Russia at war 1941-1945

I also remember a very revealing talk I had with an air force colonel during that week at Uman—revealing, because his attitude to the Western Allies—now in March 1944—was

so much warmer than what one had found in the Red Army before. He talked of the way

the air force was supplying the army, as it was advancing "towards Rumania" (the words

"Rumania" and "Mamalyga" were on every soldier's tongue in that part of the world)

[Mamalyga is maize porridge, the staple diet among poorer Rumanians; these were

condescendingly referred to as mamalyzh-niki. i.e. mamalyga-eaters.] ,with food, ammunition and petrol; and then he said:

"The German air force is much weaker now than it used to be. Very occasionally they send fifty bombers over, but usually they don't use more than twenty. There's no doubt that all this bombing of Germany has made a lot of difference to the German equipment, both in the air and on land. Our soldiers realise the importance of the Allied bombings; the British and Americans, they call them 'nashi' —that is 'our' people... A lot of the German fighters now have to operate in the west and we can do a lot of strafing of

German troops, sometimes even without much air opposition." And he added: "Those Kittyhawks and Airocobras are damned good—not like last year's Tomahawks and

Hurricanes—which were pretty useless. But here we mostly use Soviet planes, especially low-flying stormoviks which scare the pants off the Germans..."

The Turbulent Town of Uman— Dostoevskian Bishop and other odd characters

In a way, the small town of Uman was a microcosm of the whole Ukraine. Its population had dropped from 43,000 to 17,000. To live here for a week was to see something of

nearly every aspect of Ukrainian life under the German occupation—except heavy

industry of which there was none for many miles around. Uman was the centre of a large rural area, one of the richest in the Ukraine, noted for its wheat, sugar-beet, maize, fruit and vegetables. Like many other towns in the Ukraine, its population before the war had been about one-quarter Jewish; now you did not see a single Jewish face in the streets.

Half the Jews had escaped to the east in 1941, but the 5,000 who had stayed—children and all—were herded one night into a big warehouse: all the windows and doors were

boarded up and hermetically sealed, and all of them died of suffocation within a couple of days. The Ukrainians in the town did not talk much about it: they seemed to look upon it as rather a routine matter under the Germans. There were now partisans in the town, and there had been a Soviet underground during the occupation. There had also been various kinds of collaborators, and Ukrainian nationalists, and, strangely, the Red Army was still often referred to as "the Bolsheviks" or "the Reds", as though they were something extraneous to this turbulent part of the Ukraine, with its old Petlura and Makhno

traditions.

[Petlura, head of an ephemeral Ukrainian nationalist "Government" in 1918, and Makhno, head of a peasant anarchist movement during the Civil War, were both

notorious for their banditry and anti-Semitic pogroms. Petlura was assassinated by a Jew in Paris in 1928.]

But the biggest obsession was deportation. Nearly 10,000 young people from Uman had

been deported as slave labour. Only few had escaped by joining the partisans, not strong in this part of the Ukraine.

The day we arrived Uman presented a fantastic sight. One large building in the centre of the town was still smouldering. The streets were crammed with burned-out German

vehicles, and were littered with thousands of papers, trodden into the mud: office records, private documents and letters, photographs, and also whole bundles of well-printed

coloured leaflets in Ukrainian exalting the "German-Ukrainian Alliance". One said

"Down with Bolshevism" and showed a manly hand in a green sleeve tearing down a red flag with the hammer-and-sickle; another showed a German soldier shaking hands with

another person in an unrecognisable pearl-grey uniform. "Our alliance will give happiness to all the nations of Europe"; still another called "Oath to the Fatherland"

showed a crowd of gallant horsemen raising their arms to heaven and swearing: "None will lay down his arms while our Ukraine is enslaved by the Bolsheviks "

[ These leaflets were apparently part of one of the half-baked attempts to set up an anti-Russian and pro-Nazi "Ukrainian Army" along Vlasov lines. These attempts came to little, and it was not till the end of 1944, when Bandera, Melnik and other Ukrainian

"nation-

alists" were liberated by the Germans, that they encouraged something of an anti-Soviet guerrilla war in the Western Ukraine, which was to last till 1947. There had, of course, been isolated anti-Soviet guerrilla bands before that, some independent of the Germans. It was one such band that assassinated General Vatutin near Kiev in March 1944. At the