8
Pearl Harbor on the Steppes
On the evening of June 21, 1944, General Perminov threw a party for the American officers at the Poltava base. In attendance was his American counterpart Colonel Kessler, recently promoted to brigadier general, and Kessler’s new boss, Major General Robert L. Walsh, a cavalryman who had traded his horse for an aircraft while serving in the American Expeditionary Force in France in 1918 and had stayed with the US Air Force ever since, through its numerous incarnations from the US Army Air Corps, the name it acquired in 1926, to the US Army Airforces, as the service commonly known as the US Air Force was officially called after 1941.1
Walsh was now commanding officer of Eastern Command, the official name of the American Air Force headquarters at Poltava. The other hat he wore was as head of the Air Force section at John Deane’s Military Mission in Moscow. In fact, he became Deane’s deputy in charge of the bases. A favorite of the US Strategic Air Forces in Europe commander, General Spaatz, Walsh was sent to the Soviet Union to raise the profile of the shuttle-bombing mission: he had previously served as commanding officer of the US Air Force Transport Command in the South Atlantic, being responsible for the smooth functioning of the air routes between Latin America, on the one hand, and North Africa and then Europe, on the other. While in the Soviet Union, Walsh was spending most of his time in Moscow, leaving Kessler in charge of day-to-day operations at the airfields. He first came to Poltava shortly before the launch of the first shuttle-bombing mission from Italy on June 2, 1944. Walsh was back in Poltava on June 21 to welcome another shuttle mission, this time launched by the US Eighth Air Force in Britain.2
The mission code-named Frantic II involved a task force, consisting of 163 B-17s and seventy P-51s, and was led to the Poltava-area bases by Colonel Archie J. Old Jr., the commander of the 45th Combat Bomber wing. He was known for personally leading his pilots into battle and had flown forty-six combat missions over Germany, although the original official limit for the bomber pilots was twenty-five. Old would go on to have a spectacular career in the Air Force, rising to the rank of lieutenant general and assuming command of the Fifteenth Air Force, whose pilots had been the first to land in Poltava on June 2, 1944, and would be put on the nuclear alert during the Cold War. In 1957 he would make the first nonstop flight around the world, piloting a B-52 jet.
On the evening of June 21, Old was the guest of honor at Perminov’s party. In the company of senior American and Soviet officers, he was happy to share his impressions of the bombing mission. He had no way of knowing that Frantic II would result in the largest loss of American planes on the ground since Pearl Harbor.3
A man more superstitious than Archie J. Old might have seen signs of coming disaster at the very start of the mission. The task force took off from England around 5:30 a.m. under difficult weather conditions, with cloud cover limiting visibility and making it difficult to assemble the task force in the air into effective battle group. Old, in the lead aircraft, was doing his best to speed up the process when he discovered that his Flying Fortress was leaking gasoline. He landed immediately after the last plane of the task force took off, fixed the leaking tank, and took off again without refueling so as to catch up with the rest of the group. By 7:00 a.m. the force had left the English coast behind and was on course for its target, an oil refinery near the city of Ruhland, south of Berlin and north of Dresden.
Before the planes reached Hamburg, German flak damaged a number of the airplanes, including Old’s own B-17, which continued flying with a large hole in the right wing panel. Then forty-five Messerschmitt-109 fighters did their best to drive the task force off course. Twenty-six B-17s eventually dropped their bombs on a different target, but the rest—138 in all—bombed the Ruhland oil refinery as planned. Photos taken later allowed the commanders to rate the results of the bombing as “good.” The Flying Fortresses and their Mustang escorts flew toward Warsaw and then turned southeast toward Ukraine. The Messerschmitt fighters attacked the task force again approximately 50 miles before the German-Soviet front line but were repelled by the Mustangs. A German reconnaissance plane tried to follow the Flying Fortresses across the German-Soviet line, but the Mustangs went after it, and it soon disappeared into the clouds. However, that was not the end of the task force’s troubles. The Soviet air defenses mistook the Americans for Germans and opened fire, though luckily they caused no damage. The American planes descended to 2,000 feet, identified the Dnieper River, and followed it south to the Poltava-area bases.
