16

Prisoners of War

On March 4, 1945, Roosevelt gave his approval to one of the harshest telegrams he had ever sent to Stalin. Their previous exchange, around February 23—Red Army Day in the USSR—was full of courteous gestures, with the president sending Stalin his “heartiest congratulations” and the Soviet leader answering in kind: “I beg you, Mr. President, to accept my thanks for your friendly greeting.” This March telegram struck an entirely different tone. “I have reliable information regarding the difficulties which are being encountered in collecting, supplying and evacuating American ex-prisoners of war (POWs) and American aircraft crews who are stranded east of the Russian lines,” began the message, omitting the usual salutation.¹

Roosevelt was clearly angry. Thousands of American POWs liberated from German camps by the Red Army were de facto left to their own devices, even hitchhiking to Moscow to get medical help and support. Contrary to the American interpretation of the Yalta agreements, the Soviets were not informing the Americans about the number or location of liberated POWs and refused to allow US contact teams to move into Eastern Europe to assist them. General Deane and his aides in Moscow offered a solution. They wanted to use the Poltava base as a logistical hub for rendering assistance as well as an assembly point and hospital facility from which the POWs could be flown to the United States via Teheran. The Soviets would not allow the use of the Poltava base for those purposes, just as they had not allowed its use for airdrops to Warsaw six months earlier.²

Roosevelt, who had been rather diplomatic on the issue of Warsaw, showed no such restraint when it came to American POWs. “It is urgently requested,” read his cable, “that instructions be issued authorizing ten American aircraft with American crews to operate between Poltava and places in Poland where American ex-prisoners of war and stranded airmen may be located.” The cable continued: “I regard this request to be of greatest importance not only for humanitarian reasons but also by reason of intense interest of the American public in the welfare of our ex-prisoners of war and stranded aircraft crews.” Reports about the mistreatment of Americans in Soviet custody made Roosevelt worry not only about their fate but also about the future of the Grand Alliance itself.³

The question of Soviet treatment of American POWs produced the first major crisis in Soviet-American relations after the Yalta conference. The Soviet refusal to admit Americans to the original assembly points of POWs in Eastern Europe not only worsened existing tensions over the future of Eastern Europe but also exposed a profound cultural difference between the allies. The Americans of course regarded their POWs as heroes who deserved all possible assistance to save and repatriate them, and the Soviet regime, as noted, considered soldiers captured by the enemy as traitors. If the Soviets were prepared to imprison and occasionally shoot their own soldiers upon finding them in German camps, they regarded it as a courtesy to their overseas ally that they allow captured Americans to go free. Taking care of the liberated Americans’ needs was not their responsibility. Thus, what the Americans regarded as barbaric treatment by their Soviet allies was seen as humane enough by the Soviets. Once again, the Poltava airmen found themselves in the middle of a clash.

The American officers in Moscow got the first indication that something was going wrong with the agreement on the treatment of POWs on the day after Deane signed the document at Yalta.

On February 12, a representative of the pro-Soviet government in Poland informed the US mission in Moscow that there were close to one thousand American prisoners in Poland, with no one to take care of them. The message originated with two American ex-POWs who had managed to convince a local Polish official to send word to Moscow about the plight of their comrades. Deane learned the news on February 14, soon after his return from the Crimea. The mission sprang into action, and on the same day Major General Edmund Hill, Deane’s Air Force deputy, instructed Eastern Command at Poltava to prepare the base for processing as many as fifteen thousand liberated POWs in groups of one hundred at a time. The POW contact officers were supposed to reach Poltava from Britain. Food and other supplies were to arrive from Teheran. At Poltava, medical personnel got busy preparing hospital facilities for new arrivals.⁴

On February 16, the prisoner contact team headed by Lieutenant Colonel James D. Wilmeth—a three-man crew that included a doctor and an interpreter—arrived in Poltava from Moscow. They were ready to go to Poland and start helping American POWs there. All that was needed was Soviet permission to leave Poltava. Deane applied for permission on February 14, but the Soviet Commissariat of Foreign Affairs was silent. Poltava Soviet commander Kovalev did not allow any member of the Wilmeth crew to board the plane leaving Poltava for eastern Poland on February 17. “A plane took off for air rescue this morning, but we remain here,” cabled Wilmeth to Deane.

