Chapter 51 Chapter 51

Rhoda was surprised to receive a thick wax-sealed letter from the State Department.Opening the envelope, she found another very thick envelope with light blue Russian characters printed on the mouth.Inside the envelope were eleven typewritten sheets of letter paper, many of which had been corrected with pencils and pens.Also pinned to it was a small note marked "A Note from Erister Tudsbury," in Pug's strong italic handwriting in red pencil: Hey, Don't be afraid—I don't think I've ever written such a long letter since I've known you, and I haven't had experience with it.

Participating in the Kremlin banquet is another unbelievable thing, I will write this next time, this letter must be sent as soon as possible—— Tudsbury regards you.I borrowed his stationery and typewriter, and wrote them all in the situation letter. He was getting fatter and his daughter was like a ghost— love you Pug October 3rd in Moscow (still in a dream) Dearest Saida: In three hours I'm going to a banquet in the Kremlin.How about it?This is not a dream.Everything in this trip was quite new and strange. Now that we have two grandchildren (how is it, Grandma?), I'm starting to feel like I should write down some of the experiences while they're still fresh.I don't know how to write articles, but even some modest records with something to write about will be interesting to children someday.If from now on I send you batches of these materials from time to time, don't think that I'm old and talkative.After you read it, put it away for the dolls.

I haven't had a good night's sleep since I left London, and I'm always feeling groggy.The section from the British destroyer to Archangel could have been rested, but there were always meetings at night and emergency alerts all day long.It was a dangerous voyage, and almost the entire voyage was within the flight range of the Luftwaffe.The convoys on this line were attacked several times, but luckily we were sailing in fog half the time. I keep making typos because there is something wrong with Tudsbury's typewriter.Nobody in the USSR could fix British typewriters, or maybe nobody would, you never know.I always borrow the typewriter from the embassy when I work, but today they had too much to type to get the final draft of the conference papers.The Tudsburys had the best lodgings at the National Hotel, and of course Tawky always had a way!His suite faced Red Square, and from where I sat I could see the Kremlin through the drizzle.It is said that Lenin lived in this suite, and now I am here.The suite is full of reddish-brown curtains, golden chandeliers, marble statues, Persian carpets as large as an acre of land, and even a rosewood grand piano, which is placed inconspicuously in the corner (the piano’s notes are no longer ready).For my part, I had a shady room on the top floor, five feet wide by ten long, with yellow stucco walls and no ornamentation.

Tudsbury is here now, dictating to Pamela the script for tonight's broadcast, and Taoji has a way of pointing out where the battlefield is now!He confiscated Pamela from the War Information Bureau to work for him on the pretext of poor eyesight, and his manuscripts and broadcasts were considered first-class propaganda.She works in the RAF and is on extended leave, which seems to be distressing.Her pilot has been a German prisoner of war for a year, and there is still no news. Like all journalists here, Tudsbury had to find a way to live without rice.He spent two hours last night telling me in detail how hard the job was.The Russians kept the reporters in Moscow, called them every other day, and gave them some made-up press releases.Most reporters agreed that the fighting was bad, but they had no material to explain it except rumors from Moscow and short-wave broadcasts from Berlin.It seems that the Russians have more or less acknowledged the German announcement, but always two or three weeks later.The pessimists - and there are quite a few here - think Moscow could fall within a week.Neither I nor Tudsbury thought so.But some in our embassy were terribly nervous about Harriman being captured by the Nazis.They can breathe a sigh of relief when the envoy's plane leaves tomorrow.

Ah, about this trip—the sea near Russia reminds me of Newfoundland.Rhoda, in the north of the earth, is mostly large forests like Songpa and white waters.Perhaps stupid human beings will destroy both the temperate zone and the tropics one day, and human civilization will make a bad start again on the top of the earth. The first thing that surprised and surprised me was in Archangel.This is a port town built entirely of wood in the wilderness.Docks, warehouses, sawmills, factories, churches, cranes—all made of wood.Piles of wood, hundreds of millions of meters of planks, everywhere.God knows how many trees felled to build this town and pile up so much timber.But the forests near Archangel still appear to be unlogged.Arkhangel is a bit like Alaska, like the Klondike in the photo.

The first real Russian I saw was a harbor pilot who came on board downstream in the harbor, and to my surprise "he" was a woman.Sheepskin coat, trousers, boots, a healthy and beautiful face.I was on the slipway watching her lead us into port, she was a very good seaman, or seawoman.She ushered us into the port expertly without feeling nervous at all.Then she shook hands with the captain and left. There was no smile on her face during the whole voyage.Russians only laugh when they think it's funny, never for the amusement of others.This makes them look sullen and unapproachable.I think they must have thought we were grinning monkeys.This is a microcosm of our dealings with Russia. Apart from the language barrier, our personalities and styles are different.

