World War II Behind Closed Doors (40 page)

After the war Melby was questioned about this report at the congressional hearings into the Katyn massacres, and was asked: ‘Why did you come to a conclusion when, on your own evidence, you could not reach a conclusion?’

‘Because’, answered Melby, ‘I had no other basis on which to go except the Russian side of the story’. Some members of the congressional committee were incredulous at Melby's position, and he was repeatedly asked if he hadn't just reached the conclusion that he felt his superiors wanted – a charge he denied.

Kathleen Harriman too wrote a report after her visit to Katyn – and again it supported the Soviet view. Like Melby, she was asked at the congressional hearings how it was possible for her to conclude that the Soviet case was sustainable when her ‘reasoning destroys’ her ‘conclusion’ because her ‘report had more reasons why the Russians did it and not the Germans, than you have that the Germans did it’.
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Her position was that, although the Soviets had put on a ‘show’ for the correspondents, she still believed that it was the Germans who had committed the massacre – not least because of ‘the methodical manner in which the murder was committed’.

Despite the denials of John Melby and Kathleen Harriman, there was inevitably suspicion that they were reporting to the State Department what the administration wanted to hear, since it was scarcely credible for either of them to have reached the conclusion they did from the facts in their own reports. As for the correspondents who visited the burial site with them, the British embassy report stated: ‘I [the British embassy official, Mr Balfour] have discussed the excursion with several correspondents who went to Katyn. Although they are by no means reluctant to accept [the] Soviet version of the affair, they are not altogether satisfied with what they saw and heard. Some of the American correspondents told the Press department for the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs that they were not very impressed’.
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When Churchill learnt of the Soviet report he wrote to the Foreign Secretary: ‘I think Sir Owen O'Malley should be asked very secretly to express his opinion on the Katyn Wood Inquiry’.
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Significantly, he ended his brief note with the sentence: ‘All this is merely to ascertain the facts, because we should none of us ever speak a word about it’.

O'Malley reported back with a lengthy despatch on 11 February 1944. In another brilliant analysis of the claim and counter-claim now surrounding the Katyn massacres, he mentioned and then set to one side both the interview testimony and the forensic evidence since these elements could have been tampered with by either the Soviets or the Germans. Instead, O'Malley focused on facts that were indisputable. First, he pointed out that the Soviet version of events made ‘at least one essential assumption which is incredible’.
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The ‘incredible’ assumption was that thousands of Polish prisoners could, in the chaos of the summer of 1941, have been somehow transferred from Soviet captivity to German captivity without a ‘single one of them having escaped and fallen again into Russian hands or reported to a Polish consul in Russia or to the Polish Under ground Movement in Poland’. Second, O'Malley reiterated that there remained an ‘unexplained set of facts’ that have ‘dominated this controversy throughout, namely that from April 1940
onwards no single letter or message was ever received by anybody from the Poles’. The combination of these two factors made O'Malley feel that his original ‘tentative conclusion’ that the Poles had been murdered by the Soviets was correct.

No one reading O'Malley's report could doubt either the sincerity with which it had been written or the damning verdict that had to be taken from it – the Soviets had committed a terrible crime and had now sought to cover it up with a fictitious ‘Special Commission’. O'Malley ended his despatch to Anthony Eden with these poignant words: ‘Let us think of these things always and speak of them never. To speak of them never is the advice which I have been giving to the Polish Government, but it has been unnecessary. They have received the Russian report in silence. Affliction and residence in this country seem to be teaching them how much better it is in political life to leave unsaid those things about which one feels most passionately’.

