Beyond the Call Read online

  The four Americans were treated as honored guests by their Soviet military hosts. The commanding officer loaded them with as much vodka as they could drink, with the result that the Americans were all half-steamed before they’d even got past the reception. There was a play being performed that night in the base’s theater, and the CO took them along as his personal guests. Robert and his compatriots were led in and found rank upon rank of Soviet personnel standing, waiting for the guests of honor to be seated (in the front row, naturally). As soon as their rears touched their seats, without a word of command, the Russians all sat down too.

  Robert enjoyed the performance, despite not understanding a word of it (it had wolves in the title, he recalled, but there were none in the play), and passed an altogether pleasant, vodka-hazed evening. The next morning, accompanied by the commanding officer and his staff, Robert, the other Americans, and the flight crew headed out to their plane. A concerned-looking sentry reported that he and his comrades had heard noises coming from the aircraft during the night, and he demanded to be allowed to inspect it. The pilot opened up the cargo compartment and peered inside. There, lurking in the shadows and frozen almost to death, was a teenage boy – he looked to be about fifteen.

  The Russian officers interrogated the poor kid fiercely. As far as Robert could make out from the interpreter’s commentary, the boy had hopes of being a soldier; too young to enlist, he had stowed away in the belief that the plane was going to the front line and that he would be drafted into the Army as a punishment, in spite of his age. Whether he was a local or had been in the plane since the emergency stopover at Armavir, Robert couldn’t tell. It was a brave but foolish act – having spent the night in the plane, the boy was half-dead with hypothermia.

  Simmering with suppressed anger at having such an embarrassing scene take place in front of foreigners, the Russian CO proceeded to give the Americans a grand diplomatic farewell. Meanwhile, the boy was dragged away, and the last Robert saw of him he was being taken behind a hangar. ‘Oh, he’ll get his wish,’ the interpreter said darkly, but whether he meant punishment or a place in the Army, or both, wasn’t clear. A few minutes later, against the noise of the C-46’s engines starting up, Robert believed he heard a single gunshot from the direction of the hangar.

  Feeling a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold, he wondered what the hell kind of a country he had come to.

  Chapter 4

  BEHIND THE CURTAIN

  15 FEBRUARY 1945: STATION 559, POLTAVA AIR BASE, UKRAINE; HEADQUARTERS OF EASTERN COMMAND, USSTAF

  WITH A CRACKLE of breaking frost, the C-46’s door pushed open. Captain Robert M. Trimble, stiff and chilled from the long flight, stood in the doorway and looked out at Poltava Air Base.

  Instantly he was hit by the wind, a cold slap in the face that made him gasp. Blowing uninterrupted across hundreds of miles of Ukrainian steppe, it was the coldest thing he had ever experienced. It was a lazy wind – instead of taking the trouble to go around your body, it just blew straight through, taking your breath with it and leaving icicles on your rib cage. Winter in the Alleghenies had nothing on this. Maybe it explained the coldheartedness of the Russians. Robert still hadn’t got over what had happened to that boy at Rostov. (Or rather, what he believed had happened. The things he would witness first-hand over the next few months would do nothing to shake that belief.)

  Catching his breath and hugging himself, he stepped down onto the frozen ground and looked around at Poltava. It didn’t look any better from here than it had from the air as they were flying in. Pale rank grass, dusted with snow, stretched to the horizon in every direction. Nearby were some bombed-out buildings, a few flimsy-looking shacks, and, in the distance, new Quonset huts and rows of wooden barracks. Underfoot, the hardstanding on which the C-46 was parked was made from pierced-steel planking – the US Army’s all-purpose emergency surfacing material. The runways were made from it too. This stuff was intended to be used as a temporary measure, but apparently nobody had got around to replacing it with concrete. Most of the paths appeared to be surfaced with nothing but frozen mud.

  Poltava Air Base looked like Hell with everybody out to lunch.

