4

Poltava

Ever since the Teheran Conference in late November 1943, Averell Harriman had wanted Colonel Elliott Roosevelt to come to Moscow to help with the negotiations on the US air bases. The forty-three-year-old son of the president was the commanding officer of the 90th Photographic Wing, the US Air Force unit that provided reconnaissance for the Twelfth and Fifteenth Air Forces, the latter stationed in Italy and conducting bombing raids over Central and Southeastern Europe. At Teheran, President Roosevelt had asked Stalin to allow his son to take a reconnaissance flight from Italy over Europe and land in the Soviet Union. Stalin had promised to discuss the issue with Harriman in Moscow.¹

Once Stalin gave his approval for the American bases on February 2, 1944, Harriman asked General Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander in Europe, to send Elliott Roosevelt to Moscow. With the president’s son at his side, Harriman hoped to make not only Molotov but also Stalin more malleable to American requests. At Teheran, Stalin had treated Colonel Roosevelt with special respect and showered him with attention. Harriman wanted Colonel Roosevelt in Moscow, if only for a few short days, but Roosevelt was busy with other assignments. When in May 1945, Elliott was finally cleared to go to Moscow, the US ambassador was out of town, visiting General Eisenhower and Churchill in London and FDR in Washington. The visit of the president’s son to the Soviet Union would take place in the absence of the man who had initiated it.²

With Harriman away, John Deane did his best to exploit Elliott Roosevelt’s presence in Moscow to speed up the opening of American bases in Ukraine. As predicted, Elliott’s arrival helped to open Kremlin doors. On May 11, 1944, he accompanied Deane and Major General Frederick Anderson, the representative of General Spaatz, the commander of the US Strategic Air Forces in Europe (USSTAF), to a meeting with Molotov, who treated Elliott as an “old acquaintance,” as Anderson wrote to Spaatz. On May 14 Anderson, Deane, and Roosevelt flew to Ukraine to visit the newly formed Eastern Command (ESCOM), which included the airbases in Poltava, Myrhorod, and Pyriatyn. They saw the airfields under construction and American tent cities to which the new commanding officer on the ground, Colonel Kessler, would refer as “small patches of America.” There they met the Soviet commanders, impressing the importance of the operation upon them, and got their first glimpse of the country where American airmen would be living and fighting behind Stalin’s lines. It was a sobering sight. Three years of warfare had wreaked terrible destruction.³

Colonel Alfred Kessler had accomplished a lot before Roosevelt’s arrival. On April 18, three days after landing at Poltava, he produced plans for the reconstruction of the air bases and immediately got to work to implement them. Deane, who visited Poltava, Myrhorod, and Pyriatyn for an inspection in late April, was satisfied with what he saw there. In the cable that he sent Generals Spaatz and Arnold on April 29, Deane went out of his way to praise the efforts of his men in Ukraine. He could not “emphasize too strongly what a good job Kessler and his staff are doing. They are living under the most difficult conditions in an area that has been completely devastated by the Germans.” He was extremely pleased that “the whole atmosphere of the place between the Russians and Americans on the ground is one of extreme friendliness and cooperation.” Deane also did his best to reassure the Air Force bosses, who were concerned that progress at the bases was slower than expected. “Russians have very definite ideas as to how things should be done,” he wrote, “things progress in the tempo that they set.”⁴

The Soviet effort was led by the forty-three-year-old Aleksandr Perminov, the commander of the 169th Special-Purpose Air Base (ABON), with responsibility for all three of the airfields. A lanky man with a long face, Perminov had received his general’s rank on February 4, only a few months earlier. An ethnic Russian, he had joined the Communist Party in 1920 and the Red Army in 1921. He was only twenty-two at the time. When the German-Soviet war began in June 1941, Perminov was a colonel and chief of staff of the 14th Air Division of the Red Army in the Ukrainian city of Lutsk. On June 22, 1941, the first day of the war, his division lost forty-six airplanes, destroyed by the Luftwaffe while still on the ground. Altogether it lost eighty-two airplanes within a few days. Perminov’s commanding officer was court-martialed and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. Perminov was untouched by the purge of Soviet Air Force officers. In February 1944, the month of his promotion to general, he was given the Order of Mikhail Kutuzov, one of the highest Soviet awards for senior-rank commanders, and appointed commander of the Soviet airfields provided for American use.⁵

