From Alaska to Siberia. Planes packed with weapons for Uncle Joe

The Russians didn’t know antiperspirants however did know the market worth of different items. Anchorage was left with out aspirin, thimbles, stitching needles, in addition to – right here comes the gallantry of Soviet officers – tights, stockings and girls’s underwear: haberdasheries have been besieged by buyers.

The romanticism of air travelling – nonetheless higher within the Far North! – appeals to everybody’s creativeness: the most effective proof for that’s our basic creator Janusz Meissner who – as soon as he returned kind foggy England to the individuals’s homeland in 1946, unexpectedly deserted his writings about “G – for Genevieve” and took up descent, social lifelike prose about the most effective Soviet air ambulance which, amidst freezing wind and darkness of a polar night time, covers a distance a whole lot of kilometers to get to a posh case of Arctic tetanus. („Na Tajmyrze umiera człowiek” [A man is dying on the Taymyr Peninsula] MON, 1952).

However what are the exploits of Lieutenant Gonar in comparison with these of the 5 Soviet air transport regiments that have been transporting fighters and unpacked cargo planes from Fairbanks, Alaska to Krasnoyarsk and additional to the entrance? It’s a gigantic path, scarcely recorded within the annals of World Conflict II. Everybody remembers the crusing throughout the “merciless sea” (the North Atlantic from the USA to Nice Britain, the Arctic Ocean from the USA, and with time additionally from Nice Britain to the USSR). The airdrops over occupied Europe are remembered, the “Iranian route” on which deliveries traveled north from ports in British Iraq and India. However solely by navy historians bear in mind concerning the route from Alaska to Siberia (“ALSIB”), initiated eighty years in the past, on September 29, 1942.

Alaska cease, Yakutsk cease

In spite of everything it was a rare endeavor. The ALSIB route from Fairbank, Alaska to Krasnoyarsk was 6500 kilometers lengthy, out of which over 5000 above the Soviet territory. With the intention to attain the entrance from US factories, the airplane needed to fly greater than 15,000 kilometers. Flights at such distances have been out of the query at the moment: the route was divided into 5 components: the primary Soviet regiment was transporting planes from Fairbanks to the Yakustk airport Uelkal subsequent to Aanadyr, subsequent plane have been masking the next distances: Anadyr – Seymchan, Seymchan – Yakutsk, Yakutsk – Kirensk, and additional already to Krasnoyarsk…

For the nice of backup routes and airfields in Siberia a complete of 16 airports, three radiolocation stations, a community of hangars, gas storages, inns and coaching facilities have been constructed. The civil aviation within the Far East being profitable – which was a leitmotif of the postwar Soviet propaganda to a big extent was owed to the infrastructure designed by the hated Yankees.

And there was site visitors! Between 1942 and 1945 practically 8,000 plane have been transported from Fairbanks to USSR. Gulag prisoners from Kolyma have been however craning their heads: 729 B-25 bombers, 2,396 P-63 spitfires, 2,616 P38 spitfires, 707 items of the then largest Si-47 transport plane.

Moreover, they weren’t flying empty: they have been loaded with jeeps and (in components) locomotives, machine instruments and concrete mixers, stitching machines and typewriters, workplace provides and anti-tank mine primers, powdered and frozen eggs, surgical needles and carcasses from Chicago slaughterhouses, in addition to Ambassadors Maxim Litvinov and Anatoliy Gromyko. And, as chronicles report, 506 tons of mica (for isolators).

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By Wojciech Stanisławski

Translated by Dominik Szczęsny-Kostanecki

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