American commander Colonel Hampton tried in vain to persuade Kovalev to let at least the doctor from the Wilmeth team go to Poland. He then proposed to send an interpreter instead of a doctor, only to be rebuffed again. Next day Deane informed Wilmeth that the Red Army commanders were opposed to using Poltava as the POW processing center and proposed Odesa instead. From there the American ex-POWs could go by ship to the Mediterranean and join the Americans there. Meanwhile the Soviets continued to refuse to clear Wilmeth’s flight to Poland. He suspected that they were buying time to prepare exemplary conditions for handling the POWs.⁵

The Soviets had first come into contact with American POWs on January 23, when troops of the First Belarusian Front under the command of Marshal Rokossovsky overran Oflag 64, a German concentration camp near the Polish village of Szubin, between Gdańsk and Poznań. The camp housed close to fifteen hundred American officers captured in North Africa and Western Europe. The Germans had managed to evacuate most of the inmates before Soviet troops arrived, but close to one hundred sick or injured officers remained. They were soon joined by dozens of others who had managed to escape during the forced march westward. The Red Army soldiers who overran the camp paid little attention to the inmates or their needs, and it took days for a Red Army officer, who introduced himself as a liaison with the command of the front, to show up in Szubin. The Americans were moved east, away from the front line, split into smaller groups, and ordered to wait for a transport to Moscow or Odesa.⁶

The Soviets failed to inform Deane and his mission about the American POWs in their custody prior to signing the Yalta agreement or afterward. Deane, who as noted first learned of Americans behind the Soviet lines on February 14, received a full report on the fate of the Szubin inmates three days later. On February 17, three former POWs knocked on the door of the US Mission. Captain Ernest M. Gruenberg and his two colleagues had left Szubin on January 21 as part of the POW march westward but escaped two days later and made their way to the Soviet filtration camp for Americans west of Szubin. With the Soviets silent about plans to move the ex-prisoners, the three officers left the camp and headed east on their own, concerned mainly about avoiding the Soviet repatriation camp for Americans on the outskirts of Warsaw. Other Americans they met en route had terrible stories to share about hardships that awaited the former POWs there. Hitchhiking on Soviet trucks during the day and spending nights in the homes of Polish peasants, the Americans had finally got on the train and arrived in Moscow.

Members of the mission greeted them as heroes. Captain Gruenberg told Deane that there were dozens of Americans in need of medical help and hundreds of others uncared for in Poland. While Polish peasants helped the Americans as best they could, the Red Army commanders and soldiers could not have cared less about them. In some cases, Red Army soldiers took their wrist watches and other possessions they had managed to retain in the German camp. Similar stories were told by other escapees.

On February 21, three other US officers formerly imprisoned in the Szubin camp were brought to Poltava by an air rescue crew returning from Poland. They were debriefed by Lieutenant Colonel Wilmeth. “The Soviet attitude toward liberated American prisoners is the same as the Soviet attitude toward the countries they have liberated. Prisoners are spoils of war won by Soviet arms. They may be robbed, starved and abused—and no one has the right to question such treatment,” wrote Wilmeth, summarizing what he had heard from the ex-POWs and drawing on his own experiences of dealing with the Soviets.⁷

Wilmeth was growing ever more desperate at Poltava. Deane received word from his Red Army contacts that the Soviet Foreign Commissariat had cleared Wilmeth and his team to go to Lublin in eastern Poland on February 18, but General Kovalev kept dragging his feet. Wilmeth began exploring the possibility of taking a train either to Lublin, where all Americans were supposed to be sent before being put on a train to Odesa, or to Odesa itself. In Poltava local Soviet and party officials promised to assist with the ride, but Wilmeth was afraid that, as he wrote to Deane, the promises were nothing but the “usual run around.” It was on the evening of February 24, the day Wilmeth revealed his plans for a train journey to Deane, that Kovalev finally told Hampton that Wilmeth had been cleared to leave for Lublin by air. On February 27, after a delay caused by bad weather, Wilmeth and his party departed. Another group of American officers left Poltava, also by air, for Odesa, two weeks to the day after the first news about American ex-POWs had reached the US mission in Moscow.⁸

