17
Rupture
On the afternoon of March 31, 1945, the Poltava Soviet commander Major General Kovalev called an emergency meeting. Once his lieutenants were all present, Kovalev shared with them recommendations he had just received from Moscow. Lieutenant General Korolenko, a deputy chief of staff of the Red Army Air Force, advised Kovalev that given worsening Soviet-American relations there was a possibility of armed conflict at the Poltava base—an eventuality for which Kovalev and his men had to be prepared. “You see that things aren’t working out here with the Americans.”
After two battalion commanders at the base reported on the number of soldiers at their disposal, Kovalev ordered his chief of staff to prepare a plan of operation in case of armed conflict. According to that plan, in case of emergency one of the battalions was to encircle and seal off the American base, while the other took control of the airplanes and bomb depots. A counterintelligence platoon was to secure the US headquarters and take possession of the radio station, preventing the Americans from transmitting any information about developments at the base. The attack was to begin with a horn signal. Americans who happened to be in the city of Poltava at that point were to be detained there. Preparations for a possible attack on the American quarters began immediately, as the commanders of the two battalions under Kovalev’s command went to reconnoiter the base. Soldiers in the engineer battalion, who normally were not armed, were issued guns. A horn player was assigned to the duty officer to be ready to sound the attack as soon as he received an order.1
Kovalev was preparing for the worst. So was his American counterpart Colonel Hampton. Hampton took measures to secure Eastern Command files, and the most sensitive of them were placed in a steel box that was moved to the office of his adjutant, George Fischer. The normally unarmed Fischer began to carry a pistol. He assembled a group of clerks seconded from different departments who would spend long evenings copying the most important documents. That meant retyping more than a thousand pages of correspondence. The documents were supposed to be shipped to Teheran at the first opportunity or destroyed in case of emergency.2
There is no indication that Hampton knew about Kovalev’s preparations to take over his headquarters, though there was little doubt in his mind that relations with the Soviets were taking a dramatic turn for the worse. They stopped clearing any flights from Poltava. Order no. 011050 from the headquarters of the commander in chief of Soviet military forces to halt Americans flights to and from Poltava came from Stalin himself.3
The chain of events that led to the new crisis began on March 8, 1945, when Allen Dulles, the head of the Office of Strategic Services station in Switzerland, met with the commander of SS troops in northern Italy, Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, to discuss the possible surrender of German troops in Italy. Wolff, who was on a Hitler-approved mission of sowing discord among the Allies, had no mandate to speak on behalf of the German military command, so little came of the meeting. Nevertheless, Dulles’s report about it to the Allied military commanders in Italy raised high expectations about a possible German surrender in Italy. The American and British commanders sent representatives to Italy, and Averell Harriman was instructed to inform Molotov about the forthcoming negotiations. Molotov asked for the inclusion of Soviet representatives at the forthcoming meeting in Switzerland.4
Harriman conveyed Molotov’s request to Washington. He was personally skeptical, to say the least, as was General Deane. They both suggested that the Soviets would not have invited the Allies to negotiate a German surrender on the Eastern Front, nor would the Western Allies have asked to participate in such negotiations. The Chiefs of Staff in Washington agreed with that reasoning and suggested to the Soviets that they send representatives to Caserta, the Allied headquarters in central Italy, where the actual negotiations would take place, treating the talks planned in Bern, Switzerland, as preliminary. Molotov protested, demanding that the Swiss negotiations be terminated. The “Bern incident” was now an inter-Allied crisis.5
Stalin accused Roosevelt and the Western Allies of negotiating a separate peace with the Germans behind his back. He allegedly had information to the effect that the Germans had agreed to open the Western Front to the Allies, who would march into the “heart of Germany” while continuing to fight the Red Army on the Eastern Front. Although he hinted that the information came from military intelligence, his statement had no factual basis. More than anything, it betrayed Stalin’s phobias about the Western Allies and the possibility of a German-British-American deal to stop him from moving farther into Europe. Roosevelt responded with a message that opened and closed with sentences containing the word “astonishment.” In his cable of March 29 to Roosevelt, Stalin stated that the American position “is irritating the Soviet command and creates ground for mistrust.” In his response of March 31, Roosevelt referred to an “atmosphere of regrettable apprehension and mistrust.” In another message dispatched the same day, Roosevelt wrote: “I cannot conceal from you the concern with which I view the development of events of mutual interest since our fruitful meeting at Yalta.”6
The Alliance was clearly in trouble, and no one knew that better than John Deane in Moscow, who was barraged by Soviet protests over the conduct of American airmen on Soviet soil. On March 30, 1945, two days after General Kovalev stopped clearing American flights to and from Poltava, and one day before he called his emergency meeting to plan an attack on the American base, the chief of the Red Army General Staff, General Antonov, forwarded to Deane a letter replete with denunciations of American conduct on Soviet soil. Antonov complained bitterly about three occasions on which American personnel had refused to follow Soviet orders and caused friction in relations.
