12

Forgotten Bastards of Ukraine

The radar operator Palmer Myhra and his friends left Myrhorod early in the morning of October 5, 1944. Ahead was a long and exhausting trip, first by railway to Tabriz, the capital of Iranian Azerbaijan, and then on trucks and ships back to England. In his diary Myhra wrote, “At Myrhorod it was the best I ever had in the Army despite all the dangers and problems.” Judging by his memoirs, Myhra appreciated his contacts with the locals, and probably expected to see grateful crowds bidding farewell to the departing Americans. But on his last day in Myrhorod, the city streets were empty. “I am sure the whole town was aware of it and probably wanted to bid us good bye but no one even ventured out to wave to us as we passed through town.” He had noticed a change in the official attitude toward the Americans in the weeks leading up to the departure: “By now Russian and Ukrainian women were no longer permitted to talk or associate with us.” Myhra recalled that the usually friendly guards were no longer smiling at the Americans, and generally that the Soviets were trying to steal everything they could in the American camp. Fights erupted on a daily basis. “Sometimes we were wondering if we would ever get out of this place alive,” wrote Myhra years later.¹

The first echelon of American airmen leaving the Ukrainian bases departed from the Poltava railway station on October 7. There were 395 officers and enlisted men in all, accompanied by three Soviet Air Force officers and one representative of SMERSH. The train left for the city of Kharkiv and went on from there to Rostov, Baku, and Tabriz. The Soviets had furnished the coaches with soft seats and two restaurant cars, while the Americans provided their hosts with written statements of gratitude for the care they had received in the Soviet Union.

Four days later, on October 11, two more trains came to Poltava to pick up another four hundred officers and soldiers. The first train reached Tabriz on October 18. A long road lay ahead through the Middle East to Port Said, on the northern end of the Suez Canal, from where the next convoy of ships was scheduled to leave for Britain during the second week of November. Altogether around eight hundred US airmen returned to the United Kingdom by the Middle Eastern route. Fewer than two hundred others departed by air.²

The evacuation of Myhra and his fellow soldiers from the Ukrainian air bases was a direct outcome of Molotov’s demand the previous August to vacate the bases, as the Soviets needed them for their own purposes. It also came as a result of the recommendation of Major General Knerr, who visited the bases in mid-August and sensed that the Soviets wanted the Americans out as soon as possible. In his report to USSTAF he recommended “that Frantic be terminated as of September 15, and all equipment and supplies now en route be embargoed.” Knerr repeated that recommendation at a meeting later that month at Allied headquarters in Italy attended by General Spaatz, General Eaker, and the commander of the Ukrainian bases, General Walsh. They all agreed with the proposal but wanted to keep the Poltava base going through the winter months and decided to await the outcome of Harriman’s negotiations with Molotov regarding their future.³

By the end of August, Averell Harriman had found himself caught between two crises—one started by Molotov, the other by Knerr. Both threatened to destroy what he and General Deane had spent so much time building—an American presence on Soviet soil and the hope that the Alliance they envisioned would continue to work. On August 29 Harriman approached Molotov with a compromise. He offered to give up the bases at Myrhorod and Pyriatyn while retaining the one at Poltava for American use. He also proposed to reduce the number of personnel stationed there and to limit their mission. Those remaining at Poltava would service American planes engaged in reconnaissance missions and keep the base operating for the possible resumption of shuttle bombing in the spring. Molotov agreed to consider the proposal. The immediate shutdown of the bases was prevented but they remained in limbo, contributing to the decline of morale there.⁴

