A Michigan Polar Bear Confronts the Bolsheviks

This rare volume contains the graphic story of a young Michigan soldier's experiences during President Woodrow Wilson's ill-fated 1918 military expedition against the Bolsheviks in the frozen reaches of northern Russia -- a little-remembered event in U.S. history. As a member of the U.S. "Polar Bears" medical corps, Godfrey Anderson (18951981) tells of his travels by ship and train to Archangel, Russia, where a 5,000-man American contingent joined forces with French, British, Canadian, and local Cossack fighters to hold back the Red Army. Anderson's unit set up field hospitals in the vast Arctic wilderness, endured the bitter cold of winter and the ravages of the Spanish flu, rubbed shoulders with Russian villagers, rescued scores of wounded from the advancing Bolsheviks in a harrowing nighttime retreat by sleigh -- and more. Anderson's autobiographical narrative has an irresistible charm and transparency to it; a substantial introduction by Michigan historian Gordon Olson sets the geopolitical stage for this gripping and down-to-earth war memoir. - Publisher.