Beyond the Call (21 page)

That would not be possible, he was told. Taken aback, Wilmeth asked why not. The Russians pondered a moment, and declared that it was because he didn't have a permit to show that he had a right to be in Lublin.

Colonel Wilmeth was puzzled. He had arrived on a Soviet-approved plane, accompanied by Soviet officers. Wasn't that sufficient evidence that he had permission to be here?

No, it was not. He should have a written permit from the ex-prisoner repatriation headquarters. Which, they reminded him, had just moved to Praga, a hundred miles away. Without it, he would not be allowed to visit the ex-prisoners.

Colonel Wilmeth's stock of patience remained considerable, although depleted somewhat. Very well, he said; perhaps they could obtain a permit for him? Along with the permit to go to Praga? And could he send a telegram to General Deane in Moscow?

He was told to bring his message to the town commandant, who would send it on. With that curt instruction, the meeting ended.

An hour later, Colonel Wilmeth returned to the office with his message for General Deane, summarizing the meeting. The commandant told him the message could not be sent until all the people who had been at the meeting had gathered again; they would have to read it and clear it for sending.

A less placid man might have started tearing his hair at this point. James Dudley Wilmeth was, as far as any man alive could be, a placid man. At West Point he had been known as ‘Uncle Dud' and regarded as a rather dull, plodding, banal young man.
¹⁴
That temperament now stood him in good stead.

Later that evening, he was suddenly summoned back to the commandant's office and told that permission had been granted for him to visit the ex-prisoners. It was 10:30pm. All the Soviet officers from the earlier meeting had to be present for the visit. It took three trips
by jeep to get everybody – Russians and Americans – to the building near the university where the ex-prisoners were housed.

Until a few days ago, the Russians had been accommodating the ex-POWs at Majdanek, the former Nazi death camp on the outskirts of Lublin, but now they had been moved into the town. Whatever Majdanek had been like, the new quarters didn't look like an improvement. The building was in an appalling state.
¹⁵
It had walls and a roof, but that was about all that could be said in its favor. The windows were broken, and there were no doors. All the toilets were blocked up and overflowing; there was no hot water, and no bathing facilities or medicines. Into this squalor were crowded more than 200 men: 91 Americans and 129 British. Nearly half were infested with lice. They slept on straw-covered wooden pallets. Each man had one blanket. The only source of heat was a single coal-burning stove.

Colonel Wilmeth and his companions had previously heard firsthand accounts of how Allied POWs were being treated by their Soviet liberators, and they heard more now as they moved among the men, taking their names, listening to their stories; but seeing it in the flesh was something else again. The stories were sickening and heartbreaking. The worst treatment began once they were passed back from the front line to troops in the rear areas. They had been starved, robbed, herded with captured Germans; many of their comrades had gone into hiding in Polish homes to escape this treatment. It was as if the liberated POWs were regarded as spoils of war, to be plundered or discarded at will.
¹⁶

An American lieutenant told Wilmeth that if there was no transportation out of there soon, many of the men who were fit enough were thinking of slipping away and making their way south or east on their own. They had been on the verge of giving up hope, but seeing Colonel Wilmeth had revived them. At last, they believed, they would get some real help.

Wilmeth went back to his hotel and prepared a cable for General Deane in Moscow, asking him to send supplies for 2,000 men, plus
$10,000 to supplement the $4,000 the colonel had brought with him, so that urgent supplies could be purchased in the town. It was absolutely obvious that the Russians were not going to provide anything. All supplies would have to be bought on the black market. The message to General Deane did not get through.

