18
Last Parade
News of the death of Franklin Roosevelt reached Spaso House in Moscow early in the morning of April 13, 1945. It came via a public broadcast that was picked up by the embassy’s duty officer, who immediately called Averell Harriman’s residence. It was around 1:00 a.m., but no one was sleeping—a farewell party for John Melby, a diplomat in the embassy who had been recalled to the United States and would soon be taking part in the San Francisco conference for the formation of the United Nations, was in full swing.1
Kathy Harriman, who picked up the phone, listened to the report and relayed the news to her father. Both of them approached Melby and informed him. The rest of the guests were dismissed with no explanation of why the party was suddenly over. After they left, the Harrimans, Melby, and a number of other key staffers gathered in the ambassador’s office to discuss the situation. They decided to call Molotov immediately and inform him of Roosevelt’s death. Stalin, with long-standing insomnia, used to work into the early hours of the morning, forcing his subordinates to do the same. Molotov was indeed in his office when Harriman called him to break the news. Molotov insisted on coming to Spaso House immediately to offer his condolences.2
Stalin seemed equally moved. That was the impression Harriman received when he visited the Kremlin on the evening of April 13, and Stalin told him: “President Roosevelt has died, but his cause must live on.” At Harriman’s request Stalin decided to reverse his earlier decision and appoint Molotov (instead of the Soviet ambassador to the US, Andrei Gromyko) to head the Soviet delegation to the opening conference of the United Nations Organization. That was what Roosevelt had wanted him to do, and now, on receiving the news of the president’s death, Stalin decided to honor his wish. He probably also wanted Molotov to size up Roosevelt’s untested replacement, the former vice president and now president Harry Truman.3
Getting to Truman quickly was also at the top of Harriman’s agenda. In the weeks before Roosevelt’s death, Harriman had been planning to fly to Washington to see the president and convince him to take a tougher stand on Stalin and the Soviets. Now he decided to speed up his preparations, go to Washington as soon as possible, and offer Truman his help in shaping the new administration’s policy on the Soviet Union. Before leaving, Harriman met with Stalin once again on April 15. He was accompanied by the US Ambassador to China, Patrick J. Hurley, who was on his way from Washington to Chongqing, the capital of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s government.
It was not a friendly meeting. In Hurley’s presence, Harriman clashed with Stalin over the recent developments in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. The main subject of discussion was the composition of the Polish government, but the most heated disagreement involved the American Air Force. Stalin accused US airmen of siding with the Polish underground against the Red Army. The reference was to First Lieutenant Myron King’s attempt to smuggle a Polish underground operative out of Poland. Upset, Harriman told Stalin that by making such an allegation he was questioning the loyalty of General George Marshall himself. Stalin responded that he was questioning the judgment of a junior officer, adding that the Americans lacked discipline. Harriman preferred to speak about an “act of stupid soldiers, brave men perhaps, but somewhat stupid.” Hurley was surprised by this intense and undiplomatic turn of the conversation. He did not know how important the US pilots had become in the day-to-day dealings of the American diplomats with the Soviets.
On April 17 Harriman left for Washington, taking with him all the frustration that he and his fellow Americans, including the Poltava officers recently ordered out of the USSR, had built up over the last few months in dealing with the Soviets. He was also intent on conveying to Washington their understanding of Soviet politics and ways of doing business. The briefings Harriman gave Truman and other US government leaders would prove influential in bringing about a change of the American attitude toward the Soviet Union in the new administration.4
At the US base in Poltava, the news of Roosevelt’s death was received on the morning of April 13 via British and German broadcasts. It came as a fresh blow to already low American morale. Flights had been grounded for more than two weeks, leaving the personnel with little to do. The crews of downed airplanes who had been flown to Poltava and stranded there felt abandoned if not forgotten. The continuing presence at the base of Colonel Hampton, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander, and Major Kowal, who had been dismissed from their positions but could not leave because of the grounding, added to the generally depressed atmosphere. Everyone was angry at the Soviets. Some believed that the president would still be alive had Stalin not obliged him to make the dangerous and exhausting trip to Yalta a few months earlier.5
