3

Going Frantic

Stalin kept his word. Three days after Harriman received his approval for US Air Force use of Soviet bases, Molotov called a meeting with the commanders of the Soviet Air Force to which he invited Harriman and Deane. The meeting took place on February 5, 1944. The Soviet commanders were represented by Chief Air Marshal Aleksandr Novikov, whom Deane called “the General Arnold of the Red Air Force” and his chief of the directorate in charge of the formation of new Air Force units, Colonel General Aleksei Nikitin.

Novikov and Nikitin, who shared the same year of birth, 1900, belonged to the new crop of Soviet aviators who were put in charge of the Red Army Air Force after its disastrous defeats by the Luftwaffe at the start of the German-Soviet war. Back then, during the first weeks of Operation Barbarossa, the Soviets lost almost half their airplanes—close to 4,000 of the available 9,500. Many were bombed on the airfields without ever having had a chance to engage in battle. Appointed in the following year to lead the embattled Air Force, Novikov, with Nikitin’s help, reorganized it and, with the help of Airacobras, Douglasses, and other aircraft supplied by the United States through the Lend-Lease program, turned it into an effective fighting machine. They still did not accept or try to master the basics of strategic bombing, but their fighter and bomber pilots did exceptionally well in supporting Red Army front-line operations, where they first challenged and then, by late 1943, overcame the Luftwaffe’s control of the skies.¹

The two commanders of the Soviet Air Force, unlike their political bosses, were eager to cooperate with the Americans. In the cable he sent to Washington that night, Deane advised Generals Arnold and Spaatz: “It was agreed that your representatives should arrive as soon as possible and permission was granted for them to come on direct route from United Kingdom to Moscow.” The ball was now in the American court, especially that of the fifty-three-year-old General Carl Andrew Spaatz, who was then in the process of assuming command of all American Air Forces in Europe (USSTAF), including the Eighth Air Force in Britain, which he had previously commanded, and the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy. Both would participate in the shuttle-bombing operations if air bases were in fact established on Soviet territory. Spaatz needed no reminders. On February 6, the day after Deane’s meeting with the Soviet Air Force commanders, Spaatz appointed Colonel John S. Griffith commanding officer of the shuttle-bombing project, which was code-named “Baseball.” The Americans were getting ready to play their favorite game, engaging in the so-called national pastime. They would try and score the runs; the Soviets would have to provide the bases.²

But they had to hurry if the bases were to be made ready in advance of the Allied invasion of Europe. It was a huge task that required extensive planning, the formation of brand-new Air Force units to operate the bases, and the delivery of hundreds of men and hundreds of thousands of tons of equipment, supplies, and ammunition deep in Soviet territory. Deane and the American airmen would be racing against time. The basepaths were turning into an obstacle race, with the Soviets creating the hurdles, and it was anyone’s guess whether the American team would make it on time.

Major Albert Lepawsky, a city planner and former university professor from Chicago who had been assigned to the planning team of the new operation, used baseball terminology to formulate its overall goals. To his thinking, the whole point of this game was to convince the home team of how well the visiting team played, thereby issuing a kind of challenge to the home team to let them play on all their ball fields. What Lepawsky had in mind was the establishment of American bases not only in the western USSR but also in the Far East, where they would be used to help invade the Japanese islands.

That was in the future. The immediate goal of the shuttle operations was to help the US Air Force defeat the Luftwaffe in preparation for the Allied invasion of Europe. Thus, the German airfields, airplane factories, and oil refineries located in Eastern Europe that supplied the planes with scarce fuel were the prime targets of the operation. The secondary task was to distract the Luftwaffe from Western Europe by opening that second front in the East—a difficult undertaking, as the Soviet strategic air force was still in its infancy, and the Soviet command still did not believe in the benefits of strategic bombing.³

Colonel John Griffith, the commander of the new shuttle-bombing operation, seemed an ideal candidate to lead a project involving the Soviet Union. A native of Seattle, he became a flying ace while serving in the British expeditionary force during World War I. As part of the British Royal Flying Corps, he was dispatched to the Russian North in the middle of the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War. Back then he was fighting against the Bolsheviks. Now he was asked to fight on their side. His own political sympathies and antipathies aside, Griffith was first and foremost a very efficient officer. Within ten days of his appointment, Griffith and his officers managed to produce a detailed plan for the start of shuttle bombing, one that envisioned four missions per month, each conducted by 200 American bombers.

