On March 1, 1919, U.S. Army Corporal Arthur Prince was taken prisoner near the small village of Toulgas, Russia, where the men of his unit, Company B, 339th U.S. Infantry Regiment, had been hanging on for their lives amid a sea of angry Bolshevik fighters since the previous November.
Two of his mates were killed when their patrol was ambushed, while two others died of their wounds in a primitive hospital. Prince, meanwhile, endured an odyssey through Russian hospitals and prisons before returning to the U.S. in October 1920.
Amid the almost daily deluge of news and speculation over Russian meddling in our 2016 election, it’s easy to overlook a key fact:
One hundred year ago, the U.S. took part in an Allied military intervention in northern Russia, and for the first and last time in history American soldiers met Russian fighters in battle.
More than 230 heroic young Americans died during the strange episode, most of them with no real understanding of why. And while the Allied intervention is taught in schools to this day in Russia and continues to color Russian attitudes toward the U.S., the average American knows nothing about it.
Why the intervention? The story began with the Bolshevik Revolution in late 1917. Where Russian forces of the Tsarist armies had held down scores of German and Austria-Hungarian divisions on the Eastern Front since 1914, Russian leader Vladmir Lenin took Russia out of the war and signed a treaty with Germany, freeing 80 German divisions for transfer to the Western Front.
On March 21, 1918 many of those divisions took part in a series of offensives that by June left the Allies in peril. As they waited for an American army to get up to speed, the febrile minds within the Allied command sought a way to alleviate the pressure.
Before long, a plan was devised: The Allies would land troops in northern Russia, join forces with loyalist partisans, and reestablish an Eastern Front. This, it was hoped, would lead the Entente to recall thousands of soldiers from the west.
The Allies pressured U.S. President Woodrow Wilson to take part in the intervention; he initially refused, but in mid-July 1918 he agreed to send a single regiment into northern Russia.
We would do well to remember the names of these brave men, men who never understood why they were in Russia, yet did their duty, standing to under impossible odds.
That regiment was the 339th, made up mostly of men from Michigan and Wisconsin. Wilson ordered that they do little more than guard the materiel the Allies had sent to the Russian army; instead, the Americans were pulled from their ships on September 6, 1918 and sent up the Dvina and Vaga Rivers, south along the Archangel-Vologda Railroad to Obozerskaya, and into the Onega River valley.
All were soon engaged with the Red Army, which under Minister of War Leon Trotsky grew into a force of 600,000 fighters. Soon enough as well, the bitter Russian winter—“General Winter”—set in, yet the fighting continued well past the November 11, 1918 armistice.
Across a 400-mile front, the Americans bravely endured attacks and the ghastly conditions through the fall and winter. At Nijni Gora, the fourth platoon of Company A—just 45 men—was attacked by 1,300 Bolsheviks in January 1919 and routed. On the railway, Company M under Captain Joel Moore was attacked by a force of 7,000 Reds and fought it off, killing, wounding, or capturing some 2,000 of the enemy. On the Onega front, Lt. Clifford Phillips led a small band of men against more than 600 Bolsheviks, was wounded in the chest, and died a full six weeks later.
We would do well to remember the names of these brave men, men who never understood why they were in Russia, yet did their duty, standing to under impossible odds.
The Bolsheviks, too, lost men—thousands—fighting the Allies. This, the Russians remember; they also remember the time when armed foreigners tried to intervene in their revolution. While two U.S. presidents would claim separately that American and Russian soldiers had never met in battle, the Russians knew better, and still know better.
As former Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev would spitefully say in 1959: “Never have any of our soldiers been on American soil, but your soldiers were on Russian soil. These are the facts.”
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Indeed, as Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano note in their recent book “The Russians Are Coming Again,” “the trampling on Soviet Russia’s sovereignty would remain seared in its people’s memory, shaping a deep sense of mistrust that carries over to the present day.”
We remember the Maine, we remember the Alamo. We would do well also to remember Nijni Gora and and Toulgas and the other far-off, places where young American men fought bravely through the winter of 1918-1919, and where some two dozen of them remain buried under the taiga.
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