Beyond the Call (20 page)

‘No,' he said. ‘Thank you for your offer, but we'll stay here tonight.'

‘Captain, it is late. Come with us now, you'll be happy you did,' the colonel insisted.

‘No thank you, sir.'

The colonel's face darkened angrily. ‘I am a colonel; you are only a captain. You must do what I tell you to do. You will come with us now, and tomorrow a Soviet pilot will fly the airplane.'

He turned away for a second and gestured at his men to escort the American captain. Robert, acting on instinct, drew his sidearm; when the colonel turned back he found himself looking into the muzzle of a Colt .45.

‘I'm telling you something right now,' Robert said, his voice hard. He leveled the pistol at the colonel's gut. ‘I'm not going anywhere with you. But I would invite you to come up right now and talk to all of my men. They'll say the same. They'll tell you what we're here for, and what we're gonna do. We're gonna fly this plane out in the morning.'

He stared into the colonel's astonished, enraged eyes, but there was no reply. Satisfied, he turned his back on the Russians and walked back up the slope toward the Fortress, where his team was watching the drama unfold.

Behind him the colonel yelled furiously, and Maiya translated
(leaving out a few ripe curses, Robert guessed): ‘You'll hear about this! When you hear, it will be from Moscow! I will report your behavior. I don't take this kind of talk!'

With his dignity sorely wounded, the colonel marched back to his jeep, his entourage flocking behind him, including Maiya, whose linguistic skills had been sorely tried by the whole episode. It hadn't been a good day for US–Soviet relations.

Thinking back on the incident later, Robert could hardly believe his own bravado. The colonel was as good as his word; he did report it to Moscow, and the reprimand came back down the line all the way to the US Military Mission. It would do Robert no good to give his side of the story, and so he left it out of his report, along with the night of the Cossacks and the tale of the Mustang and the farmer. He merely noted that there were frequent arguments in which Maiya was caught between his decisions and the desires of the Soviets.

Having made that note, he fed a fresh sheet of paper into the typewriter and went on with his story. He wasn't done with it yet, not by a long way.

The Americans were on-site early the next morning. After a thorough inspection to ensure that no tampering had occurred in the night, Robert and Sergeant Picarelli installed themselves in the cockpit. Picarelli was a mechanic, not a co-pilot, but Robert needed him to help manage the aircraft's engine controls. With mounting apprehension, they began the routine of bringing the sleeping beast back to life. One by one, with gentle coaxing, the engines were started up, coughing and spluttering great clouds of gray smoke and settling down to an uneven grumble that Robert didn't like the sound of at all. Once they were warm, they were run up to high revs; they showed no sign of seizing or catching fire, so Robert eased back and began the slow, extremely awkward job of taxiing 687 to her take-off strip.

She was one sad-looking B-17, leaving behind a scatter of discarded parts in the snow. Battle-scarred, with sheets of plywood covering the holes in the fuselage where the gun turrets had been removed, and rags stuffed in the larger flak holes, she didn't look like much of a
prize for either side. They eased her over the little bridge the Russians had built across the ditch, and entered the take-off field.

With careful use of brakes and throttles, Robert maneuvered the B-17 into position as close to the top field boundary as he could, to maximize the run-up. He swung the nose round to face down the slope, then he and Picarelli locked the brakes and walked the throttle levers up to the stops, opening everything up to maximum emergency power. It was a method used on maximum-load missions, with fuel tanks brim-full and an overload of bombs, when even three-quarters of a mile of concrete runway might be insufficient to get the bird off the floor. Here the bird was stripped to the bone, and they had one-fifth of a mile of ankle-deep snow. With the engines roaring, blowing up a hurricane of snow and whipping branches off the trees, Robert held the control column hard back against his belly, fighting to prevent the Fort pulling herself over on her nose.

‘They're coming!' yelled a voice in his headphones. He glanced out the window and saw two jeeps pulling in at the field entrance. Russian soldiers jumped out and ran toward the plane.

