Photo below: Funeral Parade
"This is not the Western Front"
Submitted by Mike_G on Mon, 05/30/2011 - 6:21pm.
"It is hardly no front at all."
So wrote my grandfather in this letter to his parents dated "Archangel, Feb. 14, 1919. He was one of the approximately 5,000 "Polar Bears" of the American North Russia Expeditionary Force who fought the Bolshevik Red Army in North Russia from Sept. 1918 until June 1919 - more than six months after the end of the Great War. He was one of the lucky ones - more than 230 of his fellow soldiers died in North Russia.
The "dead soldiers from Russia" shown in this photo were disinterred from the Allied Cemetery in Archangel and shipped home for reburial closer to their families. Archangel finally fell to the Bolshevik forces in Feb. 1920. The remains of most of the other American dead were recovered in 1929 and brought back to the USA.
In addition to Sunday night's dinner, the 81st annual Memorial Day Service for the "Polar Bears" was held today at White Chapel Memorial Cemetery in Troy, Michigan. Their service and sacrifice have not been forgotten.
Photo below: American Expedition Archangel 1918-1918In the summer of 1918,
Submitted by flickr4jazz on Tue, 05/31/2011 - 6:19am.
In the summer of 1918, President Woodrow Wilson, at the urging of Britain and France, sent an infantry regiment to north Russia to fight the Bolsheviks in hopes of persuading Russia to rejoin the war against Germany. The 339th Infantry Regiment, with the first battalion of the 310th Engineers and the 337th Ambulance and Hospital Companies, arrived at Archangel, Russia, on September 4, 1918. About 75 percent of the 5,500 Americans who made up the North Russian Expeditionary Forces were from Michigan; of those, a majority were from Detroit. The newspapers called them "Detroit's Own,"; they called themselves "Polar Bears." They marched on Belle Isle on July 4, 1919. Ninety-four of them were killed in action after the United States decided to withdraw from Russia but before Archangel's harbor thawed.
In 1929, five former "Polar Bears" of the 339th Infantry Regiment returned to north Russia in an attempt to recover the bodies of fellow soldiers who had been killed in action or died of exposure or disease ten years earlier. The group was selected by the members of the Polar Bear Association under the auspices of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The trip was sponsored by the federal government and the State of Michigan.
Some pictures
Submitted by gator on Tue, 06/07/2011 - 12:40pm.
Archangel is actually the town where I was born and I was taught in school about British-American troops who invaded Archangelsk back in August of 1918. British memorial cemetery is situated there. British soldiers of WWI and WWII (sailors from polar convoys who were killed by nazis) are buried there. If memory serves me, there were also few American graves. http://autotravel.ru/phalbum.php/90212/137
You can see few interesting photos of WWI period here: http://warhistory.livejournal.com/1574525.html You can use Google translator to read the captions under the pictures.