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1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Serhii Plokhy 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Plokhy, Serhii, 1957– author.
Title: Forgotten bastards of the Eastern Front : American airmen behind the Soviet lines and the collapse of the Grand Alliance / Serhii Plokhy.
Other titles: American airmen behind the Soviet lines and the collapse of the Grand Alliance
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019] | Summary: “At the conference held in Tehran in November 1943, American officials proposed to their Soviet allies a new operation in the effort to defeat Nazi Germany. The Normandy Invasion was already in the works; what American officials were suggesting until then was for the US Air Force to establish bases in Soviet-controlled territory, in order to “shuttle-bomb” the Germans from the Eastern front. For all that he had been pushing for the United States and Great Britain to do more to help the war effort—the Soviets were bearing the heaviest burden in terms of casualties—Stalin balked at the suggestion of foreign soldiers on Soviet soil. His concern was that they would inflame regional and ideological differences. Eventually in early 1944, Stalin was persuaded to give in, and Operation Baseball and then Frantic were initiated in the Poltova region (in what is today Ukraine). As Plokhy’s book shows, what happened on these airbases mirrors the nature of the Grand Alliance itself. While both sides were fighting for the same goal, Germany’s unconditional surrender, differences arose that no common purpose could overcome. Soviet secret policeman watched over the operations, shadowing every move, and eventually trying to prevent fraternization between American servicemen and local women. A catastrophic air raid by the Germans revealed the limitations of Soviet air defenses. Relations soured and the operations went south. The story of the American bases foreshadowed the eventual collapse of the Grand Alliance and the start of the Cold War. Using previously inaccessible archives, Allies and Adversaries offers a bottom-up history of the Grand Alliance, showing how it first began to fray on the airfields of World War II.”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019004678 | ISBN 9780190061012 (hardback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939–1945—Aerial operations, American. | World War, 1939–1945—Aerial operations, Russian. | Air bases—Ukraine—History—20th century. | World War, 1939–1945—Ukraine. | United States—Relations—Soviet Union. | Soviet Union—Relations—United States.
Classification: LCC D790 .P64 2019 | DDC 940.54/497309477—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004678
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
Preface vii
Prologue xiii
Part I: Grand Alliance 1
1 Mission to Moscow 3
2 Stalin’s Verdict 12
3 Going Frantic 21
4 Poltava 32
Part II: The Battles of Poltava 43
5 Soft Landing 45
6 Comrades in Arms 58
7 Death to Spies 75
8 Pearl Harbor on the Steppes 87
9 Forbidden Love 104
10 Picking a Fight 122
11 Fall of Warsaw 135
Part III: Strange Bedfellows 149
12 Forgotten Bastards of Ukraine 151
13 Watchtower 164
14 New Year’s Dance 176
15 Yalta 186
16 Prisoners of War 198
17 Rupture 211
18 Last Parade 224
Part IV: Cold War Landing 237
19 Spoils of War 239
20 Poltava Suspects 250
21 Witch Hunt 261
22 Washington Reunion 270
Epilogue 283
Acknowledgments 293 Notes 295 Index 327
PREFACE
In 1950, Winston Churchill named one of the volumes of his World War II memoirs, “Grand Alliance.” He borrowed that term from the name used when England, Scotland, and European powers joined together against France in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a partnership that diminished the power of France and led to the rise of Britain. Like its early modern predecessor, the Grand Alliance of the twentieth century turned out to be an astonishing success when it came to achieving its immediate goals. American assistance to Britain and the USSR through the Lend-Lease program, the opening of the second front in Europe in June 1944, and the Soviet declaration of war on Japan in August 1945 were the most salient features of Allied cooperation. The summits of the Big Three— as Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill were called by the media—first in Teheran in 1943 and then in Yalta in 1945, ensured the unity of the Allied powers throughout the war, leading to the defeat of the Axis and helping to produce a new international order and the organization that embodied it,
the United Nations, the longest-lived international coordinating body in world history.
