5

Soft Landing

Bill Lawrence’s voice “choked with indignation,” wrote John Deane, recalling his conversation with the New York Times reporter on the morning of June 1, 1944. Lawrence, a rising star in the US media—he would stay with the Times until joining ABC News in 1961 to become the network’s evening news anchorman—had good reason to be upset.¹

Back in March he and his colleague, Harrison Salisbury, a United Press foreign editor and future recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for his journalism, had learned that something important was afoot in military relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. American airmen were arriving in Moscow from Britain in unprecedented numbers, and rumors were circulating among foreign correspondents in Moscow about American plans to supply one hundred B-17 Flying Fortresses to the USSR. Colonel Elliott Roosevelt, who visited Moscow in mid-May, had dinner with seven American correspondents, further fueling speculation about a major new development in Soviet-American relations that involved the US Air Force. From his sources in American diplomatic and military circles, Lawrence eventually learned what was really going on: American shuttle bombing between air bases in Britain, Italy and, now, the Soviet Union was about to start. He and Salisbury began knocking on the doors of the American military mission in Moscow, asking for confirmation and getting ready to file their story.²

Deane had a problem. On May 11, during Colonel Roosevelt’s visit with Molotov, it was agreed that publicity about the shuttle bombing would come from the Soviet media first. Alerted by Lawrence and Salisbury’s inquiries that the news had already been leaked to American and British reporters, Deane offered the journalists a deal. They would be invited to the air bases to see the American airplanes, but only in exchange for silence beforehand. “I had taken them into my confidence and they had agreed to avoid any conjecture stories based on the influx of American personnel,” wrote Deane later. He contacted his most powerful ally in the Soviet command, General Nikitin, and through him secured a promise from Molotov’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs to allow American and British reporters to come to Poltava for the arrival of the first Flying Fortresses. But when the time came, the press pool of about thirty reporters learned that only five of them had been cleared by Molotov’s commissariat to go to Poltava.

That was what the highly agitated Lawrence was trying to explain to Deane when he called him on June 1. The general immediately got on the phone with officials in Molotov’s commissariat. “After a frantic time spent on the telephone calling Foreign Office officials and answering calls from disappointed correspondents, I succeeded in having the quota raised to ten Americans and ten British correspondents,” recalled Deane later. But Lawrence, Salisbury, and the rest of the reporters would not take the new deal. They told the Soviets that either all of them were going or none. “The British and American Newspaper Guild staged the first labor strike in Soviet Russia,” recalled Deane. “A united front for the first time in Moscow history,” wrote Salisbury. About thirty reporters went to the airport, but refused to board the plane until all their colleagues were cleared for the trip. Molotov backed off. “Their action was effective,” wrote Deane, “and at noon all of them were put aboard a Soviet plane and sent to Poltava.”³

The American journalists would soon see and report an exciting development in the history of the Grand Alliance: hundreds of American airplanes were about to land on Soviet-held territory. The war in Europe was entering a new stage. No one knew when D-Day and the opening of the second front in Western Europe would come, but they all knew the day of the opening of a new air front in Eastern Europe. It was Friday, June 2, 1944.

Among the Americans eager to witness the arrival of the American airplanes was Kathy Harriman, who “had been living in hopes for the day when I’d see our aircraft land on Soviet soil,” as she wrote Mary in early June 1944. On the afternoon of June 1, after bidding farewell to the correspondents leaving for Poltava, Deane stayed at the Moscow airport to welcome back Kathy and her father. They were returning via Italy and Iran from a more than month-long trip to London and Washington. On the way to Spaso House, Deane told them that he was immediately leaving for the “airbase.” Harriman right away responded that he was going too. “I just sat quiet and held my breath,” recalled Kathy. She was afraid of being left behind, as she assumed that females (she heard a story about female reporters from the West) were not welcome at the top-secret base.

