Allied Fears in January 1918

But the Allies needed not only supplies but, yet more urgently, men, and these the Americans were slow to provide. When the United States had entered the war in April, their army consisted of 6,000 officers and 100,000 men. General John J. Pershing received orders to take the First US Division to France, but even that unit existed only on paper. Plans were made to expand the army to twenty-four divisions, about a million men, by the summer of 1918, but it seemed doubtful whether the Allies could survive so long. If they could, their worries would be over. By 1919 their superiority in both men and materiel would be enormous, and Allied staff officers began to plan a great offensive for that year. But meanwhile the nightmare that had haunted them for the past three years had come true. Russia had been knocked out of the war, leaving

Russia’s defeat also had alarming implications for the British Empire. Turkey no longer had to defend her Caucasian frontiers. She had been driven out of the Arabian peninsula, but that only left her free to expand eastwards and establish a Pan-Turanian hegemony extending to the frontiers of India—a hegemony stiffened by German military muscle and inspired by a jihad that could undermine Britain’s already precarious hold on the Indian subcontinent. It is not surprising that the American military representative on the Allied Supreme War Council should have written home in February 1918: ‘I doubt if I could make anyone not present at the recent meeting . . . realize the anxiety and fear that pervade the minds of political and military men here’.

Anti-Allied Coalition of Nationalists