Lost and Found in Siberia

On August 20, 1944, pilot Richard McGlinn and his crew of ten took off from a base in southern China. Their plane, a B-29 American superfortress dubbed “St. Catherine,” was destined for a bombing raid on the industrial target of Yawata, on the Japanese island of Kyushu. Little did they suspect that they would not return from their “routine” bombing raid for over five months, during which time they would traverse the entire breadth of the Soviet Union.

After a long flight north, McGlinn and his crew met with fierce Japanese resistance. “Bingo! One of our engines was hit,” McGlinn later recalled. In fact, the plane was severely crippled and had no chance of making it back to China.

McGlinn sought cover in the clouds and charted a course for Vladivostok.

Daylight faded. The weather turned turbulent. McGlinn hoped to glimpse Vladivostok’s lights very soon. Nothing. Were they too far west, over Northeast Manchuria? If so, the Japanese could be waiting. McGlinn decided to keep the St. Catherine on a northward course as long as possible.

Unknown to McGlinn, they had overshot Vladivostok. His plane was now in the northern portion of the Sikhote-Alin mountain range, which parallels the coast of the Russian Far East, between the Amur river and the Sea of Japan. The region is wild and severe, boasting towering mountain peaks, dense pine forests, swift, log-jammed rivers, and abundant wildlife, including bears and tigers.

As the plane used up the last of its fuel, it became clear that the crew had to bail out. Each man was equipped with an emergency pack containing a few day’s food rations, matches, a poncho, knife, machete, whistle, signal mirror, fish hooks, canteen, cooking pan and insect repellant. Each also had a sidearm and ammunition. McGlinn instructed the crew to head north after reaching the ground, toward what would be the wreckage of the plane, which contained a stock of emergency rations and equipment.

McGlinn jumped last into the cold night air, watching the St. Catherine silently drift north while he was pelted by frigid rain. But McGlinn did not quite reach the ground that night. His parachute lodged in the crown of a towering fir tree, where he was suspended in his harness until dawn. Then he managed to drop to the soggy forest floor, uninjured but worried about the safety of his crew.

Right gunner John Beckley had crashed violently into the wilderness and suffered a split nose and bruised ribs. He waited for daylight. When he heard gunshots, he pushed through the underbrush and came face-to-face with radar operator Otis Childs, Jr., who had sprained his knees and ankles. Left gunner Lewis Mannatt also heard the shots and quickly joined the two men.

Elsewhere, bombardier Eugene Murphy, flight engineer Almon Conrath, radio operator Melvin Webb and senior gunner William Stocks located one another soon after dawn. Murphy had injured his back in the jump, but the men nonetheless heeded McGlinn’s orders to search for the bomber’s wreckage. They soon found, however, that the route north was blocked by high, impassable mountains. They were undecided about how to proceed, but felt the other airmen must be near, so they fired more pistol shots. Beckley, Childs and Mannatt heard them and, within a short time, the seven men were united. They decided to follow a small stream flowing southwest, hoping it would lead them from the wilderness.

Two more airmen, navigator Lyle Turner and copilot Ernest Caudle landed literally side-by-side in the forest. After dawn, they too began struggling north. But when they heard faint shots from the southwest, they turned in that direction. Finding a stream running in the same direction, they decided to follow it.

The eleventh missing airman, tail-gunner Charles Robson, was temporarily knocked breathless when he landed on his back. At daybreak he fired several shots without any response. A nearby stream trickled in a westerly direction. Anxious and alone, he camped for the coming night.

McGlinn found a small, westward-flowing river that later made a bend toward the northwest. He looked for an animal or man-made trail beside it, but there was none. After camping on the riverbank, he tried and failed to catch some fish. So he brewed a tea of grass leaves and black ants. The sour brew foreshadowed the trials yet before him.

The seven-man group limited themselves to one meal a day from their scant emergency food supplies. The stream that was their guideline to the southwest tumbled over waterfalls and merged with other mountain streams. Slowed by three injured men, they tried to follow the stream’s vine-tangled bank. They were cheered when Mannatt shot a squirrel.

