THE ALLIED EXPEDITIONARY FORCE TO RUSSIA:

The Allied Expeditionary Force to Russia at the closing stages of W.W.I. was in direct response to the treaty of Brest Livotsk in which the Bolsheviks - having seized power in Russia with their October Revolution - now brokered a separate peace with Germany. This treaty effectively took Russia out of the war and allowed Germany to transfer nearly two million men to the Western Front in France.

Hoping to re-establish the Eastern Front – while covertly conspiring that whatever forces could be mustered might also crush the Bolsheviks – Great Britain and France lobbied a reluctant President Wilson to support the deployment of Allied troops to Russia. A firm believer in a country’s right to self-determination, the President was finally persuaded by a number of factors:

An Allied presence in Russia’s Pacific East would help stem the territorial ambitions of Imperial Japan, which had no qualms with taking advantage of Russia’s post revolution chaos. A presence in Russia’s far North would deter the German forces that occupied Finland from seizing the Russian White Sea ports of Murmansk and Archangel.

And finally, there was the plight of the 60,000 men of the Czech Legion. Formerly attached to the Russian Imperial Army, the men of the Czech Legion were strung out along the Trans Siberian Railroad. Efforts were being made to move them through the Russian Pacific port of Vladivostok where they could then be redeployed to France.

On September 1, 1918, 9,000 American troops landed in Vladivostok joining an Allied contingent of British, Japanese, and Italian soldiers. During their deployment, the American soldiers primarily guarded strategic points along the Trans Siberian Railroad. Their commander, General William S. Graves, managed to keep his soldiers from being drawn into planned combat operations in the burgeoning Russian Civil War that pitted Bolsheviks against the Counter-revolutionary forces commonly referred to as the Whites. The American troops that were deployed to Archangel in Russia’s far North were not so fortunate.

On September 5, 1918, the 5,500 American soldiers of the 339th Infantry Regiment disembarked in Archangel, joining British and French troops. A reserve unit activated for the war, the 339th held the moniker “Detroit’s Own” as a good number of its men hailed from that manufacturing mecca. Led to believe they would be guarding the port of Archangel, but having been placed under a British command, these Americans soon found themselves in direct combat with the Bolshevik’s fledgling Red Army.

The armistice on November 11, 1918, disappointingly brought no change to the 339th’s orders. The future of the Allied Expedition would have to wait on the outcome of the Paris Peace Conference. This actually made little difference to the soldiers as Archangel was now icebound, making any conceivable evacuation contingent on the spring thaw.

For the next six months, spread throughout the vast wilderness at isolated and vulnerable posts, the soldiers faced two formidable foes – the Red Army and the brutal Russian winter. Hundreds of American soldiers gave their lives not knowing exactly what it was they were fighting for. General Edmund Ironside, the British General who commanded the Allied expedition in North Russia, perhaps summed it up best: “Few campaigns have been fought in greater ignorance of what they were all about.”