"In taking this action the Government of the United States wishes to announce to the people of Russia, in the most public and solemn manner, that it contemplates no interference with the political sovereignty of Russia, no intervention in her internal affairs--not even in the local affairs of the limited areas which her military force may be obliged to occupy--and no impairment of her territorial integrity, either now or hereafter, but that what we are about to do has as its single and only object the rendering of such aid as shall be acceptable to the Russian people themselves in their endeavors to regain control of their own affairs, their own territory, and their own destiny." The Japanese issued a similar declaration a few days later, also disclaiming any desire for territorial aggrandizement at the cost of Russia. During the first week of August, 1918, about 7,000 American soldiers, most of them regulars from the Philippines, were landed at Vladivostok, the United States Government announcing, on August 7, 1918, that Major General William S. Graves, former assistant chief of the Army General Staff, would have command of the American expedition. The Japanese landed a similar force, under General Kikuzo Otani, president of the famous military technical school of Toyama Gakko, and who, on account of his senior rank, would assume command of the entire Allied force. The French and British landed smaller forces each, the former being native troops from Tonkin and the British being local garrisons from India. Meanwhile the Czecho-Slovak Army in the interior of Russia continued its operations. On July 26, 1918, they reported the capture of Simbirsk, 600 miles east of Moscow; on the last day of the month they gained possession of a large railroad bridge at Syzram, in the Volga region, and on the following day they took the city of Ekaterinburg, where the czar had been executed by order of the Ural regional soviet. In western Siberia they ordered the mobilization of the classes from 1912 to 1920, at Omsk. It was also reported that they were being joined by thousands of Rumanians and Italians who had formerly been soldiers in the Austrian armies and had later been taken prisoners by the imperial Russian armies. By this time it was generally recognized that the original plan of the Czecho-Slovaks, to withdraw from Russia by way of Vladivostok, had been changed to one whereby they were to remain and form the nucleus about which the anti-Bolshevist elements in Russia and the Allies might reconstruct an eastern front against the German forces. The Japanese, being the first to land at Vladivostok, were the first to advance into the interior, and they immediately took up their position along the Ussuri River, which forms the eastern boundary of Manchuria with Siberia. The Americans, as soon as they arrived, occupied the railway toward Nikolsk.