While reduced in numbers—Old lost two Flying Fortresses and two Mustangs to enemy fire, five fighters and eighteen bombers returned to England because of technical problems, and five planes landed at an airfield near Kyiv after running out of gasoline—the planes of the Eighth Air Force arrived at the Poltava bases. They assembled in formation and flew over Poltava, as had those of the Fifteenth Air Force two weeks earlier, in a show of American strength and Soviet-American comradeship in arms. Walsh, Perminov, Kessler, and their officers were there, as was a large group of Western and Soviet journalists, who had returned to Poltava to cover the arrival of the new task force, and enjoyed the view of the silver-colored Flying Fortresses and their Mustang escorts glistening in the sun and performing an air show before landing. Among the spectators was a film crew led by Anatole Litvak, a Kyiv-born Hollywood director who had been nominated for an Oscar for his 1943 documentary, The Battle of Russia, and was fresh from filming the D-Day landings in Normandy. His footage made a strong impression on Stalin. Now Litvak was at Poltava, filming the arrival of the new echelon of Flying Fortresses.4
Seventy planes landed in approximately forty-five minutes, wrote Old in his report on the mission. The crews were debriefed, fed, and sent to tents to sleep after their long and exhausting mission. American losses were more substantial than in Frantic I, whose main goal had been to avoid areas heavily protected by the Germans and reach the Soviet bases intact, but Frantic II was truly a combat mission. For a mission of that kind, the losses were quite acceptable. Colonel Old agreed to be interviewed by Western and Soviet reporters. The interview, attended by Perminov, Walsh, and Kessler, lasted half an hour. Old was upbeat. “The designated target—war industry installations southeast of Berlin—was hit with a crushing blow. Smoke from the fires started by our bombing rose to a height of 8,000 feet.”5
Around 11:00 p.m. Old and the other commanding officers accepted Perminov’s invitation and gathered around a table to celebrate the success of the new shuttle mission. Like previous dinners thrown by the Soviets, this one was expected to last until early morning, yet turned out to be the shortest of the lot. Some twenty minutes into Perminov’s party, a Soviet officer showed up with the news that German bombers were flying in the general direction of Poltava. Perminov dismissed the first warning, as the Luftwaffe did not normally dare to fly so deep into Soviet-controlled air space. But sirens—American Lend-Lease equipment recently installed at the bases at the insistence of General Eaker—sounded shortly afterward. The dinner broke up. Colonel Old later reported that approximately fifteen minutes after midnight the Soviet anti-aircraft batteries opened fire. Fifteen minutes after that the “first German PTF [Pathfinder] airplane dropped flares directly above the field.” Kessler recalled seeing a “stick of four flares right over the center.” He told an officer who interviewed him about the events of that night: “After that the fun began.” In fact, it was more like a nightmare.6
Above the Poltava air base were dozens of Heinkel-111 bombers from the Luftwaffe’s Fourth Air Corps—the only German air corps that specialized in night bombing and commanded by General Rudolf Meister. In the spring and summer of 1944 its planes regularly attacked Soviet targets, mostly railway junctions immediately behind the Red Army lines. Most of Meister’s aircraft were stationed in the vicinity of Brest and Radom on the Polish-Belarusian border, the first city serving as the corps’ headquarters. The Brest and Radom airfields were too far from the German-Soviet front line to allow for raids deep into Left-Bank Ukraine—meaning on the left bank of the Dnieper—but Meister also disposed of fields closer to the front line, near the city of Minsk, the capital of Nazi-occupied Belarus. From there, Meister’s pilots could fly well past the Soviet front.7
