10

Picking a Fight

On Sunday, August 6, 1944, the Ukrainian airfields came to life once again with the arrival of seventy-eight Flying Fortresses and their escort of sixty-four Mustangs. This was part of the first shuttle-bombing raid to be carried out since late June, when the Flying Fortresses of the Eighth Air Force had descended on the Poltava-area airfields, only to be destroyed by the subsequent German attack. After that disaster, it took the US commanders almost a month and half to launch a new raid, dubbed Frantic V. Frantic I had begun the operation in early June; Frantic II was the unfortunate mission that all but ended during the German attack of June 22 on the bases; and Frantic III and IV had been conducted in July by the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy, involving fighters alone. Frantic V, in contrast, was carried out by three bomber wings accompanied by one fighter wing—all part of the Eighth Air Force based in Britain.

The mission was undertaken as a result of a Soviet request. Moscow wanted the Flying Fortresses to bomb targets in Upper Silesia in Germany and in the Krakow area of Poland, and it wanted the job done quickly—before August 5. But bad weather postponed Frantic V and led to a change of target: the Flying Fortresses bombed installations near the Polish city of Gdynia on the Baltic coast. On the next day, August 7, they achieved part of their original goal by attacking the Krakow-area targets from the Poltava bases. On August 8, instead of flying back to Britain, the airplanes of the Eighth Air Force flew to Italy; on the way they bombed targets in Romania, which the Soviets were preparing to invade later that month.¹

The operation was considered generally successful, although the number of Flying Fortresses involved, the importance of targets hit, and the damage recorded could not compare to Frantic II, undertaken in June. This time, however, no planes were lost on the ground after the raid. The Americans never succeeded in convincing the Soviets to allow them to bring in their own night fighters and anti-aircraft defenses, a move that would have increased the number of Americans in the Poltava area fivefold. It no longer seemed necessary. The Soviet-German front line had moved too far west for the Germans to undertake the kind of attack they had mounted only a few weeks earlier. The Red Army offensive, “Operation Bagration” (named after a Russian military commander of Georgian origin who had fought in the Napoleonic wars) began on June 22, the same day the Germans bombed the Poltava air bases. By mid-August, Red Army troops were approaching East Prussia in the north, the Vistula River in the center, and the Carpathian Mountains in the southern sector of the front. Belarus and Ukraine were now almost entirely under Soviet control.²

The rapidly advancing front line presented the Poltava-area bases with a new challenge. The number of targets that the Americans could reach from those bases was decreasing dramatically as they either came under Soviet control or became part of the Red Army’s theater of operations. The Americans on the ground in Poltava and the military mission in Moscow began to notice that the Soviets were showing less and less enthusiasm for the shuttle-bombing operations. The same was true of the American commanders in London and Washington, who were becoming increasingly interested in acquiring new bases closer to the fast-moving Soviet-German front line.³

In Moscow, American requests for new bases farther west and closer to the front fell on deaf ears. The Soviets kept delaying the approval of targets for new operations; thus Frantic VI, a new mission that would bring American planes from the United Kingdom to Ukraine and to Italy did not take place until mid-September—the longest gap in the history of Frantic operations. Faced with the lull in bombing operations and receiving conflicting signals from Moscow about their future, the officers and GIs at the Poltava bases began to feel confused and unwelcome. Their conflicts with the Soviets multiplied, some degenerating into fistfights. The Alliance was developing a major crack, one that went right down to its foundation—servicemen who were supposed to fight side by side were turning against one another.

In mid-August the bases were visited by the US Strategic Air Forces in Europe (USSTAF) deputy commander for administration, Major General Hugh J. Knerr. On his arrival to the Soviet Union, Knerr visited Averell Harriman and General Deane. He spent almost a week—from August 15 to 21—at the Poltava bases. He left them highly skeptical about the Soviets’ commitment to continuing the project, and doubtful whether it made any sense to go on with the shuttle-bombing operations. Knerr also did not think much of the possibility of establishing American bases in the Far East—which has been one of the key American objectives in launching Frantic in the first place.

