Detroit S Own Polar Bears

At the end of World War I, the U.S. Army 339th Infantry--nicknamed the "Polar Bears"--was deployed to northern Russia to prevent Allied supplies stockpiled near the port city of Archangel from falling into the hands of the Bolsheviks. Drawing on firsthand accounts from men in the regiment, their 18-month campaign is narrated from the point of view of the riflemen, NCOs and officers of companies I and M. Each chapter highlights an individual soldier's experience fighting the Red Army and the Arctic winter, a quarter century before the Cold War.

In the brutally cold winter of 1919, 5,000 Americans battled the Red Army 600 miles north of Moscow. We have forgotten. Russia has not. "AN EXCELLENT BOOK." —Wall Street Journal • "INCREDIBLE." — John U. Bacon • "EXCEPTIONAL.” — Patrick K. O’Donnell • "A MASTER OF NARRATIVE HISTORY." — Mitchell Yockelson • "GRIPPING." — Matthew J. Davenport • "FASCINATING, VIVID." — Minneapolis Star Tribune An unforgettable human drama deep with contemporary resonance, award-winning historian James Carl Nelson's The Polar Bear Expedition draws on an untapped trove of firsthand accounts to deliver a vivid, soldier's-eye view of an extraordinary lost chapter of American history—the Invasion of Russia one hundred years ago during the last days of the Great War. In the winter of 1919, 5,000 U.S. soldiers, nicknamed "The Polar Bears," found themselves hundreds of miles north of Moscow in desperate, bloody combat against the newly formed Soviet Union's Red Army. Temperatures plummeted to sixty below zero. Their guns and their flesh froze. The Bolsheviks, camouflaged in white, advanced in waves across the snow like ghosts. The Polar Bears, hailing largely from Michigan, heroically waged a courageous campaign in the brutal, frigid subarctic of northern Russia for almost a year. And yet they are all but unknown today. Indeed, during the Cold War, two U.S. presidents, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, would assert that the American and the Russian people had never directly fought each other. They were spectacularly wrong, and so too is the nation's collective memory. It began in August 1918, during the last months of the First World War: the U.S. Army's 339th Infantry Regiment crossed the Arctic Circle; instead of the Western Front, these troops were sailing en route to Archangel, Russia, on the White Sea, to intervene in the Russian Civil War. The American Expeditionary Force, North Russia, had been sent to fight the Soviet Red Army and aid anti-Bolshevik forces in hopes of reopening the Eastern Front against Germany. And yet even after the Great War officially ended in November 1918, American troops continued to battle the Red Army and another, equally formiddable enemy, "General Winter," which had destroyed Napoleon's Grand Armee a century earlier and would do the same to Hitler's once invincible Wehrmacht. More than two hundred Polar Bears perished before their withdrawal in July 1919. But their story does not end there. Ten years after they left, a contingent of veterans returned to Russia to recover the remains of more than a hundred of their fallen brothers and lay them to rest in Michigan, where a monument honoring their service still stands. In the century since, America has forgotten the Polar Bears' harrowing campaign. Russia, notably, has not, and as Nelson reveals, the episode continues to color Russian attitudes toward the United States. At once epic and intimate, The Polar Bear Expedition masterfully recovers this remarkable tale at a time of new relevance.

“A moving story of abandonment, love, and survival against the odds.”—Dr. Jane Goodall The heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful story of an abandoned polar bear cub named Nora and the humans working tirelessly to save her and her species, whose uncertain future in the accelerating climate crisis is closely tied to our own Six days after giving birth, a polar bear named Aurora got up and walked away from her den at the Columbus Zoo, leaving her tiny squealing cub to fend for herself. Hours later, Aurora still hadn’t returned. The cub was furless and blind, and with her temperature dropping dangerously, the zookeepers entrusted with her care felt they had no choice: They would have to raise one of the most dangerous predators in the world by hand. Over the next few weeks, a group of veterinarians and zookeepers worked around the clock to save the cub, whom they called Nora. Humans rarely get as close to a polar bear as Nora’s keepers got to their fuzzy charge. But the two species have long been intertwined. Three decades before Nora’s birth, her father, Nanuq, was orphaned when an Inupiat hunter killed his mother, leaving Nanuq to be sent to a zoo. That hunter, Gene Agnaboogok, now faces some of the same threats as the wild bears near his Alaskan village of Wales, on the westernmost tip of the North American continent. As sea ice diminishes and temperatures creep up year after year, Agnaboogok and the polar bears—and everyone and everything else living in the far north—are being forced to adapt. Not all of them will succeed. Sweeping and tender, The Loneliest Polar Bear explores the fraught relationship humans have with the natural world, the exploitative and sinister causes of the environmental mess we find ourselves in, and how the fate of polar bears is not theirs alone.

Personalized story of the American North Russia Expeditionary Force of the Allied North Russia Campaign. Deals with the western campaign involving the Murmansk-Archangel area, concentrating on the American commitment.

With the centennial of the First World War rapidly approaching, historian and bibliographer James T. Controvich offers in The United States in World War I: A Bibliographic Guide the most comprehensive, up-to-date reference bibliography yet published. Organized by subject, this bibliography includes the full range of sources: vintage publications of the time, books, pamphlets, periodical titles, theses, dissertations, and archival sources held by federal and state organizations, as well as those in public and private hands, including historical societies and museums. As Controvich’s bibliographic accounting makes clear, there were many facets of World War I that remain virtually unknown to this day. Throughout, Controvich’s bibliography tracks the primary sources that tell each of these stories—and many others besides—during this tense period in American history. Each entry lists the author, title, place of publication, publisher, date of publication, and page count as well as descriptive information concerning illustrations, plates, ports, maps, diagrams, and plans. The armed forces section carries additional information on rosters, awards, citations, and killed and wounded in action lists. The United States in World War I: A Bibliographic Guide is an ideal research tool for students and scholars of World War I and American history.

Almost one hundred years after World War I and the Russian Revolution, U.S. diplomat DeWitt Clinton Poole's (1885-1952) perspective on his experiences negotiating with Bolshevik authorities and monitoring anti-Bolshevik movements throughout the Soviet Union is now fully accessible. Through Poole's perspective, a key figure in U.S.-Soviet relations, this book sheds new light on the Russian Revolution and World War I.

"[This book] is a red flag to restore our historical consciousness about U.S.-Russian relations, and how denying this consciousness is leading to a repetition of past follies"--Amazon.com.