Operation Frantic

On the morning of 2 June 1944 some 130 Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bombers of the US Fifteenth Air Force took off from the airfields around Foggia in southern Italy, escorted by about 70 North American P-51 Mustang fighters. Their target was the marshalling yard at Debrecen in eastern Hungary. Once its bombs had gone, however, the force did not turn back for Italy. It flew on eastwards across the front line and, a few hours later, landed on airfields in Soviet Ukraine – the bombers at Poltava and Myrhorod, the fighters at Pyriatyn. Aboard one of the Flying Fortresses was none other than the commander of the Allied air forces in the Mediterranean, General Ira Eaker. So began Operation Frantic, a series of American shuttle-bombing raids in which aircraft taking off from Britain or Italy landed in the Soviet Union and attacked further targets on the way back.

That the Americans opened Operation Frantic on 2 June by bombing Debrecen is well attested, but one qualification is in order. On the same day other formations of the Fifteenth Air Force struck railway junctions in several Hungarian cities, among them Szeged, Szolnok, Miskolc, Nagyvárad (Oradea) and Kolozsvár (Cluj), and then returned to Italy. Hungarian historiography often counts the whole day as part of “Operation Frantic”, but in American terms it was a single mission – the one that flew on to Ukraine after attacking Debrecen. The other raids belonged to the offensive against the railways of Hungary and Romania that had been under way since April, and some of them were meant to draw the German defences away from the real target.

Bases on the other side of the front

The idea of using airfields in the Soviet Union took shape in the staffs of the US Army Air Forces (USAAF) soon after the German attack on the USSR in June 1941, and after Pearl Harbor it was extended to include bombing Japan from Siberia. For a long time it remained on paper: Moscow, fighting for survival, preferred Lend-Lease supplies to the presence of foreign airmen on its soil. The American delegation formally raised the matter at the conference of foreign ministers in Moscow in October 1943, in talks with Vyacheslav Molotov.

The breakthrough came at the Tehran Conference at the end of November 1943. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt personally asked Joseph Stalin for bases for American bombers and reconnaissance aircraft, and the Soviet leader agreed “in principle”. The details were negotiated in Moscow by Ambassador W. Averell Harriman and the head of the US military mission, General John R. Deane. Stalin gave his final consent at a meeting with Harriman on 2 February 1944; the ambassador reported to Washington that Stalin approved the project “limited to 200 bombers and six airfields”. In practice the Russians made only three available.

The Americans’ aims went beyond the bombing itself. Shuttle missions would let them reach factories and communications hubs in the eastern Reich and in the lands of its allies, hitherto at the limit of the bombers’ range from England and Italy, and would force the Germans to spread their air defences more thinly. Political considerations, however, weighed more heavily: a joint operation was meant to build trust between the allies, pave the way for future bases in Siberia should the USSR go to war with Japan, and provide experience of co-operation in communications, meteorology and aerial reconnaissance. The chief of the American air forces, General Henry Arnold, initially hoped to station three heavy bomber groups permanently in the USSR, or even an entire air force. Soviet aims remain less clear. The USSR had no doctrine of strategic bombing and agreed to an American presence only once its victory was no longer in doubt; Soviet officers eagerly studied American equipment and methods, and Moscow obtained, among other things, the secret Norden bombsight and extensive aerial photographs of Europe.

Poltava, Myrhorod and Pyriatyn

The three airfields lay along the Kiev–Kharkiv railway, in territory retaken by the Red Army a few months earlier and by now far behind the front. At the end of April 1944 the American Eastern Command was set up at Poltava under General Alfred Kessler; the bases were given the code names Stations 559, 560 and 561. Preparing them was a huge logistical undertaking. Almost everything had to be brought from the United States, from high-octane aviation fuel to the steel matting used to build runways. Heavy equipment went by convoy to Murmansk and Arkhangelsk and from there by rail to Ukraine; men and lighter loads were flown in by transport aircraft via Tehran. The spring thaw turned the airfields into a sea of mud, and the retreating Germans had wrecked whatever they could – in the headquarters building at Poltava they had even left a remotely detonated bomb, which was discovered in time.