‘Brakes off!' Robert ordered. Picarelli released the brake handle, and they both took their feet off the pedals. Anticipating the powerful surge he had experienced countless times before, Robert was startled at the way the lightened Fort leapt forward and raced down the slope. The soldiers, guns raised but not shooting, were left behind instantly. She ate up the space at an alarming rate, and the line of the frozen stream was rushing toward them, jolting and shaking, before they'd even reached minimum take-off speed. The indicator rose past 100 miles per hour. For an instant Robert felt they weren't going to make it – they'd smash into the hedgerow, slide across the field beyond, and end up pancaked against the 50-foot pines.

The wheels hit the stream bank with a violent jolt that sent the Fort leaping upward. Miraculously, she stayed airborne. Engines howling, she struggled, accelerated, and began to climb. Tucking up her wheels, she cleared the pines, the very tops just brushing her belly.

Robert's stomach flipped over, and he felt the familiar thrill of
flight more intensely than at any time since his training. Once again he marveled at the miracle of the Flying Fortress. As one of his fellow pilots from the 493rd said, recalling the group's transition from Liberators to B-17s, ‘After all of the trouble we had getting the B-24s off the ground with three times as long a run, it was a real pleasure to be flying an airplane that seemed to want to fly.'
⁶

Captain Trimble kept one eye on the compass as he put the Fort into a gentle bank, turning her onto a bearing for Lwów.

The operation on which they had set out from Poltava just over a week ago was still not over, and Robert's true mission was about to make an unexpected reappearance.

Chapter 11

SUFFER THE LOST PRISONERS

23 FEBRUARY 1945: REFUGEE CAMP, CZARNKÓW, POLAND

T
HE PACE OF
the war had changed. To the people in the town of Czarnków, it seemed that the distant thunder of the guns had paused for a while, then resumed – further away and firing in a different tempo. The news eventually came through: at long last, the city of Poznań had fallen to the Red Army. It had been a stubborn point of resistance at the heart of the Soviet advance, which had been surging forward north and south of it, punching a corridor toward Berlin. Now the city was freed.

To one American, the news was particularly welcome. Sergeant Richard J. Beadle from Louisiana, formerly of the 45th Infantry Division, ex-inmate of Stalag III-C, could continue his journey to freedom.
¹
Along with thousands of displaced persons, military and civilian, he had been living in the refugee camp at Czarnków, waiting for the route south-east to clear.

Sergeant Beadle's odyssey had begun just over three weeks ago, when he and his fellow POWs were liberated. Stalag III-C was a camp for enlisted men located near Küstrin, about 50 miles from Berlin. At the end of January, with the spearhead units of the Soviet divisions closing in, the Germans decided to evacuate the camp. The prisoners would be marched to a new location 50 miles to the west.

The 1,500 prisoners were roused from their huts and herded at bayonet point into a long column. Many of them were malnourished, some were sick, and all were reluctant to be force-marched.
²
It was
hours before the column was ready to set out. The evacuation had barely begun when the leading battalions of the Red Army arrived. The Soviet troops, fighting as they came, were entirely unaware that there was a POW camp in their path. Thinking the stalag was a barracks, and that the prisoners were Hungarian troops (or so they later claimed), they poured mortar fire onto it. As the column of POWs marched from the camp, they were hit with shells and machine-gun fire by Russian tanks.
³
Men rushed for cover, many seizing the opportunity to escape from the column. By the time the Russians realized their error and ceased firing, fifteen prisoners lay dead in the snow, and another 25 were wounded.

Of those who survived, some scattered into the countryside, while others took refuge in the camp buildings. Most were rounded up by the Soviets and marched to the rear, away from the combat zone. Some were taken the twenty or so miles to Landsberg.
⁴
The group into which Sergeant Beadle had been herded was marched just a short distance from the camp, to the tiny village of Quartschen.
⁵
They were given no food and nothing to protect them from the freezing weather; their liberators simply turned them loose and told them to head for Warsaw.

