The Polar Bear Expedition: The Heroes of America’s Forgotten Invasion of Russia, 1918-1919

283 Pages·2019·16.89 MB·English

by  James Carl Nelson

Map

Contents
Cover
Map
Title Page
Prologue
Chapter One: The March to Intervention
Chapter Two: Over Where
Chapter Three: To Russia. With Angst.
Chapter Four: We’re Here Because We’re Here
Chapter Five: Archangel
Chapter Six: Upriver
Chapter Seven: The Romance of Company A
Chapter Eight: The Strangest Fighting Mission Ever Undertaken
Chapter Nine: The Bridge
Chapter Ten: Onega
Chapter Eleven: Storm Clouds
Chapter Twelve: Friends and Comrades
Chapter Thirteen: Verst 445
Chapter Fourteen: Armistice Day, Part 1
Chapter Fifteen: Armistice Day, Part 2
Chapter Sixteen: The Pinega
Chapter Seventeen: The Lonely Death of Francis Cuff
Chapter Eighteen: Medicine Men
Chapter Nineteen: A Thanksgiving of Sorts
Chapter Twenty: Better Than No War at All
Chapter Twenty-One: K Means Kodish
Chapter Twenty-Two: The Sad Case of Sergeant Young
Chapter Twenty-Three: The Devil Comes to Nijni Gora
Chapter Twenty-Four: Flight
Chapter Twenty-Five: Vistafka
Chapter Twenty-Six: To What End
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Why Did We Go to Russia
Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Ballad of Bolshie Ozerki
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Getting Out
Chapter Thirty: The Gulag Amerikanski
Chapter Thirty-One: A Return to Russia
Epilogue
Author’s Note: The Polar Bears
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Notes
Index
Photo Section
About the Author
Also by James Carl Nelson
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
Nijni Gora, Russia
January 19, 1919
T
hey’ve been expecting it for weeks—hell, months. And so the men of
Company A of the 339th Infantry Regiment—the Polar Bears, they would come
to call themselves—have stood night and day in forty-below-zero temperatures.
They stamp their feet and try not to touch bare skin on the frozen barrels of their
weapons lest their flesh be ripped off; they peer through the deep, ebony night
from their dark, log-lined dugouts into the frigid tundra toward the south and
east across the ice-choked river and watch for it, wait for it, and wonder how
many will come and how they will perform when they do—and they wonder,
too, if and how they will ever get out of this place, this frozen Hades, this last
place on earth at the top of the world.
And then early on this morning they do come, a horde of them, dim forms in
the distance spread out across the Vaga River, some on skis and others on
snowshoes and all of them armed, like ghost warriors traversing the River Styx
—hundreds of them to their mere handful of forty-six.
Bolos, the men call them.
Bolsheviks.
Now a shell, flung from upriver, arcing and piercing the barely gray of dawn,
flies over the village. Lt. Harry Mead awakens with a start, quickly dons his fur
hat and overcoat and boots, and races to the far outpost, where this scant group
of half-frozen men stands guard against not only the enemy but the tide of
history.
The sergeant hands him his field glass and he squints through the misty,
blowing snow, the only sounds the sharp snapping of frozen tree branches and
the dull booming of the river ice cracking. He sees them now, coming on several
hundred yards in the distance, and he quickly understands that the company is
probably doomed.
Now a grayish form enters his view, much closer, and he peels the glass from
his eye. Steam comes from his mouth as the thin outpost is now about to be
overrun by a nearer group of the enemy, who have snuck closer and rise like
dervishes from their concealment in the deep snow.
Lt. Harry Mead, late of Valparaiso, Indiana, and Detroit, Michigan, stranded
more than two hundred miles from his regiment’s base at Archangel, Russia,
doesn’t have to speak as the mass of Bolos descends on his small detachment.
His men are already furiously firing their machine guns and rifles at this grisly
apparition, all while more artillery shells spew over and land amid them. But
Mead yells the words anyway, as if by rote, as if it’s not too late, as if any one of
them has a chance.
“Fire!” Mead orders his men. “For God’s sakes, fire!”
Chapter One
The March to Intervention
T
he preliminaries began on March 9, 1918, with millions of high-explosive and
gas shells raining across the front between the northern French cities of Ypres
and St. Quentin; the smothering of the British-held territory continued through
that week and beyond, and was topped off with a continuous salvo from 6,700
