Detroit’s Polar Bears

That Time We Invaded Russia

From guest contributor Charles Carroll.

If you ever are visiting Michigan with family and are looking for a nice place to spend the day, I would recommend the Detroit Zoo. Don’t let the name fool you, or scare you for that matter, because the zoo actually isn’t in Detroit, but in Royal Oak, which is a very nice city. I was born and raised in Michigan, so the Detroit Zoo was always a summer staple for my family when I was a kid. After becoming quite familiar with it over the years, I began to notice subtle and hidden details that intrigued me. Instead of going into a boring litany of the oddities I have found over the years, I will instead focus on the one that I have always found the most intriguing. If you’re walking through the polar bear exhibit and stay in the outer portion of it, you’ll eventually come along the path where you see an aged bronze plaque on a boulder. A brief glance at it, and you’ll notice a wall of text with a polar bear at the bottom. If you choose to ignore the small print and move on, you would be forgiven for assuming that it was a plaque to commemorate one of the zoo’s deceased polar bears. Zoos do tend to commemorate particularly beloved animals, after all. However, upon closer inspection, this plaque doesn’t commemorate just any ordinary polar bear.

The first line of the plaque gives us a clue: “Dedicated to the American North Russian Expeditionary Forces Known as the ‘Polar Bears.’” Huh? Was this some kind of Arctic expedition? As you reason through it, you realize that it couldn’t have been a scientific expedition, since it has the word Forces in it. When did we fight in Russia? Confused, you read on:

From September 4, 1918, to June 15, 1919, fifty-five hundred American soldiers of the 339th Infantry Regiment (with elements of the 310th Engineers and the 337th Ambulance and Hospital Companies) fought Bolshevik Russian forces under harsh arctic conditions near Archangel, Russia. Since most of these soldiers came from Michigan, and of those most were from Detroit, they were known as “Detroit’s Own - Polar Bears.” Of the “Polar Bear” Soldiers, 232 died and 307 were wounded. In 1929, five former “Polar Bears” returned to North Russia to recover the remains of those left behind. They recovered 86 bodies of which 56 were buried around a white marble Polar Bear sculpture at White Chapel Memorial Cemetery, Troy, Michigan.

I am actually a descendant of one of these Polar Bears, in whom I take great pride. He was the father of my maternal grandfather. Before I ever encountered that plaque at the zoo, I had always heard my grandfather speak boastfully of how his father had been a Polar Bear and fought in Russia during World War I. Being a know-it-all kid at the time — who am I kidding, I still am — I just assumed that he was either mistaken or confused, since I had never heard of the Polar Bears or the fact that we sent troops to fight in Russia. At the time, it didn’t make sense to me: Didn’t the U.S. join the Entente with Russia? Why would we have fought them? I thought that it was one of those grandparent moments where they make things up, or at least exaggerate something true, to entertain the grandkids. Sure enough, I learned that I was wrong. My great-grandfather was supposed to have been sent to fight on the Western Front like the other draftees. Instead, he and many of America’s boys from Michigan were diverted into what would have become a failed and now forgotten military adventure in Russia. From September 1918 to June 1919, he along with 5,000 other Americans would be stranded in Northern Russia, fighting to avoid being pushed into the Arctic Ocean even after World War I had come to end.

A Little Background

America entered World War I after declaring war on Germany on April 6, 1917. America was able to land her first troops on the continent in France in June 1917, but it would take a further year for America to send a sufficiently large and trained army to make any significant impact. It would not be until May 28, 1918, that America would play its first major role on the Western Front.

Keep in mind that Russia played a major part in this war, and by fighting in the East, kept Germany fighting a two-front war. As long as Germany had to divide her forces between the Eastern and Western Fronts, she would not be able to deal a winning blow to the Entente. For nearly three years, Germany would have to dedicate more than half of her divisions to the Eastern Front. Things would drastically change soon. All the European nations in 1917 were exhausted and at their tipping point, but none more so than Russia. In March 1917, a revolution swept through Russia, motivated by the food shortages caused by the war, that would lead to the abdication of the throne by Czar Nicholas II and the establishment of a provincial government. Prompted by an opportunity to take Russia finally out of the war, the German Empire allowed Vladimir Lenin to return to Russia to instigate chaos. Later in November 1917, Lenin and his Bolsheviks would overthrow the provincial government, and now Russia was in the hands of the Communists. On March 3, 1918, Lenin and his government would sign onto the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which would officially take Russia out of the war. The Bolsheviks were now free to focus on the fighting in the Russian Civil War that had just broken out, and the Germans could concentrate on winning on the Western Front.

