It actually wasn't horrible at all. The only times he was in danger was when one of the planes returned from a bombing mission with no brakes, and was charging all over the airfield, unable to stop (my father served as a radar mechanic for most of his time there, and after that as an air traffic controller). And also I think the Germans …
It actually wasn't horrible at all. The only times he was in danger was when one of the planes returned from a bombing mission with no brakes, and was charging all over the airfield, unable to stop (my father served as a radar mechanic for most of his time there, and after that as an air traffic controller). And also I think the Germans conducted a bombing raid on the airfield, and the men had to dig trenches to spend the night in.
But basically, he had a very good time there. (We have a couple of hours of a BBC interview of him from around 1990 on CD, which I've listened to multiple times on car trips.) He had girlfriends, one of whom mysteriously disappeared, and we only found out in 2017 that someone among the Russian leaders had told her to leave him. He went to the theater, to concerts, he quite enjoyed learning the language--which I think he realized was going to be his ticket to becoming an expert on the USSR--and when the US authorities there told the men they could go home, after he'd been there for ten months, I think, he opted to stay.
There's now a book: 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), in which my father figures. The Prologue is an incident where, on his first time back to USSR after the war, a couple of KGB agents are following him, and talking to him. He'd gone to Russia for what I remember as having been more than a month, during which time I tried fairly futily to understand where he was (across the sea). We lived in Cambridge at the time, just off Mass Ave., and slightly west of Porter Square. I knew the mail existed, but I didn't know how it worked. One day I drew something or other on a piece of construction paper. I walked to Mass Ave., something I don't think I'd ever done before, and I walked in the direction away from Porter Square, to a vacant lot with a lot of junk in it. I lofted my drawing, hoping that somehow it would fly over to whereever he was, and he would find it.
(It was driving through Porter Square, the previous winter, where I suddenly realized the steering wheels in cars were all on the same side.)
Reading the prologue, I felt a sense of relief, because I was reading about where he'd been and something that had happened to him. I don't know why I didn't get that from the CDs, or, possibly I did get some relief but just didn't feel it at the time the way I felt reading the prologue.
It actually wasn't horrible at all. The only times he was in danger was when one of the planes returned from a bombing mission with no brakes, and was charging all over the airfield, unable to stop (my father served as a radar mechanic for most of his time there, and after that as an air traffic controller). And also I think the Germans conducted a bombing raid on the airfield, and the men had to dig trenches to spend the night in.
But basically, he had a very good time there. (We have a couple of hours of a BBC interview of him from around 1990 on CD, which I've listened to multiple times on car trips.) He had girlfriends, one of whom mysteriously disappeared, and we only found out in 2017 that someone among the Russian leaders had told her to leave him. He went to the theater, to concerts, he quite enjoyed learning the language--which I think he realized was going to be his ticket to becoming an expert on the USSR--and when the US authorities there told the men they could go home, after he'd been there for ten months, I think, he opted to stay.
There's now a book: 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), in which my father figures. The Prologue is an incident where, on his first time back to USSR after the war, a couple of KGB agents are following him, and talking to him. He'd gone to Russia for what I remember as having been more than a month, during which time I tried fairly futily to understand where he was (across the sea). We lived in Cambridge at the time, just off Mass Ave., and slightly west of Porter Square. I knew the mail existed, but I didn't know how it worked. One day I drew something or other on a piece of construction paper. I walked to Mass Ave., something I don't think I'd ever done before, and I walked in the direction away from Porter Square, to a vacant lot with a lot of junk in it. I lofted my drawing, hoping that somehow it would fly over to whereever he was, and he would find it.
(It was driving through Porter Square, the previous winter, where I suddenly realized the steering wheels in cars were all on the same side.)
Reading the prologue, I felt a sense of relief, because I was reading about where he'd been and something that had happened to him. I don't know why I didn't get that from the CDs, or, possibly I did get some relief but just didn't feel it at the time the way I felt reading the prologue.