All information pertaining to this little known WWI Expedition, the Michigan Monument and Polar Bear Memorial activities --- including links and images --- were excerpted from the following well-done website at http://pbma.grobbel.org

I have merely attempted to provide you with a sampling.   If you want more, remember it is a virtually endless internet out there.    So after visiting the http://pbma.grobbel.org site you may want to overflow  your bookmarks (aka "favorites") by continuing your knowledge quest HERE

Click away and good searching......

The following excerpted comment kind of sums it all up.
The quotation was copied from http://pbma.grobbel.org and its original source is from the introduction to Ernest M. Halliday's book  When Hell Froze Over

"The American Expedition to North Russia in 1918-1919 has been oddly neglected by professional historians, with the result that most US citizens, including even the best educated and well-read, have been unaware of its existence. Partly, this has been because it got underway in the closing weeks of the Great War (now officially called World War I), and like a side show at a circus where they are already striking the tent, it drew little attention.

"Besides that, there was the confusion and obscurity surrounding it with regard to its purpose, especially in Washington and among the American troops who were involved: they literally had no idea what they were being sent to do. Even President Woodrow Wilson, as will be seen, was in a spin of uncertainty as to whether he should or should not authorize the expedition, and the British leadership (for it was to be an Allied operation, including British and French soldiers, but with the British officers in all the top command positions) offered little clarification.

"Without further enlightenment, five thousand American doughboys found themselves, early in September of 1918, after a long, slow trip from England through the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean, disembarking at the Russian port of Archangel - and more than half of them no sooner ashore than they were, with astonishment, packed off to "the front" to fight "the Bolos" - which was to say units of the Soviet Red Army. The operation thus turned out to be, willy-nilly and right from the start, an invasion of Soviet territory."

Uncommon Courage:
John Withers Risked Everything to Save 2 Dying Strangers

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In 2003, the Wall Street Journal ran this incredible front page story by Bryan Gruley about Withers' heroic efforts risking his future for two strangers and how decades later he was reunited with one of them, now an American citizen. 
HERE is a local copy of the WSJ article.

John Withers, a World War II lieutenant who risked a dishonorable discharge to help two young Holocaust survivors, died Sunday.

(Also the Washington Post has an obituary on this great American.)

Mr. Withers, who was 91 years old, was the subject of a page one article in The Wall Street Journal on Nov. 25, 2003. The article described how Mr. Withers, as a leader of an all-black Army supply unit in 1945, broke military rules to hide two Jewish-Polish survivors of the Dachau concentration camp. He spent more than a year mentoring the two, whom his soldiers had nicknamed "Peewee" and "Salomon."

Mr. Withers, who had grown up in segregated Greensboro, N.C., said he identified with the boys "very strongly and instantaneously" and that they taught him that "it is possible for someone -- me, anyone -- to overcome the obstacles in his path without losing himself and face prejudice without becoming prejudiced in return."

He lost touch with them after he returned to the U.S. in 1946. But in 2001, Mr. Withers was reunited with Peewee, by then a successful Connecticut businessman named Martin Weigen. The reunion inspired Mr. Weigen to unburden himself of his own stories of losing his parents and sister during the Holocaust, and time he spent at Auschwitz and other camps. Mr. Weigen died in October 2003 at the age of 75.

Copied from Debbie Schlussel.