US FLEET CHASING JAPS TO STRIKE KNOCKOUT BLOW!
Several articles followed, but the most realistic appraisal read:
Whatever the eventual result may show in terms of respective losses in the opposing forces, one thing was certain. That is that for the time being, at least, the United States retains a firm grip on its westernmost stronghold in the mid-Pacific, Midway Island, 1,149 miles northwest of Hawaii.
Even with the journalistic hyperbole, the event was noted by the Soviets with intense interest and included in their calculus regarding the crew of Plane 8. If the Japanese were truly unstoppable, and if they had inflicted a crippling loss at Midway, Stalin might have been more inclined to deal with Tokyo. However, the irrefutable fact that the Empire had been knocked back on its heels may have saved the lives of York and his crew—or, at the least, encouraged Moscow to consider shortening their internment.
Three days following General Kalinin’s visit, the Russian lieutenant hurried in and informed them that “People from your embassy in Moscow are on their way to see you!” Tremendously excited, York and his crew again cleaned up, shined shoes, and got their letters together. Maybe this was it. Maybe they were coming to take the crew to the embassy. The two pilots desperately wanted news of their babies; if they had been born, and were their wives all right? They all discussed the possibilities at length, and York reminded them all of the disappointment at Kuybyshev when no one showed up. It could happen again.
But it did not.
Three cars arrived bearing General Kalinin, several Soviet officers, and two Americans: Lieutenant Colonel Joseph A. “Mike” Michela, who was the embassy’s military attaché, and Edward “Eddie” Page, the State Department’s second secretary. The new arrivals brought cigarettes, clean shirts, socks, and soap. Page, who was fluent in Russian, also gave York an English-Russian dictionary. After the preliminary greetings and hand shaking all around, the two pilots were able to get Michela and Page alone, where the attaché immediately asked, “How long have you been here?” York was surprised at the question, and the colonel informed them that the embassy had been kept informed, Russian-style, of the crew’s whereabouts. This meant he was told after they had been moved each time, but not before. Emmens and York were relieved to know that Michela knew of their presence in late April and that Ambassador Standley had promptly informed Washington. This was good news, and the pilots breathed easier knowing their families had not been living with uncertainty for two months. Both men were also told they were now fathers—York had a daughter and Emmens a son—and that their wives were just fine. The day was shaping up to be the best they’d had in the Soviet Union until the subject of going home was raised.
“Well … getting out is not so easy. You see, these people are worried about a war in the east right now, and they are afraid that the Japs might be offended if you are released.” York’s suspicions were confirmed, and he asked about a possible solution. This time Page replied with, “I think we may be able to have you out of the country inside of two or three weeks.” This wasn’t great news, but at least it was light at the end of the tunnel. Unfortunately, lights in tunnels are often oncoming trains.
This light certainly was.
Barbarossa and the ensuing actions on the Eastern Front had drained Germany’s fifty-six-million-barrel oil reserve to a dangerous level. Romania, Berlin’s main source of imported oil, produced only eight million barrels annually, and the balance of the demand was being met by the production of synthetic oil from coal. In desperation, the Eastern Front’s strategic objective now became what should have been Barbarossa’s main focus: seizure of the Soviet Union’s primary sources of oil deep within the Caucasus. These were Maikop, Grozny, and Baku, which itself was capable of 176 million barrels per year. Capture and operation of this field would be sufficient to maintain Germany’s military machine on all fronts against all foes. “If I do not get the oil,” Hitler stated, “then I must end this war.”
Taking Moscow, or even the defeat of the Red Army, were no longer priorities, and Case Blue, the offensive into the southern Russia and the Caucasus, commenced on June 28, some six weeks after York’s men arrived in Penza. The German Army Group South lunged southwest, and by July 5 the Fourth Panzer Army crossed the Don and was battling for Voronezh, just 266 miles southwest of Penza and Plane 8’s crew. Capturing Voronezh would anchor the German north flank along the river and permit a drive into the Caucasus without threat of a Soviet counteroffensive. Unfortunately for the Germans, even this short advance had already outrun their logistical support, and fuel was extremely limited. Infuriated by this, Hitler dismissed Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, then split Army Group South into two new entities. Army Group A and the First Panzer Army were to advance southwest for the Caucasian oil fields, while Army Group B would wheel east and cut the Russian supply lines at Stalingrad, near the confluence of the Don and Volga Rivers.