Kessler, his American counterpart, who had previously served as commanding officer of the 13th Combat Bomb Wing of the Eighth Army Air Force in Britain under Spaatz and taken part in bombing raids on Germany and North Africa, found in Perminov a battle-scarred aviator he could work with. Major James Parton, a historian of the US Fifteenth Army Air Force who visited Poltava in 1944, characterized Perminov as a “keen, straightforward flyer” who “used his authority to the utmost to slash red tape and settle the myriad daily problems on the spot.” “Kessler and Perminov took an immediate liking to each other and proved to be a good team,” recalled Deane. The readiness of Soviet Air Force commanders to accommodate their American counterparts that Deane had noticed in Moscow was now apparent in Ukraine.⁶

At Poltava, the Germans had destroyed or attempted to destroy every building in the proximity of the air base. Only one six-story building had miraculously survived the German demolition squads. When Captain Robert H. Newell of the US medical service inspected the building, he discovered that there was no glass in most of the windows, electricity was available in only two rooms, and the living quarters were full of rodents and insects. He found the bathrooms “malodorous” and described the bathing facilities as “unsanitary, inadequate, and primitive.” Newell suggested that the building be demolished altogether. As far as sanitation was concerned, it was easier to house not only the personnel but also the ESCOM headquarters in the tent city nearby.⁷

The Soviets, adamant that both they and the Americans should use the building, began to repair it. They were in for a nasty surprise. On April 27, Red Army soldiers who entered the building’s basement discovered a charge consisting of three undetonated air bombs, each 550 pounds (250 kilograms) in weight. There were three equally powerful charges elsewhere—two in the main building and one in an adjoining structure. If detonated, the charges could demolish the buildings they were hidden in. All four charges were connected by radio cables to a radio set buried in the soil just under 1,000 feet (300 meters) from the main building. The charges could be detonated by a radio signal, and the batteries in the radio set might last up to half a year. It had been seven months since the Red Army had recaptured Poltava, but the charges were not detonated, apparently because of damage to the wires leading from the radio set to the air bombs. General Aleksei Nikitin ordered the evacuation of the building and the resettlement of the American officers. Eventually Stalin himself would be briefed on the accident as Soviet engineers tried to figure out how the apparatus worked. They had never encountered such sophisticated radio-triggered explosive devices.⁸

Despite all the difficulties, work at Poltava and the other two bases proceeded at neck-breaking speed. “Frantic” took on new meaning as the project became something of a race against time. Plans for the reconstruction of the Myrhorod and Pyriatyn bases were ready by April 22. In one place the Soviets were turning a former girls’ school into living quarters; in another they were refurbishing old artillery barracks. On April 24 the first American engineers, signal officers, and medical personnel arrived by plane from Teheran. On April 26 the first permanent personnel were dispatched to Pyriatyn, and a day later to Myrhorod. On April 28 the first equipment reached Poltava from Murmansk, where it had been shipped from the United Kingdom. The metal matting that was supposed to be unloaded first was actually the last to leave the ships, as it had been placed at the bottom of the cargo holds, but it began to arrive as well. The Americans and Soviets got busy laying down new airstrips and extending the old ones.⁹

The metal matting, technology unknown to the Soviets, made quite an impression on Stalin himself. In March 1944, when General Nikitin reported to him that the Red Air Force was largely grounded by rains that had turned airstrips into mud flats, Stalin asked the general whether the metal matting for airstrips was produced in the Soviet Union. “No,” responded Nikitin, “A great deal of metal is required for the airstrips: every strip weighs about 5,000 tons.” Stalin interrupted his commander: “How do you know how much metal is produced in the country? Are you a specialist?” He ordered Nikitin to prepare a memo and submit it to the State Defense Council, the main Soviet governing body during the war.¹⁰

The Soviets did their best to deliver to Poltava bases and install the metal matting. Produced by Pittsburgh steelworkers, the mats were shipped first to Britain, then to Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, and delivered by train to Poltava and adjacent bases—all in record time. Miraculously, the Soviets found enough trains to ship the mats from the northern Russian ports to Ukraine in the middle of preparations for a major offensive in Belarus that was to begin on June 22, 1944. The arrival of every new shipment at the Poltava-area bases was treated as a festive event. Deane and his companions saw how, at one of the railway stations, “Russian soldiers went into raptures as each piece of American equipment was unloaded from the trains.”

