Chad Thumann - The Undesirables

“How did you get out of Leningrad?”

“Across the Road of Life.”

“I didn’t see you get off a truck.”

“Because our truck got strafed by German planes. We barely escaped on foot.” Karen showed the commandant her ticket. “Look, we have tickets to Moscow. We’re to join a T-34 training battalion.”

It wasn’t a likely story, but there wasn’t anything the commandant could flag as obviously untrue. So he stamped their ticket and directed them to the station.

Eventually, Karen and Petr procured a seat on the next train to Moscow. It wasn’t a seat, really—it was just enough space to stand, in a crowded boxcar. “You ever been on a troop train before?” asked one of the grinning soldiers.

“No,” Karen replied.

“You’re gonna love it,” the soldier assured her ironically. “You get a massage free with the ticket.”

He was right. There was nothing to hold on to in the boxcar, so with every move of the train, the soldiers were falling all over one another. Karen and the other female passengers were constantly getting pinched and groped. Petr noticed and wanted to intervene, but Karen subtly gestured to him to swallow his anger and remain calm. The German beatings and NKVD torture were far worse than any pinching. She didn’t mind the unwelcome attention so long as miles of Russia continued to pass beneath her feet.

Heading southeast, away from Leningrad and toward Moscow—that was what made Karen happy.

Bobby was starting to regret encouraging Major Bovington to move them all to Alaska. It had started promising enough, with a transfer back in April to the 57th Pursuit Squadron at Hamilton Field in California. Amazingly, Major Bovington’s command now included some of the most experienced P-39 pilots in the Army Air Forces, so they were to help train the pilots of the 57th.

Bobby had embraced the duty because he knew that the 57th would soon be transferred from California to Alaska. Alaska was, he secretly hoped, one step closer to Karen.

No one else in his squadron shared his enthusiasm. And now that they were finally in Alaska, it was worse than any of them expected.

The facilities weren’t bad—they were far better than the dump of an airfield in Eritrea. But it was colder than they’d feared. Even though it was now May, they had to plow snow off the airfield every morning. The roads were choked with more snow, and the shore was so clogged with ice it was hard to tell where the land ended and the water began. The icy wind gusted in from the sea, bringing large clouds of snow with it, and going outside was like getting caught in a blizzard. Everyone hated going outside, and nobody did unless they had to. The absolute temperature wasn’t too bad: it hovered around thirty degrees. But the windchill brought that close to zero.

They huddled in their barracks, playing cards, and gambling with bottle caps they called “duty chips.”

Jack had come up with the idea to deal in duty chips—you could win them to make someone else do your work for you. Scrubbing latrines was a duty chip. Peeling potatoes was a duty chip. But any task outside was several duty chips. Digging a defensive trench was ten duty chips. Plowing the airfield was five.

“Call,” Bobby announced, and tossed a bottle cap onto the pile of tin heaped in the middle of the rickety card table.

Max grabbed the deck and tapped it a couple of times against the tabletop. Max was twenty-three and from San Diego. He’d joined their squadron at Hamilton Air Field, where he’d turned out to be a natural pilot. He looked to Jack expectantly.

“Two,” Jack said. He slid two cards from his hand facedown toward Max; Max flicked Jack two new cards from the deck before glancing at Wally.

“Gimme a sec—I gotta think,” Wally told him, eyeing his cards carefully.

Bobby used the opportunity to analyze his hand. It was garbage: a jack, a ten, a seven, an ace, and a three. It didn’t add up to anything. He should have folded. Calling was a fool’s bet.

“Just one, I think,” Wally muttered.

“You think or you know?” Max grumbled.

“Yeah, just one.” Wally slid one of his cards across, and Max flicked him a new one from the deck. His eyes shifted to Bobby.

“Three,” Bobby said with a frown. He tossed the cards to Max, not really caring whether anyone saw what they were. Max flicked three new ones back.

“Call,” Jack said after analyzing his new hand.

All attention passed to Wally, who hemmed and hawed and fidgeted, unwilling to commit.