Greater than the military success of the second Grand Alliance was the expectation that it would continue into the postwar era, and greater still was the disappointment that followed its collapse a few years later. By 1948 the world was effectively divided into two camps, with the United States and Britain belonging to one and the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites to the other. The following year saw the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a military alliance of the Western powers, followed in 1955 by the Warsaw Pact between the Moscow-led communist regimes of Eastern Europe. By that time the world found itself threatened not only with a new world war but also with the possibility of nuclear annihilation. The Grand Alliance ended in a Grand Failure, symbolized by Churchill’s other famous coinage, the “Iron Curtain” that divided postwar Europe in half.
“What went wrong?” was the question asked throughout the world. Who was responsible for the start of the Cold War? Some pointed to Joseph Stalin and his efforts to carve up Iran and take control of the Black Sea straits, as well as his imposition of communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Others suggested that America’s use of the atomic bomb in August 1945 and its subsequent refusal to share the new technology with the Soviet Union had shifted the world’s power balance, leaving Stalin no choice but to consolidate his wartime geostrategic gains. This book will take a different track, revealing the roots of Cold War conflicts and nightmares in the story of the Grand Alliance itself. My main argument is quite simple: that it was doomed from within by conflict between the Soviet and American political traditions and cultures, and that it began to fall apart during rather than after World War II.
This is the story of collapse from below, focusing on the only place where the Soviets and Americans actually got the chance to live and fight side by side—the three American Air Force bases established on Soviet-controlled territory in April 1944. Taking off from airfields in Britain and Italy, American airplanes would bomb their targets and then land at these bases, which were located in the Poltava area of today’s Ukraine, repeating the
bombing on their way back to Britain or Italy. For the final year of the war in Europe, Americans worked intimately with Soviets. The Poltava bases were not small or merely symbolic. Thousands of pilots, airplane mechanics, and rank-and-file soldiers participated in the shuttle operations. Moreover, tens of thousands of Ukrainian citizens were able to meet US Airmen and, in some cases, establish close personal relations with them. Thus, this story is very much about people—their lives, views, and emotions.
The history of the air bases in Ukraine in 1944–1945 has a significant literature. The American side is well documented, thanks to the vast array of sources available to scholars in US archives and library collections. Four well-documented and more or less contemporaneous official histories of Frantic, as the American shuttle-bombing operations were called by the commanders of the US Strategic Air Forces in Europe, each covering a different period of time, have been preserved. The archives of the US Air Force Historical Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama and the documentary collection of the US Military Mission to Moscow at the National Archives and Records Administration in Maryland, the Averell Harriman Archive at the Library of Congress, and President Roosevelt’s papers at the FDR Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York, provide rich source material for this account of the bases and those of my predecessors.1
What makes this account quite unique is the use of previously unavailable sources—files of the Committee for State Security (KGB) and its predecessors, documenting Soviet military counterintelligence and secretpolice surveillance of Americans and their contacts in the Red Army Air Force and the local population. The files begin with the establishment of the bases and continue into the onset and mounting tension of the Cold War from the late 1940s to the early and mid-1950s. The Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine, which took place in 2013–2014, resulted among other things in an archival revolution—the unprecedented opening of former KGB archives, including World War II materials inherited from military counterintelligence. The reports of spies and the memos of their masters and handlers— comprising about two dozen thick volumes—have now become available
to scholars and the public at large. As the Americans suspected, the Soviets actively spied on their allies, recording not only their actions but also their views.
With a level of clarity and precision that few sources can match, the KGB documents describe Soviet attitudes toward American servicemen, the evolution of relations between Soviets and Americans on the Poltava-area bases, and the transformation in the guests’ attitudes toward their hosts. Taken together, American military records and Soviet counterintelligence reports provide a solid basis for our understanding of the role of politics, ideology, and culture in forging elations between the wartime allies. They leave little doubt that relations deteriorated not only because of the disappearance of the common enemy, or ideological incompatibility, or the change in Soviet and American geopolitical calculations as the war drew to its conclusion. No less important was the experience of these American servicemen, which turned even most of the pro-Soviet among them into committed opponents. The conflict of profoundly different worldviews and values shared by the rank-and-file participants of the Soviet-American encounter undermined the Grand Alliance even before the greater geopolitical reasons for its existence disappeared, reasons that conflict presaged and reflected.
