A look at the immediate post World War One World:
1919 Advice About Substituting Foods in U.S. to Help Needy Children Abroad
It's interesting how, in our American memory, when World War One ended, it just ended. Looking back we just recall the end of the war as the turn to peace and all that was good about that.
But in reality, millions of Europeans were refugees. We've published some photos of them here recently. A lot of the French were attempting to return to their homes only to find them destroyed. French farmers who had been driven out of their lands due to the fighting returned in many cases to find a totally altered landscape (a landscape that we'll be posting some images of here soon).
And this wasn't limited to Europe. In the Middle East millions were adrift. An entire people, the Armenians, had been in peril since the beginning of the war and many had been victims of genocide. Those who had survived had been driven east and west, with some ending up as far away as the United States. In the region of their homeland, the opportunity to break free from former colonial masters meant border combat with other regions doing the same which were their neighbors.
Fighting raged on elsewhere also. In Germany fighting went on in individual cities and towns over what Germany was to become. Germany had been on the knife's edge of starvation in the Fall of 1918 and now that the war had ended, the situation was somewhat alleviated, but only somewhat. On Germany's borders a war raged with Polish revolutionaries, supported by a newly born Poland, over whether certain regions would be Polish or German. Likewise, the Poles were fighting off a Czech invasion from the south over which border regions would be Polish or Czech. At the same time the Poles were fighting the Ukrainians over large sections of their frontier due to the rarely noted ethnic fact that the Poles simply grade into the Ukrainians, and the two people are closely related. And the Poles were fighting off a Red Army invasion as well, part of an effort to impose a Communist regime on Poland and whose Red Army commander, Trotsky, imagined might carry his Red forces all the way to Berlin.
Russia was in an enormously violent civil war, which the United States and the other Allies were participating in, in varying degrees. And not doing too well at the century removed moment either. The Russian Civil War would prove to be a human tragedy of epic proportions, in no small part because both sides became vicious in regard to the other, and the Communist became genocidal nearly from the onset. Millions would die in that war, following the Great War in which millions of Russians had died. Millions more would die due to Communist violence, purges and acts of intentional starvation after the Civil War ended in a tragedy that, for the Russians, started in 1914 and would really only abate just before 1950.
The Reds were also fighting in the Baltics, with all the Baltic nations struggling to break away from the Russian Empire, aided in their struggle mostly by the British, but to a degree by the Finns, who had succeeded in that effort and who had fought their own, brief, very violent, civil war in the closing days of World War One. All over western Russia and what had been parts of the Russian Empire stranded German troops had yet to return home, with some them still serving in combat at that against Red forces they'd helped come about through their late Imperial government's ill thought out intrigues.
In a bit of a foretaste of what was to come for all of the remaining European colonial powers after World War Two, the United Kingdom was suffering a rebellion in its oldest colony, Ireland. The UK was pursuing a policy of ignoring the newly formed Irish Dail, but the IRA wasn't ignoring the UK and had already commenced a terrorist rebellion against it.
Things were a mess.
