World War II Behind Closed Doors (31 page)

He soon discovered that dead bodies were a common sight in the streets of Molotovsk: ‘Several times in the morning we'd get up early and walk up to the town, and then in the gutters you'd see a body lying there – an old body. Grandfathers etc., they couldn't work…and didn't have enough to eat’.

‘It was a big shock’, says Risk. ‘I had no idea that people could be treated that way and still not do something violent in return…. We had learned that Stalin was a brute just like Hitler was a brute. They were just brutes in a different language. [When] I came back I was interviewed in New York on a radio station about the trip and one of the questions was: “How do you feel about the future of Russia?” And I said: “Well, you know, all those millions of people they have over there are treated like animals. They're prisoners in their own country. They have a commissar that rules them day and night and they can only do what he or she says. And they're going to rise up in righteous indignation and overthrow Stalin”. Well, they didn't – but that was my attitude. I said I cannot conceive of people being treated this way and still not doing something violent in return’.

But although Risk found ‘the system’ in the Soviet Union repulsive, he discovered that the ‘ordinary’ citizens could be generous and friendly. He remembers that there was ‘lots of fraternization going on’. The most noticeable sign of this – clearly visible to him on his second trip to the city, later in the war – was the sight of ‘black babies’. ‘We had black crew on board ships, mostly in the storage department, and they went ashore and connected. Not very many of them, you know, but there were a
few black babies. There could have been some white babies, but we would not recognize that’.

On his first trip to the Soviet Union, Risk and his shipmates were waiting nearly nine months for a return convoy. As a result, the food on the American ships began to run out, and eventually all they had left was their emergency supply of Spam. The paucity and monotony of the diet, combined with the intensely depressing atmosphere, began to turn a few American minds to thoughts of self-harm. ‘We had two suicides in our four American ships tied up there’, says Risk. ‘We had no idea when we were gonna go home – if we were ever gonna go home. As far as we knew, we might just become Russian citizens!’

Risk witnessed at first hand the attempted suicide of one seventeen-year-old sailor on his own ship: ‘We had a guard on the top of the flying bridge of the ship – that's 45 feet above the water level. And his job is to walk back and forth and survey everything that's going on and make the ship secure…. He was walking back and forth and my state room was right under that section of the bridge…and as I stepped out of my state room I could hear him walking and then all of a sudden I heard a scuffle and I looked up and he was on the edge of the bridge [and] jumped into the water…. And I yelled to the bosun to launch the lifeboat and I dived after this kid. It was so cold! Anyway, we both came to the surface and I grabbed him and he was willing to be grabbed, and by that point they'd launched a lifeboat and they came and picked us up’. So severe was the young sailor's depression that he was immediately sent home on an American merchantman sailing from Britain to the United States. But the story has a sad end: ‘He managed to jump off the side of that ship on the way [back] and committed suicide’, says Risk. ‘He was from Georgia – a farm boy…. He was just despondent, despondent… it was such a waste’.

The personal experience of these American sailors in the Soviet Union was so searing that previously held allegiances changed completely. ‘Aboard my ship, for instance’, says Risk, ‘when we went to Russia we had six members aboard who were red [Communists] – “pinkies,” we called them. And when we got back
to Philadelphia Navy Yard at the end of the year they were no longer pinkies. They had learned what a mistake it was’. And as for Stalin, Risk had formed the view, as a result of his acquaintance with the Soviet regime – that he was ‘the dirtiest, filthiest personality in the world’.

The Allied sailors, of course, experienced life in the northern ports of the Soviet Union and in due course returned home. But for the women who fraternized with them, life was altogether different. Valentina Ievleva, for example, who loved to frequent the International Club and flirt with foreign sailors, faced vilification because of the life she now led: ‘Everybody, from children to elderly people, they called me an “English doormat”. Not American, but English – I think it was easier to pronounce’. In addition her ‘girlfriends stopped being my friends’ – they were ‘jealous of me because I could dance with any man I liked and I took their men away from them. I came to the club in a very plain cotton dress, and from all corners of the room immediately three or four people got to their feet and came up to me. I was a great success’. This ‘jealousy’ that Valentina experienced was not, however, occasioned entirely by envy of her beauty and charm. There was also a more practical reason: ‘In the International Club it was chocolate and chewing gum and cigarettes only. But if they came to your home they brought you soup and canned meat and sausage and whatever they had. I remember there were biscuits. I will remember it for ever. There was peanut butter in those biscuits. It was so delicious. I still remember this’.