Despite capturing the plans for Case Blue in June, Stalin refused to initially consider this offensive was anything but a ruse. Moscow, he fervently believed, was still Hitler’s main objective. Nevertheless, the chaos and indecision within the Red Army and Soviet command structure caused by the German move meant that the fate of Plane 8’s crew was further delayed throughout the summer of 1942. Despite the German logistical woes, by the first week in August Army Group A was closing in on the oil field at Maikop, and 350 miles to the northeast the German 6th Army was less than sixty miles from Stalingrad. Once again, the situation looked bleak for the Soviet Union, and once again Stalin felt he could not afford Japan as another enemy at this point in the war. Fortunately, some seven thousand miles southeast of Stalingrad, another offensive was about to commence. This, too, would have profound consequences for the course of the war, and for five lonely Americans stranded in the Soviet Union.
Eight months to the day after Pearl Harbor, the heavy cruiser USS Quincy opened fire with her nine eight-inch guns from the Sealark Channel off the north coast of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. On August 7, 1942, Operation Watchtower, the first American counteroffensive of the war, began with Quincy’s shore bombardment and airstrikes from the carriers Enterprise, Wasp, and Saratoga. As they watched, a tepid breeze carried the island’s stink of decaying coconuts, rotting vegetation, and dead fish to the 19,105 officers and men of the 1st Marine Division crammed into transports idling offshore. Except for the native Melanesians or a few planters and missionaries, no one had any use for Guadalcanal until a month earlier. On July 5, an Imperial Navy captain named Tei Monzen landed with 2,500 men of the 11th and 13th Construction Units to build an airfield on the only feature that made Guadalcanal valuable: a flat, central plain big enough for the 3,600-foot-long runway the Japanese planned.
Wearing new sage-green battle dress but armed with the same Springfield rifles their fathers carried during the Great War, the U.S. Marines clambered over their transport’s sides and down to the Higgins boats bobbing below. At 0919, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Maxwell became the first American in forty-four years to lead an amphibious assault as his 1st Battalion, 5th Marines waded through the surf onto a stretch of beach near the mouth of the Tenaru River. The Japanese responded by dispatching a cruiser task force into the Sealark Channel around Savo Island to destroy the Allied surface ships gathered there and isolate the enemy beachhead. They were successful, and the American-Australian task force pulled out after losing four heavy cruisers and 1,077 men: the Marines were now alone on Guadalcanal—temporarily. This began a six-month cycle of hell on earth for the 1st and 2nd U.S. Marine Divisions, the 25th and Americal Divisions of the U.S. Army, and roughly thirty thousand men from the Imperial Japanese 17th Army.
Four days after the landings on Guadalcanal, York’s crew was moved away from Penza, and thus from the Germans along the Don River. Four days northeast by rail though Kazan brought the men to the Kama River, where they took a ferry to a small village called Okhansk, about thirty-five miles southwest of Perm. York and Emmens discussed trying to escape but discounted it for the time being since they were too deep in Russia and had no idea where the Germans might be. The same week the crew arrived at Okhansk, the German 6th Army chased the Soviet 62nd and 64th Armies into Stalingrad, where they were stopped cold. Stukas, FW-190 fighters, and Ju-88 medium bombers of General Wolfram von Richthofen’s Luftflotte 4 dropped one thousand tons of bombs in two days but could not dislodge the Russians.* Important only to the Germans as flank security for their thrust into the Caucasus, this battle would eventually involve nearly two million men on both sides. Through the long, dark autumn and winter of 1942, the immediate course of the Pacific War literally hung on the outcome of Guadalcanal, while the fate of Plane 8’s crew was intertwined with the battle raging in Stalingrad.
For Ed York, the frustration mounted. He would not hear again from the U.S. embassy until September, and even suffering from scurvy and dysentery, they were permitted only a single visit by the embassy’s physician. Playing volleyball and swimming, the men tried to remain as fit as possible, while the two pilots threw themselves into studying Russian and were rapidly becoming conversational. They were assigned several women to cook and clean, and one in particular, Zietseva, spoke English and helped with learning her language. In fact, she spoke English better than she should have and tried to seduce Bob Emmens, so it was quite likely she was an NVKD plant.
