15
Yalta
Averell Harriman was the first to propose the old tsarist playground of Yalta on the Crimean peninsula as the venue for the meeting of the Big Three. On December 6, 1944, in the middle of preparations for the meeting, he cabled Roosevelt: “Two of our naval officers visited Yalta and Sevastopol during last summer. They report that Yalta has a number of large and well-built sanatoriums and hotels undamaged by German occupation. By Russian standards, town is extremely neat and clean. The winter climate is reasonable.” The ambassador was looking forward to seeing the place he had heard so much about but never visited himself.1
Yalta, or for that matter the Crimea, was far from Roosevelt’s first choice for a conference venue. His health was clearly in decline and he had only a few months to live. Had he known how short his time would be, he would probably have chosen another destination for his last trip abroad. The road to the Crimea involved a voyage across the Atlantic, infested by German submarines, and a long flight in an unpressurized airplane cabin over the Balkans, still occupied by the Germans. Roosevelt had asked Stalin for a meeting closer to the United States, but the Soviet leader would not budge. He was in no hurry to meet his allies, who would want to discuss Poland and his oppressive policies in Eastern Europe.
Roosevelt gave in because he felt he could not wait. He wanted to see Stalin as soon as possible to discuss the war in the Pacific and plans for the creation of the United Nations Organization. Churchill, disturbed by developments in Poland and Stalin’s diplomatic recognition of his Lublin puppets, was eager to see both Roosevelt and Stalin. As noted earlier, he wanted to meet with Roosevelt on Malta to agree on a joint position before the conference. On January 1, 1945, the day he refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Lublin government, Churchill sent Roosevelt a cable asking for a private meeting and adding lines of doggerel of his own composition: “From Malta to Yalta. Let nobody alter.” He found the prospect of going to Yalta extremely unwelcome. “[I]f we had spent ten years on research we could not have found a worse place in the world,” he told Harry Hopkins, an early champion of the Crimea as a possible venue for the meeting.2
Harriman may have regretted his own advocacy of Yalta when in mid-January 1945 he began looking for a way to get there. His original plan was to fly to the Crimea either via Poltava or directly to the town of Saki on the southern shore of the peninsula, but bad weather made that impossible. In his original suggestion of Yalta to the president, Harriman had written: “Average temperature in January and February 39 degrees Fahrenheit. The town has good southern exposure and is protected from the north winds by high mountains.” During the last weeks of January 1945, the weather refused to cooperate. After waiting in vain for flight clearance from the Soviet Air Force command, Harriman and his always energetic, curious, and observant daughter decided to take the train.3
“A long affair—three days and three nights—most of the time spent standing in bombed out stations,” wrote Kathy Harriman in one of her letters. The railway from Moscow to Simferopol, the largest city in the Crimea, passed sixty miles to the east of Poltava, giving her a chance to observe the now snow-covered landscape familiar from her summer trip to the city. “The Ukrainian peasants seem far more prosperous than those around Moscow. Their cottages are painted, with thatched roofs and quite picturesque,” she wrote Mary. At one of the stations, Kathy and her companions bought fresh eggs and made punch out of canned milk, bourbon and butter. Still, it was a long journey. By the time they finally reached Simferopol late in the afternoon of their third day of travel, her father was so impatient to get to Yalta, which was about fifty miles away, that he disregarded the advice of his Soviet hosts, who counseled against a night drive through the mountains in a snowstorm, and insisted on departing immediately. After a drive of three and a half hours, during which one of the cars became stuck in the snow, they made it to Yalta.4
The Harrimans would spend the following days making sure that everything was ready for the visit of the dignitaries, Roosevelt and Churchill in particular. The Western leaders of the alliance were scheduled to arrive at the Saki air base in the Crimea on February 3. The American officers charged with ensuring that the arrival would come off without a hitch were flown to Saki from Poltava. They would do their best to make the conference a success.
Arrangements for the American arrival at Saki, the airfield closest to Yalta, were entrusted to Poltava base commander Colonel Hampton. Soon after January 10, the day on which Churchill gave his final approval to the Yalta venue, Hampton and his subordinates put all other projects on the back burner and focused on the Crimea. As an officer wrote at the time, the Poltava staff was under orders “to furnish a nucleus of service people for a secret mission in Crimea.” No longer “forgotten bastards of Ukraine,” the Poltava airmen found themselves involved in a political event of world—and as it turned out historical—significance. By the time the Yalta conference ended, it would provide the base with a new mission, one involving not merely observing Soviet actions in Eastern Europe but helping American prisoners of war on Soviet-controlled territory get home.
