[Milsurplus] FW: "An Airplane’s Extraordinary Story Recalls Bygone U.S.-Russian Amity"

[Hubert Miller]

Let's try that again. I wasn't verifying the picture bytes  in the first try, thus no appear.

Subject: "An Airplane’s Extraordinary Story Recalls Bygone U.S.-Russian Amity"

Article from New York Times, Weds. 8 May 2019, at
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/world/europe/russia-lend-lease-douglas-airplane.html
with these 2 copyable photos. Print article has one more photo not in online article, a very good photo, but I have not scanned it yet. If anyone interested, I can forward the
other photo once I have scanned it. It is a good photo.
-Hue

[A sandy beach next to a body of water  Description automatically generated][A military plane parked in a field  Description automatically generated]




An Airplane’s Extraordinary Story Recalls Bygone U.S.-Russian AmityAn Airplane’s Extraordinary Story Recalls Bygone U.S.-Russian Amity

MOSCOW — Like cans of Spam and Harley-Davidson motorcycles, American-made Douglas airplanes became symbols to Soviet people of World War II-era cooperation between their country and the United States.

During the war, the United States sent 705 Douglas transport planes to the U.S.S.R. under the Lend-Lease program, flying them from Alaska across Siberia. Some were shot down or crashed, others were returned to the United States after the war, and some remained in use in the Soviet Union for years after the fighting ended.

Only one remains in Russia today, a Russian historian of Lend-Lease said, preserved by a quirk of fate: The twin-engine C-47 made an emergency landing on a patch of Arctic tundra so remote that for almost 70 years, nobody ever stripped it for scrap metal or bothered to retrieve it.

Now, the plane may have a future that is no less improbable than its past.

Relations between the United States and Russia are at an ebb today over Moscow’s election interference and the wars in Ukraine and Syria. Even so, a group linked to the Russian government plans to restore and exhibit the American aircraft as a centerpiece in a new museum — a reminder of a time when the two powers set aside their differences and worked closely together.



“States, like people, can argue and make up,” said Aleksandr V. Matveyev, one of the engineers restoring the plane.

Commemorations of the war take center stage in President Vladimir V. Putin’s promotion of national pride, and celebrations for Victory Day, May 9, have become more elaborate every year. The Kremlin has recast the World War II victory as a cornerstone of its argument that Russia deserves to be a world power.

But there is little talk in Russia of Lend-Lease, the American program that sent millions of tons of aid — trucks, jeeps, motorcycles, planes, tanks, fuel and food — to the Soviet Union and other allies, and played a crucial role in helping them to continue fighting. Displaying the restored Douglas would highlight that overlooked aspect of wartime history, which does not fit neatly into the image projected by Mr. Putin’s government.

“When relations are good, we talk about this,” said Vyacheslav V. Filippov, a historian specializing on the wartime aid program. And when American-Russian ties go south as they have recently, “everybody goes silent” about Lend-Lease, he said.

The Douglas has become an exception. The Russian Geographical Society, a group with close ties to the Kremlin, is sponsoring its restoration, expected to begin this summer. It is planned for Krasnoyarsk, a Siberian city about 1,400 miles south of where it sat for seven decades.

In part, at least, the attention stems from a tale unrelated to wartime cooperation or the plane’s Made in America origins. The surviving C-47 is a relic of what was once a famous tragedy of Russia’s far north.

Maksim D. Tyurikov, its final pilot, was such a dedicated airman that he named his daughter Avelina, an invented name that sounds like the Russian word for airline.

“He loved flying,” Avelina M. Antsifyerova recalled.

In the spring of 1947, when she was 6 years old, she learned the terrible news: The airplane he was flying had gone down in the Arctic. Her father was dead.



The Douglas plane during a 2016 expedition to retrieve it. Credit Collection of Vyacheslav V. Filippov, via Russian Geographical Society

On his last flight, an engine and the radio gave out over the Taimyr Peninsula, a realm of featureless Siberian tundra far above the Arctic Circle. Mr. Tyurikov landed the plane on the frozen landscape almost without damaging it.

He then wrote in pencil on the inside of the fuselage that he had saved the passengers, though he would not save himself. He died trying to summon help by walking to the nearest settlement, more than 100 miles away.

A total of 26 or 32 people were aboard, according to differing sources researched by the Russian Geographical Society. Six passengers and two crew members died trying to walk out, while those who huddled in the plane survived for 19 days before help arrived, partly by stretching out the emergency rations of American Spam kept on the plane.

For seven decades, the Douglas remained there, upright and intact, surrounded by wildflowers in the spring and golden-hued leaves of dwarf birch in the fall. Fierce winds and snow blasted off the green paint, leaving it glistening and silver.

It faded from popular memory, becoming a little-known curiosity — a monument to superpower friendship seen only by the occasional passing reindeer herder.

As a child, Ms. Antsifyerova had dreams of walking in the snow and finding her father’s airplane parked, as if at an airport, in the flat, far-northern landscape. “Even today, I get the shivers whenever I hear the word Douglas,” said Ms. Antsifyerova, who is now 78.

After seeing a picture of the plane on the tundra a decade ago, the Russian historian of the Lend-Lease program, Mr. Filippov, lobbied the Geographical Society to send an expedition to the site to recover the plane for museum exhibition.

When the mission took place, in 2016, the society took along Ms. Antsifyerova, offering her a chance to finally see her father’s Douglas on the tundra.

“I cried,” she said of arriving at the site by helicopter. “I saw that silver bird, lying on the ground, with its wings still spread.”

Inside the plane, the restorers found rusty, empty cans of Spam. They unbolted and cut loose the wings, and airlifted the main body of the plane to a Siberian river port for transport by barge to the south. The wings traveled separately, attached to a large sled and tugged across the tundra by an all-terrain vehicle.

Some restoration has already taken place, but the heavy work will begin this summer at an aviation repair factory. The geographical society says the plane will be displayed in the Museum of the Conquest of the North, in Krasnoyarsk, to commemorate both American Lend-Lease aid and the heroism of Soviet pilots.

Ms. Antsifyerova always missed her father terribly but was also proud he had landed the plane and saved so many lives. When she entered the flight deck, she said, “I had the feeling his hands were still on the instruments. I had the feeling he was nearby, somewhere.”






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