The first episode concerned Lieutenant Colonel Wilmeth’s refusal to leave Lublin as ordered by Soviet commanders on March 11. Wilmeth, who was taking care of American ex-prisoners of war, managed as we have seen to stay in the city until the end of the month. The second involved Captain Donald Bridge, who landed his aircraft at the Soviet air base near Mielec in Poland on March 22. He took off after refueling but without Soviet clearance. The incident led to the suicide of a Soviet captain named Melamedov, who was probably held responsible for the incident by his superiors and SMERSH officers.7
General Antonov was especially bitter about the third case, which involved First Lieutenant Myron King, the pilot of a Flying Fortress. King’s aircraft was hit by German flak over Berlin in early February 1945, but he managed to land at a Soviet base near Warsaw. The Soviets fixed the plane and cleared it for return to Britain. As the plane stopped for refueling at a Soviet air base near Szczuczyn in northeastern Poland, however, the Soviets discovered that King and his crew were trying to smuggle a Polish citizen in British uniform out of their zone. King listed the man as a “waist gunner” (aircraft side gunner), but the deception was uncovered by a Red Army major, who shouted at King and threatened to shoot him. King tried to bribe his way out, offering the major his wrist watch. The major took the bribe yet still refused to clear the flight. For seven long weeks, King and his crew remained in Soviet custody. They managed to free themselves only on March 18, after the Soviets gave King permission to fly to Kyiv; he headed for Poltava instead.8
Colonel Hampton conducted his own investigation into the King incident and informed General Deane of his findings on March 29. Hampton’s report arrived the day before Antonov’s letter, giving an unexpected spin to the affair. Antonov accused King of having taken on board “a terrorist-saboteur brought into Poland from England.” According to Antonov, King had tried to bring back to Britain a spy sent to Poland by the Polish exiles in London who was involved in Home Army activities against the Soviets. “The facts listed are a rude violation of elementary rights of our friendly mutual relations,” wrote Antonov. He demanded that Deane not only prevent any more such cases but report to him on actions taken with regard to those who had committed the violations listed in the letter.9
That was not all. The next day, March 31, Deane received another protest, this time from his main liaison at the Red Army General Staff, Lieutenant General Slavin. It concerned an incident in Hungary, where the crew of a B-24 bomber had made a forced landing at a Soviet-held airfield. It then flew to Italy with a thirty-seven-year-old Red Army captain named Morris Shanderov on board. A native of Ohio, Shanderov was born into the family of a Russian revolutionary who had immigrated to the United States after the Revolution of 1905. Shanderov returned to the Soviet Union in 1925 and stayed there. In the spring of 1944 he was stationed at the Poltava air base, where he attracted the attention of SMERSH officers because of his contacts with the Americans. On the evening of April 23, 1944, a few weeks after the arrival of the US airmen, Shanderov was detained while trying to make his way to the American base. A few days later he asked his commander for permission to hold a party to which he wanted to invite the Americans. Lieutenant Colonel Sveshnikov, the SMERSH commanding officer at the time, ordered Shanderov out of Poltava.10
In March 1945, Shanderov met American pilots again, this time at the airfield in Hungary. He told his life story to Lieutenant Charles Raleigh and informed him that he wanted to go back to his native land, the United States. Raleigh took Shanderov, then working with a crew of Soviet engineers who helped to repair the American plane, on board, ostensibly for a test flight. Raleigh flew to Italy, landing in Bari, where Shanderov requested asylum and was interrogated and detained by the US military command. The American crew’s takeoff without clearance from the Soviet airfield, especially with a Red Army officer on board, infuriated the Soviet commanders. Now Slavin was accusing the American crew of violating the trust shown to them by the Soviets as they helped to repair Lieutenant Raleigh’s plane. He demanded the return of Shanderov and the punishment of Raleigh and his crew.11