Hampton went to Saki in the company of two of his Russian-speaking aides, his adjutant George Fischer and First Sergeant John Matles, a native of Bessarabia in the former Russian Empire who had worked on a number of American projects in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. Others would soon follow, either dispatched on short visits or seconded to Saki and Sarabuz airfield near the peninsula’s main city of Simferopol for the duration of the conference.5
Hampton and his people were intent on doing all they could to ensure the smooth running of the conference. It turned out to be not an easy task. As before, the Soviets insisted that the first pilot on all American flights between Poltava, Saki, and Sarabuz airfields be one of their own airmen. Given that the Americans did not trust the Soviet pilots, whom as we have seen they considered prone to take unnecessary risks, relations between the two sides over Yalta immediately grew tense.
The level of mistrust was illustrated by an episode involving the head of the Allied Expeditionary Air Force in Europe, British Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder, who came to Moscow to negotiate with Stalin. On January 17, Hampton brought Tedder from Moscow to Poltava and flew him to Saki the next day. His Soviet copilot insisted on being the first pilot on the plane. Hampton refused and Tedder backed the American, taking over as second pilot himself. The Soviets were upset but did not venture to contradict a senior British commander fresh from a meeting with Stalin. Once in the Crimea, however, Tedder discovered that a briefcase he had with him on the plane had disappeared. By that time the plane, piloted this time by a joint US-Soviet crew, had returned to Poltava.
Tedder turned to Hampton for help. On January 19, Fischer approached a Soviet radio operator at the Saki air base, asking him to contact the Poltava base by radio and find out whether the crew had found Tedder’s briefcase. General Kovalev, who received the request, was informed that the briefcase had been found and offered to fly it to Saki, but the Americans insisted that one of them deliver it. The US military mission in Moscow was in agreement; Kovalev maintained that it should be delivered by Soviet personnel. Contrary to established procedure that prohibited him from interrogating American officers, the general questioned the American sergeant who had found the briefcase on the plane after it landed at Poltava. Kovalev’s action was protested by the American officers at Poltava, and ultimately the briefcase instead of being turned over to the Soviets was delivered to Tedder by the Americans.6
The lack of trust made Hampton’s task of flying between the Poltava base and the Saki and Sarabuz all but impossible. American planes could take off from the Poltava airfield only with clearance from the Soviet authorities, clearance that had to be requested a day in advance. In the summer and fall of 1944 it normally took only a few hours to clear an American flight, but as relations between the two sides at Poltava deteriorated, delays grew longer, and sometimes flights were not cleared at all. That was the case on December 22, 1944, when Hampton and Major General Edmund W. Hill, the commander of the US military mission’s Air Division, were scheduled to fly from Poltava to eastern Poland.
The Soviet commanders at Poltava gave a simple explanation for the delays: they had no authority to clear flights on their own. Final approval had to come from Moscow, and Moscow was often silent for days, if not weeks. The Red Air Force commanders in Moscow issued a blanket order prohibiting any flights from Poltava between January 20 and 28, 1945, at the height of preparations for the Yalta conference, giving bad weather as the reason. The weather that week was terrible indeed, with constant heavy snowfalls. American weather officers at Poltava reported that there were breaks in weather conditions during that period. Nevertheless, the blanket prohibition remained in effect as the opening date of the conference, February 4, drew near.7
Moscow’s refusal to clear flights even after the weather improved provoked an open conflict at Poltava, the first that directly involved Hampton and Kovalev, the two commanding officers. On January 29, Hampton flew an American C-47 from Saki to Poltava. He then requested clearance to return to Saki, a flight that he claimed to have been cleared by Marshal Semen Zhavoronkov of the Soviet Air Force, the commander of Soviet naval aviation, who was also responsible for air communications pertaining to the Yalta conference. Kovalev asked Moscow for permission to clear the flight and was informed that General Nikitin had canceled all flights for the day. Hampton protested that he had to bring some American officers back to Saki and had permission from Zhavoronkov.
