The Polar Bear Expedition: The Heroes of America's Forgotten Invasion of Russia, 1918-1919

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They’ve been expecting it for weeks—hell, months. And so the men of Company A of the 339th Infantry Regiment—the Polar Bears, they would come to call themselves—have stood night and day in forty-below-zero temperatures. They stamp their feet and try not to touch bare skin on the frozen barrels of their weapons lest their flesh be ripped off; they peer through the deep, ebony night from their dark, log-lined dugouts into the frigid tundra toward the south and east across the ice-choked river and watch for it, wait for it, and wonder how many will come and how they will perform when they do—and they wonder, too, if and how they will ever get out of this place, this frozen Hades, this last place on earth at the top of the world.

And then early on this morning they do come, a horde of them, dim forms in the distance spread out across the Vaga River, some on skis and others on snowshoes and all of them armed, like ghost warriors traversing the River Styx—hundreds of them to their mere handful of forty-six.

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