Generals Antonov and Slavin peppered General Deane with accusations that the Americans had violated their Soviet allies’ trust at the same time as they ordered General Kovalev at Poltava to halt all American flights to and from the base. On March 28 Kovalev issued his own order grounding the American airplanes. Twenty-two American technicians were then at various locations in western Ukraine and eastern Poland, repairing US aircraft. They could not return to the base, and the base commanders could not send them food supplies or spare parts to continue their work. Three repaired planes remained where they were, as there were no available crews to fly them to Poltava. Flights to and from Poland were grounded, as were Poltava-Moscow and Poltava-Teheran flights. Three American nurses from the Poltava base were on leave in Moscow and could not return. A far more disturbing effect of the grounding was that six wounded Americans who badly needed operations in Teheran could not be flown there.12
Kovalev’s order took the Americans completely by surprise. Since he gave no reason for it other than to say that the order had come from Moscow, the Americans at Poltava were at a loss as to what to think. Soviet counterintelligence agents picked up signs of displeasure in American dealings with their Soviet counterparts. They would refuse to give information the Soviets wanted from them, either claiming that the workday was over or questioning the reason for the inquiry. They complained about transit crews left at Poltava without sufficient food supplies, asked why the Soviets refused to evacuate their wounded, and demanded the return of the nurses from Moscow. The Soviets would not allow the nurses to return even as they continued to bring food-service personnel from Moscow to Poltava.13
The US airmen at the base could not understand the sudden change in Soviet behavior. Franklyn Holzman told a SMERSH informer: “It’s not clear to me why flights are not being allowed because of personal disputes. Your armies and ours are at the gates of Berlin, and this is no time for disputes, as flights are needed to secure military operations.” Sergeant Major Matles, who had been involved with helping British and American prisoners of war, believed that flights had been grounded because of tensions between the US military mission in Moscow and the Soviet authorities. Sergeant Chavkin told a SMERSH informer that the US mission in Moscow blamed the American commanders at the base.
The base, in turn, blamed Moscow. George Fischer, now promoted to captain, wrote in a report that the Americans at Poltava were unhappy both with the Soviets and with their own commanders in Moscow, who apparently “gave in to the Soviets too much,” provoking such behavior on their part. “It is hard to cram a true picture of the feelings that pervaded through the base through that painful frustrating and sad period in the history of this command,” wrote Fischer later. “It changed from apathy to despair, from disgust to short hopefulness, from trying to forget the outbursts of angry accusations of the Soviets and higher headquarters, and again and again so.”14
The “higher headquarters” meanwhile did their best to reduce the intensity of the conflict that had resulted in the grounding of American planes at Poltava. On March 31, the day after General Deane received General Antonov’s indignant letter, and the day on which General Slavin wrote to Deane complaining about American pilots smuggling Polish and Soviet officers out of Eastern Europe, General Hill, Deane’s deputy in Moscow in charge of the US Air Force, wrote to Colonel Hampton at Poltava. Hill informed Hampton that Soviet-American relations had been severely strained by a series of incidents in which US personnel had failed to comply with Soviet demands and regulations. He instructed Hampton to enjoin his subordinates at Poltava “to preclude the possibilities of friction and arguments, to conduct themselves with dignity and avoid slurs to the end that present strain will be corrected and that there will be no recurrence.”15
Caught between his cautious superiors and belligerent underlings, Hampton was becoming increasingly irritated and no longer attempting to hide his attitude toward the Soviet regime. Major Zorin was getting considerable information on Hampton’s attitude from the Soviet interpreters, who doubled as SMERSH informers. One of them, Lieutenant Sivolobov, who used the code-name “Kozlov,” repeated to Zorin on April 1 what Hampton had allegedly told another Soviet interpreter, Galina Shabelnik: “You have freedom only in words, but in fact there is the dictatorship of the NKVD. Your whole population has been cowed, and you are forbidden to associate with foreigners.”