By February 28, after a week-long air journey via Cairo and Teheran, Griffith was in Moscow, sitting next to Aleksei Nikitin, and discussing the details of the operation. Deane, who escorted Griffith to Nikitin’s office, asked for airfields closer to the center of the front line and located as far west as possible—the less territory bombers taking off from Britain and Italy had to cover, the better. Nikitin was reluctant to offer bases close to the Soviet front line, suggesting that many of them had been destroyed. He offered instead the bases in central Ukraine, on the southern sector of the Soviet front and relatively far from the front line.⁴ Deane saw no choice but to take what was offered. He proposed an inspection of the airfields as early as the next day. According to the US memorandum of conversation, Nikitin promised to “get busy about making arrangements.” It was a good beginning.

Colonel Griffith and his team got ready for the flight. But the next day passed without a word from General Nikitin, then another, and another. Griffith was becoming ever more impatient. He had been given three weeks to prepare for the start of shuttle bombing. It took him a week to get to Moscow, and during his first week there all he had been able to accomplish was to hold one meeting with the Red Air Force commanders. Deane was trying to calm Griffith and his second in command, Colonel Alfred Kessler, who was equally impatient. “They had been used to dealing with the British, who were at least approachable,” recalled Deane in his memoirs. “They could not get to the Russians to let off steam—but they could get to me. Much of my time was spent in smoothing their feathers.”⁵

It took more than two weeks for Griffith and Kessler to see the proposed bases, as their flight was not cleared until March 31. From Moscow they flew south to central Ukraine. There, on the left bank of the Dnieper River in the lands of the former Hetmanate, the Cossack state of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were three old Cossack towns: Poltava, famed for the Battle of Poltava (1709); Myrhorod, the home town of the writer Nikolai Gogol (Mykola Hohol in Ukrainian); and Pyriatyn. All three had airfields built by the Soviets before the war and used by the Germans during their occupation of the territory in 1941–1943. Those airfields were now being offered to the Americans.

At Poltava the Germans had damaged or destroyed all the buildings with the exception of one barrack. There was no “water, sewage or power system,” Griffith wrote to his commanders in England. The concrete runway could not be extended because of the existing structures, but there was enough space to build a new runway using metal mats. The branch line leading to the main railway had been destroyed by the Germans, but the American visitors thought it could be rebuilt. At Myrhorod, another base fifty miles northwest of Poltava, there were no remaining buildings of any kind, which meant that the existing runway could be extended at will. Pyriatyn, fifty miles west of Myrhorod, had no buildings or concrete runways, so the inspection party could not land. None of the bases much impressed the Americans. Griffith believed that the Soviets were either unable or unwilling to offer anything else or better, and that they had to take what they could get.⁶

By the time Colonel Griffith visited the Poltava and Myrhorod airfields and made his recommendation to accept the bases, he was serving his last days as commander of the “Baseball” shuttle-bombing project, now renamed “Frantic.” What the officers who gave the project its new name had in mind was the panic and distress that shuttle bombing would cause the Germans. But it accurately reflected Griffith’s state of mind, given the never-ending difficulties caused by his Soviet hosts. The perpetual delays in obtaining permission to inspect airfields, shipping equipment, or getting responses to simple questions were driving him insane. Apart from that, the Soviets insisted on full control over American actions. Griffith’s own Douglas C-47 Skytrain airplane could be flown to and from Teheran only by a Soviet pilot. The authorities also wanted Soviet navigators and radio operators to accompany any American plane and insisted on having their own crew fly the American hospital plane.