For the Entente, this was a disaster and a major impediment in their fight with the German Empire, which could now move its troops from the Eastern to Western Front. Adding to the severity of the situation, there were also 600,000 tons of military supplies as well as another 600,000 tons of coal up for the taking in the ports of Archangel and Murmansk in Northern Russia. Literally the day after the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Britain would land 170 soldiers in Murmansk. Ironically enough, the British were requested by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky to provide protection to the area from a possible German invasion, assuming that the Germans might break their agreements.

While this intervention would eventually morph into a half-hearted fight with the Bolsheviks, the original intention of the British and Americans was to keep Russia fighting on the Eastern Front in order for the Entente to win at the Western Front. The Entente had mixed feelings about intervention in the Russian Civil War. The Entente had issues with both the Red Army and the White Army, but they were also concerned with the Tsardom being lost to Communism alongside feeling a sense of betrayal from the Bolsheviks for taking Russia out of the war. Some notable characters such as Winston Churchill wanted Britain to go further and stamp out Bolshevism, while others wanted simply to focus on winning the war. Skirmishes would break out between the British and Bolsheviks that would strain their already frail relationship. At the same time, the issue of the Czechoslovak Legion would further add fuel to the fire until violent conflict broke out between the Bolsheviks and the Legion. Trotsky became suspicious that the Legion were agents of the Allies and began operations against them. Eventually, things escalated to the point where Britain coordinated a coup with the White Army to overthrow the local soviet in Archangel in August 1918, signaling that Britain would now take a side, albeit with no real desire to pursue it to the end.

Before we get to the Americans arriving in Northern Russia, we must examine one more factor that motivated the Americans alongside other members of the Entente to embark on this expedition. The Czechoslovak Legion was a volunteer army made up of Czechs and Slovakians that fought alongside the Entente. Their hope in siding with the Entente was to fight against the German Empire and Austro-Hungarian Empire for Czech and Slovakian independence. Just before Russia withdrew from the Great War, the Bolsheviks negotiated with around 42,000 to 50,000 members of the Legion who were stranded in Ukraine to allow them to leave Russia and go fight on the Western Front. However, the Bolsheviks demanded that they leave at the port of Vladivostok, which is a Pacific port near the modern border between Russia and North Korea. At the port, the Entente would ship them on over to the Western Front. This meant that tens of thousands of Legion members would have to travel across Siberia to the Pacific via the Trans-Siberian Railroad. It was while they were traveling that Trotsky decided to order them either to join the Red Army or to be forced into concentration camps. The Legion found Trotsky’s insane ultimatum to be unacceptable, and they were forced to hunker down along the railroad and begin fighting. The Bolsheviks became further enraged once the Legion began naturally to ally with the White Army, since their survival depended upon it, thus leading to the accusations that the Legion was being used as a puppet to fight the Bolsheviks. The relationship between the Entente and the Bolsheviks was now fully severed.

America Sends Her Boys to Russia

Woodrow Wilson was reluctant to get engaged in military expeditions into Russia, and it would take much pleading from Britain to convince Wilson to send American troops there. While he would agree to support the mission of defending the supplies from falling into the hands of either the Germans or the Bolsheviks, and also helping to rescue the trapped Czechoslovak Legion, he made it clear that the United States was to remain neutral in the Russian Civil War. With reluctance, he agreed to send 5,000 Americans (who later became known as the Polar Bears) to Archangel and another 8,000 to Vladivostok (a group equally as forgotten, but lacking a cool and memorable nickname).

