I’m making all these typing mistakes because Tudsbury’s typewriter is cranky, and there’s nobody in the Soviet Union who can fix a British typewriter—or who wants to, you’re never sure which. I’ve been cadging embassy typewriters for my work, but they’re swamped today getting out the final conference documents. The Tudsburys occupy the best quarters in the National. Naturally! Leave that to Talky. His suite faces out on Red Square, and I can see the Kremlin through a drizzle from where I sit. Lenin stayed in this suite, they say; now here I am. It’s all maroon plush and gold chandeliers and alabaster statues, with a Persian rug about an acre big, and this room even has a rosewood grand piano, almost lost in a corner. (The piano’s out of tune.) Me, I’m lodged in a back room on the top floor about five feet by ten, with bare yellow plaster walls.
Tudsbury’s here right now, dictating to Pamela his broadcast for tonight. Leave it to Talky to show up where the action is! He got the War Information Office to requisition Pamela for him; his stories and broadcasts are considered ace propaganda, and he pleaded failing eyesight. She’s on extended leave from the RAF and seems miserable about it. Her flier has been a German prisoner for over a year, and she hasn’t had word of him in months.
Like all the correspondents here, Tudsbury’s trying to make bricks without straw. He bent my ear for two hours last night about how tough it is. The Russians keep the reporters in Moscow, and every other day or so just call them in and give them some phony handout. Most of them think the war’s going very badly, but they don’t have much to go on besides Moscow rumors and Berlin shortwave broadcasts. It seems the Russians have been more or less admitting all the German claims, but two or three weeks late. The pessimists here—and there are plenty—think Moscow may fall in a week! I don’t, nor does Tudsbury; but our embassy people are nervous as hell, some of them, about Harriman being captured by the Nazis. They’ll be mighty relieved tomorrow when the mission flies out.
Well, as to the trip—the sea approach to Russia reminded me of Newfoundland. Up north the world is still mostly conifer forest and white water, Rhoda. It may be that man in his jackass fashion will devastate the temperate and tropical zones, and civilization will make a scrubby new start at the top of the globe.
The first surprise and shock comes at Archangel. It’s a harbor town in the wilds all built of wood. Piers, warehouses, sawmills, factories, churches, crane towers—wood. Stacks of lumber, billions of board feet, wherever you look. God knows how many trees were cut down to build that town and pile that lumber, yet the forests around Archangel look untouched. There’s an Alaskan look about Archangel, like pictures of the Klondike.
The first honest-to-God Russian I saw was the harbor pilot. He came aboard well down channel, and that was another surprise, because he was a woman. Sheepskin coat, pants, boots, and a healthy, pretty face. I was on the bridge and watched her bring us in, and she was quite a seaman, or seawoman. She eased us alongside very handily. Then she shook hands with the skipper and left, and all that time she hadn’t cracked a smile. Russians smile only when they’re amused, never to be pleasant. It makes them seem distant and surly. I guess we strike them as grinning monkeys. This epitomizes the job of communicating with Russians. Language aside, we just have different natures and ways.
Mr. Hopkins told me about the forests of Russia, but I still was amazed. You remember when we drove west in midsummer, I think in 35, and didn’t get out of cornfields for three days? The north Russian woods are like that. We flew to Moscow at treetop height. Those green branches rushed by below our wings for hours and hours and hours, and then all at once we climbed, and ahead of us was a tremendous sprawl from horizon to horizon of houses and factories. Moscow is flat and gray. From a distance it could be Boston or Philadelphia. But as you get closer in and see the onion-top churches, and the dark red Kremlin by the river, with a cluster of churches inside, you realize you’re coming to a peculiar place. The pilot flew a circle around Moscow before landing, maybe as a special courtesy, and we got a good look. Incidentally, the takeoffs and landings are expert, but by our standards hairy. The Russian pilot jumps off the ground and zooms, or he dives in and slams down.