That first day at Lublin proved to be a foretaste of Colonel Wilmeth's entire stay in the town. His messages to Moscow were garbled or blocked. He and his companions were banned from leaving their hotel without a Soviet escort (he drew the line at having a Russian sleep in the room with him). The Americans could not use their own jeep, because they were not allowed any gasoline for it. They bought gas on the black market, but still couldn't use the jeep without their Russian chauffeur. A couple of Russian officers commandeered it and used it to drive around town picking up girls.
¹⁷

Wilmeth challenged the Russians about the way they were housing the ex-prisoners in prison-like conditions rather than just sending them on their way to freedom. They needn't even go to Odessa, he argued; Eastern Command had plenty of planes and could fly the POWs out to Poltava twenty at a time, making several flights a day. The Soviets told him that would not be possible. There were no airfields at Lublin, or at any of the other POW concentration points. Wilmeth knew from speaking to American pilots at Poltava, as well as from the evidence of his own eyes, that all the towns had airstrips. Anyway, American pilots could land and take off from a field if it was large enough. The Russians flatly denied this: there were no proper airfields and it was not possible to take off from an ordinary field.

In that case, Wilmeth asked, why could the ex-prisoners not be put on trains to Odessa or Poltava as soon as they came into Lublin? Why keep them confined for days and weeks? Because, came the Soviet response, the trains to Odessa were intermittent, and there was no rail connection to Poltava. Colonel Wilmeth visited the Lublin rail station and spoke to the Polish stationmaster. Why yes, there was a train to Odessa every day, the stationmaster said, and there were regular trains to Poltava as well. But the Russians continued to insist that there were
not. And anyway, no travel could take place without proper permits, and these could not be obtained instantly.

On 28 February, his second day in Lublin, Colonel Wilmeth met Colonel Vlasov, the Soviet head of POW repatriation in Poland, who came all the way from his new headquarters at Praga (by plane, from one non-existent airfield to another) to take a look at the American interloper.

The meeting took place in the office of the town commandant. It was rather crowded, with all the Soviet officers who had been at the previous meeting attending this one also. Wilmeth quizzed Colonel Vlasov on how many ex-prisoners had so far been evacuated to Odessa. More than 3,000 Americans, Vlasov claimed, 800 of them having been sent by rail just in the past week. (He was lying; 3,000 was more than the entire number of American POWs received at Odessa throughout the whole period;
¹⁸
but Wilmeth didn't know that then.) And how many were still unaccounted for in Poland? How many altogether had been liberated from POW camps by the Red Army? Vlasov did not know.

Colonel Wilmeth felt that this was not good enough. It was time to stop pandering to these Soviets, he decided.

‘Colonel Vlasov,' he said, ‘I would like you to obtain permission for me to' – he counted off on his fingers – ‘one, move to Praga to cooperate with your department there; two, have direct communication with the Military Mission in Moscow; three, visit all the POW collecting points at Praga, Kraków, Łódź, and the two yet to be established, wherever they may be; and four, to visit Odessa.'
¹⁹

Vlasov's face darkened as Wilmeth's requests were communicated to him by his interpreter. ‘Colonel Wilmeth,' he replied, ‘I believe it has already been suggested to you by Captain Purtautov' – this was the bird dog who accompanied the American party everywhere – ‘that you and your comrades go back to Poltava soon. I endorse that suggestion. You should return there tomorrow, and await the answer to your requests.'

‘I'm not returning to Poltava,' Wilmeth said. ‘On the contrary, more Americans are coming here. Ten contact teams are currently en
route from Great Britain via Tehran. The teams, each with an airplane and a jeep, will go to each of the POW collection points in Poland. The Soviet government will provide billets and food, and the United States government will provide everything else.'

As an attempt to bulldoze the Soviets, it was imaginative and bold, but completely ineffectual. It was true that ten small POW contact teams were coming from London, but so far they had yet to be granted entry to the USSR.

Colonel Vlasov was unfazed; he suggested blandly that Colonel Wilmeth might like to go to Moscow to discuss the plan with General Golubev, the Soviet officer in charge of POW affairs. Colonel Wilmeth declined. His patience was almost worn away now.

‘Just this month,' he said angrily, ‘the President of the United States and Marshal Stalin both signed an agreement at the Yalta Conference. It contained provisions for the handling of liberated prisoners of war. That agreement,
signed by Marshal Stalin himself
, gives me the right to receive
immediate
information about released Americans and to have
immediate
access to the camps where they are being held.' He stared at Vlasov. ‘I have a copy of the agreement with me. Would you like me to loan it to you? You could read it tonight.'