The men who would become the Polar Bears were a part of the U.S. Army’s 85th Division and were originally destined to fight in France. They would depart from Camp Custer, their training camp in Michigan, on July 14, 1918. Wilson would agree to limited American intervention in Russia just three days later, and some units of the 85th Division would instead be diverted first to England for training and to be outfitted for fighting in Russia. It was while they were in England that the Americans were forced to part ways with their Enfield rifles, and instead were issued the Russian Mosin-Nagat rifle. This was a prudent measure, since ammunition would be much more readily available to them in Russia than if they had kept their Enfield rifles. From the 85th Division, three infantry battalions from the 339th Infantry were selected to go to Russia alongside the 337th Field Hospital, the 337th Ambulance Company, and the 310th Engineers Battalion. In total, about 5,000 American men would join up with British, French, Canadian, and White Russian men in Northern Russia.

The Polar Bears first landed in Archangel on September 4, 1918. Their first objective, to secure the war supplies, was already a failure. Upon their arrival, the Polar Bears discovered that the Bolsheviks had already looted the supplies and sent them up the Dvina River. Just before the arrival of the Polar Bears, the British and French were forced to retake the port of Archangel after the Bolsheviks had captured it. During this struggle, the Bolsheviks had managed to heap most of the war supplies onto trains before the Entente recaptured the city. As the Bolsheviks were fleeing, the Entente naïvely decided to chase after them; soon enough, the pursuing Entente force became trapped. Due to an unresolved and undefined chain of command, the newly-arrived Polar Bears fell under the sway of the British commanders, who ordered the Polar Bears to help rescue the trapped British and French troops. This began a six-week offensive, contrary to what Wilson wanted, wherein the Polar Bears helped rescue their allies, but at the cost of now being spread thin along a front hundreds of miles long, guarding an area the size of Texas and Oklahoma combined.

By the time this offensive campaign was forced to come to an end in late October, the Russian winter had begun to creep in upon the Polar Bears and other Entente soldiers, requiring them to dig into defensive positions. For lack of better words, the weather became miserable. First, the temperature dropped from 30 below to eventually 50 below. The snow began to pile deep, and the nights lengthened. At these temperatures, even the oil in the machine guns began to freeze. Being wounded and stranded meant certain death. Being spread so thin and forced to hunker down, one unit could not so easily come to the aid of another. Within just 30 days of landing in Russia, America lost 69 men and saw 150 of her boys wounded. Combine all these circumstances with poor rations, and it was no wonder that the morale plummeted. All this reminds me of an important lesson from my high school history teacher: never invade Russia in the winter.

While November 11, 1918, would forever be remembered as the day the Great War came to an end, it would also be remembered for the Battle of Tulgas. Even though fighting on the Western Front had come to an end, the Entente and Bolsheviks were not made aware of the armistice and would engage in a major battle. The battle took place in Tulgas, a village roughly 200 miles southeast of Archangel, along the Dvina River. With the river frozen from the harsh Russian winter, the Bolsheviks took the advantage and surrounded the village. A force of 600 men made up of Americans, White Russians, Canadians, and French were forced to fight a Bolshevik force of 2,500 men. During the four-day onslaught, the Bolsheviks launched around 4,000 artillery shells upon the Entente forces, nearly overwhelming them. Only a desperate surprise counter-attack led by the Americans would force the Bolsheviks to retreat, leading to an American victory. At the end of the day, the Entente had 30 of their men killed and 100 wounded. The Bolsheviks suffered heavier casualties with around 500 of their men killed and 30 of them captured. While the Americans may have felt some relief and even joy in their victory, it would soon turn to dismay when they heard the news of the armistice. Everyone else would get to go home except them.

Purgatory & Departure

They had no reason now to be there, but they could not leave. To these men, it must have felt like Purgatory, awaiting their chance to leave this place of Hell-like torture. Leaving Russia would not be a simple task. It was not a matter of packing everything up and marching back to the port at Archangel. The White Sea, on which that port sat, was frozen. The Polar Bears would have to wait for everything to thaw — and the orders from Washington — to begin departure.

