Armageddon (31 page)

“We have more than two thousand heavy pieces to get over in this sector. If this bridge goes it can delay the entire offensive on Berlin.”

Igor merely shrugged. “Berlin is not going to run away.” Popov’s aide did not fathom Igor Karlovy’s humor. He knew the marshal had his heart set on opening the offensive so Berlin might fall by May Day.

The entourage followed Colonel Karlovy downstream. He consulted with two other engineers and decided upon the best place to erect temporary crossings.

“The main highway will have to be diverted so there must be a rampway built to get the mobile equipment down the bank. I suggest cutting some of these lovely German trees and constructing a log road. Now, if Marshal Popov will assign a regiment of men for labor I think we can have a crossing by tomorrow morning.”

“No sooner?”

“Certainly not.”

The aide stomped off to get the labor. Igor drew up hasty plans for building of a crossing. Captain Ivan Orlov pushed into the circle and drew the colonel out. He pointed to his watch excitedly. “Commissar Azov is waiting for us at Eberswalde.”

Captain Orlov obviously dropped Azov’s name for the colonel knew V. V. Azov was more powerful than Popov himself. Ivan Orlov, the party man assigned to watch the engineers, was apt to panic at the thought of being late to see the commissar.

“Drive across the bridge before it collapses and wait until I get things set up. If the bridge goes down, I’ll swim over to you as quickly as I can ... now, please ...”

Captain Ivan Orlov went off to the Mercedes staff car they had commandeered from a German general in Warsaw. He blew the horn with jerky violence and swung the vehicle between a pair of gargantuan SU-100 tanks rumbling over the trembling bridge.

Toward midday a human blanket of labor swarmed over the area. The masses of men and women had stripped a small forest, hand-carried in tons of fill dirt, and laid a rampway to the water’s edge. Others working in the swift stream had started the temporary bridge. Satisfied that the bridge would be built in less time than he predicted, Igor turned the job over to the subordinate engineers.

Captain Ivan Orlov was near frantic by the delay. He sped the car toward Eberswalde, zigzagging between the endless lines of tanks, guns, gondola wagons, horsemen, blowing the horn incessantly, sending foot troops scurrying into the ditches. He jabbered without respite. Igor tried to ignore him. What a magnificent sight, this great great mass of men and guns. Soon the five horrible years would be over. They were at the gates of Berlin ... Russians ... Ukrainians ... squat Asians from Mongol and Tartar lands ... dark-eyed Armenians and Georgians.

Igor was disturbed by gossip in the high command that Stalin preferred a street fight for Berlin rather than allow Nazi surrender. It would be a pretext to take Berlin apart street by street, house by house. What a shame to lose many thousands of young men in this last hour of war.

Igor rolled up his overcoat, made a pillow of it, and pretended to doze in order to shut off Ivan Orlov’s chatter. An intersection clogged with wagons brought them to a halt. A large-busted woman in military-police uniform answered Orlov’s long, undinted horn blast.

“Out of the way, damn you, clear that road!”

“What is your great hurry, comrade?” the woman soldier demanded.

“We have a meeting with a commissar.”

“Excuse me, comrade. Clear the way! Let them through!”

The People’s Military and Civil Governing Group was temporarily established in the boys’ gymnasium in the town of Eberswalde, some fifty kilometers north of Berlin, where they awaited the fall of the capital. White flags of surrender hanging from the town’s windows clashed with the red flags atop the schoolhouse.

Captain Ivan Orlov, now an hour late, leaped from the Mercedes. He quickly identified himself to two blue-capped guards from political security and trotted down the main corridor, which still held a portrait of Adolf Hitler.

Igor was met at the door by his two junior officers, Captain Boris Chernov and young Lieutenant Feodor Guchkov. They had not seen the colonel for several days. There were embraces and backslaps.

“Have you heard, Igor? Popov’s White Russian Front has approached the eastern and southern suburbs of Berlin!”

“And the Ukrainian Front is pouring in from the north!” Feodor added. “We have them in a pincers.”

“It’s official. We have joined hands with the Americans at the Elbe River!”

“Magnificent!” Igor Karlovy roared, “but for now I’d better get in to see Comrade Azov.”

“We’ll wait here,” Feodor said. “Tonight the bombardment of Berlin begins in earnest. I know a place up near the front lines where we can watch it.”

