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In the 1930s, America was among the most pacifist and isolationist of nations. It was official policy to allow the US military to be run down. There was a widespread and popular belief that the United States’ involvement in the Great War had been for the profit of the few – arms manufacturers and bankers – but paid for by the sacrifice of the many. As a result, many joined the Pacifist League, believing that it was in the interests of the US to stay out of others’ conflicts. Even if the money were available, there was no desire to divert scarce state resources to building up the US military beyond a minimum level. The State Department had no intention of antagonising any foreign power except imperial Japan, who were a threat to their sovereignty over the Philippines. Even then their involvement was limited to arranging large loans for the Nationalist Chinese government to buy US-made arms, including warplanes, to hit back at the invading Japanese.
Soviet industrial espionage was meanwhile spreading beyond aviation. In 1934, the authorities again ignored reports that visiting Soviet engineers, sitting in a US factory, had been brazenly drawing the design for a brand-new naval anti-aircraft gun. The reality was that, despite the steeply rising war tensions in Asia and Europe, the US armaments industry received little government support and was dependent on foreign orders to keep the factories open, the skilled workers employed and their product up to date.
Airframes at the time were designed around a single-engine model. Motors wore out faster than frames, which led to constant demand for engines. A flow of individual parts manufactured in America to be assembled in Russia soon followed the first complete engines delivered by Curtiss, while the Russians developed their own variant around their Curtiss engine – the only difference between the Soviet M-25 variant and the equivalent US version being the use of entirely metric components. Over 13,888 M-25 engines were eventually built, with performance equal to a Wright motor. The M-25 was developed into the ASh-73, the engine that would power the Tupolev Tu-4 into the sky at Tushino in 1947.
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By this point a great deal of information was flowing to the US authorities about the extent of Soviet espionage in their factories. At another manufacturer, Douglas in California, a cat-and-mouse game developed between the company’s private security guards and visiting Russian engineers. The Russians enjoyed the game. They had bought licences to manufacture the DC-3 and the rights to some information, but were intent on taking far more. In particular, they wanted to reproduce every detail of the Douglas design room back home but in metres rather than feet. They wanted the exact dimensions. When a direct request was refused, they took to pacing it out while on smoking breaks, dogged by American security guards trying to protect the company secrets.
Officially, the US authorities took the view that the USSR was simply too far away to be a military problem. Several US diplomats in Moscow including Loy Henderson and George Kennan, on the other hand, were fiercely anti-Soviet. They wrote back to Washington warning about the dangers of arming Moscow with the latest weapons and insisted that only obsolete technology should be sold. The unintended consequence of such letters (which were intercepted and read by the Russians) was to intensify the pace of intelligence gathering in the US. But there was no political will to deal with the reports of Russian spies in the US, especially during the Depression. Ingrained arrogance and complacency were typical of the attitude of the US military and government at the time. Senior US officers believed in the innate superiority of their own forces over any perceived enemies. Soviets flyers were inferior pilots, peasants in the sky lacking the skills to operate modern equipment. As a result, US intelligence-gathering efforts in the USSR were inadequate. The State Department solicited the views of Charles Lindbergh on his visit to the Soviet Union; otherwise, they relied on third parties such as the Baltic states to provide assessments or the travel experiences of embassy staff. They did not believe in the Soviet air myth, and found reports of Soviet air strength and capabilities to be widely exaggerated. Flying around the USSR was described as a far worse experience than anything that could be had on any American airline. There were observations of inadequately trained mechanics and a lack of spare parts. This is the perennial problem of intelligence. It is easy for an agent to find what they set out to look for and ignore the inconvenient truth of Soviet aviation development. The US failed to spot the direction of travel until it was too late.