Shabelnik, who informed on the Americans under the code-name “Moskvichka,” a former classmate of Fischer, added more details. Hampton had allegedly told her: “Your people live badly. Our unemployed, about whom your newspapers have written so much, live better than those who are employed in your country.” Hampton was also involved in what SMERSH described as anti-Soviet propaganda. He supplied Shabelnik with English-language publications, which included an article by Aleksandr Barmin, a former Soviet diplomat and intelligence officer who had defected to France in 1937 to avoid Stalin’s terror and whom Zorin called a “traitor to the motherland.”16
The secret police were not the only ones to notice Hampton’s growing irritation with his Soviet counterparts at Poltava. He made no secret of his hostility in the numerous reports that he submitted to his Air Force commanders and the US military mission in Moscow. George Fischer, wrote in his memoirs about his boss: “We both got the anti-Soviet fever. … Together [Hampton and I] went on a holy crusade. All we could, we pushed our own higher-ups. The U.S. air [force] headquarters in Paris, the U.S. Military Mission in Moscow. We flooded them. Fired off oodles of messages. Sent one coded cable after another. Spelled out the Poltava crisis, the Soviet misdeeds and broken promises. We never stopped urging action. To heed the ally/foe much more. To take a much, much tougher stand. No response came. That didn’t matter. It even egged us on. To spread the word, build a crusade.”17
Meanwhile, the Soviet authorities decided that things had gone too far and that it was time to alleviate tensions. Stalin wanted the alliance to survive at least until the end of the war. On April 5 he ordered Molotov to denounce the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, signed in April 1941. It was a clear signal to the United States that the Soviet Union was honoring its obligations under the Yalta agreements concerning the war with Japan and preparing the diplomatic ground for an alliance with Washington in the Pacific. In a message dated April 7, Stalin assured Roosevelt that he had never questioned his “honesty or dependability.” The dictator believed that he had pushed far enough, having obtained from Roosevelt the reassurance he wanted: the Americans were not contemplating a separate peace on the Western Front.18
Measures were also taken to calm things down at Poltava. A high-level commission arrived from Moscow in early April to look into General Kovalev’s preparations for a possible armed takeover of the headquarters of Eastern Command. On April 2, two days after Kovalev ordered the preparation of a plan for a possible attack on the American headquarters, Major Zorin, whose task was to seize the headquarters in case of a crisis, sent a report to the commanding officer of SMERSH in Moscow. Zorin expressed his concern that Kovalev’s plan might lead to open conflict with the Americans. The SMERSH commanders sounded the alarm, and the report was forwarded to Stalin on the same day. His resolution on the report read: “Please calm Comrade Kovalev and forbid him any unauthorized actions.” On April 3, Lieutenant General Fedorov, a deputy chief of staff of the Red Army Air Force, and a Lieutenant Colonel Belov, a high-ranking SMERSH official, flew to Poltava to investigate the situation.
The investigation confirmed all the facts presented by Zorin. Kovalev had indeed ordered the preparation of a plan of attack. It seemed that he was simply overzealous, though SMERSH was fully prepared to assume the worst. Could Kovalev be an enemy within, trying to provoke a conflict between the Allies to benefit the Germans? SMERSH dug into its files for all possible information about Kovalev. Zorin soon discovered that in 1938, at the height of Stalin’s Great Terror, Kovalev, an ethnic Ukrainian and a native of the Poltava region, had been investigated for possible membership in a Ukrainian nationalist organization. The organization had allegedly worked among cadets of the Red Army officers’ school in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, where Kovalev worked as an instructor. Two other officers under investigation testified that between 1928 and 1937 Kovalev had been involved in spying on Red Army cadres and installations. He was also accused of indoctrinating cadets in the spirit of Ukrainian nationalism. Kovalev pleaded complete innocence. Luckily for him, the key figure in the investigation, the commander of the school, Onufrii Nahuliak, refused to implicate Kovalev and was eventually shot for his role in the alleged conspiracy. Another officer who testified against Kovalev subsequently withdrew his testimony. Kovalev was left alone. 19
Another piece of potentially compromising information on Kovalev had been his report on the Valentine’s Day party at the American base. The party, which SMERSH officers believed to have denigrated the honor of Red Army officers, took place on February 14, and as we have seen Kovalev filed a report about his participation on March 1. The SMERSH memo about Kovalev’s report was produced on March 27, only a few days before his order to prepare plans for an attack on the American base. SMERSH found Kovalev to have been too understanding of the Americans one day and too eager to start a fight with them the next. Apparently, in the minds of Kovalev’s superiors, neither of these attitudes constituted a crime, and they canceled each other out. The high commission from Moscow reprimanded Kovalev for overzealousness but left him in command of the base. His political loyalty to the regime was never questioned. Still, Kovalev got the message: open confrontation with the Americans was to be avoided at all costs.
At the US military mission in Moscow, John Deane and his deputy General Hill were also looking for ways to smooth things over at Poltava. They decided to change commanding officers at the base. While the Soviets reprimanded but kept Kovalev, the Americans decided to send Thomas Hampton away in peace, if not with honor.