pieces of German artillery, which began at 4:40 A.M. on March 21.
Five hours later, heavy mortars began raining death and destruction on the
British Fifth Army, and five minutes later the advance of three German armies,
sixty-nine divisions in all, poured from their trenches and headed east, with the
aim of splitting the junction of British and French forces on the southern end of
the Somme front and sending the Brits in a panic for the protection of the
Channel ports.
There was an urgency to the assault, and for good reason. With the signing of
the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on March 3, Russia had officially taken itself out of
the war and relieved the pressure on Germany’s Eastern Front. After years of
fighting a two-front war, German forces were now consolidated. Meanwhile, the
United States, which had declared war on Germany nearly a year before, had yet
to send enough men across the Atlantic to tip the balance in the Allies’ favor on
the Western Front. But the Yanks were coming. During that spring of 1918,
therefore, Germany had a small and unique window in which to act while the
numbers favored them, and so the handpicked assault troops went forward in
great and deadly haste.
Above the attackers, 326 fighter aircraft soared into the morning, their
opposition just 261 British planes. Following barrages, small teams of storm
troopers appeared out of the deep fog and, ignoring the British strong points, cut
swaths through the trenches with light machine guns, automatic weapons, and
flamethrowers.
By the end of the first day of what would be a months-long offensive, the
Germans had pushed more than four miles through the British and were still
advancing. In their wake, they left the bodies of an untold number of defenders,
thousands of wounded, and 21,000 prisoners. By March 23, three huge guns
made by the arms manufacturer Krupp had been hauled forward and began
sending shells into Paris, seventy-two miles away. Two hundred Parisians would
be killed on that day alone.
Those unlucky Parisians would be but grains of sand in an ocean of war that had
enveloped France since August 1914, when a gray tide of Germans had pushed
across the border with Belgium and by early September had very nearly taken
Paris. The flood was checked on the Marne River east of the French capital in
early September, but the war—it would eventually become known as the Great
War—had only begun. The Germans intended to stay, and by the end of 1914 a
dizzying series of parallel zigzagging trenches—German, French, and, to the
north, those of France’s British allies—scarred the French soil from Switzerland
to the North Sea as all sides settled into a deadlock.
Over the ensuing months and years, incredibly costly attempts would be
made on all sides to break that deadlock, only to fall victim to a new generation
of powerful killing tools, chief among them the machine gun, long-range
artillery, and gas. The men, meanwhile, lived like troglodytes in the trenches,
sloshing about in knee-high water and dodging rats that fed on the dead, and
poking their heads above ground only to watch for a coming enemy attack across
the scarred ground pocked by shell holes and barbed wire and mud.
And the attacks did come, from all sides. At Loos in the fall of 1915, more
than eighty percent of an attacking force of 10,000 Brits were killed or wounded,
cut down in rows by machine guns as they advanced. In a single day—July 1,
1916—at the Somme more than 20,000 British soldiers were killed and another
25,000 wounded, this although more than 200,000 artillery rounds had been fired
at the German lines prior to the attack. Between July 1916 and the following
November, the British would take six miles of ground, losing almost 100,000
men in the effort; the Germans, meanwhile, lost more than 160,000 men over the
same period and same ground.
The French fared no better. An April 1917 offensive at the Aisne River was
launched with the hope of capturing six miles of territory, employing
newfangled tanks in battle for the first time. But the advance quickly ground
down, and by the time it was called off, 100,000 French had become casualties.
By then, the French had lost so many men—almost 1.4 million French soldiers
would die by the end of 1918, a number dwarfed only by the 1.8 million
Germans killed in the war—that there were open revolts in the ranks. Fifty
French soldiers—poilus—were subsequently tried, found guilty of mutiny, and
shot by firing squads, while hundreds of others were imprisoned.