Sergeant Beadle was in better condition than most. As a medic he knew how to take care of himself, and as a combat veteran who had served at Anzio he was used to harsh conditions. He also had the advantage of having been a prisoner for a relatively short time; captured the previous September,
⁶
he had suffered the privations of the camp for just a few months, and his health was good. He set out, making his way toward Warsaw as best he could.

Warsaw was more than 200 miles away, and the route was a fraught and dangerous one. The Red Army's northern divisions, forcing the Germans back into their fatherland, had pushed the line of the Eastern Front hard, swinging it like a vast double door, opening up a broad corridor from east to west. The hinges on which the doors had swung were two of the fortress cities designated by Hitler as
Festungen
: strong-points which were not to be surrendered, where the soldiers of the Reich were ordered to fight to the last man.

In the middle of the open doorway, isolated as the Soviets advanced around it, stood the
Festung
city of Poznań. Known to the Germans as Posen, it was an ideal place for a siege. An earlier generation of German occupiers in the nineteenth century had built a vast, impregnable network of fortifications – the
Festung Posen
– and it was in these redoubts, forts, and tunnels that the Nazi forces held out for week after week against the Red Army, which pounded the city with massed artillery and sent Guards regiments to infiltrate the defenses.

To Sergeant Richard Beadle, the siege of Poznań was an impassable obstruction on the route to Warsaw. Keeping a safe distance from the front line – the walls of the corridor – he found his way to the town of Czarnków, where there was a refugee camp. There he settled down to wait for the siege to break.

It happened on 22 February, when the fanatical Nazi commander at Poznań committed suicide and his surviving men surrendered. The Russians flooded through, and the road to Warsaw was clear. Sergeant Beadle left the refugee camp and headed south.

It was a doubly significant date for him. Exactly one year ago he had been in Italy with his unit, I Company, 180th Infantry Regiment, at the Anzio beachhead. On 22 February 1944, I Company and its neighboring units were the focus of savage German assaults. One of the men who were instrumental in fighting off the attacks that day was Beadle's platoon commander, Second Lieutenant Jack C. Montgomery.
⁷
With his platoon reduced to half its strength, Montgomery, a Cherokee from Oklahoma, launched a series of single-handed assaults which killed eleven Germans, captured more than 30 more, and knocked out two machine guns. His actions earned him the Medal of Honor. Later that night, Lieutenant Montgomery was caught in a mortar barrage and severely wounded. As he lay alone in the dark, he had faith that help would come. ‘It wasn't very long before my medic found me,' he recalled. ‘Your medic was one person that you had to have confidence in. I knew Beadle would find me.'
⁸

Now, exactly a year on, Beadle needed to have that same kind of
faith in himself, and in his ability to find his way to friendly forces. And if he was lucky, onward to his home in Louisiana – a little place called Reserve, on the Mississippi between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Home seemed more like a different world than merely a different country.

When Beadle passed through Poznań, it was a living nightmare, a city of death. Almost the whole of the city center was in ruins, and much of the outlying districts too, pounded to rubble by Soviet and German artillery. Despite the devastation, the Soviets had quickly got the railroad working again (the Poznań route was a vital artery connecting the front line to the supply system), and Sergeant Beadle managed to get aboard a train to Warsaw. He rode the whole way in a boxcar with no source of heat, and again the Russians refused to give him any food.

If Poznań had been a sad place, Warsaw was worse. The scene of uprisings by the ghetto Jews and by the Polish Home Army, it had been attacked ferociously by German forces and the Red Army. Despite having been instructed to come here, Sergeant Beadle found no assistance, and quickly moved on. There were no trains available, so he set off walking toward Lublin, where he had been told there was a reception center for liberated POWs. It was more than a hundred miles from Warsaw to Lublin, and Sergeant Beadle covered about half of it on foot, managing to catch a ride on a truck the rest of the way. If it hadn't been for the fact that he was fit and healthy to begin with, and received help and food from Polish people he met on the way, he might never have made it.