According to the SMERSH report, an hour and a half after landing at Poltava Hampton again took to the skies in violation of direct orders from Kovalev. The Soviet general was furious. He tried to establish radio contact with the aircraft, but it was already out of range of the transmitter. Kaluta, who was then at the air base’s control center, witnessed Kovalev’s outburst. “I would have believed that a young fighter pilot would disobey my instructions, but not Colonel Hampton,” said Kovalev, making no effort to hide his frustration. He added that he was the base commander, and no aircraft was allowed to take off without his command.8
Kovalev had every right to be upset, though he had never given Hampton or any other American a plausible explanation of the Soviet refusal to clear flights. The reason was given by Major General Slavin, the assistant chief of the Red Army General Staff in charge of liaison with the Americans, in a letter to the chief of staff of the Soviet Navy, Admiral Vladimir Alafuzov, the direct superior of Marshal Zhavoronkov, who had ordered Hampton’s flight. Slavin told Alafuzov that the entire crew of the C-47 flown by Hampton was American. “They could use flights from the Crimea to Poltava without our navigators and radio operators aboard to photograph sites of interest to them,” wrote Slavin. He also pointed out that American officers were using the special Soviet government line for communications between Poltava and Sarabuz airfield. Slavin asked Alafuzov to warn his subordinates at Saki against allowing the Americans to use government communication lines or making flights without Soviet personnel on board.
Slavin’s letter was written on February 8. By that time the American and British delegations were already at Yalta, negotiating with their Soviet counterparts. The tone of the letter and the policies it introduced differed sharply from the friendly attitude that Stalin displayed toward his American guests, in particular President Roosevelt, whom he tried to charm and separate from Winston Churchill physically, mentally, and politically.9
Roosevelt and Churchill landed at Saki airfield as planned on the afternoon of February3. If Churchill’s main concern was Soviet behavior in Eastern Europe, where Stalin was continuing to crush democratic opposition, represented in the first instance by forces loyal to the Polish government-in-exile in London, Roosevelt’s main objectives, as noted earlier, were to ensure that the Soviets would not renege on Stalin’s earlier promise to enter the war with Japan after victory in Europe and to convince the Soviet leader to join the United Nations Organization—the key institution Roosevelt envisioned of the postwar world order.
The American delegation to Yalta, originally meant to number no more than seventy, grew tenfold as the summit meeting approached, partially because Roosevelt invited so many American military commanders. This was a ploy to push for the opening of negotiations on Soviet participation in the Pacific war, which the Soviet side had kept postponing. The American brass was eager to broach the issue. Major General Laurence S. Kuter, representing the commander of the US Air Force, General Henry Anderson, who had fallen ill and could not attend the meeting, was especially interested in discussing US bases in the Pacific. In the months leading up to the conference, General Deane had been frustrated by the refusal of the Red Army General Staff to make any progress on the matter. The hope was that Roosevelt’s presence would induce the Soviet commanders invited to Yalta to begin discussions.10
The question of the bases came up on the third day of the conference, February 8, when Roosevelt, accompanied by Harriman, met Stalin to discuss the war in the Pacific. The president began indirectly, noting that with US troops entering Manila, the time had come to intensify the bombing of Japan, and the US Air Force was establishing new bases on islands south of Japan. Stalin got the hint. He told the president that he was prepared to allow US Air Force bases in the Amur region. It was a breakthrough of enormous proportions. Stalin also agreed to new US military bases in the vicinity of Budapest and approved another request: to allow American officers to go behind the Soviet lines in Eastern Europe to survey the results of recent US Air Force bombings.
Stalin was clearly on his best behavior. Although Harriman knew from experience that Stalin’s oral approval was not the end of the story, he also knew that it was essential to make something happen in the Soviet Union or in the parts of Eastern Europe occupied by the Red Army. Roosevelt reciprocated, saying that he saw no problem with the USSR taking over southern Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands in the Far East. They agreed that the consultations could take place later. A deal had been made: American bases and Soviet participation in the war in exchange for Soviet territorial acquisitions. Stalin was happy with it, as were the US military in general and the Air Force commanders in particular. If they could establish new air bases in Eastern Europe and the Far East, they would be able to make use of the experience gained at Poltava at the new bases and shut down the existing ones.11
The American hopes turned out to be premature. Soviet insecurity about the Western presence behind their lines was demonstrated by the long and largely fruitless negotiations on the future of Poland, the issue most discussed at Yalta. It had become central to US-Soviet relations ever since the Warsaw Uprising, and reporting on developments there continued to be one of the tasks of the American airmen who traveled from Poltava to Lviv and back. Roosevelt made his last attempt to convince Stalin to leave the city of Lviv in Poland. Stalin refused. With the Red Army in control of much of Eastern Europe, Stalin had little incentive to compromise. He was also a master at playing the nationalities card, which counted for much in deciding the future of that ethnically and religiously mixed region.
