In August 1918, eight thousand American soldiers arrived at the Russian port of Vladivostok with orders that simultaneously authorised their deployment and prohibited almost everything a soldier normally does. They were there to guard a railway, protect some supplies, and assist a Czech army that had already rescued itself. They were not to take sides in the Russian civil war raging around them. They were not to interfere in Russian internal affairs. They were not to do what every one of their Allied partners was doing.

For nineteen months, their commander ? Major General William S. Graves, a Missouri-bred officer of absolute professional integrity ? followed those orders with a literal-minded fidelity that enraged the British, frustrated the French, alarmed the Japanese, and produced the only morally defensible American military conduct in one of the most savage theatres of the twentieth century. Around him, Cossack warlords financed by Japan massacred thousands of civilians. A White Russian admiral struggled and failed to win a war his own forces were losing with their terror. The Czech Legion fought its way across a continent to a country that had not yet existed when it set out.

Frozen Mandate is the full, unsparing narrative of America's forgotten war in Siberia ? the first act of the Cold War, conducted without a declaration, concluded without victory, and buried without honest reckoning. It is a story about what happens when a great power deploys its soldiers with inadequate orders into an impossible situation, and about the rare officer who holds to his mandate when everyone around him demands he abandon it.