The Polar Bear Memorial
You won't find it in Arkhangelsk, the location of the "campaign." It's in Troy, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. Allied commanders decided to deploy soldiers to Arkhangelsk after the conclusion of World War I. Their justification for this superbly dumb expedition was to defeat the Bolshevik armies and rejoin with the Czech Legion.
Fifteen hundred infantrymen from Michigan and Wisconsin were sent to fight over some of the coldest and most inhospitable terrain in the Northern Hemisphere. They joined an additional thirty five hundred British and French soldiers along the Murmansk coast; facing the White Sea and the Arctic Ocean. Their mission proved to be futile and directionless. Extreme cold, a shortage of supplies and the Spanish Flu combined with their unclear objectives deteriorated the troops morale.
After several public calls to bring "Detroit's Own" back home Woodrow Wilson (and the other Allied commanders) decided to pull the plug on the "Polar Bear Expedition." By the early summer of 1919 the soldiers began to return. It would take another ten years for the Russians to return the remains of the American dead. The Polar Bear Memorial in Troy has a quote from Stephen Decatur engraved on its base: "Our Country, in her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our Country, right or wrong."
3 comments:
superbly dumb expedition was to defeat the Bolshevik armies
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I do not know. I do not know how "dumb" was that particular expedition, in military or political terms. I do not know whether it was technically possible at all to stop Bolsheviks at that time, considering the Allies weakened by the war, old Russian imperial being totally discredited, and a huge part of the Russian population being under great illusions of future justice and prosperity, promised by the Bolsheviks. What I do know, is that if it _was_ possible to stop them by any means, the millions and millions would have survived. And maybe Hitler would not come to power either.
But of course, who could know then?
But I would not call this "dumb", as I would not call so any military operation of the Allies during the next great war, WW2, no matter how inefficient and disastrous some of them were.
Although the overall objective of the mission might not have been "dumb," the idea that 7,000 troops could fight a land war against a force many times their size throughout the vast nation of Russia.
I never meant to condone what the Bolsheviks did to the Russian people. Nevertheless, the leaders of Allied nations at the time ought to have realized how low the prospects were for victory.
Well, the way I understand the matter, it was not that simple and unambiguous. Russians did fight themselves, the resistance had been going on for more than three years, and the outcome was not clear until the capture of Crimea in the fall of 1920. The Allies took action not only in Arkhangelsk. The troops (not only American, but also British, French, Japanese, Greek) were deployed in other key ports - Odessa, Murmansk, Vladivostok. There was a flow of military supplies to the White forces. In the summer of 1919 Denikin's forces were close to capturing Moscow. So there was a dynamically developing situation and certain relatively small local operation could indeed tip the scale. So I can not agree that the idea was - that abovementioned 7,000 troops had to fight a war throughout the entire Russia.
(Unless, of course, there is a deep conviction that any solution of any social/political problem involving a use of force, that is any war or violence in general is morally unacceptable... As much as I personally hate violence, I must admit and realize that it is, has been and, probably, always will be an inseparable part of human nature, therefore, a part of history etc...)
Anyway. Looking at this photograph, no doubt a remarkable one, I may agree that for someone who's never been there, this image could really bring about a feeling of profound remoteness, vastness, foreignness and ... well... amplify, mostly on emotional level, the conviction that it is not right to try to handle political events in this (or other) huge, faraway incomprehensible land merely by sending there a number of armed people.
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