Rule of the East

Vladivostok Station., originally uploaded by chimpsonfilm.

The Vladivostok Terminal of the Trans Siberian Railway is an elegant structure. It is eight time zones and several days' journey away from it's opposite terminus.

The Polar Bear Memorial

Уехать за горизонт, originally uploaded by Mothlike.

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."