Wilmeth, as noted earlier, assumed that he had been delayed so long to give the Soviets time to prepare exemplary conditions for the Americans in Lublin. He was in for a surprise. The Soviet officers in charge of the American repatriation camp told Wilmeth that his presence in the city was unnecessary, especially as the headquarters of the Soviet repatriation commission had moved the previous day from Lublin to the Warsaw suburb of Praga. When Wilmeth told them that he wanted to see the American ex-prisoners, he was given the reply that he would need permission, which could only be obtained in Warsaw. When Wilmeth announced that he was going to Warsaw, the Soviets told him that they would first have to get permission from Moscow. It was a master class in Soviet cynicism.

Wilmeth was able to break out of this run-around only when he produced a letter from General Deane stating that his mission was to help the American ex-POWs get home. The Soviets probably did not want to create any trouble on the Moscow level. They took Wilmeth to the barracks, which housed 91 American and 129 British ex-POWs. Before ending up in Lublin, some of them had been housed in Majdanek, the German concentration and extermination camp on the outskirts of Lublin. Close to eighty thousand people had been killed there, three-quarters of them Jews. The Soviets did their best to publicize the Nazi atrocities but could not resist the temptation to use the camp facilities to incarcerate soldiers of the Polish Home Army, which had launched the Warsaw Uprising. Eventually they put the Americans and British in the same barracks where victims of the Holocaust had awaited their end.

Wilmeth found the ex-POWs angry with the treatment they had received. They had been hastily moved to another facility three days before Wilmeth’s arrival, but the new housing had no warm water, toilets were overflowing, and there were no outside latrines. There was a shortage of beds; many slept on the floor. There was no bedding or clean clothing available: all they got was a blanket. A number of the ex-POWs had lice. They were fed twice a day with black bread and thin gruel. If that was the main repatriation camp, one can only imagine what was going on in the smaller ones. Not surprisingly, the ex-POWs tried to avoid such camps at all costs, though the Soviets did not seem to be concerned or unduly embarrassed. The conditions in which their own soldiers lived and fought were not much different, and now they were expected to divert scarce resources to house and feed liberated POWs who, as far as they were concerned, deserved to be punished for surrendering to the enemy, not hailed as heroes and pampered by the victorious Red Army.⁹

The Soviets wanted Wilmeth to go back to Poltava and wait there for an answer to his request to visit the repatriation camps established for the Americans in Krakow, Łódź, and Warsaw. Wilmeth refused. Instead he presented a top Soviet commander, Colonel Vlasov, with a copy of the Yalta agreements. Vlasov declined to take it. Given the stalemate, Wilmeth stayed in Lublin. On March 1 he bade farewell to the American and British ex-POWs, who were put into boxcars and shipped to Odesa. According to the Soviets, there were already more than 2,500 ex-POWs assembled in Odesa. The American contact group that went there from Poltava found local conditions tolerable. They were not up to American standards but quite different from those in Lublin, and the main complaint they heard was about the trip to Odesa: the boxcars had no toilet facilities, and trains waited forever for their turn to use the tracks.¹⁰

By early March 1945, when Roosevelt sent his terse cable to Stalin about American POWs, the Soviets already had in place a rudimentary system of collection points, camps, and railway connections that they used to ship the ex-prisoners to the relative safety of Odesa. That allowed Stalin to respond to Roosevelt on March 5, the day after receiving his message, with assurances that any problems with the POWs were a thing of the past.

