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The troubles, suggests General Deane, were not only Soviet suspicion of "foreigners" and "capitalists," but Soviet bureaucratic confusion—or a blend of both in special wartime form. In July 1944, the Red Air Force asked for instruction in the use of the Norden bombsight. The U.S. promptly agreed, but it was September before the Soviet Foreign Office got around to granting entrance visas to U.S. instructors. Starting classwork in October, the instructors found that their students were allowed only 72 hours for the entire course. They thereupon asked Washington for a Liberator to speed up group training. The Liberator was dispatched. In November Soviet officials announced that it would not be allowed to enter the Soviet Union. The class disbanded, having had no practical training at all.
Tires & Atom Bombs. Again, there was the case, of the tire factory. It had operated at 115% of designed capacity as part of the Ford Motor plant at River Rouge, Mich. But the Russians needed rubber tires, so the machines were dismantled, and the factory was lifted overseas, a $6,000,000 Lend-Lease item.
The Ford equipment was shipped in 1943, and extra equipment, including a power plant, was sent in 1944. But the Russians dallied, temporized, changed blueprints, left the machinery standing around in the snow and rain. Eventually a team of U.S. experts sent to help with the construction got tired of waiting, and all but one went home.
By October 1945, when the U.S. Military Mission itself left Russia, the plant had still not turned out a single tire, says General Deane. "Whenever I am asked," he concludes, "how long it will take the Russians to produce an atomic bomb, I think first of the vast American plants at Oak Ridge and elsewhere and then of the way the Russians set up a tire plant which was already designed, built and ready for installation."