At the end of 1918, as World War I drew to a close on the Western Front, thousands of
American troops were suddenly repositioned in the remote tundra of North Russia. Their surprising
directive was issued to help the British and French in a standoff with the Russian Red Army,
the newly-formed rebel communist fighting force that had grown in the wake of revolution in
Russia. As civil war gripped the country, the American soldiers waited out the harsh
winter in fear and confusion of what was to come when the frozen landscape thawed.
It would be the tensions driven by these harsh conditions that would eventually drive the U.S.
into one of the only open rounds of combat in history against its great Russian adversary.
By the spring of 1919, hundreds of American soldiers would be lost both to fighting and
to a plague of influenza that spread rapidly in the miserable environment of Siberia. The
desperate men who had survived the winter only to face an unplanned war would come to believe
they were being taken advantage of by the British generals who were overseeing the
operation. And with their backs against the wall, talk of mutiny would begin to brew.
LOGO The 339th
The 339th Infantry Regiment, formed in June 1918, was made up mostly of young men from Michigan.
They came from car factories, dairy farms, and family businesses to Camp Custer in Battle Creek,
Michigan, where the 4,487-man unit spent a month in basic training before shipping out
on July 14th for England, where they would receive their marching orders.
They landed in Liverpool on August 4, 1918. They had been told that their
unit would be headed to the Western Front in France, but by this late point in the war,
the threat of the German army had been defanged by years of trench combat and fortified lines. It
seemed American reinforcements like the men of the 339th were more urgently needed elsewhere.
Earlier in the summer, President Woodrow Wilson had received requests from the governments of
Great Britain and France for assistance in an intervention being staged in North
Russia. President Wilson, in solidarity with his wartime allies, agreed to come to their aid,
sending 5,300 American troops to North Russia to fall under British command. But Wilson’s offer was
conditional - the role of the U.S. soldiers in Russia would be limited, and purely defensive.
They would not, in other words, be participating in any live combat. This stipulation, however,
proved to be hollow and short-lived. A Change of Plans: Red vs. White
The men of the 339th infantry division finally received word on where they would be serving
from General John J. Pershing, who passed down the directive from President Wilson. Instead of
heading for France and the Western Front, they would be redirected to North Russia to join
the British and French and aid in two primary objectives: preventing allied resources already
in Russia from falling into enemy hands, and aiding in the rescue of the Czechoslovak Legion,
a volunteer army of 40,000 Czech troops which opposed the communist Bolsheviks and had become
stranded along the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Their time in the Arctic began on a foreboding note,
as a handful of soldiers on the boat began to show signs of the Spanish flu, a pandemic that
had killed millions over the previous year. The diminished division arrived on the muddy
streets of Arkhangelsk on September 4, 1918. Arkhangelsk, a small port city in Northern Russia,
had become a major point of entry for the Allies during the war, due to its position both on the
Dvina River and the White Sea. Many of its local inhabitants resisted Bolshevik rule,
and it proved to be a strategic stronghold for the anti-communist White Russians as well,
having been captured by allied troops on behalf of the White Russian Army a month earlier.
Upon arrival, the men of the 339th were swiftly employed in an offensive maneuver,
already stepping outside the guidelines laid out by President Wilson. The first battalion was
sent hundreds of miles southeast from the port of Arkhangelsk along the Divina River, where British
troops had failed to capture the town of Kotlas and needed reinforcements. The third battalion
headed out in trains to make a play at controlling the Vologda railroad, and became entangled
in weeks of fire fighting with the Red Army. These two fronts, the river and the railroad,
proved nearly impossible to hold for any sustained amount of time, due to the tricky terrain. Because
of their long and narrow borders, they became difficult to re-supply and protect. Arkhangelsk
would soon freeze over and be closed off to any shipping of food or supplies. By October of 1918,
the allies were forced to give up both offenses, with the winter fast approaching
and the Red Army much more suited to the drop-in temperature. The Allies retreated.
A Dire Winter The retreat emboldened the Bolshevik army,
who went on the offensive along the Vaga River, where they chipped away at the meager front lines
of the Allied forces and forced them to retreat even further south. News of the Armistice on the
Western Front that ended World War I on November 11th eventually reached the Americans in North
Russia. Feeling as if their orders had been manipulated by the British to further interests
that did not concern them, the men began to voice their objections amongst themselves,
and morale continued to plummet. The Bolsheviks began to spread socialist propaganda in the press
directed at the U.S. troops – [quote] “Demand to be sent home!” they urged.
On January 19, 1919, the Bolsheviks launched an offensive of their own, sending a unit 4,000 men
strong into the village of Ust Padenga, where the Americans had settled for the winter. They
pelted the American shelters with heavy artillery and machine-gun fire, forcing the Americans to
abandon the village and fall further back along the river, doggedly pursued through the snow by
the Bolshevik troops. When the dust settled, 29 Americans had been killed, 58 were wounded, and 19
were unaccounted for - by far the bloodiest incident in the conflict in Russia thus far.