Well, since we got to Moscow we’ve been in the meat grinder. It’s been round-the-clock. Our orders literally are to work through the night. When we aren’t conferring we’ve been eating and drinking. The standard fare for visitors seems to be a dozen different kinds of cold fish and caviar, then two soups, then fowl, then roasts, with wine going all the time. Each man also has his own carafe of vodka. It’s a hell of a way to do business, but on the other hand the Russians may be wise. The alcohol loosens things up. The feeling of getting drunk is evidently the same for a Bolshevik or a capitalist, so there at least you strike some common ground.
I think this conference has been an historic breakthrough. When have Americans and Russians sat down before to talk about military problems, however cagily? It’s all most peculiar and new. The Russians don’t tell hard facts of their military production, or of the battlefield situation. Considering that the Germans three short months ago were sitting where we and the British sit now, I don’t exactly blame them. The Russians have been a hard-luck people. You can’t forget that when you talk to them. This is a point that our interpreter, Leslie Slote, keeps making.
I’m not revealing secrets when I tell you the British are yielding some Lend-Lease priorities and even undertaking to send the Russians tanks. It’ll all be in the papers. They were stripped bare at Dunkirk, so this is decent and courageous. Of course, they can’t use the tanks on the Germans now, and the Russians can. Still, Churchill can’t be sure Hitler and Stalin won’t make a deal again, so the Germans may suddenly turn and throw everything into a Channel crossing. I don’t think it’ll happen. The growing hate here for the Germans is something savage; you only have to see the gruesome newsreels of villages they’ve been driven out of to understand why. Children strung up, women raped to death, and all that. Still, Hitler and Stalin seem to have mercury for blood. Nothing they do is too predictable or human, and I give the British lots of points for agreeing to send the Russians tanks.
Some of us Americans feel peculiar at this meeting, damn peculiar. The British, in danger themselves, are willing to help the Russians, while our Congress yells about sending the Russians anything. We sit between men of two countries that are fighting the Germans for their lives, while we represent a land that won’t let its President lift a finger to help, not without outcries from coast to coast.
Do you remember Slote? He’s the second secretary here now. He looked me up in Berlin, you remember, with a lot of praise for Briny’s conduct under fire in Poland. He’s the man Natalie went to visit. He still seems to think she’s the finest girl alive, and I don’t know why he didn’t marry her when he had the chance. Right now he’s trying to romance Talky’s daughter. Since she’s one of the few unattached Western girls—I almost said white girls—in Moscow, Slote has competition.
(Incidentally, my remark about white girls is ridiculous. After two days in Moscow, trying to put my finger on what was so different here, I said to Slote there were two things: no advertisements, and no colored people. It made him laugh. Still, it’s so. Moscow has a real American feel in the informality and equality of the people, but you don’t find such a sea of white faces in any big city in America. All in all I like these Russians and the way they go about their business with determination and calm, the way the Londoners did.)
Now I have a story for you, and for our grandsons to read one day—especially Byron’s boy. It’s a grim one, and I’m still not sure what to make of it, but 1 want to write it down. Yesterday between the last afternoon conference and the official dinner at the Metropole Hotel, I went to Slote’s apartment for a while with Tudsbury and Pam. Talky engineered this little party. He wanted to pump me about the conference, but there wasn’t much I could disclose.
Anyway, I was having a drink with them—if you get this tired you have to keep up an alcohol level
in your bloodstream, it’s a sort of emergency gasoline—when a knock came on the door, and in walked a fellow in worn-out boots, a cap, a heavy shabby coat, and it was a Jewish merchant from Warsaw, Jochanan Jastrow, Natalie’s uncle! The one they call Berel. Briny and Natalie went to his son’s wedding in south Poland, you recall, and that’s how they got caught in the invasion. He’s cleanshaven, and speaks Russian and German with ease, and he doesn’t seem Jewish, though Slote remarked that in Warsaw he wore a beard and looked like a rabbi.
This fellow’s escape from Warsaw with the remnants of his family is a saga. They landed in Minsk and got caught there when the Germans blitzed White Russia. He gave us only bare details of how he got himself and his family out of Minsk through the woods, but obviously this is quite a guy for maneuvering and surviving.