Mr. Hopkins told me about the Russian forests, and I am still amazed.Do you remember, about three or five years ago, we used to drive west in midsummer, and we hadn't driven out of the cornfield for three days?The same is true of the Russian boreal forests.When our plane went to Moscow, it flew low close to the treetops, and the blue branches passed under the wings. For hours and hours, there was no end in sight. Suddenly, the fuselage rose, and the endless rows of houses and factories were just behind us. Front.Moscow is a gray plain.From a distance, it is similar to Boston and Philadelphia.Only when you get closer and you see the domed churches, the crimson Kremlin on the riverside, and some churches inside, do you feel that you have arrived in a strange place.Before landing, probably out of special courtesy, the pilot circled over Moscow to show us the panorama.They took off and landed proficiently, though crudely by our standards.The Russian pilot ascended steeply as soon as the plane left the ground, and it also went straight down when it landed.

Speaking of which, when we arrived in Moscow, we did not distinguish between day and night, and we were full of fish and meat all day long.We were supposed to work all night, but if there were no meetings in the evening, we ate and drank.The standard meals for entertaining guests here are roughly twelve or three different cold fish, caviar, two soups, chicken, and barbecue, and wine is constantly added.Each also had their own bottle of vodka.It's a hellish way of doing things, but on the other hand maybe it's the cleverness of the Russians, and once the wine is down, things don't get too tense.Getting drunk seems to be the same for Bolsheviks and capitalists alike, so at least we still have something in common.

I think our meeting is epoch-making.Secret however it is, when in the past did the United States and Russia sit together and talk about military issues?This time is the most novel.The Russians never tell you the actual situation of arms production and war situation.Come to think of it, just three months ago the Germans were in the same position as we and the British are now, and I don't want to blame them very much.The Russians have had bad luck in the past.You can't forget that when you're negotiating with them, a point our translator Leslie Sloter often makes. Told you, the British would cede some Lend-Lease preferences and even agree to give the Russians some tanks.These will all be in the papers shortly.They lost all their equipment when they retreated from Dunkirk, so it was an honorable and courageous decision.Of course they can't use tanks to fight the Germans yet, but the Russians can.Even so, Churchill was not sure that Hitler would reach an agreement with Stalin again and then suddenly turn around and commit all troops to cross the Channel.I don't think so.The growing hatred of the Germans here has a blood-feudal feel to it, and you only have to look at the horrific newsreel footage of the villages they were driven out of by the Germans to understand why they hated the Germans so much.Children were strangled in groups, women were raped to death, and so on.Although Hitler and Stalin seemed to have a capricious temperament, and nothing they did was predictable or humane, I think the British agreed to give the Russians tanks very commendable.

Some of us in America felt weird, fucking weird, at this meeting.The English are willing to help the Russians in their own dire straits, while our Parliament screams when we give the Russians something.We sit between the representatives of two nations that are fighting to the death of the Germans, and we represent a nation that either does not hear the cries from the Pacific to the Atlantic coast, or that won't allow its president to lift a finger to help Get busy. Do you remember Slote?He is now the second secretary at the embassy here.Remember, he came to me in Berlin and praised Braney for his performance in the war in Poland.He's the one Natalie went to visit, he still thinks she's the best girl in the world, I don't know why he didn't marry her when he had the chance.He is now courting Taoji's daughter.She was one of the few Western girls (I almost said Caucasian girls) who didn't have a girlfriend in Moscow, and she wasn't the only one pursuing her.