Deane was determined to keep peace with the Soviet commanders at almost any price. “Colonel Griffith believes that operations under the above conditions will be highly restricted and that these matters should be brought to your attention,” cabled Deane to London and Washington. “However I do not feel that they should be made a major issue at this time, but rather that it will pay us in the long run to attempt to break down these restrictions gradually.” Deane and Griffith clearly did not see eye to eye, and Griffith wanted to make his disagreement with the commanding officer known to his superiors. Deane, for his part, believed that Griffith, who had helped anti-Bolshevik forces fight the Red Army during the revolution, had the wrong attitude and would have to be replaced if the project was to succeed. Griffith had to go, the first victim of Deane’s and the Air Force commander’s desire to keep the Soviets happy and the prospects for Frantic alive. In early April, Deane informed the Soviets that the colonel was being transferred to the United States.⁷

Colonel Kessler replaced Griffith on April 8. Like his commander, Kessler was initially taken aback by the slow pace of negotiations with the Soviets, but he brought a different attitude to the problems. In 1943, Kessler had spent three weeks in the Soviet Union as a member of the US delegation led by Donald M. Nelson, the chairman of the US War Production Board. A graduate of West Point and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he had earned a degree in aeronautical engineering, Kessler had been impressed by Soviet military production and by the Soviets in general. For that reason, Deane felt much more comfortable working with Kessler than with Griffith, and did not even mention Griffith’s name in his memoirs about his tenure in Moscow.⁸

On April 15, 1944, after customary delays caused by the Soviet side, Kessler and a handful of his aides, as well as close to 3,000 pounds (1,350 kilograms) of baggage, including the equipment they needed to start work, were flown to Poltava by a Soviet plane. Deane could finally celebrate a small victory. On the day Kessler left Moscow for Poltava, Deane cabled Spaatz in London and Arnold in Washington: “Kessler and the remainder of his staff moved to Poltava today.” He asked for Kessler’s speedy promotion from colonel to brigadier general. Deane was, as always, in a hurry; the bases were supposed to be ready before the main part of the American contingent had reached the Ukrainian steppes. And they were already on their way—four echelons of the American servicemen, more than 1,200 airmen altogether.⁹

Colonels Griffith and Kessler, who had flown to Moscow in February 1944 with a handful of officers, constituted the first echelon of the Frantic task force. The second and third echelons were larger but numbered dozens rather than hundreds of officers and GIs, and thus could be flown to Poltava from Teheran. The fourth, and last—as well as largest—echelon consisted of 67 officers, four warrant officers, and 680 enlisted men—more than half the US contingent in the USSR, limited by the Soviets after long negotiations to 1,200 men. They traveled by sea, crossed deserts, mountains, and steppes, the entire journey taking almost two months.

The fourth echelon began to assemble in Camp Jefferson Hall (AAF 59) near the town of Stone in Staffordshire, between Birmingham and Manchester, in early March 1944. It consisted of the airplane technicians and ground personnel, and had been selected from units of General Spaatz’s Eighth Air Force. They were chosen individually, not as members of existing units, which made for a diverse and sometimes not very agreeable group—commanders eagerly seized the opportunity to dismiss those whom they considered troublemakers and misfits. But the selection officers did their best to ensure that those who made the cut were experienced in their jobs and in reasonably good health. Those without experience or diagnosed with such things as venereal disease (common enough), hernias, or bad teeth were vetted out.¹⁰

Those selected for the mission had no idea where they were going and for what purpose. The destination would be kept secret until they were about to cross the Soviet border. On March 25, the echelon boarded a train and traveled to Liverpool to embark on the British HMT (Hired Military Transport) ship Alcatrana. The ship, with its US Air Force passengers on board, headed first from Liverpool to the Firth of Clyde in British coastal waters shielded from the Atlantic and German submarines by the Kintyre Peninsula. She waited there for other ships to arrive and form a convoy headed for Gibraltar.

