The Forgotten War: America’s Invasion of Russia
Few recall that in 1918, American soldiers landed in Russia, fighting Bolsheviks for over a year in a little-known chapter of U.S. history.
As World War I drew near its close, the world was chaotic and unstable. While most remember the Western Front, or the Armistice of November 1918, almost no one knows that United States troops fought on Russian soil. In fact, at the tail end of the Great War, President Woodrow Wilson authorized two separate American military interventions in Russia, sending thousands of U.S. soldiers to Archangel in the north and Vladivostok in the far east. Their mission was foggy at best, and their presence lingered far longer than many people realize.
The roots of America’s Siberian and Northern Russia Expeditions lay in the geopolitical confusion unleashed by the Bolshevik Revolution. When the Russian Czar was overthrown in 1917, Russia left the Allied war effort, signing a separate peace with Germany. The Allies, including the United States, were deeply unsettled by the rise of the Bolsheviks and worried about the fate of military supplies in the vast, frigid Russian north—supplies that had been sent to support the now-defunct Eastern Front. There was also concern about the approximately 50,000 Czech Legionnaires stranded in Russia, trying to escape Bolshevik control and reach the Western Front via Vladivostok.
In July 1918, about 5,000 “Polar Bears,” mostly from Michigan’s 339th Infantry Regiment, landed in the northern Russian port of Archangel. Their stated objective was to safeguard the military supplies and assist anti-Bolshevik White Russian forces. At almost the same time, about 8,000 American troops under the command of General William S. Graves were deployed in Vladivostok, in the Far East, as part of a much larger international force of Allied nations.
The circumstances for the American soldiers were bewildering. Both expeditions suffered from ambiguous orders and shifting objectives. In the north, they were quickly drawn into the Russian Civil War, engaging in bitter skirmishes with Bolshevik or “Red” forces, often fighting in subzero temperatures and in near-total darkness as winter set in. Lines of supply were perilously thin, and communication with higher command was sporadic. Morale plummeted as soldiers wondered why they were fighting a war in which the United States had no clear stake. In Siberia, American troops primarily guarded the Trans-Siberian Railway and protected supply depots, but were often inevitably drawn into the conflicts between Red and White forces.
The American interventions in Russia were largely unpopular among the men who served. Some letters home described confusion at being asked to fight in an unfamiliar land after the armistice had been declared in Western Europe. Soldiers in Archangel and elsewhere wondered if they’d ever see home again, with some units not being withdrawn until June 1919—many months after the end of the First World War. Ill-prepared for the gruesome Russian winter, hundreds fell victim not only to combat, but also to frostbite, disease, and psychological strain.
News of the interventions in Russia was tightly controlled and quickly faded from the American public’s consciousness. The legacy of the “Polar Bear Expedition” and the Siberian campaign remained a bitter memory among veterans and their families but never really entered the broader narrative of American military history. Instead, these chapters were gradually overshadowed by the tumult of the 1920s and, later, the Second World War. Soviet leaders, however, did not forget. The episode fostered distrust between the new Bolshevik government and the West—a mistrust that simmered and would later form the backdrop for Cold War hostilities.
Today, only a handful of memorials, scattered primarily in Michigan and Alaska, mark the places where American soldiers were interred following their deaths in northern Russia. Personal diaries and military reports from the “Polar Bears” and their Siberian counterparts offer rare glimpses into a harrowing, little-discussed episode that tested both the resolve and the morale of U.S. troops abroad.
Ultimately, the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War was a strategic failure, achieving little of its intended purpose and arguably exacerbating suspicion between Russia and the West for decades to come. The story of America’s forgotten war in Russia serves as a sobering reminder of how quickly even significant historical events can fade from memory, and how the consequences of such moments can echo far beyond their time.
###END###
