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Japan's Siberian Intervention, 1918-1922: "A Great Disobedience against the People." By Paul E. Dunscomb . Lanham, MD : Lexington Books , 2011. xiii, 249 pp. $75.00 (cloth); $29.99 (paper).
Book Reviews--Japan
The October Revolution of 1917 resulted in civil war and the withdrawal of Russia from World War I. When Russia concluded a separate peace with the Central Powers in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the eastern front collapsed, and some 50,000 soldiers of the Czech Legion found themselves behind enemy lines in Russia's Far East. The remaining powers of the Entente dispatched troops to Russia's Maritime Region to aid the Czechs, but more to prevent the large caches of war matériel in Vladivostok from falling into the hands of the Germans or Bolsheviks, to prop up a White Russian government, and to reestablish the Eastern Front. In July 1918, President Woodrow Wilson urged Japan to contribute 7,000 troops to the international coalition converging on Siberia. By November, over 70,000 troops of the Imperial Japanese Army occupied the Russian Far East and northern Manchuria. This book focuses primarily on how this rapid escalation of Japan's military presence in the region came to pass, the difficulty the government encountered in trying to withdraw troops once committed, and the political fallout that continued occupation engendered.
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