In March 1944, one month after the conclusion of the Yalta Conference, one month and the arrest of Red Army member Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (for writing a joke about Stalin), HMS Arawa (above) carried 1,657 Turkoman Muslims, Soviet citizens, back to the Soviet Union to the Gulag and/or certain death. These men, most of whom had volunteered for the German army to fight Communist rule, were among the millions of Soviet-claimed nationals who would be returned at Stalin's to the Gulag and/or certain death by British and American forces in "Operation Keelhaul."

They and their multiethnic brothers-in-German-arms from the USSR were “a constant reminder,” Nikolai Tolstoy writes, “of the fact that the USSR alone of all the Allies had provided the enemy with thousands of recruits." 

John Batchelor and I discuss the voyage of the Arawa and other vignettes from American Betrayal here (begins at minute 19:00).