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.