World War II Behind Closed Doors (25 page)

Of all the important figures in the Second World War – with the possible exception of Hitler – Stalin was the one who most needed to be dealt with coolly and objectively. This was something that General Sir Alan Brooke immediately recognized on seeing Stalin for the first time during the August 1942 meeting in Moscow. ‘Stalin is a realist if ever there was one’, he wrote in his diary, ‘facts only count with him…[Churchill] appealed to sentiments in Stalin which I do not think exist there’.
²⁴
As Brooke intuitively realized, Stalin was not someone with whom to attempt
emotional connection. Churchill was the first Allied leader to make this mistake; Roosevelt would later be the second.

But, of course, one must not be naive. Ultimately, Churchill felt he simply had to get on with Stalin. What was the point of dwelling on the unpleasant aspects of Stalin and the Soviet Union? The bigger issue was the war against the Germans, and the Red Army was unquestionably carrying the brunt of the fighting. But all the evidence is that Churchill himself was not so hard-headed about the encounter. His happy emotions on his return from the private meal with the Soviet leader seem genuine enough. He had now convinced himself not only that Stalin was a ‘great’ man, but that he, Churchill, was capable of liking him as well.

FRATERNIZATION

It was not just Churchill, of course, who was forging a personal relationship with the Soviets during 1942. While Churchill and Stalin met, the seamen who had sailed on the convoys to the far north before the cancellation order of the summer of 1942 were also trying to make sense of life in the Soviet Union. Their experience, together with the personal histories of the Soviet citizens they encountered, offers a rare insight into the extraordinary collision of cultures that was the alliance between the West and the Soviet Union during the Second World War.

When PQ16 docked on 30 May 1942, the Allied seamen were shocked at what they saw: ‘Murmansk was a ghost town’, says Eddie Grenfell. ‘It was so badly bombed – we never suffered anything like the bombing that happened there’. The city had been devastated by Luftwaffe attacks – only Stalingrad suffered more damage in the Soviet Union during the war.

Eddie and the other survivors of ships that had been sunk were disembarked from the boats that had rescued them and taken to a warehouse on the quayside: ‘There were probably about 350 to 400 survivors who were all in this big warehouse. And this is our first real experience of Russia. We had sentries – Russian sentries
with rifles and bayonets – at either end of the warehouse. We were still suffering. I was bruised and cut and all the rest of it. And there were people who were very badly wounded lying there – people were moaning and so on. And we lay there for 36 hours’. As they lay in the warehouse, they heard bombs dropping on the city as the Germans began another raid. ‘You've never come across anything like it’, says Eddie. ‘It was really frightening’.

The British sailors were given water, but no food of any kind. Then trucks arrived to take the wounded away. Neil Hulse, Eddie Grenfell and the other injured British servicemen were taken over roads pitted with bomb craters to a hospital that had been converted from a school. But it was like no hospital that the British had ever seen before. ‘The smell was dreadful’, says Eddie Grenfell, ‘and the moaning and the screaming’.

‘This hospital was most gruesome’, confirms Neil Hulse. ‘We were glad at least to get a dry bed, [but] the poor Russians! Many were lying on the floor of the hospital. There was a lot of screaming [and] shouting of poor Russian soldiers who were having amputations of their limbs without anaesthetic…. Three corridors away I could hear these poor Russian soldiers bellowing and shouting, wrestling and trying to escape from this wretched type of operation’.

Neil Hulse was terrified that the frostbite in his toes might mean that he would be operated on in this Murmansk hospital – which would mean his toes would be amputated without anaesthetic. But a ship's doctor from one of the Royal Navy vessels that had arrived in Murmansk advised him that if he kept massaging his toes he might be able to escape the surgeon's knife. So Hulse came to an arrangement with one of his shipmates who was also suffering from frostbite: ‘I was busy massaging one chap's fingers, he was busy massaging my feet, for quite a few days at regular intervals. Thank God I've still got my toes on me, and he's still got his fingers on him’.

At night, while others tried to sleep, Eddie Grenfell stared at the wall and saw that it was ‘absolutely covered black with cockroaches and lice and every horrible thing you could think about’.
And so he decided to try and escape the hospital. He lobbied the aide of Admiral Bevan, the senior British naval officer in the Soviet Union, and eventually managed to get a transfer to a naval camp further down the Kola inlet at a city called Vaenga.