Elsewhere, Turner and Caudle endured the fog and rain. They continued through the wilderness along the widening stream. They did not see any animals, not even squirrels. Neither did they find any tracks in the mud to indicate that the fabled Siberian tigers and bears had passed this way.

Meanwhile, on his second day along, Robson battled swarms of insects and massive thorn bushes. He kept walking within sight of the stream. Often he stopped and listened. He heard only the splash and gurgle of water moving from rock to rock.

After a second night’s rest, McGlinn was refreshed and ready to begin the search for the crashed bomber. He still believed that his crew members were not far away. He deposited his equipment at his river bank campsite and, in a note that he attached to a nearby bush, explained where he had gone and that he would return. However, after a daylong search, he encountered only mountains and endless forest stretching in every direction.

On his return to his campsite, McGlinn heard a whistle. He blew his own whistle. A whistle answered! The sound came from the direction of his camp, which Robson, following the stream, had found. The two men embraced; they were no longer alone.

At this point, McGlinn decided to abandon his search for the bomber wreckage. Instead, he believed that he and Robson should seek their way out of the wilderness by following the river to a settlement. They had no way of knowing they were starting a race with death.

When the eleven airmen parachuted into the stormy night of August 20, they were at least 100 miles from the Amur river. Nine of them were on the southwestern slope of the Sikhote-Alin mountain range. McGlinn and Robson were on a northwestern slope. The groups were moving in different westerly directions along the headwaters of the Monamo and Khoso rivers. With each step they took, McGinn and Robson were moving further away from the other nine men.

The group of seven continued to follow their stream. Turner and Caudle also struggled to keep their stream in sight. Although they did not yet know it, they were on higher ground behind the other seven men. They were all following the Monamo river.

Days were wet and nights cold. Their emergency rations dwindled and they ate whatever they found—squirrels, wild fowl, frogs, snails, mice, fish, insects, grubs, worms, pine nuts, berries and wild grapes, leaves, moss and grass.

Their strength ebbed. Their despair mounted. Rain widened the rivers to flood levels. Debris and swamps blocked the stream banks. Vines and fallen trees slowed the men’s travel. The distance covered each day became shorter and shorter.

McGlinn and Robson lost track of time as day followed day. Stinging insects made every waking hour miserable. Their search for food was constant.

Concluding that their best chance to survive was by building a raft to float down the Khoso river, they spent three days at slow labor with their machetes, cutting suitable logs for a raft and tying them together with parachute cord. The river seemed calm when they launched the raft and climbed aboard. Later, the river made a sharp turn and suddenly entered a gorge, where the raft was smashed against a massive log jam. McGlinn and Robson escaped with their lives. However, they lost vital personal items, including a pistol, a machete and, most significantly, one of Robson’s shoes.

Merging with the other mountain streams, the Monamo river became wide and deep. Exhausted and hungry, the group of seven decided they should build a raft to float down river. They were not aware, of course, that McGlinn and Robson had already tried and failed to do the same thing on the Khoso.

The raft was a huge undertaking: it had to be large enough to carry seven men. The seven men worked in relays with their machetes to cut enough logs. Yet when they tested the finished raft, they were disheartened to discover that it would only support the weight of three persons.

By this time, the men had been in the wilderness for 13 days. Three of them had still not recovered from their injuries, and none of them had the strength to build a yet larger raft. Time was running out.

It was decided that Beckley, Webb and Murphy, the strongest and healthiest of the seven, would ride the raft downriver.

The stream was at flood stage and the men floated for a time, but were soon caught in a log jam. They used their remaining strength to swim to shore. After resting, they began walking downstream, lessening their hunger pangs with squirrels, frogs, moss and berries.

On the seventh day of walking, they glimpsed an apparently abandoned village on the opposite bank of the river. The very sight of the village boosted their spirits. They knew that they had reached the edge of the wilderness. Then, as they watched, a small child and later a woman appeared. They turned to see a man and a boy paddling an ulmagda [a dugout canoe for use on mountain streams] toward them.

