13

Watchtower

John Deane got a chance to question Stalin directly about the future of the air bases on October 14, 1944. The occasion was a meeting of Soviet, American, and British military commanders with Stalin and a visit from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to the Kremlin. The main agenda items were the conduct of the war in Europe and the future of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. The Pacific war was included as well, and Deane seized the opportunity to ask Stalin a series of questions about Soviet participation in the war on Japan. One question concerned the opening of US air bases in the Soviet Far East. “Young man,” said Churchill to Deane after the meeting, “I admired your nerve in asking Stalin those last three questions. I have no idea that you will get an answer, but there was certainly no harm in asking.”¹

To everyone’s surprise, at the next day’s session Stalin gave direct answers to all Deane’s questions. He approved the idea of American bases in the Far East but noted that the Americans would have to find a way of supplying them via the Pacific route, as the Trans-Siberian railway would be used to full capacity in moving Red Army troops to the region. Responding to a follow-up question from Averell Harriman, Stalin assured the ambassador that the Soviet Union would enter the war with Japan three months after the end of the war with Germany, assuming that conditions were met. The conditions that Stalin had in mind were Soviet territorial claims to the Kurile Islands, Southern Sakhalin, and Port Arthur, as well as the establishment of a de facto sphere of influence in Manchuria. Harriman and Deane were delighted. “We adjourned with the conviction that progress was being made,” recalled Deane.²

In the opinion of Harriman, the promises extracted from Stalin on Soviet participation in the Pacific war and US air bases in the Far East were easily the most successful outcomes of Churchill’s visit to Moscow. The rest was much more problematic. As far as the future of Europe was concerned, Harriman had reason to be unhappy both with Churchill, who had arrived in Moscow on October 9 for a ten-day visit, and with his own president, who was interested in a Big Three meeting but could not come because of the imminent American presidential election and had asked Harriman to represent him, though merely in the role of observer. Harriman attended some of the meetings between Stalin and Churchill but not others and was unable to present and defend the American position as much as he deemed necessary. At a reception in honor of Churchill, Maxim Litvinov, the former Soviet foreign commissar and now deputy to Molotov, asked Deane, referring to an article in Look estimating Harriman’s wealth: “How can a man with a hundred million dollars look so sad?”³

Harriman was particularly unhappy with Roosevelt’s refusal to take a more active part in deciding the future of Poland—a thorny issue in Allied relations and an emotional one for Harriman after Stalin’s refusal either to help the Polish insurgents in Warsaw or to allow the Allies to use the Poltava bases to render assistance on their own. Churchill flew to Moscow with the Polish question at the top of his agenda, and Harriman believed that it should headline the American agenda as well. If Roosevelt could not come, perhaps Harry Hopkins could fly in and help Churchill save the country from Soviet domination, reasoned Harriman. It did not happen. Harriman was left on his own.

Churchill had first outlined his plan for Poland at the Big Three conference in Teheran in late November and early December 1943. According to that plan, Stalin was supposed to keep the former Polish eastern territories that he had seized in 1939 on the basis of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, under the pretext of defending fellow Ukrainians and Belarusians. The Polish government in London was expected to accept a new eastern border following the Curzon Line, proposed back in 1920 by then–British Foreign Secretary George Curzon that more or less coincided with the Polish ethnic boundary in the east. But the Poles refused. Now Churchill brought to Moscow Stanisław Mikołajczyk, the Prime Minister of the Polish London government in exile. That did not help either. Mikołajczyk refused to play along and accept the Curzon Line as Poland’s new eastern border. In particular he objected to giving up the city of Lwów (Ukrainian Lviv), a major urban center surrounded by the Ukrainian settlements but largely settled by Poles. Harriman knew that the deadlock in negotiations benefited Stalin.

The issue of Lviv and the Polish eastern border was postponed until the next Big Three meeting, which would not take place until February 1945. Meanwhile, with no agreement in place, Stalin could do as he wished in the Polish territories conquered by the Red Army and which remained out of reach to the Western Allies. The closest outpost to the region that the Americans had at that point was Poltava. The only US military personnel with access to Lviv and the region around that contested city were the airmen who flew there to salvage downed American aircraft. This new situation unexpectedly thrust the Poltava air base into a new role—that of watchtower for US military and diplomatic interests in Eastern Europe.⁴

Captain William Fitchen was the chief of the Poltava air base intelligence section, and only twenty-six years of age when he embraced a new role for himself and for the base. It happened on October 21, 1944, when a C-47 with American pilots that had been damaged while flying in Central Europe landed at Poltava en route from Lviv.