At Spaso House, Kathy, as she later wrote to her sister, “found an opportune moment and suggested perhaps it would be a good idea if I went too.” Her father was not pleased and pretended to be surprised by the suggestion, but she was ready to preempt his objection by pointing out that there were female nurses at the base, so that another female presence there should not be a problem. To strengthen her case, she cited top-secret information known to very few at the time: General Ira C. Eaker, commander in chief of the Mediterranean Allied Air Force, which included the US Twelfth and Fifteenth Air Forces, and who had just hosted Harriman and Kathy in Italy, would be leading the first shuttle-bombing mission to the Soviet Union. Kathy had promised Eaker that she would be there to see him land. Harriman’s resistance was broken. The two of them would be flying to Poltava.⁴

Tired but excited—they had awoken at 4:30 in the morning in Teheran and flown the whole day, first to Moscow and then to Poltava—the Harrimans reached the air base late in the afternoon of June 1 amid what Kathy described as “the cheers of the assembled air corps and press who’d heard that we’d not be back in time to make it.” They were right on time for a concert organized by General Perminov to entertain the Americans and his own troops. “The concert was held in the roofless, wall-less remains of what must have been a largish building,” wrote Kathy later. In fact, it was a bombed-out hangar with only two brick walls still standing. The interior was filled with long benches, many built out of the remaining bricks and covered with wooden boards. “The stage had been fixed up with a roof,” wrote Kathy, but the benches were in the open. She remembered that the audience was “very enthusiastic.”⁵

The cameras of the American and British reporters were already rolling to capture the whole event. Judging by the footage, the Soviets—Red Army servicemen and local participants—performed mostly folk songs and dances, both Russian and Ukrainian. Most of the applause went to the Cossack dancers and a number in which two Red Army soldiers, one standing on the shoulders of the other and both covered with a huge skirt, imitated the dance of an oversized village woman. The biggest hit of all was the Red Army band, especially the drummer. The reporters would soon learn his last name—Gvozd, meaning “nail.” He placed his small drum between the legs of an upside-down stool and truly nailed the rhythm of the piece he was performing. The GIs told the reporters that he would be a true find for any jazz band in the United States.⁶

Kathy noted that while the Soviets in the audience clapped to show their appreciation, the Americans whistled. As she wrote, the “cat calling” created “one of the first difficulties we ran into down there on this American-Soviet venture.” She continued: “In Russia any form of whistle is the prime way to insult an entertainer and get him off the stage!” Deane recalled a similar episode when a Soviet female dancer had been driven off the stage by whistling GIs. The Americans next to Perminov rushed to explain that in the United States whistling was a sign of utmost approval, and the general passed on that information to the distressed performer. The dancer, as Deane recalled later, “returned at once and shook more muscles than the GI’s knew she had. She was thereupon rewarded with a shrill crescendo of whistles that threw her into ecstasies.”⁷

Later in the evening, at the dinner hosted by General Perminov, Kathy found herself next to a Soviet general who tried to speak English to her. When the waiters served stew, the general told Kathy that the meat in it was “cow.” She responded that he probably meant “beef,” but the general insisted that he meant cow, “the kind you can milk.” Kathy decided not to argue with the general, whom she described as a “Siberian,” referring to his place of birth and his tough look. “It tasted good anyway,” wrote Kathy to her sister. As in all Soviet-American relations at the time, what mattered and overrode everything else was the reason underlying the cooperation. And in early June 1944, the two sides were about to raise that cooperation to a new level.⁸

The next morning, June 2, 1944, Kathy Harriman woke up to a cacophony of sounds. “Aside from the fact I damned near froze to death, I slept wonderfully in between wondering why Ukrainian cocks crow for hours on end and what the hell a full orchestra (brass band) was doing playing in the yard,” she wrote. Apparently the drummer Gvozd and his fellow musicians were practicing their skills in preparation for the ceremony welcoming the American airplanes to Poltava. Harriman spent a good part of the morning wandering around the camp, visiting the American nurses in the hospital tent—“trim as a doll house”—and talking to the GIs. “Morale was sky high, firstly I guess because that day exciting things were to happen and secondly because our boys in Russia are sort of a pioneering group,” she wrote to her sister two days later.⁹

It was “dark and overcast in Ukraine,” recalled John Deane, who had accompanied the Harrimans to Poltava the previous day. He described the mood of that cloudy morning as one of “suppressed excitement—everyone pretending an outward calm to cover the anxiety seething within.” Deane and others in the top leadership knew that the bombers and fighters of the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy were supposed to leave their bases early that morning and hit targets in and around the city of Debrecen in Hungary before continuing east and landing in Poltava. But they did not know whether the operation had actually been launched, whether the weather was favorable, and what, if anything, had happened above Debrecen. Radio operators were trying unsuccessfully to get any indication that the operation was under way. Then, at half past twelve, they finally got a message that the Flying Fortresses and the fighters accompanying them had taken off from the Italian bases on time. That meant they might appear above Poltava at any minute.