Upon receiving the news of the president’s death from Moscow, General Kovalev once again gathered his subordinates. He ordered them to form a column and march toward the American quarters in a show of solidarity. Not unlike Molotov the night before, Kovalev surprised his American counterparts with this unexpected demonstration of sympathy. The arrival of the Red Army column shook the Americans out of their apathy, and on the following morning they held a parade of their own. They marched in formation, with the American flag carried at the front of the column by a color guard—the first such display of the flag at the base. Earlier initiatives to display it prominently had been abandoned in order not to alienate the Soviets. Now, with little if anything to lose, the Americans were not shy about showing the colors.6
When the American officers gathered that day for a memorial service in honor of the president, they were all dressed in Class A uniforms—the first time Franklyn Holzman had seen his superiors so attired at Poltava. Captain Trimble, the new commanding officer, spoke at the ceremony. “Today the United States has lost a great leader,” he declared, “and Eastern Command too has lost a leader.” The reference was to Colonel Hampton, who was seated in the front row next to General Kovalev, the head of the Soviet group at the ceremony. Holzman recalled that Trimble mentioned Hampton first and Roosevelt second, eliciting a gasp from the audience. A university graduate, Holzman considered Trimble, who had little schooling, a good but simple man who had to fill the big shoes of a base commander under difficult circumstances, and had trouble rising to the occasion.7
On April 15, Trimble visited General Kovalev in his new capacity as commanding officer of the base and told him that he was under instructions to do everything possible to improve relations with the Soviets. Kovalev suggested that relations were being strained because the Americans could not send stranded crew members from downed airplanes on their way from Poltava. A few hours later, he gave permission for them to be flown to Teheran. Problems with clearing flights would continue, but the siege of the Poltava base was effectively over. Kovalev, or, rather, his bosses in Moscow were eager to use the occasion of Roosevelt’s death to show their willingness to cooperate with the new leadership, both in Washington and in Poltava. The only question they had for their counterparts at Poltava was: “Who is President Truman?” The Americans themselves were not sure of the answer.8
The partial lifting of the flight ban helped raise the morale of the American airmen at Poltava, but few were optimistic about the prospects of cooperation with the Soviets. That attitude was shared by the commanding officers of USSTAF in Paris, who by now saw little reason to keep the Poltava base open. By late March, it was clear that the advance of American troops in the Pacific was making it possible to establish American air bases on captured islands near the Japanese mainland. The need for Soviet air bases, involving political problems and logistical difficulties because of long supply lines, was diminishing. Soviet procrastination with the opening of new bases in the Budapest area clouded the general prospect of using bases in Eastern Europe, and the rapid advance along the Western Front was making them unnecessary. The Americans could now use newly captured airfields in Western and Central Europe to support their bombing operations.
With plans for Far Eastern and Budapest-area bases effectively canceled by mid-April, USSTAF decided to shut down the Poltava base. The proposal to do so was sent to George Marshall on April 13, the day on which Trimble assumed full command of the base and presided over the memorial service for Roosevelt. Marshall gave his approval on April 19. The Soviets officially lifted the ban on all flights to and from Poltava on April 27. By that time they knew that what they had long wanted had been achieved: the Americans were leaving.9
A page in Soviet-American wartime relations was about to be turned, but the bitterness it helped create on the American side would live on. In Washington, Harriman told Truman on April 20 that the Soviets were launching a “barbarian invasion of Europe” and that they mistook American generosity for softness. The president was receptive.
Harriman got a chance to develop his ideas in another meeting with Truman and his advisers on April 23. Among those present in the Oval Office was General Deane. It turned into a brainstorming session to advise the president on the eve of his meeting with Molotov, who was stopping in Washington on Stalin’s orders before proceeding to the San Francisco conference. The key question was the formation of the new Polish government. The Soviets had proposed a formula according to which communists would outnumber noncommunists by three to one. Harriman, backed by Deane, insisted that the Soviet position was a violation of the Yalta agreements, in which the Soviets had agreed to form a new government.
Not everyone agreed with Harriman’s interpretation of the Yalta agreements. Among the skeptics was Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. The military believed that the Soviets had actually delivered on all their promises in the military sphere. Stimson suspected that Harriman and Deane’s experiences in Moscow had prejudiced them. “They have been suffering personally from Russians’ behavior on minor matters for a long time,” wrote Stimson in his diary. He was sympathetic but also concerned that their anti-Soviet argument had won the day. “[T]hey moved for strong words by the President on a strong position.”
