To Be Missing

By Leonard Chepel

It has been the darkest period in human history, when on September 01, 1939 the Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and the Soviet Union supported the invasion by attacking Poland from the east on September 17, 1939. Such was a beginning of the WWII with the Nazis fascists raiding the European countries and the USSR communists seizing the Baltic countries. My father was a pilot of an attack bomber Il-2, and he took off on 22 June 1941 to meet the Luftwaffe west of Kyiv. Then, one month later he flew a final combat sortie over Ukraine. Through the misty shades, the pilot noticed down the ground an enemy armor convoy and threw his bomber into a sharp-dive-attack, precisely hitting the target with heavy bombs. But, probably, it was too sharp, and the fuel in the tanks was very low quality to abort the inertia of such a steep descend. Ivan-pilot crash-landed on the field. The Soviets classified it as a fatal war casualty and called it “lost without news”. But he survived and was kept in a Nazi death camp, where he deceased in 1944. I have traced the father’s tragic path all through from the moment of his last sortie and then, in the manmade hell of captivity. Today, the people come to that once deadly place of Flossenburg in Bavaria and venerate the fallen in the war with hope that it will never happen again. But after 81 years, it again came to Ukraine, however, from the other side – from the east. The Russians suddenly invaded this country almost in the same way as they did it in Poland in 1939 and then, in Finland and the Baltic countries. And again, the Ukrainian life turned deadly with thousands and thousands killed and “to be missing”. The bell tolls for them all over in Ukraine. And that sad song-requiem of the 20th century about “Buchenwald alarm bells” has been resumed in the 21st century, resonating in this country, but under a new caption today – “Ukrainian alarm bells”.
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• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jan 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9798823080071

Leonard Chepel

Leonard Chepel was born in Ukraine; marine biologist-ichthyologist; PhD. Took part in research voyages throughout Arctic and Atlantic Ocean from Greenland-Labrador to Antarctica. Served an Executive Secretary of Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO) in Halifax, NS, Canada, 1991-2002. Published professional articles & books in English and Russian

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2023 Leonard Chepel. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 01/24/2023

ISBN: 979-8-8230-8008-8 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-8230-8007-1 (e)

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Contents

Preface

I: On the Eve

II: Soft Black Soil

III: Road to Hell

IV: Anne’s Account

V: The Ghostly Past

Epilogue

For Father

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After graduation from a pilot military school.

(Restored from an old photograph, 1935–1936)

Requiem for My Father

A war … the war … the war …

And falling in attack a plane.

It was my father’s bomber-plane,

And the pilot’s feat was not in vain.

Preface

For the world, the story told here was just an insignificant episode in the distant, tempestuous past, about which so many accounts have been penned. But this is a special one about my father, a military pilot who, together with many millions of other combatants and simple people, experienced the catastrophic events of warfare almost seventy-five years ago. The people of the world called it the Second World War, while the society of one big northern country unanimously proclaimed it the Great Patriotic War. Such a passionate label was probably appropriate, considering the enormous costs and extraordinary sacrifice of compatriots, which was estimated by the rulers of that country to be more than 25 million human lives. It was the second Great Patriotic War for this country-empire, preceded by the war against Napoleon Bonaparte in 1812, though nobody ever counted the enormous patriotic price of human lives for that war.

Neither the Russian tsars nor the subsequent Bolshevik-communist rulers were ever virtuous or trustworthy. The most realistic estimate of the death toll of the Second Great Patriotic War is that no fewer than 50 million people were dead or missing, and not only on the battlefields. The political chieftains of the country controlled not only the largest piece of the planet with 300 million subjects but also the biggest freezing prison in the world, Siberia, in which the zealot-communists hid and killed so-called disloyal elements and even true patriotic soldiers after the war. The last war destroyed the lives of many millions of people in that colossal country-empire once called the Soviet Union.

My family has been just a miniscule part of those millions. In spring 1944, we received a message from a local military commissariat that our father had gone missing near Kyiv in July or August 1941. The military officials of this country have never classified such war casualties as missing in action (MIA), a combat casualty tag assigned in all civilized countries to combatants who have disappeared during wartime, as that would imply the individual may have been killed or captured. Instead, they acted as if my father, who at the time was a pilot of the best Soviet ground-attack aircraft, the Il-2 Sturmovik (by a Soviet aircraft designer named Sergey Ilyushin), had gone missing almost accidentally, like he had gone off course for some reason during a casual journey in the air and nobody had seen him afterwards.

