A polar bear advancing menacingly and protectively past a cross with a World War I helmet strapped to it. The sculpture is mounted upon a stepped, castellated base of polished Swedish black granite.

The monument commemorates the "Polar Bears," a group of soldiers from Michigan's 339th Infantry Regiment, who were sent to Archangel in northern Russia in 1918 at the end of World War I to prevent a German advance and to help reopen the Eastern Front. The soldiers fought Bolshevik revolutionaries for months in the frozen terrain after the Armistice ended fighting in France, arriving in September of 1918, and seeing their last fighting in April, 1919. Ninety-four soldiers were killed in action before the United States decided to withdraw. Public attention was drawn to the expedition in 1929 when two commissions, one appointed by the governor of Michigan and the other organized by the Veterans of Foreign Wars for the War Department, went to Archangel to recover the bodies of American soldiers killed in the expedition. Fifty-six of the eighty-six remains they found were returned for burial with honors around the Polar Bear Memorial, which was dedicated on Memorial Day, 1930. The memorial has been designated a Historic Site by the State of Michigan. The black granite base of the memorial symbolizes a fortress, and the cross and helmet denote war burial.