Documentary about the U.S. Invasion of Communist Russia in 1918

[Tom in N.J.]

dfrak, The "Polar Bear" memorial is located in White Chapel cemetary, Troy, MI. There are some great photos and information on the Polar Bear website. Introduction - "Detroit's Own" Polar Bear Memorial Association

Here is a photo from that site of the memorial and one of the color guard at a memorial service. Note the rifles are Mosin-Nagants.

[Surpmil]

It is very difficult to put oneself back into a previous place and time and try to look forward from that point, without being influenced by the people and events that followed it.

I try to steer a middle course between the "masses" and the "great man" theories of history; frankly theories are best left to theorists. There are no rules of history except as Churchill so pithiliy put it, that the only thing we learn from the study of it is that man learns nothing from the study of it!

There is no doubt that certain critical figures like Lenin play a decisive role at times. Had Fanny Kaplan's aim been a little better, or Hitler on time for his speech at the Burgerbraukeller, the history of the world would have been very different indeed. I don't think anyone can deny that.

I don't think you can "rearrange the people, forces and events", because they are not chess pieces, they are created by each other in turn.

The best example I can think of is the oft-cited underestimation of the Japanese before 1941. Historians go on about this as though it was some inexplicable blindness that afflicted our forefathers. Few seem to remember that Japan had stumbled about in China for years by the late 30s. China which the Western powers had defeated with the most puny expeditionary forces a generation or two earlier. To add insult to injury, the Japanese lost dramatically to the Soviets at Nomohan around the same time. The same Soviets who barely managed to bring Finland to the armistice table in 1940 and only at the cost of huge losses. Does anyone see the logical conclusion at the time??

Few people were acute enough to realize that "the little men" as they were derisively termed were seething with racial resentment and and a belief in their own innate cultural superiority, creating a fanatical desire to make events match their self-image, in their more confident moments at least.

And the rest is history, or is it merely prologue?!