Think United States soldiers have never directly fought Russian forces? Ronald Reagan thought so, but think again. A forgotten epilogue to WWI is the North Russian Expedition. The ostensible peace-lover and anti-interventionist President Woodrow Wilson sent 5,000 US Army soldiers to North Russia where they engaged Bolshevik troops. Wilson mistakenly allowed US troops to be used under British command; the American soldiers were thrown into the Russian civil war to reopen an eastern front. Apparently his advisors convinced Wilson that Germany had installed the Soviets in power to end their participation in the war; Germany indeed allowed Lenin to cross Germany from exile in Switzerland in a sealed train. Wilson was also convinced that an allied intervention would lead to an anti-Bolshivik uprising among the Russian people. American leadership completely misunderstood the nature of events in Russia. The uprising never occurred. The 339 Infantry Regiment, who later adopted the sobriquet "Polar Bears", fought on the Divina and Volga Rivers in North Russia and suffered 210 casualties including 70 deaths from the raging flu pandemic of the time. One of the significant facts of this ill-fated intervention is that it caused dissension among US soldiers once the Armistice was signed with Germany on November 11, 1918. Many began to write home complaining about the severe conditions, low morale, and the lack of justification for continued fighting against a former ally in the world war that had signed a peace treaty (Brest-Litovsk) almost a year earlier.
Their demands to come home reached the newspapers and in Washington, DC their representatives raised the issue in Congress.
Early in 1919 the complaining, which is not unusual among soldiers, exploded to the level of action. Mutinies in the Allied ranks became frequent. Four soldiers in Company B of the 339th drew up a petition protesting their continued intervention in the Russian civil war and were threatened with court martial, a potential death by firing squad. About 290 soldiers were said to be in sympathy. The newspapers exploded the story into a mutiny (Washington Post 11.04.19) Faced with concerted decent at home and horrendous conditions in the field, President Wilson directed the withdrawal of the 339th from North Russia. In April, 1919 a US Army general arrived in Archangel with orders for a withdrawal at the earliest possible moment. By early June most of the American expeditionary force sailed for Brest and then New York. The 8,000 British volunteers sent in to take their positions were soon overrun by the Red Army, which recaptured Murmansk and Archangel. The Russian government eventually repatriated the bodies of fallen US servicemen not already recovered in 1934. The last Polar Bear veteran died in 2003. The lesson of this forgotten, but important saga of western military history: when soldiers refuse to fight, intervention is infeasible.