On board the tug that took him and a number of other British sailors to Vaenga he saw first hand how the Russians on board ‘were just like our own merchant seamen…. Out came the vodka, they'd put on gramophone records and they were just as nice as could be. So we began to realize that the Russians were quite ordinary people’.

But for Eddie the naval camp at Vaenga was scarcely an improvement on the hospital in Murmansk: ‘When you consider the danger we'd faced, not only in the Arctic [but] everywhere else, you'll probably laugh at this, but I was scared to hell by one thing – the rats. The rats jumped from body to body at night-time. They were looking for any scrap of food we had…. You felt these blooming things jumping on your body, plopping and squeezing in between you at night. It was terrible’.

Eddie Grenfell was also shocked to discover how the Soviet authorities at Vaenga dealt with breaches in discipline amongst their own men. One night a petty officer in the Soviet navy, who had become friendly with some of the British sailors, started banging on the barrack door. He was clearly extremely drunk – something that was frowned upon by the Soviet authorities, especially in front of foreigners. When the Allied sailors opened the door to let him in, he was immediately seized and taken away by one of the Soviet sentries stationed at one end of the hut. ‘Half an hour later we heard a volley of shots’, recalls Eddie, ‘A little bit later there was a hammering on the door of our hut and we went to the door and there was a [Soviet] commissar – the ugliest-looking man I've ever seen in my life. Bloody stern face – not a soldier, probably never heard a shot fired in his bloody life, but he was a commissar, he was just in charge of something or other. And he just said in good English: “We are sorry that you were disturbed like this. It was dreadful that this man should behave as he did. You'll be glad to know we shot him”. Just like that! He was shot!
And, of course, we were astounded. We were not accustomed to this sort of thing’.

Incidents like this summary execution led Eddie Grenfell and his comrades to form the conclusion that ‘the ordinary Russian was a damn nice fellow, but they were under the thumb of pretty horrible people…. So therefore we realized that it was a pretty horrible regime, but we had to accept it because they were fighting on our side’.

And it was not just British sailors who experienced this kind of radical awakening when confronted with the realities of life in the Soviet Union. American seamen too underwent a similar initiation. Jim Risk
²⁵
arrived in Murmansk on board an American merchantman, the
City of Omaha
. Born in Florida, he had never even seen snow until he journeyed to New York to board his ship. But snow and ice had accompanied him across the Atlantic and up the coast of Norway to the north of the Soviet Union. His relief at reaching Murmansk was palpable, not least because just off the Kola inlet his ship had nearly been destroyed: ‘It was at night-time, about one o'clock in the morning, the lookout on the starboard wing yelled: “Mate!” That means you've got trouble. So I ran out on the starboard wing and there was a ship closing right alongside of me. Now ships are pretty strong in all kinds of ways, except if you put two ships together broadside – then they're both going to go down…. So I yelled to the helmsman: “Hard to port!,” which he did. And, thank goodness, the other ship must have yelled: “Hard to starboard!” and they pulled away and we survived. But that was the closest I've ever come to losing a ship in all seven years I was at sea’.

The Murmansk Jim Risk witnessed, as the
City of Omaha
steamed into harbour, was ‘a shambles – just nothing going on around there at all’. And if the bombed-out devastation of the Soviet port was his first surprise, his second was that women were charged with the task of unloading the ship, supervised by a fearsome matron called Olga. ‘All of a sudden’, says Risk, ‘the captain of the ship yelled around, and he couldn't find any of the crew, and the armed guard commander couldn't find any of the crew either. And so being the
youngest officer, of course, my job was to find them – and do whatever the captain wanted. So I started searching the ship’.

Eventually, down in the bowels of the ship, on a grating in a space above the engines, he saw an astonishing sight: ‘I found the crew. They were all in there with Olga. She had gotten a mattress from somewhere and she was charging two packets of cigarettes a throw…[for] having sex, yeah…. Certainly I'd never run into anything like that before in my life. Neither had anybody else on the American ships or English ships either…. So I had to throw Olga off the ship’. But whilst he condemned Olga, Jim Risk did have some sympathy for his crew: ‘These boys had been through pretty much hell, and they needed release any way they could get it’.

