6

Comrades in Arms

In late May 1944, soon after returning to London from his trip to Moscow and Poltava, Colonel Elliott Roosevelt and a member of his traveling party, Brigadier General Edward Peck Curtis, were invited to an evening of bridge with the supreme Allied commander in Europe, General Dwight Eisenhower. As the president’s son later recalled, he and Curtis went down “in ignominious defeat before the deadly efficiency of Ike Eisenhower.” Eisenhower and his aide Harry Butcher, however, were interested in more than a game of bridge. As Roosevelt recalled, they were “pumped dry” with questions about their Soviet trip.

“What was it like? What was their army like? How were their fliers? How was their discipline? What did they think of us?” Those were the questions that interested the supreme Allied commander. He wanted to know not only what the political leaders and military commanders in Moscow were saying and thinking about the Americans but the prevailing attitudes among the officers and soldiers of the Red Army. “The big thing for all of them,” answered Roosevelt, “is still the second front. That’s the one big test of what they think of us. If it comes off, okay. If not … .” “If, what is this if?” interrupted Eisenhower. When the president’s son explained that he had in mind the promises given to Stalin by his father and Churchill at Teheran, Eisenhower told him that he knew nothing about those promises. He then added: “But I know about the invasion of France. The Russians needn’t worry about that one.”¹

The Allied cross-channel invasion of Europe began in the early morning of June 6, 1944, four days after Eaker’s Fifteenth Air Force bombers and fighters had safely arrived at the Poltava airfield. Around midnight British summer time, the Royal Air Force started dropping dummies behind the Wehrmacht’s defensive lines to distract and confuse German anti-paratrooper detachments. One hour later real paratroopers began their descent on German-held territory. An hour after that, around 2:00 a.m., General Spaatz’s Strategic Air Forces in Europe joined the British assault and began their bombing raids across the Channel. Altogether 2,200 American, British, and Canadian bombers took part in the invasion.

Around 3:00 a.m., under cover of darkness, the first US ships began dropping anchor near Omaha Beach. At 5:30 a.m. the Allied battleships started the bombardment of German coastal defenses. General Eisenhower’s grand armada of ships and landing craft, numbering more than 5,500 vessels with more than 150,000 troops on board, began the invasion of France. Despite heavy casualties—4,000 men killed and more than 6,000 wounded—the invasion was a great success. The bridgeheads established on the first day and extended afterward made it possible to deploy 875,000 men to the new European front by the end of June 1944. The second front everyone had been talking about for so long was finally there. The airmen on the Poltava-area bases were prepared to help move it eastward. But before that could happen, the new comrades in arms would have to learn how to live and fight together.²

When John Deane, now in Moscow, first heard about the Allied landing in Normandy, he reacted to the news with the same sense of jubilation and relief felt by so many others. He had more than one reason to feel happy.

In the previous months he had been under constant pressure to convince his Soviet contacts that the Americans actually meant what they had said at Teheran, where Roosevelt had promised Stalin an invasion of Europe in May. In February 1944, in the middle of crucial negotiations on the Poltava bases, Deane had sought to overcome Soviet skepticism by betting General Slavin twelve bottles of vodka that the invasion would take place in May. “I think this did more to convince the General Staff of the firmness of our plans than did the promise of Churchill and Roosevelt.” As D-Day was postponed to June, Deane had to pay his debt to Slavin. That alleviated the tension, but not by much. With the invasion now a reality, Deane could finally feel rehabilitated. He put on his uniform and walked to the US embassy, expecting to be cheered by the Muscovites. To his disappointment, no one paid any attention to the American general in the streets; most Russians would probably have been unable to recognize a US uniform.³

In Poltava and other US bases in Ukraine the US pilots got news of the invasion around 9:00 a.m. local time. Raymond Davies, who had stayed at the base after the arrival of the American Flying Fortresses four days earlier, recounted the moment in one of his reports: “A transport plane roared onto the field at the American base and an excited pilot rushed out shouting ‘Hey, fellows, it’s here. We’ve invaded Europe.’” As it turned out, the news came not from the Allied command or the American or British media, which were silent, but from the Germans. Berlin radio announced at 6:48 a.m. London time that Allied paratroopers were landing in France. Hitler was still asleep at his Berghof retreat in the Bavarian Alps, and his generals were reluctant to use reserves without the Führer’s command. But the news had already broken for the rest of the world to evaluate and draw its own conclusions.

