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David Holzman's avatar

It's impressive how these flyers seem to be all in on the war--something that hasn't happened since WWII as far as I know. This is stuff I never would have looked for on my own, and I'm happy to be reading it. I love the photos too!

During WWII my father was a radar mechanic at the far end of the shuttle bombing, dubbed Operation Frantic, in which allied bombers left England to bomb Germany and German-held territory. But instead of having to fly all the way back to England, they could fly the relatively short distance to Poltava or Mirgorod, and land in one of the three US bases in what was then USSR and is now Ukraine. He was there from May 1944 to--if I remember correctly--late summer 1945, and learned Russian well enough to become one of the foremost experts on the Soviet economy.

Brooklyn born and raised, he finally learned to drive on one of the bases in Ukraine, in a Jeep. The story is well told in Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front: American Airmen Behind the Soviet Lines and the Collapse of the Grand Alliance, by Serhii Plokhy, a Ukrainian scholar at Harvard, who took advantage, among other things, of a KGB file on my father that we only found out existed in 2017, from which we learned--among much else--that a Russian woman he'd gone out with there, who disappeared on him, had been told by the Soviet authorities she must ditch him.

And I finally learned a bit about what he'd been doing on his first postwar return trip to Russia, which took place when I was about to turn 5, while he was gone for six weeks. I didn't understand how the mail worked, but one day during that period I'd colored something on some construction paper. I'd taken my childish creation outside and lofted it, hoping the winds of Cambridge would somehow convey it to him in the mysterious land over the mysterious sea. And there, in the prologue of Plokhy's book was a vignette about my father being followed and questioned by a couple of incompetent KGB officers during that very period. Yes, all these years later, it was a (minor) relief to have an account.

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Stewart Whisenant's avatar

Beautiful work, TC. Thats Another Fine Mess is the greatest subscription value on Substack. BTW, thanks for the Thom Hartmann recommendation--another great value in journalism with integrity.

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