Beyond the Call Read online

  Praise for Beyond the Call

  ‘Vivid and engaging, Beyond the Call is partly a story of one officer’s guile and bravery in the face of forces much larger and more powerful than himself. But is also a moving and appalling tale of the full horror of World War II’s last year on the eastern front.’

  Randall Hansen, author of Fire and Fury and Disobeying Hitler

  ‘Beyond the Call is the brilliantly told, fast-paced true story of a remarkable young man. Deceived by his superior officers, he found himself in a place where danger abounded and life was cheap but, drawing on a courage he hadn’t known he possessed, he began his assignment. Nerve-wracking, informative, yet profoundly moving, Beyond the Call is a truly inspiring book.’

  Susan Ottaway, author of Sisters, Secrets, and Sacrifice

  ‘Snappy and cinematic, Beyond the Call is a gift, an untold story from those last days of WWII in Europe when the unthinkable became real – when our ally had turned against us, when our POWs were left to die, and when a veteran pilot would receive a harrowing final mission – to fly against the might of the Soviet Union.’

  Adam Makos, New York Times bestselling author of A Higher Call

  BEYOND

  THE CALL

  BEYOND

  THE CALL

  THE TRUE STORY OF ONE WORLD WAR II

  PILOT’S COVERT MISSION TO RESCUE

  POWS ON THE EASTERN FRONT

  LEE TRIMBLE WITH JEREMY DRONFIELD

  Published in the UK in 2015 by

  Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

  39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

  email: [email protected]

  www.iconbooks.com

  Published in the USA in 2015 by Berkley Books

  Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia

  by Faber & Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street,

  London WC1B 3DA or their agents

  Distributed in the UK, Europe and Asia

  by TBS Ltd, TBS Distribution Centre, Colchester Road,

  Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW

  Distributed in Australia and New Zealand

  by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd, PO Box 8500,

  83 Alexander Street, Crows Nest, NSW 2065

  Distributed in South Africa by

  Jonathan Ball, Office B4, The District,

  41 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock 7925

  Distributed in India by Penguin Books India,

  7th Floor, Infinity Tower – C, DLF Cyber City,

  Gurgaon 122002, Haryana

  ISBN: 978-184831-851-9

  Text copyright © 2015 Lee Trimble and Jeremy Dronfield

  The authors have asserted their moral rights.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any

  means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  Typeset in Bembo by Marie Doherty

  Printed and bound in the UK

  by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  CONTENTS

  About the authors

  Acknowledgments

  Abbreviations

  Maps

  Preface

  Prologue

  1. One Lucky Bastard

  2. An American in London

  3. The Long Way Round

  4. Behind the Curtain

  5. A Brutal Awakening

  6. Running with the Bird Dogs

  7. Fighting Bastard of the Ukraine

  8. Kasia

  9. Night of the Cossacks

  10. Russian Roulette

  11. Suffer the Lost Prisoners

  12. American Gentlemen

  13. Rising Tide

  14. Far from Home

  15. Isabelle

  16. Bait and Switch

  17. Blood Sacrifice

  18. Spare the Conquered, Confront the Proud

  19. The Long Way Home

  Epilogue: Not Without Honor

  Bibliography

  Endnotes

  Index

  THIS STORY is based on the recollections of Robert M. Trimble, as recorded by his son, Lee Trimble. Every effort has been made to verify all aspects of the story, and at most key points it has been corroborated by independent evidence. However, for some episodes there are no traceable surviving eyewitnesses, and because of the hastily improvised, top secret, and politically sensitive nature of Captain Trimble’s mission, there is no direct official record. Those parts of his recollections must be taken on trust. Where corroborating evidence exists, it is cited in the book’s endnotes.

  In memory of Robert M. Trimble

  who went to war

  and Eleanor Trimble

  who brought him home again

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Lee Trimble was born in 1950, the son of Captain Robert M. Trimble. He worked in research and development on lasers, electronics and semiconductors, and was a scientific writer and reviewer for scholarly and professional journals. Jeremy Dronfield – ‘a gifted, original writer’ (Sunday Telegraph) – is a novelist and historical biographer with a special interest in World War II aviation. Among his many books is the critically acclaimed The Alchemist’s Apprentice (Headline, 2001), described as a ‘captivating metaphysical mystery and an otherworldly love story’ by the Sunday Times.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FROM THE FIRST inception to the final proof, this book and its authors have been helped along their way by a host of kind and gifted people.

  Michael and John Kaluta assisted with the early research, and gave access to the rich resource of photos, film, and documents belonging to their father, Lieutenant William R. Kaluta, who was at Poltava throughout the duration of Eastern Command and became its official historian. William MacLeod kindly passed on to us the recollections of his father, Sergeant Don MacLeod, and helped with the sourcing and identification of photographs of the Lieutenant Tillman crew during their time in Poland and Ukraine. Don Nicholson (former major, USAAF) kindly gave his recollections of Poltava and Lwów, and of his work on aircrew rescue for Eastern Command, along with copies of documents and help with photo identification. The Vergolina family generously allowed us to read the POW memoir and press clippings of Sergeant Rudy Vergolina; his son Al and grandson Joseph helped with discussion of Rudy’s experiences in Normandy and Poland.