At Poltava, the radio operators turned on their equipment and heard the bulletin from Berlin, followed by confirmation from the headquarters of the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy. Then the British broadcast Winston Churchill’s speech to Parliament in London delivered that afternoon. He declared that 4,000 ships had taken part in the invasion and that the Allies had 11,000 aircraft at their disposal to support the landing. “The battle that has now begun will grow constantly in scale and in intensity for many weeks to come, and I shall not attempt to speculate upon its course,” declared Churchill. “This I may say, however. Complete unity prevails throughout the Allied Armies. There is a brotherhood in arms between us and our friends of the United States.”⁴

The news was widely discussed at the base. Some doubted that the numbers cited by Churchill were accurate, and with reason. The number of aircraft cited was part of a propaganda effort to intimidate the Germans and lift spirits at home. In reality, the Allies had roughly 4,000 aircraft in the air. Still, the mood was on the whole upbeat. Lieutenant Colonel Slusar, who heard the news on his return from a bombing run, told his Soviet interlocutors that he had returned to the base in an excellent mood because he had shot down a German fighter but was even happier to learn about the opening of the second front. He was ready to go back into battle immediately, despite being tired from his previous flight. First Lieutenant John L. Fredericks thought that the opening of the second front was long overdue and expected the war to be over by late 1944, or early 1945 at the latest—a view that was widely shared for a time. “Guess we will be going home soon,” overheard Davies, a young navigator who had flown to Poltava from Italy a few days earlier.⁵

Soviet reaction to the news was not as exuberant as American, but overall very positive as well. Palmer Myhra, a young radar operator who doubled as a gunner on one of the bombing raids and got the news while in the air, remembered later: “All was in celebratory mood that day, but it did not seem to impress the Soviets very much. … To the Soviets it was probably another day in the war.” Davies had a more positive assessment of the Soviet reaction. He wrote that the young Ukrainian women working at the base’s kitchen greeted the news with skepticism. Only when they realized that Davies and other reporters spreading the news were serious did they exclaim: “How good, how wonderful!” Their enthusiasm was shared by most of the Red Army soldiers and officers. “Now, together, we will give the Germans hell,” enthused a Red Army private. A young lieutenant echoed him: “Nothing can stop us anymore!” Everyone was excited and wanted details. Information was scarce, but it was clear that the invasion had begun and was progressing. Allied victory was now in sight.⁶

That night Raymond Davies flew back to Moscow to report on the reaction to D-Day there. He was told by fellow reporters that in Moscow the news had been announced from loudspeakers. “At a corner near the Hotel Metropole, where the correspondents reside, about twenty people stopped to listen,” wrote Davies. “Then as the first words of the announcer began to come over, people dropped everything and hundreds rushed across the street, counter to traffic regulations and formed a solid group listening in silence. They shook hands, some embraced, and all raced to their offices or homes to spread the news.”⁷

Kathy Harriman, also back to Moscow, met that day with Soviet cultural officials to plan an exhibition of American photographs. The meeting turned into a celebration of the news from France. US embassy officials were toasted in the restaurants that evening. The American diplomats noticed a profound change in the tone of the Soviet press around the time of the Normandy landing. The “chary praise and criticism” of the Allies, who were allegedly dragging their feet on the second front, was now replaced with expressions of “admiration and appreciation,” wrote Maxwell M. Hamilton, a member of the US embassy staff, in a report to Washington. Stalin himself could not have been more cheerful when he welcomed Averell Harriman to his office on June 19. “We are going along a good road,” he told the American ambassador.⁸

On June 6, the day of the Normandy invasion, 104 B-17 Flying Fortresses and 45 P-51 Mustangs took off from the Poltava-area bases for Galaţi in Romania, their target being the German airfield nearby. It was the first American bombing mission to be launched from Soviet territory.

