A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

The Final Stages of the War 919

Compounding this bleak picture for the Allies was a combined Austrian
and German offensive in Italy, strengthened by the arrival of German
troops from the Russian front. They pushed the Italian army back seventy­
five miles in the Battle of Caporetto on the Isonzo River in October 1917,
taking three-quarters of a million prisoners. Despite 200,000 casualties
and twice that many desertions, the Italians held along the Piave River,
just twenty miles from Venice. The Allies coordinated their war efforts. In
October 1917, they established a Supreme War Council, which held regu­
lar meetings of the prime ministers of France, Britain, and Italy, as well
as a representative sent by President Wilson.
Better news for the Allies came from the Middle East. The discovery of
oil there prior to the war had dramatically increased the stakes for influ­
ence in the region. During the war, the British took advantage of Arab
resentment—particularly by Muslim fundamentalists—of the Turks, who
had ruled much of the Middle East for centuries. They stirred up revolts
beginning in June 1916. The writer T. E. Lawrence (1888—1935), a British
colonel, coordinated attacks against the strategically important Turkish
railway that led from the sacred city of Medina to Damascus.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, more Jews in Europe had
begun to long for a homeland in Palestine, which was part of the Turkish
Ottoman Empire. By 1914, 85,000 Jews had moved there. The British gov­
ernment in principle supported the Zionist movement for a Jewish state.
On November 2, 1917, the Balfour Declaration expressed British willing­
ness to support the future creation of a “national home” for the Jews in
Palestine, once the Turks had been defeated, provided that such a state
would recognize the rights of the Arab populations who already lived there.
This declaration partially contradicted the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916,
which had secretly divided Syria and other parts of the Middle East into
British and French zones of influence. The British government hoped that
the eventual creation of a Jewish state in Palestine could serve as a buffer
between the Suez Canal and Syria, the latter controlled by France. In
December 1917, a British force captured Jerusalem. The Central Powers’
ally Turkey seemed on the verge of collapse.

The German Spring Offensive

In the spring of 1918, the Germans launched their “victory drive,” their

first major offensive since 1914. But Austria-Hungary showed signs of virtu­

ally dissolving, with major national groups openly calling for independence.

The United States now had 325,000 troops in Europe. They were com­

manded by General John Pershing (1860-1948), who had won early fame

for leading a “punitive expedition” (which turned out to be a wild-goose

chase) against the Mexican bandit Pancho Villa. He had also served in cam­

paigns against the Sioux in the American West, and had fought in the Philip­

pines and Cuba. Pershing, a tall, tough, stubborn commander, insisted that