Message to F. Roosevelt (Correspondence Vol. 2, No. 277)

Your message of March 4 about prisoners of war received. I have again conferred with our local representatives in charge of this matter and can tell you the following:
The difficulties which arose during the early stages of the speedy evacuation of American prisoners of war from the zones of direct military operations have decreased substantially. At present the special agency set up by the Soviet Government to take care of foreign prisoners of war has adequate personnel, transport facilities and food supplies, and whenever new groups of American prisoners of war are discovered steps are taken at once to help them and to evacuate them to assembly points for subsequent repatriation. According to the information available to the Soviet Government, there is now no accumulation of U.S. prisoners of war on Polish territory or in other areas liberated by the Red Army, because all of them, with the exception of individual sick men who are in hospital, have been sent to the assembly point in Odessa, where 1,200 U.S. prisoners of war have arrived so far and the arrival of the remainder is expected shortly. Hence there is no need at the moment for U.S. planes to fly from Poltava
to
Polish territory in connection with U.S. prisoners of war. You may rest assured that appropriate measures will immediately be taken also with regard to American aircraft crews making a forced landing. This, however, does not rule out cases in which the help of U.S. aircraft may be required. In this event the Soviet military authorities will request the U.S. military representatives in Moscow to send U.S. aircraft from Poltava.
As at the moment I have no proposals to make concerning the status of the Allied prisoners of war in German hands, I should like to assure you that we shall do all we can to provide them with facilities as soon as they find themselves on territory captured by Soviet troops.

March 5, 1945