In Lublin he found the promised reception center – or what passed for one. Dozens of his fellow American and British ex-POWs had gathered. Some of them were survivors of the Russian assault on Stalag III-C. There was a small contact team of American officers in the town, led by a Colonel Wilmeth, recently arrived from the Military Mission in Moscow. They were doing what they could to organize the men's relief and evacuation. For a brief time, it seemed like Lublin might be the end of Sergeant Beadle's odyssey. In fact, it would turn
out to be just a way station on a journey that was far from over. Things were not going well for the Americans in Lublin.

 

7 MARCH 1945: EUROPA HOTEL, LUBLIN, POLAND

L
IEUTENANT
C
OLONEL
J
AMES
D. Wilmeth stared out of his hotel window across the snow-covered rooftops and the open spaces beyond. How many men were still out there, he wondered; how many still lost or hiding in the vast reaches of Poland's countryside? Intelligence he had heard from the tiny handful who had made it to Poltava and Moscow indicated that there were thousands. There was nothing he could do for them unless they came to him, here in Lublin. He was trapped here. And even if they came to him, what he could do was limited.

He had been in the town just over a week and was already bowing under the weight of the task he'd undertaken. The work itself was far beyond the capacity of one small group of men, but it carried a moral imperative that drove Wilmeth and his two companions onward. But the constant, bull-headed resistance from the Soviets at every level was utterly demoralizing.

After the way he'd been repeatedly stymied before even leaving Poltava, it was pretty much what he ought to have expected. For two weeks he'd been stuck at the air base while the Soviets responded with refusals and excuses to his requests to be allowed to fly to Poland. He and Colonel Hampton even discussed the possibility of loading up an American plane and flying Wilmeth to Lublin without Soviet permission.
⁹
It would undoubtedly result in Soviet rage and some kind of punishment against Eastern Command, but Colonel Hampton was willing to risk it. He started readying a plane. Wilmeth persuaded him to abandon the idea. Instead, he advised that Eastern Command start preparing facilities and air transport for the large numbers of POWs who would undoubtedly be coming to Poltava soon, once he got into
Poland and started liaising with the Soviet repatriation authorities on the ground. It was sure to happen; they just had to be patient.

On 27 February, Captain Robert Trimble set off with his salvage team to Staszów. On that same day, almost two weeks after coming from Moscow to Poltava, Colonel Wilmeth was finally allowed to fly to Lublin.

Wilmeth and his two companions – Lieutenant Colonel Curtis Kingsbury, who was a surgeon, and interpreter Corporal Paul Kisil
¹⁰
– boarded a Russian-crewed C-47. The plane was loaded with supplies, plus a jeep that Wilmeth intended to use to travel around seeking out and contacting stray POWs. The little team was accompanied by three Russians: a ‘chauffeur' for the jeep, an interpreter (unnecessary, since Kisil spoke excellent Polish and Russian),
¹¹
and an officer as their ‘escort'. All three were known at Poltava to be NKVD bird dogs.
¹²
This wasn't a good sign. And for all the use it would be, they might as well have left the jeep at Poltava, and saved themselves the trouble of maneuvering it in and out of the C-47's cargo doors.

The obstructions, restrictions, and inconveniences started almost the moment the plane touched down at Lublin.

On that first day Colonel Wilmeth met with the town commandant and the Soviet officers in charge of evacuating Allied prisoners of war. All five men regarded him with cold hostility.
¹³
When he announced that he had come to help with the task of locating ex-prisoners, caring for them, and evacuating them, they told him that they needed no help. The process was in hand. His presence was unnecessary and – they implied – deeply unwelcome. Besides, they said, the Soviet officer in charge of the ex-POW repatriation group, Colonel Vlasov, had moved his headquarters to Praga the previous day. Praga was a district of Warsaw, about a hundred miles away.

In that case, Wilmeth said, his patience still in abundant supply, he too would move to Praga, if that was acceptable? No, it was not. Permission would have to be sought from Moscow.

Very well, Wilmeth said; could they seek permission for him? They told him grudgingly that they could. In the meantime,
Wilmeth was eager to visit the liberated prisoners of war who were currently in Lublin. If somebody would be so good as to take him to the camp …