With the winds of the new Cold War becoming chillier by the day, we need to look back at how the Grand Alliance played out in those American airbases in Ukraine in 1944–1945 and learn from the experience of those who did their best to make it work. One obvious lesson to future generations is that partnerships can be sustained for some time by the need to defeat a common enemy, but no mutual trust and enduring relationship can be established between allies with incompatible visions of the just political order and, at the end, of freedom and tyranny.
Mission to Moscow
The welcoming party had reached the Central Airport in Moscow well ahead of the arrival of the guests. It was the late afternoon of October 18, 1943, and with the night temperatures hovering around freezing level, unusually cold even by Moscow standards. Viacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, a stocky man with a square jaw, a Mexican-style moustache, and glasses perched on his slightly pointed nose, was getting cold. So were his numerous deputies, the officers and soldiers of the honor guard, and the musicians of the brass band. Although the airport was less than five miles from the Kremlin, a fifteen-minute drive at most for a government motorcade, Molotov had not wanted to take any risks and came early. The guests he was to receive were US Secretary of State Cordell Hull and British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden.1
With time on their hands, Molotov and his party found shelter from the chilly weather in the airport building, the first terminal in the Soviet Union to become operational. The airport—popularly known as Khodynka after the Khodynka Field, where in May 1896 more than 1,300 people had been trampled to death by festive crowds celebrating the coronation of the last Russian emperor, Nicholas II—was the cradle of Soviet aviation. In 1922,
five years after the revolution and only one year after the end of the subsequent civil war, the victorious Bolsheviks had launched their first international flight, to Königsberg and Berlin, from Khodynka Field. Russia and Germany, the two international outcasts at the end of World War I, were looking to the future together, and the sky was anything but the limit to their cooperation. On the contrary, it offered opportunities to enhance their relations. Seventeen years later, in August 1939, Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, flew to Moscow by the same route to sign the pact with Molotov that provided for a German-Soviet condominium in Europe, and launched World War II.2
Now, at the very airport where Ribbentrop had landed only four years earlier, Molotov awaited the arrival of new allies. The Soviet Union needed Cordell Hull and Anthony Eden to help defeat its erstwhile ally, Germany. Contrary to all assurances, Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, and by December of that year his troops had advanced all the way to Moscow, a few dozen miles from the capital’s airport. But now the situation was not so dire. The Red Army had driven the Germans back from Moscow in December 1941, and in February 1943, with the help of American supplies pouring into the USSR under Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease program, defeated them at Stalingrad. The tide of war had turned in favor of the Soviets.
Yet the prospect of victory was still distant. In October 1943, the Red Army was still fighting the Germans in the middle of Ukraine and getting ready to attack Hitler’s Eastern Wall—the defensive line along the Dnieper. That river, as wide as 700 meters or 2,300 feet in places, was a formidable obstacle. Nikolai Gogol’s claim in his novel of Cossack life, Taras Bulba, “rare is the bird that flies to the middle of the Dnieper,” was no idle observation. The Battle of the Dnieper, which had begun in August 1943 and would continue into early winter, would cost the Red Army up to 350,000 officers and soldiers dead, with total casualties of almost 1.5 million. With victories like that, the Red Army could soon run out of men. The Soviet leaders needed American help.
Molotov had flown to London and Washington in May 1942, pushing for a joint British-American second front in Western Europe. Roosevelt promised to help, but the British were dragging their feet. The invasion began in July 1943, not in Western but in Southern Europe, with the Allies
landing on the shores of Sicily—a British-endorsed plan meant to protect their Mediterranean route to India. By early September they were fighting on the Italian mainland. Molotov’s boss, Joseph Stalin, was by no means happy. The Germans could defend the Apennine Peninsula without withdrawing any divisions from the Eastern Front. As far as the Soviets were concerned, this was no second front. Only a landing in France would force Hitler to withdraw divisions from the East, and they wanted it as soon as possible. They also needed a continuing supply of Lend-Lease armaments, including the newest aircraft that only America knew how to produce and could supply. They hoped that Cordell Hull would help to deliver both.3
What Molotov and his party soon saw in the sky was a perfect embodiment of American power and technological superiority. Sometime after 4:00 p.m. three huge silver Douglas C-54 Skymasters, glistening in the last rays of the autumn sun, appeared above Khodynka Field and began to maneuver for landing.