A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, where he had earned a degree in entomology, Fitchen spent the summer months interviewing crews and collecting information on the German Air Force, anti-aircraft defenses, and the results of American bombing. The end of bombing runs in September meant there were no more crews to interrogate, unless they came from western Ukraine and eastern Poland. With the arrival of the plane from Lviv, Fitchen and his people began to do what the SMERSH officers had suspected them of doing all along—collecting information not only on the Germans but on the Soviets as well.⁵

The C-47 from Lviv brought to Poltava two US airplane crews that had been forced to make emergency landings on now-Soviet-held territory near the cities of Lviv and Tarnów. Given that the Red Army was advancing into Poland, American crews flying from Britain and Italy on missions to bomb German targets could make emergency landings behind the Soviet lines, as these two crews had done. They ended up in the hands of Red Army commanders who shipped the Americans off to Poltava.

Fitchen did his own debriefing, though it was not of the usual kind. Next to him was Colonel George A. McHenry, the deputy chief of the Air Force division of the US military mission in Moscow, who flew to Poltava to take part in the debriefing of the pilots. According to one of the US Air Force historians, McHenry “was primarily interested in those points that were of a political nature.” He wanted to find out about the situation on the ground in the Soviet-controlled areas of what had been eastern Poland before the war. The pilots reported that once in Soviet custody they were kept under constant surveillance, but that their personal liberties had not been constrained in any way and they were well treated by Red Army personnel. According to their observations, there were clear signs of tension between the Soviets and the Poles, with the latter regarding the Red Army as little better than the Germans.⁶

This first information on the situation in the Soviet-occupied territories was soon confirmed by other American pilots who were flown to Poltava in November 1944, and by members of the Poltava base’s own staff. The Soviets allowed American technicians based in Poltava to fly to places where downed planes had landed in order to repair them and fly them back to Poltava. Some would spend weeks in those areas on repair missions; others would visit for shorter periods. All of them turned out to be important sources of information on the situation in western Ukraine and eastern Poland. Their reports would be sent fairly regularly to the military mission in Moscow, and some would make it onto Harriman’s desk.⁷

Among the latter group was a report filed by Colonel Hampton, the commander of the Poltava base. On November 14 Hampton, in the company of a number of Russian-speaking officers and technicians, including his chief operations officer, Mike Kowal, the intelligence officer Sergeant Samuel Chavkin, and the technician Philip Mishchenko, visited Lviv, where they spent four days before returning to the base on November 18. They took off from Poltava on one of the base’s two VC-47 Douglasses and flew to Lviv to provide fuel for a B-24 Liberator that landed there. (The B-24 was a heavy bomber with a longer wingspan than the B-17, though many believed that it was not as good, or as reliable, as its predecessor.) On their way back they took on board Captain Joe R. Johnson, who had been in the area of Lviv helping the downed American crews since October 6 and was a fount of information. Johnson and US officers from the Poltava base had noticed NKVD surveillance and seen Red Army soldiers harassing local girls who were interested in meeting the Americans, and were able to gather a fair amount of information on the situation in Lviv simply on the basis of their observations and occasional contacts with the locals.

Like the crews Fitchen had debriefed in October, Hampton and his companions found the Poles, who constituted a majority in the city, highly dissatisfied with the Soviets. They all filed individual reports, concurring that the Poles actually preferred German rule to Russian. Hampton wrote that the locals had found the German city administration more efficient than the Soviet. “Evidently the Germans left the Poles pretty well alone and they carried on their own way of life while the Soviets are poking into everything and making life generally unpleasant.” Besides, according to Hampton, the Soviets were trying to reduce the standard of living in order to bring it into line with that of the Soviet Union. They forced the locals to work for meager salaries of 200 rubles per week (a black-marker equivalent of one American dollar). The Soviets were busy selling cans of food received from the United States through Lend-Lease at inflated prices. The Poles, for their part, were selling their belongings in order to survive. “Food was more scarce and expensive under the Soviets than under the Germans,” wrote Hampton.⁸