Deane got into a car and rushed to the concrete-and-metal airstrip—the joint project of the American engineers and the Red Army female soldiers. He arrived just as the Flying Fortresses of the Fifteenth Air Force had begun to appear in the Ukrainian sky. “The sky was filled with them,” wrote Deane later, “and huge as they were, they seemed much bigger with their silver wings silhouetted against the black sky above.” For Deane, it was a dream come true—after months of hard work punctuated by days and sometimes weeks of frustration. “For an American standing on the field below it was a thrill beyond description,” he wrote in recollection. “There in the sky was America at war—these few planes epitomized American power, the skill of American industry and labor, the efficiency of American operations, and the courage of American youth.”¹⁰

Approaching the Poltava base was an armada of B-17 heavy bombers, popularly known as “Flying Fortresses.” The four-engine Boeing-made airplane had a crew of ten, a length of more than 74 feet, a wingspan of more than 103 feet, a flying range of 2,000 miles, and could develop a cruising speed of 182 miles per hour. Each plane was armed with thirteen .50-inch M2 Browning machine guns, and on a long-range mission such as the flight to Poltava it could deliver up to 4,500 pounds of bombs. They cost under a quarter million dollars to produce and were worth every penny, as far as the American public was concerned. The Flying Fortress had become the most recognizable American airplane of the war and a symbol of American air power.¹¹

The B-17s put on the most impressive air show that the Soviets had ever seen. “They came on, their motors roaring over the field, filling the space of this luscious land, roars rebounding from the ruins of a nearby city, squadron after squadron, until their shapes created castle-like designs in the sky,” wrote the Canadian reporter Raymond Arthur Davies. “One received the impression of great power. Then gracefully peeling off from formations, they came down one after another.” It took the planes up to two hours to land. The touch-downs were met with a sigh of relief by the Red Army women who had built the runway. “Would it buckle? Had they been careless?” wrote Deane, describing their feelings. He added: “Their relief was audible as the first Fortresses rolled down its entire length.”¹²

Kathy Harriman arrived at the airfield in the company of her father and General Perminov. They drove in a Buick, which had some trouble negotiating the rough terrain around the airfield, and made it just in time. “We were driving out to the field when the first bombers appeared as specks off in the horizon,” she recalled, “it looked like thousands, then suddenly the first squadron was overheard with its welcome roar.” “Jesus—but it was exciting,” she wrote Mary, “more so than anything I ever saw in England.” Averell Harriman was equally elated, telling his daughter that “he didn’t think he’d ever before been so thrilled by anything.”

The Harrimans’ excitement was shared by Perminov, who was sitting in the back of the Buick next to the ambassador. For Perminov, as for Deane, the arrival of the planes meant the fulfillment of long days and nights of planning, coordination, conflicts, compromises, and occasional small victories. “He bubbled over with joy,” wrote Kathy, and went to give her father a kiss. Harriman restrained him, but Perminov “let out a few more Russian equivalents of cowboy hoots.” More than anything else, the Soviets were impressed by the strength and order that the American armada displayed to anyone who raised his eyes to the sky, and with the roar of airplane engines, it was difficult not to look up.¹³

The young Soviet airplane technician Vladlen Gribov, who witnessed the arrival of the Flying Fortresses at the Myrhorod air base, where there were no clouds or rain to obscure the airplanes in all their splendor, was particularly impressed by the way in which they approached the base. “I had seen large groups of planes earlier,” wrote Gribov years later, “but at a great height and, if they were bombers, then usually in long files. But here the planes flew low, in close formation, with six in each group and more than ten files. The space they occupied seemed to be a kilometer wide and two kilometers long, literally blocking out the sunny sky.” The Soviet reporters were no less impressed. To them, the way in which the planes approached the air bases after completing a long raid was proof of the mastery of the American airmen. “Having flown a long distance over the countries of Europe, the bombers proceeded in strict formation, which attests to the great expertise of the pilots, their teamwork and first-rate organization,” wrote Pravda (Truth), the main mouthpiece of the Stalin regime, a few days later.¹⁴