She recognizes that some people might feel her actions came close to prostitution – a charge she denies. ‘I'm not excluding the material factor’, she says, ‘but I think the main driving factor was fondness – liking…. I don't think we were selling ourselves. But I'm not denying the material factor. It was also important to get something material. Let's face facts – it helped you survive the next day’. And then, almost inevitably given the circumstances, Valentina became pregnant. She had met, on one of her frequent visits to the International Club, an American sailor from Brooklyn. ‘We slept together’, she says simply. ‘He said: “We are married –
you are my wife, I am your husband”’. The relationship lasted for four months until the sailor returned home. And the baby was born in February 1945.

Valentina dreamt of living a new and glamorous life in America: ‘Everyone was saying: “You're so beautiful – if you came to Hollywood you would become famous”. I just wanted to be an actress. I had no idea whatsoever about American life. I was very young and I was thoughtless…everyone was admiring me. Everyone was open and I greeted them in the same way. The world looked wonderful’.

But her ‘wonderful’ life and dreams of America were destroyed when the NKVD began to take an interest in her. Stalin had always been suspicious of contacts between foreigners and Soviet citizens and anyone who had spent time with a foreigner was a suspect. In such an environment Valentina Ievleva, with her baby fathered by an American, was more at risk than most, and when her flat was searched by the NKVD they found a diary she had been writing. It was merely a collection of girlish dreams and longings, but sections of it were underlined by the investigators as incriminating. They included sentiments such as: ‘I want to go to America so much. I dream about it day and night. To be an actress in America you only have to be beautiful. And here? To be beautiful is not enough, you have to have ten years of schooling’.
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And so, armed with these devastating discoveries, the NKVD accused Valentina of ‘spying for two intelligence services – of being both an American and a British spy’.

‘My investigator was saying: “Tell me about your spying activities,” and I was only smiling at him. What could I have seen? What could I have done? How could I be guilty? Of loving someone? I loved a man, so what was wrong with that? Who did I harm? I didn't harm anyone, only myself!’ Her interrogator followed normal NKVD practice in such circumstances and asked Valentina the same question over and over again: ‘What were your spying activities? What were your spying activities?’ During the ‘investigation’ – mostly conducted at night – Valentina was deprived of sleep. When her investigator was bored with his single
question he read the paper or talked to his wife on the phone, but ensured that Valentina stayed awake. The interrogation normally ended at about five in the morning, and only then was Valentina taken back to her cell. But she was forced to get up again at seven and, like the rest of the prison population, was not allowed to sleep during the day. All this left her with lifelong insomnia.

Once during the interrogation, tired and frustrated, she spoke angrily back to her tormentor, saying: ‘How did you help your Soviet Motherland? By arresting and interrogating people! Is that how you helped your Motherland?’ For this crime Valentina was sentenced to several days in the punishment cell – a tiny, concrete-floored cage about 6 feet by 9 feet. She survived by singing songs in English she had learnt from the movies she had watched at the International Club. She refused to stop when ordered to, and as a result was forced into a straitjacket: ‘After that I burst into tears and they told me to stop crying, which I couldn't. But soon the doctor came and they untied me. That's how I suffered for my resistance’.

Valentina was sentenced to six years in a Gulag for the ‘crime’ of fraternization and ‘spying’. But her fundamental optimism and humanity were not crushed by the experience of working in a penal camp, dragging logs in the icy north of the Soviet Union. Instead she focused on the positive gains from her wartime experience, which included the ability to belly-dance, a skill she had first seen in a Hollywood movie at the International Club. ‘After that film I stood in front of the mirror and practised belly-dancing, and so I learnt to do it… [then] in the Gulag it helped me because no other woman could do belly-dancing and they [the other prisoners] asked me to demonstrate it again and again. “Do you have any artificial parts?” they asked. And everyone was surprised’.

And still, with the knowledge of hindsight, Valentina Ievleva would not have chosen to act differently: ‘I remember those years [visiting the International Club] as the best years of my life. I would be ready to go to the Gulag for ten more years if I could spend three years living like that – the love, the admiration, the compliments. It's like a drug’.