Stalin’s main objective was to convince Roosevelt to keep his officers out of Eastern Europe—his war trophy and new political playground. “[T]here is no necessity to carry on flights of American planes from Poltava to the territory of Poland on matters of the American prisoners of war. You may feel assured that the appropriate measures will be properly taken also in respect to crews of American planes having a forced landing,” read Stalin’s cable. While the Soviets did all they could to preclude or limit American access to their ex-POWs before they reached Odesa, they did not stop US Air Force operations intended to help downed crews.¹¹

There have been a number of reasons the Soviets treated Poltava-based air rescue missions differently from those intended to evacuate ex-POWs. First, air rescue missions were limited in number and could be controlled with little expenditure of resources, while the permanent presence of American officers at the numerous POWs concentration points made it more difficult for the Soviets to cover up the real situation in the region from their Western allies. There was also a cultural and political component. The crews of planes that made forced landings had never surrendered to the enemy, and therefore deserved better treatment. They were served food on plates. Ex-POWs had to eat their food from buckets. The members of one US crew testified at Poltava that they had received from Red Army officers “the best treatment that it was possible for people to give.”¹²

Unable to help POWs as originally envisioned by Deane at Yalta, the US airmen at Poltava did their best to assist them while conducting air rescue missions. In February 1945 the Poltava base meteorologist, Major Donald Nicholson, and Sergeant Major Wiseheart visited Lviv as members of an air rescue team and found close to one hundred US ex-POWs in local hospitals. The reports they got from the ex-POWs in Lviv left no doubt that there were many more wounded and exhausted American ex-POWs in newly Soviet-occupied areas trying to survive under terrible conditions. Nicholson and Wiseheart could not help all of them but insisted on bringing back three officers, former POWs of Oflag 64, Lieutenants William R. Cory, Peter Gaich, and Hill Murphy. The Soviets refused to give permission, arguing that ex-POWs were supposed to go to Odesa. Wiseheart insisted, and the Soviets gave in. The lieutenants were flown to Poltava on the afternoon of February 21.

The lieutenants told their saviors a disturbing story. One of them had escaped from the forced march to the west, while two others hid in the Szubin camp and never joined the march. They were among the 233 Americans (83 of whom were sick) that the Soviets moved to the town of Rembertów near Warsaw. Those were the early days of the POW crisis, when the Soviets had not yet decided what to do with the Americans. After six days in the camp, they were told that they could proceed eastward on their own, and that Red Army officers would help them get on trucks going in that direction. One hundred twenty-eight sick or wounded Americans stayed in the Rembertów camp. The rest started their journey east without money, food, or knowledge of local languages.

Captain Fitchen, the Poltava intelligence officer, was appointed POW contact officer at the base. He summarized the three officers’ reports on their treatment at the hands of the Soviets as follows: “the men were just allowed to wander around, being told that they would be taken care of in the next town.” The lieutenants took advantage of Soviet assistance and then did their own hitchhiking to get to Lublin, which they reached on horseback, and Lviv, arriving there on February 15, more than three weeks after the Soviet takeover of Oflag 64. They were taken for questioning by Soviet officers dressed, strangely enough, in Polish uniforms. The interrogation lasted from 3:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m., with Gaich, who spoke Russian, agreeing to serve as interpreter. It ended only when the officers refused to answer any more questions about their personal background and training.

The Americans were then put up at the Hotel George in Lviv, where they befriended the Moscow Radio reporter Vladimir Beliaev, who was in town as a member of the Soviet commission investigating German atrocities. According to a later report, Beliaev “personally saw to it that the men were treated as white men.” (The rest of the POWs, given the conditions they endured, probably were viewed by Fitchen and his informants as “blacks.”) Beliaev also “briefed the men… and warned that there were many in the town who were still very pro-German.” Whether Beliaev befriended the Americans on his own or did so on behalf of the NKGB, with which, some believed, he was closely associated, was not entirely clear, but the Americans appreciated the help he offered them.¹³