The idea of locating and bombing American Flying Fortresses at their Soviet air bases came to Meister during the Frantic Joe operation of June 2–11. Ever since, his officers had been on the lookout for another American shuttle-bombing operation. On June 21, a German fighter tried to follow the Flying Fortresses on their way east but was chased away by the Mustangs. A few hours later, a German reconnaissance plane was spotted over the Poltava and Myrhorod airfields soon after the Flying Fortresses landed there. At Myrhorod the American commanders wanted the Mustangs to drive the intruder away, but the Soviets did not allow them to do so, either because every American flight had to be cleared with Moscow or because of a particular Soviet sense of pride: it was their job to protect the Americans. The Flying Fortresses glistened in the afternoon sun and were visible dozens of miles away. The German pilot, who could not miss them, took a number of photos.8
News of the Americans at the Poltava bases reached General Meister’s Brest headquarters late in the afternoon of June 21. He immediately put together a task force consisting of Battle Wings (Kampfgeschwader, or KG) 4, 27, 53, and 55, comprising more than 350 Heinkel-111 bombers and six Junkers-88 light bombers, which were used for target marking, among other things. Meister ordered KGs 27 and 53 to move closer to the front line, relocating to the airfields near Minsk and Białystok. The commanding officer of KG 55, Colonel Wilhelm Antrup, told all his squadrons to be on the alert at 8:45 p.m. They were going to bomb Myrhorod. The task looked ideally simple: the German photographs showed the Flying Fortresses aligned in rows at the edges of small airfields. At 8:30 p.m. the reconnaissance planes were already in the air. By 8:45 Antrup’s pilots were in their cockpits. Fifteen minutes later, they began to take off for Ukraine.9
Lieutenant Colonel Fritz Pockrandt, the commanding officer of KG 53 “Condor Legion,” led the raid on Poltava. His bombers took off immediately after those of Colonel Antrup. The attack was scheduled for midnight Berlin time (1:00 a.m. Moscow time). The most dangerous part of the route was the crossing of the Soviet-German front line east of Minsk. Soviet Yakovlev-9 fighters tried to stop the bombers, but the German planes were protected by squadrons of Messerschmitt-109s and Focke-Wulf-190 fighters that fought off the Soviet attack. The road to Poltava was now open. At fifteen minutes to midnight a Junkers-88 bomber dropped the first flare bomb on a parachute over the Poltava airfield, illuminating the target for the other planes. Soon ten more German planes were over the Poltava base, dropping additional “lights” and attacking Soviet air defenses and lighting stations. Then came the first group of bombers. Wave after wave of Heinkels attacked the Flying Fortresses parked in the open on the edges of the airfield. It was a slaughter.
Pockrandt’s bombers were eventually joined over Poltava by those of Antrup’s task force. They could not reach Myrhorod on time, as the area was covered with heavy clouds. By the time they made their way to the target, the Ju-88 planes had run out of flare bombs. Antrup turned his bomber wing toward Poltava, where there was no shortage of light because of exploding bombs and burning American planes. The other bomber wings did likewise, whether their target was Poltava or Myrhorod, and together they turned the Poltava airfield into a burning hell. The bombing lasted two and a half hours. Around 2:30 a.m., the Luftwaffe bombers finally began returning to their bases in Belarus and eastern Poland. They left dozens of Flying Fortresses burning, the air base in ruins, fuel and ammunition depots destroyed, and dozens of people killed. Not a single German plane was lost. Later in the morning Meister congratulated his men on their stunning success, praising them for “proven bravery.”10
The Soviet air defense headquarters in Kyiv had detected the approach of Meister’s bombers soon after 10:00 p.m. Moscow time. They soon realized that there were two groups of planes, one heading toward Myrhorod, the other toward Poltava. They alerted air defense batteries and ordered their fighters into the air. That is when the problems began.