A few days earlier, General Eaker had convinced the Soviet air command to allow his planes to bomb the target they had wanted to hit all along—the German airplane factory in the Polish city of Mielec, halfway between Lviv and Krakow. Eaker was happy to mention that agreement to Molotov when he and Harriman met with the Soviet foreign commissar on June 5; Molotov gave his tacit approval. But bad weather stood in the way—Central Europe was overcast, so the bombers instead flew south to Galaţi, still going after Luftwaffe targets. With more than 200 tons of bombs dropped on the target, the mission was declared a success. The Flying Fortresses returned to the Ukrainian bases with no losses at all. Two Mustang fighters did not make it back, although the American pilots shot down six German fighters.⁹

That the first air raid from Soviet territory was undertaken on the same day as the Normandy landing gave an additional boost to American morale. There were strategic advantages as well. “Presence of your force in Russia more important at this point than returning to Italy,” cabled General Spaatz in London to Eaker at Poltava on June 7. He wanted the American bombers to stay, wait for better weather, and try to bomb Mielec. At stake was more than an attack on a Luftwaffe airplane factory: Spaatz wanted to keep Eaker in the Soviet Union, threatening from the east at a time when the Germans needed every available aircraft in France to fight off the Allied invasion. The Soviets did not object. The American bombers and fighters would stay, with Operation Frantic Joe lasting until June 11, 1944, nearly nine full days¹⁰

Eaker took the opportunity to make one more trip to Moscow. At a reception hosted by Ambassador Harriman in honor of Air Force officers who had participated in the planning and execution of the shuttle-bombing operations, he bestowed the Order of the Legion of Merit on the two highest-ranking Red Air Force officers involved in Frantic, the commander of the Soviet military Air Force, Marshal Novikov, and his deputy, General Nikitin, who had contributed most to the success of the operation. With the second front opened and the first shuttle-bombing operation a success, the mood was sky-high in Moscow and Washington alike. “We were sure that the accord thus attained would spread to other fields of military collaboration,” wrote John Deane later.¹¹

With the excitement of the arrival receding into the past and bad weather still preventing any further missions, American life at the bases began settling into a routine. The Soviets did their best to entertain the American guests by holding concerts that featured Red Army performers and local folk ensembles, as well as dances. The official historian of the 15th Air Force, Major James Parton, who came to the Poltava air base on June 2 and, like everyone else, was stranded there for the next nine days, wrote that with little to do, the crews “lolled in the warm sun, played softball in the thick clover, ambled curiously through the ruined towns, flirted with the few American nurses, made a few tentative approaches to the somewhat meaty Russian girls, griped about the plain food and went to bed early.”

Those Americans who manned the ground crews at the three airfields had more time and opportunity to get acquainted with the life around them than did the pilots. Those who came from farms, like Palmer Myhra, found it interesting to compare living and working conditions in Ukraine with those back home. “The houses in most cases were small, consisting of maybe two rooms with sleeping room up above,” wrote Myhra decades later. “The walls were often decorated with pictures or religious icons.” Myhra found that houses also had a picture of Lenin, Stalin, Engels, or Marx and assumed that it was something mandated by the state.¹²