Hampton had a very different story to tell about the Jews of Lviv. He reported that he had met many witnesses of the atrocities committed by the Germans, including two university professors. “Almost always the Jews were sufferers at the hands of the Nazi,” he wrote. “Surprising to me was the fact that those Poles who had lived with and seen these atrocities committed apparently had little or no sympathy to the Jews. In fact I think some of my informers were in accord with the Nazi policy against the Jews.” This was probably the first account of the mass extermination of Jews in Lviv and the role of the local population in the process to reach the American military command and officers of the US embassy in Moscow.⁹

When Hampton and his crew flew to Lviv in November 1944, what would become known as the Holocaust was still not revealed to the general public. In late August 1944, the Soviets arranged for American and other Allied correspondents to go to Majdanek, the German extermination camp near Lublin in eastern Poland, allowing the Western world for the first time to see gas chambers and furnaces in which the bodies of the inmates were burned. One of the reporters, Bill Lawrence, published an article in the New York Times about his trip to Majdanek. “I have just seen the most terrible place on the face of the earth—the German concentration camp at Majdanek, which was a veritable River Rouge for the production of death, in which it is estimated by Soviet and Polish authorities that as many as 1,500,000 persons from nearly every country in Europe were killed in the last three years.” (Lawrence was referring to the Henry Ford’s best known plant, located in River Rouge, west of Detroit.) The conveyer-belt extermination of Europeans, but not yet of European Jewry, was first revealed to the world.¹⁰

Kathy Harriman, who spoke with Lawrence upon his return to Moscow from Majdanek, saw tears in his eyes. Still, neither Lawrence nor any other Western reporter pointed out that Jews were the main victims of the atrocity, and that what they had seen was evidence of the planned extermination of an entire people. They simply did not know the truth. The Soviets organized the trip partly to legitimize the Stalin-backed Polish government in-tactrade-making, and the reporters had a chance to interview Edward Osóbka-Morawski, the nominal leader of the Lublin Poles, who promoted the view that the Germans had killed people of all nationalities. In a letter to Mary, Kathy gave the number of those nationalities as twenty-two. That figure apparently came from Lawrence, who took it from his Soviet and Polish guides. Lawrence’s report was originally met with disbelief. While new reports on Majdanek published in the fall of 1944 confirmed his story, there was still little understanding of the ethnic composition of the victims—as late as November, they were characterized as “Jews and Christians alike.”¹¹

No other member of Colonel Hampton’s crew in Lviv was more traumatized by the story of the city’s Jews, and left a more detailed account of their plight, than Samuel Chavkin, the Air Force intelligence officer, who was a native of Kyiv and a Jew himself. In his report, Chavkin recounted a story told to him by a Jewish woman who had survived the German occupation of the city. “Just soon as the Nazis had entered the city they began to round up Jews or anybody who resembled a Jew. Through the local Fifth Column, they contacted the pro-Nazi Poles who acted as their guides. She claims that in the space of six months of German occupation all of Lwow’s 100,000 Jews were massacred. Approximately 3,000 who managed to hide in the provinces remain alive.” Captain Johnson, who had been in the region since October 7, wrote in his report about 160,000 Jews of Lviv killed “by methods ranging from mass executions to killing children in the streets.”¹²

Estimates of the number of Jewish victims of the Holocaust in Lviv given by Hampton and his crew were neither inflated nor unrealistic. The city had been home to approximately 110,000 Jews before World War II; 100,000 more Jewish refugees found safe haven there after 1939 and saw the German takeover of Lviv in late June 1941. Present-day estimates of the number of Jews killed in the city and its environs exceed one hundred thousand. The fate of the rest is unclear, though only a few hundred survived the occupation of the region to see the arrival of the Red Army in July 1944. The reports were also correct about the role played in the Holocaust by the locals. Many non-Jewish residents, not only Poles, as mentioned in the reports, but also Ukrainians, helped carry out the Holocaust in the city.¹³

The horrors of the Holocaust were only part of the story told by Hampton, Chavkin, and their comrades. Their attention was focused mainly on Soviet policies in the city and region, and they saw clear signs that the Soviets were not going to return Lviv to Poland. The Poles were given a choice of becoming Soviet citizens or moving to central and western Poland. “Lwow has been declared a Ukrainian city by the Russians and the Russians do not want the Polish people there,” wrote Johnson. Major Kowal noted that the NKVD had terrorized the city, and Poles were afraid to speak to members of the US team. Privately they would tell the Americans that their only hope was American intervention. Hampton wrote that the Polish citizens of Lviv were determined to “hang on until Roosevelt and Churchill intervene on behalf of the Polish people.” Chavkin noted that many hoped to immigrate to the United States.¹⁴