The Americans acted on the assumption that they would be allowed to stay at least in Poltava but made preparations to leave Myrhorod and Pyriatyn, dumping some of their surplus equipment into the rivers—an activity not overlooked by SMERSH. Uncertainty about the future of the Poltava base depressed commanders on the ground and unnerved USSTAF planners. On September 27, Air Force commander Hap Arnold gave vent to their exasperation about the lack of clarity on the issue of the Poltava base in a telegram to Moscow. On the following day Harriman wrote to Molotov, reminding him of the request made a month earlier. Again, there was no answer. Deane for one believed that Soviet agreement to help the Americans winterize their quarters at Poltava indicated that approval was forthcoming. The experienced Kremlin watcher got it right. On October 7, the Soviets approved the continuing operation of the Poltava base, putting a cap on American personnel there at three hundred officers and GIs.⁵

In all approximately two hundred Americans stayed at the Poltava base, about thirty of whom were officers. Those who remained were volunteers. In fact, there were more volunteers at first than spots available for them. Given the political importance of the mission, only those with little previous communication with the Soviets were selected, in order to deflect any suspicion that they harbored anti-Soviet attitudes. As in the selection of candidates for the Frantic mission in Britain in the spring of 1944, individuals suspected of anti-Russian or anti-Soviet attitudes were weeded out.⁶

SMERSH officers in Moscow were suspicious of the official American explanations for staying on at Poltava. In their internal correspondence they noted that the Americans had been left in Poltava “on the pretext that in time ‘shuttle’ operations would be revived.” Their subordinates shared the same concern. Soviet commanders on the ground remained in the dark with regard to the American intentions. “The purposes of the continuing existence of the American base in Poltava are unknown to our commanders,” read a SMERSH report of the time. The counterintelligence officers were doing their best to collect information from the American personnel, both those leaving and those staying, about those purposes. Most of the Americans they interviewed believed that they were being left in Poltava to await Soviet entry into the war with Japan. After that they would be moved to the Far East.⁷

That was indeed one of the hopes shared by Harriman and Deane in Moscow. Nonetheless, USSTAF commanders still had to define a new mission for the reduced personnel that would go beyond the promise of the Far Eastern bases. Their desire to keep the base going in order to “avoid any interpretation of the termination of our activities as an incident,” as stated at the high-level meeting in Italy in late August, hardly constituted such a mission. American commanders discussed the issue among themselves throughout September. Among the tasks to be handled by the remaining personnel were support for reconnaissance flights, salvaging of damaged American aircraft, assistance to American prisoners of war liberated by the Red Army from German camps in Eastern Europe, and upkeep of the base should shuttle-bombing operations be resumed in the spring.⁸

Because the shuttle-bombing operations were suspended, and the rationale for remaining in place still under discussion and debate, the American airmen selected to stay in Poltava were not entirely sure what they were doing. They felt abandoned by their government, their USSTAF commanders, and the public at large. No acknowledgment of their existence was made in the media, and Americans at home did not know that their compatriots were still behind the Soviet lines. In their own words they became “forgotten bastards of Ukraine.”

The Poltava base needed a new commander. General Walsh became a special assistant to General Arnold in Washington, while the recently promoted General Kessler became an Air Force attaché in Stockholm. At Poltava he was replaced by Colonel Thomas K. Hampton, a thirty-five-year-old experienced commander, who had served with distinction in the Panama Canal Protection Zone and the Eighth Air Force in Britain before coming to Ukraine in the spring of 1944. By the end of the summer he was in charge of operations at the Poltava base.

Though a veteran of the base, Hampton lacked knowledge of Russian and needed considerable help in dealing with the Soviets. The SMERSH officers, who carefully studied the new command infrastructure that the Americans set up at Poltava, noticed that Hampton appointed at least one officer who could speak Russian to all key departments and areas of operation—they counted sixteen such officers in all. The American assessment of those who spoke Russian was more modest. It was reported that four had native fluency in Russian and three had picked up enough of the language over the summer to be able to communicate. The commanders made a conscious effort not to take too many Russian-speaking enlisted men, as it was now understood that they were the first to get into trouble with the Soviets.⁹

