The ultimate fate of BUK 102 soldiers is not well known. My research leads me to believe that a good number who joined the French Foreign Legion survived the war and continued to serve in the Foreign Legion in order to secure their freedom. They ended up in far corners of the world, propping up French colonialism in what turned out to be losing causes in places like Vietnam and Algeria. But if they served 15 years in in the FFL, they were promised French citizenship. Other members of BUK 102 emigrated to Canada and the U.S. I surmise that those who rejoined the Soviet Army, like the 20-30 Poles at the castle, faced varying fates, with some likely ending up in Soviet gulags as enemies of the state.
After the war, grandfather stayed in contact with Major Lev Hloba, BUK 102’s young Ukrainian commander who was a key figure in the revolt against the Germans. Hloba, remarkably, was just 21 when the war ended. He turned out to be one of the lucky ones.
Three years after the end of the war, Hloba’s personal odyssey – from Soviet Ukraine to Germany to France — had landed him in a displaced persons camp in the U.S. zone of partitioned Germany. He worked as a translator and transport mechanic for the International Refugee Organization (IRO), a UN agency created in 1946 to deal with the massive refugee problems created by World War II. He was alone, having lost contact with family members during the war. Unable to return to the Soviet Union to search for them, he set his sights on emigrating to North America.
Living at the time in Puerto Rico, Grandfather did what he could to help Hloba – having his own father send Hloba second-hand clothes, researching the kinds of documentation a displaced person like Hloba would need to emigrate to the U.S., and providing support in finding a job.
From letters grandfather wrote to Hloba, it’s clear that he felt a debt of gratitude to BUK 102. In April 1948 grandfather wrote to Hloba that he wanted to help him because of “the magnificent job that you and your battalion did for the Allied cause.” A few months later in October 1948, grandfather wrote about BUK 102: “I have never seen a finer fighting unit.”
Letter from Waller Booth Sr. to Lev Hloba in 1949 when Hloba was in a displaced persons camp in Germany. Letter courtesy of Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Center.
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In Germany, Hloba, no doubt trying to establish a work record that would define him as more than a soldier, worked admirably for the IRO. When it came time to get character references for immigration documents, his supervisors hailed him as a model employee. “His devotion to, and performance of, his many duties have been consistently of a high caliber. His loyalty, perseverance and integrity always were above question,” wrote his boss at the Office of Public Information at the International Refugee Organization in 1951. “It was a distinct pleasure to have been associated with him.”
Supported by such testaments, Leon Hloba – after apparently having anglicized his name from Lev to Leon– arrived in Canada in June 1951. He left behind turmoil and destruction that had defined much of his life since his birth into a Ukrainian military family in Holm (spelled Chelm today), Poland, in 1924. There was occupation of his hometown in 1939, first by the Soviet Army and then by the German Army; and then, starting as a teenage graduate of the Kharkov Military Academy, military service in the Soviet, German and, finally, French armed forces from 1941 to 1945. As previously recounted, Hloba’s service may well have included work as a spy for the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. It had been a full life for a man barely entering his third decade.
In Canada Hloba’s work ethic and intellect helped him to start a new life that saw him live until 2012. He had a long and successful career as an award-winning photographer for the Hamilton (Ontario) Spectator. He was considered a pioneer of color photography in Canada and earned renown for building groundbreaking darkroom equipment.
His new life in Canada, far from the battlefields of his youth, must have been like a salve for bitter memories of lost family members, colleagues and his Ukrainian homeland. Over the course of 60 years living in Canada, Hloba rarely talked of his war experiences, according to relatives. (Apparently, he was reunited with a sister in Canada.) Nor did he mention the Croix de Guerre given to him by the French for acts of heroism during combat with the enemy. He locked away the French medal in a safe deposit box for decades.
Major Lev Hloba wearing medals, including the Croix de Guerre
awarded to him by the French Government.
There may be other reasons he declined to speak about the war. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish global human rights organization which researches the Holocaust, BUK 102, when part of 102nd battalion of the 30thWaffen SS Division of the German Armed Forces, was involved in notorious actions taken against Jewish populations.
Hloba’s emigration to Canada meant that he didn’t have to continue to fight to earn his freedom — unlike his BUK 102 subordinates who joined the French Foreign Legion –and he mercifully avoided the Soviet prison system. One account of a BUK 102 soldier named Taraniuk, who may well have fought under Hloba, relates that when he returned to Soviet Ukraine, the certificate of resistance given to him by the French for steadfast duty was confiscated, and he was sentenced to 25 years in prison, most likely in connection with his service in the German armed forces. It’s not clear if Taraniuk was one of the BUK 102 soldiers who voluntarily agreed to return to the Soviet Union.