After they were ferried across the river, they were fed raw vegetables and then led to a nearby settlement of log and bark huts. Again they were fed, after which the exhausted men fell asleep on the floor of one of the huts.

Twenty days had passed since the eleven airmen had bailed out over Eastern Siberia. Three were now safe.

Like their seven comrades ahead of them, Turner and Caudle followed the Monamo river. Desperate for food, they subsisted mainly on frogs and snails. Then, on September 5, [a few days after Beckley, Murphy and Webb had set afloat down the Monamo], they stumbled into the camp where Conrath, Stocks, Childs and Mannatt were waiting.

Downriver, Beckley, Murphy and Webb awoke after a night of sound sleep in the village. They were then paddled down the river to another village that was only two hours by horseback from the Amur river. Two Soviet Army officers rushed the bed-ragged men to the border patrol headquarters in Troitskoye, where they were finally able to relate their experiences.

It was now September 12; Soviet officials finally found out that eleven American airmen had been missing in the Siberian wilderness since August 20. Was it possible, they wondered, that the other eight men were still alive? Border patrol pilots assembled an aerial search of the upper Monamo river valley. Meanwhile, the three rescued men were put up in the Troitskoye hospital and treated for malnutrition, cuts and abrasions. After four days of bed rest and feeding, they boarded a motor launch and were taken up the Amur river to the border patrol hospital in Khabarovsk.

On September 12, the six men at their makeshift camp on the Monamo heard the search planes overhead. But rain and clouds made it impossible to attract the attention of the search party. On the next day, the sun was shining, and when they again heard the sounds of plane engines, they were able to hail the pilots with their signal mirrors. A pilot fired a recognition signal and returned to Troitskoye to report his discovery.

On September 14, another plane located the men’s camp and dropped a sack with food and a note assuring them that help was on its way, and that Beckley, Murphy and Webb were safe.

The men waited several days while rescue dugouts were poled and paddled mile by mile upstream, through rapids and around log jams and snags. When the rescue party finally arrived, it was surprised to find not four, but six lost airmen. The men were successfully delivered downstream to Troitskoye where, after several days of rest and feeding, they joined Beckley, Murphy and Webb in the border patrol hospital.

Nine of the men were now accounted for. But where were McGlinn and Robson? Weather permitting, border patrol pilots continued to fly over the nearby mountains, looking for any sign of life in the dense wilderness below. With each passing day, winter drew nearer and hope of finding McGlinn and Robson alive began to fade.

Having lost one of his shoes, Robson converted his leather pistol holster into a makeshift sandal, which he tied to his foot with parachute cord. He and McGlinn were thus able to resume their stumbling walk along the Khoso riverbank, eating what wild grapes, berries and edible leaves they could find.

“Things were getting desperate,” McGlinn later wrote. “Our clothes were torn, our food a mere taste, and we were very weak.”

Alexander Pobozhy was camped in the Sikhote-Alin mountains in September 1944. An engineer, he was the head of an expedition that was selecting the route for the future Baikal-Amur Railroad (BAM), to run from the city of Komsomolsk east to the Sea of Japan. On September 20, a messenger from Komsomolsk arrived at Pobozhy’s camp with an official order: Pobozhy was to halt his engineering activity and immediately organize a search party to find the remaining two American airmen. He was assigned the area of the Khoso river from its mouth to its headwaters.

Pobozhy and five men established a base camp at the mouth of the Khoso on September 22. They then set out upstream in dugouts, probing the log-jammed river. Privately, Pobozhy wondered how the two men could still be alive over a month after landing in the wilderness. If they had not starved to death, he thought, surely they had been torn to pieces by wild animals by now.