A big surprise to the Americans was the depth of the Ukrainian black soil. Myhra’s friend Donald Barber, who had grown up in South Dakota, told him with astonishment that he had seen “some men digging a hole four or five feet deep, all black dirt.” He now understood why Ukraine was called the “breadbasket of Europe.” However, neither Myhra nor Barber was impressed by the attitude of the locals toward working that rich land. “Under their collective farm system farmers didn’t put in as much interest or effort as they would have if they owned the land,” wrote Myhra. Another surprise was the lack of mechanization. While watching local women marching to the fields every morning with hoes on their shoulders, Myhra could not help but recall his own farm. “I would think of my father back home in Wisconsin with his little Ford tractor producing more than all those who used a hoe,” wrote Myhra. Once he saw the locals using a repaired German tank to do the plowing.¹³

Then there were cultural pecularities. “American flyers,” wrote Parton, “registered mild surprise at seeing Russian soldiers dancing together; Russians showed equal surprise at US jitter-bugging.” Through daily interaction, the two sides were discovering similarities and differences. The Soviets found the Americans open, eager to make friends, and ready to exchange almost anything they had for a souvenir: a red star from a soldier’s uniform, metal buttons with Soviet symbols, cigarette lighters and cigarette cases. Some Americans were surprised by Soviet drinking habits. “It seemed that the more you could drink and still stand on your feet to the Russians especially, the more you were a ‘real man,’” wrote Myhra. That was just the beginning of their gradual acquaintance.¹⁴

The two groups of Allied soldiers that cooperated most closely were the technicians who serviced the planes. Each Soviet crew consisted of three technicians—an assistant crew chief and two helpers—assigned to a given plane. They were led by an American crew chief. Other groups of technicians, including radar operators and weathermen, also collaborated closely. Some Americans were truly impressed with the qualifications of their Soviet partners. Sergeant Franklyn Holzman, the man code-named “Tourist” by the KGB during his 1958 visit, was then a twenty-three-year-old from Brooklyn with a degree in economics from the University of North Carolina. He was assigned as a radar technician to Myrhorod, where he worked alongside a Soviet lieutenant whom he found “brilliant.” “Only 27, and he is an electrical engineer,” wrote Holzman in a letter home. “We got to talk about music and discovered he was very much interested in Beethoven and Schubert chamber music as I am.”¹⁵

Of course, not everyone on the American or Soviet side was as educated or as fond of classical music as Holzman and his Soviet friend, but they all found ways to communicate and work together. The Americans were initially skeptical about the skills of the Soviets, since Soviet airplanes were hardly a match in technical features: while the Soviets were getting American airplanes through Lend-Lease, Flying Fortresses and Mustangs were not part of the deal. The Soviet mechanics often felt that they were looked down upon by their American counterparts. “Building an air base, providing fuel, loading bombs—that the Russians can do. But the technical side, complex modern aviation technology, is beyond them,” wrote Yulii Malyshev, one of the Red Army assistant crew chiefs at the Myrhorod base, trying to describe the American evaluation of Soviet capabilities.¹⁶

The Soviets were truly impressed by the instruments that the Americans brought along, their abundance of spare parts, and their professionalism, but they considered themselves more resourceful. Malyshev surprised his American supervisor by replacing an engine carburetor single-handed, although the task usually required more than one person. The American showed his appreciation by bringing the rest of the American mechanics, including officers, to show them what Malyshev had accomplished. The Soviets also believed that they were more committed to the job than the Americans. They were surprised to see Americans breaking for lunch and supper without finishing the job they were working on. Soviet standards were different: a mechanic had no right to leave the plane before the job was finished. Before coming to Myrhorod, Malyshev had once spent two days and nights on a plane, sleeping and eating there until the job was done.¹⁷

Malyshev’s colleague at Myrhorod, Vladlen Gribov, who served as an assistant crew chief under an American sergeant named Tommy, shared his friend’s opinion about the Americans as good professionals who nevertheless worked “without commitment,” and for whom “the supply of food was more important than the task at hand.” Given the scarcity of everything in the Soviet Union at the time, Gribov considered the Americans profligate and wasteful. “It turned out that the casing on the nose gun of one of the first planes was torn,” recalled Gribov later, “I began sewing it up. When the job was done, Tommy, praising my work, noted that we could have done without it and just changed the casing.” That was just the beginning. More than once, Tommy stopped Gribov from doing what he had been trained to do in a Soviet technical school: when a device malfunctioned, to disassemble it, identify the problem, manufacture a new part in the repair shop, and put the device back together. Gribov eventually got used to that.¹⁸