  David Schmitt of the 493rd Bombardment Group (H) Memorial Association provided a wealth of information about the group’s missions, including copies and transcripts of original mission documents. Lisa Sharik of the Texas Military Forces Museum, Austin, was very helpful in providing information and photos from the Lieutenant Tillman Collection. The tracing of the record of the Croix de Guerre awarded to Robert Trimble was assisted by Gérome Villain, along with Lieutenant Colonel Michèle Szmytka of the Ministère de la Défense et des Anciens Combattants.

  Mike Allard helped with the early research, and brought to light the short snorter signed by Robert Trimble and the Tillman crew. Mike Mucha of the Aircraft MIA Project, Poland, and Geoff Ward of the 96th Bomb Group Association (UK) gave valuable information on the adventures of the crew. Doug Sheley’s online albums were helpful in sourcing photos from the USAF archive. The George Hotel in Lviv, Ukraine (formerly the Hotel George, Lwów, Poland) kindly gave permission to use a photo of the hotel.

  The staff at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, DC, and the Cambridge University Library were invaluable in easing the path of documentary research.

  Thank you to Natalee Rosenstein, Robin E. Barletta and everyone at Penguin/Berkley for having faith in the book, to Duncan Heath and everyone at Icon for their work in producing this edition, and to our agent Andrew Lownie for seeing the potential in the story of Captain Robert Trimble and bringing the two of us together to tell it.


  Finally, heartfelt gratitude goes to Carol Trimble Minnich and Robert Howard Trimble, Lee’s sister and brother, for their help and support in bringing their father’s war stories to light, and to Lee’s wife Robin and children Aaron and Rachael, for their endless patience.

  ABBREVIATIONS

  AAF

  (United States) Army Air Forces

  AC

  Air Corps

  ATC

  Air Transport Command

  Eascom

  Eastern Command

  NKVD

  People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del); Soviet police/intelligence force

  oflag

  German prisoner of war camp for officers (Offizierslager, ‘officers’ camp’)

  OSS

  Office of Strategic Services

  POW

  prisoner of war

  RAF

  Royal Air Force

  RCAF

  Royal Canadian Air Force

  SHAEF

  Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (Europe)

  SMERSH

  Special Methods of Spy Detection (Spetsyalnye Metody Razoblacheniya Shpyonov); Red Army counterintelligence arm

  SOE

  Special Operations Executive

  stalag

  German prisoner of war camp for enlisted men (Stammlager, ‘main camp’)

  TD

  temporary duty

  USAAF

  United States Army Air Forces

  USSTAF

  United States Strategic and Tactical Air Forces in Europe

  MAP 1

  Captain Robert M. Trimble’s route from the UK to Ukraine, January–February 1945. Map by J. Dronfield

  MAP 2

  Eastern Europe, early 1945. Captain Trimble’s area of operations. Map by J. Dronfield

  PREFACE

  BY THE FALL of 1944, the mighty forces of the Red Army, at a bitter cost in lives, had pushed the Nazi invaders out of Russia. As the front line rolled steadily across the Ukraine and Poland, the grim prison camps of the Third Reich were discovered and liberated: concentration camps, death camps, slave labor and POW camps. In their thousands, the suffering inmates were set loose.

  The Soviets’ attitude to the freed prisoners of war was not charitable. Setting the moral mood for the ‘Great Patriotic War’ against Nazi Germany, Stalin had decreed in 1941 that there were no prisoners of war, only traitors and cowards. His declaration, coupled with the culture of savage violence on the Eastern Front, led to cruel treatment and even atrocities against former Russian soldiers who were liberated from POW camps.

  It also affected the treatment of Allied ex-prisoners. They were left to wander, starving, sick, and dying. Some were fired upon indiscriminately by Russian troops; some were robbed; many more were marched to the rear and abandoned. Even worse, hundreds were rounded up into camps where they were treated as potential spies or anti-Soviet partisans and kept in squalid conditions. Those who were able to went into hiding in the forests and abandoned farms, where they mingled with freed slave laborers and escapees from the Nazi death marches. The fortunate ones were given shelter by Polish citizens. Many lost hope of ever seeing their homes again.

  Britain and the United States pleaded urgently with the Soviet government to honor their obligations to Allied prisoners of war. The United States offered to bring in planes, supplies, and contact teams to round up the liberated POWs and evacuate them. Stalin refused. He didn’t want foreigners wandering around in his territory, seeing things he didn’t want them to see. A tense, increasingly angry exchange of letters between President Roosevelt and Marshal Stalin failed to resolve the situation.

  The ex-POWs were caught between callousness and politics.

  Stalin began using the POWs as leverage to force Britain and America to repatriate Russians who had been liberated from POW camps or captured fighting for the Germans. Give me mine, and I’ll give you yours seemed to be the attitude. Roosevelt and Churchill rightly mistrusted Stalin’s motives, and feared for the lives of any Russians repatriated to the USSR.

