AMERICAN BETRAYAL - Part 5

[Registrar]

This is the fifth and final part in a series based on the new book American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (St. Martin’s Press) by Diana West.

DID UNCLE SAM LEAVE 15,000 TO 20,000 GIS IN STALIN’S HANDS?

On March 3, 1945, under prodding from both the senior US military commander and US ambassador in Moscow, FDR cabled Stalin to request “urgently” that provisions be made for ten American rescue crews to move in and out of Soviet-captured territories to evacuate liberated American prisoners or war, many of whom required medical attention. With uncharacteristic punch, FDR underscored his request as being “of the greatest importance.”

On March 5, 1945, Stalin replied: Nyet. There were no groups of American ex-POWs in the Red zone, so no flights necessary. The Soviets would tell the British the same thing about an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 British ex-prisoners.

The US ambassador, Averill Harriman, knew Stalin was lying. He was hearing about hundreds, even thousands of lost American men roaming Soviet-held territory, and he was hearing straight from some who had made their way to Moscow.

On March 6, 1945, the Soviets forcibly took over Romania, shredding the Yalta agreement.

On March 8, 1945, Harriman cabled FDR that he had positive proof that Stalin’s statement regarding American POWs “was not repeat not true.” He stated that some three to four thousand Americans had been freed from German POW camps and were still unaccounted for.

On March 16, 1945, Churchill cabled FDR. “At present all entry into Poland has been barred to our representatives... This extends even to the liaison officers, British and American, who were to help in bringing out rescued prisoners of war... There is no doubt in my mind that the Soviets fear much our seeing what is going on in Poland.”

FDR would cable Stalin again on the matter. Following another rebuke – Stalin insisted that the remaining 17 American POWs in Red territory were en route home – FDR dropped the matter. He died a few weeks later.

This tense, behind the scenes discussion remained mostly unbeknownst to the American people for decades.

On May 12, 1945, the AP filed a startling report from Allied headquarters in Europe. “Nearly half of the estimated 200,000 British and 76,000 American prisoners of war still in Germany are believed to be within the Russian zone of occupation and Supreme Headquarters has twice requested a meeting to arrange their return.”

On May 19, 1945, Supreme Commander Eisenhower signed a cable stating: “Numbers of US prisoners estimated in Russian control 25,000.”
On May 22, 1945, Soviet and American delegations met in Halle, France, to settle the POW matter. Maj. Gen. R. W. Barker would write a chilling memo, noting that the Americans in Soviet custody were “in effect being held hostage”; “that we may find a reluctance to return them all”; and they might not come home for an “appreciable time to come.”

On May 30, 1945, the Kenner Memorandum, named for Gen. Albert Kenner, Eisenhower’s surgeon general at Allied headquarters, issued a memo stating that 20,000 American and 20,000 British soldiers remained in Soviet hands, along with literally hundreds of thousands of European nationals.

On May 31, 1945, the top US commander in Moscow, Maj. Gen. John R. Deane, wrote a top secret letter to his Soviet counterpart stating that 15,597 American soldiers were believed to be under Soviet control. That same day, the War Department in Washington announced “substantially all” American soldiers taken prisoner in Europe had been accounted for.

On June 1, 1945, Eisenhower signed a cable that read: “It is now estimated that only small numbers of U.S. prisoners of war still remain in Russian hands.”

“In other words,” states the May 23, 1991, US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Minority Report on POW/MIA policy, “on June 1, 1945, the US government’s public position was that most America GIs taken prisoner have come home and been repatriated, even though the cable traffic for the previous fortnight was reporting between 15,000 and 20,000 still held.”

What happened to these men?

American betrayal.

This completes the series. 