  Until just over a year ago, the Luftwaffe had been flying missions from here, and they hadn’t been happy about giving it up. In September 1943, with the Red Army closing in on them, the German occupiers destroyed as many of the base’s buildings as they could, and mined others with remote-control demolition charges. The runways too were wrecked. Since then, only the bare essentials had been done to get the airfield functioning again.

  It wasn’t only the air base that had suffered. The whole Poltava region had seen some of the most ferocious fighting on the Eastern Front. The huge battles of Kursk and Kharkov had been fought just to the east of here in 1942 and 1943, and the battle for Poltava itself had been a savage one. War had plowed through the area twice – once in 1941, when the region was swallowed up in Operation Barbarossa and became part of the Third Reich, and again in 1943, when the Soviet Union clawed it back in the Dnieper–Carpathian Offensive. Millions had fought, and hundreds of thousands had died, in those vast battles. The USSR had lost more than a million men and women killed or wounded in the fight for this region – just a fraction of their losses in the Great Patriotic War.

  In the aftermath of this conflagration, the first small group of Americans arrived at Poltava in the spring of 1944: engineers to clear the battle damage and build new facilities, preparing the way for the airmen that were to follow.

  It was an ambitious plan that brought them here – to use Poltava as a stopover base for long-range bombing missions. Much of Germany’s industry was in the eastern half of the Reich, beyond the reach of British and American bombers based in England and Italy. The four-engine heavies that formed the bulk of the Allied strategic bombing force didn’t have the range to hit targets that far away and then make it back to England. They could be fitted with extra fuel tanks, but that would reduce the bomb loads they could carry. The solution was to bomb these remote targets and then fly the much shorter distance onward to bases in Soviet territory. There they could refuel, load up with more bombs, and hit another set of targets on the way back to their bases. This was ‘shuttle’ bombing. It was a bold concept, and totally dependent on cooperation from the Soviet Union.

  Despite profound unwillingness on the part of Stalin, Operation Frantic was agreed on. The Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces (based in Britain and Italy respectively) would be taking part. The base at Poltava was designated the headquarters of the newly created Eastern Command, under the overall control of the United States Strategic and Tactical Air Forces in Europe (USSTAF). Two satellite bases near Poltava were incorporated into the project. American supplies, fuel, and munitions poured in, buildings were put up and steel planking laid down, and soon Poltava was a functioning air base again. The Americans didn’t have the place all to themselves – it was under overall Soviet command and was a base for Russian fighter squadrons too – but they had all the facilities they needed. Combat operations began in June 1944.

  The Frantic missions were few in number, and the results didn’t live up to the planners’ hopes. The whole of Operation Frantic quickly began to buckle under the colossal obstructiveness of the Soviet Union. By this stage in the war, Stalin had begun to believe that the USSR could win without its allies. He would take anything the Americans and British could give – such as Lend-Lease supplies – but he had little desire to reciprocate. Moreover, there was Soviet disapproval of the Western Allies’ strategy of pulverizing German industry; the Soviet way was to slaughter the people and capture the industrial facilities.1 Above all, Stalin did not like having foreign military forces trampling around in his front yard, going places and seeing things he didn’t want them to see and bringing their alien capitalist values with them. American personnel at Poltava were kept to a bare minimum, and were watched closely, spied on, and escorted everywhere by Soviet guards.2

  As the base
was under overall Red Army Air Force command, they provided its defenses. The base was surrounded by anti-aircraft guns (which American personnel weren’t allowed to inspect closely).3 The defenses looked impressive, but when it came to the test, they proved pathetically weak. When the Luftwaffe decided to attack Poltava on the night of 21/22 June, they had a clear run and easy pickings.