It was unjust to my father and to the other servicemen lost in combat; they fought and withstood the wicked power not only on the front line but also inside of their own country. They all tragically perished or went missing, and not many truthful accounts have been written to justly honour them all. As I have already written about the father in my first book, Two Colours (2012), my father’s air brigade was stationed at a stronghold west of Kyiv, and he flew his bomber Il-2 in the first sortie to repel the Luftwaffe at sunrise on 22 June 1941. Then, nearly a month later, he piloted his last flight over Ukrainian soil. His war was short-lived. In Two Colours, I also recorded what my mother and other survivors of the war knew and included the most trusted accounts of these bygone events and about my father. I also shared the following account of father’s final flight:

Captain Petrenko was watching his partner’s Il-2 was nosediving fast towards the ground like in an uncontrolled plunge. Then it changed; the plane showed signs of revival and began to steadily and smoothly descending. He realized that the pilot had regained the control of the gear and was attempting to climb up. However, the distance at the moment was, probably, no more than 200-250m to the ground, and the plane was not designed to abort such a drastic descend; most likely an antiaircraft blast had damaged the bomber’s engine … Ahead was a field of black soil, and the pilot definitely was directing his fated Il-2 towards the field … Captain Petrenko did not have enough fuel to stay over the site; he could no longer help his commander-pilot.(Two Colours; pp. 315-316).

It wasn’t the closure of a pilot’s mission. The fact that they classified casualties of war as missing kept our hopes alive. Against the odds and pitiless time, we all waited and hoped that he had survived and could come back. We knew that many death camps in the Western Europe were liberated by the US army, and that supported our best hopes. The news did not come until the twenty-first century, when the USA opened its files on the WWII concentration camps to Ukrainian officials and we heard the names Flossenbürg and Falkenau. We discovered father’s name on the list of casualties. He had died in a death camp in Falkenau, which was a subcamp of Flossenbürg. My mother, Anna, was 97 years old and still very strong. She had lived through the harsh twentieth, surviving a destitute life in that despondent and lost Soviet society. She had been waiting for news about her pilot for such a long time. I remembered what she said in her faltering voice after we found out about the father’s last resting place. I felt that he hadn’t die in 1941 … He should have been alive … Now, I know where he is … was, but I cannot travel so far away to see that place … So, now, I must go soon and join him in his heavenly home. She died half a year later.

My father survived his crash landing in the field of black Ukrainian soil in 1941. He was captured and incarcerated in Sokolov (Falkenau), a subcamp of the German concentration camp of Flossenbürg located in the Czech Republic (formerly Czechoslovakia). I knew that I had to write my second book about my father’s life after his landing on that Ukrainian field of black soil and to follow him all along his anguished, tragic way. This is my story about my father’s life after his disappearance from the sky in 1941. It is an imagined account—based on everything I have discovered, heard, read, and seen—of my father’s tragic and, no doubt, heroic life after he was officially reported missing. And his destiny was not unique but rather a fate shared by many millions of citizens of that former, huge empire called the Soviet Union, or USSR.

People still remember that many millions of warriors and civilians of that mammoth country, or rather of its many constituent countries and nations, went missing under the former Soviet-communist system of a distorted human world and during the tragic Second World War. When I started writing this book, I thought that it would be a novel only about the events of that forever gone disastrous past, but I was wrong. The tragic past was not gone forever. It was merely hiding not far away in the obscurity of imperial power and has now come back into our present peaceful lives, and again, many warrior-defenders of their land have gone missing. This book is dedicated to my father and to all of them.

I

On the Eve

On the eve of the Second World War, the whole world was surprised by an unlikely alliance between two improbable associates—the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. However, those odd companions were much the same—they were the two extreme authoritarian powers in the world. In that moment, nobody could’ve imagined how far this alliance would propel the human world towards appalling consequences. In August 1939, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin announced that the two countries had come to agreement on a nonaggression pact. It was signed in Moscow on 23 August 1939 by the two foreign ministers, J. Ribbentrop and V. Molotov. The agreement was officially known as the German-Soviet Treaty of Nonaggression. The official clauses of the treaty provided a written guarantee of peace by each party towards the other and a declared commitment that neither government would ally itself to or aid an enemy of the other.

Only a few people in Moscow and Berlin knew that the treaty, in addition to containing the publicly announced stipulation of nonaggression, concealed the most sinister skeletons in the two nations’ political cupboards. It included a strictly secret protocol which defined the spheres of influence of the two nations and outlined their aggressive plans to expand well beyond their official and historical borders through military action. The nonaggression treaty was, in fact, the most aggressive antihuman pact ever to exist on this planet. It wasn’t made for peace but only for a war in which tens of millions of human beings would be massacred. In August 1939, the Nazi Party of Germany and the Communist Bolshevik Party of the Soviet Union created the conditions and motivations for the most devastating war in history, World War II.