On February 22, the day after the arrival of the three lieutenants brought by Nicholson and Wiseheart, three more former POWs, one captain and two lieutenants, reached Poltava via Moscow and were debriefed by Captain Fitchen. On February 28, another ex-POW arrived from Moscow. On March 6, a Poltava air rescue crew brought eleven more American and two British ex-POWs picked up in eastern Poland and western Ukraine. The plan was to fly them to Teheran, but by then the Soviets were insisting that all ex-POWs go to Odesa and prohibited the Poltava air rescue crews from bringing any more of them to the base. The Soviets took custody of the British and wanted to send the Americans to Odesa. The American commanders refused, asking General Deane for instructions. Deane secured special permission to fly the eleven ex-POWs to Teheran.¹⁴

The American sergeant Richard J. Beadle and the British private Ronald Gould were among the lucky ex-POWs who managed to reach the safety of Poltava at the height of the Soviet-American crisis. They were brought to the base on March 17 by an air rescue crew headed by Captain Robert Trimble, the Poltava base’s assistant operations officer. Trimble, along with the Russian-speaking Sergeant Major John Matles from the Poltava base, met Beadle and Gould near the Lviv railway station. They were part of a group of five American and British ex-POWs who had left the Lublin collection camp, were caught by the Soviets and then escorted by Red Army soldiers to the city commandant after escaping from one of the Soviet repatriation camps for American and British POWs.¹⁵

Trimble took the men to the Hotel George, where they ate, bathed, and checked into rooms. The two British officers in Beadle’s group of five had papers to be delivered to General Deane from Lieutenant Colonel Wilmeth, who was still holding on in Lublin despite Soviet attempts to send him back to Poltava. Trimble put the two on a train to Moscow, while Master Sergeant Matles took Beadle, Gould, and one more member of the party to the Soviet repatriation camp in Lviv, from where they were supposed to go to Odesa. The Red Army officer in charge of the camp assured Matles that he was ready to take the ex-POWs and had warm quarters, bathing facilities, clothes, and even a barber shop to take care of them before their departure. Matles left the three in the officer’s custody, giving them his telephone number at the Hotel George in case they needed assistance.¹⁶

Three days later Beadle and Gould were back. The Red Army officer with whom Matles left the POWs arranged for them to have showers, but only after a three-hour wait. They were then taken to another building, where they shared a room with ten French soldiers and two civilians. They slept on the wooden floor in a cold room without blankets. Beadle and Gould, who had no overcoats, could not fall asleep because of the freezing cold. Next day they received some additional clothing. However, during the night a group of Red Army soldiers woke them up and took from Beadle his two woolen shirts, giving a Soviet one “in exchange.” Next day the Soviets moved sixteen civilians of both sexes (one of the women was ill) to the already overcrowded room. Altogether the room housed twenty-four men and six women. The food they got consisted of soup, tea, and a piece of black bread.¹⁷

Beadle and Gould had had enough and went to see Captain Trimble at the Hotel George. To their relief, he was still there. Shocked by what he heard, Trimble decided to take the two to Poltava. He and Major Sergeant Matles arranged a room in the Hotel George. Soon afterward, more exhausted and needy ex-POWs showed up. The night before Matles left Lviv, he arranged a room for five more desperate Americans. Next day, just as Matles was ready to get on a truck that would take him to the airfield, seven more American officers and a number of enlisted men, all ex-POWs, showed up at the Hotel George. All Matles could do was buy them some beer and tea and wish them luck on their way to Odesa. In the report that Matles helped Captain Trimble to file on their return to Poltava, he urged the commanding officers to station a US representative in Lviv to help arriving ex-POWs. He found those whom he met in the city “in the most horrible condition; hungry, dirty, lousy, and with no one to receive them, guide them, or take care of them, or to offer them a cup of tea or a piece of bread.”¹⁸

On March 17, the day Captain Trimble returned to Poltava with Beadle and Gould on board his plane, Roosevelt fired off another cable to Stalin. “In your last message to me you state that there was no need to accede to my request that American aircraft be allowed to carry supplies to Poland and evacuate the sick. I have information that I consider positive and reliable that there are a very considerable number of sick and injured Americans in hospitals in Poland and also numbers of liberated US prisoners in good health who are awaiting entrainment in Poland to transit camps in Odessa, or are at large in small groups that have not yet made contact with Soviet authorities.”¹⁹

