Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front Read online

  Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front

  Serhii Plokhy

  Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front

  American Airmen behind the Soviet Lines and the Collapse of the Grand Alliance

  Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.

  Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

  198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

  © Serhii Plokhy 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.

  You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Plokhy, Serhii, 1957– author.

  Title: Forgotten bastards of the Eastern Front : American airmen behind the Soviet lines and the collapse of the Grand Alliance / Serhii Plokhy.

  Other titles: American airmen behind the Soviet lines and the collapse of the Grand Alliance

  Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019] | Summary: “At the conference held in Tehran in November 1943, American officials proposed to their Soviet allies a new operation in the effort to defeat Nazi Germany. The Normandy Invasion was already in the works; what American officials were suggesting until then was for the US Air Force to establish bases in Soviet-controlled territory, in order to “shuttle-bomb” the Germans from the Eastern front. For all that he had been pushing for the United States and Great Britain to do more to help the war effort—the Soviets were bearing the heaviest burden in terms of casualties—Stalin balked at the suggestion of foreign soldiers on Soviet soil. His concern was that they would inflame regional and ideological differences. Eventually in early 1944, Stalin was persuaded to give in, and Operation Baseball and then Frantic were initiated in the Poltova region (in what is today Ukraine). As Plokhy’s book shows, what happened on these airbases mirrors the nature of the Grand Alliance itself. While both sides were fighting for the same goal, Germany’s unconditional surrender, differences arose that no common purpose could overcome. Soviet secret policeman watched over the operations, shadowing every move, and eventually trying to prevent fraternization between American servicemen and local women. A catastrophic air raid by the Germans revealed the limitations of Soviet air defenses. Relations soured and the operations went south. The story of the American bases foreshadowed the eventual collapse of the Grand Alliance and the start of the Cold War. Using previously inaccessible archives, Allies and Adversaries offers a bottom-up history of the Grand Alliance, showing how it first began to fray on the airfields of World War II.”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019004678 | ISBN 9780190061012 (hardback : alk. paper) | ebook ISBN 9780190061036

  Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939–1945—Aerial operations, American. | World War, 1939–1945—Aerial operations, Russian. | Air bases—Ukraine—History—20th century. | World War, 1939–1945—Ukraine. | United States—Relations—Soviet Union. | Soviet Union—Relations—United States.

  Classification: LCC D790 .P64 2019 | DDC 940.54/497309477—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004678

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

  Contents

  Preface

  Prologue

  Part I: Grand Alliance

  1 Mission to Moscow

  2 Stalin’s Verdict

  3 Going Frantic

  4 Poltava

  Part II: The Battles of Poltava

  5 Soft Landing

  6 Comrades in Arms

  7 Death to Spies

  8 Pearl Harbor on the Steppes

  9 Forbidden Love

  10 Picking a Fight

  11 Fall of Warsaw

  Part III: Strange Bedfellows

  12 Forgotten Bastards of Ukraine

  13 Watchtower

  14 New Year’s Dance

  15 Yalta

  16 Prisoners of War

  17 Rupture

  18 Last Parade

  Part IV: Cold War Landing

  19 Spoils of War

  20 Poltava Suspects

  21 Witch Hunt

  22 Washington Reunion

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Plates

  Preface

  In 1950, Winston Churchill named one of the volumes of his World War II memoirs, “Grand Alliance.” He borrowed that term from the name used when England, Scotland, and European powers joined together against France in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a partnership that diminished the power of France and led to the rise of Britain. Like its early modern predecessor, the Grand Alliance of the twentieth century turned out to be an astonishing success when it came to achieving its immediate goals. American assistance to Britain and the USSR through the Lend-Lease program, the opening of the second front in Europe in June 1944, and the Soviet declaration of war on Japan in August 1945 were the most salient features of Allied cooperation. The summits of the Big Three—as Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill were called by the media—first in Teheran in 1943 and then in Yalta in 1945, ensured the unity of the Allied powers throughout the war, leading to the defeat of the Axis and helping to produce a new international order and the organization that embodied it, the United Nations, the longest-lived international coordinating body in world history.

  Greater than the military success of the second Grand Alliance was the expectation that it would continue into the postwar era, and greater still was the disappointment that followed its collapse a few years later. By 1948 the world was effectively divided into two camps, with the United States and Britain belonging to one and the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites to the other. The following year saw the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a military alliance of the Western powers, followed in 1955 by the Warsaw Pact between the Moscow-led communist regimes of Eastern Europe. By that time the world found itself threatened not only with a new world war but also with the possibility of nuclear annihilation. The Grand Alliance ended in a Grand Failure, symbolized by Churchill’s other famous coinage, the “Iron Curtain” that divided postwar Europe in half.