To the surprise of the Americans, most of the work involved in placing the mats was done by Red Army women. In March the Soviets had promised two engineer battalions, each 339 soldiers strong, to help with the reconstruction of the bases. No one expected that the battalions would be largely female. “The airfields were swarming with Russian women laying down the steel mat,” remembered Deane. “The girls work at everything,” recalled Sergeant Joseph M. Sorenson in an interview for the US Army magazine Yank a few months later: “they are truck drivers, snipers, pilots, artillerymen, engineers, antiaircraft gunners, clerks—just everything.” The Red Army women were eager to outdo the men, especially American men. When they were told that the norm for a GI was to lay down ten yards of mats per day, they made sure to lay twelve. “It was apparent that there would be no delays on this score,” remembered Deane.¹¹

The Soviets and Americans did their best to overcome differences of language and culture as they worked together. The language gap was not only a hurdle; it was an opportunity for the occasional prank. One of the US personnel taught a Soviet soldier guarding the entrance to headquarters to greet every American officer with the following words: “Good morning, you filthy son of a bitch.” The soldier was proud when he said those words: his pronunciation was not perfect, but the message got through. Deane thought such episodes meant that the Soviets and Americans were learning to get along.¹²

Colonel Elliott Roosevelt, who arrived at the Poltava-area air bases in mid-May together with Major General Frederick Anderson, described the Poltava airfield as “little more than the shambles the Nazis had left when they retreated.” Like everyone else, he was surprised by the massive employment of manual labor where the Americans would have used machines, and impressed by the work of women in uniform, whom he called “husky Amazons, who thought nothing of tossing around fifty gallon gasoline drums like toys.”¹³

The program of Colonel Roosevelt’s visit to the Poltava bases included both an inspection of the airfields, and a tour of the city of Poltava, sponsored by Major General Perminov. The city lay in ruins. Poltava and the surrounding area had witnessed a major battle in September 1943, when the Red Army recaptured the region from the retreating Germans. By May 1944, its streets were cleaned of rubble but the surviving structures were still missing window glass and sometimes portions of their walls and roofs. The Soviets counted the losses. Completely or partially demolished were 45 schools, 9 hospitals, and numerous theaters and museums. Also lost was 3.8 million square feet (350,000 square meters) of housing.¹⁴

One of the first things the Soviets did after the takeover of the city was to build a monument to Stalin, but there were a few old prewar buildings monuments standing. “The city of Poltava was terrible,” recalled Soviet airplane technician Vladlen Gribov, assigned with a friend to the Myrhorod air base, as he described his impressions on first visiting the city in mid-April 1944. “We walked the city, searching for at least one building that had remained intact. No! Bare walls with holes where windows had been. Neither roofs nor ceilings. Graves in the city gardens and in the yards. On one of them, a sign: ‘Here lie two fighters and a woman brutally tortured by the Germans.’ A boy of eight or nine tells us: ‘And there is a well into which they threw children!’ ”¹⁵

Poltava began in the mid-fifteenth century as an outpost of princely rule on the contested steppe frontier between the local Ukrainian population and the Crimean Tatars. It became famous in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as one of the centers of the Ukrainian Cossacks, who created their own state on the banks of the Dnieper River and fought first with the Tatars, then with the Poles, and finally with the Russians, who took control of the region in the mid-seventeenth century. In the early eighteenth century, the pro-independence aspirations of a Cossack leader, Hetman Ivan Mazepa, brought to Poltava Charles XII of Sweden, who counted on Mazepa’s support in his war with Peter I of Russia. In June 1709, in what became widely known as the Battle of Poltava, Peter defeated Charles and his Ukrainian supporters. The victory helped Peter win his war with Sweden and set Russia on the path to becoming a European superpower.¹⁶

The nineteenth century brought a different kind of fame to Poltava. It briefly became the seat of the governor general of “Little Russia”—the name of the former Cossack lands now incorporated into the Russian Empire—and a center of cultural and literary activity. A native son, Ivan Kotliarevsky, produced the first literary works in the modern Ukrainian language. His play Natalka from Poltava became a classic of the Ukrainian theater and helped turn the local dialect into the basis of the modern Ukrainian language. The Poltava region was rich enough in local talent to support the development of not one but two literatures. Nikolai Gogol, born near the city of Myrhorod (where one of the US bases was located, of course) laid the foundations of modern Russian prose with Taras Bulba, and a collection of short stories with the Russian title Mirgorod. The family of another well-known Russian literary figure, Vladimir Korolenko, came from Poltava, where the writer died and was buried in 1921.