Both Gribov and Malyshev, young sergeants who had grown up in Moscow and belonged to the first generation shaped by Soviet education, believed in the superiority of their political and economic system. “Almost all of us had been thoroughly propagandized to make us absolutely certain of the rightness, justice, and ‘bestness’ of our system and cause,” recalled Gribov, whose first name, Vladlen, was a combination of the first syllables of the first and last names of Vladimir Lenin. “There was no need for any doubts about us: we could have propagandized anyone at all,” echoed Malyshev. Observing what they considered to be American wastefulness and their abundant supply not only of spare parts for airplanes but also clothing, flashlights, snacks, chewing gum, and other things that the Soviets had never seen, the two friends saw this not as an indication of the inferiority of the Soviet economic system but of the impact of the war.

Nevertheless, meeting and working hand in hand with the Americans shook some of the Soviet postulates ingrained in the consciousness of the young Soviet mechanics. “We knew,” recalled Gribov, “that in ‘their’ armies it was the workers and peasants who did the grunt work, while the bourgeois held officer rank.” But Gribov soon discovered that his American supervisor, Tommy, came from a farm family that owned as much land and equipment as an entire Soviet collective farm, and yet he was serving in the military as an enlisted man, not as an officer. The young Soviet technicians were also shocked to observe American soldiers talking to their officers as equals without standing at attention, often saluting informally and casually, wearing similar uniforms, and sharing the same food. The army of the bourgeois superpower was more egalitarian in relations between the ranks than that of the first “worker-peasant” state.¹⁹

Living in a country that had allegedly solved the nationality question but still divided its population into nationalities and singled out entire ethnic groups, such as the Volga Germans, for punishment and resettlement, Gribov was surprised to realize how multiethnic the US Army was. He could not believe that Tommy’s friend Bill Drum was an ethnic German. “After all, we were at war with the Germans,” explained Gribov later. “But there he was, a German.” The only feature that seemingly fitted the Soviet propaganda image of Americans was their attitude toward African Americans. There were no black soldiers permanently stationed at the base. Decades later, Gribov remembered disparaging expressions on the faces of his American acquaintances when they saw the image of a smiling black boy on the cover of a tin of tooth powder—the Soviet designers had wanted to show the effectiveness of the powder by contrasting the boy’s white teeth with his dark skin.²⁰

Since the effort with the Americans was as much about cooperation as about competition, the Soviet command wanted to show that its soldiers were dressed and supplied as well as, or at least no worse than, the Americans. Old-style military boots worn with cotton puttees were replaced with a new Soviet product whose inventors got a Stalin Prize—jackboots made of a featherlight material—but it was no match for American army boots, which the Soviet soldiers regarded with envy. Nonetheless the Red Army officers at Poltava did their best to persuade the Americans that jackboots were superior to the American boots, as they were allegedly more comfortable, better protected ankles from moisture, and kept feet and trousers cleaner. After a conference with their Soviet counterparts, the American surgeons requested 400 pairs of leather jackboots from the US Army suppliers.²¹

The Soviet Air Force officers and technicians assigned to the Poltava-area bases were thus better off than at any other of their wartime postings. They received two uniforms—an unheard-of luxury by the standards of the time—and got brand-new linens. They took pride in making their beds in such a way that the straw-filled mattress, shaped by a specially designed wooden box, would keep its shape for a whole day. Neatness and cleanliness in Soviet barracks and tents was enforced by the officers and punctiliously maintained by the soldiers, who were therefore shocked by the messy, cluttered American tents. “The beds were made any old way; things lay about where they were left. Wrapping and packaging, illustrated magazines, pocket books all over the place,” recalled Gribov, his disapproval still obvious decades later.²²