“Bring the vodka,” Igor said, and asked for directions to V. V. Azov’s office. He stopped for a moment to look into the auditorium. The Agitation and Propaganda Corps were hard at it: stacks of broadsheets holding portraits of Stalin, Lenin, Marx, Engels; stacks of leaflets; long strips of red lettering on white cloth carrying slogans would come in on the heels of the last shot.

V. V. Azov sat deadpanned behind his desk. Ivan Orlov was nervously repeating an apology of why they were late. “Marshal Popov personally asked Colonel Karlovy to look after the bridge.”

Azov silenced the captain by holding up his hand without indication of belief or disbelief. He seemed remote from the elation of the great turn of events. One almost never saw a smile, a frown, or any of those indications attributed to human reactions. He greeted Igor Karlovy matter-of-factly. His thick black hair was in place and his huge moustache was combed and carefully turned. The simple tunic was opened at the throat. Behind his dull gray eyes was a brain trained to receive and disseminate information without emotion.

“I heard the news of our joining with the Americans!” Igor said. “It’s marvelous!”

Azov opened his mouth slowly, began to speak with automation in expressionless tones. “We can well understand the elation of the moment. However, Comrade Colonel, we are not to lose sight of the fact that the American participation in this war has been a minor factor.”

From a long-standing dealing with commissars, Igor knew how to interpret Azov’s pronouncement. For several months now the Russian people had been indoctrinated to the effect that the winning of the war was a singular Russian effort. Hearing it from Azov’s lips, Igor knew, was a voicing of official policy. It was for damned sure, Igor knew, that the Agitation and Propaganda people were preparing literature to downgrade the American participation.

“Of greater importance,” Azov continued, “is that you and our comrades on the German People’s Liberation Committee draw up the final plans for the dismemberment of Berlin’s industrial complex as the first installment for war reparations.”

“It shall be done, Comrade Commissar,” Igor Karlovy answered.

Having run out of patience with the German People’s Liberation Committee, Igor left Captain Ivan Orlov to quibble with them and sought out Boris Chernov and Feodor Guchkov. The three of them left Eberswalde in the direction of the front lines with two loaves of bread, five bottles of vodka, an accordion, a mandolin, and a balalaika. Young Feodor uncorked the first bottle and broke into song. Boris drove the battered car off to a side road filled with chuck holes. They banged their way uphill, then cut diagonally over a farmer’s field to a small bluff, parked, and walked to the edge. An awesome vista unfolded below them. Thousands of individual guns of light-artillery brigades, heavy artillery, rocket-launcher regiments, and self-propelled guns were aligned wheel to wheel as far as the eye could see in either direction.

This called for a second bottle of vodka. The three men squatted on a mound of boulders eating the bread and a portion of rice from their kits, washing it down with the Polish vodka.

Igor put the field glasses to his eyes. In front of the rows of cannons, divisions of tanks were deployed and ready. What seemed to be a million infantry and horsemen swarmed through the forests, on the roads, through the fields toward the hazy outlines of the northern suburbs of Berlin.

One by one, fire control up forward called for the artillery to shoot test rounds. Forward observation posts called for necessary adjustments. With the coming of darkness the tempo increased until every firing piece in the line began to rain steel into Berlin in the most concentrated artillery saturation of a single target in the history of warfare. The guns recoiled angrily, launchers hissed their rockets away in a deadly arch, and black smoke erupted on the horizon from tortured Berlin. The guns leaped back a dozen at a time making the earth shake violently and the sky was lit with ten thousand flashes of lightning from the muzzles and the roar became horrendous. A hot wind blew up to the knoll from the unnatural agitation, bringing to their nostrils the smell of burned gunpowder.

Igor Karlovy and his two officers were becoming numbed by the fury and the vodka. Boris Chernov shook his fist toward Berlin and cursed and Feodor cheered and screamed encouragement.

“Kill the Nazi bastards!”

The barrage reached a new savagery. Igor Karlovy stood still as a statue. The light flashes reflected in his eyes and brought to him the memory of other fires....

Igor Karlovy was in Leningrad in his memory and he stood on the Sovietsky Prospekt staring over the frozen Neva River. Then it was German and Finnish guns pouring it on Leningrad and the fires were all around him. He saw Children’s Home #25 crumple under a direct hit! He ran toward it. The screams of agony reached his ears. The children had been caught unawares.