There was a strange postscript to the Olga story – the reaction of the Soviet authorities: ‘[They] came back aboard the ship and they raised hell with us – the officers – for throwing her off the ship’. And even though the Americans explained what happened, telling them about the reprehensible conduct of their female longshoreman, this did little to assuage the Soviet anger. Moreover, Olga wasn't punished, and Jim Risk saw her working on the other ships that came in behind them.

Across the other side of the Kola inlet, at the port of Archangel, a teenage Russian girl called Valentina Ievleva
²⁶
welcomed the arrival of the Allied sailors as a kind of ‘holiday’. ‘It was very exciting’, she says. ‘It meant something new. There were naval officers, speaking a foreign language – [they were] cheerful. It made you forget about the war’. In Archangel the Allied sailors frequented the International Club, where they relaxed and mingled with invited locals – most of them female. ‘I went there to the International Club every day’, says Valentina. ‘I couldn't live without it. They showed films like
Lady Hamilton
or
Pinocchio
, or films with Bing Crosby – I liked all the melodies of his songs at the time’. For Valentina the place soon took on the status of a paradise on earth: ‘I'd never seen such comfort as I saw in the International Club. It was inside an old merchant's house, and when you came in there was carpet and it was so soft that you didn't even hear your footsteps. Then there was a library, and I loved books and
music and somebody always sang and read. There was a place to play chess, there was a dance hall and there was a screening hall where you could see films. Once a week there was a dance, and I danced from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. and at 5 a.m. I came home. I danced every dance. I never sat down’.

Her social life in the International Club inevitably led to Allied sailors taking an interest in her: ‘They were very courteous. One naval officer's name was Christopher. He took me as far as the tram stop, kissed my hand, saluted and bade me goodbye. And everyone was looking surprised at this scene. I got on the tram and I felt very flattered’. This chivalrous behaviour from a British officer contrasted dramatically with her experience of Soviet men. ‘If a Russian took me home, he took it for granted that I would invite him inside. Once, when I didn't let a Russian officer come into my home, he got very angry. They didn't want to waste time. If they met someone they liked, they didn't want to waste any time on courtship, they just wanted to have this girl, whereas the Westerners were different’.

And, as many inhabitants of Archangel and the other Soviet ports remember, there was also a clear difference in attitude between British and American sailors. ‘The British were somewhat more closed’, says Maria Vetsheva, who in 1942 was a teenage Soviet sailor. ‘The English came from a country at war and their mood was very depressed. The Americans weren't from a country at war – they did not have bombing, and so if they survived on their way here then they were very happy’. This notion that the British appeared more reserved than the Americans is confirmed by Alexander Kulakov,
²⁷
who used to watch the sailors as they walked the streets of Archangel: ‘My impression was that the Americans were more loose and the British were more inside themselves’.

Maria Vetsheva experienced first hand the ‘more loose’ attitude of the Americans when she was unloading goods from Allied ships in Murmansk harbour. She was operating a primitive rope-and-pulley system to haul the supplies out of the ship's hold and swing them over to the quay, when one day an American sailor sat down next to her and started to ask her questions. After a few minutes he tried to ‘hug’ her, but she rebuffed him and then asked a Soviet
frontier guard what she should do if the American made advances again. He gave her a big stick and said she should keep it by her side.

‘Then this American became more blatant’, says Maria. ‘He said: “Jiggy, jiggy?” and he unbuttoned his trousers and took out his assets. So I took the stick and hit him. He screamed, and then a frontier guard came and asked what was the matter’.

Much to the amusement of his comrades, the American was thrown off the ship by the guard. ‘So he received what he deserved’, says Maria. ‘It was a strong hit – I did my best. These things happen’.

Valentina Ievleva had precisely the reverse problem with a British sailor called Bill, whom she fell in love with in 1943 – because he wouldn't make the advances she wanted. 'Bill and I met and started dancing and then dating. But one day he said: “I'm leaving tomorrow,” and he gave me the home address of his aunt. And he came to say goodbye and brought a tin of cocoa and some food…. I said to him: “Bill, I want to have your baby, because I'm not going to love anyone any more”. And he said: “Val, you're a good girl, I don't want to ruin you. I believe in God and I don't want to be responsible for your ruined reputation”.