On the Soviet attitude toward the bases, Knerr commented in his report: “The Devil [is] no longer sick and not interested in becoming a Monk for the defeat of Germany.” That memorable assessment reflected the views of American officers and GIs at the bases. The Soviets, emboldened by their recent victories, were showing steadily declining enthusiasm for cooperation with their American allies. After all, by this point the Americans were bogged down in France, still far from the German border, while they, the Soviets, were on the move, liberating their own territories and now crossing into Central Europe and the Balkans. Knerr criticized the Soviets for doing very little to improve air defenses after the German attack of June 22. He also noted that cooperation between Americans and Soviets technicians who serviced the planes was breaking down, and that “the Russians steal all the tools that they can get their hands on.”⁴

Knerr believed that under the circumstances General Walsh was failing to maintain morale and discipline. He saw a sign of “lack of leadership” in the weeds growing around the American tents at Poltava. Morale at the bases was indeed in free fall. Seeing the writing on the wall, the GIs talked of little else than returning to their bases in Europe or home to the United States. Discipline also deteriorated, with a sharp increase in cases of illicit trade in American goods and drunken conflicts between fellow Americans, as well as between them and the Soviets.

There could hardly have been a more striking indication of the apathy that was afflicting the American bases than an episode that occurred in the course of Knerr’s inspection—a drunken brawl in the Soviet-run restaurant at the American base in Myrhorod all but resulted in shooting between the Americans and Soviets. On the night of August 17 First Lieutenant Philip R. Sheridan, a bomber pilot whose plane was under repair in Myrhorod, had too much to drink. Heavily intoxicated, he hurled two bottles through the window of the restaurant and got into a quarrel with Soviet officers. In the confusion caused by Sheridan’s behavior, two American NCOs outside the restaurant heard the sound of a Soviet soldier loading his weapon. Apprehensive that he was about to start shooting the Americans, the two NCOs attacked the Red Army soldier and disarmed him, causing a minor cut to his face. No shots were fired, but in the resulting confusion the American officer on duty, apparently trying to break up the brawl, struck another American on the head with a flashlight, sending him to the hospital. General Perminov demanded that the perpetrators be punished. Sheridan was sent back to England to face court-martial.⁵

Restaurants like the one at the Myrhorod base were run by Voentorg, and were opened in late June at Poltava and in early July at the other bases. From the start, they were a focal point of the growing tensions between American and Soviet personnel at the bases. They sold drinks and food, especially pastries. The restaurants were established with the support of General Perminov, who pleaded in late May 1944 for the authorization of shops at the bases. While the Americans were well fed, they needed a place to spend their spare time, and the Soviets not only had no pubs available to them but had restricted their access to the locals. Perminov needed restaurants to stop the Americans from wandering into the towns and villages to buy liquor. The restaurants became a meeting place for the two groups and should ideally have strengthened rapport between them. In fact, as friction developed and morale declined, especially on the American side, they had the opposite effect.⁶

The Americans found the food and drink of good quality and the waitresses “personable and attractive.” As the restaurants were open to both Americans and Soviets—the former were allowed to invite guests from the bases but not from among the local population—the Americans had to learn quickly how to drink glasses full of vodka bottoms-up, as the Soviets insisted, without immediately becoming intoxicated. When one American officer emptied a glass of vodka under the table, his action was noticed, and General Perminov demanded that he drink another glass as punishment. The Americans soon learned to neutralize the effect of vodka by eating rye bread, onions, and greasy food, but newcomers to the base, such as Lieutenant Sheridan, had to learn the hard way.⁷

Downing vodka in quantity was not the only challenge facing the Americans at the Soviet restaurants. For them, those establishments soon came to exemplify all that was wrong with economic conditions in the Soviet Union. The Americans believed that the restaurants encouraged corruption and illicit trade in military goods. As the Voentorg restaurants sold goods for both dollars and rubles, they solved part of Perminov’s problem by stopping GIs from going to nearby towns for liquor but aggravated it in another way—by increasing GI traffic to the same towns to sell American goods in order to acquire rubles needed to buy liquor in the restaurants.