Instead of the several thousand men planned, the Russians agreed to accept only about 1,300 Americans. The Soviet authorities controlled communications, flight routes and the choice of targets, and every concession required lengthy negotiation. American officers thought well of their co-operation with Soviet airmen and mechanics but complained of a mistrustful bureaucracy. Moscow reserved the air defence of the bases for itself and refused to admit American night fighters and radars – a decision that was soon to backfire. At the end of May a small detachment of Lockheed P-38 reconnaissance aircraft began operating from Poltava, and that same month a delegation from the headquarters of the US Strategic Air Forces in Europe visited the bases and pronounced them ready to receive bombers.

“Frantic Joe”

The first mission was assigned to the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy. The choice of target caused disputes: the Americans proposed, among other things, the Heinkel aircraft works near Riga, but the Russians did not want American raids in areas where they were preparing their own great summer offensive. In the end the commander of the US Strategic Air Forces in Europe, General Carl Spaatz, acting on General Deane’s advice, chose the marshalling yard at Debrecen – an important junction on the lines running from Hungary into Transylvania and to the front in the Carpathians, to which Moscow had no objection. Because serious repairs to damaged aircraft would have been impossible at Poltava, the force was to avoid combat with Luftwaffe fighters, while other units of the Fifteenth Air Force attacked targets in Hungary and the Balkans that day to divert the German defences.

The first mission bore the working name “Frantic Joe”. Since “Joe” was the Americans’ popular nickname for Stalin, and frantic means “frenzied”, the name was judged awkward, even insulting to the Soviet leader, and was shortened to plain “Frantic”. According to American records, on 2 June about 130 B-17s escorted by some 70 Mustangs bombed the marshalling yard at Debrecen; they were joined by 27 bombers that had strayed off course on their way to the junction at Nagyvárad. One Flying Fortress was lost over the target. General Eaker, who wanted to impress his Soviet hosts in person, flew in a 97th Bomb Group bomber named Yankee Doodle II. After several hours over Hungary, the Carpathians and the front, the formation reached Ukraine; the bombers landed at Poltava and Myrhorod, the fighters at Pyriatyn. On the airfield at Poltava Eaker was welcomed by Ambassador Harriman, American generals and Soviet officers led by General Perminov, who was responsible for the bases on the Soviet side. For both sides it was above all a demonstration of Allied unity.

In Hungary itself the day looked very different. According to Hungarian figures, the raids of 2 June – on Debrecen and the other railway junctions – killed 2,387 Hungarians and 174 Germans across the country; the heaviest losses were in Kolozsvár, where, according to the mayor’s report, 459 people died, 362 of them civilians. Rail traffic in Hungary was paralysed for three days, but transit through the country was never stopped completely, as detours remained. The raids were part of the campaign the American air forces had been waging over the country since April, whose first great blows are described under the raids on Budapest and Bucharest. Hungary, occupied by the Germans since March, had become one of the main targets of the Allied air forces in Italy, as had the Romanian refineries around Ploiești, bombed since the beginning of April.

From Ukraine over Romania

The airmen spent more than a week in the USSR. On 6 June, the day the Western Allies landed in Normandy – news of the invasion reached Poltava that same day – 104 B-17s escorted by 42 Mustangs took off from Ukraine, bombed the airfield at Galați in Romania and returned to the Soviet bases; by their own count the Americans shot down eight German fighters for the loss of two Mustangs. On 11 June the force flew back to Italy, bombing the airfield at Focșani on the way and losing one more Flying Fortress. So ended the first mission, known as Frantic I. The command judged it a complete success, and the mood at Poltava was excellent.

The night at Poltava

The second mission fell to the Eighth Air Force in England. On 21 June 163 B-17s took off to bomb the synthetic fuel plant at Ruhland, south of Berlin, and then fly on to Ukraine; 144 of them landed at Poltava and Myrhorod. A German reconnaissance aircraft shadowed the formation from a distance, although according to some sources the Germans already knew where the bases were and had assembled a strike force on the airfields around Minsk in advance. Shortly after midnight on 21/22 June, the third anniversary of the attack on the USSR, some 75 Heinkel He 111 and Junkers Ju 88 bombers appeared over Poltava. Pathfinders dropped flares, and for nearly two hours the bombers hit the Flying Fortresses parked in the open with great accuracy. Soviet anti-aircraft guns fired heavily but blindly, and the fighters – Soviet and American alike – were not given permission to take off.