On the evening of April 12, after steaming along the North African coast and, on one occasion, dropping depth charges to hit suspected German submarines, the Alcatrana anchored at Port Said, Egypt. The men of the fourth echelon disembarked, collected their baggage and supplies, and moved to Camp Huckstep, an Allied military base eight miles from Cairo, named after a GI killed in a plane crash in North Africa in 1943. They would spend two weeks there, making preparations for the rest of the trip, which they were told would bring them to Teheran, relaxing and partnering with the American Red Cross. The unit’s diary noted that the Air Force would “take every man to see the Pyramids, the Sphinx, Masks and other ruins of ancient Egyptian Civilization.”

Palmer Myhra, a twenty-two-year-old radar and radio operator from Wisconsin, recalled that climbing them was no mean feat. The pyramids were built of stone blocks four feet high, and it was easy to slip and roll down more than a hundred steps to the bottom. In fact, as the Americans learned, a British soldier had fallen to his death a few days earlier. Still, Myhra also remembered the “feeling of elation when we finally reached the peak. We could see most of the Nile delta from there.”¹¹

On the afternoon of April 23, the first of the two detachments of the fourth echelon boarded a train for the trip from Cairo to Haifa. It took them 36 hours to cover a distance of under 300 miles. From Haifa they traveled in trucks. If the sea leg had been dangerous and the train leg uncomfortable, the motor trip through deserts and mountains was both. They had to cover close to 550 miles of rough terrain from Haifa to Baghdad, the first long leg of their trip to Teheran. In some areas they averaged less than sixteen miles per hour, “the mountainous roads and steep climbs preventing making better time,” wrote Captain Charles N. Manning, who was entrusted with keeping the trip diary. But the main problem was scarcity of water: the men “were permitted to draw water only once at each stop,” reads the diary. If there was little water to drink, there was none with which to shower. They finally arrived in Baghdad on May 1 and were given two days to bathe and rest.

On the morning of May 3 they were on the road again, now headed by truck to Hamadan, southwest of Teheran, another 366 miles of difficult terrain. They arrived on the afternoon of May 5. For 47 enlisted men and 6 officers, that turned out to be the last stop on their journey. The Soviets had, as noted, insisted on a strict limit of 1,200 Americans at the Poltava-area bases, and those 53 Americans were extras. They were reassigned to the Persian Gulf command, not knowing what they would miss. The rest of the troops, some 650 men, still had no idea where they were going. The presence of Russian speakers in their ranks indicated the Soviet Union as their destination, but there were also those who spoke Chinese. Most guessed that they would be reinforcing American troops in China and building air bases to fight the Japanese.

The officers and soldiers of the fourth echelon (the latter were more and more often referred as GIs, or “Government Issue,” irrespective of whether they served in the army or in the air force) learned their destination only on May 10, when they entered the Soviet-controlled area of northern Iran. Some saw the big red star with which the Soviets had marked a building on the border of their zone and assumed that it was a Texaco gas station. It took them a while to figure out that they were entering the Soviet zone. On May 11 they reached Tabriz, the main city of Iranian Azerbaijan. A Soviet train was waiting there to pick them up. The long-suffering travelers bathed and had dinner before departing at 8:30 p.m. on May 11. Many remembered the last leg of their journey as the most pleasant. The coaches were comfortable, not overcrowded, and there was plenty of food and drink.¹²

Captain Manning, who spent pages describing the previous difficulties of the trip, relaxed as well. His log of the previous five days of travel, from Tabriz to Poltava, filled barely half a page of his records. That leg of the trip was documented by the Soviets, mostly commanding officers and interpreters, who filed detailed reports with the Red Army military counterintelligence unit.

Meeting Americans for the first time in their lives, many Soviet officers were truly impressed. They noted with some envy how well equipped and supplied the Americans were: every officer and soldier had a pack weighing up to 80 pounds and one or two suitcases of personal belongings—unheard-of luxury by Soviet standards. The Soviets were also surprised by the democratic spirit of relations between American officers and GIs. “Outward discipline is not wholly satisfactory; greetings and subordination to superiors are hardly to be seen. An American soldier talks to an officer with his hands in his pockets, a cigarette between his teeth, and so on,” wrote a Red Army officer in amazement. He was accustomed to the practice inherited from the Russian imperial army, which required a soldier to salute and stand at attention when speaking to an officer. The Soviets found the American attitude toward security too lax. They were appalled that the Americans failed to post sentries while traveling through unfamiliar territory and, upon arrival in Poltava, left weapons unattended in the coaches.