And silence was what now emanated from both the British and the American governments on this subject. Despite the knowledge that the Soviet report was based on an ‘incredible’ assumption, the Western leaders still stuck to Churchill's rubric that ‘we should none of us ever speak a word about it’. And when Averell Harriman was asked directly at the Katyn hearings: ‘As far as you know, at Tehran, at Yalta, and Potsdam, did you engage in any discussion at all, with any of our officials or foreign officials, with reference to the missing Polish officers, or their problem?’ he replied: ‘No; I do not recall the subject came up’.
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A direct insight into Roosevelt's attitude to Katyn – and indeed one of the only recorded occasions on which he was compelled to mention the subject – comes from a meeting he held in May 1944 with George Howard Earle III, a former governor of Pennsylvania and friend of the President's during the 1930s. Earle was a colourful character, fond of the good life. ‘Twenty-four hours a day he was on the go’, says Lawrence Earle,
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his son. ‘He was an adventurer. He was a pilot of aircraft – he was game for anything – and he loved fishing and hunting. After the First World War he became a wonderful polo player, and he played with some of the best
teams in the world and was captain of the Philadelphia polo team…. He's mentioned in the book of polo as being one of the best polo players in the world’.

Earle had served as American diplomatic minister in Bulgaria, and more recently as the President's special emissary for Balkan affairs based in Turkey. Now, in 1944, he returned to Washington to give Roosevelt the benefit of his views on the Katyn massacres. Earle had been briefed by a number of intelligence contacts in eastern Europe about the killings and had come to the firm view that the Soviets were responsible for the crime. Before meeting the President, Earle had been warned by an ‘old friend’ of his, Joe Levy of the
New York Times
, ‘George, you do not know what you are going to get over there [in the White House]. Harry Hopkins has complete domination over the President and the whole atmosphere over there is “pink”’.
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Once in Roosevelt's presence, Earle outlined the evidence that had made him certain in his own mind that the Soviets had committed the murders at Katyn – evidence that included testimony from Bulgarian and ‘White Russian’ agents, as well as a number of photographs from the burial site. ‘About this Katyn massacre, Mr President’, said Earle. ‘I just cannot believe that the American President and so many people still think it is a mystery or have any doubt about it. Here are these pictures. Here are these affidavits and here is the invitation of the German Government to let the neutral Red Cross go in there and make their examination. What greater proof could you have?’

‘George’, said President Roosevelt, ‘they could have rigged things up. The Germans could have rigged things up’. Roosevelt was adamant that ‘this is entirely German propaganda and a German plot’.
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‘Mr President’, insisted Earle, ‘I think this evidence is overwhelming’.

Earle also made it plain during the meeting that he was ‘very much worried about this Russian situation. I feel that they are a great menace, and I feel that they have done their best to deceive the American people about this Katyn business, and, also primarily
the most important of all, by this dreadful book of Joe Davies'
Mission to Moscow
which made Stalin out to be a benign Santa Claus. We never recovered from that. It made such an impression on the American people’.

‘George’, said Roosevelt, ‘you have been worried about Russia ever since 1942. Now let me tell you. I am an older man than you are and I have had a lot of experience. These Russians, they are 180 million people, speaking 120 different dialects. When this war is over, they are going to fly to pieces like a centrifugal machine cracked through and through travelling at high speed’. This, Earle said, was Roosevelt's ‘stock in trade’ answer: ‘We have nothing to fear from the Russians because they would fly to pieces’. Earle felt ‘hopeless’, and his last words as he left Roosevelt were: ‘Mr President, please look those over again’.

The Earle story has a revealing postscript. In March 1945 he decided that he ought to tell the world his view about the Soviets, but as a loyal friend of the President's he first asked for permission to make his observations public. Almost by return he received a note of admonition from Roosevelt. ‘I have noted with concern your plan to publicize you unfavourable opinion of one of our allies’, wrote the President on 24 March 1945, ‘at the very time when such a publication from a former emissary of mine might do irreparable harm to our war effort…. To publish information obtained in those positions without proper authority would be all the greater betrayal…. I specifically forbid you to publish any information or opinion about any ally that you may have acquired while in office or in the service of the United States Navy’.
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‘I think that he really basically felt that my father had let him down by not staying with the team’, says Lawrence Earle. ‘And Roosevelt was a man that demanded a team effort. I mean, he wanted people around him…when he said jump, they jumped’.