[Registrar]

From a Part 1 which showed so much promise (to incorporate recent Russian intelligence records into the strategic WWII narrative), to Part 5 which is almost like scraping the bottom of the conspiracy barrel, West's standards certainly slipped. Part 5 reads more like cheap TV current affairs journalism - vague statements open to all sorts of interpretations. Normally, someone writing a history book includes pesky little details like facts, evidence and sources. If she did in her book, why not have put a few of them in Part 5 of her teasers? She didn't have to give away the entire farm, just a sacrificial cow or goat.

Does she really think that there would be between fifteen to twenty thousand families who would have said nothing? Even now? Oh come now! Yes, there was a lesser number, but I cannot accept 15,000 as proven, long-term, un-repatriated U.S. prisoners in Russia.

In 1992, Dmitri Volkogonov, a military adviser to President Boris N. Yeltsin of Russia, told a U.S. Senate committee yesterday that more than 22,000 U.S. soldiers had been taken to the Soviet Union from German prisoner-of-war camps. The Russian official said most of the U.S. servicemen were returned to the United States shortly after the war, but that 119 U.S. citizens with Russian, Ukranian or Jewish names were kept behind. Mr. Volkogonov said that of that group, most were subsequently returned to the United States after U.S. protests, but that 18 had died while in Soviet custody and that some who had been forced to renounce their citizenship remained in Soviet prison camps "for a long time." (More reading here.)

Compare this with what happened to the German POW's - where the Soviet Union has admitted 381,067 POW deaths in custody. Of the almost 100,000 Germans captured following the Battle of Stalingrad (some say 200,000 but I will accept the lower figure in order to simplify this post), only 5,000 survived the war. German estimates place the overall figure of deaths in Russian custody at about one million. Soviet records are entirely skewed as they classified ethnic Germans of Eastern Europe as nationals of their country of residence before the war (eg Sudeten Germans were labeled as Czechs.) I do not know how the Soviets classified Germans from the eastern regions which were incorporated into Soviet-controlled Poland.

In the U.S., the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) is the lead agency responsible for personnel accounting and personnel recovery.

I just don't buy West's theory that "American statecraft was an instrument of Soviet strategy." Throughout the 1930's, America had been solidly Democrat. They held the Presidency, the House and the Senate solidly between 1932 and 1945. If American statecraft happened to advantage Soviet strategy, that was not because American statecraft was being surreptitiously manipulated by FDR's friends,  spies and agents of influence. It was because there were certain political theories, developed openly, which had attracted a worldwide commonality within the political cognoscenti. That remains the case, even to this day, when American political debate (to a foreigner like me) seems to be even more polarized than in any period since WWII.

Both FDR and Churchill had to rely on votes to stay in power. No votes are gained by sustaining massive casualties. How many casualties would it have cost them to ensure an eastern Europe independent of Soviet control after the war?

At no point in documents, or even anecdotally, can anyone ever pin down FDR or Churchill as delaying the second front so that Soviet lives were lost instead of American or British lives. "But this doesn't mean that it wasn't so" says Reesin Behind Closed Doors. (supra. He argues that as extremely smart politicians, they, at some visceral level, surely knew that it was to their, and their country's advantage that the Red Army rather than their own boys should deal with the Germans.

The casualties tell the story. The Americans and the British (and Commonwealth) each suffered around 400,000 dead. The Soviet Union endured a death toll approaching 27 million.

WWII was not just a "moral" war (Nazism was one of the most immoral ideologies that has ever existed) it was about power politics and the attempt to deal with the Nazis controlling Europe (and the Japanese Imperial controlling China and Southeast Asia.)  It was not the kind of success that the Hollywood version accords to it - for it resulted in the establishment of an even more egregious tyranny over much of Europe than even Nazism contemplated - and in the destruction and dismemberment of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, parts of Finland, a quarter Poland, then all of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Ruthenia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, Albania, a quarter of Austria and a third of Germany.

It was not just an alliance of good people who fought an alliance of bad people. To think that is to laud a naivete that, in this nuclear age, and with increasing instability between the world's great religions, we cannot afford.