The Soviets wanted the Skymaster as part of Lend-Lease, but the Americans were hesitant to deliver one of their newest planes—it was only in its second year of operation. Washington needed C-54s for the Pacific war and the forthcoming invasion of Europe. The four-engine Skymasters were 93 feet in length, with a wingspan of 117 feet. They could cover a distance of up to 4,000 miles at an altitude of 22,000 feet, with a cruising speed of 190 miles per hour. With a crew of four, the plane could take up to fifty soldiers on board. Originally designed as a passenger plane and later converted to military purposes, the plane could be reconverted and indeed served as flying headquarters for American leaders and military commanders. In January 1943 President Roosevelt used the presidential C-54, popularly known as the “Sacred Cow” because it was so heavily guarded, to fly to Casablanca for a meeting with Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain. To Stalin’s deep satisfaction, the two Western allies decided to wage war until the complete defeat or “unconditional surrender” of Germany.4
Secretary Hull and his party needed all the comfort that the VIP version of the Skymaster could offer on their long trip to Moscow. Having
taken off from Washington on October 7, they had first to fly to Puerto Rico and then embark on a sea voyage to Casablanca. There they boarded planes that had crossed the Atlantic without their human cargo and flew to Algiers, then to Cairo, then Teheran, and finally to Moscow. Hull, who had turned seventy-two shortly before the trip, was in visibly poor health and anything but a happy traveler. The doctors, fearing that at an altitude above 8,000 feet he would suffer a heart attack, sent a Navy doctor to administer oxygen to Hull as required. The secretary of state was determined to reach Moscow.
The second most important person on Hull’s team was the newly minted US ambassador to Moscow, Averell Harriman. The tall, lanky New Yorker was about to mark his fifty-second birthday but looked much younger. His open face, with its large, manly features and broad smile, made him popular with women and helped secure his reputation as a successful dealmaker. Like many members of Roosevelt’s administration during the war, Harriman had been a businessman. With the help of his friend and the president’s right-hand man, Harry Hopkins, Harriman joined the Roosevelt administration in the spring of 1941. Roosevelt needed someone with business experience to administer his Lend-Lease program with Britain. Harriman traveled to London to become the president’s special representative in Europe, with responsibility for running a billion-dollar program to provide American supplies to Britain and keep it afloat in the war with Germany. In September 1941 he flew from London to Moscow to negotiate with Stalin an extension of Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union, and in October 1943 Roosevelt appointed Harriman US ambassador in Moscow. Roosevelt wanted Harriman to go to Moscow to reassure Stalin about American goodwill, establish closer military cooperation in the run-up to the second front, and, last but not least, negotiate with him on the future of Eastern Europe, especially Soviet plans for territorial acquisitions at the expense of the Baltic states, Poland, and Romania on the basis of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Roosevelt wanted the Soviets to restrain their ambitions in exchange for future cooperation with the United States and Britain. He was prepared to offer Stalin the right to negotiate as an equal with the Western powers, give assurances of Soviet access to Baltic ports
through international agreements, and provide financial and technical assistance in rebuilding the war-torn Soviet Union.5
Before leaving Washington, first for London and then for Moscow, Harriman received Roosevelt’s assurances that he would be privy to all aspects of American-Soviet relations, including military cooperation. Not only was Harriman’s wish granted but also he got to choose the military mission’s head. General George Marshall, the US Army chief of staff, agreed to send to Moscow one of the two people suggested by Harriman, the fortyseven-year-old secretary of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, Major General John Russell Deane, who was highly capable and respected in Washington. General Deane, known to his friends as Russ, was now on the same flight to Moscow as Harriman and Hull. “I was eager, hopeful, confident, and happy,” wrote Deane later about the feelings he had on the flight. Like Harriman, Deane believed that he could get along with the Soviets. After all, getting along with the Americans was in their interest as well. He was happy to leave behind his secretarial duties in Washington and take charge of his own command. He also welcomed the opportunity to work with Harriman, whom he respected and admired.6
If Harriman saw it as his main task in Moscow to negotiate a postwar settlement in Europe, Deane’s prime objective was the coordination of the Soviet-American effort to defeat Germany. The second front—the invasion of France—was still months away, but here was an opportunity to begin immediate cooperation with the Soviets. Before their departure for Moscow, both Harriman and Deane were approached by General Henry “Hap” Arnold, the commander of the US Air Force, then engaged with the British Royal Air Force in joint bombing raids on Germany and its European allies. American pilots would bomb Germany from British bases and then return to Britain. Arnold wanted Harriman and Deane to convince the Soviets to allow the US Air Force to establish bases on Sovietheld territory. Bombers could then fly much farther behind the German lines, taking off from Britain and landing in the Soviet Union, then flying back a few days later with a new supply of bombs, not only to destroy German industrial targets in Eastern Europe but also to soften up their defenses on the Eastern Front.