Stimson read the situation right. Later that day, when Truman met with Molotov, he demanded that the Soviet Union fulfill the Yalta agreements on Poland. “I have never been talked to like that in my life,” he protested to the president. “Carry out your agreements, and you won’t get talked to like that,” retorted Truman. Harriman remembered that he too was taken aback by Truman’s treatment of Molotov, as it might allow Molotov to report to Stalin that Roosevelt’s policy of cooperation with the Soviets was being abandoned. Nonetheless, his actions at the time show little concern about the president’s general position. Harriman believed that the United States had to use whatever leverage was available to influence Soviet behavior in Eastern Europe.
At a private meeting with Truman on May 10, Harriman suggested threatening to curtail Lend-Lease shipments to send Moscow a signal that he meant what he said about Poland and Eastern Europe. The president signed a directive that was interpreted as an order to stop shipments immediately. It was implemented on May 12, provoking Soviet and British protests, as shipments to Britain were affected as well. The directive was immediately recalled, as the Americans still needed the Soviets to fight in the war on Japan, and the Soviets needed fresh supplies of armaments, ammunition, and food.10
The change in the White House was looking more and more like a change in the nature of Soviet-American relations. Truman was signaling that he was prepared to risk losing Soviet participation in the United Nations to ensure that they did not create a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe—something his predecessor would never have considered. Harriman played an important role in instigating that change, convincing Truman that concessions were a road to nowhere and that the Soviets needed the Americans more than the Americans needed the Soviets. That belief was also deeply held by the US officers at Poltava, who knew only too well that the Soviets were flying American airplanes and driving Lend-Lease cars and trucks while treating Americans as unwanted guests who had outstayed their welcome.11
By early May 1945, the two allies could hardly agree on anything, including Victory in Europe Day. News of the German surrender reached the Americans at Poltava by radio broadcast at 5:00 p.m. on May 7. Celebrations, accompanied by the firing of guns into the air, began immediately but involved only the Americans. The Soviets had received no official announcement from Moscow about the surrender and refused to take part.
The victory celebrated by the Americans had been declared in Reims, France, in the early hours of May 7. General Eisenhower signed the documents stipulating the unconditional surrender of Germany on behalf of the Western Allies. General Alfred Jodl signed on behalf of the German government. The Soviets were represented by General Ivan Susloparov, who put his signature on the document next to those of the representatives of the British and French governments and armed forces. The Germans were surrendering on both the Western and the Eastern fronts, but the Soviets felt that they had been robbed of the victory by their Western partners.
The Soviet government declared the Reims surrender a preliminary one and arranged for another ceremony in the Berlin suburb of Karlshorst on May 8. The key figure on the Soviet side was Marshal Georgii Zhukov and, on the German side, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel. On behalf of the Western Allies, the document was signed by two airmen, British Air Chief Marshal Tedder and the American commander of the Strategic Air Forces in Europe, General Spaatz, both involved the Eastern Command’s operations at Poltava. The Soviets could now openly celebrate as well.
News of the German surrender in Berlin was received by General Kovalev at Poltava around 2:00 a.m. on May 9. Celebrations began immediately, leading to the joint Soviet-American parade the following day. Sergeant Chavkin wrote an article published in an army newspaper describing “a colorful parade and carnival in which American air corpsmen marched shoulder to shoulder with their Soviet comrades in arms.” In fact, they marched in separate columns. The Americans noticed that some of the German prisoners of war working on the reconstruction of Poltava under Soviet guard removed their hats when they saw the American flag. The American reaction was dismissive. “It’s too late now to show your respect for the United States,” said one of them. It soon turned out that many of the so-called Germans were in fact Poles exiled to the Soviet Union. They hoped for a better future with the Americans and showed no similar respect for the Soviet flag.12
On May 9, Victory Day in the Soviet Union and the day of the Soviet-American parade, General Spaatz, fresh from the signing of the German surrender documents at Karlshorst, issued an order to close the Poltava base by transferring most of the equipment and supplies to the Soviets under the Lend-Lease program. Captain Trimble and his subordinates got busy with preparations for departure. Relations between the two sides had improved once again. Soviet-American parties celebrating the victory would continue throughout May, and the Soviets would reserve seats for the Americans at performances by Soviet theater groups. “Though in line of duty, frequent conflict and friction arose,” wrote Lieutenant Kaluta, now appointed official historian of Eastern Command, “personal relations were very friendly.” He then added: “It was EASCOM’s diplomatic mission.”13
The “diplomatic mission” was that of strengthening the Grand Alliance and improving Soviet-American relations that the planners of Frantic had put forward back in early 1944. Many officers and sergeants of Eastern Command left transformed by their experience. The face-to-face encounter with their Soviet allies had made a strong impression on the Americans at the base, though for many of them it was not transformative in the way envisioned by their commanders or welcome to their Soviet hosts. Having come to Ukraine with high expectations and great sympathy toward the Soviets, they were leaving utterly disillusioned and, more often than not, even openly hostile to the regime. Others maintained their initial pro-Soviet views or developed sympathy toward the people.