(By the way, it was ridiculous for me to mention white girls. After two days in Moscow, I wanted to point out what was so different from us here. I told Slote about two differences. One was seeing No ads, no people of color. Sloter laughed. Still, it's true. In Moscow, the atmosphere of informality and equality is like America, but you're in America You don't see all white people in any big city in the world. And most of all I like these Russians and their calm and determined way of dealing with problems, just like Londoners.) Now, I'm telling you a story, also for our grandchildren, especially Braney's son, to read someday.This is a cruel story, I still don't know how to look at it, but I want to write down the experience.Yesterday, after the last meeting in the afternoon, and some time before the formal dinner at the Metropolitan Hotel in the evening, Tudsbury and Pam and I went to Sloter's apartment for a while.This small party was Taoji's idea.He wanted to hear a little from me about the meeting, but I had nothing to say. Be that as it may, I was drinking with them--so tired, No more spirits in the veins without a certain amount of alcohol, this is emergency fueling—there was a knock at the door, and in came a chap in battered boots, a bonnet, and a battered overcoat, and it was a man from Warsaw. Jewish businessman, Joche Jastrow, Natalie's uncle!It was the uncle they called Ben Riel.You remember, it was because Blaney and Natalie went to the south of Poland to attend his son's wedding that they encountered the German invasion.He was clean-shaven, fluent in German and Russian, and did not look Jewish, although Sloter said he had grown a beard in Warsaw and looked like a rabbi. The fellow escaped from Warsaw with the few remaining members of his family, as legendary hero stories tell.They arrived in Minsk, just as the Germans were attacking Belarus with lightning.He only briefly told us how he and his family escaped from Minsk through the forest, obviously a man who was good at adapting to circumstances and narrowly escaped death. Here's the unbelievable part.Jastrow said that one month or so after the fall of Minsk, late at night, the Germans drove a convoy of trucks to the ghetto they had set up for the Jews there.They arrested all the people on the two most densely populated streets and stuffed them into trucks. Men, women, children, infants, and old people who couldn't walk were not left behind. There were at least a few thousand people.The men were sent to a ravine in the forest a few miles from the city, where they were shot and buried in a freshly dug pit.Earlier, Jastrow said, the Germans had captured a group of Russians and told them to dig a hole, and then trucked them to another area.A few of them sneaked back through the forest to see what was going on, and that's how things got out.One of them took a photo with a camera.Jastrow produced three photographs.Whatever it is called, it happened before dawn.In one photo, the light of gunfire can be seen, and in the other, a group of figures can be seen in the distance.The third picture is the clearest, where the man wearing the German steel helmet buried the soil.Jastrow also gave Sloter two documents in Russian, one in manuscript and one in typescript, describing what he had seen. Jastrow said he was determined to come to Moscow to deliver material on the Minsk massacre to some American diplomats.I don't know where he got Sloter's address.He is a very thoughtful person, but a little naive.He believed, and apparently still believes, that if President Roosevelt had learned of this and told the American people, the United States would have immediately declared war on Germany. Jastrow handed these materials to Sloter, and said, I risked my life to bring these things to Moscow, how many women and children were slaughtered, and asked him to keep these photos and materials properly.I had a few words with him about the kids, and when I told him Byron and Natalie already had a boy, tears welled up in his eyes. After he was gone, Sloter handed over the materials to Tudsbury.He said, "This is material for your broadcast, and it's going to be on the front page of every newspaper in America." To my surprise Tudsbury said he didn't want to use the material at all.He had worked for British propaganda after being wounded in the last war, helping them spin stories of enemy atrocities and plant them on others with false evidence.He said the British made up stories about the Germans making soap from the dead soldiers.Maybe the Minsk massacre was real, but to him, Jastrow looked like a crook sent by Russian intelligence.It is by no means a coincidence that a distant relative of mine--in the first place, the relationship is peculiar enough--suddenly and automatically appears in Moscow with such materials and invented stories. A lively debate ensued, and in the end Tudsbury said that even if he thought the story was true, he was not going to use the material.These things, he said, could backfire and keep America out of the fight, just as Hitler's policies toward the Jews had paralyzed Britain for years. "Nobody wants to fight a war to save the Jews," he insisted, patting the table.Hitler still convinces many people that anyone who fights against Germany is really only shedding blood for the Jews.Taoji said that this is one of the great tactics of war propaganda in history.Stories about the Minsk Jews might also be exploited by the Germans. Well, I've got the facts of the matter down.I don't mean to be wordy, but this incident haunts me forever.As long as Jastrow's story is a little truthful, the Germans really did a killing spree there, among other things, Natalie and her children are in great danger, unless they have now left Italy .Whatever Hitler did Mussolini imitated.But I figured they had left, Sloter told me, and everything had been arranged before the birth. Rhoda, thinking about Jastrow's story makes me go crazy, and I feel like the world I grew up in is disappearing.Even if it's an exaggerated story, hearing such a thing reminds