It sounded like a win-win proposal. “Harriman and I,” recalled Deane, “were delighted with Arnold’s attitude and went to Russia feeling certain that sheer logic would enable us to carry out his wishes.” They believed that bases on the Soviet side of the Eastern Front would prepare the ground for similar bases in the Far East, where the American commanders were counting not only on Soviet participation but also on the acquisition of air bases to launch bombing raids on the Japanese mainland. Deane, who was not an airman himself but, as secretary of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had had many dealings with Arnold and the US Air Force in Europe, was eager to make the air base proposal his top priority in Moscow. On the way from the United States to the Middle East and then to the Soviet Union, he made a stopover in London to visit the headquarters of the US Eighth Air Force, which was raiding German targets in Europe. He met with commanding officers there and collected materials on the results of the strategic bombing of Europe, as well as a list of targets in Eastern Europe that the American pilots could not reach unless they were granted landing rights in the Soviet Union. With his task cut out for him, Deane looked forward to the start of his Moscow mission.7
The Skymaster flight from Teheran to Moscow was nothing if not a demonstration of the desire of American and Soviet airmen to work together. In Teheran the Soviets added their own radio operator and navigator to the American crew to ensure that the plane would not get lost in Soviet airspace or be mistaken for an enemy aircraft. But if the desire to work together was there, the opportunity to do so was limited indeed. Ambassador’s Harriman’s daughter, Kathleen, who accompanied him on the flight, wrote to her sister, Mary: “Shortly after we got going, I got a formal note from Hull’s pilot . . . that the pleasure of my company was requested up front.” When Kathleen walked to the cockpit of the Skymaster, she noticed the American pilots arguing with their Soviet counterparts. The Soviets insisted on flying at a high altitude, while the Americans refused, as the doctors had prohibited Hull from flying above 8,000 feet. The problem, as Kathleen wrote later to Mary, was that “no one spoke any known language in common.” Neither did Kathleen, but the American pilots still put her between themselves and their Soviet counterparts. The presence of a young woman calmed both sides.
Kathleen Harriman, or Kathy, as she was known to her friends and family, had joined her father in London in May 1941, working first for the International News Service and then for Newsweek. At twenty-six, an equestrian enthusiast, Kathy was tall and sporty. Her broad smile and outgoing personality made her popular with men. Unlike the ailing Secretary Hull, she was looking forward to her Moscow adventure. In her time in Moscow she would learn Russian and become a hostess at the American embassy, smoothing over quite a few conflicts between Soviet and American diplomats and military officers, who tended to behave with greater reserve in female company. She had already discovered that talent on the flight to Moscow. “By the time we neared Stalingrad all tension and difficulty ceased & in sign language the Battle of Stalingrad was fought out for us,” wrote Kathy to her sister. “By the time we reached Moscow we were all fast friends.”8
To the disbelief of the American pilots, the Soviet navigator was bringing the Skymaster to its destination by following rivers, railroads, and highways. They flew over the Kremlin before making their landing at the Moscow Central Airport. “From the window of my plane,” wrote John Deane later, “I could see the domes of the Kremlin blackened with war paint, the sparkling waters of the Moscow River, Red Square, St. Basil’s Church, and the glistening bayonets of a guard of honor waiting in the field below to salute for the Soviet Union our great Secretary of State, Cordell Hull.” After circling the airport and locating the landing strip, the Skymaster made its final approach. The long trip from Washington to Moscow was finally over.9
Viacheslav Molotov, his deputies and entourage, whom Deane found “blue with cold that had penetrated to the marrow,” greeted the American delegation, clearly happy that their freezing wait had come to an end.