Colonel Vlasov declined the offer. The meeting came to a frigid end.

That had been a week ago now, Wilmeth reflected as he gazed across the rooftops of Lublin, and he had made barely any progress since.

The day after the meeting with Vlasov, 267 American and British POWs were loaded aboard a train and dispatched to Odessa. More continued to drift into town. They were put in the same stinking, ramshackle building. Over the ensuing days, using what limited money he had, Wilmeth purchased soap and toothbrushes for the POWs, as well as lightbulbs, brushes and brooms, and other requisites to make the building more habitable. He also bought picks and shovels so the men could dig latrines.

He tried repeatedly to make contact with the Military Mission in
Moscow, requesting more money and reporting the situation, but his messages didn't seem to get through the Soviet system.
²⁰
He asked if he could contact Moscow or Poltava by radio, but the Russians told him there was no radio available. What about the one in the plane he had come in? he asked. It was broken, they told him. The barefacedness of the Soviets' lies was breathtaking.

If it hadn't been for the Polish people, Colonel Wilmeth's mission might have been utterly futile. With each batch of prisoners that came into town, he heard stories of the help that ordinary Poles had given. They had taken the wandering foreigners into their homes, in spite of the risk of trouble from the Russians, and fed them despite the fact that they had so little themselves. In Lublin, the Polish Red Cross provided meals for newly arrived POWs, arranged billets with local families to ease congestion in the official camp block, provided medical facilities and paid hospital bills for the sick, and even helped buy gasoline for Colonel Wilmeth's jeep. To avoid the ruinous official rates for exchanging dollars for rubles and zlotys, and barred by regulations from using the more profitable black market exchange, Wilmeth came to an agreement whereby the US Embassy would reimburse the American Red Cross in Moscow.
²¹

By prior agreement with his British counterpart in Moscow, Wilmeth shouldered responsibility for caring for British POWs to the same degree as Americans. He visited French POWs, who were kept in a separate camp, in conditions even more squalid. The burden of responsibility was almost too much to bear. As the days went by, no messages reached Wilmeth from General Deane.

Convinced that the Soviets were blocking communications both ways, Wilmeth decided to get a message to Deane directly. On 5 March he made four copies of a report containing a true account of his experiences in Lublin thus far, put the papers in sealed packets, and gave them to four trusted POWs – two Americans and two British.
²²
He put the four men aboard a train to Moscow, with instructions to deliver the packets into the hands of General Deane. Of the four, surely at least one would get through.

On 7 March, another batch of POWs was prepared for departure. Fifty-four American and British prisoners were given a rudimentary wash, had their clothes disinfected, and were loaded into a boxcar destined for Odessa.

Among them was Sergeant Richard J. Beadle, who had arrived from Warsaw three days earlier, after his arduous month-long journey from Stalag III-C.

The boxcar stood in the Lublin marshaling yard all that night and most of the next day before finally being hitched to a train and departing. The Russian commander of the holding camp said that the delay was a punishment for the men's poor discipline during bathing earlier.

A couple of days later, Colonel Wilmeth was informed by Colonel Vlasov that two of his secret Moscow-bound couriers – the American officers – had been caught and detained at Warsaw, where they had been trying to board a plane.
²³
Red Air Force guards had also arrested an American ex-POW doctor Wilmeth had sent to a camp near Warsaw to investigate a report that there were hundreds of sick Americans there. Vlasov was furious; Wilmeth had no right to send unauthorized messengers through Soviet territory. Wilmeth insisted that he had every right. Again he offered to let Vlasov read his copy of the Yalta agreement.

Colonel Wilmeth went on with his tasks with a heavy heart, but also with iron in his soul. From this moment on, he would have to fight every step of the way just to be allowed to stay in Lublin, let alone do any good. Meanwhile, two of his secret messengers were still at liberty and might still get the truth to General Deane.