American entrepreneurs meanwhile saw Soviet efforts at economic expansion as a source of enormous profit. Curtiss-Wright, the world’s largest aircraft engine manufacturer, earned Soviet money throughout this period, which allowed it to continue developing its powerful radial engine designs at a time when the US military was actively cancelling its orders. Pratt & Whitney was its only competitor in the engine market, and the precision needed to produce engines was a barrier to other companies entering the market. Nevertheless, during the Depression, sales had dropped, and Curtiss-Wright was forced to close many of its satellite plants. The corporation posted losses for several years even while it remained the country’s largest aircraft firm. Undoubtedly, it was saved by export sales from its engine division, Wright Aeronautical, which during the first half of the 1930s provided more than 50 per cent of the company’s revenues from China and the USSR.
In the capitalist model, private corporations risk their own capital on prototypes to compete for limited government contracts. To stay ahead in the air race required constant innovation and investment. Sometimes change stemmed from disaster: on 31 March 1931, a wooden-winged Fokker airliner serving the route from Kansas City to Los Angeles crashed in the Kansas prairie, killing sports hero Knute Rockne, ‘without question, American football’s most-renowned coach’, who had been on his way to consult on the movie The Spirit of Notre Dame. A wooden wing failed on his aircraft because water had seeped between the layers of laminate and dissolved the glue holding it together. The accident led the Aeronautics Branch of the US Department of Commerce to introduce new restrictions on wooden wings. The result was the development of all-metal aircraft.
There was cut-throat competition even in the fast-developing commercial aviation sector. In a 1935 article, Donald Douglas stated that a single model of the first prototype DC-1 had cost him $325,000 to design and build, while each DC-2 – the sample plane sold to the Russians, at a price of $130,000 – cost $80,000 to manufacture. He sold the licence to produce the DC-3 to the Russians for $207,500. So the profit on each aircraft was thin. Douglas worked out that he would need an order of at least 100 planes to turn a profit on a model; such large orders were non-existent in Depression-hit America. Foreign contracts became the bread and butter of US industry. But this meant sharing or giving away secrets.
In just a few years, meanwhile, the Russians had progressed from buying completed planes abroad to assembling kits and then to building entirely under licence. They were one of the few nations able to do so. In comparison, the DC-2 licence was sold to the Dutch firm Fokker, but they could not build the planes themselves. Fokker’s European customers, KLM, LOT, Swissair, CLS (Czech) and LAPE (Iberia), purchased the extraordinary plane via Fokker in the Netherlands. But the aircraft were manufactured in the US and shipped to Europe.
The Japanese aircraft company Nakajima wrestled with the complexities, but only managed to construct one plane before turning to assembling kits. Of the countries who bought the DC-3, the USSR was the only one to be successful. Russian aircraft designers had cut their teeth on reverse engineering; Tupolev’s first project had been to deconstruct and rebuild a Blériot plane. Engineers would take a sample-imported plane to pieces and reassemble it. They might then copy it as far as possible from local materials. Otherwise, they would adopt the best features of several models to build their own. In this way the Soviets developed the skills to be able to produce 22,000 of their DC-3 variant, the Li-2. Boris Pavlovich Lisunov, a member of Shumovsky’s 1935 team, was the plane’s designer. The plane was built from components sourced in Russia,
the Li-2 was a shining example of how Stalin’s plan to make Russia self-sufficient in aviation might be fulfilled. Soviet-built planes were cheaper than imports, used local resources, created jobs and ensured the safety of the Soviet Union. There would be no repeat of the Tsar’s dependence on foreign arms suppliers.
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Russia and the United States share a border divided by a hostile terrain: the Arctic. In 1936 Stalin devised a plan to symbolically narrow the gap between the two countries by sending aircraft on non-stop flights to the US. The warming of relations between the USA and the USSR could never happen quickly enough for the Soviet leadership with their strategic concerns. Stalin was surrounded by the expanding forces of Nazism in the West and imperial Japan in the East, both aggressively rearming. The Soviet Union’s richest natural resources deposits lay within easy striking distance of these expansionary powers: the Soviet breadbasket of the Ukraine and Don was uncomfortably close to Germany, as were the prize oil fields of the Caucasus. Japan eyed Siberia as a potential colony, while the imperial Japanese army had been reluctant to abandon the territories captured during their intervention in the Russian Civil War.