Stalin brushed aside Roosevelt’s proposal to return Lviv to the Poles by presenting himself as an advocate of Ukrainian national interests. “What would the Ukrainians say if they [Stalin and Molotov] accepted the Allies’ proposal?” Stalin asked Roosevelt and Churchill. “They might say that Stalin and Molotov had turned out to be less reliable defenders of the Russians and the Ukrainians than Curzon and Clemenceau.” The former reference was of course to the Curzon Line of 1920, created in the wake of the Paris Peace Conference. As Harriman knew by then from Poltava intelligence reports, the Soviets were already moving people from one side of the Curzon Line to the other in order to create homogeneous ethnic communities—Ukrainians to the east and Poles to the west. Both Roosevelt and Churchill had to accept the new border, with Lviv remaining under formal Ukrainian and actual Soviet control.12
Stalin was equally uncooperative on the question of the Polish government, which he staffed with his own people, and on the future Polish elections, which he promised to arrange but was intent on controlling. When the issue of the forthcoming Polish elections came to the fore, Stalin assured Churchill that as far as the Red Army was concerned, British and Western diplomatic representatives would be free to travel in the country to observe the elections but would have to negotiate directly with the Polish government. With Stalin’s representatives now running key sectors of the Polish government, he could easily take away with one hand what he had given with the other. The Poltava base would remain one of very few places where the Americans could gather information on the Polish situation after the conference.13
The question on the Yalta agenda that would be of greatest importance to the Poltava airmen in the weeks and months to come was settled on the last day of the conference, February 11, when General Deane signed an agreement on the exchange of prisoners of war. It had been long in the making, and Deane had reason to celebrate. He had first raised the question of American POWs with the Red Army General Staff in June 1944, days after the first American planes landed on the Poltava-area airfields. This was also the period of the run-up to Operation Bagration, the Soviet offensive. The American commanders expected that the Soviet advance would free the Allied POWs held by the Germans in that part of Europe and wanted Soviet cooperation in bringing them home as soon as possible. The Soviets had then shown no interest in the subject. Now they were finally ready to accommodate the American request and sign a formal agreement.
The basic principles of the agreement were laid out by Molotov in a letter sent to the US embassy in Moscow on November 25—almost five months after the POW question had first been raised. Molotov agreed “in principle” to the American proposal, which provided for the free access of American representatives to liberated American prisoners of war. He also raised the question of Soviet POWs and former Soviet citizens enrolled in the Wehrmacht and auxiliary German formations captured by the Americans and British in Western Europe. Molotov wanted them placed in separate camps and sent back to the Soviet Union. Deane did not object. He agreed to the deal, which obliged the Americans to send all Soviet citizens from the territories occupied by the US Army back to the USSR. In exchange, the Americans would be allowed to evacuate their own citizens from territories controlled by the Red Army.14
Deane signed the agreement he had helped to negotiate on the last day of the Yalta conference. That was probably also the last day on which he was satisfied with its content. The deal would create more problems in US-Soviet relations. “The agreement was good one,” he recalled, “but, so far as the Russians were concerned, it turned out to be just another piece of paper.” The document failed to address profound differences between American and Soviet political and military culture. If for US servicemen there was no higher duty than to rescue their own prisoners of war, Stalin regarded his POWs as deserters and traitors to the socialist fatherland. As far as he was concerned, they were criminals deserving the harshest possible punishment. Former Soviet citizens, captured in German uniform, knew that and refused to go back, claiming German citizenship on the basis of their service in the Wehrmacht. They preferred that the Americans treat them as Germans rather than Soviets. Some would even commit suicide in American custody to avoid deportation to their home country.