Molotov and Hull inspected the guard of honor. The band played the Soviet anthem, the Internationale, the hymn of the European socialist movement. Its lyrics promised nothing good to the capitalist world: “We will destroy this world of violence / Down to the foundations, and then / We will build our new world,” went the Russian translation of the song. The band went on to play “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Its words, “In God is our
trust,” occasioned no diplomatic embarrassment, as neither anthem was sung. Deane found the performance of the American anthem “excellent though slightly unfamiliar.”10
Also waiting on the tarmac to greet the Americans was the British delegation to the Moscow talks, led by Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. It was a solemn occasion. After Molotov went to the microphone to welcome the Allies, Hull and Eden responded with brief greetings of their own. Hull said that it gave him “special satisfaction to visit Moscow, the capital of the country united with my own in common cause.” Later that day Hull, Eden, and Molotov, accompanied by their respective delegations, met in Molotov’s Kremlin office to define that cause and how best to attain it. They agreed to issue a short communiqué listing the names of the US and British officials who had arrived in Moscow and the Soviet officials who met them at the airport, though no purpose of the visit was announced to the media.11
There was good reason not only for secrecy, given wartime conditions, but also for restraint in commenting publicly on possible outcomes of the visit. The leading Allied diplomats came to Moscow to take part in the first ministerial conference on the postwar world order. The participants in the Moscow Conference, as the meeting later came to be known, had high ambitions, but there was no telling whether the visions of the future presented by the three allies would coincide. Over the course of twelve days, from October 19 to October 30, the three foreign ministers would discuss the creation of the United Nations Organization and the launch of a European Advisory Commission to deal with liberated countries and territories in Europe. They would debate the eradication of fascism in Italy, the restoration of Austrian independence, and the prosecution of those guilty of war crimes. It was the start of a long process of looking for common ground in the organization of the postwar world. Difficulties lay ahead, but the hopes were flying high.12
Soviet-American cooperation was entering a new era, and Harriman and Deane believed that it would be a bright one. Meeting with Molotov on October 21, Harriman told the Soviet foreign commissar that he had come “as a friend.” He expressed his hope that one day the two of them would take a flight in Harriman’s high-speed plane. Having become exceptionally
close to Churchill during his days in London, Harriman was now trying to make friends in Moscow and in particular to establish personal relations with Molotov. Inviting friends in government to enjoy his family’s fortune— Harriman’s father had been a railroad tycoon and he was a millionaire many times over—by attending dinners, riding horses, and driving in fast cars and planes had worked in both business and politics in the West. Harriman was trying the same approach in Moscow, offering friendship and expecting friendship in return.13
Before long both Averell and Kathy Harriman were developing an emotional attachment to the country and its people. “Now I’m just beginning to realize that the good old Russian communiqués that deal in impersonal heroics and the huge number of dead, missing and wounded mean something very personal here in the way of friends and family,” wrote Kathy to Mary on November 5. “When you get down to it, despite the teachings that the State comes first, the Russian still is a human being and funny enough, the government treats him as such—and so the reason for periodic fireworks when a new victory is announced and the dressing up of the bombed buildings.”14
The American team had arrived in Moscow full of enthusiasm and determined to advance Soviet-American relations to a new stage, including not only summit meetings between the leaders of the Grand Alliance but also direct military cooperation between American and Soviet forces. General Deane, whose job was to establish such cooperation, was as eager to succeed as anyone else. He believed that he could achieve his goal by breaking through the façade of the communist state to the shared humanity behind it.