THE KURSK OFFENSIVE

As spring turned to summer in 1943, Stalin and the rest of the Soviet leadership anticipated a massive German offensive in the centre of the front around the city of Kursk, 400 miles south of Moscow. And still in 1943 the signs were that the Germans had not lost their ability to destroy the Red Army once the snows melted. During February and March German troops under Field Marshal Erich von Manstein had managed to retake Kharkov in the Ukraine, and now they had assembled a massive attacking force near Kursk. Their plan was simple. Around the Soviet-held city there was a bulge in the front line that contained nearly 20 per cent of the Red Army. The Germans planned to attack simultaneously north from Kharkov and south from Orel in a gigantic encirclement, reminiscent of the glory days of Kiev and Vyazma in 1941. The scale of this encounter dwarfs the imagination. Three times more tanks would fight at Kursk than participated in the battle of El Alamein, the most famous armoured encounter in the West, and the battlefield was spread over an area as large as Belgium.

But the German attack lost all element of surprise because the operation was delayed until July, when new armaments – in particular the powerful Panther tank – were expected to arrive. And, unbeknownst to the Germans, the Soviet High Command already knew from intelligence sources the details of the offensive. In particular John Cairncross, the Soviet spy who worked at the British decoding unit at Bletchley Park, provided intricate information that officially the British would not give their Soviet ally for fear of compromising the source – ‘Ultra’, gained from breaking German Enigma codes.

As a consequence of all this fore-knowledge, the Soviets dug massive defence works just behind their lines – more than half a million mines were laid and elaborate anti-tank ditches were prepared. But still the Red Army soldiers were insecure – after all, uppermost in their minds was the knowledge that they had never successfully held a German summer offensive. ‘I often had shivers down my spine’, says Mikhail Borisov,
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a Soviet artilleryman at
Kursk, ‘the result of fear. I didn't know what would happen if we had to come face-to-face with the German tanks’.

By contrast, the mood amongst German tank crews was high: ‘The Tiger [tank] was good’, says Alfred Rubbel,
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a tank commander who took part in the German assault on Kursk from the south. ‘We had good leadership…there wasn't much you could do against the Tiger – that made us a bit reckless sometimes’. But as soon as the battle began, Rubbel realized that Kursk would be a different kind of encounter from the easy victories of 1941. ‘The Russians shot – we'd never experienced it before – such an initial barrage… it was so dense…. We crossed the river and immediately afterwards we came into a minefield. All fourteen vehicles got stuck there. The second company never had a very good reputation, so twelve Tiger tanks were gone’.

During the intense fighting the officer in charge of Mikhail Borisov's artillery battery was killed and he had to take over command. He and two comrades fired shell after shell: ‘I found the tank in the sighting device and fired. And the tank caught fire. Then I loaded the next shell and released the second…and I was lucky again…. And I set the next tank on fire…the hatch opened and the tank driver, a tall guy, young, very thin, wearing black overalls, he stood on the turret and he shook his fist in our direction…. He was no threat to me. But I shot directly at him and I killed him’.

‘It was non-stop shooting’, remembers Wilhelm Roes,
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a tank driver with the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. ‘We at that time were not aware it was such a huge tank battle, but we thought: “God! How many tanks are shooting off?” When a [Soviet] T34 tank explodes the turret flies off and a huge ring of smoke goes up, [and] we saw these rings of smoke coming up. We thought: “How many more are coming? All these rings of smoke going up to the sky!”’ During the battle of Kursk, Roes took part in one of the most famous tank encounters of the war. At Prokhorovka, a small town on the main railway line to the city, 600 Soviet tanks faced 250 German tanks.
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‘The Russian scenery, the landscape, that had been beautiful before was [now] complete chaos’, recalls Roes. ‘Everywhere burning tanks, smoke everywhere, smell of
ammunition, smell of burning corpses. It was like an inferno. It was Hell’. Such was the impact of Prokhorovka on his imagination that he ‘dreamt after the war, not once but a hundred times, that I was again and again on the battlefield of Prokhorovka. But I was alone, and I had to get home from Prokhorovka, through 1500 kilo metres of enemy territory. I was constantly thinking: “How can I do it?” In my dream there were always burning tanks…. I was alone, wondering how I could get back home through the forests, how I could hide. Then my wife would wake me and say, “You're dreaming of Russia again”’.
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