The Americans, for their part, were appalled by sanitary conditions at the base canteens. “[I]t was found that the Russians do not believe in the use of soap for washing dishes and kitchen utensils, asserting that it caused diarrhea,” wrote a shocked Major Parton. “Instead they used a 3 percent soda solution and a greasy towel.” The Americans sounded the alarm as early as April 1944, when they discovered that the kitchens had no refrigeration facilities and food was stored in open containers, unprotected from dust and myriad flies and insects. The Soviets tried to improve the kitchen and dining facilities but found it a difficult task. In May the US medical officer Captain Robert H. Newell complained about poor ventilation in the kitchens, which were full of smoke from the wood-fired stoves. Another concern was kitchen refuse and food leftovers, which the Soviets collected in huge, foul-smelling wooden barrels and then dumped into a ditch not far from the kitchen. “Rats and rodents have free access and exit to all rooms of the mess,” wrote Newell in his report.²³

Some of the American pilots would refuse to take food after noticing that the kitchen staff failed to wash their hands after visiting the Soviet-style latrines. Captain Newell, who found the beds and bedding perfectly satisfactory, reported that the latrines were in a “deplorable state.” He was echoed by Parton, who wrote in June 1944 that “If the Russian kitchen may be termed bad, their latrines can only be called indescribable.” The Americans refused to use the Soviet latrines, which consisted of a row of holes in the floor, often covered with excrement. They demanded the construction of new facilities, though the only type of latrine the Soviets could build was already on display. Eventually the Americans gave up and built their own latrines at each of the Poltava-area bases. They could do nothing about the latrine facilities in Kharkiv, Kyiv, and other Soviet-run bases, which the Americans visited from time to time.

For the locals and Red Army soldiers, among whom the American medics frequently observed bad teeth and signs of malnutrition, poor sanitation was coupled with inadequate medical care. According to the chief American surgeon at the bases, Lieutenant Colonel William M. Jackson, it was fifty years behind American standards. Jackson set up separate hospital facilities on each base, staffed by American personnel. Captain Newell wrote in his report of April 1944: “The Soviet standards of diet and sanitation are so vastly different from those of the American people that little change can be prognosticated.” Major Parton quipped in his report that “bathing among the local populace appeared to be at best a biennial event.”²⁴

The Soviets tried hard to deal with the problems pointed out to them by the Americans, although matters of sanitation and personal hygiene were embarrassing to address. Some Americans turned the Red Army soldiers’ poor hygiene to their advantage. Private First Class Martin Kloski from Jersey City told American military reporters that “Russian women keep things very clean. They manage somehow, although there’s hardly any soap. Russian men, though, are another story. I figure that the fact that we kept clean, and that our uniforms were neat, is one of the big reasons we made a hit with the gals.”²⁵

Colonel Kessler was pleased. “GIs walk around the town just as they walk around London,” remarked the American commander. Less pleased were the secret-police officers at the Poltava headquarters of the People’s Commissariat of State Security (NKGB), the civil security service that monitored the attitude of the local population to the presence of Americans. They spotted some Americans attending church services, which was barely tolerated in the USSR. Others shared with the locals their impressions of comparative living standards in the United States and the Soviet Union, which were anything but in favor of the latter. “You do five dollars’ worth of work, and you could live perfectly well on that in America, but here, for that amount, you wouldn’t be able to buy a kilogram of bread,” one of the American servicemen allegedly told a secret-police informer. He continued: “America is really heaven on earth; here there’s nothing but suffering.”

Especially worrisome to the authorities was the attitude of the locals to the Americans and the hopes they cherished in connection with their arrival. Ukraine had been a problem for the Soviets ever since the Revolution of 1917, when its political and intellectual elites pushed for independence from Russia and created a state of their own. The Soviets managed to crush Ukrainian resistance only by making major concessions to local cadres and agreeing to support the native language and culture. The Soviet Union was created in 1922 as a quasi-federal structure largely to pacify the Ukrainians and Georgians. It gave both rebellious republics and a score of other Soviet nations a degree of autonomy that they would lose with the consolidation of the Stalin regime.