On September 15, a clean white river yacht showed up on the bank near their house, and among the Soviet officers were a pair of civilians and two Americans in uniform. Joseph Michela, now a brigadier general, was one of them. Eddie Page was there, and the second civilian was no less than Ambassador Standley. Surprisingly, the other officer was an Army pilot wearing the two stars of a major general. After a short tour they swapped news; York was congratulated on his promotion to major, and the general, whose name was Follett Bradley, informed them that none of the Doolittle raiders had been shot down over Japan. He said the Japanese “got one or two of the crews,” but he did not know which ones were captured.
Bradley was unusual. Class of 1910 from the U.S. Naval Academy, he opted for a cross commission two years later into the Army Field Artillery. Bradley then earned his wings in 1916, and though he flew as a pilot during the Great War, he also fought during the Aisne Offensive as an artillery officer. Bradley had been in Russia since August waiting to meet Stalin on behalf of President Roosevelt—and Hap Arnold. Once alone with the pilots, Bradley informed them he was on a “special mission,” as he put it, to conduct a survey of Far East airfields and secure Stalin’s permission for a joint U.S.-USSR theater of operations. In effect, he was finishing what York started. The war was going badly enough for Moscow that this option was being seriously considered. Yet the Russians, always negotiators, wanted American and British intervention, specifically fighter aircraft, in the Caucasus to protect his oil fields. Stalin also wanted a second front opened in Europe immediately, which was not going to happen since the Americans were set to launch Operation Torch, the invasion of French North Africa, in early November.
With this news, the Russian treatment of his crew made sense to Ed York. Beyond the situation with the Japanese, he and his men were still a card Stalin could play, albeit a small card, to pressure Washington into meeting Moscow’s demands. The visitors also filled them in on the Pacific War, specifically Guadalcanal. There had been several large naval battles, and the Marines were clinging to the island by their fingernails. As pilots, York and Emmens were keenly interested in the ragtag “Cactus” Air Force composed of Army and Marine fighter planes that were holding the Japanese at bay. More than ever, the two pilots felt frustrated at being kept out of the war.
Though it has never been recorded, undoubtedly York and Emmens passed along to Bradley and Standley the results of their own survey of the Soviet Far East. It is also logical to assume that procuring York’s information was the reason the general made the difficult, dangerous, and uncomfortable trip into the Urals.* The same was true for Standley; ambassadors rarely, if ever, stray far from the centers of power, and to make such an excursion during wartime is highly unusual and bespeaks of a highly significant reason for doing so. Collecting York’s information, which was still the only current intelligence regarding the Maritime Territory and its suitability for military operations, would have been important enough to dictate such a journey.
The New Year arrived with no end in sight for York’s crew. Drinking homemade vodka and listening to music from Moscow, the Americans ushered in 1943 by singing “Auld Lang Syne” to the Russians. Yet if the Americans stranded in Okhansk had little optimism for the coming year, there was some evidence that the winds of war were shifting, and the first week in February brought new hope to the Allies.
At Stalingrad, the Red Army had gradually sandwiched the 265,000-man German 6th Army into a pocket between the Don and Volga Rivers. Paulus recognized the danger and asked for permission to withdraw, but Hitler refused. Hermann Göring promised that his Luftwaffe could provide an “air bridge” of supplies but managed less than 15 percent of what was required. A breakout effort was initiated by Field Marshal von Manstein, but after getting to within thirty miles of the besieged 6th Army, this also failed. Retreating into the ruined city, the starving Germans held out until February 2, when their pocket collapsed under renewed Russian attacks. Only 91,000 Germans, Italians, Romanians, and Croatians remained to surrender and they, in company with twenty-two general officers, were herded off into captivity.*
This battle halted German offensives in the east and, in conjunction with Rommel’s defeat in North Africa, ended the myth of the Wehrmacht’s invincibility. The other significant outcome to the battle was that the Soviet Union would hold out, against most expectations, and would not initiate a separate peace with Hitler. Tokyo, in particular, noted the battle’s conclusion with trepidation. A Russia frightened and surrounded was one thing, but a triumphant and reenergized Red Army was something else entirely.