Wally hated the cold more than anyone. But they all hated Alaska equally. Alaska was too far from the fighting they all craved. The only thing keeping the pilots from griping too much was the prospect of finally getting into a fight. It was why most of them had joined the Army Air Forces, and they’d begun to resent having spent their entire brief military careers in training and transport.

Combat was the official reason given for their being reassigned to the 57th, and it was why they’d been sent to this little airfield in Nome, Alaska. Army brass feared an imminent Japanese attack on American territory, and Alaska, so far off the beaten path, was deemed highly vulnerable. Wally, Jack, Max, and the rest only hoped the army brass were right.

Bobby had cards in his hand, but he barely looked at them. His mind was wandering. Alone among his squad mates, Bobby knew that the Japanese weren’t about to attack Alaska. That was a mere cover story, intentional disinformation designed to obscure the truth.

Major Bovington had continued to confide in Bobby because of his special knowledge of Russian conditions, and Bobby was able to deduce the big picture.

Army Air Forces’ real purpose in Alaska had very little to do with Japan and everything to do with Russia. In a technical sense, Alaska was as close to Russia as America could get. The Bering Strait, a tiny strip of ocean only fifty miles wide, was all that separated Russia from American territory. But there wasn’t a lot of trust between the Russians and Americans. After all, only two years ago, Stalin had been Hitler’s ally—Russia and Germany had invaded Poland together and divided the conquered country between them.

But that was then, and this was now. Hitler had betrayed his erstwhile ally, and now Russia was fighting for her survival. So Americans were forced to change their opinions of Russia and Stalin.

As Great Britain’s leader, Winston Churchill was quoted as saying: “If Hitler invaded hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” Even if Stalin was the devil incarnate, he was still the enemy of the enemy—enemy of Nazi Germany, a traditional enemy of Imperial Japan, and therefore a convenient friend of America.

The Soviet Union became an ally purely by virtue of mutual interest. But it wasn’t a trusted friend. American military experts didn’t believe that Russia could withstand another summer of German aggression. The Wehrmacht’s war machine had been unstoppable everywhere it marched, including Russia. Mechanization—trucks, airplanes, and tanks—seemed to have broken those barriers that prevented Napoleon from conquering Russia 150 years earlier.

Germany’s Army Group South had stalled, digging in over the winter and consolidating its gains. But there were already signs of it stirring. American generals believed it would soon be back on the move, driving south toward the rich oil fields of the Caucasus Mountains, in Baku, which appeared to be the key to the entire war. They provided an almost limitless supply of petrol. If Germany could secure that fuel, and by all appearances it seemed they would be able to, Russia was doomed.

And so, too, might America be. America’s greatest advantage was her size and industry. Japan was an island nation with limited resources, and Germany was only slightly bigger than Texas. But Russia was vast. With access to Russian manpower and resources, German industry could dwarf that of the United States.

So the real reason Bobby’s squadron had been transferred to Alaska was to help prepare a fallback strategy. If Germany’s Army Group South were to succeed, if they were to capture the oil fields at Baku, America wanted to bomb those fields.

They couldn’t stop there. They would have to bomb Chelyabinsk, so-called Tankograd, Russia’s boomtown military-industrial complex, which had recently relocated to Siberia. America simply couldn’t allow all that Russian industry to fall into Nazi hands.

The pretext was Lend-Lease. The United States would provide Russia with warplanes, flying them across the Bering Strait from Alaska. Russia considered the proposal, not suspecting that America’s secret desire in flying the planes over themselves was to identify the Russian airfields they’d need to capture for a future bombing campaign. But things seldom work out according to plan. Contrary to everyone’s expectations, the Russians ultimately refused.

They didn’t refuse the planes; they wanted the planes. But it seemed they didn’t trust the Americans any more than the Americans trusted them. They didn’t want Americans flying through Russian airspace. They wanted to send their own pilots to Nome, where they would then take possession of the American planes and fly them to the Russian front themselves.

The whole plan was a bust, and as a result, the American pilots had nothing to do. They didn’t know it was a bust. It was all top secret. But the truth was they were just wasting their time playing cards until the Russian pilots arrived, with no prospect of getting into a real fight.