The most important position at the US base at Poltava from the point of view of contact with the Soviets went to an officer whose Russian was better than his English. First Lieutenant George Fischer was Hampton’s adjutant and responsible for the day-to-day running of the colonel’s office. The bespectacled, serious-looking twenty-one-year-old Fischer had been born in Berlin but spent most of his childhood and adolescence in Moscow. He adopted the Russian name Yurii, attended an elite Soviet school, and befriended children of European communists then exiled in Moscow. His closest friend was the future head of foreign intelligence of the East German Ministry for State Security (or Stasi), Markus Wolf, who would become known to Western intelligence services as the “man without a face,” since they could not locate any photograph of him. Fischer gave Markus his nickname, “Mischa,” by which Markus would be known to his Soviet and Russian friends until his death in 2006.

Fischer was a true believer in communism during his years in Moscow. His father, the prominent American journalist Louis Fischer, born in Philadelphia into a family of Jewish emigrants from the Russian Empire, had strong socialist convictions, though never became a communist. George’s mother, Bertha Mark, who came from a Jewish merchant family in the Russian-controlled Baltics, was a card-carrying communist with extensive connections among the Bolshevik elite during the early postrevolutionary years. Bertha, known as “Markoosha”—an affectionate Russian rendering of her surname, Mark—stayed with George and his younger brother, Victor, in Moscow throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Meanwhile Louis, who long served as Moscow correspondent for The Nation, traveled the world, writing and advancing the leftist agenda. He joined the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War and served as a liaison between the Soviet government and leftist circles in the West.

An ideological freelancer or, in the parlance of Stalinist propaganda, a “fellow traveler” of the regime rather than its devoted soldier, Louis Fischer soon got into trouble with the increasingly authoritarian Stalin regime, which demanded that he promote Stalin’s policies in his writings. His refusal to do so made life difficult for his family in Moscow, and he wanted to arrange their departure. Bertha Mark was even more anxious. With the start of the Great Purge in 1937, she abandoned her loyalty to the Stalin rule and grew terrified as her friends and neighbors—foreign communists and Soviet officials she had befriended in Moscow—were arrested. The authorities kept Bertha and her children in Moscow as hostages, hoping to influence the tone of Louis’s publications abroad.

Soviet officials were not the only ones opposed to the family’s departure from the Soviet Union. The seventeen-year-old George (or Yurii) Fischer also objected to the move. A Young Communist League activist and devotee of the Stalinist system, he dreaded the idea of leaving the communist paradise and moving to the capitalist West. It took Bertha a great deal of effort to convince him to join the family on their way out of the USSR. George finally agreed, but only on condition that he be allowed to return if he wished. The family managed to leave in the spring of 1939—the result of lobbying efforts of no less a figure than Eleanor Roosevelt, an old acquaintance of Louis Fischer.

In New York, where the Fischer family found temporary home after traveling through Europe, George did not abandon his leftist beliefs but became critical of the Stalin regime, especially because of the Great Purge. In 1942, he enlisted in the US Army in hopes of becoming an intelligence officer. His family’s communist leanings stood in the way, however, and he was assigned to work as an Army censor in London, where he made friends with politicians and writers representing the left wing of the Labour Party. Among his new acquaintances was George Orwell, who wrote for the Tribune, the newspaper representing that current of opinion. It was in London that a US reporter and old friend of George’s father recommended him to one of the officers overseeing preparations for Frantic.

