Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front: American Airmen behind the Soviet Lines and the Collapse of the Grand Alliance

355 Pages·2019·3.055 MB·English

by  Serhii Plokhy

FORGOTTEN BASTARDS OF THE
EASTERN FRONT

SERHII PLOKHY
F O R G OT T E N B A S TA R D S
O F T H E E A S T E R N F R O N T
American Airmen behind the Soviet Lines and the
Collapse of the Grand Alliance
1
1
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)
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 vii
Prologue xiii
Part I: Grand Alliance 1
1 Mission to Moscow 3
2 Stalin’s Verdict 12
3 Going Frantic 21
4 Poltava 32
Part II: The Battles of Poltava 43
5 Soft Landing 45
6 Comrades in Arms 58
7 Death to Spies 75
8 Pearl Harbor on the Steppes 87
9 Forbidden Love 104
10 Picking a Fight 122
11 Fall of Warsaw 135
Part III: Strange Bedfellows 149
12 Forgotten Bastards of Ukraine 151
13 Watchtower 164
14 New Year’s Dance 176
15 Yalta 186
16 Prisoners of War 198
vi ■ Contents
17 Rupture 211
18 Last Parade 224
Part IV: Cold War Landing 237
19 Spoils of War 239
20 Poltava Suspects 250
21 Witch Hunt 261
22 Washington Reunion 270
Epilogue 283
Acknowledgments 293
Notes 295
Index 327
PREFACE
I
n 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 im-
mediate 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,
viii ■ Preface
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, fol-
lowed 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 anni-
hilation. 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
Preface ■ ix
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 mechan-
ics, 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 dif-
ferent period of time, have been preserved. The archives of the US Air Force
Historical Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama and the docu-
mentary 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 unavaila-
ble 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 counterintelli-
gence. The reports of spies and the memos of their masters and handlers—
comprising about two dozen thick volumes—have now become available