As the search began, McGlinn and Robson were trying to bypass a swamp bordering the Khoso. Exhausted, they camped and built a fire. Suddenly, they heard airplane engines for the first time since abandoning the St. Catherine. Above them were two planes. Frantically, McGlinn and Robson threw tree branches onto their fire to make a smoke smudge. At first, the ploy seemed unsuccessful, because the planes continued their course. But then they turned back and began to circle above the men’s position. The two planes dived and buzzed the smudge area before departing. Weeping with joy, McGlinn and Robson tried to relax as darkness came. They hardly dared to believe that their prayers for rescue had been answered.

The next morning, September 23, the temperature dropped to below freezing. Pobozhy’s search team, moving from the river’s mouth, was able to move upstream only very slowly, because of all the fallen trees. In the late afternoon of that same day, a plane again located the two men’s camp and dropped a sack containing food and a note that read, in broken English, “Good day, Comrades. You are in USSR. Raise left the hand if you need help.” McGlinn later recalled that “we waved everything, no only because we were in desperate need, but for joy.”

The next day, planes dropped more bags of food. On the following day, September 25, a new note read: “Stay where you are. Do not move. Our people are coming for you. Nine of your crew are safe and well.”

Early on the morning of September 26, Pobozhy selected three men to continue the search with him in one large dugout. Before long, they saw a thin column of smoke and two men standing near a campfire on the river’s bank. When Pobozhy and his men stepped ashore, Pobozhy recalled, “the Americans tried to hug us. They were so weak they could not stand for long. ... I didn’t know any English words. Not knowing how to greet these people from acros the ocean, I shouted, ‘Mister America.’” Both men had beards. McGlinn wore a leather jacket over tattered overalls that barely reached his knees. On his swollen feet were battered shoes. Robson wore overalls that were snagged to shards below his waist. One of Robson’s swollen feet was wrapped in rags and his pistol holster was still tied to the other. Their faces and bodies were lacerated and covered with festering insect bites.

The trip downstream was fast. They reached Pobozhy’s base camp before dark the same day, September 26. Using the camp’s radio equipment, Pobozhy reported the successful rescue to his superiors in Komsomolsk. He also ordered clothing and shoes for the Americans that were dropped in by aircraft the following morning. McGlinn and Robson were now comfortably clothed. In gratitude, McGlinn gave Pobozhy his pistol and the two remaining cartridges.

Two days later, on September 29, Pobozhy delivered the two men to the Komsomolsk military hospital for examination and treatment. The men had defied the odds, surviving for forty days in the wilderness with little more than their wits and some luck.

On October 2, Pobozhy visited the men. It was the last time he would ever see them. Years later, Pobozhy wrote that he wondered “whether Dick (Richard McGlinn) and Charles (Robson) remember our friendship on the bank of the Khoso?”

McGlinn and Robson healed and rested in Komsomolsk until October 5, then made the cold voyage up the Amur river to the Khabarovsk Border Patrol Hospital. Now interned, they were examined, photographed, and allowed to join their nine fellow airmen. Little did they know that their journey home was far from over.

On April 13, 1941, the Soviet Union and Japan had signed a five-year neutrality pact. The agreement stipulated that the USSR would remain neutral in the event of any war Japan had with other powers.

Soviet neutrality in the US-Japanese war in the Pacific (begun December 7, 1941) was first tested in April 1942, when one of the Doolittle Tokyo raiders landed near Vladivostok. If the Soviet Union simply released the men, they would be aiding Japan’s enemy, violating the principle of neutrality. So the five-man crew was to be interned, theoretically for the duration of the war. However, the men were quietly moved across Siberia to Perm, where they spent the winter. Then, in May 1943, after having been moved to Ashkhabad, Turkmenistan, the five men were allowed to “escape” from internment, across the border into Iran.

This was only the beginning of the Soviet Union’s internee “problem” during World War II. Over the course of the war, some 286 more American airmen were interned in Russia. In July 1943, the first of what would be 32 Aleutian Island-based army and navy bombers crash-landed on Kamchatka. Four China-based superfortresses, including McGlinn’s, crashed or landed in the Soviet Far East.