A letter from Mieczysław Karol Borodej, a British Air Force officer of Polish descent, that Hampton was asked to pass on to the British embassy in Moscow left no doubt that the Soviets were prepared to crush any attempt to keep the city in Poland. A native of the city of Stanyslaviv (present-day Ivano-Frankivsk, in western Ukraine), Borodej had just completed his training as a pilot when the Germans attacked Poland in September 1939. He escaped to Britain, where he became a pilot in the Royal Air Force. Shot down by the Germans in the fall of 1941 during a mission over Europe, Borodej ended up in a German prison camp but escaped and joined the Polish underground in Lviv. He was arrested by Soviet counterintelligence in July 1944, soon after the Soviets entered the city, and charged with membership in the underground Polish Home Army, which had staged the Warsaw Uprising. While in captivity, Borodej wrote a letter to the British ambassador in Moscow, pleading for help. The letter was smuggled from the prison and found its way into Hampton’s hands. The Allies were unable to help. In January 1945, Borodej was sentenced to twenty years’ hard labor and sent to the Kolyma gold mines in Siberia.¹⁵

Colonel Hampton’s team was not the last to visit Lviv. Others would follow in the weeks and months to come. Among them was a team of officers led by a medical doctor from the Poltava base, Major Robert Wiseheart, who flew to Lviv on December 6. During his four days in the city Wiseheart noticed among the locals “a marked lack of appreciation of the efforts of their Russian liberators.” The desperate Poles pinned their hopes on the Americans and on a future American-Soviet war. He and his men were greeted with questions: “When will you clear the Russians out of Poland?” “Will the Americans and Russians fight after Germany falls?” Wiseheart returned to Poltava not only with fresh impressions of the situation in Lviv but in the company of American airmen who had made forced landings in the area and spent significant time in the countryside. They provided firsthand intelligence on the situation in the region.¹⁶

One of those brought to Poltava from Lviv was the B-17 nose-gunner Sergeant John R. Dmytryshyn, who was of Ukrainian descent and could understand discussions going on around him. He recounted the story of his adventures after his airplane had been shot down to Fitchen once he got to the air base. Dmytryshyn was making the first parachute jump of his life, and his parachute opened without a problem, but he found that he had no sensation of falling and was seized by panic at the thought that he would remain floating in the sky until he died there. He tried to unbuckle the parachute straps; fortunately he did not succeed. When he finally started his descent, Dmytryshyn realized that he was in danger of another kind: someone from the ground was shooting at him. After landing, he found three bullet holes in the canopy. Dmytryshyn hid the parachute in the bushes, covered himself with leaves, and prepared for an encounter with the Germans.

Dmytryshyn had lain quietly in his hideout for roughly half an hour when he heard someone addressing him in his native Ukrainian. It was an unarmed farmer, who took him to his village, where Dmytryshyn was discovered by Polish police loyal to the Soviet-controlled Lublin government rather than to the Germans who used to control the area. The policemen initially treated him in friendly fashion when he told them that he was an American. However, after hearing him speaking Ukrainian, a Polish captain decided that Dmytryshyn was in fact a German. The Poles took him to the neighboring town, where they turned him over to a Red Army colonel who interrogated him for more than four hours, claiming that he was a German who had learned English and Ukrainian specifically for the mission in which he was now engaged. About 2:00 a.m., Dmytryshyn told Fitchen, he broke down and started crying. The Soviets then left him alone. The next day he was reunited with his commander, Lieutenant R. E. Beam, and another member of his crew who had also parachuted from the plane. They had been picked up either by the Soviets or by their Polish allies.¹⁷

Fitchen debriefed Dmytryshyn upon his arrival in Poltava on December 10. Another group of pilots arrived there on December 18, and Fitchen also wrote down their stories. Their experiences had been fairly similar, although some had ended up in the hands of members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, who were fighting both the Soviets and the Poles and operating in the Peremyshl (present-day Przemyśl) region, with its mixed Polish-Ukrainian population. The insurgents turned out to be quite friendly toward their American guests. Some of them had family members who had immigrated to the United States, had visited the country, and spoke some English. They were playing a cat-and-mouse game with the local Polish police but arranged for the Americans to be picked up by that police. The Poles in turn passed the Americans on to the Soviets.