Both Germany and Japan believed that they were peoples with an unfulfilled destiny, trapped within their current borders. Both saw colonies in the territory of the USSR as their right. On the face of it, Fascism and Communism were locked in an ideological battle, but underlying the struggle was a naked plan of conquest and extermination. While the destiny of Germany was to rule, the peoples of the USSR faced annihilation. Stalin understood that he was in a long fight for survival. In a February 1931 speech to industrial leaders he said prophetically:
One feature of the history of old Russia was the continual beatings she suffered because of her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol Khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords. She was beaten by the Polish and Lithuanian gentry. She was beaten by the British and French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. All beat her because of her backwardness, military backwardness, cultural backwardness, political backwardness, industrial backwardness, agricultural backwardness. We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall be crushed.4
By 1937 few doubted that an armed clash between the forces of Fascism and Communism was inevitable and imminent. Stalin was already in a fight with Japan. The low-level proxy war along the Manchurian border in China started in 1931 and spilled over into set-piece battles. From July 1936, the Spanish Civil War pitted the new generation of Soviet arms against the developing technologies of Germany and Italy. Stalin broke the League of Nations arms embargo to supply the Republican government in Madrid with weapons including his best tanks and aircraft. Thousands of Red Army troops served on the Republican front line alongside other international volunteers. On the battlefield and in the skies of Spain, Russian tanks and planes held their own against all but very latest German fighters, bombers and anti-tank guns. The reason for the defeat of the Republicans was down to their amateur army being unable to resist professional soldiers and the greater level of support given to the rebels by Germany and Italy, rather than to the inferiority of Soviet arms. The experience of the fighting in Spain was somehow lost on Hitler, as would be evidenced by the disaster of Operation Barbarossa when Soviet military equipment proved a match for everything but the best.
The key message for Stalin from the Spanish Civil War had been that the League of Nations and the Western powers were toothless in the face of Fascist aggression. His country needed more and better weapons to defend itself. Internationally, moreover, Stalin needed friends, and so he began to approach his enemies’ enemies. America was the block to Japan’s expansion in the Pacific, the same development that threatened the USSR. Following the German Kondor Legion’s mass air raids on Guernica, Madrid and Barcelona, it was clear that the next war would involve a strategy of bombing raids on civilian population centres. As a deterrent to imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, the Soviets intended to build a strategic bombing capability. To lead the design effort, Stalin chose Tupolev, a designer with an enduring interest in building long-range aircraft.
After the terrible experiences of the Spanish Civil War, the strategic bombing of civilian centres was prohibited by the League of Nations. Many countries focused away from heavy to build medium or fast bombers. The exception was the United States, where a fierce battle over how best to defend the long US coastline would rage for a decade between the traditionalist forces in the US Navy Department and the proponents of air power. A squadron of long-range bombers cost a thousandth of a battleship. But were they as effective? The visionary US Army general Billy Mitchell, ‘Father of the Air Force’, was a fierce proponent of the ideas of air power theorist General Giulio Douhet that the fundamental principle of strategic bombing was offensive, and that the only defence against carpet-bombing and poison gas attacks was to meet them with equal offensive sorties. For this reason Stalin armed the USSR with nuclear weapons following Douhet’s philosophy to meet an attack with an attack.
The US became the leader in bomber design. In August 1934, in response to a rare tender from the War Department for a new plane, Boeing began at its own expense a programme to build a prototype four-engine bomber. Although it took five years for the plane to enter military service, the process would culminate in the development of the heavily armed B-17 Flying Fortress and later the Superfortress. The idea was to rely on heavy defensive armament and giant payload, rather than speed, to be effective. Shumovsky was very interested in gathering information on this innovative plane.
