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By Root 1052 0

to SHAEF. He insisted that contacts should be conducted exclusively through Moscow. In addition to refusing to refuel Allied aircraft seeking to aid the Poles, the Russians denied requests that RAF and USAAF planes crippled on bomber operations should be allowed to land at Soviet forward airfields. A British SOE mission parachuted to the Army Krajowa, led by a full colonel, was detained, disarmed, interrogated, humiliated, imprisoned and finally shipped to Moscow. The Russians were seriously tempted to shoot its members, as they had already shot some SOE personnel in Hungary. It was two months before the British embassy in Moscow could gain exit visas for the SOE group. Allied commanders, conscious of the huge volume of vehicles, equipment and supplies delivered to the Soviet Union, were increasingly exasperated by Russian recalcitrance. Yet from Stalin’s viewpoint his policy was perfectly rational. The consequences would be gratuitously embarrassing if Allied liaison officers witnessed at first hand the conduct of the Red Army in eastern Europe, and reported it to Washington and London.

An American officer who did glimpse the Red Army in motion was amazed by the spectacle of this teeming host, mingling the modern and the medieval, drawn from a hundred races and tribes, burdened with equipment and loot, accompanied by horse-drawn carts, civilian vehicles, bicycles, trucks of every shape and size interspersed with tanks and guns: “I’ll never forget those Russian columns and the crap they had. Holy smoke, you wondered how the hell they marched all that distance with that kind of stuff.” A New Zealand doctor liberated from captivity by the Soviet advance watched Zhukov’s men stream across Poland in late January:

What a disorderly rabble they looked. Terrible congestion and utter chaos . . . During my whole eight weeks as a guest of the USSR, I saw absolutely nothing in the way of medical organisation . . . Before leaving a Polish hospital, I was attracted by a commotion outside. I went to the window and saw a stretcher containing a wounded German officer being carried down the steps. As I looked, a young Cossack officer hurried after the stretcher, drew his revolver, and shot the German through the head. It was a ghastly exhibition, but even more nauseating was the sight, some few minutes later, of Polish children stripping the body of clothing as it lay in the street.

Even after the doctor’s recent experiences in the hands of the Nazis, he experienced a surge of pity when he found himself on a train at Odessa halted alongside wagonloads of Germans on their way to Siberia: “it was difficult not to feel sorry for the blighters.”

“There seemed to be little difference between [Russian] treatment of the peoples they were supposed to be liberating and those they were conquering,” wrote Peter Kemp, one of the SOE party mentioned above, who observed the Red Army’s behaviour to the Polish residents of a building commandeered as a corps headquarters.

The soldiers . . . behaved with calculated brutality and contempt. They broke up furniture for firewood, they pilfered every article of value and marked or spoilt what they did not care to take away; they urinated and defecated in every room . . . the hall, the stairs and passages were heaped and spattered with piles of excrement, the walls and floors were splashed with liquor, spittle and vomit—the whole building stank like an untended latrine. It is a pity those communists who declared that they would welcome the Red Army as liberators never saw that particular army at its work of liberation.

Discipline within the Red Army was indeed erratic. Pyotr Mitrofanov, the forty-five-year-old driver of Vasily Kudryashov’s T-34, was supposed to be on watch one night when the lieutenant found him asleep in their tank. Kudryashov lashed out at him: “You traitor! You know you could be shot for this!” Mitrofanov fell trembling on his knees before the officer, pleading for mercy. He was brusquely forgiven. Next day, the driver said: “Comrade commander, will you write a letter to my family