One of the new arrivals, Sergeant E. G. Kelly, testified that upon landing he had encountered a Ukrainian insurgent who had been to Scranton, Pennsylvania. Kelly noted that the Poles were unhappy with the Soviets but followed their orders, as they were allied against the Ukrainians. A Soviet officer interrogated Kelly in particular detail about the time he had spent with the Ukrainian “bandits.” Another fresh arrival, Sergeant R. G. Stubaus, had also fallen into the hands of Ukrainians armed with machine guns, and again, one of them spoke some English, having visited New Jersey—Stubaus’s home state, as it turned out. In one of the villages where Stubaus stayed, he was informed that the Russians were getting ready to post notices ordering Ukrainians out of that particular village.¹⁸

The reports of the US airmen collected by Fitchen and sent to the American embassy in Moscow in December 1944 left no doubt that the Soviets were creating a new reality on the ground. They were determined to keep Lviv for themselves, forcing the Poles out and declaring that the city belonged to the Ukrainian SSR. But west of the Curzon Line, which passed through the Przemyśl (Peremyshl) region, they allied themselves with the local Polish militias against the Ukrainian insurgents and were pushing the Ukrainians eastward, into the territory they wanted to keep for themselves. By the time Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met in Yalta in February 1945, the ethnic composition of the region would be dramatically changed by the Holocaust, still unknown to the world, as well by Soviet policies introduced immediately after the takeover of the region in the summer of 1944. In the fall of that year, the Lublin government and Stalin’s lieutenant in Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev, signed an agreement on “population exchange” between Poland and Ukraine.¹⁹

Major Anatolii Zorin replaced Lieutenant Colonel Sveshnikov as the chief SMERSH official in charge of the reduced US personnel at Poltava after the “downsizing” of American operations in Ukraine in October 1944. He was first alerted to American information-gathering activities in Lviv after the visit of Colonel Hampton and his team to the city in November 1944. Zorin believed that the whole trip was nothing but a pretext to spy on the Soviets. On the basis of testimony given by the Soviet members of the Douglas C-47 crew that accompanied Hampton to Lviv, Zorin concluded that neither Hampton nor Kowal was needed to deliver fuel—the official purpose of the trip.

Zorin learned that the American airmen had spent their time in Lviv shopping and meeting with the locals, who sold them trinkets. Among the locals were a Hungarian actress and four Polish women. It was learned subsequently that the Hungarian actress had been arrested at some point by the Soviet secret police. The Polish women were suspected of harboring anti-Soviet views. Some Americans were accused of holding and even spreading anti-Soviet views of their own. Sergeant Chavkin had allegedly asked his Soviet teammates why Ukraine and other Soviet republics were not independent, and suggested that the Poles in Lviv were more friendly toward the Germans than toward the Russians, while the population of Poltava was not happy with the Russians either.²⁰

Zorin reported on Hampton’s trip to Lviv to the Soviet Air Force commanders along with the request that Americans flying to the region to salvage airplanes be accompanied by senior Soviet officers. From then on, SMERSH would also try to place its agents among the interpreters on American flights in order to supervise American contacts with locals. The interpreter who accompanied Hampton on the November 14 flight to Lviv, Second Lieutenant Galina (Galia) Ganchukova, apparently was not a SMERSH informer and did not file a report on the trip. But after the next American flight to Lviv, which included Major Wiseheart and Sergeant Chavkin, SMERSH officers got a detailed report from an interpreter code-named Olia. The agent reported on a meeting that Wiseheart and Chavkin had with a professor of the local university, who had a brother in the United States and was trying to reestablish contact with him.²¹

The Americans complained bitterly to their superiors in Poltava and Moscow about the surveillance conducted almost openly by Soviet liaison officers and interpreters on their flights to western Ukraine and Poland. They called them “Bird Dogs” and blamed them for much more than spying on them. The Soviet minders gave false weather reports in an effort to stop flights from leaving or returning to Poltava, and prevented American contacts with the local population by forcing the crews to sleep in their aircraft. At Poltava the Soviets increased their activity, monitoring relations between GIs and locals and trying once again to prevent contacts between GIs and Ukrainian women.²²