Of the 73 bombers that had landed at Poltava, 47 were destroyed and most of the rest badly damaged; the painstakingly accumulated stocks of fuel and ammunition went up in flames as well. The Americans, sheltering in trenches far from the aircraft, lost two men killed. The Russians suffered far heavier losses, as their soldiers and ground crews were sent to fight the fires and clear unexploded bombs while the raid was still in progress; small fragmentation bombs went on exploding on the airfield for weeks. The Germans did not lose a single aircraft. The following night they struck Myrhorod, hitting fuel and ammunition dumps, and searched for Pyriatyn, but the aircraft still able to fly had already been moved further east. On that same 22 June the Red Army opened its great summer offensive in Belorussia – Operation Bagration.

From Gdynia to Warsaw

After the disaster at Poltava the operation continued, but on an ever smaller scale. In July and early August the Fifteenth Air Force sent only fighters to Ukraine; they attacked targets including airfields in Romania and the aircraft works at Mielec. On 6 August Eighth Air Force bombers attacked the works at Gdynia and the next day, at the Soviet side’s request, the refinery at Trzebinia, where Polish workers employed there were also killed. By then the Warsaw Uprising was already under way. Washington and London asked for permission to use the Ukrainian bases for supply drops to the Home Army, but for several weeks Stalin refused, provoking the first serious crisis in American–Soviet relations and changing the way American diplomats and soldiers saw Moscow’s aims.

Permission came only in September, when the uprising was in its death throes. On 18 September 107 Flying Fortresses of the Eighth Air Force flew over Warsaw, dropped 1,284 containers of weapons and supplies by parachute and went on to land in Ukraine. Because the drop was made from high altitude and the insurgents held only a few isolated districts, only a small part of the load reached the Poles – according to historians, 288 containers, less than a quarter; the rest fell into German hands. It was the only large American daylight supply drop for the uprising. The next day the bombers, flying from Ukraine to Italy, bombed the marshalling yard at Szolnok – the last combat mission of Operation Frantic.

After the Warsaw affair Molotov made it clear to the Americans that their presence was no longer needed, and the atmosphere at the bases turned hostile, with incidents, thefts and obstruction multiplying. Citing logistical difficulties, the USAAF suspended shuttle missions; only a skeleton staff of about 300 men stayed on at Poltava for the winter, and they were finally withdrawn in June 1945. In all, the operation comprised seven missions and attacks on 24 targets in Germany and the countries under its control – some of them within reach of American strategic bombers for the first time.

Its place in the war

Militarily, Operation Frantic was a sideshow. Almost all the targets attacked could have been reached from Italy or England, the Russians vetoed some American proposals, and the night raid on Poltava showed how defenceless bases without modern air defences were. The German command saw the shuttle missions mainly as an American propaganda exercise designed to impress the Russians, and it was not far from the truth – the operation’s main purpose had always been political rather than destructive. Nor were the bases used for the tasks in which they might have been decisive: regular supply of the Warsaw Uprising or the swift recovery of American prisoners of war. The idea of bases in Siberia lost its point when the Americans captured airfields in the Marianas in the summer of 1944.

Frantic mattered far more for American–Soviet relations. Begun on 2 June amid Allied euphoria, the operation ended a few months later in mutual mistrust. Soviet fighters and anti-aircraft guns fired on American aircraft more than once; the Russians explained that the American pilots had not kept strictly to the assigned corridors and altitudes. The problem was considered so serious that before the Yalta Conference in February 1945 the Americans demanded that their own observers be posted with the Soviet anti-aircraft batteries around the airfield where Roosevelt was to land. Soviet officers who had co-operated too willingly with the Americans fell into disgrace – Chief Marshal of Aviation Alexander Novikov, who had been awarded the American Legion of Merit, was arrested and convicted after the war. Historians today see the experience of Poltava, Myrhorod and Pyriatyn as one of the first harbingers of the Cold War.