“It was a somewhat bizarre series of events that had brought this contingent of American soldiers to this remote and desolate place.”
By James Carl Nelson
IT WAS NOVEMBER 11, 1918 – Armistice Day. The fighting in Europe had just ended, but for a contingent of 5,000 Doughboys their war was only beginning.
Even as Germany’s surrender was being signed in a railway car at Compiegne Forest near Paris, even as throngs were celebrating in London and New York, Captain Robert Boyd and the men of the U.S. Army’s 339th Infantry Regiment, Company B, were fighting for their lives against hundreds of Bolshevik troops in the snowy, bitterly cold wastes of northern Russia.
It was a somewhat bizarre series of events that had brought this contingent of American soldiers to this remote and desolate place: the village of Toulgas on the Dvina River, 150 miles from the relative safety of the frozen port of Archangel on Russia’s northern coast.
Their mission had been devised mainly by the British during the Great War’s darkest hour the previous spring. The German offensive of March, 1918 threatened to break the Allied lines in France and roll the British all the way to the Channel ports before the United States, which had entered the war in April 1917, had enough troops ready for the Western Front. Desperate, the brass agreed to divert a small force of American soldiers to far off Russia of all places to fight in an entirely new war.
The collapse of the Czarist monarchy the same year had, by the end of 1917, resulted in the rise of a Bolshevist regime. By March, the revolutionaries hurriedly negotiated a treaty with Germany, signing the agreement in March of 1918. Secure in east, Germany rushed scores of veteran divisions from the Russian Front to France to take part in the offensive.
With their backs to the wall, the British and French desperately searched for a solution to their plight, and eventually settled on the idea of somehow reigniting the war on the Eastern Front, which might ultimately divert German forces there once more, and stopping the flow of enemy manpower to the Western Front.
To that end, troops—British, French, Italian, and even Poles—would be sent to northern Russia with the aim of reaching Kotlas, 300 miles southeast of Archangel, and Vologda, about 400 miles due south.
As the troops pushed their way through the backwoods of Russia, they would recruit an army of White Army loyalists to help spread counter-revolution from the southeast all the way to St. Petersburg and Moscow to the west. By May, British troops were already in Murmansk, northwest of Archangel, and ready to do what many considered to be the Lord’s work.
The British also by then had approached Woodrow Wilson and appealed to him to join an intervention in Russia. The U.S. president initially demurred, saying he did not want to drain any American soldiers and weaken the Allied effort in the west.
As the Allies continued to press, and the Supreme War Council led by Marshal Ferdinand Foch approved the sending of Americans into Russia, Wilson finally caved, and agreed to authorize one regiment with the expressed, single intent of guarding the millions of dollars’ worth of military and other stores that had been sent from the Allies to Archangel to help the Russian war effort.
And so in mid-August 1918, as the men of the 339th Regiment of the 85th U.S. Division trained in southern England, they began to hear outlandish rumours that their destination was not the trenches of France, but instead Archangel, Russia, of all places.
The British, whom the war council had put in charge of the intervention, had taken the port in a bloodless coup in August 1918 and by the time the three transports carrying the Americans docked on Sept. 5, the Bolsheviks that had been ousted had stripped the city of almost every bit of materiel and hustled their plunder down the Archangel-Vologda railway line and up the Dvina River.
Ironically, with them went the ostensible and only reason that Wilson had approved the intervention—the guarding of stores. But that didn’t stop the British from finding good use for the 339th Regiment, which by the time of debarkation had holds filled with Influenza-ridden, dying men.
As the 339th’s commander, Colonel George Stewart ham-handedly looked the other way, the British co-opted his men and hustled them away.
Even as the 339th’s third battalion was debarking on Sept. 6, it found itself chugging south on the railway towards Vologda. In ensuing days, the first battalion would steam southeast up the wide, sluggish Dvina, its destination Kotlas.
The British commander, General Frederick Poole, was certain each force would reach its destination by November, a ridiculous assumption considering that the Americans and their allies would very shortly begin encountering, and battling, Bolsheviks, or “Bolos” as the Americans soon called them.
The third battalion battled mightily through the fall on the railway line, but could push its lines fewer than 20 miles south of Obozerskaya, which sits about 100 miles below Archangel. Fighting in swamps and thick scrub and woods, the Allies discovered they were no match for the gathering Red Army.
Casualties soon mounted there and at Kodish to the southeast, where Company K and, later, Company E of the second battalion struggled mightily to reach the Red base at Plesetskaya. “General Winter,” who had defeated Napoleon and would 25 years later defeat even Hitler, reared its head, and men and machine guns froze as the temperatures across the fronts dipped to -50 degrees F.
On the Dvina, Company B fought a spirited fight at Seltso in mid-September, losing a handful of men, before retreating farther north to the village of Toulgas. There the unit would spend much of the fall and winter. Company A, meanwhile, was sent southwest up the Vaga River, and would take up the farthest, and most forlorn, position of all at a cluster of villages surrounding Ust Padenga—almost 250 miles south of Archangel.
Battles raged at Kodish on the Emtsa River through October and November, and on Nov. 11—the day the great war ended—Company B and its allies, which included a Canadian artillery battery and some loyal White Army soldiers, were attacked and spent the next several days heroically beating off a horde of Reds.
They would reinforce their string of blockhouses in the coming weeks, and bravely hang on—just barely—as attacks and depredations by the Bolos continued into March.
At Ust Padenga on the Vaga, the Bolos also launched an attack on Lt. Harry Mead’s 45-man platoon in the early morning of Jan. 19, 1919. Mead and just a handful of survivors made it to Company A’s headquarters one mile north.
After severe bombardments by Bolo artillery, the entire host of Company A—what was left of it—plunged into the snow and cold and headed north for Shenkursk, thence Vistafka 20 miles farther on, where it circled the wagons and fought furiously until being finally relieved on March 9, 1919.
Company A lost more than 25 men during its desperate hegira and in the ensuing siege. Company B lost nine men dead and wounded at Toulgas, and would lose more before being relieved by loyal Russians.
All told, across the various fronts, more than 150 Americans were killed in action or died from wounds and accidents, while another 12 were taken prisoner by the Reds between September 1918 and April, 1919.
Even as the men wondered if they’d ever get relief, a growing hue and cry in the United States emerged over the men’s situation. Wilson finally gave the order for the Americans to pull out before summer. In June, the fronts were turned over to loyal Russians and just-arriving British troops, many of them out-of-work veterans of the Western Front, and the Americans sailed for France, and then home.
The survivors would call themselves “Polar Bears,” and wonder at their bizarre, frozen ordeal, and wonder as well just why they had been sent to fight and die and suffer in the wilds of deepest Russia. No good answer was ever given, beyond the one that Lt. Charles Ryan of Company K jotted into his diary at one point during the long winter:
“We’re here because we’re here.”
James Carl Nelson is the author of The Polar Bear Expedition: The Heroes of America’s Forgotten Invasion of Russia, 1918-1919 (William Morrow, 2019), and three other books about the American military experience in World War One.
Originally published Feb. 19, 2019