For BUK 102 members who ended up in the French Foreign Legion, fighting continued as a way of life. But those who served out their contracts with the French Foreign Legion were able to settle in France and live in peace. Their post-war lives in France are a testament to the efforts of grandfather and Walter Kuzmuk to lobby for their freedom in 1944.
Among the BUK 102 soldiers who ended up in France was Vladimir Batchenko, a handle-bar mustachioed Ukrainian who hailed from the Dnipropetrovsk region of Soviet Ukraine. Batchenko joined the Red Army in 1939 at 16 and was captured fighting the Germans in 1941. As a POW, he was forcibly integrated into the 30thWaffen SS Division and placed under Hloba’s command, where in 1944 he participated in the mutiny, the liberation of Confracourt and battles in and around Belfort, France, where he was wounded. Following the war, Batchenko served with the French Foreign Legion in Indochina and Algeria before retiring in 1960. He was known around the French town in Haute-Saone where he settled and eventually married as the “last mujik,” designating his peasant roots and survivalist instinct. A painting made features him in his Red Army military uniform, holding a Soviet submachine gun (contrary to the description below the painting below which states he holding an American-made Thompson sub-machine gun).
La Liberation En Franche-Comte: Agents Secrets & Services Special Dans La Resistance, Volume 1
Unlike Hloba, Batchenko returned to Ukraine to search for his family, including a young daughter he left in the care of his grandmother when he left German-occupied Ukraine in 1943 as a German POW. Decades later when he returned, he found no trace of her.
As for the other members of BUK 102, I hope to do more research on them and, if lucky, trace their descendants up to the present day. My plan is to travel to the French Military Archives outside Paris to review BUK 102’s military journal, which was kept during the period the battalion was in the Haute-Saone region and which should contain more personal information about individual soldiers. Armed with that information, I hope to track down relatives.
And how about the other members of MMP? What happened to them?
Grandfather, like Lev Hloba, was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his work with the French military. After World War II he joined the Army Reserve and moved back to Puerto Rico where he got into business. According to a published book*, he actually was working for the OSS in Puerto Rico both before and after the war. His mission was to keep tabs on the Puerto Rican nationalist movement under the cover of being a businessman. In 1950 he returned to work for the CIA (The OSS became the CIA in 1947.) in hot zones, working with native guerrillas behind enemy lines in North Korea during the Korean War and advising the French in Vietnam who were fighting Ho Chi Minh’s guerillas. He moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina in 1956 and lived there until his death at 82 in 1986.
Michael Burke also continued clandestine work for the CIA, training infiltration teams and working to undermine communist countries in Eastern Europe in the 1950s. But he became more famous as the general manager of Ringling Brothers and Barnum Bailey Circus and president of the New York Yankees baseball team. He eventually retired to Ireland, the land of his forebearers, and passed away in 1987.
Walter Kuzmuk went on to a long career in the CIA, serving three tours in Vietnam working with South Vietnamese forces, helping set up a national police force in the Dominican Republic, and providing Thai forces with parachute training. He died in 2006 and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
After a career in the French military, in which he attained the rank of Colonel, Paul Marchardier lived in southern France. He kept in touch with grandfather and wrote up a citation for grandfather to receive the Chevalier of the Legion of Honor on the 40th anniversary of D-Day.
I have no information about Captain Cornut, the fifth member of the OSS parachute team.
Claude Vougnon lived out the rest of his life in his native Haute-Saone region, the region he fought so bravely to defend in 1944 with his close friend and comrade Simon Doillon. Vougnon raised a family in a town outside Vesoul and on numerous occasions over the decades welcomed grandfather and Booth family relatives to Confracourt for visits . I personally met him in 1981 in Confracourt.
*The book, titled The War Against All Puerto Ricans, written by Nelson A. Denis and published in 2015, makes the claim that grandfather was a James Bond sort of character who set up night clubs in Puerto Rico for intelligence purposes. The author also claims that grandfather was known as “the smoothest and most popular Office of Strategic Services (OSS) agent in Latin American history.” It all seems exaggerated based on the grandfather I knew and have researched.
Jeffrey Lilley Writing 