The USSR’s militaristic union with Germany was not an exception in its history but rather a continuation of Russia’s historically aggressive policy towards its western neighbours—the Scandinavian and Baltic countries, Poland, and Ukraine. According to a number of chronological accounts, the Vladimir-Moscow Principality, a remote northern province of Kyivan Rus, separated from its parent nation in the twelfth century, and a couple of centuries later on, it turned into the Russian Empire. Over the course of many centuries, the apostate principality-empire has been looking for domination and waging almost unstoppable wars against major European countries and smaller nations all along its borders.

The rulers and tsars of the socially and culturally backward northern territories, which were secluded near the upper springs of the Volga River and inhabited by diverse uncivilized tribes, attempted to reach and join the civilized world, but they did it mostly by violent militaristic methods. Their efforts peaked in the eighteenth century when the Tsar Peter I provoked the Great Northern War in 1700 and axed a window into Europe by conquering the historical territories of the Baltic countries. Then, almost two and a half centuries later, the Soviet Union suddenly got a new chance and began cutting and expanding its window much deeper, right into the heart of Western Europe.

In August 1939, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the Nazis) and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union conceived and developed the conditions for the most devastating war in history. Two dictators, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, in close cooperation, devised an aggressive militaristic model and initiated the most dreadful deeds of the bloodiest war in the world with the main goal of dividing, occupying, and enslaving other nations. It was a special, historical moment in Europe when countries became alienated from one another and destabilized due to sociopolitical discord and socialist revolutionary movements. The social turmoil was fully utilized and manipulated by the national socialists of Germany and the communist socialists of Russia.

The two aggressive parties moved cooperatively and almost simultaneously. Germany led the way by invading Poland on 1 September 1939, and the Soviet Union followed shortly, on 17 September, by occupying eastern Polish territories. Then, on 22 September 1939, the two victorious associates, the Red Army and the Wehrmacht, celebrated their blitz victories over Poland with a joint military parade in the occupied border city of Brest-Litovsk. The Nazis and Soviets marched in goose-step accompanied by the heroic sounds of the German marching song Erika, or Auf der Heide blüht ein kleines Blümelein (On the Heath a Little Flower Blooms), and the state anthem of the Soviet Union, Союз нерушимый республик свободных (The Indestructible Union of the Freest Republics). At that time, the people of the world didn’t yet know the consequences that would follow. Those were the funeral marches for millions of little blooming flowers and millions more living in the freest republics, and they marked the tragic end to peaceful life in Europe for the next six years. The victorious parties thought that their celebrated union was complete, and it seemed to be unwavering. From that instant, the two super military powers were ready to expand and do whatever they wished to do with this world. The next steps followed without much delay.

Two months later, the Red Army, or Raboche-Krestianskaja Krasnaja Armia (RKKA; Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army), moved into Finland. The Soviets had concocted a serious case for the war by staging an artillery bombardment of their own territory near the settlement of Mainila on 26 November 1939. The Shelling of Mainila was a fabrication carried out by the Soviet state security agency NKVD (rus. the Narodnyĭ Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del – People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs). Then, a couple of days later, early on the morning of 30 November 1939, Soviet bombers suddenly attacked Helsinki and dropped a number of heavy bombs on the city, inflicting substantial destruction and killing many people.

The Soviet Union began moving with broad aggression against its peaceful neighbours, targeting the new territories along the Baltic Sea and Karelia at the north. Meanwhile, Hitler targeted France and Belgium and all around. The Soviet Union was victorious in its expansion, successfully invading the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuanian. Between 1939 and 1941 the German Third Reich and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) were steadfast allies, moving their armies and aiming to take and divide the world for their own possession. Those military partners, like two sinister predators, descended upon the human world, inflicting apocalyptic levels of ruin and death.

And right at the beginning, after the invasion of Poland, the Soviet Union committed a most heinous act: the Khatyn Massacre—a mass murder of Polish officers and intelligentsia in the forests near the small village Khatyn (54° 46′ 24″ N 31° 47′ 20″). The killing weapons were Walther PP and Browning pistols; and the site was the Khatyn forest in the USSR. In the dense forests west of Smolensk, the commissars of the NKVD (the predecessor of KGB) shot Polish officers, POWs, and peaceful intellectuals nonstop during April and May of 1940. The killers were led by the most inhumane executioner in this world, NKVD General Vasily Blokhin. He personally slaughtered many prisoners during that massacre and bragged that he could kill 250–300 people in one day. The Soviets preferred to use the Walther guns with German ammunition because they were smooth and unfailing instruments that didn’t hurt the killers’ hands.