Soviet ground-based radar had difficulty distinguishing German planes from Soviet ones. “As our planes rose into the sky and the enemy neared the target, they got mixed up on radar,” reads a Soviet report on the attack. “It became completely impossible to figure out which were enemy planes and which were ours.” Having no radar at all, the fighter pilots became desperate, getting ready to crash into German planes kamikaze-style. But even that was impossible without searchlights. “Get your lights onto at least one fascist plane, and I’ll bring it down with mine!” had demanded Senior Lieutenant Bashkirov. Senior Lieutenant Krasnov made the same request. “I can’t see anything. Give me a lead with your searchlight: I’ll ram him!” he radioed to the ground. By then, however, the searchlights were gone. The Germans had hit the Soviet lighting stations, and whatever remained of the Soviet air defense batteries, operated largely by young female soldiers, was useless, as the gunners could not see their targets. The Soviet air defenses had failed completely. “The batteries were pounded with incendiary and high-explosive bombs. The bombs exploded in the gun emplacements, wounding the personnel and damaging the equipment,” read a Soviet report about the attack.11
No matter how bad the situation, for many Soviet officers and soldiers on the ground the failure of air defenses on the night of June 21 was by no means shocking. They were used to the absence of night fighters in the sky and the ineffectiveness of Soviet air defense batteries. Their way of dealing with such attacks was to wait them out in the narrow trenches dug for that express purpose. The airplane mechanic Yurii Dubrovin found his way to one such trench immediately after the alarm sounded at a quarter to midnight: he had just returned to his quarters from a concert in honor of the American pilots of the Frantic II task force. In the trench, Dubrovin found himself next to a Red Army captain named Khalturin—rank did not matter much under such circumstances. The captain had his own way of calming his nerves. “So for the whole three hours of the bombardment he sang, ‘The old woman had a little gray goat,’” recalled Dubrovin. “And I sang an accompaniment, ‘A-na-na, a-na-na, a-na-na, chi ki bri ki shii t’ assa-sa, purpurli-murmurli, kurlialia.’ Such an idiotic refrain. In the dark, the feeling of fear is dulled.”12
For the Americans, the absence of effective air defenses had come as a complete and shocking surprise. They had lived through numerous air attack alarms at their bases in Britain but never experienced a real bombardment from the air. The bases there were protected from the Luftwaffe by night fighters and flak artillery. Thus, when the Soviets had sounded such an alarm, many of the American pilots slept through it, either not hearing the alarm or deciding not to react to it. The Americans had seen many flak batteries around the Poltava area air bases and expected night fighters to be on the alert to defend them. They were also dead tired after a long and difficult raid. Their commanders had taken that into account by rescheduling the instructions on how to react to air raids from 9:00 p.m. to 9:00 a.m. the next morning.
Colonel Old later commented that after the sirens went off, his men “merely turned over and cursed because they had been awakened.” Old added, however, that when the bombs started falling, “they found the ditches and shelters in record time.” As there were 1,100 Americans, and the trenches could shelter only 300 of them, a number of men “elected to lie in depressions along the railroad tracks, while others took shelter behind brick walls,” recalled General Kessler. According to Kessler’s report, “no one in slit trenches was injured.” Those who did not make it to the trenches fared worse. Kessler counted one man killed and thirteen injured—a very low number, given the severity of the attack. Some injuries were minor, like that of the filmmaker Anatole Litvak, who fell and injured his mouth.13
Killed on the spot was Joseph K. Lukacek. The twenty-four-year-old second lieutenant, a copilot of a B-17, had arrived earlier that day as a member of the 237th Bomber Squadron of the 96th Bomber Group. Originally from New Jersey, Lukacek was a descendant of emigrants from the Czech lands of the Habsburg Empire. The chief surgeon, Lieutenant Colonel William Jackson, wrote in his report on the consequences of the attack that Lukacek died of shell wounds that caused multiple fractures of his bones. His copilot, First Lieutenant Raymond C. Estle, a twenty-two-year-old native of Nebraska, initially survived the attack. Estle had joined the Air Force in January 1942. By April 1943 he was fighting in Europe, the flight to Poltava being his fourteenth mission.14
Lieutenant Colonel Jackson, who treated Estle, recorded his and Lukacek’s Poltava experiences in remarkable detail. “Following the long mission of that date, he [Estle] was dog tired,” wrote Jackson,
He ate, attended the briefing and then turned in to sleep in the tent assigned to him. He slept so soundly that he did not hear any air raid alert sounded, and was aware of the situation when he was first awakened by the first bombs exploding. He ran out of his tent together with his co-pilot, but had no idea where the slit trenches were located. He ran aimlessly in the direction which he thought to be away from the airfield. In the light of the flares at the edge of the hospital he remembers loose bricks stacked in a wall formation. At that moment a plane zoomed low and he heard bombs dropping. They instinctively flung themselves flat on the ground. A stick of three high explosion bombs landed in line about twenty feet apart. The nearest one exploded about twelve feet from where he was lying. Fragments struck both him and his co-pilot. He realized he was hit in many places. He called to his co-pilot, received no answer and in the flare light saw that he was dead. He lay there unable to move and calling for aid.