Just a few days later, Earle learnt in practical terms what the President thought of him. He was on a boat, fishing in a remote lake in Maryland, when suddenly he looked up and saw another boat coming towards him. On board were two FBI agents. They came alongside and said: ‘Mr Earle, we have a letter for you’. It
contained the news that – with immediate effect – Earle had been appointed assistant head of the Samoan Defence Group. This meant he had to leave for the Pacific at once – all because the President had directly ordered the Navy Department to send him ‘wherever’ they could made use of Earle's services. His son Lawrence, then an officer with American forces in the Pacific, was able to visit his father in this remote outpost. He found him ‘bitter; he was very disappointed – he was very upset that the President had done that to him’.

Roosevelt wanted rid of George Earle. And that remains hard for his son to take. ‘I think it was very unusual and very autocratic’, says Lawrence Earle. ‘Because I mean in a democracy you don't do that sort of thing, but the President thought in wartime he could do it and he did it. Of course, he got away with it’.

PUNISHMENT DEPORTATIONS

In May 1944 – the same month as George Earle had his fruitless meeting with Roosevelt in the White House – Stalin was considering a proposal to deport an entire ethnic group within the Soviet Union. The document, dated 10th May,
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was from Beria, head of the NKVD, and concerned the fate of the Crimean Tatars. Around two hundred thousand of them lived in the Crimea, on the north shore of the Black Sea, alongside the Russians. The Tatars had their own language, customs and dress; they were also followers of Islam. In the 1930s they had suffered Soviet persecution
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and now, during the German ocupation, many of their villages had been raided by ethnic Russian-dominated partisan units.

Without question, a number of Tatars had collaborated with the Germans during their occupation between November 1941 and spring 1944. Nearly twenty thousand of them, selected from prisoners of war, had served in German-organized self-defence units. But although it is true that the German military commanders considered the Tatars as more likely to collaborate than the
ethnic Russian population of Crimea, it is also the case that tens of thousands of Tatars served loyally in the Red Army.

Now that the Crimea had been recaptured, Stalin had to decide how the Tatars should be treated. Would it be possible to see in Stalin's response evidence of ‘the deep-seated changes which have taken place in the character of the Russian State and Government’ that Churchill claimed to have detected?

No, not at all – Stalin acted true to form by authorizing Beria to deport the entire Crimean Tatar nation into the wasteland of Uzbekistan in the Soviet interior. Every single one of them would suffer because of the actions of a minority. And whilst it was certainly a monumentally unjust method of dealing with the ‘problem’ of the Tatars, it had the benefit, as far as the Soviet authorities were concerned, of being swift and decisive.

The plan was to arrest the entire nation in little more than one day. ‘It was a big operation’, says former NKVD Lieutenant Nikonor Perevalov,
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who took part in the action. ‘The Crimea is a big area, and in order to evict them you need a lot of people’. Around twenty-three thousand NKVD troops took part in the action, and, just as they had in eastern Poland in 1940, the NKVD first carried out a careful reconnaissance of the area for several weeks before the day appointed for the arrests. When the locals asked why so many troops were suddenly stationed in the Crimea, behind the front line, the NKVD were told to reply that they were ‘just on leave from the front’.

At dawn on 18 May 1944 the NKVD entered every Tatar village. ‘I came and knocked on the door [of the first house targeted]’, says Nikonor Perevalov. ‘The light switched on and they asked: “Who is it?”’ Perevalov told them he was a representative of the Soviet state and they should open the door immediately. Once inside, he read out the decree announcing their deportation: ‘And of course they all started crying and screaming, and the people were frightened. But they didn't fight against us. They didn't put up resistance. No one tried to run away. They received us in an obedient way’. Perevalov says he felt personally ‘unhappy’ as he saw the devastated Tatar family in front of him:
‘I was sorry for them on a personal level because, for example, an elderly person was carried out on a stretcher to the truck…. She was so weak that she didn't utter a single word. She didn't even move. She was very old’. It was obvious, of course, that this sick old lady could not have collaborated with the Germans. ‘That old woman wasn't guilty of anything’, confirms Perevalov ‘Most people were not guilty of anything – I have to be frank about it’.