  Stalemate.

  President Roosevelt, his diplomats, and the United States military high command were left with no option: relations with the USSR were tense and deteriorating, but had to be preserved. If they were going to save their missing men – not to mention the other Allied ex-prisoners – from starvation, imprisonment, and death, they would have to go undercover.

  The Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, provided the means. The options were limited. The OSS European branch, based in London, had no established presence in the regions where the POW camps were. However, the United States did have just one small foothold in Soviet-occupied territory: the air base at Poltava in the Ukraine. Earlier in the war, the Russians had allowed an American unit to be set up there to service long-distance ‘shuttle’ bombing operations from England and Italy. The shuttle missions had ended by late 1944, and Eastern Command had been scaled down to a tiny winter detachment with few duties, almost forgotten, just waiting for the war to end.

  Poltava, a tiny dot of freedom in a sea of Communist red, would be the base for the covert rescue mission.

  They had the location; they had the mission. All they needed was a man to undertake it …

  MY FATHER WAS a regular guy. Not quite what you’d call ordinary, but not noticeably exceptional either. Not a bad father, for someone whose own dad had deserted his wife and children. Dad was faithful and did his best, despite the lack of a role model. As a citizen, he did his duty in the war, and survived, then came home and raised a family. I couldn’t have told you anything extraordinary about him, had it not been for an astonishing confession when he was 86 years old, which revealed a whole period in his life that I knew nothing about.

  The events that led to his confession began on a hot summer day in 2005, when Dad was working alone in the communal garden of his retirement community. After a couple of hours under the sun, he began to feel dizzy. He’d forgotten to bring his medicine and water. Rising from his work, he felt faint. He was unconscious before he hit the ground. He lay there for hours before he was found, sunburned and close to death. But Robert Trimble had always been a survivor.

  Around noon of his second day in the Willow Valley Manor infirmary, he was done lying in bed. Without permission, he got up and dressed himself in the dirty, sweaty gardening clothes he’d been brought in wearing. Having paid a visit down the hall to his dear wife Eleanor (her dementia had confined her permanently to the infirmary), he was back in his own apartment. He got some homemade bean soup out of the refrigerator, then turned on the ball game. After dinner he put on his cap, the one with his WWII squadron insignia, and headed back to the garden.

  DAD’S FALL MADE me realize that the time I had left with him and Mom was limited. And so, in the winter of 2006, I began the first of several long drives up from Virginia to Pennsylvania.

  I needed Dad to help me get reacquainted with my heritage. I knew he’d been a bomber pilot in the war, and I wanted to hear those stories again in detail and learn more about his earlier life. He had been a mystery throughout my life. He was a sociable, friendly kind of guy, yet he wasn’t someone we children could share our troubles with intimately. He had even greater difficulty sharing his own feelings. He was kind and caring, but none of us had a close personal relationship with him in our younger days. He was a disciplinarian, so I tended to steer clear of him when I was in trouble, which meant most of the time.

  On that winter day, when I knocked on the door of his apartment he answered with a happy greeting. But when I announced casually that I wanted to spend some time talking about his early life and his experiences in the war – and that I’d brought a recorder with me to preserve his memories – he frowned and said, ‘All right, if that’s really what you want to do.’ He suggested we go and shoot some pool in the rec room.

  ‘Okay fine, Dad,’ I said, chuckling inside that he was still deflec
ting after all these years. I was determined to get him to open up. I asked him about his experiences as a pilot. I knew this would hook him. Although he didn’t like to talk about the past, he did love to talk about flying. Our conversation lasted until dinnertime. He was relaxed and forgot that he was being recorded.

  We kids always admired him for his WWII heroics – my brother Robert (who was named for him), my sister Carol (who was born in the midst of it all), and I. He didn’t talk about the war very often, but when you got him started, he always spoke vividly, reliving the memories as he spoke – right down to the remembered conversations and the emotions.

  On that day in 2006, I finally realized my lifelong wish of recording his story, the tales of adventure in the hostile skies above Europe. At the controls of a heavy bomber (B-24 Liberators at first, later B-17 Flying Fortresses), he ran the gauntlet of 35 harrowing raids over Germany and France during the last six months of 1944. He withstood the horror of seeing his friends blown to bits by German flak. He fought courageously to return to base with engines in flames or, worse, blown completely off of the wing, leaving a hole ten men could stand in. Hearing the stories in our youth, we hadn’t realized, of course, how lucky he was to have survived to tell them to us.

  As long as he was talking war stories that weekend, his conversation was self-sustaining. When asked about his personal feelings, though, he would deflect by commenting on the ball game that was usually running on TV in the background. But I was feeling content that I had thoroughly documented all of Dad’s wartime testimony. Above all, I felt I was beginning to know him, to bond with him again.

  Before leaving that Sunday afternoon, I asked Dad about his father. He fell silent. When he finally spoke, his voice quivered with anger. I felt the urge not to press him, as he was old and frail, but I had to know. It seemed like I had touched a hidden trigger, and at last Dad’s feelings started to come out.