That was exactly the impression that General Eaker, commander of the Mediterranean Allied Air Force, wanted to make on his Soviet allies. As planned, he led the bombers of the Fifteenth Air Force in person on their mission to Ukraine.

Altogether 200 planes and more than 1,400 men took off from the Italian airfields early in the morning of June 2, 1944 with the goal of bombing targets in Hungary. The real goal of the Eaker task force was not so much to bomb Debrecen as to impress Poltava. “It is imperative that we gain the full confidence and respect of the Russians by starting our collaboration with an efficiently executed operation of immediate significance to them,” wrote Eaker in his planning report on the mission. As it was assumed that the Poltava bases did not yet have adequate facilities for serious repairs to damaged airplanes, it was suggested that the task force avoid unnecessary confrontation with the Luftwaffe. In fact, the rest of the Fifteenth Air Force that was employed over the Balkans that day had the task of distracting German attention from the Poltava force, allowing it to achieve its bombing objective with minimal losses. The air route to Ukraine was chosen expressly to avoid German flak batteries as much as possible.¹⁵

From the start, the first shuttle mission, dubbed Frantic Joe, was meant to be more symbolic than substantial. With Stalin and Molotov having dragged their feet all the way to May 1944, many of the original goals of the Baseball and Frantic operations had been rendered all but obsolete. By then the Allied air forces had all but annihilated whatever threat the invasion might face from the Luftwaffe. In early June the Allied command had at its disposal up to 12,000 planes that could be sent into battle over Europe, to be countered by 300 German planes—a ratio of more than 40:1. The outcome of the air war was clear even before it began.¹⁶

Unexpectedly, choosing the targets to be bombed during the first mission had become anything but an easy task. Negotiations had begun in early May, with the Americans suggesting the bombing of the Heinkel airplane plants near Riga in Latvia and Mielec in Poland. The US Air Force wanted to use shuttle bombing mainly to achieve its original goal—that of crippling the Luftwaffe and the German air industry. The Soviets, more concerned with the German mechanized divisions on the Eastern Front, wanted to leave them without gasoline and suggested that the Americans bomb the Ploesti oil fields in Romania. In England, USSTAF Commander Spaatz was glad to oblige and added the oil refineries to the bombing list, suggesting also the marshaling yards in Lviv, Brest, Vilnius, and Kaunas, all in close proximity to the German battle lines on the Eastern Front. To Spaatz and Deane’s surprise the Soviets refused to approve the target list or to supply one of their own, and negotiations stalled.

The Red Army commanders were getting ready to launch a major offensive code-named Bagration in Belarus. It would result in the Red Army’s advance all the way to the borders of East Prussia, and Deane suggested to Spaatz that the Soviets did not want to attribute any part of their expected achievement to the results of American bombing. He also believed that the Soviets did not trust the Americans and did not want them to know where the main thrust of their attack would take place. “The three targets originally selected by Spaatz,” wrote Deane later, “were distributed at equal distances across the Russian front. The Russian attack when finally launched had its main effort in the north, and for this reason they did not want an American attack on Riga which would attract German fighter aircraft to that area. They could not tell us this without revealing the plans for their offensive.”

Deane suggested that Spaatz select the first targets on his own and, instead of asking the Soviets for approval, simply inform them what they would be. That would not oblige the Soviets to show their hand in any way. Deane turned out to be right: when Spaatz named the marshaling yards at Debrecen as the first target for Frantic Joe, the Soviets did not protest. Hitting targets in Hungary would distract the Germans from the main offensive in the north. The operation was in their interest, but for reasons of secrecy the Soviets were not object to say either yes or no.¹⁷

General Eaker, who of course had decided to lead the mission in person to ensure that everything went according to plan, selected some of the best units of the Fifteenth Air Force to take part. It was scheduled for the first day in June with favorable weather. Four bomber groups—the 2nd, 97th, 99th, and 483rd, for a total of 130 B-17 aircraft—were allocated for the mission. The famed Flying Fortresses, which had been a standard part of the air arsenal since 1938, were protected on the flight to Ukraine by a much more recent acquisition of the US Air Force, the P-51 long-range Mustang fighters, which had gone into service in January 1942.