At the core of the Americans’ problems was the USSTAF decision to pay them only part of their salaries in Soviet rubles and the Soviet-imposed exchange rate used to convert their dollar allowances into rubles. Lieutenant Arthur Cunningham, who was stationed at Myrhorod, explained to a Soviet acquaintance that out of his monthly salary of US $165 he received only $18.00 in rubles; the rest was sent to his American bank account. At the official Soviet exchange rate of 17.35 rubles per dollar, Cunningham’s Myrhorod salary amounted to 315 rubles, which was far less than Soviet officers earned and put the Americans at a disadvantage.

The decision to pay only a small part of US military salaries in rubles was probably influenced by the assumption that there was little to purchase in places such as Poltava and Myrhorod. The opening of the restaurants changed the situation. Now there were drinks, food, and cigarettes to buy but little money to spend. With 315 rubles in his pocket, an American could buy little more than two bottles of vodka priced at 150 rubles each. Beer went for 15 rubles a bottle. And no sooner had the restaurants opened than the Soviets changed the exchange rate, offering Americans only 5.30 rubles to the dollar and thus reducing their already meager buying power by two-thirds. With less than 100 rubles to spend per month, the Americans were unhappy and had no inhibitions about expressing their dissatisfaction.

Soviet counterintelligence was quick to pick up on the displeasure voiced by the Americans. “If you have few goods, then there was no need to open up that trade,” complained First Lieutenant Elias Bacha. “Our Americans are considered the wealthiest in any country, considering the high exchange value of the dollar,” said Lieutenant Jaroff, soon to be sent out of the country for allegedly provoking conflicts with the Soviets, to one of his Soviet contacts. Jaroff added that the American commanders were discussing plans to buy liquor in Iran and bring it to the bases. Indeed, on July 8 the Americans in Myrhorod opened their own store, selling goods to Americans only—a pack of American cigarettes for one ruble, while in the Soviet-run restaurant a pack of low-grade Soviet cigarettes went for more than a dollar. General Walsh complained to Perminov, who in turn petitioned Moscow, as did Lieutenant Colonel Sveshnikov.⁸

Moscow said nothing. The new exchange rate remained the same for the rest of the summer, encouraging American GIs to look for other ways of obtaining rubles. Poor in currency, they were rich in goods that were plentiful on their bases but unavailable in Soviet stores, from instruments and technical equipment to uniforms, shoes, blankets and, last but not least, sweet-smelling soap. Almost overnight, the markets of Poltava, Myrhorod, and Pyriatyn were flooded with American merchandise, including cigarettes and chewing gum. Two bars of soap went for 120 rubles, American-made shoes for 6,000 rubles, blankets for 2,000, and watches for 5,000. The Americans investigated cases of black-marketeering to the best of their ability but could not root out the illicit trade fueled by the demand for rubles.⁹

Franklyn Holzman, stationed at Myrhorod, recalled that during the first month after deployment in June the Americans gave things away free of charge, moved by the scope of wartime destruction and the general poverty of the population. Later they began selling goods for rubles. According to Holzman, everyone was doing so, but GIs were upset when they saw their chaplain drive away from the base with a supply of blankets for sale. Some American officers with access to cars, dissatisfied with the prices they could get in the towns, turned into itinerant salesmen, traveling to nearby villages and selling goods according to price lists they distributed among the population. Rubles were not only spent at restaurants but also used to purchase goods available in local markets and stores. Soviet-made cameras, replicas of German Leicas, were especially popular, and some of them had German lenses. Items of Ukrainian folk art were especially sought after, embroidery in particular. Holzman purchased quite a few embroidered blouses and sent them home.¹⁰

Red Army soldiers tried to steal whatever they could from the Americans. In June, in Myrhorod, they stole two wallets from a safe in the office of the intelligence unit. Soviet drivers transporting American supplies stole 39 cans of food, 4 parachutes, 125 boxes of candy, and 40 packs of cigarettes from one of the American warehouses. Someone removed the ignition system, one light, a spare tire, and instruments from an American car parked at an airfield. Personal belongings of a female nurse, including an alarm clock, a flashlight, and gold pins were stolen from an American hospital.

