James Nelson - The Polar Bear Expedition

He had been married for nine years to Rosa Sparks Dunlap, by whom he had three children, when duty called in 1917. He then added the Fort Sheridan Officers’ Training Camp to the list of organizations to which he already belonged—among them the Detroit Athletic Club, the New York Yacht Club, the University Club in Chicago, and the Grosse Pointe Riding and Hunt Club in Michigan.

It wasn’t long before 2nd Lt. J. Brooks Nichols, “several times a millionaire,” was rising through the ranks at Camp Custer, jumping to major by April 1918 and lieutenant colonel by war’s end. He would in between take command of the 339th’s Second Battalion, and later the Third.

“And if ever there was a popular promotion it was that which elevated Major Nichols to his present station,” the Detroit Free Press would report that April. “Every army man you speak with, even the regulars—which is the acid test of a newer officer’s personality and worth—say Major Nichols is a ‘fine officer:’ than which no finer tribute could be paid a man in the olive drab of his country.”

Others arrived at Camp Custer that summer of 1918, and while some had the alleged benefit of months of training, others had but weeks or even days to get some sense of what they had been dragged into.

“Many men arrived here today,” Donald Carey, who was himself just a month into training and had been assigned as a private first class to Company E of the 339th, wrote on June 25. “They’ll soon be enjoying the pleasures of army life.”

Rumors by then abounded through the camp of an impending trip overseas. “Every indication points to a speedy departure,” Carey would write. “The canteen closed last night; trains are loaded and coaches awaiting someone—probably our division.”

That same month, the Eighty-Fifth Division received several thousand men who had been training at Camp Grant, in Illinois, and Camp Taylor, in Kentucky. By that time, one history of the division says, “the division knew definitely that it was going to France.”

Sure enough, on July 14 orders were given to prepare to move. The Eighty-Fifth Division’s men packed their few belongings through the morning and afternoon, and that evening boarded a series of trains. Before long, all were headed east toward uncertain futures.

The journey took them through Detroit, thence to Canada, where the Eighty-Fifth Division’s men encountered “considerable cheering along the route,” Carey remembered. (Canada had been at war since 1914.) At dusk on the second night of moving, they went around Niagara Falls and across a suspension bridge into New York.

The men eventually arrived in Hoboken, New Jersey, where Godfrey Anderson and the other midwestern farm boys gawked at the looming skyline of New York City to the east across the Hudson River. The city was “thickly congested with towers and skyscrapers, stretching off in the distance as far as the eye could reach,” Godfrey would write. “I, for my part, stood completely dumbfounded, gaping spellbound at the magnificent scene.”

The men were then ferried around the tip of Manhattan, where in the distance they could espy the Statue of Liberty “holding aloft her torch, and beyond the water glittering in the brilliant sunshine,” Godfrey would remember. The ferries headed up the East River to the Long Island Rail Road Station, where they again boarded trains for Camp Mills, which was located near Hempstead on Long Island.

On July 21 and July 22, the call to move out came once more, and the division’s men reversed and found themselves heading back through Long Island to Brooklyn, and thence by ferry down the East River and back to their embarkation point in Hoboken, where various overseas transports—the Plattsburg , the Northumberland , the Anchises , the Harrisburg —plus a convoy of battleships awaited the Eighty-Fifth Division.

“Great adventure begins,” one soldier aboard the Plattsburg , Clarence Scheu of Company B of the 339th Infantry Regiment, would note in his diary.

Rocking and rolling through a stormy North Atlantic, the ships would take more than ten days to reach Liverpool, England. As they sailed, all thoughts aboard the vessels focused not only on the rough seas, but on the threat of German submarines.

Many men became seasick; sailing on British transports with English crews, even the still-hungry could barely force down the food prepared by the cooks. Rice, meal, potatoes, and tripe were offered to the men aboard Carey’s ship, the Northumberland , but it was “so unpalatable and sickening that I ate little during the voyage,” he would write.

“Execrable” was the term Godfrey Anderson, who was aboard the British ship Anchises with the rest of the 337th Field Hospital Company, would say about the food. As well, “the whole mess was spoiled and stank to high heaven.”

On or about August 3, the convoy’s battleships turned about, and British destroyers took over the watch. As the transports approached the “forbidden zone” off the English coast where enemy submarines would be most likely to roam, “lifeboats are lowered, rafts loosened, everything held in readiness to abandon ship,” Clarence Scheu wrote.

One by one, though, the transports left the Irish Sea and entered the mouth of the Mersey River, and soon were at the docks of Liverpool. “We dis-embark, march through city to railroad station, nice reception,” wrote Scheu of the English, who, after almost four years of bleeding and suffering, were more than happy to have these Yanks finally pick up some of the burden.

From there, it was once more on the trains, which began rolling across the pastoral English countryside, carrying the thirty-five hundred men of the 339th U.S. Infantry Regiment, Eighty-Fifth Division, each one of whom looked forward to whatever perils and ordeals might await them on the scarred and storied battlefields of France.

They started getting sick as the ships skirted the coast of Norway. They began dying even as the ships rounded the Kola Peninsula and headed south, toward the Russian coast, in the early days of September 1918. The first body was wrapped in a sheet and dumped overboard while the Somali was still coursing through the White Sea. Other men lay in various states of distress, shivering and moaning and ashen, as the medicines that might have helped them had been left back in Newcastle, England.

“All bunks were occupied by soldiers desperately ill, with raging fevers,” Godfrey Anderson would write, while “others lay on stretchers, the breathing of all a rasping wheeze.”

The influenza had also struck the Nagoya , aboard which Lt. Harry Mead and the rest of Company A of the 339th sailed. Making things worse even for those not afflicted was the cold; the voyage had taken the regiment above the Arctic Circle, and yet their baggage and needed cold-winter clothing had been loaded into the ships’ cargo holds.

In their postwar book, The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki , Mead, Joel Moore, and Company K’s Lewis Jahns would write, “This suffering from the cold as they crossed the Arctic circle was a foretaste of what they were to be up against in the long months to come in North Russia.”

Far from home, the 339th and its associated engineer and hospital units were also far from France, to which the rest of the Eighty-Fifth Division had sailed, there to be designated a replacement division, and its soldiers meted out to various American divisions preparing to fight in the offensives at St. Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne in the fall of 1918.

The 339th, however, had been personally plucked by Gen. John Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force, for special duty as the American Expeditionary Force, North Russia (AEFNR). Following Woodrow Wilson’s pained and agonized decision to allow American combat forces to enter Russia—supposedly to do nothing more than guard Allied materiel from the predations of Bolsheviks and Germans—the regiment had been ordered to sail from England, and thence to Murmansk, on the Barents Sea. The Twenty-Seventh and Thirty-First U.S. Infantry Regiments, stationed in the Philippines and California, meanwhile, were ordered to Vladivostok as the AEF, Siberia.