Exasperation in Moscow

THE STRANGE ALLIANCE (344 pp.) --John R. Deane--Viking ($3.75).

The strangeness and the strain of the U.S. wartime alliance with Soviet Russia was guessed at by the U.S. public, but the public had only suspicions to go on. Now in a sober, fact-packed book, a man who knows a great deal about it, Major General John R. Deane, describes what was perhaps the most one-sided friendship in history.

Now retired to civilian life, General Deane was head of the U.S. Military Mission to Moscow, 1943-45. As such he was senior U.S. military officer in the Soviet Union, coordinating land, sea, air and Lend-Lease activities. In almost every respect, he reports, the Russians acted as friends and allies only when it suited their purpose. Most of the time they played hard-to-get, wore a surly, suspicious look, now & then did not even trouble to acknowledge official letters. Then suddenly they would be all smiles and dazzlingly amiable gestures, complete with vodka and caviar.

Sweet & Sour. Readers who followed Molotov, Gromyko & Co. through recent international conferences will recognize the exasperating Soviet sweet-sour game, though in 1943-45 the exasperation was probably not all one-sided. The U.S. had reservations, too (e.g., U.S. airmen were briefed to destroy certain devices and documents in the event of forced landings on Russian soil). But, as allies go, the U.S. was certainly openhanded--and in return, its chief representative was snubbed, given the runaround, even scolded. "I was in a high dudgeon much of the time," says General Deane.

Occasionally the alliance really worked. From time to time U.S. flyers bailed out or force-landed in Siberia after a bombing raid against Japan. According to international law, the flyers could have been interned, since the U.S.S.R. was not then at war with Japan. But the Russians transported them to a convenient frontier and allowed them to "escape" into U.S. hands. Another exception was a working arrangement between U.S. and Soviet intelligence agencies, which General Deane says was not only profitable but was carried out with "the utmost cordiality and good will."

Sabotage & Silly Reasons. The normal atmosphere, however, was grudging cooperation and hardly a trace of good will. U.S. planes which came down behind Soviet lines in Europe were in many cases simply taken over by the Red Air Force, without a by-your-leave. Permission to set up radar stations in Soviet territory to guide Allied bombers over Eastern Germany was curtly refused ("the silly reason . . . that they would have caused interference to Red Army radio communications"). U.S. shuttle-bombing bases in the Ukraine were established only after months of painful negotiation, and then, says General Deane, "the [Soviet] General Staff, the NKVD, the Foreign Office, and the party leaders" did their utmost to "sabotage the venture which they had reluctantly approved."

The troubles, suggests General Deane, were not only Soviet suspicion of "foreigners" and "capitalists," but Soviet bureaucratic confusion--or a blend of both in special wartime form. In July 1944, the Red Air Force asked for instruction in the use of the Norden bombsight. The U.S. promptly agreed, but it was September before the Soviet Foreign Office got around to granting entrance visas to U.S. instructors. Starting classwork in October, the instructors found that their students were allowed only 72 hours for the entire course. They thereupon asked Washington for a Liberator to speed up group training. The Liberator was dispatched. In November Soviet officials announced that it would not be allowed to enter the Soviet Union. The class disbanded, having had no practical training at all.

Tires & Atom Bombs. Again, there was the case, of the tire factory. It had operated at 115% of designed capacity as part of the Ford Motor plant at River Rouge, Mich. But the Russians needed rubber tires, so the machines were dismantled, and the factory was lifted overseas, a $6,000,000 Lend-Lease item.

The Ford equipment was shipped in 1943, and extra equipment, including a power plant, was sent in 1944. But the Russians dallied, temporized, changed blueprints, left the machinery standing around in the snow and rain. Eventually a team of U.S. experts sent to help with the construction got tired of waiting, and all but one went home.

By October 1945, when the U.S. Military Mission itself left Russia, the plant had still not turned out a single tire, says General Deane. "Whenever I am asked," he concludes, "how long it will take the Russians to produce an atomic bomb, I think first of the vast American plants at Oak Ridge and elsewhere and then of the way the Russians set up a tire plant which was already designed, built and ready for installation."

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