DEATH TO THE NAZI BABY MURDERERS!
An enormous sign hung over the entrance of Factory #67. Above the sign, a portrait of a woman worker holding a mutilated infant in her arms. All over Leningrad signs and slogans snarled at the Nazi tormentors, and other signs and slogans exhorted the workers and soldiers to put up superhuman efforts.

“Look, Colonel, look!” Feodor cried, throwing his arms about Igor. His drunken tongue wagged freely. “Look at the fires in Berlin! Kill the bastards!”

How long! How very long had Igor Karlovy waited to see this glorious moment. Berlin burning! Berlin in mortal pain! How many times did he believe it would never come. All of those terrible days gone by are memory now ... all thirty months of the siege....

“Death to the Nazi bastards! Rapers of our motherland!”

When Igor Karlovy was transferred to Leningrad in 1941 it was a confused and frightened city. There was terrible shock among the people with the realization that the Red Army was vulnerable.

The first weeks of the campaign against the Finns had ended in disaster. The Finns, dressed in white, skiing as ghosts in the snow, and using their forests for cover, butchered the onrushing Reds. Here, the Russian steam-roller tactics did not work. Until the Russians learned to fight the Finnish way, they were slaughtered by an enemy a fiftieth their size.

There was Soviet indignation against the Americans, who overtly took the side of the Finns just because a few dollars had been paid yearly on an old war debt. The Americans didn’t understand that Finland had military positions on the Karelian Isthmus at Leningrad’s throat, and that the Finnish dictator, Mannerheim, had been sleeping with the German staff. For the Soviet Union not to challenge these Finnish positions would have been to court suicide.

Just as the Finnish campaign ended, Igor Karlovy went to Leningrad. The city had a meaning, like Moscow itself. Not only was it a great Soviet cultural center and seaport, but the cradle of the October Revolution. With the Soviet Armed Forces reorganizing, it was a time and a place for a young officer to make his name.

The sneak attack by Germany against the Soviet Union came in June of 1941. By September, thirty German divisions and the revenge-seeking Finnish Army were pressing on Leningrad.

The masses of the city were confused and angry! Never before had the leaders heard so much open bitterness against the regime. The masses cried “betrayal.” They had been duped into thinking the Red Army was invincible and further betrayed because Leningrad was literally defenseless and without stores.

Then passivity overcame them. It was not that they welcomed the Germans, for they knew they would be dealt with harshly, but that, with great relief, they knew the Communists would soon flee.

The panicked Communist leaders were packed and ready to go when ordered by Stalin to stay, and Leningrad was commanded to hold no matter what the cost.

A million workers from factories and schools and the Army went out to build a great belt of defenses against the approaching Nazi armies.

Yes, it was a time a young Red Air Force engineer could make a name. Although primarily concerned with runways, air traffic, and air installations, the needs of the day took him into other fields of engineering. Igor Karlovy demonstrated a type of initiative and inventiveness desperately needed in the construction of defenses. It was he who conceived a plan to dismantle the unfinished stadium and use the thousands of concrete slabs on the perimeters.

By the time the Red Army had fallen back into Leningrad, the Russian people had come to learn that the German was no liberator. Driven by sheer fear, tens of thousands of men and women formed into defense battalions and manned the parapets.

Within sight, feel, and smell of Leningrad, Hitler went against the advice of his generals and ruled against a street fight. With the Finns as an ally, Germany set siege to the city. Hitler was certain the siege would break the Russians just as demoralization, bombardment, and starvation had worked in Warsaw and other unfortunate cities of Europe. Hitler felt the Russians were subhumans so the will to resist would quickly be crushed from them. One of the monumental sieges of all time had begun.

The Red Army artillery continued the bashing of Berlin in unabated fury into the night. Young Feodor was passed out drunk. Boris Chernov slept in the back seat of the car. Igor Karlovy alone retained the watch, for he was sober and the pain of memory now stuck sharply.

He recalled the unmerciful agony of the winter of 1941. Leningrad was cut off from Russia except for a single passage over Lake Ladoga at their backs. There were not enough ships on the lake to either evacuate the old and young or to bring in sufficient fuel, food, and ammunition, and they were forced to cross under the guns of the enemy. The Communist leaders, harangued from Moscow, in turn harangued the masses.