This valuable addition to the Hoover Institution’s collections on the Russian Civil War and US intervention in that conflict contains the diaries, photographs, and associated papers of Henry Nelson Hammond (1900–1969), a corporal in the US Army (27th Infantry Regiment, “Wolfhounds”), covering his enlistment and deployment in the Russian Far East as part of the American Expeditionary Force in Siberia.
The journals provide wonderful details, offering a rare glimpse into the life of a US soldier stationed in Siberia, the Philippines, and then the United States until 1922. The unique photographs that accompany the diaries include the date, place, and subject of the photograph. The collection also contains Hammond’s original army lockbox, inscribed “Beresovka, Siberia, 1919.”
The Hoover Archives contain numerous collections relating to the US intervention in Siberia (1918–20), such as the papers of General William S. Graves, William Duncan, Fred Bugbee, and Edith Faulstich. Many of the diaries Hoover holds, such as William S. Barrett’s “America in Russia, or the diary of a Russian wolfhound,” have no illustrative material, making Hammond’s papers useful to researchers.
