Polar Bears

The strikes and riots began in St Petersburg seventy-seven years ago, the February Revolution that the Russians celebrate due to the peculiarities of the Old Style Calendar.

My sons would not care. The empire that was spawned by the Red Rising crumbled away when they were still pre-teens.

If they think that their Old Man is a Cold Warrior, it is in the context of a generation who might have done the jitterbug.

They are back in town. The younger is on Spring Break, and has eschewed a jaunt to sun-drenched Cancun for lack of cash and a nagging accounting course that may be the pivot point to admission to the Business School.

The older boy is joining the family business, but that is his business and if he wants to talk about it, that is entirely up to him. College is behind him now, and I am very proud of him. But both of the boys have changed a bit by their exposure to the Michigan winters where they went to school.

The younger son marveled at wearing a short-sleeve shirt when he returned to the gentler clime of the Old Dominion. In their way, the exposure to the endless winter of the upper Midwest has made them Polar Bears.

The days were starting to lengthen in St. Petersburg, though it was still bitter cold. The crisis had been brought to a head by agitators who opposed the Karensky regime that had followed the abdication of the Czar. They were opposed to the war with the Germans, too, and were determined to establish worker’s collectives and bring the fruit of Marx’s dialectic into being.

Bakeries were looted, and those that had purchased bread were robbed of it. Those that did not join the rioting were harassed, and mounted Cossacks attempted to restore order.

There was no hostility to the soldiers. Then, as now, people supported their troops regardless of what they thought of the larger bloody policy.

The Bolsheviks were determined to end Russian involvement in the German War, and Lenin dispatched my favorite communist Leon Trotsky to negotiate with the Central Powers.

On the 3rd of March the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was concluded after long and sometimes bitter negotiations. Trotsky at one point suspended the talks, but Germany resumed the offensive and under Lenin’s direct order, Trotsky accepted the German ultimatum.

The separate peace created a dangerous situation for the Allies in the west. The Germans were able to transfer forces to confront the British and French, and the spring offensive of 1918 was initially successful. The Germans appeared on the verge of triumph on the Western Front after four long years of fighting. Action had to be taken.

The Allies had already provided significant aid to try to keep the Russians in the war. Vast stores of war materiel remained vulnerable after the Russians laid down their arms. Russian port cities were suddenly open, and the Royal Navy’s iron blockade of the continent was springing leaks. Moreover, there was an orphan Czech army of 40,000 men left behind, suddenly at risk.

And at the end of the day, there was the issue of the triumph of the Bolsheviks, and a political bacillus that might spread like influenza through Western Europe, or even to the New World.

Karensky had already requested American assistance to provide security to the Trans-Siberian railroad.

During the summer of 1918, the American 85th Division, composed mostly of Michigan men whose grandfathers had made up the famed civil war Iron Brigade arrived in England from Fort Custer, near Battle Creek, Michigan. Most were destined for the west front, but 5,000 troops of the 339th Infantry and support units were issued Russian weapons and equipment.

Under the Command of General William S. Graves, one force sailed for the White Sea port of Archangel, 600 miles north of Moscow, and the other to the end of the earth at Vladivostok, to ensure that the Japanese did not exploit the situation unilaterally.

When the Americans arrived at Archangel on the 4th of September, they joined an international force under British command. The strategy was to advance south and east and join Russian and foreign anti-Bolshevik armies. First American casualties occurred two weeks later, south of the village of Obozerskaya.

The snow was deep and the night and lines of communication were long. The Americans built barracks in the places they were stationed to guard railroad junctions and river crossings. One of the little collection of buildings was called “Camp Michigan,” and the men began to call themselves the Polar Bear Expedition.

The Germans quit the war on the 11th of November of that year, but the intervention in Russia went on. The American front lines were at Toulgas, 200 miles from Archangel, and the scene of an Armistice Day battle that marked the beginning of a decline in American morale. In January 1919 the Reds launched an offensive northward, and the allies were forced to regroup. The Michigan men were more widely dispersed in the snow and pine trees.

Back home the intervention was getting mixed press. Some newspapers wondered why American forces were still overseas. In the discussion of the Versailles Treaty, the whole Russian adventure did not get much attention. The war was over, and the Spanish Flu was spreading. In the 1918-19 pandemic as many as 675,000 Americans died of it, more North Americans than had ever seen combat in the Great War.

There were two unsettling incidents in March of 1919. Members of one company in Archangel may have disobeyed a direct order, and an antiwar petition was signed by members of another company. The troops were ready for the new American commander who arrived at Archangel in April 1919 with orders to withdraw.  As soon as navigation opened in June, the American forces pulled out. 

On August 5, the headquarters of the American force in Northern Russia was officially closed. They had taken more than four hundred casualties, and most of the dead were killed after the last shot was fired on the Western Front. Some of the bodies were not recovered until after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. 

Veterans of the Polar Bear Expedition held a reunion in Detroit, three years after they left Russia. It was the same year Lenin proclaimed the foundation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The Polar Bears continued to have the odd luncheon meeting up through the 1980s, almost making it to the end of the USSR.

Before their passing, the association erected a marble statue of a Polar Bear in Troy, Michigan. That town was mostly cornfields when I was growing up in the village next door. The optimistic sign at the city limits proudly said ”Troy: The City of Tomorrow Today.”

After the riots that destroyed old Detroit in the 1960s, it seemed as good a place to put it as any.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

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