Young as he was, George Fischer played a key role in selecting US officers and GIs with a knowledge of Russian to serve as interpreters and liaisons at the Ukrainian bases. “Tried to choose the right people,” he wrote later in his memoirs, “with good Russian and apt to work well with the Soviets.” The trick was to select Russian speakers who were not anti-Soviet and would not be regarded as White Guardists. It was no easy task, as most of the Russian speakers were refugees from the Soviet regime, or their children, but Fischer did what he could. “I interviewed hundreds, picked a dozen,” he recalled. Altogether he selected more than twenty interpreters who were sent to the Poltava camps.¹⁰

Fischer himself was assigned to the intelligence unit at Pyriatyn and spent most of the summer of 1944 there. In his memoirs, written close to the end of his life in 2005, Fischer called the Soviet Union, which he equated with Russia, his “motherland,” a reference to his mother’s birthplace, and the United States, the birthplace of his father, “fatherland.” Landing in Ukraine led to an attempt to reconcile his two loyalties. At first he was glad to be back in the USSR. “I was happy to be on Soviet soil with Soviet people,” he wrote later. “To hear and talk Russian. To eat hearty native food in the Soviet mess hall for their Poltava officers.” He was glad that the Grand Alliance was working and delighted that the Americans regarded the Soviets as “a noble people with a great leader.” “I choked on the praise of Stalin,” added Fischer—he considered Stalin guilty of betraying the Revolution. “Otherwise I shared the warm glow and postwar hopes.”¹¹

Fischer’s Moscow past naturally caught the attention of Sveshnikov and Zorin. The SMERSH agents compiled a file on Fischer and tried to collect more information through a female classmate of his in Moscow, now a lieutenant serving as an interpreter at Poltava and a SMERSH agent code-named “Moskvichka.” A SMERSH report characterized Fischer’s father as a “Trotskyite”—a follower of Stalin’s nemesis, Leon Trotsky.

Fischer’s excitement about returning to his beloved “motherland” began to change as time passed and he began to notice that the Russian-speaking liaison officers whom he had selected with such care in Britain started disappearing one by one. “The Soviets picked one interpreter at a time. Complained about each. Our Eastern Command honored the complaints. It shipped out the accused. To me that felt like a Stalin purge, like the ’37 cleansing.” In July they transferred Albert Jaroff from Myrhorod. In September they sent away Igor Reverditto, who had become a close friend of George’s despite his “White Guard” origins—they dated women together in Poltava and partied together.¹²

Fischer later remembered that of all the people he had selected in Britain, only one continued to serve at Poltava after the reduction of personnel in October—Major Michael Kowal, whom Fischer remembered as “Mike, a pal of mine from New Jersey.” Kowal was born in 1917 in Paterson, New Jersey, to a family of Slavic immigrants (SMERSH documents identified him as Ukrainian) and had a good knowledge of Russian. Before coming to Poltava, he had piloted Flying Fortresses in the Eighth Air Force, completing twenty-five daylight bombing missions over Germany—without benefit of fighter protection, as at that stage in the war the Allies still lacked long-range fighter aircrafts capable of protecting the bombers on their raids over Germany. In the fall of 1944 he inherited Colonel Hampton’s old job as operations officer at the Poltava air base.

Fischer and Kowal managed to stay at Poltava partly because Soviet authorities did not consider them White Guardists or anti-Soviet. Another factor was the inept manner in which SMERSH tried to remove them from the base, leading Eastern Command to refuse to send unwanted American personnel back to Britain, as it normally did. During the second week of September 1944, in the midst of American preparations to evacuate the bases, General Perminov complained to Kessler that on September 7, at the communications center of the Pyriatyn air base, Major Kowal and First Lieutenant Fischer had allegedly quarreled with a Soviet officer, created a scandal, and tried to assault a female switchboard operator. Sveshnikov included the incident in his report to Moscow at the end of September, describing it as a provocation on the part of the Americans that was resolved by the Soviet command.¹³

Major Ralph Dunn, the inspector of the bases, immediately investigated the incident. Kowal and Fischer testified under oath, claiming that there had been no altercation whatever. Dunn interviewed the Soviet commander of the base, Major A. Yerko, to whom the initial complaint had allegedly been lodged. Yerko had heard nothing about the incident. Dunn filed a report stating that there were no grounds to reprimand the American officers. He also concluded that there was a Soviet campaign to discredit Americans of Russian background or those associated with the Soviet Union by family origin. Both Fischer and Kowal, who of course volunteered to continue at Poltava, were allowed to stay. The Soviets did not protest. SMERSH had nothing on file about the two officers except their background and the trumped-up charge about the quarrel at Pyriatyn.¹⁴

