Time Machine: A rescue mission to Russia

Following the polite tradition of “ladies first,” last week’s Time Machine was about Iowa poet Ethel Penningroth. In researching her, I found her husband, the Rev. Louis P. Penningroth, equally interesting, given his heroic rescue of American and British POWs after World War I.

Penningroth, from Tipton, played football for the Hawkeyes while a student at the University of Iowa from 1909-13 and also was president of the university’s YMCA. After graduating, he enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

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In 1915, during World War I, Louis cut short his studies and joined the International YMCA as a worker among soldiers and prisoners in the war zone in Austria. When the United States entered the war in 1917, he was expelled from Austria because he was a U.S. citizen.

After a brief trip home to Tipton, he went to Russia as secretary of the YMCA War Prisoners Aid. After the 1918 assassination attempt of Communist Party leader Vladimir Lenin, Penningroth and others were expelled from that country.

He was reassigned to Copenhagen, where, in 1919, he heard Allied POWs had been captured by the Bolsheviks months before and were being held in Russia.

Penningroth decided to use the skills he had learned with the YMCA to rescue the American prisoners. He succeeded, but the story released at the time was brief and short on details.

Going into Russia

The dramatic inside story wasn’t known until The Gazette asked Penningroth about the experience in January 1932.

Most Americans were unaware the U.S. in the fall and winter of 1918 landed a small force in northern Russia. It was sent to protect a large supply of munitions that had been stored in Archangel (Arkhangelsk) for use by the Russian army when it was still fighting with the Allies, Penningroth said.

The Allied force was sent into Russia “to keep those munitions from falling into the hands of the Bolsheviks,” he said. The Bolsheviks went after the munitions and, in the process, took Allied soldiers as prisoners.

When Penningroth learned the Bolsheviks were holding Allied POWs in Russia, he was in Denmark working on behalf of POWs in Europe. He gathered food and money to deliver to the Allied prisoners in Russia and explored how to get the provisions to them and perhaps get them released.

Traveling to Berlin, he met with Gen. George H. Harries of the Inter-Allied Commission, seeking permission to go to Moscow. Harries applauded the idea but declined to help. Penningroth got the same response from the American charge d’affaires in Denmark, U. Grant Smith.

Penningroth’s friends and coworkers were equally discouraging. They said he was “drunk or crazy,” and warned “you’ll be killed the minute you cross the border.”

Nonetheless, Penningroth left Copenhagen by boat March 13, 1919. At Helsinki, he asked permission to cross the border into Russia.

“We’ll not stand in the way of your helping American prisoners,” Finnish officials told him. “But we want to warn you. You are walking into the mouth of a cannon in going into Russia.”

Going into Russia

On the bridge marking the border between Finland and Russia, Penningroth unloaded his boxes of food and supplies at the half-way mark. A Bolshevik officer in a heavy leather coat appeared at the other end of the bridge.

Penningroth’s Finnish guide said, “We have turned people over to him and never heard from them again.” He handed Penningroth’s passport to the Bolshevik officer, who took it and waved for Penningroth to follow him. He began to question him:

“Who are you, and what is your purpose?”

“I am a friend of the Russians in Christian work,” Penningroth replied.

“I see from the smile on your face that you are kind, and you say you are in Christian work. Come with me,” the officer said before ordering guards to pick up the boxes left on the bridge.

Penningroth, unsure of what would come next, recalled offering “a prayer that I might at least be given a chance to state my case in behalf of suffering prisoners of war. But even while I hoped, I remembered stories of men in Russia being shot first and then searched to find out who they were.”

After he was questioned, Penningroth was given permission to board a train for Petrograd (St. Petersburg), where he managed to get his luggage taken to the American embassy, manned only by its caretaker, a man named Ivan. Penningroth gave Ivan a package of tobacco and spent the night in the ambassador’s bedroom.

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The next day, Penningroth was on a train for Moscow. He met with the Soviet commissar of the foreign office, Georges Tchitcherin, who granted him a permit to go to “the only prison-camp ever established in Russia where American soldiers were among the prisoners as prisoners-of-war.”

When he arrived, he learned the POWs were given a hunk of bread every other day to eat. They made tea in a homemade samovar.

He asked for custody of the seven American POWs.

After many days of visiting with the POWs and Tschitcherin, Penningroth asked, “Will you turn these American prisoners over to me, not as soldiers but as my friends?”

Surprised by the request, Tschitcherin said, “It’s never been done. I don’t know what Lenin will think of it. But I’ll do it.”

Penningroth then asked for an equal number of British POWs, and the request was approved.

Leaving Russia

The POWs and Penningroth boarded a special train and, four days later, were at the Finnish border station Penningroth had passed through about a month before.

The Russian guards were new and perplexed as to why 14 POWs were no longer in prison. They called Petrograd and were told to let them pass.

As they crossed the bridge, the Finnish officers were willing to let Penningroth through but refused to let the POWs in because they had no passports or papers.

After lengthy negotiations, Penningroth made a deal with them.

“I am a Christian minister, and I ask you to take my word that these men are who I say they are, and to let us into Finland,” he said. “You can verify my story, and if by tomorrow you find that anything I have told you about these men is not true, you can take me out and shoot me.”

The officers acquiesced, and the prisoners crossed the border to freedom.

Penningroth returned in the United States and married Ethel Blythe, another University of Iowa graduate, in Williamsburg in September 1919. He returned to his seminary studies in New York City and was ordained in 1921. He and his wife served churches in Minneapolis, Minn., and in Blue Grass, Red Oak and Davenport, Iowa.

In the late 1940s, the Penningroths retired to their Valley View Farm at the east edge of Iowa City. Penningroth died in 1973 at age 85.

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