Like all American visitors to the city, General Anderson and Colonel Roosevelt were taken to downtown Poltava to tour places of interest and monuments marking the city’s memorable dates and honoring its favorite sons. The main attraction was the Corpus Garden, a city park located on the former site of the imperial officers’ school and used for public gatherings, concerts, and dances. The Corpus Garden’s centerpiece, a monument to the Russian victory of 1709 over the Swedes, was built a century after the battle. The column, topped with the Russian imperial eagle, miraculously survived both the Soviet anti-tsarist campaigns and the German occupation. The marauders only removed the old cannons from the foot of the monument. American servicemen in Poltava included the column in many of the photographs they took.¹⁷

The American guests were also taken to another city park to see Korolenko’s house. All that remained was a tombstone bearing an inscription with Korolenko’s name and dates. The house was in ruins, destroyed either by the retreating Germans or advancing Soviets amid the chaos that engulfed the city during the Soviet retreat in 1941 and their return in 1943. All but destroyed by fire was another city landmark—the local museum, designed in the early twentieth century by one of Ukraine’s best modern artists, Vasyl Krychevsky. The pseudo-baroque style of the museum was a reminder of the Cossack past of the city and region. Only the walls remained, featuring elements of traditional Ukrainian ornament.¹⁸

On the streets of Poltava, the Americans saw an impoverished population. War had brought more hardship to a region devastated less than a decade earlier by the 1933 man-made famine caused by the Stalin regime’s collectivization of agriculture and the shattering of Ukrainian political and cultural aspirations. Among the hardest-hit regions of Ukraine were those of Poltava, Myrhorod, and Pyriatyn, where the death toll in some villages reached as high as half the population. Altogether, close to four million died in Ukraine between 1932 and 1934. The World War II losses accounted for another seven million, approximately 15 percent of the country’s prewar population, making Ukraine proportionally the third most war-ravaged nation after neighboring Belarus and Poland.¹⁹

Poltava had had a population of almost 130,000 before the start of the German-Soviet war in June 1941. When the Germans, who took control of the city in September 1941, did their own census in May 1942, they counted only 74,000 people. Ukrainians accounted for 93 percent of the population, Russians for more than 5 percent. For the first time in centuries, the minorities did not include Jews, most of whom had been lucky enough to leave the city before the arrival of the Germans. Those who could not leave or decided to stay for family reasons were rounded up and killed—up to 2,000 in the city alone, and approximately 9,000 more in the towns and villages of the region.²⁰

Most of those on the streets of Poltava in May 1944 were women, children, and the elderly. Women had accounted for more than 60 percent of the city’s population in 1942. Their percentage probably grew, as the Soviets drafted most of the local men into the Red Army after retaking the city in September 1943. Young Poltava women were about to become objects of special attention on the part of American GIs, and the Corpus Garden with its monument would become a rendezvous point for most dates. At the time of Anderson’s and Roosevelt’s visit to the city, the men of the fourth echelon had finally arrived there after their epic two-month voyage.²¹

Deane, Anderson, and Roosevelt left Poltava for Moscow in the morning of May 15, 1944. Perminov gave a send-off dinner the previous night, with no shortage of food and drink. When the Soviets poured more liquor for dessert, Anderson turned to Deane and asked, “When will this end?” Deane, who was well aware of the tradition of drinking toasts bottoms-up, replied: “This is Mother Russia; wait a bit, it’s just getting started.” The partying continued.

The friendly atmosphere around the table was put to the test at the end of the dinner, when the Americans were informed that they were not cleared to fly to Teheran, as originally planned. The Soviets wanted them to return to Moscow to talk to General Nikitin and clear up a number of issues raised at the previous meeting. The official reason cited for the cancellation of the flight to Teheran was bad weather. One of the Americans present, Brigadier General Edward Peck Curtis, General Spaatz’s chief of staff, was outraged. “Then why don’t you forbid us to fly to Berlin when the weather turns bad?” he asked his Soviet counterparts. The Americans began demanding permission to fly directly to Cairo. The Soviets tried to smooth the situation over, claiming that the Americans were important figures, and there was no need to risk their lives.²²

The minor incident at the dinner table notwithstanding, Deane left Poltava deeply satisfied with the results of the visit. American planes were flying largely unobstructed between the Poltava air bases and Moscow, as well as between Poltava and Teheran. Getting permission from the Soviet Air Force for flights had become routine, although—as usual—the Soviets insisted that their navigators be on board. Visa issues had finally been resolved as well, with the Soviets setting up border posts at the bases. Deane wrote later: “Toward the end of May 1944 the bases were completed and operations were about to start.”²³

Colonel Roosevelt was equally optimistic about the results of the visit. He left the place full of respect for “the vigor with which [the Red Army] overcame obstacles” and “carried away the impression that the Russians were almost childishly eager to get along with us, cooperate with us.” Indeed they were.²⁴