Jackson did his best to save Estle’s life. Upon finding him on the field, he gave the young airman morphine, and during a lull in the bombing moved Estle to a slit trench, where he gave him blood plasma. Estle had sustained numerous wounds penetrating the left and right buttocks and a severe wound to the lower right leg, as well as bone fractures. He would die of those wounds on July 2, 1944.15
The morning of June 22 was Jackson’s busiest at Poltava. Sometime after 4:30 a.m., while driving a Jeep and looking for wounded officers and soldiers, he was approached by an ad hoc international team of rescuers, including US Air Force Captain Theodore Bozard, and Soviet Sergeant P. A. Tupitsyn. They were returning from the vicinity of an American airplane that had exploded just as a group of Soviets were trying to salvage it. Some were killed instantly, and Captain Bozard administered first aid to the wounded survivors. A Soviet interpreter, Lieutenant Ivan Sivolobov, joined Jackson in his Jeep, which made communication easier. Communication was essential, as only the Soviet personnel could clear the way for Jackson to drive to the exploded plane. Since the Germans had dropped thousands of small bombs that would explode on contact, scouts had to survey the area in search of unexploded bombs. Sergeant Tupitsyn and his fellow mechanic Sergeant Georgii Sukhov volunteered to do the job.
Their bravery and self-sacrifice deeply impressed Jackson. A few days later, he wrote, “the two Russian enlisted men voluntarily got out in front and with total disregard for personal safety proceeded to pass the Jeep through the tall grass heavily sown with bombs and mines where the wounded lay. … Sgt. Tupitsyn sat on the front of the Jeep, watching for mines, and mechanic Sukhov Georgy was walking in front of the Jeep, picking up mines and bombs [and] laying them carefully aside. A total of 40 or more was picked up and laid aside to allow the Jeep to pass safely.…” As they reached the damaged plane, they found two severely wounded Soviet soldiers, one with his left leg blown away by the explosion, the other with a fractured leg. Tupitsyn and Sukhov put them in the back of the Jeep and proceeded to the hospital, again risking their lives to provide safe passage. Jackson petitioned his commanders, asking them to nominate the two Soviet soldiers for an award.16
Decades later, Sergeant Tupitsyn, who would rise in the ranks to become a lieutenant colonel, remembered with great clarity the events described by Jackson. He was one of eight volunteers assigned to salvage airplanes that had not been destroyed. As they approached one of the lightly damaged Flying Fortresses, there was an explosion, killing and injuring some members of his group. Tupitsyn did his best to save the lives of the injured, and it was then that he enlisted the help of the Americans. When they put the wounded in the Jeep, he recalled, “day began to break, and we could clearly see the way to drive out of the air base by the shortest route. Sukhov and I walked 30–40 meters in front of the car, clearing the road of unexploded mines. All that involved great risk but ended well.”17
“The attitude of the Russians toward the Americans during the raid was rather embarrassing,” Colonel Old later wrote about that memorable night. “Their attitude seemed to be: ‘Nothing must happen to the Americans or their equipment, regardless of the cost to us.’ At the height of the bombing raid, the Soviet military personnel, both male and female, were rushed out of their shelters into an open field trying to extinguish the fire on the B-17s by throwing dirt at the burning machines. Many of these were killed or wounded by the bombing.” The Soviet commanders were clearly aghast that they had failed to protect their allies and mobilized the only resource they had in an effort to save face. There was also a principle involved: in the Soviet system of values, airplanes and military equipment, especially those as rare and precious as the ones brought in by the Americans, were more valuable than human lives. Saving them at the risk of one’s life was standard operating procedure in the Red Army and its Air Force.18