The Mustangs were operated by one pilot, and had a length of 32 feet, a cruising speed of 362 miles per hour, and a flying range of 1,650 miles. Their production cost was less than a quarter of that required for a B-17—about $50,000—and their main task was to protect the Flying Fortresses on their strategic bombing missions with their six 0.50 caliber machine guns. As of March 1944, the Mustangs carried drop gas tanks that increased their range of operations, making it possible to undertake a lengthy mission, like the one to Poltava. There were seventy P-51 Mustang fighters in the 325th Fighter Group.¹⁸

The ultimate destination of the task force had been kept secret from the pilots and crews, leading them to speculate that they might be going anywhere in German-controlled Europe. When the destination was finally revealed to them immediately before takeoff, the pilots had welcomed the news with happy whistles. They were told to be on their best behavior at the Soviet bases. “Impressions created will color the thinking of the entire Russian military establishment and set the stage for future relations,” read the instructions. “Our performance will be the yardstick by which the Russians will judge the fighting capabilities, the discipline, the morale and the energy of the whole of the American forces, Ground, Naval, and Air.”¹⁹

General Eaker flew to Poltava in a B-17 known as “Yankee Doodle II,” decorated with an image of the beloved American figure and the musical score of the song. The aircraft was part of the 97th Bomber Group, in which Eaker had flown his first bombing mission from Britain to Germany in August 1942. The bombers had taken off before 7:00 a.m. from bases near Foggia in Italy, grouped into formation over the Adriatic and crossed Yugoslavia, encountering neither enemy fighters nor flak. Unobstructed, they dropped their bomb load on the locomotive depot and marshaling yards of Debrecen, hitting their targets. At that point they were joined by the P-51 fighters and set their course over the Carpathian Mountains toward the Dnieper River.

The only flak that the task force had encountered was near the city of Chernivtsi in the Bukovyna region of Ukraine. The fire was highly inaccurate but there were still losses: an engine on one of the Flying Fortresses caught fire, causing the plane to explode. It was gone in a split second—the pilots of B-17s nearby saw no parachutes after the explosion. The casualties, apart from the ten-man crew, included a P-51 pilot who was flying to Poltava as a passenger. A number of planes returned to Italy after experiencing mechanical problems. For the American doctors and nurses at Poltava, the day was uneventful when it came to their direct duties. The only patient they got to treat was a pilot who suffered an attack of appendicitis.²⁰

The first plane to touch down on the Poltava runway was General Eaker’s Yankee Doodle. It stopped in front of the receiving party of American and Soviet generals led by Averell Harriman. Eaker emerged from the plane and walked toward the welcoming party, paying no attention to the drizzling rain, to receive their greetings and smiles. Eaker’s name was supposed to be kept secret from the general public until he was safely back in Italy. Had a commander of his stature suffered an accident, neither the Americans nor the Soviets wanted it to be associated with the shuttle bombing and cast a shadow over their first joint air operation. Thus, when writing to her sister, Kathy Harriman referred to Eaker as “our ex-host from Naples” and “our big boy.” The Canadian reporter Raymond Arthur Davies called him a “high-ranking U.S. officer” in his news story.