However, the Empire had other reasons to be concerned in February 1943. At three minutes past midnight on February 7, the last 1,796 emaciated Japanese soldiers were pulled aboard destroyers idling off Cape Esperance on Guadalcanal’s northwestern tip. During the six-month-and-two-day campaign, the Imperial 17th Army put nearly 36,000 men ashore; 10,652 were evacuated, leaving 14,800 killed or missing and another 9,000 dead from starvation or disease. The Combined Fleet lost two battleships, a light carrier, and at least 1,000 highly trained aviators. American ground losses stood at 1,207 Marines killed, with 2,894 wounded, and the Army suffered 1,860 dead or wounded. In addition to 420 naval aviators lost, eight cruisers and fifteen destroyers went down, and the bitter fight claimed the carriers Wasp and Hornet. Launching Doolittle’s raiders and surviving Midway, Hornet sank in October 1942, north of Guadalcanal off Santa Cruz, while York’s crew languished 7,300 miles away in Okhansk.
Just as Stalingrad signaled the end of large-scale German offensive capabilities, Guadalcanal marked the furthest point of imperial expansion in the Pacific. Nevertheless, the Axis was far from beaten. German U-boats would sink five hundred thousand tons of shipping during the opening months of 1943, while the Wehrmacht still had 3 million men under arms, and the Imperial Japanese Army could field twenty-five divisions, another million men, from China. Two bloody years of fighting remained, though the Japanese would remain defensive behind their contracting perimeter as the full weight of American military might was brought to bear. The profound consequences of both battles had smaller, yet intensely personal, ramifications for the men of Plane 8. Japan’s defeat removed the threat against the Far East Soviet Union, so an emboldened Stalin now felt he had little to fear from the Japanese and potentially much to gain by remaining with the Allies.
“Christ Bob,” Ski York told Emmens, “do you realize that our future is not tied up with the war with the Germans but with the Japs?” True enough, since just six weeks after the American victory at Guadalcanal, “two well dressed, smart looking Russian officers” stepped in through the back door of the crew’s house in Okhansk. A major and a captain, both from Moscow, had been sent to move York’s men. By now both Bob and Ski were quite conversant in Russian, and after introductions the Soviet major asked when they could be ready to leave. Ski blinked and immediately replied, “One hour.” The Russians laughed, but then realized he was deadly serious, and in an hour they were all on the road to Molotov.* Both Soviet officers were courteous, and even showed some humor, which was unexpected. They were “the healthiest Russian specimens we had seen since we had been in the country,” Emmens wrote.
Put up in a hotel in Molotov, the crew was fitted with Soviet uniforms and taken to see the Kirov Ballet perform Swan Lake. From Molotov, they were flown to Ufa, then Chkalov, about seventy miles north of the Kazakh border.† Remaining here for two days, the five Americans then boarded a train with the Russian major, who was quite firm about placing them in very specific sleeping compartments. Strangely, Ed York was placed in one alone. “This was against all their practices,” Ski stated, and he was immediately suspicious. More so when he discovered he was not alone. Several big pieces of luggage were tucked under the lower berth, and a leather satchel lay open on top revealing Maxwell House coffee, butter, and a tin of real American Spam—all in plain sight.
As the train pulled out heading south, a stocky Russian a few years older than Ski appeared, and the two men introduced themselves. His name, he said, was Kolya, and he was an importer of goods to Russia, but based in Ashkhabad, the capital of Soviet Turkmenistan. Thus began a very odd nine-day trip through Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, always heading south. When Ed learned their destination was Ashkhabad, he was convinced that this “was a put-up job, completely.” Kolya had an abundance of food, as if it was planned for two, and the pilot ate pickled sturgeon, caviar, various meats, and bread. Of course, the Russian also had vodka—enough for two for the entire trip. The Soviet officers, who brought along food for the other crew members, “never expressed any curiosity about the fact that I was eating all this good food that belonged to this so-called civilian. Well,” York added, “of course it was all laid on.”
Kolya spoke no English, he claimed, but after ten months of speaking Russian twelve hours a day, Ski was quite fluent. Emmens was fairly proficient, but growing up speaking Polish had given Ski an ear for the Slavonic languages that Bob did not possess. Over the course of the trip, York told Kolya who they were, not that he didn’t know anyway, and the man confided that he was actually Caucasian, not Russian, and so he was sympathetic. “I know some of these smugglers near the border. Maybe I can help you.”