In the Khatyn woodlands, according to official documents, the Soviet secret police agents killed 21,857 people, and this official list is most likely incomplete. The mass murder was personally initiated by Stalin and his Central Committee of the Communist Party and its executive body called Politburo or Political bureau on 5 March 1940. Before the Khatyn slaughter, the Soviet Communists had held mass executions only in the remote regions of the Siberian taiga and subarctic tundra. In 1940, they brought it close to Western Europe, right to the centre of the European continent. And it was a sinister signal for the second collaborator in the deal, Adolf Hitler, to follow. He would eventually supersede Joseph Stalin, but only in Europe. In Stalin’s Russia nobody could ever count all those millions of human souls perished in the Soviet labour death camps in that enormous, hardly accessible space of Siberia, which will forever be the largest human graveyard on this planet.

The Soviet Union had occupied all neighbouring countries to the west, and the Soviet leaders were filled with gratitude towards their Nazi friends for such unexpectedly easy bounties. In return, Stalin furnished Germany with substantial material support, including food and all kinds of mineral elements for their military industry. The Russian metallurgical supply was very valuable and was instrumental in building up and strengthening the Wehrmacht. Hitler was likewise generous, allowing Soviet specialists to visit and see the advanced military hardware and production in Germany. Germany even delivered some modern technical supplies to the USSR. Historians have claimed that Hitler regarded the Soviet Union and its political rulers with disdain, maintaining that the Soviets, with their outdated technology and confused autocratic management, wouldn’t be able to introduce Western innovations into production.

As it happened, the Nazi Party leader was right. The Soviets were careless and sloppy with military modernizations. But regardless, Stalin was proud of such a strategic friendship, and he personally controlled the timely deliveries to Germany. Therefore, the Wehrmacht was well supplied with the best Ukrainian food products and industrial ores before it began its invasion of the USSR. Stalin became obsessed with the newest German cars, the Opel Kadett and the Opel Olympia. The Kremlin boss preferred to get those only in black, which was fitting for stealthy nightly raids. The German cars were driven primarily by the NKVD for the purpose of delivering the enemies of people and Stalin’s opponents to prisons and executions.

The Soviet-Nazi friendship looked so strong that one of the principals, Stalin, didn’t see any danger. He praised his Western counterpart more and more, as the Soviet Empire was expanding all around, creeping into Ukraine, Poland, Baltic countries, and Finland. By that time, the Soviets were informed and had gotten many messages from Western leaders, including strong warnings from Winston Churchill and other intelligence sources, signalling that the Germans were preparing for an imminent invasion of the Soviet Union. Instead of paying serious attention to these facts, Stalin did everything to reinforce the two nations’ friendship by sending more and more food and strategic material to Hitler. As Stalin used to repeat at political gatherings, he did so to coax and fool them that to win the time. During that time, the Eastern dictator himself was preparing his army for an assault on his best Western friend. For this reason, the whole Soviet industry had been undergoing a major overhaul, and the Red Army was becoming larger and stronger, though only in terms of numbers.

According to the official statistics, in the short period from 1 January 1939 to 21 June 1941, the Soviet Union practically doubled its military potentials. The number of regular soldiers increased from 2.4 million to 5.7 million organized into 316 divisions (up from 131). The number of heavy guns increased from 55,000 to 117,600, the number of tanks went from 21,000 to 25,700, and the number of fighter and bomber planes increased from 7,500 to 19,000. Stalin was readying for all-out war with the capitalistic West, as he proclaimed in his speech at a secret meeting of the highest political body of the USSR, the Politburo – to establish the dictate of the (Communist) Party by the means of a great war. But the great war was closing on him much faster than he has anticipated.

The Soviet Union’s inglorious war against Finland was both a revelation and an encouragement for Hitler. In Finland, the demoralized and disorganized Red Army performed badly and suffered enormous losses, much greater than those of the Finnish defenders. There were approximately 125,000–130,000 casualties among the Soviets compared to 20,000–25,000 among the Finnish servicemen and volunteers. For the Finns, it was a true patriotic war of freedom-loving people defending against barbaric, uncivilized invaders who were coming with an evil intent to occupy and kill. In fact, that war wasn’t different from the wars the Russian Empire used to wage against the Baltic countries over the previous six centuries, from the time of Yuri Dolgorukiy to the reigns of Ivan the Terrible and all the other belligerent tsars of the Russian Empire.