While the Americans lost mainly equipment to the German bombing, the Soviets paid mostly with their lives. Kessler reported the destruction beyond repair of forty-nine B-17s, four C-47s, and one F-5 airplane. Sixteen Flying Fortresses could be salvaged but needed substantial repairs; merely six were operational and three “flyable only.” According to the same report, the Soviets lost one Douglas aircraft, the personal plane of General Perminov, and seven Yaks—fighter planes. But their human losses exceeded the American ones many times. The Americans lost one killed and thirteen wounded; the Soviets counted thirty men and women dead and ninety wounded. Those were the losses at Poltava. They also lost a few people at Pyriatyn and Myrhorod, where the bombing was less intensive.19
Among the Soviets killed in the attack, none had a higher public profile than Petr Lidov, a reporter for the main Soviet newspaper, Pravda. Lidov was a member of the group of Soviet and American journalists who came to Poltava to cover the arrival of the Frantic II planes. He had first made a name for himself in January 1942, when he published an essay titled “Tania” about a young Soviet woman with a partisan unit who had been captured by the Germans in a village near Moscow in November 1941. Interrogated by the Germans, she allegedly responded to her captors’ question “Where is Stalin?” with the words “Stalin is on duty.” The Germans hanged the young woman in front of the entire village. “Tania’s” real name was Zoia Kosmodemianskaia. She was an eighteen-year-old student from Moscow who had volunteered to join a partisan commando group.
Lidov was instrumental in discovering the heroine’s real name. Together with his friend Aleksandr Kuznetsov, he exhumed Zoia’s body. But he either did not know or preferred not to reveal all the circumstances of Zoia’s death—as a Soviet commando, she was implementing the policy of scorched earth, burning down villages occupied by the Germans, together with their Russian peasant inhabitants. It was a collective farmer trying to save his house from the partisan arsonist who spotted Zoia and alerted the Germans. Other peasants hurled insults at her before she was hanged by the Germans. Despite the fact that the story turned out to be more complex than the one told by Lidov, a new heroine was born, one of those most celebrated during and after the war, and the Pravda reporter was credited with discovering her.20
Lidov came to Poltava with a number of other reporters, including Kuznetsov. It was Lidov’s second trip to the base—his first, on June 2, had resulted in his article “Flying Fortresses,” which was published in Pravda and introduced the shuttle-bombing operations to the broad Soviet public. Like the other newsmen, Lidov and his fellow reporters were put up for the night in a sleeping coach parked on the railway line near the outskirts of the Poltava base. When the Germans started to bomb the airfield, Lidov and his companions took shelter in a nearby trench. They survived the first attack, but in a lull between bombings they left the trench and ran in the darkness, apparently looking for a safer place to hide.21
The next morning, on June 23, a radio technician named Aleksei Spassky, who had arrived with Lidov and other reporters from Moscow the previous day, was invited by his friends to take a look at the bodies of dead soldiers who were rumored to be German parachutists. The dead were dressed in Soviet uniforms, but a young woman standing guard next to the corpses pointed to them with disgust and called them “fascists.” In the pocket of one of the deceased the Red Army soldiers found German currency and a German pin with a swastika. Soviet documents were also found on the corpses. The Communist Party card of Aleksandr Kuznetsov was soon presented to Spassky, who immediately recognized the name and photo of his fellow reporter—certainly no spy. The female sentry told Spassky that they had also documents in the names of Lidov and Strunnikov, another Moscow reporter.