Perhaps what most surprised the Soviets was how freely their American guests accessed Soviet publications and expressed their political views. “They read our newspapers, magazines, and other literature without restriction and take great interest in the bulletins of the Soviet Information Bureau,” wrote the Soviet commander in charge of that leg of the trip. He was under strict orders not to read any “bourgeois propaganda” that might be offered by the Americans and to prevent his subordinates from doing so. Accustomed to the control exercised by the Soviet secret police and counterintelligence officers over relations with foreigners, the Soviet commander expected the same from the Americans and was taken aback that a US Air Force captain acting as a liaison officer “had no particular influence on [his] officers or even the enlisted men.” In the Soviet commander’s view, the captain had failed to fulfill his duties as political watchdog.

The Soviet officers considered themselves ideologically superior to the Americans. In their opinion, their guests from the capitalist world were failing to see the light of communist truth. “Their political outlook is limited, officers and soldiers alike,” reads one of the counterintelligence reports. They picked up elements of racism in the attitude of some of the officers and enlisted men. “The southern part [of the United States] is disposed against the Negroes and speaks very badly [about them],” reads the report filed by the same Red Army officer. “In conversation, a lieutenant colonel from the southern United States spoke openly of his dissatisfaction with President Roosevelt, saying that if he were to be reelected, he would remain president for life and give complete freedom to the Negroes.” The Soviets were confident that communism alone could solve all the world’s problems, including ethnic and racial ones.

All the Soviets noted the positive attitude of the Americans toward them. The Americans knew the names of top Soviet commanders, such as Marshal Georgii Zhukov, and were shocked by the extent of destruction caused by the war. While the Americans were friendly toward the Soviets, their attitude toward their British allies appeared surprisingly hostile. In Tabriz, when a Red Army officer raised a toast to Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill, he noticed that the Americans officers drank with enthusiasm to Stalin and Roosevelt but showed indifference to Churchill. “The attitude toward England is generally unfriendly,” reported one of the Soviet interpreters attached to the echelon. “When they speak of England, they place it last: Russia, China, and only then England when it comes to allies.”

Major Ralph P. Dunn, the commanding officer of the second detachment of the fourth echelon, was pleased by the reception that he and his men received from Red Army officers and civilians at train stops. He compared it favorably to what the Americans had encountered in the Middle East, where, according a Soviet interpreter who spoke to Dunn, there were “cases of theft and rude behavior on the part of the inhabitants.” At the end of the trip Dunn presented the Soviet military officer in charge of transporting his detachment with a bracelet of animal bone—a gift for the officer’s wife—and a letter of thanks to his commanders. “All the Americans were very well disposed toward our officers, and that was expressed in a mutual exchange of gifts,” reported the Soviet commander of the echelon. “After we reached Poltava, they would come into our wagon every half hour to say how sorry they were that we would have to part so soon.”¹³

Major Dunn’s detachment of fewer than 400 men (the entire fourth echelon on its departure counted 680 servicemen) reached Poltava on the evening of May 16, 1944. With the new arrivals there were now 922 Americans at the Poltava-area bases. Most of them—416 servicemen—stayed in Poltava, 243 were dispatched to Myrhorod, and 263 to Pyriatyn. Operation Frantic was about to enter its decisive stage. The Americans had managed to reach the Ukrainian bases before the Allied invasion of Western Europe, and chances were that the bases would become operational by D-Day. John Deane could celebrate his first real victory. Not only had he managed to get over all of the hurdles by the Soviets since he first broached the idea of the bases in October 1943, he had made them keep their word. The cost was high, including the dismissal of the first commander of the shuttle-bombing operation and long periods of uncertainty and confusion, but the results were plain to see and the future looked promising.¹⁴