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

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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

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