Fred Helps Save Mother Russia
No. 3 Engine
Blog 2 – 07/10/2023 Fred Helps Save Mother Russia
In The Infidel and the Ghost of Moscow and its two sequels, I explore death as a collateral of the war raging around the world. Men expect death during combat, but war raises the possibility of death in unexpected ways. One of my characters dies in a civilian plane crash. An officer loses her life in a botched assassination. A spouse dies beneath the wheels of a bus. Because death is everywhere during wartime, life itself is more precarious and precious.
I find inspiration and ideas for my novels in many sources. A stanza from a song captures an emotion I can relate to a love scene. Conversations between my characters reflect dialog I remember from a movie. While bits and pieces come together to form the whole, I attempt to remain true to the facts even as I color them with my imagination.
When I moaned to my wife about my research efforts concerning the U.S. Lend Lease policy for Russia, she reminded me that her father, Fred, served in Iran. She is an avid genealogist and, as part of her documentation of her family, she had transcribed her father’s journals. His descriptions of a private’s life on the ground in Iran provided details of a military operation that I could find nowhere else.
Fred served with the U.S. Army’s 730th Railway Operating Battalion in Iran. He was part of the Lend-Lease Program in the Persian Corridor that funneled military supplies, planes, trucks, arms and ammunition, even food and medicine, to Stalin’s armies on the Eastern Front. Allied ships crossed the Atlantic Ocean, cruised through the Strait of Hormuz, and traveled up the Persian Gulf to southern Iran where they off-loaded freight onto trains and trucks that continued the journey to Tehran. The Russians transferred these supplies to their own trains and trucks for a trip across the Iranian desert and over treacherous mountains all the way to the Caspian Sea and on to destinations deep within the USSR.
On December 7, 1942, Fred boarded the Isle de France, a French luxury liner that had been converted into a troop carrier. He traveled through Pearl Harbor where he saw the mangled hulks of our fleet at the U.S. naval base. After stops in New Zealand, Australia, Bombay, and Bahrain, he landed in southern Iran on January 27, 1943.
At first, everyone slept directly on the ground beneath blankets too thin for winter’s chill. The troops set about building shelter, digging latrines, and managing food supplies. Although in his civilian life Fred was a lithographer, in the army he was a truck driver. When the officers asked for volunteers to become cooks, Fred stepped forward. At least he’d be well-fed. Food supplies came in boxes, cans, and crates. Periodically, Fred was handed a rifle and ammunition and told to go into the hills and shoot whatever game he found. Usually, he returned with a wild boar or a stag. The influx of thousands of troops from several nations ruined the local food economy. The Iranians staved off starvation by scavenging scraps from the army’s garbage pit outside the fenced enclosure. Fred tasked one of his helpers with distribution of the mess’s leftover food. His helper knelt next to the fence with a clean container while men, women, and children reached through to claim whatever they could hold.
Fred was sent north to Tehran and ended up in Parandak, about fifty miles southwest of the capital city. The years passed. Fred wrote of extreme weather conditions, poor food deliveries, and intermittent mail service. He journaled his homesickness and boredom. He recorded the train wrecks and thievery of copper and wood by the Iranians.
After a final leave in Palestine, Fred departed Iran in July 1945. He mustered out in Camp Joseph T. Robinson in Arkansas in November 1945 and boarded a train for the final leg of his journey home to Cincinnati, Ohio. He knew his wife would be waiting for him at Union Station. She suffered through three additional days of waiting, not knowing what happened to him when he failed to make an appearance on the appointed day.
Somewhere along the route, the train that carried the troops to their homes derailed. At least one of the cars near the front of the line held fuel. When the engine left the tracks, the fuel carriages exploded. Men in the cars behind the fuel carriages passed through scorching heat and flames. Everyone in those carriages died. Fred was in the first carriage that derailed without running through the initial explosions. Everyone in his car and farther back lived. Fred stepped from his carriage directly onto the ground because it had plowed into the dirt as it came to a halt. He had survived the war only to escape a random brush with death on a train bound for home. In 1995, fifty years after Fred’s return from Iran, the Russian government sent him a letter of appreciation and a medal for his service in saving the Motherland.
The Infidel and the Ghost of Moscow is a love story that spans the years before the war in 1938 to late 1942 across two continents from Moscow to Kuwait. But the framework upon which my novel is built is the security of the Persian Corridor.
In future blogs, I’ll discuss my writing routine. Historical novels require research, imagination, and lots of coffee. Dark roast, if you please.