan McGuire Mohr, ISBN 9780786465712

Five out of five stars

Another sad tale of U. S. military sent with no plan

 In the last years of the First World War, some of the belligerent nations began to fall apart. The Russian Czar abdicated and was replaced by a series of weak governments. On the eastern front between the Central Powers and the Russian forces, large numbers of ethnic Czech and Slovak soldiers fighting for Austria-Hungary had either been captured in battle or surrendered in large clusters. Once they were under Russian control, they organized themselves into coherent combat units. Severely persecuted by the Germans and Hungarians in the Austrian Empire, they were eager to join the battle against the nation they were formerly fighting for.

 When the Russian forces collapsed and the German-Austrian forces began taking control of large sections of Russia, the Czech and Slovak units were in danger of being executed for desertion. Now desperate for motivated fighting men on the western front, the Allied leaders decided to have the Czech and Slovak units evacuated through Siberia to Vladivostok. From there, they could be loaded on ships and transported to the western front to join the fight against Germany.

 This was the beginning of one of the most absurd military ventures in history. This is the story of how those valiant men were used as pawns in the international game of power politics. As the new state of the Soviet Union was being formed, several fighting factions emerged. Using the excuse of expediting the transport of the Czech and Slovak units, Allied forces, including some from the United States and Japan, landed on the Pacific coast of Russia and moved inland.

 While U. S. President Woodrow Wilson tried to export his idealism, in this case he was a naïve dupe, and the U. S. forces really had no political direction. The Japanese were engaged in little more than a grab for influence in the area around Vladivostok and Manchuria. The story is one of incredible duplicity and cynical power politics. A new nation of Czechoslovakia was being born and the leaders needed these men to preserve the integrity of the new state.

 American history is replete with U. S. forces being sent into combat zones with no real plan to deal with contingencies. The intervention in Russia after the rise of the Bolshevik government was one of the first and as can be gleaned from this great book, a strong candidate for the most poorly executed.

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