After learning of the Axis defeats at Stalingrad and on Guadalcanal, York was certain Stalin wanted them out of Russia. Obviously, there remained some lingering doubt in Moscow about the Japanese; otherwise, the crew would have been released outright. It was, Ski knew, a very Russian solution: oblique and deceptive, yet to them quite practical. There was no other reason to send the crew 1,400 miles south and put them in a town eighteen miles from a border through which they could leave Russia. York was positive of it: “If you were running Russia and you had five people that you didn’t want to leave, they certainly wouldn’t leave.” Stalin wanted them gone, but he wanted to be able to claim they escaped; therefore, he was not to blame. The staff officers were sent to ensure this, and Kolya, who was very likely NKVD, was the facilitator. “This [Kolya] was no peasant,” Ski said, emphatically. “I don’t know what his true function was … it just didn’t smack right. I made up my mind right then and there that we eventually were getting out of the country. I wasn’t put in that compartment by accident, and he wasn’t either. He was doing his job.”
Ashkhabad was the modern reincarnation of the ancient Silk Road city of Konjikala, which was sacked by the Mongols during the thirteenth century. Russian communists took it over in 1917 because of its proximity to the British installations in Iran, and the city subsequently passed to the newly established Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic in 1924. Operation Countenance, a 1941 joint Anglo-Soviet invasion of neutral Iran, overwhelmed the country in four days to prevent Reza Pahlavi, the self-proclaimed shah, from allying his nation with the Axis. By taking Iran, the Allies now had access to virtually unlimited oil and a secure supply route for Lend-Lease goods up from the Persian Gulf to the Soviet border.* In partitioning the country, Moscow took the northern part, which included Lend-Lease termini along the Caspian—and the city of Meshed. Moscow’s British allies took the south of the country but maintained a presence throughout northern Iran, including a consulate at Meshed—just 130 miles southeast from Ashkhabad.
Upon arrival in the city during early April, the Soviet major took the crew to their quarters, and even his face fell when he saw the shabby mud brick house surrounded by a mud fence they were to inhabit. He left the following day, and the Americans never saw him again.† Under very loose supervision, the crew could basically come and go as they pleased. As York put it later, “They [Moscow] probably said, ‘we are going to look the other way, and if they [Plane 8’s crew] are too stupid to get out under these conditions, let them rot here.” Giving credence to that, Kolya showed up several days later, and during the next five weeks there were many dinners and clandestine meetings. He finally confided to the pilots, “I can help you and I will.” He knew a smuggler who ran jewelry and drugs over the Kopet Dag mountains into the Soviet Union and who sometimes took people out. On May 20, Ski was to meet the man, Abdul Arram, and Bob Emmens recalled the night clearly. “It was the twentieth of May … on the eighteenth my son had his first birthday. I wondered what he looked like.”
Just past midnight on Monday, May 25, the five Americans clambered into the back of a truck, and Arram drove to the border.* They crossed by foot to avoid the Russian checkpoints, then met the truck that took them to Meshed. Rather, to within four miles of the city, where they were dumped and left to make their own entrance. Leaving the other three men concealed in a bomb crater outside the city, the pilots slipped past a final checkpoint and, using a diagram carefully drawn by Kolya, found their way to the British consulate. The Iranian guards let them through a gate in the high whitewashed wall and escorted them in, where the Americans stopped cold.
It was astonishing. A sandy path led through a “rolling stretch of green lawn, beautifully kept,” lined by flowers, and at the far end was a swimming pool! A pet gazelle was grazing in the center of the lawn. “It looked like the Garden of Eden to us,” Emmens recalled. On a slip of paper that he passed to the guard, York wrote:
Major E. J. York
and
Lieutenant R. G. Emmens
U.S. Army Air Forces
The man left, and within a minute a young Englishman emerged, holding the paper and staring at them with astonishment. Quite surprisingly, he knew all about them. “This is the most amazing coincidence,” the man sputtered. “I was on the staff of the British Embassy in Moscow in 1942.” Sending a truck back for the others, the crew was reunited within an hour, and as reality set in, they slowly relaxed. For the first time in thirteen months, the weary Americans had a hot bath and a real bed with sheets and pillows. Later they talked about the mission, their internment, and, most of all, of going home. Bob Emmens remembered thinking of those they’d encountered during their amazing odyssey: “they seemed unreal, like characters out of a fiction book. I felt as though I had just awakened from a bad dream … or rather, a nightmare.” But nightmares fade with the light of day—or in the case of Plane 8’s crew, in that singular, warm glow that comes with finally returning home.
EPILOGUE