  Squadrons of American B-17 bombers and P-51 fighters had arrived that afternoon on a shuttle mission, having bombed targets in eastern Germany. The fighters went to one of the satellite fields; the bombers were split between Poltava and the second satellite. They were parked around the half of the field allocated for American use, and spread out; but the dispersal wasn’t as good as it should have been. Regulations set by the Soviet authorities dictated that all parked aircraft must be a certain minimum distance from the runways. As a result, the dispersal space was limited and planes were too close together.4

  The raid began just after midnight. Luftwaffe aircraft began dropping flares, one after another, until the whole airfield was lit up like a dance floor. As the flares floated down on their little parachutes, there was an eerie pause, filled with the drone of approaching aircraft. When they hit, the impact was like a juggernaut through a picket fence. Wave after wave of Junkers Ju 88s and Heinkel He 111s flowed overhead, slamming the base with a barrage of demolition bombs, then raining down thousands of incendiaries and anti-personnel bombs all across the field. ‘It lasted for an hour or so,’ the CO of Eastern Command recalled. ‘They hit us with everything except the kitchen stove, and I’m not sure that I didn’t see even one of those when I looked round afterwards.’5 The midnight summer sky turned red with erupting fire-balls and filled with mounting columns of black smoke; the fuel and bomb dumps were hit, and half a million gallons of aviation-grade gasoline and thousands of bombs went up in a cataclysm of flame.

  The Russian anti-aircraft gunners blazed away with courage and ferocity and hit precisely nothing; Soviet night fighters were scrambled, but failed to shoot down a single plane.

  Next morning, the Americans and Russians began to count up their losses. Only two American personnel had been killed, but the Russians had lost 30, mostly in attempts to fight fires. The majority of the American aircraft had been lost. There had been 73 B-17s on the field. Most had been hit, 47 of them totally destroyed, reduced to scatters of melted Alclad from which the huge tail fins stood up intact, like gravestones. The airfield was out of action for two days because of unexploded bombs. One of the official historians of Eastern Command would later compare the devastating raid to the Japanese attack on Hickam Field, Pearl Harbor.6 The Germans were so pleased with their success, they came back again the next night and bombed the satellite base at Mirgorod; again the Soviet defenses were absolutely ineffective.7

  Official relations between the Americans and their Soviet counterparts deteriorated. For the American high command, the raid was a severe black mark against the viability of Operation Frantic. Only seven shuttle missions were run, and by the end of September 1944 the operation had been put on ice. Eastern Command was reduced to just 200 men and women – the ‘Winter Detachment’. The only thing preventing the command being shut down altogether was the usefulness of having a foothold in the Soviet Union.

  Eastern Command acquired a new role: salvage of American aircraft that had made emergency landings in Soviet-held territory, and evacuation of their crews. Another role was envisaged too: with the Red Army pushing deeper into Poland, the Americans hoped that Poltava would be a good receiving center for the flood of liberated US prisoners of war that was bound to start sometime soon.

  But as with Operation Frantic, cooperating with the Soviets would prove frustrating. The entire Soviet system, from Stalin down to the local political operatives, disliked the presence of Americans. The mechanics and pilots who made up the aircraft salvage teams had to venture far from the confines of the base and go deep into the areas behind the Russian front line. The Soviet authorities saw them as nosy, interfering, always poking about, witnessing and commenting indignantly on the Soviet way of doing things, especially in the occupied territory of liberated Poland. The Americans didn’t like what they saw in Poland, and some of them had the nerve to say so.

  Russian sensitivities about Poland went back to 1939, when the country was divided up between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Tens of thousands of Polish political prisoners were taken away to camps at Smolensk in Russia. They included most of the officer corps of the Polish Army, who were perceived as a source of nationalist resistance. Stalin already had a deep loathing and distrust of Poland and the Poles, rooted in the history of the two nations.8 The mere possibility of insurrection was more than he could tolerate. In March 1940 Stalin and the politburo authorized the NKVD (the state security and intelligence police) to exterminate the 20,000 prisoners.

  The incident might have passed unnoticed by the outside world if it hadn’t been for the German invasion in 1941. German officers stationed near Smolensk discovered that a massacre had taken place. An investigation led to the uncovering of 4,000 bodies buried in the Katyn Forest, about twelve miles west of the city. Locals recalled the truckloads of Poles that were taken from the prison and driven out into the forest. The convoys and the gunfire went on for days.