  “What went wrong?” was the question asked throughout the world. Who was responsible for the start of the Cold War? Some pointed to Joseph Stalin and his efforts to carve up Iran and take control of the Black Sea straits, as well as his imposition of communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Others suggested that America’s use of the atomic bomb in August 1945 and its subsequent refusal to share the new technology with the Soviet Union had shifted the world’s power balance, leaving Stalin no choice but to consolidate his wartime geostrategic gains. This book will take a different track, revealing the roots of Cold War conflicts and nightmares in the story of the Grand Alliance itself. My main argument is quite simple: that it was doomed from within by conflict between the Soviet and American political traditions and cultures, and that it began to fall
apart during rather than after World War II.

  This is the story of collapse from below, focusing on the only place where the Soviets and Americans actually got the chance to live and fight side by side—the three American Air Force bases established on Soviet-controlled territory in April 1944. Taking off from airfields in Britain and Italy, American airplanes would bomb their targets and then land at these bases, which were located in the Poltava area of today’s Ukraine, repeating the bombing on their way back to Britain or Italy. For the final year of the war in Europe, Americans worked intimately with Soviets. The Poltava bases were not small or merely symbolic. Thousands of pilots, airplane mechanics, and rank-and-file soldiers participated in the shuttle operations. Moreover, tens of thousands of Ukrainian citizens were able to meet US Airmen and, in some cases, establish close personal relations with them. Thus, this story is very much about people—their lives, views, and emotions.

  The history of the air bases in Ukraine in 1944–1945 has a significant literature. The American side is well documented, thanks to the vast array of sources available to scholars in US archives and library collections. Four well-documented and more or less contemporaneous official histories of Frantic, as the American shuttle-bombing operations were called by the commanders of the US Strategic Air Forces in Europe, each covering a different period of time, have been preserved. The archives of the US Air Force Historical Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama and the documentary collection of the US Military Mission to Moscow at the National Archives and Records Administration in Maryland, the Averell Harriman Archive at the Library of Congress, and President Roosevelt’s papers at the FDR Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York, provide rich source material for this account of the bases and those of my predecessors.1

  What makes this account quite unique is the use of previously unavailable sources—files of the Committee for State Security (KGB) and its predecessors, documenting Soviet military counterintelligence and secret-police surveillance of Americans and their contacts in the Red Army Air Force and the local population. The files begin with the establishment of the bases and continue into the onset and mounting tension of the Cold War from the late 1940s to the early and mid-1950s. The Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine, which took place in 2013–2014, resulted among other things in an archival revolution—the unprecedented opening of former KGB archives, including World War II materials inherited from military counterintelligence. The reports of spies and the memos of their masters and handlers—comprising about two dozen thick volumes—have now become available to scholars and the public at large. As the Americans suspected, the Soviets actively spied on their allies, recording not only their actions but also their views.

  With a level of clarity and precision that few sources can match, the KGB documents describe Soviet attitudes toward American servicemen, the evolution of relations between Soviets and Americans on the Poltava-area bases, and the transformation in the guests’ attitudes toward their hosts. Taken together, American military records and Soviet counterintelligence reports provide a solid basis for our understanding of the role of politics, ideology, and culture in forging elations between the wartime allies. They leave little doubt that relations deteriorated not only because of the disappearance of the common enemy, or ideological incompatibility, or the change in Soviet and American geopolitical calculations as the war drew to its conclusion. No less important was the experience of these American servicemen, which turned even most of the pro-Soviet among them into committed opponents. The conflict of profoundly different worldviews and values shared by the rank-and-file participants of the Soviet-American encounter undermined the Grand Alliance even before the greater geopolitical reasons for its existence disappeared, reasons that conflict presaged and reflected.

  With the winds of the new Cold War becoming chillier by the day, we need to look back at how the Grand Alliance played out in those American airbases in Ukraine in 1944–1945 and learn from the experience of those who did their best to make it work. One obvious lesson to future generations is that partnerships can be sustained for some time by the need to defeat a common enemy, but no mutual trust and enduring relationship can be established between allies with incompatible visions of the just political order and, at the end, of freedom and tyranny.

  Prologue

  On a warm day in May 1958, a year that inaugurated the crises that led to the construction of the Berlin Wall, a KGB mobile team in Ukraine picked up a subject of surveillance they code-named “Tourist.” The man was approximately 35–36 years of age, of medium height, and on the slim side. He had a slightly elongated face, a large straight nose, and was wearing glasses. The subject was dressed in a greenish shirt and dark gray pants, tight by Soviet standards, which suggested that he was a foreigner.

