In the brutally cold winter of 1919, 5,000 Americans battled the
Red Army 600 miles north of Moscow. We have forgotten. Russia has
not. "AN EXCELLENT BOOK." -Wall Street Journal * "INCREDIBLE." -
John U. Bacon * "EXCEPTIONAL." - Patrick K. O'Donnell * "A MASTER
OF NARRATIVE HISTORY." - Mitchell Yockelson * "GRIPPING." - Matthew
J. Davenport * "FASCINATING, VIVID." - Minneapolis Star Tribune An
unforgettable human drama deep with contemporary resonance,
award-winning historian James Carl Nelson's The Polar Bear
Expedition draws on an untapped trove of firsthand accounts to
deliver a vivid, soldier's-eye view of an extraordinary lost
chapter of American history-the Invasion of Russia one hundred
years ago during the last days of the Great War. In the winter of
1919, 5,000 U.S. soldiers, nicknamed "The Polar Bears," found
themselves hundreds of miles north of Moscow in desperate, bloody
combat against the newly formed Soviet Union's Red Army.
Temperatures plummeted to sixty below zero. Their guns and their
flesh froze. The Bolsheviks, camouflaged in white, advanced in
waves across the snow like ghosts. The Polar Bears, hailing largely
from Michigan, heroically waged a courageous campaign in the
brutal, frigid subarctic of northern Russia for almost a year. And
yet they are all but unknown today. Indeed, during the Cold War,
two U.S. presidents, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, would assert
that the American and the Russian people had never directly fought
each other. They were spectacularly wrong, and so too is the
nation's collective memory. It began in August 1918, during the
last months of the First World War: the U.S. Army's 339th Infantry
Regiment crossed the Arctic Circle; instead of the Western Front,
these troops were sailing en route to Archangel, Russia, on the
White Sea, to intervene in the Russian Civil War. The American
Expeditionary Force, North Russia, had been sent to fight the
Soviet Red Army and aid anti-Bolshevik forces in hopes of reopening
the Eastern Front against Germany. And yet even after the Great War
officially ended in November 1918, American troops continued to
battle the Red Army and another, equally formiddable enemy,
"General Winter," which had destroyed Napoleon's Grand Armee a
century earlier and would do the same to Hitler's once invincible
Wehrmacht. More than two hundred Polar Bears perished before their
withdrawal in July 1919. But their story does not end there. Ten
years after they left, a contingent of veterans returned to Russia
to recover the remains of more than a hundred of their fallen
brothers and lay them to rest in Michigan, where a monument
honoring their service still stands. In the century since, America
has forgotten the Polar Bears' harrowing campaign. Russia, notably,
has not, and as Nelson reveals, the episode continues to color
Russian attitudes toward the United States. At once epic and
intimate, The Polar Bear Expedition masterfully recovers this
remarkable tale at a time of new relevance.
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