The struggle on the river proved to be a breaking point for the various allied troops on the ground
in North Russia. The White Russians had been the first to refuse orders, with two companies of the
Arkhangelsk Regiment having barricaded themselves in their barracks the previous
December. The American troops fired rounds into the windows and forced the mutineers out of the
building waving a white flag. The leaders of the revolt were rounded up and executed. On March 1,
a company of French soldiers then rejected orders to relieve the Americans still stationed on the
Vologda railroad. They eventually relented, but the force proved ineffective and would end up
stopping fighting altogether. With the prospect of any relief diminished, the seeds of mutiny were
sowed among the American infantry as well. Mutiny
The men communicated their frustration and exhaustion in the letters that made it through
censors to their families back home. The families, in turn, began to write to the press and circulate
petitions asking the government to bring the stranded Americans back home. The commander
of the 339th, Colonel Stewart, tried to keep his communications buoyant. But other members of the
American brass in Russia were less confident. Rumors of planned mutinies had found their
way back to Washington. Captain Eugene Prince composed a severe and pointed memo detailing
the bottoming morale among the troops. Colonel James Ruggles, wrote to his superiors that neither
the enlisted men nor their commanding officers were sure who or why they were still fighting
in Russia. They received no clear response. Members of Company A of the 339th made a desperate
attempt to cross enemy lines and peace with the Bolsheviks. One of them, who had Russian ancestry,
attempted to write a truce in rough Russian. [quote] “We are combating you and fighting
you only to stay alive,” the letter assured. [quote] “We support your desire to give up the
crown and throw the Tsarism down.” It’s unknown whether the letter ever reached the Bolsheviks,
or if it was captured by censors. But the sentiment was certainly
shared among the rest of the 339th. A small group of outraged privates in Company B,
led by Private Bill Henkelman and three others, drafted an ultimatum to their commander stating
that if they were not pulled off the assignment by March 15, they would refuse to advance any further
or put up any resistance to the enemy. Over 65 men signed the ultimatum, but the document proved
to be a mere tactic by its authors, keying the mutineers in to which soldiers they could trust
to join their fight. The commanding officers, aware of a stirring turmoil among their division,
took Company B off the front lines. On March 30th, Company I staged its
own small rebellion when a sergeant gave the order for the men to load up sleds
and return to the front lines. The men of Company I outright refused and barricaded
themselves into the barracks. Like Company B, they demanded to be given a swift withdrawal,
and asked for the officers to commit to a date. Colonel Stewart was brought in to speak with the
men and de-escalate the situation, reminding the men that mutiny was punishable by death.
The colonel acknowledged that he didn’t know what they were doing in North Russia,
but that one thing was clear – [quote] “if we don’t fight, we will all be wiped out,” he told
the men. Company I reluctantly agreed to load the sleds and return to combat, in exchange for a
release of another of their privates who had been arrested for dissent. Their mutiny too, was over.
Four days later, Army officers became aware of the soldiers’ plot to rebel, and Private
Henkelman was brought before a military court to answer to charges of treason, desertion,
and mutiny. He faced a death sentence. News of the various mutinies spread in the U.S. media,
especially in the local papers of Michigan, the home of the 339th. On February 16, 1919,
President Wilson asked his War Department to begin strategizing a withdrawal of the AEF in
North Russia. A month later, he traveled to Paris to meet with the commander in nothern Russia,
Brigadeer General Wilds P. Richardson, and told him to pull all American troops
out of the area as soon as the White Sea ice broke up and ships could dock at Arkhangelsk.
Homecoming
None of the mutinies of the winter and spring of 1919 were fully brought to fruition,
and yet the combined efforts of the tired, fed up 339th reached back to Washington and spoke
to the highest ranks of the American Defensive branch that these men were unlikely to take their
conditions much longer. Brig. Gen. Richardson arrived on an icebreaker in Arkhangelsk on
April 17 to oversee the withdrawal himself. 8,000 British volunteer troops arrived in North Russia
to relieve the Americans of their duties, and in early June, the majority of American
troops finally bid their bitter farewells to a region that had not treated them kindly.
The American soldiers had officially been re-designated the “American Expeditionary Force,
North Russia”. But during their withdrawal, the men of the AEF in North Russia took to
calling themselves “Polar Bears,” and were given authorization to wear an insignia that
featured a white bear and Russian script that translated to “we finish with the bayonet” on
their left sleeves. The AEF in North Russia was officially disbanded on August 5, 1919,
having gained nothing and lost hundreds - 144 men in total - to battle, to the
winter, to the disease that began to plague them before they ever stepped off the boat.
The American intervention in North Russia was over. They had lost. The next U.S. President,
Warren G. Harding, would call the expedition a grave mistake.
The embattled men of the 339th returned to Michigan and their relieved friends and
family. They formed the Polar Bear Association in 1922, and lobbied Congress for money to return to
Russia and recover the bodies of their fallen comrades who were left behind in the bitter
winter. The remains of 56 AEF in North Russia soldiers were eventually re-buried in White
Chapel Memorial Cemetery in Troy, Michigan, surrounding a sculpture of a Polar Bear.