Captain Fischer, ordered out of Poltava on April 28, was leaving Ukraine, where he had spent almost a year, with a new sense of his American beloning. He flew to Paris, the headquarters of USSTAF to which he had been assigned, via Teheran, Greece, and Italy, arriving in time to celebrate V-E Day there. Fischer imagined that he had been summoned for a high-profile job as liaison with the Soviets, possibly for Eisenhower himself. He was in for a disappointment, as there was no such prestigious appointment in the offing. Colonel Hampton, now out of Poltava himself, was concerned about the well-being of his adjutant and fellow conspirator in their joint anti-Soviet crusade. He simply wanted Fischer out of the USSR before he got into real trouble with the Soviets.
Before Hampton left Poltava, Fischer had given him My Lives in Russia, a memoir by his mother, Markusha Fischer, to read. The book, issued in the United States the previous year, candidly described the Fischer family’s experiences in the Soviet Union, including during the Great Terror. Markusha documented the Soviet attempts to prevent her and her American children from leaving the promised land of communism. Hampton felt that had the book, numerous copies of which Fischer kept in his footlocker at Poltava, been discovered by the Soviets Fischer would have found himself in hot water, possibly unable to leave the USSR.14
For Fischer, his year at Poltava had not shaken his love for what he still called his “motherland”—Russia, or the Soviet Union—his mother’s birthplace and the country in which he had grown up. That year had strengthened his disgust with the Stalin regime—an attitude he had first developed after encountering the democratic societies of the West. “Old hate,” wrote Fischer in his memoirs. “The Poltava year boosted it. The hate began soon after I left Moscow. It went back to the unthinkable year 37. My shock got renewed now, the memory of it brought up-to-date. That wed me to Uncle Sam. To the new main foe of the motherland, the new leader of the Free World. Near the end of my Poltava stay I caught it.”15
Even more striking was the evolution of Kaluta, the new official historian of the mission. As noted earlier, Kaluta began his tenure at Poltava with a sense of excitement. He was critical of his more conservative or suspicious countrymen, including Lieutenant Reverditto, Major Kowal, and even Colonel Hampton. But day-to-day encounters with the Soviets transformed his way of looking at things. “I have sharply changed my view of Russia,” Kaluta told a SMERSH informer in May 1945. “I imagined that there was complete freedom in Russia, but in fact the NKVD dictatorship holds sway here,” he continued. “I do not see your officers feeling free. People cannot say what they think here.” In the last weeks of his stay at Poltava, the usually gregarious Kaluta tried to stay away from his Soviet contacts.16
According to SMERSH reports, probably the only US officer at Poltava who had not been disillusioned by the Soviet Union was Chavkin, who arrived later than the others, in August 1944. If one believes SMERSH reports, Chavkin volunteered information about the attitudes of his fellow officers and was even upset when the Soviets took no action on that basis, so that those officers remained in place. He complained that almost everyone around him, including Fischer and Kaluta, was anti-Soviet.17
Even so, Chavkin was not trusted by the Soviets. Given his Jewish-Ukrainian origins, knowledge of Russian, and the fact that he was assigned to the intelligence unit at Poltava, he was immediately entered on the SMERSH list of possible spies. His seemingly naïve questions—why, for example, Soviet republics such as Ukraine were not free to leave the Soviet Union—gave SMERSH grounds to suspect him of spreading anti-Soviet propaganda. His desire to meet Soviet officers in order to write a book about the Battle of Stalingrad was regarded as an attempt to spy on the Red Army.18
Franklyn Holzman remained oblivious to the SMERSH efforts to keep him and his comrades under surveillance and chase away his girlfriends. He left Poltava rather pessimistic about the future of the Soviet-American alliance, but feeling friendlier than ever toward the Soviets. He was now quite proficient in Russian, enjoyed attending Russian and Ukrainian performances in the local theater, and thoroughly enjoyed listening to Soviet musicians. Unaware that his former girlfriend had been prevented from dating him by the secret police, he struck up a relationship with another woman named Natalia. He had no plans to marry Natalia, who for reasons unknown to Holzman avoided being photographed with him (a clear sign that she did not want to leave any evidence of her liaison with an American), but did later consider marrying a woman of Russian descent in the United States, partly to keep up his conversational Russian. That plan came to nothing, but the Russian that Holzman picked up in Myrhorod made a profound impact on his life and decided his future career.19