In the early 1930s Stalin starved close to four million Ukrainians, along with millions of other Soviet citizens, in his attempt to collectivize agriculture. As noted earlier, Poltava, Myrhorod, and Pyriatyn were among the areas of Ukraine that suffered most from the famine. Stalin took advantage of the crisis to attack the Ukrainian party cadres and launch an assault on the nation’s cultural revival. Ukrainians living outside Ukraine and constituting the largest national minority in Russia proper were reregistered as Russians almost overnight. Contemporaries speak of those events as a Ukrainian genocide.²⁶

As the Third Reich invaded Ukraine in 1941, many locals wanted to see the German divisions as portents of the arrival of European civilization and long-awaited liberation from Stalin’s brutal rule. Many used the occasion to reclaim their non-Soviet identity and restore a Ukrainian Orthodox Church independent of Moscow. Although the Germans allowed that, they went on to establish a reign of terror in Ukraine. The main victims were Jews: close to a million Jewish men, women, and children, or every sixth Jew who died in the Holocaust, came from Ukraine. Young Ukrainians were hunted down to be sent to labor camps in Germany, producing a huge forced emigration—2.2 million Ukrainians ended up there by 1944. Ukrainian nationalists, briefly tolerated in 1941, also fell victim to the German regime as their leaders were killed and their followers driven underground.²⁷

By the time the Red Army came back to Ukraine in 1943, there were few believers in German liberation, but the population did not forget or forgive the Soviet atrocities of the revolutionary and interwar eras. Well aware of this, the Soviet authorities were concerned that Ukrainians had been exposed to anticommunist propaganda during the German occupation and were now anything but loyal to the Soviet regime. With the arrival of the Americans, foreigners of a different brand, the secret police was all eyes and ears.

“The anti-Soviet element, mostly on the list of suspects under surveillance, is trying to establish ties with the Anglo-American aircrew,” reported Lieutenant Colonel Chernetsky, the head of the Poltava NKGB (the Commissariat of State Security) to his Kyiv boss, Serhii Savchenko, on June 30, 1944. The locals were impressed by American technological achievement, considering them culturally superior not only to the Russians but also to the Germans. “The Americans have built an airport in Poltava that we could not even dream of,” asserted a construction office worker Serhii Ivanovsky. “They have brought special flagstones from America with which they have paved the whole airport. They don’t let our people in there for supervisory duties. The Americans, like the Germans, are highly cultured and very rich; even here, they don’t deny themselves many trifles and luxuries.”

Some even expected an eventual American takeover of Ukraine: the Americans were the second foreign army in the region in the course of the previous three years, and it was easy to imagine that the new foreigners, no matter how rich and cultured, wanted the same as the Germans. Antonina Korsun, a fifty-year-old schoolteacher, allegedly told a secret-police informer on June 3: “The Americans have organized their airports … with a certain purpose in mind. They don’t want to fight the Germans on the front but send our fighters there; while our men are on the front, they’ll establish themselves all over Ukraine and take it over with no fighting at all. The Germans conquered Ukraine openly, but the Americans are taking it by stealth. Which is better, only time will tell … .”

Some of the Poltava-area residents, such as Stepan Kanarevsky, a fifty-three-year-old employee of the Poltava city retail department, welcomed an American takeover as a way of freeing his country from communist rule. “I’m very glad that there will be no communists, and that the Americans will be in charge,” Kanarevsky allegedly confided to one of his acquaintances. “I took an interest and rode a bike around the airport myself; our people only have patrols there, but all the rest are Americans who could deliberately kill off our young people raised in the communist spirit and take over themselves.” If one believes the secret-police stooges, Kanarevsky was ready for another war, this time between the Soviets and the Americans, and there was no doubt whose side he would take.