one of the new dark ages we've entered.I can't stand it, and the worst thing is that I can't bring myself not to believe Jastrow.There was a keen and dignified demeanor in this man, and I have no objection to being related to such a man, though it is always strange to think that he is mine.It's five minutes to six.I have to finish my letter and get ready to go to the party. This war really took a toll on our family, didn't it?In those days in Manila, the three children were still in school, and there was a tennis court in front of the house, and I taught them how to play. All this seemed like a long-lost dream.Those were our best days.Now I am in Moscow.I hope you still keep up with the weekly tag team with Fred Kirby and the Vances.You will always feel better when you exercise.Say hi to Brink and Anna for me, and Fred too, and say I hope the State Department hasn't let him down. Although I am very busy, I still miss you very much.But, my dear, you must not be interested in the Soviet Union, neither in wartime nor in peacetime.Pamela Tudsbury said there wasn't a hairdresser she wanted to visit in Moscow.All her coats and skirts are washed in gasoline by herself. You know, I've met Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, and tonight I might shake Stalin's hand.For such a small person as me, this is a big deal!My life experience has taken a decidedly strange turn.For the sake of my grandchildren (you already know that), I'd rather put in my record that I've been at sea for the past two years.But this is impossible to change. On the other hand, I think that you can learn something even if you are not at sea.Only at this point, I am very content, but indeed, I would rather not go to the Kremlin to attend the banquet, and then go to smell the smoke of the Navy's chimney.Let’s talk about it next time, I love you infinitely—— Pug October 2, 1941 Hotel Ethnic Victor Henry was in Moscow with the Harriman-Biverbroke delegation just as the Germans were making their crushing autumn offensive against Moscow.The armored corps had fought less than a hundred miles from the city, but the Russians still entertained their guests, took them shopping in black cars, watched ballets, and held long-drawn-out committee meetings. Nothing was out of the ordinary, although at the farewell party they seemed to have moved a little faster than when the guests had first arrived in Moscow less than a week earlier. Both the Americans and the British knew that the German center advance had been halted east of Smolensk more than a month earlier and had been compelled to hold the defense there until now.In Moscow, there is still a However, it is said to be a great achievement of the Soviet army, a new "Marine miracle".They claim that just as the French held off the advance of the barbaric Germans thirty miles near Paris in 1914, thereby depriving them of a chance of quick victory, so the Red Army held back the advance of Hitler's thugs, who had Those who want to occupy Moscow before winter.The Russians even took foreign journalists to the central front, showing them captured villages, destroyed Nazi tanks, and Germans killed or captured.Now the Germans claimed that the march on Moscow had advanced again, and the Russians denied the news.Wartime camouflage to confuse the outside world effectively conceals the truth of the matter. Contrary to what was widely circulated at the time, there was always another theory that the German army that entered Russia was not all equipped with tanks and armored vehicles, that it was not a fire-breathing, murderous force that clanged across the enemy's country.Hitler had a horse trolling army, which was larger than Napoleon's, but like Napoleon's "Grand Army", the German army invaded Russia by relying on animal power and on foot.He also has some armored divisions, but they are arranged on the flanks of the third army that invaded the Soviet Union.Blitz warfare was carried out like this: Tank and armored divisions advanced on both sides of the attacking force, cut into the enemy's lines, and crushed the enemy with the terror and power of a sudden attack.The infantry regiment advances as quickly as possible into the path opened by the armored troops, killing or capturing enemy troops that have been cut off or surrounded by the tank forces. These armored corps were a great success and there is no doubt that Hitler was willing to use more of them.But, as his generals mutter, he started this war a little too early, and he has only been in power for six years.He has hardly armed Germany in its entirety, though he shouts horribly as if he has done the job, and Europe believes it.Thus, his armor was small compared to the length of the front. In August, the three extended attack lines had penetrated deeply into the territory of the Soviet Union. Hitler transferred the limited armored forces in the center to the north and south lines to assist both sides in capturing Kyiv and besieging Leningrad.After this task is completed, the armored troops will return to their original positions and launch an attack on the capital together with the Central Army Corps.This is a question that military writers have debated so far, but in any case, after the armored soldiers in the center retreated, the infantry and horse-drawn artillery in the center had to stop and dig trenches for defense, waiting for the armored soldiers who played the role of steel knives to return.This is the new "Miracle of Marne".The Russians were the first to be surprised at the sudden stop of the huge army advancing towards the capital.Then it was very exciting. At this time, although they had been broken up, they still fought back and achieved some small victories. The "miracle" ended at the end of September. At that time, the German armored forces had returned to their original positions, probably after overhaul and refueling, and then divided into two curves and headed for Moscow again.It was at this time that Harriman and Bifferbroke arrived in Moscow.Arriving in the same car with them was the unknown Captain Henry.