Some of the Americans left Poltava heartbroken: in Ukraine they had met the love of their lives but were unable to marry. Among those was Sergeant Mishchenko. The son of Ukrainian émigrés to the United States (his father came from the Russian Empire and his mother from Austria-Hungary), Mishchenko was an airplane mechanic selected for Frantic thanks to his knowledge of Russian and Ukrainian. Language skills were in high demands at the bases and Mishchenko helped translate conversations between US officers and Soviets, as well as facilitating contacts of fellow GIs with local girls. His facility in languages naturally and immediately put him under suspicion as a possible spy. SMERSH recruited a Soviet counterpart, one of Mishchenko’s fellow mechanics, to keep an eye on him.20
SMERSH agents soon uncovered Mishchenko’s liaison with Yelena Semizhenova, an attractive young blonde who worked at the local post office. As the Soviets began harassing local women who dated Americans, Semizhenova became a prime target of the secret-police campaign. In the eleven months that they dated, she was arrested by the NKVD five times, told that Mishchenko was a spy, and ordered to report on him. She refused, saying that he was not a spy, and there was nothing to report on. They kept arresting her for failure to cooperate. After the fifth arrest, when they locked her up for two days, Mishchenko, deeply upset, went to the local NKVD headquarters to inquire about her. The duty officer told him that his fiancée, a member of the Young Communist League, was in fact a prostitute, had slept with Germans, and had a venereal disease.
The NKVD refused to release Yelena. When her mother begged them to let her daughter go, they suggested that it was all Mishchenko’s fault. “Today our allies, tomorrow our enemies,” was the explanation they gave Yelena’s mother, who claimed that her daughter was dating a friend, not an enemy of the Soviet Union. Mishchenko turned for help to General Kovalev, who assured him that Yelena had been arrested by mistake. Indeed, she was soon released. She told Mishchenko that before the secret police let her go, they awakened her in the middle of the night for interrogation and told her that her boyfriend had abandoned her. They then told Yelena that the American was not worthy of her and threatened her with ten years’ imprisonment if she continued dating him. Finally they made her sign a pledge that she would never tell anyone what had happened to her in custody.21
Despite ongoing NKVD harassment, Mishchenko and Yelena decided to marry. Mishchenko’s father in America gave his blessing; the US embassy in Moscow did not. When Mishchenko flew to Moscow to petition the embassy for permission to marry, his plea was rejected: it was the policy of the US military mission to discourage such marriages, given the Soviet government’s refusal to allow Soviet wives to leave the country with their American husbands. Mishchenko returned to Poltava with the bad news, sending Yelena into a depression. According to SMERSH reports, she was afraid that with Mishchenko gone, the secret police would be free to do with her as they pleased. SMERSH was concerned that Mishchenko might try to smuggle his fiancée out of the country by placing her on a flight to Teheran. He made no such effort. Heartbroken, Mishchenko left the Poltava base in June 1945. Yelena Semizhenova stayed in Poltava, the subject of an ongoing secret-police investigation.22
Kaluta, who tried to help Mishchenko in dealing with the Soviets and included the story of his relations with Yelena in his history of Eastern Command, was the only American who managed a successful romance in Poltava. In April 1945, Kaluta married a fellow American, Second Lieutenant Clotilde Govoni, a nurse stationed at the Poltava base. Their wedding took place at the Poltava City Hall in the presence of numerous onlookers. Captain Trimble, the senior officer at the base, took the place of Clotilde’s father. Red Air Force officers were happy to bring gifts to the wedding. The newlyweds spent a few weeks of their honeymoon in Egypt, their departure from Poltava delayed by the April ban on flights.23
In May 1945, Kaluta returned to participate in the closing of the American base in Poltava. On June 23, Trimble and Kaluta became the last American officers to leave the base. Trimble boarded a Douglas C-47 Skytrain to Moscow, from where he would fly to USSTAF headquarters in Paris. Kaluta took a similar plane to Cairo. Being fully committed to his new role of the official historian of the mission, he took along a precious cargo—the Eastern Command records that would serve as the basis for his history and one of the key sources of this book. The story of the Poltava bases was effectively over. Their history was about to begin.24