Perminov sounded the alarm on July 26. He ordered his subordinates, as well as SMERSH officers, to investigate cases of theft among Red Army personnel. The Air Force commanders followed the order. The SMERSH officers, on the other hand, protested it all the way to Moscow. They argued that Perminov had no authority over them, and that it was not their job to deal with petty crime. The SMERSH bosses in Moscow agreed with their subordinates in Poltava that the task of counterintelligence was to look for spies and deserters, not to deal with property crimes against the Americans. Perminov was left to deal with the crime on his own.¹¹

SMERSH became involved in larceny investigations only when Red Army servicemen were engaged in criminal schemes with Americans. The latter supplied the goods, while the former took care of the sales. That was one area in which Soviet-American cooperation encountered few setbacks. In September 1944, three boxes of American goods were found by SMERSH officers in a Red Army auto shop on one of the bases. The person charged with taking them for resale was Lieutenant Ivan Kuchinsky. He testified that the boxes, which included eight packages of photo paper, a leather jacket, clothes, cans of meat, sausages, and packages of sugar and chewing gum belonged to an American acquaintance, a technician in a photo laboratory, who had asked him to sell the goods. Kuchinsky’s acquaintance, who was preparing to leave the base, was apparently selling either personal belongings or items obtained from military stores to which he had easy access, such as photo paper.

Kuchinsky admitted to his guilt. He also confessed that in the past he had sold merchandise for his American friend while on a business trip to the city of Kharkiv. Back then, he had sold the goods for slightly more than 2,000 rubles, ten times the monthly allowance of an American soldier at the bases. While pleading guilty, Kuchinsky asked for clemency. He told the SMERSH interrogators that he was not a “lost man” but needed money to help his family, which had fallen on hard times. The plea was of no avail. The merchandise was discovered on September 12, and on the following day Kuchinsky was expelled from the Communist Party—a clear sign that they were putting him on trial. SMERSH was eager to show its zeal in fighting American illegal trade.¹²

By later summer of 1944 the rubles that the Americans received from illegal commerce abruptly changed the symbolic balance of power in the Soviet-run restaurants, where Americans were now the equals of their Soviet counterparts or could even outspend them. The cash-rich Americans, who also had access to Air Force shops and could ask pilots to bring them goods from Britain, Italy, and Iran, also had a clear advantage over the Soviets when it came to courting local women. Almost all cases of sexual liaison between American men and local women investigated by SMERSH involved some form of material benefit to the women. That was true even in cases when the Americans were not looking for sexual favors but simply wanted to enjoy the company of younger women. According to SMERSH reports, such was the motive of William Jackson, the surgeon who praised the bravery of the ordinary Soviet soldiers during the June 22 German attack on the bases. He had dated Zinaida Blazhkova of Poltava. The relationship, which began, according to the SMERSH reports in June 1944, involved gifts of stockings and perfume.

In most cases, however, gifts of American goods smoothed the way toward sexual encounters between American GIs and Soviet women. Around 2:00 a.m. on the morning of August 30, a Soviet officer on duty in Myrhorod discovered that two female soldiers from his department, the nineteen-year-old Taisia Nesina and the twenty-one-year-old Liubov Abashkina, were absent from their night shift at the local bakery. The officer soon found them in their rented room, “sleeping in the nude with two Americans.” A search of the room turned up “630 rubles, 5 bars of American toilet soap, a package of American chocolate, a brooch with American stones, 4 packets of expensive face powder, 2 bottles of perfume, and 2 photos of those Americans.” The girls were arrested, and one of them was expelled from the Young Communist League. The women in their unit were treated to a lecture “on Soviet morals.”¹³