Here comes the incredible part. Jastrow says that late one night, about a month after the capture of Minsk, the Germans came into the Jewish ghetto they had set up, with a caravan of trucks. They cleaned out two of the most heavily populated streets, jamming everybody into these trucks: men, women, children, babies, old folks who couldn’t walk. Several thousand people, at least. They drove them to a ravine in the forest a few miles out of town, and there they shot them, every single one, and buried them in a huge freshly dug ditch. Jastrow says the Germans had rounded up a gang of Russians earlier to dig the ditch, and then had trucked them out of the area. A few of them sneaked back through the woods to see what would happen, and that was how the story got out. One of them had a camera and took pictures. Jastrow produced three prints. This occurrence, whatever it was, took place at dawn. In one of them you see a line of gun flashes. In another you see this distant shadowy crowd of people. In the third, which is the brightest, you just see men in German helmets shovelling. Jastrow also gave Slote two documents in Russian, one handwritten and one typed, that purported to be eyewitness accounts.
Jastrow says he decided to get to Moscow and give some American diplomat the story of the massacre in Minsk. I don’t know how he got Slote’s address. He’s a resourceful man, but naïve. He believed, and evidently still believes, that once President Roosevelt found out this story and told the American people, the United States would immediately declare war on Germany.
Jastrow turned over these materials to Slote, and said he’d risked his life to get that stuff to Moscow, and that a lot of women and children had been murdered, so would he please guard those pictures and documents with care. He and I talked a bit about the kids; his eyes filled up when I told him Byron and Natalie’d had a boy.
After he left, Slote offered the stuff to Tudsbury. He said, “There’s your broadcast for you. You’ll hit all the front pages in the United States.” To our surprise, Tudsbury said he wouldn’t touch the story. He worked in British propaganda after he was wounded in the last war, and helped concoct and plant atrocity yarns. He claims the British invented the business of the Germans making soap out of the bodies of soldiers. Maybe this Minsk massacre happened, but to him Jastrow looked like an NKVD plant. It was too coincidental that a distant Polish relative of mine by marriage—a freakish connection to begin with—should suddenly pop up of his own free will in Moscow with this yarn and these documents.
A heated argument ensued, and Tudsbury finally said that even if he knew the story were true, he wouldn’t use it. This thing could backfire and keep America out of the war, he claimed, just as Hitler’s Jewish policy worked for years to paralyze the British. “Nobody wants to fight a war to save the Jews,” he kept insisting while banging the table, and Hitler still has a lot of people convinced that anyone who fights Germany is really spilling blood just for the Jews. Talky says this is one of the great war propaganda ideas of all time, and that this story about the Minsk Jews would play into German hands.
Well, I’ve just set down the bald facts of this. I didn’t mean to get so long-winded, but it’s been haunting me. If there’s even an element of truth in Jastrow’s yarn, then the Germans really have run amuck, and among other things Natalie and her infant, unless they’re out of Italy by now, are in grave hazard. Mussolini apes whatever Hitler does. But I assume they did get out; Slote tells me it was all set before her confinement.
Rhoda, when I think about Jastrow’s story my head spins and it seems to me the world I grew up in is dissolving. Even if it’s an exaggeration, just hearing such a story makes me think we’re entering some new dark age. It’s all too much for me, and the worst of it is I found it hard not to believe Jastrow. The man has a keen and dignified manner; not a man I mind having for a relative, strange as it felt to look on him as such.
It’s five minutes to six. I have to wrap this up and get on to the banquet.
This war has sure played hell with our family, hasn’t it? The days in Manila, with all three kids in school, and that house with a tennis court where I taught them all to play, seem a far-off dream. Those were the best days. And now here I am in Moscow. I hope you’re keeping up that weekly doubles game with Fred Kirby and the Vances. You always feel better when you get exercise. Give my best to Blinker and Ann, also to Fred, and tell him I hope Foggy Bottom isn’t getting him down.