  They began to follow Tourist at the exit from the Kyiv Highway to the city of Poltava in central Ukraine—a couple dozen miles away from the city. He was driving a Soviet-made Volga sedan. Once in Poltava, Tourist showed particular interest in the Corpus Park, the Poltava Victory monument, and the local museum and theater. As one might expect of any tourist, he took pictures of all those places. But his interest in one of the ordinary-looking houses in central Poltava aroused suspicion. Tourist arrived at Number 28 on Pushkin Street and knocked on the door. There was no answer. He then entered the courtyard, where he met a woman from a neighboring house. He asked her something. The surveillance team managed to catch only one word, “Nina.” The woman then pointed to one of the doors off the courtyard. Tourist knocked on that door; again there was no answer. He then got back into the car and drove off. His entire visit to Poltava lasted less than three hours. The KGB surveillance team filed their report. They had no idea who Tourist was, or what he was doing in the city. All they knew for certain was that he did not find whoever he was looking for.1

  “Tourist” was thirty-nine-year-old Franklyn Holzman, a former radar mechanic in the US Air Force who has spent a good part of 1944 and almost half of 1945 at the US air bases in Soviet Ukraine. The author of a book on Soviet taxation, he was visiting Moscow and Kyiv and decided to make a stopover in Poltava, where he had spent eight months, a memorable period that helped decide his future career as a scholar of Soviet economics. The woman he had been looking for was Nina Afanasieva, whom he had met in Poltava in December 1944 and who, on the orders of the secret police, had broken contact with him in the spring of 1945. The Poltava KGB would spend the rest of 1958 and much of the following year trying to find Nina Afanasieva. They eventually located her in the city of Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine. Upon investigating, they found no proof that she had tried to make contact with Holzman. She was allowed to continue living a normal life.2

  By the time of Holzman’s visit in 1958, World War II had been over for more than a decade and the Cold War was reaching its height. The former allies had become adversaries. Holzman knew nothing of the KGB surveillance and suspicions. Until the end of his life in September 2002 he maintained positive memories of his wartime service in the Soviet Union. In his Lexington home in Massachusetts he kept photographs, letters, and embroidered Ukrainian tablecloths that reminded him of the days when Americans and Soviets had fought together. Yet when asked, Holzman, an accomplished scholar of the Soviet economy, was never able to explain some crucial aspects of his wartime experience, especially the question of why the Soviets had allowed American bases to be established on their territory in the first place.3

  Part I

  Grand Alliance

  1

  Mission to Moscow

  The welcoming party had reached the Central Airport in Moscow well ahead of the arrival of the guests. It was the late afternoon of October 18, 1943, and with the night temperatures hovering around freezing level, unusually cold even by Moscow standards. Viacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, a stocky man with a square jaw, a Mexican-style moustache, and glasses perched on his slightly pointed nose, was getting cold. So were his numerous deputies, the officers an
d soldiers of the honor guard, and the musicians of the brass band. Although the airport was less than five miles from the Kremlin, a fifteen-minute drive at most for a government motorcade, Molotov had not wanted to take any risks and came early. The guests he was to receive were US Secretary of State Cordell Hull and British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden.1

  With time on their hands, Molotov and his party found shelter from the chilly weather in the airport building, the first terminal in the Soviet Union to become operational. The airport—popularly known as Khodynka after the Khodynka Field, where in May 1896 more than 1,300 people had been trampled to death by festive crowds celebrating the coronation of the last Russian emperor, Nicholas II—was the cradle of Soviet aviation. In 1922, five years after the revolution and only one year after the end of the subsequent civil war, the victorious Bolsheviks had launched their first international flight, to Königsberg and Berlin, from Khodynka Field. Russia and Germany, the two international outcasts at the end of World War I, were looking to the future together, and the sky was anything but the limit to their cooperation. On the contrary, it offered opportunities to enhance their relations. Seventeen years later, in August 1939, Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, flew to Moscow by the same route to sign the pact with Molotov that provided for a German-Soviet condominium in Europe, and launched World War II.2

  Now, at the very airport where Ribbentrop had landed only four years earlier, Molotov awaited the arrival of new allies. The Soviet Union needed Cordell Hull and Anthony Eden to help defeat its erstwhile ally, Germany. Contrary to all assurances, Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, and by December of that year his troops had advanced all the way to Moscow, a few dozen miles from the capital’s airport. But now the situation was not so dire. The Red Army had driven the Germans back from Moscow in December 1941, and in February 1943, with the help of American supplies pouring into the USSR under Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease program, defeated them at Stalingrad. The tide of war had turned in favor of the Soviets.