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Advertising postcard map of European Russia, with inset images of a mounted Cossack lancer, a troika, and St. Petersburg.
War or early post-war photograph of the Belleau Wood American Cemetery. The American assault by U.S Marines and Army infantry to take Belleau Wood began on June 6, 1918 against well-entrenched German defenders. The battle continued for three weeks. The Marine casualties were 113 officers and 5,598 men killed, wounded and missing; the Army 9th and 23rd Infantry lost 65 officers and 3,496 men.
1917 photograph of Austro-Hungarian soldiers posing on the ruins of a destroyed plane, likely a pusher with the engine facing the rear of the plane.
A poem beneath a United States flag calls on American boys to show the Kaiser.
Memorial statue to Prime Minister David Lloyd George in Parliament Square, London, United Kingdom. © 2013 John M. Shea
"The spring and summer of 1918 were unusually hard. All the aftermath of the war was then just beginning to make itself felt. At times, it seemed as if everything were slipping and crumbling, as if there were nothing to hold to, nothing to lean upon. One wondered if a country so despairing, so economically exhausted, so devastated, had enough sap left in it to support a new régime and preserve its independence. There was no food. There was no army. The railroads were completely disorganized. The machinery of state was just beginning to take shape. Conspiracies were being hatched everywhere." ((1), more)
"The individual soldiers are very good. They are healthy, vigorous, and physically well developed men of ages ranging from 18 to 28, who at present lack only necessary training to make them redoubtable opponents. The troops are fresh and full of straightforward confidence. A remark of one of the prisoners is indicative of their spirit: 'We kill or get killed.' . . .Only a few of the troops are of pure American origin; the majority is of German, Dutch, and Italian parentage, but these semi-Americans, almost all of whom were born in America and have never been in Europe, fully feel themselves to be true-born sons of their country." ((2), more)
"In Germany and Austria the early days of July were a time of scarcity, of explosions of pacifist sentiment in the Reichstag, and of open defiance of edicts of the Imperial Government. The Brest-Litovsk peace and resulting measures taken to include the old dominions of the Czar in the Mittel-Europa trading complex only resulted in spreading the Bolshevik contagion through the kingdoms, dukedoms and city states of the central empires. The imperial confederation that Bismarck cemented was shaking apart. Even Prussia, the cornerstone was cracking.The Kaiser had assured his subjects that Ludendorff's spring offensives would bring peace with victory, but all the German workingpeople could see was an immense new butcher's bill, and hunger and stringency. It was the turn of the Germans to get tired of being killed. They were beginning to listen to Bolshevik agitators whispering that peace lay in defeat." ((3), more)
"Throughout June and into the first days of July, the Americans were part of the nail-biting waiting game—waiting for the German assault. Nightly shelling harassed the New Yorkers. Influenza struck, too, afflicting 40 percent of the men in the regiment. Nerves frayed. Sgt. Noble Sissle felt an 'air of tenseness that seemed to show that trouble brooded of a greater magnitude than we had witnessed in our section of the front.'" ((4), more)
". . . the real moment to make peace will be reached as soon as the totality of American reinforcements will have landed in Europe. The enemy will then be really anxious. You must make peace when he fears you most, and very often he fears you more before an offensive campaign than after it.Mr. Balfour found that this was a new way of envisaging the end of the war. In common with Mr. Lloyd George, he did not believe a military victory impossible on account of the weariness of Austria and Turkey . . ." ((5), more)
(1) Leon Trotsky writing of Russia in the spring and summer 1918. The Russian Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917, the armistice that quickly followed in December, and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed between Russia and the Central Powers in March all occurred as ethnic groups within Russia and Europe's remaining empires increasingly called for independence. Trotsky continues: 'In the West, the Germans occupied Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, White Russia and a large section of Great Russia.' Ukraine had declared independence, French and British troops were in Murmansk and Archangel, the Czech Legion — former Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war — had crossed Russia and taken Vladivostok on the Pacific, and anti-revolutionary leaders were battling Russia's new government.
My Life: an Attempt at an Autobiography by Leon Trotsky, page 395, publisher: Dover Publications, Inc., publication date: 2007
(2) Excerpt from an official German report on American prisoners of the Second US Infantry Division (5th, 6th, 9th, and 23rd Regiments) captured in the Bouresches sector between June 5 and 14, 1918.
The Great Events of the Great War in Seven Volumes by Charles F. Horne, Vol. VI, 1918, pp. 207–208, copyright © 1920 by The National Alumnia, publisher: The National Alumni, publication date: 1920
(3) German Commander Erich Ludendorff mounted four offensives on the Western Front between March 21 and June 14, 1918. They bent but did not break that Allies, and did not end the war with a German victory. There would be one more beginning in mid-July. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed between Russia and the Central Powers in March, 1918 following Russia's Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917.
Mr. Wilson's War by John Dos Passos, page 347, copyright © 1962, 2013 by John Dos Passos, publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
(4) By July Germany had already mounted four offensives on the Western Front in 1918, the last ending on June 14. Through the following month The Allies expected the fifth offensive at any time. The 'New Yorkers' were Black soldiers in America's segregated army. The country's and the army's racism forbade Black and White soldiers serving together, and kept the former from combat. Our author, Stephen Harris, elsewhere writes (page 175), 'The men of the Fifteenth New York had been moved out of St. Nazaire as common laborers and into the French Fourth Army as combat infantrymen. On 12 March the regiment had been placed at the disposal of the French Sixteenth Division "for service as a combat unit." French Black and other colonial soldiers were an integral part of the French army. The influenza would return in the autumn in a more deadly form.
Hellfighters of Harlem by Stephen L. Harris, page 216, copyright © 2003 by Brassey's Inc., publisher: Brassey's Inc., publication date: 2003
(5) Excerpt from the War Diaries of Albert, King of the Belgians on his July 10, 1918 meeting with the British War Committee in London, a group that included Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour. The Committee wanted victory, expecting it in 1919. The King cannot have endeared himself to them when he declared, 'Those who refuse to show a certain good will towards avoiding a fifth year of war would bear a heavy responsibility in the annals of history. It would be criminal to attempt nothing to avoid the further bloodshed which would result.'
The War Diaries of Albert I King of the Belgians by Albert I, page 218, copyright © 1954, publisher: William Kimber
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