The first weeks after the evacuation of the Myrhorod and Pyriatyn bases passed with no major Soviet-American conflict. False reports about American misdemeanors, such as the one involving Kowal and Fischer, became matters of the past. At Poltava, the Soviets helped American crews to build new housing from prefabricated parts shipped from the United Kingdom and generally showed a better attitude toward their guests than in late summer. American morale improved as well with the lifting of uncertainty about the future of the Poltava base. George Fischer was probably glad to report, in his capacity as adjutant to the chief of Eastern Command, that “the month of November was marked by a complete friendliness between the officers of the Russian and American headquarters both at work and in personal relations.”¹⁵

Friendship and solidarity between the two armies and peoples was demonstrated during the celebration of the twenty-seventh anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, marked on November 7 with a military parade and a rally in Poltava that involved Red Army personnel, locals, and Americans. The Americans marched to Poltava for a ceremony, including speeches by party and military officials that lasted about two and a half hours. American photographers took dozens of pictures of the ceremony and those who attended it.

Nonetheless, the solidarity captured by the photos had its limits. After the rally was over, the Americans returned to the base, as the city was declared temporarily off-limits to GIs. The Soviets were concerned that fights might be started by drunken Red Army soldiers, and their commanders worried that they could not restrain their subordinates. Once at the base, the Americans celebrated the holiday with a dinner in the mess. The day ended without incident, though the Americans were not exactly happy. “They were given a day off, then forced to attend a celebration at which they understood nothing of what was said and finally restricted to the airdrome for the evening,” reads an American account of the event by William Kaluta, the author of the history of the Eastern Command at its final stage, after the evacuation of the Myrhorod and Pyriatyn bases in the fall of 1944.¹⁶

On November 7, the same day as the celebration in Poltava, Americans in the United States voted in a presidential election, choosing between Franklin Roosevelt and his Republican opponent, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York. Discussion of the election at the Poltava base exposed the political and cultural gulf between the Soviets and the Americans. The Soviets, following the lead of their media, strongly supported Roosevelt and could not understand how American newspapers could publish portraits of Dewey, whom the Soviet propaganda portrayed as an enemy of the Soviet Union. It was probably an even greater shock to the Soviets that the Americans could openly criticize their president and vote for his opponent. For the Soviets, official ceremonies like the one held on November 7, began and ended with praise of Stalin; political discussions were infrequent and brief. “The Americans refused to talk politics with people who knew nothing about our political set-up,” wrote Kaluta.¹⁷

According to Fischer’s reports, Soviet-American relations on the base had a new and positive start in October and November but began to deteriorate in December 1944. He listed three main reasons for growing dissatisfaction among his fellow officers. The first was the slow processing of their requests to clear flights from Poltava to Moscow, Teheran, and airfields in western Ukraine and Poland, where damaged American airplanes were now landing. The second was the struggle between American and Soviet pilots for control of the two American Douglas C-47s used to fly to and from the Poltava base. Finally, there was Soviet petty theft of American property that had begun in the summer months and continued.¹⁸

On the first issue, the Soviet commanders were indeed in no rush to facilitate flights requested by the Americans, whom they continued to regard with suspicion, especially now that the shuttle bombing operations were over. Nor did they trust the Americans to make flights on their own, having insisted from the beginning that Soviet pilots take charge, with Americans as copilots. During the summer months, the Douglasses were used largely for flights between the Ukrainian bases. While the Americans complained generally about Soviet pilots taking unnecessary risks and flying too low, that did not seem to be a major problem on short flights mostly between the bases. It became one when the Myrhorod and Pyriatyn bases were returned to exclusive Soviet control and Red Air Force pilots took charge of long-distance flights, such as to Lviv in western Ukraine and airports in the Krakow area. The Americans began to complain loudly about their hosts’ reckless flying techniques.