Many hoped that the arrival of the Americans portended changes in the Soviet political regime. Olga Smirnova, a woman in her late thirties who studied English and was suspected of anti-Soviet sympathies, stated: “I don’t know how the political system of the USSR will change in form after the war, but it cannot remain as it is, for England and America will help us in that regard.” Serhii Ivanovsky, impressed by the cultural superiority of the Americans, was more specific about his expectations of change. He told a secret-police informer: “I think the Americans will suggest to us that the party apparatus be prevented from interfering in affairs of state; they will teach us, and they are worth learning from.” Others, such as the twenty-five-year-old sports official Anatolii Baev, envisioned a restructuring of the Soviet Union along the American model. “I think it’s no accident that the Americans are traveling around Siberia and looking closely at its riches, and the appearance of American air bases on our territory will bring about the end of the existence of the Soviet Union, and completely separate republics (states) will be organized, as in America,” said Baev (rather unwisely) to an NKGB informer.²⁸

The attitude of the local Ukrainian population to the arrival of the Americans was quite different from that of Red Army officers and soldiers. The latter, especially young officers and technicians, indoctrinated in Soviet class-based thinking and sharing official prejudices against the capitalist West, grudgingly accepted American economic and military prowess, compensating where possible by asserting their sense of their own ideological and cultural superiority. The locals, especially those who had lived in the Russian Empire as children and experienced the German occupation as adults, were not impressed by Soviet propaganda that sought to demean the Americans, viewing their arrival as a change for the better—as heralding reform of the Soviet political system by limiting the power of the party; or the expulsion of the communists altogether; or undoing the takeover of Ukraine.

On the morning of June 11, 1944, the Soviet military and the locals bade farewell to the American pilots as they took over the Poltava, Myrhorod, and Pyriatyn air bases. Altogether there were 129 Flying Fortresses and 60 Mustangs in the formations that assembled above Gribov’s Myrhorod air base before flying southwest on a course for Italy. It was the last day and the final mission of Frantic Joe.

To General Eaker’s disappointment, weather still did not permit the bombing of the Mielec airplane factory, so he designated the German airfields near the Romanian town of Focşani as the new target. Other airplanes of the Fifteenth Air Force took off from Italian bases to divert the attention of the Luftwaffe and anti-aircraft defenses from the shuttle bombers coming from Poltava. The bombing was a success: at the Focşani airfields six workshops were completely destroyed, as were six barrack-type buildings; the fuel facilities and filling station were set on fire. Also significantly damaged were numerous other buildings and facilities in the area. The bombers did not hit the town itself.

The Germans were better prepared to attack the bombers and their fighter escort this time than they had been on June 2, with flak heavier and Luftwaffe fighter pilots more aggressive. But the losses were still minimal. One Mustang crashed on takeoff, and seven turned back because of technical problems, as did six Flying Fortresses. One more Mustang went down over Yugoslavia because of technical problems, and one B-17 was lost to enemy fire. Unfortunately, that plane was carrying an American photographer who had taken numerous pictures of the Poltava air bases. Those in the know hoped that they would not fall into enemy hands.²⁹

Now that it was over everyone considered Frantic Joe a stunning success. On June 12, the day after General Eaker’s return to Italy, Averell Harriman sent a telegram to Major General Anderson in London, congratulating the deputy commander of the US Strategic Air Forces in Europe, who had overseen the shuttle-bombing operations on behalf of General Spaatz. Arnold was happy to reciprocate with a similar telegram. “I wish you would express my heartfelt appreciation to the General Officers on the Red Army General Staff and the Red Air Force who cooperated with us in making this operation a success, and request them to convey these sentiments to their officers and men.” The future looked bright both for the continuation of Frantic Joe—or whatever the next name was—and for the Soviet-American alliance. In addition to the Northern France, the Americans were fighting on the Eastern Front. A Grand Alliance had taken its final shape.³⁰