Immediately on approaching the welcoming party, General Eaker presented General Perminov with the medal of the Legion of Merit and read the citation. Clearly moved, Perminov responded, as Deane later recalled, by giving all credit for the preparation of the bases to his American counterpart, Colonel Alfred Kessler. He also praised the pilots, stating, according to one news report, that “today’s operation was most brilliantly carried out.” Perminov’s staff presented Eaker with a bouquet of flowers, “a usual Russian custom when a general enters a town victorious,” wrote Kathy, who also received a bouquet. The photos taken at the ceremony show a reserved but happy Eaker and a broadly smiling Kathy. Deane made a brief speech, hailing Frantic Joe as a landmark event in Soviet-American cooperation. “Then we stood around for a while everyone was swapping short snorters [signatures of fellow travelers], pictures were taken … and the bombers continued to land,” wrote Kathy.²¹

The happy occasion did not pass without an accident of sorts. General Slavin—a Soviet military intelligence officer and Deane’s liaison with the General Staff, who had flown to Poltava on the same plane as Deane and the Harrimans the previous day—not only did not make it into the pictures but missed the ceremony altogether. As there had been no news about the American shuttle mission and General Slavin had nothing to do around the base, he took an afternoon nap, awakened only by the sound of the arriving bombers. By the time he realized what was going on, everyone had already left the tent camp for the airfield, and the general had to run to make it in time for the ceremony. He did not get farther than an American sentry guarding the approaches to the field. “The red trimmings of the General Staff inspired none of the fear in our sentries’ hearts that it did in those of Red Army soldiers,” remembered Deane. When Slavin finally arrived at the airstrip, he “attacked Perminov with such a heat that I thought he would have apoplexy,” recalled Deane. His Legion of Merit medal aside, Perminov was clearly worried about the consequences of the incident, and Deane did his best to assume American responsibility for the misunderstanding.²²

If Slavin’s outburst spoiled Perminov’s day, other Americans and Soviets were in a celebratory mood. Raymond Arthur Davies and other reporters in the crowd interviewed Americans on the base and the arriving pilots, who were being debriefed in a tent next to the one assigned to the correspondents. They were jubilant. “I have never seen a more friendly attitude,” commented Lieutenant Albert M. Jaroff from Portland, Oregon. “Russian warmth towards Americans,” he said, “is unequaled anywhere in the world.” He added: “We aren’t just here to fight Germans [but to] represent America like diplomats.” Jaroff was an Air Force intelligence officer who had arrived in Poltava a few weeks earlier with the fourth echelon and was assigned to the Myrhorod air base. His family originally came from Odesa in southern Ukraine, and he was clearly happy to be back in his ancestral homeland, fighting the common enemy.

Davies also described the meeting of two brothers, Igor and George McCartney, who had not seen each other for more than a year. “The door opened,” wrote Davies. “A young private stepped out. Just as his leg left the upper rung of the short aluminum ladder, he looked at a bunch of fellows standing nearby. His eyes widened. ‘George!’ he shouted. George was in the crowd, but he thought someone else was wanted. He turned around and was about to walk away when the lad from the plane jumped to the ground and ran towards him. ‘George! George!’ he kept on shouting. ‘George, don’t you know me?’ George stopped, looked, then rushed to the newcomer. ‘Igor! Igor!’ he cried. They embraced. A little later the two boys, surrounded by correspondents, were telling their story.” They had been born in Harbin to a Russo-Ukrainian family fleeing the Russian Revolution, got their Irish last name from their stepfather, and enlisted in the US Army, one in December 1942, the other in February 1943. They had not seen each other since then. “How do you like the Soviet Union?” asked Davies. “It’s just like home to us,” both replied at once.²³

Happiness and excitement were the order of the day. “Every one of us is glad to be here,” said the twenty-two-year-old Charles Williamson of Norfolk, Virginia, who, according to Davies, had already participated in 47 combat missions, 12 more than required at the time for a bomber pilot to complete the tour of duty and be reassigned to a training base. “It certainly was a wonderful day and I do not imagine I will forget it for a long time,” wrote Kathy to Mary a few days later. She left Poltava for Moscow together with her father and Generals Eaker and Deane late in the afternoon of June 2.²⁴

The photos and footage taken on that memorable day by the American photographers and film crews show the rest of the American senior officers being led on a tour of Poltava by General Perminov, all dressed in trench coats, supporting the recollections of participants that June 2 was an unusually cold day by Ukrainian standards, although there is no sign of rain in the photos. The weather did not seem to matter. “The day our first landings were made marked the high tide of our military relations with the Soviet Union,” wrote Deane a few years later. The drizzling rain notwithstanding, in their minds the sun was shining brightly on the future of Soviet-American cooperation.²⁵