The last sentence was taken almost verbatim from a cable sent to the president from Moscow by Averell Harriman on March 12. The ambassador informed him that after forty-eight hours of delay, the Soviet authorities had denied General Deane’s request to be allowed to travel to Poland personally to investigate the ex-POWs’ situation. They wanted Deane to apply for permission to the Soviet-controlled Polish government. Deane found the demand ridiculous, as the Lublin government was completely dependent on Moscow. The Soviet commanders also demanded the termination of Lieutenant Colonel Wilmeth’s mission in Lublin and did not allow a plane with medical and other supplies to leave Poltava for Lublin. The claim was made that there were no more American ex-POWs in Poland. “It seems obvious that the Soviets have been attempting to stall us off by misinformation from day to day in order to hold up the sending in of more of our contact officers until they get all of our prisoners out of Poland,” wrote Harriman.²⁰

The ambassador urged the president to send Stalin another cable, a draft of which he provided. Roosevelt agreed, adding a few words of his own to heighten the emotional impact of his appeal. “Frankly I cannot understand your reluctance to permit American officers and means to assist their own people in this matter,” wrote the president. “This government has done everything to meet each of your requests. I now request you to meet mine in this particular matter.” He added: “Please call Harriman to explain my desires in detail.”²¹

Stalin never called Harriman. Instead, on March 22 he cabled Roosevelt, suggesting that the information he had received was wrong. There were only seventeen sick Americans remaining in Poland; all the rest were on their way to Odesa, and those who were ill would be flown there. Given that situation, Stalin claimed that American officers stationed behind the Soviet lines would only be an impediment to Red Army commanders, who would have to busy themselves with arranging meetings for them and protecting them from German agents. That would divert the commanders from their main tasks, and they, wrote Stalin, “pay with their lives for the state of matters at the front and in the immediate rear.” He then went on the offensive, asserting that conditions for American ex-POWs were better than those for Soviet ex-POWs in the American camps, where they were kept together with Germans, “often mistreated and even beaten up.”²²

Harriman, who received a copy of Stalin’s cable, was outraged. He wrote to Roosevelt, stating that the suggestion that the American POWs were in good condition was “far from the truth… until arriving in Odesa the hardships undergone have been inexcusable.” He added that Polish civilians helped the ex-POWs more than the Red Army officers, a statement echoed by almost every ex-POW who made it to Poltava. Harriman wanted Roosevelt to tell Stalin all that in a new cable. The president refused. “It does not appear appropriate for me to send another message now to Stalin,” he wrote to Harriman, asking him nevertheless to ensure the best possible treatment of Americans through available diplomatic channels.²³

Meanwhile, the Soviets pushed for the prompt departure of the remaining American representatives from Poland. With the Lublin repatriation camp closed on March 17, the Soviets, as noted, wanted Wilmeth to end his mission there and to leave for Moscow as soon as possible. On March 23, the day after Stalin’s response to Roosevelt, Deane ordered Wilmeth to depart. With no plane available to take him to Poltava, the Soviet authorities threatened to put him on a train. He finally left for Poltava by plane on March 28. In Moscow he faced an unhappy Deane, who believed that Wilmeth had unnecessarily alienated the Soviets by refusing to leave Lublin when ordered to do so. Wilmeth disagreed. In his report to Deane he listed twenty-seven cases of friction and unprovoked hostility toward him on the part of the Soviets, making it clear that they had never wanted him in Lublin in the first place.²⁴

On March 31, the Soviet command ordered a halt to all flights from Poltava. By that time twenty-seven American and four British former POWs had passed through the base, which had played a more important role in supplying information on their sorry state in Soviet custody than in taking them to safety and medical care in Teheran or the United Kingdom. In his account of Eastern Command, First Lieutenant Kaluta appropriately put the blame for that not on lack of effort by his Poltava comrades but on the Soviets and their attitude toward POWs.²⁵

All of the Americans considered that treatment baffling, and even those in the Poltava bases who had been pro-Soviet found their last reservoirs of good will diminishing.