  In 1943, facing expulsion from Russian soil by the advancing Red Army, and guessing that they might be blamed for the massacres, the Nazi regime decided to publicize their discovery internationally. They boosted their investigations, bringing in the Red Cross and setting up an international commission. What followed was one of the greatest displays of political hypocrisy of the twentieth century, as two mass-murdering nations pointed accusing fingers at each other.

  The Polish government in exile, based in London, had known about the deportations of 1939 and 1940, but the truth about the Katyn massacre came as a hideous shock. They pressed for further investigations and asked that action be taken to bring the Soviet Union to account. The Soviets responded with frigid hostility.9 Foreign Minister Molotov indignantly denied that the massacres had been a Soviet deed (as a member of the politburo, his signature was actually on the document authorizing the extermination). It must, the Russians insisted, have been yet another Nazi atrocity. Moreover, the Soviets claimed that the Polish government in exile was now actively collaborating with the Nazis in trying to shift the blame.

  Alarmed that the ‘Big Three’ Alliance might be jeopardized, Winston Churchill did what he could to shut the Poles up and pacify Stalin. It was no use. The Poles continued to protest. On 25 April 1943, the Soviet government formally broke off diplomatic relations with them. Western hopes of a restored, democratic Poland were ruined, and the Soviets began preparing to install a Communist-friendly government. As the Red Army pushed across Poland, the NKVD followed in its wake, enacting the plan. The puppet government was established in Lublin in 1944, and the Sovietization of the country, which had been interrupted in 1941, resumed.

  It was a brutal process, and Stalin did not want his allies to witness it. He mistrusted them; the Polish government in exile still existed, and Churchill and Roosevelt continued to support it. Stalin believed that the British and the Americans might engage covertly in helping anti-Communist nationalists to resist his puppet. The USSR was busy putting in place its vision of post-war Eastern Europe, and its allies seemed to feel entitled to judge and object to Russian actions.

  Naturally, the Americans and the British who witnessed those actions saw it rather differently. They believed they were fighting for a world that was free of repression and tyranny, not a Stalinist empire east of the river Elbe.

  Caught up in all of this were the prisoners of war, whose liberation was getting closer and closer as the Red Army pushed across Poland. Added to the callous Soviet attitude to their plight was the problem of getting American help into Poland. Anticipating the difficulties, and the potential risk to liberated prisoners, the men at the top of the American military and diplomatic services secretly made
preparations for working around the Soviets.

  The first requirement was to have covert personnel in the field in the regions where the prison camps were located. That was a problem in itself. There was no existing intelligence system in place that could be used. Throughout 1944 there had been negotiations between Washington and Moscow about cooperating on intelligence in Eastern Europe, all of which had come to nothing. In early 1944, an idea was floated for America’s OSS and Russia’s NKVD to run an exchange program, with OSS officers in Moscow and NKVD officers in Washington. The Russians were eager, but the scheme was shot down by President Roosevelt.10 He was entering an election year, and allowing Soviet agents into the United States would be a propaganda gift to his political opponents.

  Throughout the summer, other ideas for getting OSS/NKVD cooperation in Eastern Europe had been suggested, but were all blocked by Stalin and his foreign minister, Molotov. General Pavel Fitin, the deputy director of the NKVD, was enthusiastic. Fitin was the brilliant spymaster who had tried to warn Stalin in 1941 that the Germans intended to invade. His relationship with Stalin and Molotov was uneasy. While their ideological paranoia urged them to keep foreigners out, Fitin saw the value in maximizing all sources of intelligence-gathering. He even used his discussions with General William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, head of the OSS, to chisel information out of him about OSS training, technology, and methods – information which Donovan happily (and rather naively) supplied.11 Fitin was willing to bypass both Molotov and Stalin, and suggested ways of infiltrating OSS officers into Eastern European countries such as Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Romania secretly through diplomatic channels.12 But in Poland, where the most important German strategic effort was focused (and where the POW crisis was likely to occur), the diplomatic channels did not exist.