General Harbord Submits Report on Armenia Mission (16 OCT 1919)

Armenians awaiting deportation in a city square. They were reportedly executed just outside the city … READ MORE

On Oct. 16, 1919, Maj. Gen. (later Lt. Gen.) James G. Harbord submitted the final report from his intelligence mission to Armenia to the American Peace Commission (alternately known as the American Commission to Negotiate Peace) at the Paris Peace Conference. The report detailed a months-long investigation into political and military conditions in postwar Europe, particularly how war and genocide against the Armenians affected American efforts towards peace in Asia Minor and Eastern Europe.

At the end of the First World War, the delegate nations involved with the Paris Peace Conference were tasked with coordinating various peace negotiations across numerous affected European nations. Such negotiations required extensive information on these regions and their particular grievances. After the war, many of the reports by American military attachés stationed across Europe were passed to the Military Intelligence Division in Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, the American Peace Commission did not have the authority to examine these records for successive intelligence operations.

Needing accurate intelligence and unwilling to rely solely on the limited available attaché reports, the Americans suggested an ambitious program to establish missions to collect information in key regions of Europe. These missions were principally directed by the American Commission and primarily consisted of American government and military personnel. Ellis L. Dresel, military attaché to Berlin from 1915 to 1917, was selected as chairman of the new program, while Col. (later Maj. Gen.) Ralph Van Deman, intelligence officer with the American Peace Commission, served as one of the Army’s representatives.

The crumbling Ottoman Empire—particularly Turkey and Armenia—represented an especially fraught problem for the Peace Conference. Between 1915 and 1917, the Ottoman Turks had massacred between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians, more than half of the Armenian population in northwest Asia. Thousands more were deported, sold into slavery, unwillingly married to the Turks, or were forcibly converted to Islam. Under the Americans’ new program, General Harbord was appointed commander of the American Mission to Armenia to collect intelligence from this extremely troubled region. Harbord had served as General John J. Pershing’s chief of staff from 1917 to 1918 and, later in the war, commanded the 4th Marine Brigade and the 2d Infantry Division before taking over the American Expeditionary Forces’ Services of Supply. His military prestige, experience, and integrity prompted his appointment as leader of the Armenia Mission.

On Oct. 16, 1919, Harbord submitted his final report to the American Peace Commission. The report summarized the expedition through Armenia and Asia Minor and included a lengthy history of the Armenians and their relations with the Turks and Russians; interviews with government officials, as well as victims, witnesses, and perpetrators of the genocide; and recommendations for the Peace Conference to limit further conflict in the region. The report found the only way to maintain peace between nations in the region was to specifically include Armenians in mandates and relief aid ordered for the whole of Asia Minor and the collapsing empire but to avoid granting aid solely to Armenians, as this could lead to further bloodshed.

Furthermore, in “certain regions where the temptation to reprisals for past wrongs will be strong for at least a generation,” the report recommended an occupying military force be deployed to maintain order and support the establishment of native constabularies. It outlined reasons for and against the United States taking on this mandate and concluded: “If we refuse to assume [responsibility]. . .we shall be considered by many millions of people as having left unfinished the task for which we entered the war, and as having betrayed their hopes.”

Conditions in the Near East: Report of the American Military Mission to Armenia can be read in its entirety at https://www.loc.gov/item/20026422/.