One episode in particular illustrates the basis for such complaints. According to an official report compiled later by Mike Kowal, in November a Soviet pilot named Kvochkin returned from a trip to Lviv and almost crashed his airplane while trying to land it at Poltava. Low scud above the airfield prevented a landing at Poltava, so he proceeded to Myrhorod. American passengers told their colleagues that the aircraft hit the surface twice but failed to land. Kvochkin then returned to Poltava, where he landed the aircraft perpendicular to the runway. The Americans later found that the airplane’s “oil filters were full of wheat and leaves, twigs were lodged in the control surfaces, and ears of corn were found in the wheel wells.” Moreover, the gas tanks were empty, as Kvochkin had burned gas in his attempt to land at Myrhorod before returning to Poltava. Kowal wrote in his report: “After questioning the pilot it was deduced that he was flying by the seat of his pants, and did not attempt making approaches with the available radio facilities. The night lighting facilities were all displayed and all radio facilities were on, which, if they were used, should have lowered the risk of safe landing.” He concluded, “It seems that the Russians are not very well trained in instrument flights and the navigators are not capable of doing more than pilotage.”¹⁹

The greatest cause of tension between the Americans and the Soviets in the autumn of 1944, however, was that petty theft. The issue was as complicated as it was controversial. Neither side was wholly innocent. While the low exchange rate of the American dollar had been offset by a per diem introduced in late August, the Americans continued to engage in barter, using their access to American stores and Air Force supplies either to acquire local goods or to engage in black-market activity. Cameras, including Leica and Contax models, remained popular and were available in Poltava for between 2,500 and 5,000 rubles, bargain prices. The Americans sold items of their clothing; pilots’ leather jackets were especially popular. The American command clamped down on barter in its own ranks, making officers and enlisted men personally responsible for equipment and supplies entrusted to their care. This put them on a collision course with Red Army thieves.²⁰

The US motor pool at Poltava was a particular locus of stealing. On October 24 a Red Army soldier tried to drive an American vehicle off the base; on November 4, another soldier tried to steal antifreeze, probably for drinking; on November 14, tires were stolen by unknown individuals, though some were later recovered at the Soviet motor pool. American supplies were guarded by Soviet sentries, who were either complicit in theft or negligent of their duties. Americans vented their frustration on the sentries, causing conflicts.

Close to midnight on November 20, a US sergeant on duty at the motor pool discovered that two Soviet guards had left their post and, in a complete dereliction of their duties, were sleeping in a nearby tent. The sergeant and two other US officers entered the tent and confronted the guards. One of them ran away but the other resisted. One of the Americans, Warrant Officer Roy Cannon, who had spent part of the evening in the restaurant, fired warning shots from his pistol into the ground. The Red Army sentry surrendered but refused to cooperate. When he declined to write down his name, Cannon struck him twice on the face. This physical abuse of a Soviet soldier by an American went all the way to General Deane, who assured the Soviet commander at Poltava that the perpetrator would be court-martialed. Cannon was indeed shipped out of Poltava on November 23.²¹

Things would become much more tense as the “forgotten bastards of Ukraine” continued serving at the Poltava base into the late fall and early winter of 1944. Those who opted to stay at the Poltava base tended to be sympathetic toward the Soviet Union and its people, if not toward communist ideology, and in fact that had been one of their reasons for volunteering to take part in the new stage of the mission. However, SMERSH officers were growing increasingly concerned about what they deemed the spread of anti-Soviet sentiment among the Americans, many of whom had become highly critical of the Soviet regime. Ironically, it was SMERSH activity, which became considerably more intrusive as counterintelligence officers and agents investigated the remaining Americans with greater scrutiny, that helped to turn allies first into skeptics and then into adversaries.²²