As the future of the bases became murkier, the Soviets showed less and less interest in accommodating the Americans, who in turn were growing ever more frustrated with the limitations imposed by their hosts on their freedom of movement and contacts with locals. The result was a sudden spike in conflicts between them. Especially “productive” in that regard were the first two weeks of September, when word spread among the Americans that they were about to leave the bases. With nothing to lose, they became ever more open in venting their frustration with what General Knerr referred to in his memo of August 25 to General Spaatz as “political control,” which he found “neither friendly, nor cooperative.”¹⁴

Events planned as ways of improving and strengthening relations between the allies tended increasingly to result in quarrels. On September 1, a group of American officers celebrating their newly received promotions invited their Soviet counterparts to celebrate the occasion at the Poltava air base restaurant. They apparently had too much to drink and, according to a SMERSH report, one of the Americans, Captain Hiller, got into a fight with a Red Army Lieutenant named Savchuk. Hiller told the Soviet interpreter, First Lieutenant Ivan Sivolobov, that he “hated Russians like dogs and wanted to beat someone up.” Lieutenant Colonel Sveshnikov interpreted such conflicts as deliberate provocations intended to worsen relations between the allies and took credit for preventing fights from escalating. He was happy to report to his superiors that one such fight between Soviet officers and American sergeants at the Pyriatyn base restaurant had been prevented. The Americans had allegedly broken into the restaurant after hours to get drinks and food.¹⁵

As Soviet-American conflicts grew in number and intensity in the first weeks of September, the SMERSH agents of Sveshnikov and Zorin kept a close watch on certain American personnel. As Sveshnikov noted in his report to Moscow in mid-September, “in most cases the provocations are initiated by American intelligence personnel who know the Russian language and have relatives in the USSR.” In September the SMERSH officers insisted on prosecuting one such Russian-speaking officer, Second Lieutenant Igor Reverditto, who got into a fight and shouted anticommunist insults.¹⁶

Reverditto provides an interesting case. Despite his Italian name, he was born in 1919 in Ulan-Ude, then Verkhneudinsk, the capital of the Russian Baikal gubernia, to the family of an actor and theater director named Konstanin Petrovich Arkazanov and his wife, Kharkiv-born actress Marina Mikhailovna. Arkazanov’s name was a stage one, “borrowed” from a leading character of a popular 1886 Russian play “Arkazanovs.” The theater company Arkazanov ran was real. It traveled around before and during World War I, and Konstantin and Marina Arkazanov were constantly on the move. The Russian Revolution caught the family in the Siberian city of Tomsk, where in July 1917 the theater staged performances in Polish and in Russian, suggesting Polish origins of some of the members of the group, if not Arkazanov himself.

Judging by the place of Igor’s birth, by 1919 the theater and the family moved further east and ended up in Ulan-Ude. In 1920 the city became the capital of a Bolshevik-controlled but formally independent Far Eastern Republic. The Arkazanov family left Verkhneudinsk for China in 1923, the year in which the Bolsheviks incorporated the republic into the Russian Federation. Igor’s father died in China. His mother immigrated with young Igor to the United States, where she married again and changed her and Igor’s surname. The left-leaning Albert Jaroff, under whom Reverditto served in the Intelligence Department of the Myrhorod base, distrusted Reverditto and called him a “White Guardist,” suggesting his family’s anti-Bolshevik leanings. There was little doubt that they had left Russia in order to flee from the Bolsheviks.¹⁷