American military commanders such as Deane either did not understand the situation or did not want to understand it. At the top of their agenda was the welfare of US prisoners of war: if the Soviets wanted to reclaim their nationals and made that a condition of helping the American POWs return home, they were prepared to accept it. Deane also underestimated the depth of Soviet paranoia about the American presence behind their lines in Poland and other countries of Eastern Europe, where they were installing communist-led governments while cracking down on independent political activity and basic elements of the democratic electoral process. The agreement that Deane signed did not specify that the Soviets were to provide access to the American POWs as soon as possible after their liberation in areas close to the front lines, and the Soviets refused to allow American representatives anywhere near their front.15
In the next few months—which he called his “darkest days”—Deane would become thoroughly acquainted with the traps and loopholes of the document he had signed at Yalta, as well as the cultural difference in the Soviet and American treatment of POWs. The American personnel at the Poltava base would become essential to Deane’s efforts to make the agreement work, as they were the only American detachment with access to parts of Eastern Europe, where thousands of American POWs were being held.16
“In an alliance the allies should not deceive each other,” said Stalin at a dinner that he hosted at Yalta for Roosevelt and Churchill on February 8. “Perhaps that is naïve? Why should I not deceive my ally?” continued the dictator, who had successfully bugged the premises of the American and British delegations and was receiving reports on their conversations. He went on: “But I as a naïve man think it best not to deceive the ally even if he is a fool.” The Western leaders, who Stalin had just suggested might be dupes, listened in silence to their interpreters. Stalin, for his part, could not stop playing with the idea of double-dealing. “Possibly our alliance is so firm just because we do not deceive each other.” He then had another thought: “Or is it because it is not so easy to deceive each other?” He finally proposed a “toast to the firmness of our Three Power Alliance. May it be strong and stable; may we be as frank as possible.”17
Many in the American camp believed that Stalin meant what he said in his final toast. The conference ended with high hopes. The Americans got what they wanted on Soviet participation in the United Nations and in the war on Japan and found Stalin unusually accommodating on other issues, including the establishment of US air bases on territory that he controlled. There were problems, especially in Poland, but given the good will Stalin showed at Yalta, they believed that they could be worked out as well. Harry Hopkins expressed the feelings of many when he recalled after the war: “We really believed in our hearts that this was the dawn of the new day we had all been praying for and talking about for so many years.”18
The Poltava airmen seconded to the Crimea for the duration of the conference knew the Soviets and their methods better than anyone else in the American delegation, and were therefore less impressed by their Soviet hosts. That was certainly the case with George Fischer. Before the conference, Hampton’s adjutant had been concerned about prospects of a new world war and was afraid that if the US government, which kept making concessions to the Soviets, did not start asking for something in return, “the Russians will learn to despise us, and we will learn to hate them.” Fischer’s time at the Saki air base did nothing to dispel those worries despite the fact that he enjoyed company of his Soviet counterparts. “Having fun together eased the jelling and blending,” he wrote later. It helped that the Allied officers were given the same rations as the top brass. “Loads of good food,” recalled Fischer before turning somber and admitting that “on starving land we drank and ate like kings. We had a Feast in Time of a Famine.”19
Not all Poltava airmen’s reminiscences of their free time in the Crimea were as favorable as Fischer’s. William Kaluta, who flew to Saki on February 1, recalled that five days later, the Soviets arranged an evening of dance and some American pilots invited local women to the event. The women began to leave the hall after being approached by Soviet officers. The explanations they gave the Americans may have been true in some cases but could not have applied to all. One woman allegedly had to go home, another to work, a third suddenly felt ill. Soon the rest of the locals who had had a chance to talk to the Americans were gone, putting an end to the evening. For visitors from Poltava such as Kaluta, the pattern was unmistakably clear: the Soviet secret police was doing in Saki exactly as it had done in Poltava.20
The Poltava airmen helped the conference become the success it was judged to be, but their Poltava experience made them much less optimistic about the prospects of the Grand Alliance than were Roosevelt and Churchill. They knew that there was a huge gulf between what the Soviets said and did. The American leadership would soon appreciate that hard-earned truth of the Poltava veterans. Their base would soon become not only the main American window on the rapidly deteriorating situation in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe, but also safe haven and last hope for American POWs freed by the Red Army advance in the region and facing confinement in Soviet transit camps.