On April 7, in the midst of the ban on flights to and from Poltava, Hill informed Hampton that he was removing him from Poltava and reassigning him to US Air Force headquarters, now located in Paris. He was about to be dismissed “without prejudice.” The same applied to his second in command at the base, Lieutenant Colonel Marvin L. Alexander. On April 10, Hill issued an order reassigning both officers. There was a feeling at the base that Deane was sending Hampton away not just to ease tensions but because he blamed the colonel for the crisis that had led to the grounding of flights. While the letters that Deane received from Generals Antonov and Slavin at the end of March listed no violations of discipline, the halting of flights from Poltava made American commanders there easy targets for the wrath of their superiors. Their removal signaled to the Soviets that the Americans were listening and prepared to clean up their act.20
On April 11, the Americans notified General Kovalev about Hampton’s imminent departure. However, with flights still grounded, Hampton would stay at the base for a few more days, waiting for a chance to leave the Soviet Union. His duties were taken over immediately by the new American commander, Hampton’s former chief operations officer and George Fischer’s close friend, Major Kowal. Kowal managed to stay in his new position for less than a day, as Hampton received a new order from Hill on April 12. It turned out that Kowal’s appointment was protested by General Slavin, who suggested that Kowal “had shown himself to be unamiable and frequently hostile to Red Air Force officers and was a source of deterioration of relationship.” Kowal, who of course spoke Russian fluently, had as we have seen found himself in the middle of many conflicts with the Soviets and was repeatedly listed by SMERSH among the US officers suspected of spying on them. Slavin demanded Kowal’s dismissal. Deane and Hill were quick to oblige. Hill reassigned Kowal to the Paris headquarters and cabled Hampton, ordering him to take Kowal along when he departed. Command over the base then passed to Captain Trimble, the Air Force officer who had arrived less than two months earlier and worked with returning American prisoners of war in Lviv.21
The American military diplomats in Moscow were doing their best to appease the Soviets and put the crisis behind them. Removing the Poltava base commanders was one element of the plan; going after US officers guilty of transgressions was another. Court-martial procedures were initiated against First Lieutenant Myron King, who had tried to smuggle a Polish citizen to Britain, and Captain Donald Bridge, who had flown the Soviet major Morris Shanderov from Hungary to Italy.
On April 12, when Hill reassigned Kowal and appointed Trimble the new commander, a B-24 made a landing at the Poltava airfield. It was one of the few planes allowed to land at Poltava since the official grounding of flights in late March. The plane was on a top-secret mission to Moscow. Soviet officers armed with pistols guarded it during the stopover, prevented American personnel from approaching, and made an exception only for the maintenance crew, which helped to refuel the aircraft. Inside the plane, guarded by American military police, was Shanderov, on his way from Italy to Moscow to what seemed certain death. Information about the plane’s destination and its passenger was withheld even from Captain Trimble. He learned the truth only after refusing to clear the plane’s departure. Trimble then reluctantly gave his approval. The order had been given from above, and there was little that he could do.
On the same day, Trimble welcomed another American plane carrying Generals Deane and Hill, who were flying from Moscow to the United States for a meeting with American commanders there. Hill took Trimble aside and told him to do everything in his power to cooperate with the Soviets, which meant the sacrifice of Shanderov.22
In the United States, where Deane and Hill were heading, President Roosevelt began his day on April 12 by talking to Dewey Long, the White House travel officer, with whom he discussed the best route to San Francisco. The founding conference of the United Nations Organization was scheduled to open there later that month. The president was in Warm Spring, Georgia, still recuperating from the impact of the Yalta trip on his health and demeanor. He wanted to attend the conference both to bask in the glory of his greatest foreign-policy achievement and to ensure that everything went smoothly.
Soviet-American relations were at a difficult pass, and the agreements made at Yalta appeared to be in jeopardy. Stalin was doing everything in his power to prevent the formation of a representative government in Poland. The crisis over American prisoners of war and the Bern incident were behind Stalin’s decision not to send Molotov to the conference, thereby lowering the level of Soviet representation at the founding conference of the body whose creation had been at the top of Roosevelt’s agenda at Yalta. Nonetheless, the Soviets were still coming, which was essential.
At 10:50 a.m., as Roosevelt worked on his papers, his chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, cabled from Washington to Warm Springs a draft message to Averell Harriman in Moscow. On the previous day Leahy had forwarded to Harriman the text of the president’s letter to Stalin that the ambassador was to deliver to the Kremlin. Roosevelt wanted to put an end to the controversy surrounding the Bern incident. His message read: “There must not, in any event, be mutual mistrust, and minor misunderstandings of this character should not arise in the future.” Harriman delayed the delivery of the message, suggesting that the word “minor” be dropped with in reference to the Bern incident. That was not what Roosevelt wanted, and Leahy, who could read the president’s mind better than anyone else, drafted a response: “I do not wish to delete word ‘minor’ as it is my desire to consider the Bern misunderstanding a minor incident.” The president wanted to avoid anything that would jeopardize Soviet-American cooperation.
At 1:06 p.m. Roosevelt approved the wording of his cable to Harriman. Nine minutes later he told those next to him: “I have a terrific pain in the back of my head.” He soon lost consciousness. The president was declared dead at 3:30 p.m. on April 12. It was afternoon in Warm Springs and late evening in Moscow and Poltava.23