In 1935 the Russians had concluded publicly at the end of Tupolev’s US visit that there was little America could teach them about the development of large aircraft. In private, however, they saw the potential in the DC-2 and its successor the DC-3. Enormous efforts went into replicating the Douglas factories, products and methods in the USSR.
The Maxim Gorky flies over Red Square
Tupolev built the famous Maxim Gorky, at the time the world’s largest aircraft. This monster of a plane was so vast that it included a printing press and a cinema as well as a crew of twenty-five.fn3 The plane had little practical value; it was underpowered, the engines straining to lift the vast bulk of the fuselage off the ground, so it could never carry any sizeable cargo. Furthermore, it was so slow that it was vulnerable to even an old fighter. Rumours reached Moscow from Shumovsky’s network of the progress made by Boeing and others in heavy bomber design. Developments included new, more powerful engines, the use of durable, lightweight construction materials (mainly aluminium) and finally the development of rotating machine-gun turrets providing the aircraft with an effective all-round defence. The US believed it was possible for a large formation of bombers to defend itself against any number of attacking fighters if it flew in a close enough formation with interlocking machine guns. The development of motorised rotating turrets placed at weak points including the rear and the nose made the design of the new generation of US bombers the most innovative in the world. All this was information that the Russians badly needed.
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It was in this climate that the plan came together in 1937 to establish a new world record for a non-stop flight. If successful, it would combine a dramatic publicity coup with a chance to cement relations between the US and the Soviet people. The stated goal of the programme was the eventual establishment of non-stop commercial passenger flights between Moscow and the United States. But behind the open message of friendship was a more sinister covert message aimed directly at Tokyo and Berlin; if we can fly a plane to America, your capital cities and population centres are within range of a bombing fleet too.
Planning this world record attempt required overcoming significant challenges. First, at the time, pilots flying over remote areas without wireless location beacons relied on a magnetic compass to determine their position. The only practical route
between Russian and US territory was over the magnetic pole, but pilots attempting the feat discovered that their key navigational instruments were useless. The Soviet solution was to establish a radio station close to the pole. This required an expedition led by Arctic explorer Otto Schmidt, who built a permanently occupied drifting base that broadcast a location signal to the small number of aircraft flying above.
The next stage was to find an aircraft that could cover this vast distance non-stop. The ANT-25, an experimental prototype, had the range. Once in the air, its engine was incredibly fuel-efficient. However, the ANT-25 could cover the distance only at a very low speed, essential to keep fuel usage to a minimum so that the plane could carry enough supplies to reach its intended destination. This meant that any flight to the United States would last a very long time, testing the mettle of the crew. A second difficulty was that the plane required an enormous runway in order to generate sufficient speed from its single engine to take off.
In the summer of 1937, the elite of ‘Stalin’s Falcons’, a group of his most daring and intrepid pilots, began preparations for more record-breaking flights. The most famous of these, Sigismund Levanevsky, had already denounced Tupolev as a ‘wrecker’ in an ill-tempered meeting at the Kremlin, having suffered a dangerous oil leak in one of the single-engine aircraft. He refused to fly a Tupolev plane.
Two pilots and their crews were however prepared to undertake the pioneering journey. Legend has manufactured competition between the two, Valery Chkalov and Mikhail Gromov. Chkalov, with an unparalleled reputation for derring-do, was Stalin’s favourite pilot. His most famous feat was flying under a bridge in Leningrad against direct orders. With his background and skills, Chkalov epitomised the Soviet pilot. Ruggedly handsome with wide-open peasant features, he was the embodiment of what an ordinary Russian could achieve given the opportunity. He enjoyed a close personal friendship with Stalin and was celebrated as a national hero. He was a fighter test pilot, a hazardous job given the primitive state of aircraft testing in the 1930s. However, his expertise was not in long-distance endurance flights.
The Spy Who Changed History Page 24