Like all Russian-speaking Americans, Reverditto found himself under the eye of the SMERSH officers soon after his arrival at the Poltava base. They discovered that the handsome, tall, and blond American was interested in dating local women. They did not know this, but before joining the US Air Force Igor had spent some time in Hollywood, where, according to family legend, he had dated up-and-coming stars Alexis Smith and Donna Reed. In late June 1944, Igor was seeing a Ukrainian woman named Valia, and SMERSH naturally sought more information about her. In July Igor met and dated an attractive Poltava woman named Zinaida Belukha. She had a child from a previous marriage, and her father, a Soviet police official, had been executed before the war. Reverditto told Belukha that the Americans on the base were unhappy. They had been advised that while local women were not officially banned from socializing with Americans, these women had been discouraged from doing so. When they did meet up with Americans, they did so in secret. Reverditto shared the general resentment over this.¹⁸

On Friday, September 8, Reverditto made his displeasure known to his SMERSH watchers. Sveshnikov’s agents spotted him at the Poltava restaurant in the company of a fellow Russian speaker, First Lieutenant William Roman Kaluta. According to the SMERSH report, the two “were trying to cause a quarrel with members of our officer staff, spreading provocative rumors that Russian officers were trying to prevent Americans from going out with girls.” The next time SMERSH agents reported on Reverditto, they said he was not only spreading anti-Soviet propaganda but had been involved in a fight with a Red Army officer. According to the report, on September 12 Reverditto and Kaluta beat up Red Army Lieutenant Fedor Grishaev and tried to assault other Soviet officers. “During the uproar,” read the report, “Reverditto shouted obscene anticommunist abuse and declared that ‘It’s not you who are helping us but we who are helping you.’”¹⁹

The American investigation found Reverditto, though not Kaluta, guilty as charged. It all began with a remark made by First Lieutenant Michael Dubiaga, another American officer of East European ancestry, to Reverditto, who was drinking heavily and using foul language. Later Dubiaga and Reverditto got into a fight, which was joined by Reverditto’s drinking buddy, First Lieutenant Cherry C. Carpenter. The cause of the fight was Reverditto’s assault on an American corporal. Reverditto and Carpenter then attacked Dubiaga. Kaluta appeared on the scene and tried to break up the fight and instead exchanged blows with Reverditto. At some point in this brawl, Reverditto, speaking Russian, assaulted the Soviet manager of the restaurant, saying the words that were picked up in the Soviet report. As always, the Soviets refused an American request to interview their people, leaving gaps in the investigation, but the overall story was clear—bored beyond endurance and fed up with Soviet tactics, the American officer cracked under pressure.²⁰

Two days after the fight, Sveshnikov presented General Perminov with a long list of American “provocations,” headed by the fight. Others included an unsubstantiated claim that two American officers had tried to rape a female Red Army officer at the Pyriatyn air base; an accusation that Americans in Myrhorod were deliberately taking pictures of poorly dressed people; and a claim that the Americans were making anti-Soviet comments in public and private. Perminov in turn protested to generals Walsh and Kessler. They promised to investigate all the cases mentioned by Perminov. In Reverditto’s case they acted almost immediately. He was fined half a month’s pay, his promotion was withdrawn, and he was transferred from Poltava on September 15, less than three days after the incident. The American commanders had to restore discipline, if not morale, among their officers and soldiers as soon as possible before the situation got completely out of control. Nevertheless, they felt sympathy for the officers they had to reprimand.

On September 15, the same day Reverditto was ordered out of Poltava, General Kessler wrote him a glowing letter of recommendation that made no reference to the incident and recommended Reverditto as a “loyal, sincere and conscientious officer.”²¹ Kessler and his deputies at Poltava no longer trusted their Soviet counterparts. Not so for their commanders in Moscow. In a further attempt to appease the Soviets, Walsh ordered Corporal Peter Nicolaeff, the Russian-speaking officer whom SMERSH and General Perminov considered anti-Soviet, to be transferred back to the West European theater. He also issued an order prohibiting GIs from taking photos outside the bases. The last thing Walsh and Deane wanted was to give the Soviets any pretext for shutting down the bases before the US Air Force was able to complete its last mission over Eastern Europe: the raid on Warsaw, which was in the middle of an all-out uprising against the Germans.²²