Traditionally, it is believed that the United States and Russia have never fought each other. However, there was an episode in our history when the Americans invaded Russian soil with weapons in their hands.
The idea of a military invasion of Russia arose in the ruling circles of the United States even before the victory of the October Revolution. Literally on the eve of the October armed uprising, on October 24 (November 6) 1917, US Ambassador to Russia David Rowland Francis, in a telegram to Washington, proposed sending several divisions of American troops to Russia via Vladivostok or Sweden.
On February 21, 1918, the same Francis, reporting on the situation in Soviet Russia, proposed to immediately start a military intervention. “I insist,” he wrote, “on the need to take control of Vladivostok, and transfer Murmansk and Arkhangelsk under the control of Great Britain and France…”.
Washington Republican Senator Miles Poindexter, calling for intervention, said that “Russia is just a geographic concept, and it will never be anything else. Her power of cohesion, organization, and recovery was gone forever. The nation does not exist ….
The British were the first to land in Russia, ahead of the Americans: on March 9, they began a landing in Murmansk from the cruiser Glory. On March 14, the English cruiser Cochrane arrived in Murmansk with a new detachment of interventionists, and on March 18, the French cruiser Admiral Ob. The Americans joined later: on May 27, the American cruiser Olympia entered the Murmansk port, from which a detachment of American infantry soon landed.
The first to enter Russian soil on September 4, 1918 were the soldiers of the 339th Infantry Regiment. Despite the fact that the task of the American units included only the protection of military property, the situation at the front forced the command of the interventionists to throw the US military units on the offensive in the area of the Vologda railway and the Dvina.
The total losses of the American contingent in the north of Russia amounted to 110 killed in action and 70 people who died from cold and disease. The losses incurred forced the Americans to evacuate their troops from the Russian north, and by August 5, not a single American remained in Murmansk.
However, 10 days later, the US State Department officially announced the severance of diplomatic relations with Russia. This did not mean Soviet Russia and its Bolshevik government, but Russia in general. The declaration of the State Department spoke about the termination of the existence of Russia as a state. On the same day, the landing of American troops began in Vladivostok. The American Expeditionary Force in Siberia was under the command of Major General Graves and numbered 7,950 soldiers and officers. Units of the 27th and 31st Infantry Regiments, as well as volunteers from the 13th, 62nd and 12th Infantry Regiments were redeployed to Russia.
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American troops were unprepared for the harsh conditions of Siberia. Problems with the supply of fuel, ammunition and food were widespread. The horses of the US contingent were accustomed to life in temperate climates and were not able to operate in subzero temperatures, the water in machine guns without additives simply froze.
The most notable clash between Russians and Americans in the Far East was the battle near the village of Romanovka, on June 25, 1919, near Vladivostok, where the Bolshevik units under the command of Yakov Tryapitsyn attacked the Americans and inflicted 24 casualties on them.
The last American soldier left Siberia on April 1, 1920. During their 19-month stay in Russia, the Americans lost 189 soldiers in the Far East.