Spassky took a closer look at the bodies. He soon recognized Lidov—the face of the famous reporter was covered with his military jacket, which was missing its shoulder boards—they had been ripped off by the Red Army soldiers who discovered the body. Someone had also removed Lidov’s leather boots. Currency found on the corpses was taken and not passed on to officials—Spassky saw bundles of five-ruble bills disappearing into the pockets of the female soldiers who searched the bodies. He was in no position to protest, as he himself fell under suspicion of being a German spy and was taken to the air base headquarters. There Spassky was turned over to a counterintelligence officer who had written a report on what had happened to Lidov.
Petr Lidov and his friends were buried with military honors in a park in downtown Poltava. A street would be named after him and a legend born: that he had been killed while shooting at German airplanes with a machine gun and indeed had managed to down one of them. The plane allegedly crashed close to Lidov, mortally wounding him and his friends. The author of the legend of Zoia became the subject of a legend himself. Regardless of such mythmaking, there was no shortage of true heroism demonstrated by Red Army soldiers in the line of duty.22
News of the German attack on Poltava was reported to Stalin, Molotov, and People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs Lavrentii Beria, the same day. According to Soviet reports the flak batteries and machine guns fired close to 30,000 rounds without shooting down a single German plane. The night fighters made 17 sorties, also to no avail. Most disheartening was that the losses of the Eighth Army’s Flying Fortresses were the largest ever. From the Soviet perspective, the disaster came at the worst symbolic moment—the third anniversary of the German invasion of the USSR on the morning of June 22, 1941.23
Who was to blame for a failure of such proportions? The Soviets, while feeling guilty for not having managed to protect their guests, were nonetheless pointing fingers at them. General Perminov had allegedly proposed moving the planes to other airfields after German reconnaissance planes were spotted in the area, but the American commanders had refused, citing the fatigue of their crews. They also had not dispersed their planes around the field, placing them at significant distances from one another—the Soviet “know-how” of dealing with night bombing raids without benefit of night fighters and effective flak batteries. The Americans, in turn, blamed the Soviets, recalling how they had offered their fighters to drive away the German reconnaissance planes and the Soviets had allegedly refused. More than anything else, the Americans complained about the absence and ineffectiveness of night fighters—the main defense of British airfields against German raids.24
Perminov pointed out that Soviet bombers had attacked German airfields in retaliation. He also ordered the removal of still operational airplanes from the Poltava-area bases to Soviet airfields further east. That was all the Soviets could do in anticipation of the next night and another German air raid. Indeed, as expected, the Germans showed up the following night and bombed the Myrhorod air base to devastating effect, though the Flying Fortresses were no longer there. Major Marwin Bower of the 100th Bomber Group stayed at Myrhorod with the few remaining planes, one of them in disrepair, and witnessed the attack. “[A]bout 01:00 hours from 75 to 100 Ju-88s plastered the field with everything except the kitchen stove and live fish. Many Russian soldiers were wounded and some were killed,” wrote Bower in his diary. “Our damaged B-17 was practically destroyed but the two others escaped with only minor damage, probably from falling flak.” The following day Bowman flew to the air base near the city of Kirovohrad (present-day Kropyvnytskyi in central Ukraine), where he “was royally entertained by three Russian generals and the whole post for that matter.”25
Radio operator Palmer Myhra was also stationed at Myrhorod and remembered later that he had learned about the coming attack on his base from German radio. The GIs in Ukraine entertained themselves by listening to the “Axis Sally” show, a German program that mixed popular music and propaganda. It was hosted by an American-born actress named Mildred Elizabeth Gillars, who had been in Germany before the war and agreed to broadcast Nazi propaganda aimed at American troops fighting in Europe. (She would be arrested in 1946, convicted of treason by the United States court and spend more that fifteen years in prison.26) “Of all the women we knew when in Operation Frantic, the most discussed and familiar was Axis Sally,” remembered Myhra. “She came to us most every night with her sexy insinuating messages.” The program would end with her words: “Don’t forget to listen again tomorrow and kisses for all of you from Sally.”
