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Home from Siberia The Secret Odysseys of Interned American Airmen in World War II by Otis E. Hays, Jr. |
As war spread across the world at the end of 1941, the Soviet Union found itself between a rock known as Nazi Germany and a hard place called imperial Japan. With all its forces battling Germany in the west, the Soviet Union had to keep peace on its isolated and vulnerable eastern borders. To avoid risking its status as a neutral country in the war between the United States and Japan, the Soviet Union interned nearly three hundred American flyers who crashed or made emergency landings in eastern Soviet territory after bombing raids on Japanese targets.
This is the long-secret and nearly forgotten story of how the Soviet commissariat for internal affairs interned 291 young Americans in Siberia and, at the risk of war on a second front, eventually smuggled four groups of them (and released another after the war ended) to south central Asia and finally across the Iranian border. In Iran American officials swore the airmen to secrecy and confiscated any items that would indicate they had been in the Soviet Union. Like the oft-repeated guideline "name, rank, and serial number," the brief phrase "in a neutral country" was the only permissible public explanation for the flyers' whereabouts.
Official U.S. military records of the internments, many declassified as recently as 1986, are impersonal and sketchy. To tell the story in its entirety, Otis Hays, Jr., sought out surviving airmen. Some had blotted this secret episode from their memories or found it too painful to relive, but others had smuggled rudimentary diaries out of the Soviet Union and helped piece together the tale.
To many of the American flyers, the months of internment seemed little different from months in captivity. Inadequate diet, clothing, medical care, and housing, plus surveillance, confinement, illness, and uncertainty about their future left these men in an anomalous situation for the rest of their lives--soldiers who had been held by the allies of their country. But the ordeal had lighter moments, when the internees found pets, played ball with improvised equipment, and made friends with some of the Russians, friendships that, sadly, were quickly blotted out by the first winds of the Cold War.
OTIS HAYS, JR., has had careers as both army officer and foreign service officer (U.S. Information Agency). During World War II he was assigned as the Alaska Defense Command's staff supervisor of liaison with Soviet personnel and activities in Alaska. He is now a freelance writer and lives near Pierce City, Missouri.
Number Sixteen: Texas A&M University Military History Series
Home from Siberia
+ ISBN 1-58544-010-8. paper $19.95s
LC 89-20569. Military History #16. 248 pp. 9 b&w photos. 1 line drawing. 4 maps. App. Bib. Index. 6x9.
Publication Date: 1990.
This title may be obtained through your local bookseller, who will place special orders for them through Ingram Book Company's on-demand division.