As is written in many historical documents, the renegade from Kyivan Rus principality around cities of Vladimir and Moscow in the remote north-eastern territory of Kyivan Rus was led by Yuri Dolgorukiy (c.1145–1148) and his son Andrei Bogolubskiy (1157–1174), and then all following rulers of this principality-Russian Empire regularly invaded neighbouring countries to the west. And those wars were characteristic with the most symbolic upshot: one Western fighter could stand against eight to ten poorly equipped Russian soldiers, who would come on like ancient hoards and fight by sheer force of numbers without motivation or military skill. The Soviet aggression against Finland once more confirmed Russia’s historical mores by the sad death toll.

Encouraged by the inferior performance of Russian soldiers and spy reports that the best generals and high-ranking Soviet officers of the Red Army had been dismissed or executed, Adolf Hitler was confident he could easily win over his Eastern friend in a blitzkrieg. It looked almost true except for some key essentials. The ambitious Nazi dictator had missed a couple of distinct points in the ruthless strategy of the Kremlin’s dictator and his enslaved society. That huge country-empire, the only such aggressive sociopolitical formation ever to exist in the history of the world, has always considered its subjects to be no more than slaves and soldiers. Therefore, through many centuries of history, the people/slaves/soldiers have been foredoomed to serve as waste material, like easily dispensable cannon fodder. In its battles against Finland, the Soviets had further advanced in their specific violent military culture and innovated new fighting tactics with a new misanthropic application. The killing squads of the NKVD, armed with Kalashnikovs, were positioned behind the front lines and encouraged the soldiers to attack by shooting at them.

Soviet forces wholly utilized one more highly cherished cultural component of the Russian style of life: in that inglorious war-extermination, Stalin signed an order about the so-called Narkomovskie 100 grams, or Stalin’s 100 grams, of vodka. As a result, the Soviet soldiers were drunk most time and didn’t care much about danger, recklessly charging against the enemy in suicidal attacks. In addition, before each serious attack at the Finnish defensive fortification, known as the Mannerheim Line, the soldiers would get the most appreciated bonus: full aluminium mugs of vodka. The heavily inebriated and badly trained combatants would fearlessly rush across minefields towards their deaths from explosions and bullets, and many wounded quickly froze in the snow and −30°C weather. This was another sad reason why the Red Army lost so many during such a short period in the Finnish Winter War.

Stalin and his party followers were just warmongering, autocratic despots who ruled with intimidation and elimination. Therefore, the Soviets couldn’t build up a modern army. In fact, Stalin had been doing everything to weaken the Red Army by removing and executing the best officers and failing to implement true innovations. On the eve of the war, the Soviets completely failed to organize and implement the new technologies they had just gotten from Germany. The inflexible communistic party system wasn’t made for progress. Even after obtaining a lot of reliable spy information, the Kremlin couldn’t use it in a sober way.

Soviet spies regularly sent back intelligence about a forthcoming German invasion, the information was directed to Moscow and delivered right to Stalin’s office. But all that information appears to have been useless, as it couldn’t help the USSR chief to apprehend the realistic international situation; his specific sickly intellect couldn’t accept and analyse the complex diplomatic situations at the moment. Stalin, like many tyrants in this world, could never accept and manage complex information reasonably and logically. The narrowmindedness and despotism of the Soviet dictator were terrifying and deadly, and nobody was eager to speak contrary to him. Therefore, the huge Soviet spy machine became useless and even harmful, and many messengers and advisers offering bad but well-grounded news were destined to end their lives in lethal NKVD basements or in Siberian concentration labour camps.

One day before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Gerhard Kegel, a Soviet undercover agent at the German Embassy in Moscow, informed his liaison that the embassy had received a message from Berlin about the upcoming invasion, which would begin in the early morning of the next day. This information wasn’t delivered directly to Stalin, as everybody was scared of being labelled a provocateur. Even the chief of the main spy department office in Moscow opted to postpone his report to Stalin and instead wait for more information. In the evening of the same day, Kegel informed his liaison that a new, reliable message had come in from Joachim von Ribbentrop instructing the embassy staff in Moscow to be ready for evacuation, as the invasion was scheduled to begin at three or four o’clock in the morning, right at daybreak on 22 June 1941. This information, again, wasn’t taken seriously, and Stalin continued waiting for confirmation