At home, the public became restless at the fact that American soldiers were trapped in Russia after the Great War had finally ended. While everyone waited for Washington to respond, the Bolsheviks began conducting hit-and-run raids upon the Entente forces that soon racked up casualties. For example, the Bolsheviks chased the Americans to Shenkursk and would end up forcing another American retreat. In this battle, the Polar Bears lost 27 men, had 100 wounded, and saw 30 men go missing. It would not be until February 22, 1919, that the forces in Archangel would receive a wire from President Wilson to begin preparing to leave Russia for good. This was all good news, but the sea would not thaw until late spring or early summer; the Polar Bears would have to continue hunkering down to avoid being pushed into the sea and perishing. Casualties from hit-and-run raids would continue mounting.

On April 17, 1919, the Polar Bears would receive more good news. U.S. Army Brigadier General Wilds P. Richardson arrived in Archangel via an icebreaker. He was charged with leading an orderly withdrawal, which meant that a return home was now within sight. In June 1919, the USS Des Moines arrived in Archangel to conduct the Polar Bears home. Only two railroad companies and a graves registration would temporarily be left behind to recover the remains of our fallen soldiers, but even then, they would get to return home soon enough. Around 120 soldiers’ remains would be forced to be left behind when all of the American forces said their long-awaited goodbyes to Russia.

Aftermath

It was while the Polar Bears were aboard the USS Des Moines that they decided to give themselves the nickname of “Polar Bears” for their having survived the brutal Russian winter. By the end of this fateful expedition, America had suffered 553 casualties: 109 dying in battle, 35 dying later of battle wounds, 81 dying from disease, 19 dying from accidents, 305 wounded, and 4 who became POWs but later were released.

The expedition was a failure from the start, and even worse, it had morphed into an untenable and dangerous situation for the men trapped in Northern Russia. With their first objective already dead before their arrival, mission creep would end up entangling America’s boys into a conflict with the Bolsheviks, even after the Great War had ended. If there are any lessons from this to be taken, it’s this: beware of foreign wars. There is also a lesson here about taking due care regarding whom you form alliances with. With good reason would President Warren G. Harding later criticize the Wilson administration for such a doomed expedition that got out of hand.

The ramifications of this went well beyond just at home in America; in fact, they influenced international relationships. As you can imagine from the Soviet perspective, they were not too happy that the United States fought on their own land and against their Red Army. Even in 1965, the Soviets were still showing propaganda films about the Polar Bears, alleging that they committed great atrocities against the Russian people. The Russians wouldn’t forget, even if Americans did.

At least 226 Polar Bears were buried in Northern Russia. The Polar Bears even after returning home would not forget their dead. Immediately, they began lobbying the government to bring home the remains of their comrades. They would go even beyond lobbying and lead an expedition in the fall of 1929 to bring home the remains of their men. Their efforts were successful, and it is believed that only around 30 men now remain buried somewhere in Northern Russia. The last-surviving Polar Bear would pass away in 2003, but their memory lives on as local legends in Michigan.

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Sources

“Much Ado About Nothing: Allied Intervention in the Russian Civil War,” George Mason University.

Alexander F. Barnes and Cassandra J. Rhodes, “The Polar Bear Expedition: The U.S. Intervention in Northern Russia, 1918–1919,” U.S. Army, Army Sustainment (March–April 2012).

“‘Nonsense From the Beginning’ — Allied Intervention in Russia’s Civil War at 100: Historical Perspectives from Combatant Countries,” The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 32 No. 4 (October–December 2019).

George W. Patterson III, “Britain’s Secret Weapon Against the Bolsheviks,” U.S. Naval Institute, Proceedings 77/1/575 (January 1951).

Sumner Shapiro, “Intervention in Russia (1918-1919),” U.S. Naval Institute, Proceedings 99/4/842 (April 1973).

Roderick A. Hosler, “The American Intervention in North Russia, 1918-1919,” Army Historical Foundation.

“Russia Quits the War,” Facing History & Ourselves.

Robert Höhne, “Success and Failure of the British North Russia Intervention,” The Society for Army Historical Research.

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“The White Wastes & The Red Menace: The Polar Bear Expedition & The Roots of the Cold War,” Army Heritage Center Foundation.

“Allied Intervention in the Russian Civil War,” Wikipedia. Accessed July 12, 2024.

“American Expeditionary Force, North Russia,” Wikipedia. Accessed July 14, 2024.

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