When Americans spent Christmas and New Year’s freezing in Russia
Published: 30 December 2024
By Nicholas Slayton
via the Task and Purpose website

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Soldiers with the 3rd Platoon, 339th Infantry Regiment in Russia in 1919. American Red Cross Collection, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
As World War I ended, thousands of American troops were fighting in the early stages of Russia’s civil war.
106 years ago, American troops were in a pitched battle for control of villages in northern Russia, fighting on a mission tied to a war that had ended a month prior. It was Dec. 30, 1918, and American soldiers from the Midwest were outside the village of Kadish, preparing to launch an offensive that would move from town to town, regaining territory ceded to Bolsheviks a month prior. It was part of one of the biggest fights between Americans and Russian communists, but it was years before the outbreak of the Cold War.
World War I ended on Nov. 11, 1918 with the armistice. The guns fell silent on the Western Front. On the Eastern Front, fighting had stopped earlier in the summer when Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik government signed a treaty ending fighting with Germany. The Central Powers began shifting troops west. That’s why in the summer of 1918 the allies of the Entente Treaty sent thousands of soldiers to Russia, hoping to secure war materials and possibly reestablish the Eastern Front. After some goading from French and British leaders, American President Woodrow Wilson also agreed to help.
Allied forces carried out interventions throughout the former Russian Empire, with thousands of troops deploying to the north and south, as well as into Siberia and around the eastern city of Vladivostok. It was the American Expeditionary Force, North Russia that would later earn the nickname the “Polar Bear Expedition.”Roughly 5,000 troops, mainly from the 339th Infantry Regiment went to Arkhangelsk (another 8,000 or so from other units went east). Their mission: protect the weapons and also support the Czechoslovak Legion, an allied force fighting against the communists in the expanding Russian Civil War.
The European powers sent veterans of the last four years of conflict. They had seen the most intense fighting of the war; some had survived Verdun. The American forces, predominantly from Michigan and Wisconsin, were not hardened from fighting on the Western Front. In fact, many of the Americans thought they were heading to France. After all, that was where the bulk of the fighting was, they were mobilized to fight against the German-led Central Powers. They were told they were there to secure a large cache of weapons and munitions at Arkhangelsk, lest it fall into German hands or into the Bolsheviks.
American troops reached Arkhangelsk in September 1918, after some training in the United Kingdom on surviving arctic conditions, and after an outbreak of the Spanish influenza spread through their transport ships. After that, conditions for the expeditionary force got worse. They found themselves put under the command of British forces there, and then started expanding out from the city, heading into the north Russian countryside to fight the Bolshevik forces — referred to contemporaneously as the “bolsheviki” or “bolos.” It was also starting to get cold and medical supplies were in short supply. Many Americans were dying from disease and exposure, not combat.
They pushed out into the countryside, engaging in skirmishes with the Bolsheviks. For the Americans, this was their first taste of the kind of trench warfare and machine gun fire that had defined the first World War. Soon they found themselves trapped as the Russian winter set in.
Read the entire article on the Task and Purpose website here:
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