I miss you, busy as I am, but you sure wouldn’t care for Soviet Russia, darling, in war or peace. Pamela Tudsbury says there isn’t a hairdresser in Moscow she’d go to. She cleans her own suits and dresses with gasoline.
You know, I’ve now met Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, and tonight I may shake hands with Stalin. Considering that I’m nobody much, that’s something! My career’s taken a decidedly freakish turn. For my grandsons’ information (you already know this) I’d have preferred an entry in my record showing I’d been at sea these past two years. But there’s no changing that, and in a way I guess it’s been an education. Only at this point I’ve had my bellyful, and so help me God, I would gladly trade dinner in the Kremlin for one honest-to-God whiff of Navy stack gas.
Till the next time, with lots of love—
Pug
Victor Henry had arrived with the Harriman-Beaverbrook mission just as the Germans were starting their autumn smash toward Moscow. The panzer armies were breaking through less than a hundred miles away, but the Russians wined and dined their visitors, whirled them about the city in black limousines, took them to the ballet, and carried on long committee meetings, with no hint that anything was going wrong; though they did appear a bit brisk in laying on a farewell banquet less than a week after the guests had got there.
The Americans and the British understood that the Germans had been stopped east of Smolensk more than a month earlier in their central push, and had been pinned down there on the defensive ever since. In Moscow this halting of the Nazi hordes in the center was still talked of as a great feat of Soviet arms, a new “Miracle of the Marne.” Just as the French had stopped the Huns thirty miles from Paris in 1914 and snatched away their chance of quickly winning the war, so the Red Army had halted Hitler’s marauders, the assertion went, in their drive to seize Moscow before the winter set in. The Russians had even taken foreign correspondents to this central front, showing them recaptured villages, smashed Nazi tanks, and dead and captured Germans. Now the Germans claimed the march toward Moscow was rolling again, and the Russians were denying it. The fog of war effectively hid what was really happening.
Contrary to a notion popular at the time—a notion which has never quite died—the Wehrmacht was not a giant solid phalanx of tanks and armored cars, spitting flame and death as it clanked through whole nations. Hitler had a horse-drawn army. It was larger than Napoleon’s, but mainly it advanced into Russia as the Grande Armée had, by animal power and the march of men’s feet. He also had some armored divisions, spaced on the flanks of the three big groups invading the Soviet Union. The blitzkrieg worked so: the armored forces, the panzers, chugged ahead on either side of each attack front, slicing into the enemy lines, counting on surprise, terror, and punch to soften or panic the foe. The infantry came along between these two swathes as fast as it could, killing
or capturing the forces which the panzer divisions had broken into or thinly encircled.
These armored divisions were a big success, and no doubt Hitler would have been glad to employ more of them. But he had started his war—as his generals had feebly grumbled—much too soon, only six years after he took power. He had not come near arming Germany to the full, though he had made frightening noises exactly as if he had, and Europe had believed him. He was therefore very low on panzer divisions, considering the vastness of the front.
In August, when his three-pronged attack had jabbed far into the Soviet Union, Hitler diverted the thin armored layers of the central formation north and south, to help wrap up the war on the flanks by taking Kiev and investing Leningrad. This done, the panzers were to come back on station and start driving again with the Center Group for the knockout blow on the capital. It was a move that military writers still argue about; but in any case, with the central armor thus peeled away, the infantry and horse-drawn artillery in the center perforce had to halt and dig in, to await the return of the panzers, the steel cutting edges, from their side excursions. This was the new “Miracle of the Marne.” The Russians were at first surprised, then immensely heartened, at this sudden stop of the huge force advancing on their capital; and disorganized though they were, they went over to counterattacks and won minor gains. The “Miracle” ceased at the end of September, when the panzer armies, back in their positions, and properly overhauled and gassed up, went slashing toward Moscow again, in two wide curving paths. That was when Harriman and Beaverbrook arrived, with the obscure Captain Henry in their train.