As the number of internees increased, the Soviets commenced moving them from Petropavlovsk (Kamchatka) and Vladivostok to Khabarovsk’s Red Army Rest Camp. Meanwhile, the Soviets organized an internee holding camp at Vrevskaya (now Almazar), near Tashkent, Uzbekistan, thousands of miles from prying Japanese agents.

Internees began arriving at Vrevskaya in late 1943. Soon afterward, the Soviet Foreign Commissariat and the Internal Affairs Commissariat staged the first of four elaborate “escapes” that repatriated the internees to American hands. Sixty-one airmen, accompanied by an American military attaché, escaped to Teheran, Iran, in February, 1944. The Soviets confiscated their cameras, film and souvenirs. American security officers, keen to protect the illusion of Soviet neutrality in the Pacific and mindful that there were other internees, ordered the soldiers to sign pledges that they would not reveal to anyone where they had been while interned in the USSR.

As snow deepened and ice formed on the Amur in the winter of 1944, McGlinn and his crew were relocated to the Red Army Rest Camp in Khabarovsk. There they met 28 other internees who had been rescued from Kamchatka. On November 15, the 39 Americans were issued winter clothing and boarded a trans-Siberian train bound for Novosibirsk. From there, a southbound train carried them to Tashkent. On November 24, they entered the Vrevskaya internee holding camp, where they met 51 other Aleutian airmen and the 11-man crew belonging to Howard Jarrell’s B-29, also from China.

On December 5, 100 men were packed onto a train bound for Ashkhabad for an escape over the border into Iran (one was too sick to travel). Three days later, the train deposited the men on a railroad siding near Ashkhabad. The Iranian border lie just 18 miles to the south. Restless, the men waited in vain all day for their escape trucks to arrive and drive them across the border. The next day, the men were informed that American newspapers had reported that the Doolittle five had escaped from Siberia with Soviet help. As a result, Moscow called off the escape to await Japan’s reaction to the rumors.

Despite orders to stand fast, 34 of the internees (none of McGlinn’s crew) decided to attempt a real escape and headed for the Iranian border on foot. The effort was futile. Most were rounded up within hours, the remainder the following day. All were sent back to Vrevskaya where, by December 16, the camp’s population had swelled to 130, with the arrival of two more B–29 crews (piloted by Weston Price and William Mickish) and another army crew from the Aleutians.

As it turned out, Japan did not react to the Doolittle rumors. So the Soviets hastened to organize another, bigger escape on January 25, 1945. This time, the train held 130 men and went as far as Kyzil Arvat, Turkmenistan, near the Caspian Sea (the passes from Ashkhabad having been closed by avalanches and snow drifts). They were escorted by Major Paul Hall, assistant military attaché. Ten covered trucks carried the concealed men on the two-day overland trip to Teheran. After again being ordered to observe strict secrecy about their past whereabouts, the men were flown on January 31 to Abadan, Iran, then Cairo, Egypt and then, on February 10, to Naples, Italy. There they became the only passengers on the transport John L. Sullivan, which reached New York on March 6, 1945. The navy airmen were escorted to the naval air station at Floyd Bennett Field, and the army men to Fort Hamilton, NY. Souvenir items and any clothing that were clues to their recent presence in the Soviet Union were confiscated and the men were given yet another set of orders binding them to secrecy.

McGlinn, Turner and Beckley, however, were earmarked for special attention. They were rushed to Washington, where War Department intelligence specialists interrogated them in depth on March 8. Undoubtedly, they wanted to know how American airmen could slip into the Soviet Union unnoticed and roam the wilderness undetected for weeks.  RL

PostScript

After the group of 130 left the Soviet Union, two more groups of American airmen were accommodated at the notoriously escape-prone Vrevskaya internee holding camp. A group of 43 airmen escaped on May 17; a final group of 52 were released August 24, after the war had ended.

In 1992, half a century later, the US Air Force and Navy Departments recognized 291 secret internees as having been prisoners of war and awarded them the military POW medal.