That evening, recalled Myhra, Axis Sally was on the air earlier than usual, “telling us at Myrhorod that we were next.” Indeed, around midnight they had heard Soviet anti-aircraft batteries and machine guns opening fire. They waited for Soviet night bombers to appear, but none did. Once again the German bombers had a field day, bombarding the air base without much opposition. The only difference was that the American planes were now gone, relocated the previous day to other airfields. “The big loss was fuel supply and bomb dumps,” recalled Myhra.27
The Soviets did their best to make Americans forget the terrible experience of June 22 and 23. It was no easy task. Morale at the bases was deteriorating quickly. SMERSH agents picked up rumors among the Americans that the bombing raid had been caused by the Soviet newspaper announcement of the arrival of the Flying Fortresses. First Lieutenant Albert Jaroff, the US Air Force intelligence officer at Myrhorod, whose job was to debrief the US pilots about the German targets and air defenses, and whom the SMERSH commanders suspected of espionage, expressed the feelings of many of his comrades when he told one of the SMERSH informers: “I consider your anti-aircraft defense system very weak: during the attack, the shooting was very poor; there were no night fighters; the searchlights provided very poor illumination; our artillery and our night fighters should have been put into service, then all would have been well.”28
The American commanders Walsh and Kessler approached General Perminov, informing him of the suspension of shuttle-bombing operations. A Soviet counterintelligence report summarized their complaints as follows: “The Germans are bombing us [the Soviets] scot-free, our artillery is not powerful enough, our fighters are not equipped for night fighting, which means that they cannot do their job properly, and military operations will begin when they [the Americans] are confident that they will not be bombed here and will be adequately covered with anti-aircraft artillery and fighters.” The Soviets could do little to accommodate those demands, as they had no radar-equipped night fighters, and their flak batteries were all but useless at night.29
In Moscow the American commanders, backed by the US embassy, asked permission to bring in American night fighters and air defenses, but the usually accommodating General Nikitin was not enthusiastic about the idea. His political bosses did not want more Americans on the Poltava air bases. Following Nikitin’s negative response, the American commission investigating the matter suggested a number of provisional measures to avoid disasters like the one of June 22. These included keeping as few American aircraft as possible on the Poltava-area fields at any given time and replacing the silver-painted Flying Fortresses with camouflaged ones. The time to show off American air power had passed: the priority was now to preserve and secure it.30
Meanwhile, General John Deane at the US military mission was in damage-control mode, doing his best to reduce tensions, avoid finger-pointing and, most importantly, prevent Allied journalists from reporting about the bombings—even as Berlin radio was triumphantly broadcasting news of the Poltava raid. He succeeded in convincing Western reporters who had been at Poltava and those who had stayed behind in Moscow not to report on the disaster and to focus instead on the heroism of the Soviet and American comrades-in-arms. Having organized a joint press conference for Soviet and Western reporters, Deane managed to avoid a public-relations disaster. Nonetheless, there was little he could do to bridge the gap in Soviet-American relations that began to widen after the Poltava raid.
Deane later wrote that the Poltava disaster “sowed the seed of discontent, the Russians smarting and sensitive because of their failure to provide the protection they had promised, and the Americans forgiving but determined to send their own anti-aircraft defenses as protection for the future.” The spirit of cooperation at the Poltava-area bases was rapidly deteriorating, tensions were growing. It did not help matters that the Western media would refuse to follow Deane’s instructions.31