The men underwent a month or so of infantry training at Camp Custer in Battle Creek, Mich., before traveling to New York and embarking on ships to England in July 1918. Most of the 3,800 car-factory workers, tax attorneys, farm laborers, shopkeepers and other conscripts who filled its ranks hailed from Michigan. The 339th Infantry Regiment was known as Detroit’s Own. Soldiers from Company B of the 339th Infantry Regiment wear snowshoes during a patrol in northern Russia. This account of the 1918 Archangel campaign is based on century-old military records, declassified government memos, personal letters, diaries, photos and film in the National Archives and Records Administration, and the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, as well as soldiers’ memoirs. In the late summer and early fall of 1918, PresidentĪdded some 5,300 American soldiers to that volatile mix, sending them to northern Russia with vague and contradictory orders. Turned to defending their revolution from White Russians, supporters of czarist rule who were backed by the British and French. The pact allowed Germany to focus on the Western Front. The Bolsheviks seized power in Moscow and, on March 3, 1918, signed a peace deal with Germany. Then the 1917 Russian Revolution upended the alliance. In the early years of World War I, Imperial Russia fought beside France, Britain and the U.S. It didn’t go well for the Americans, a loss all but erased from the country’s collective historical memory on the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War. and Russian troops battled each other came a century ago, with the heaviest fighting in the Archangel campaign that so aggrieved Pvt. Washington and Moscow have been hot-war allies and Cold War adversaries. Sailors from USS Olympia pose with newly arrived soldiers from the 339th Infantry Regiment on Sept.

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