Hitler's War (60 page)

Superior Private Shinjiro Hayashi said, “Please excuse me, Sergeant-
san
, but do our superiors believe the Russians
don’t
know we’re preparing an attack?” His education didn’t keep him from seeing what also looked all too obvious to Fujita.

“If you think our superiors tell me what they believe, Hayashi, you’re dumber than I give you credit for, and that isn’t easy,” Fujita snapped. He quashed the university student without showing how worried he was himself. He hoped he didn’t show it, anyhow. If Hayashi had suspicions, he also had the common sense to keep quiet about them.

The Japanese got a start hour—0530 on 1 April 1939. The last couple of days dragged along. Everybody got ready and did his best to make sure the Red Army went on thinking everything was normal…if that was what the Red Army thought.

“When we detach Vladivostok from the Communists, the Emperor
will be proud of us,” Lieutenant Hanafusa told his platoon as they waited for the barrage to begin. Sergeant Fujita imagined marching into Vladivostok. He imagined the Emperor pinning a medal on him with his own divine hand. He imagined his heart bursting in his chest from pride.

The shelling opened right on time. The noise was titanic. The Kwantung Army was firing everything it had, and firing as fast as it could—so it seemed to Fujita, anyhow.

Hanafusa’s whistle shrilled. “Let’s go!” he said. They raced out of the dugouts and ran for the boats waiting on the river. As soon as they got in, got over, and got out, they could start fighting a more ordinary kind of war.

Russian shells were already dropping on the Japanese side of the Ussuri. The barrage hadn’t stunned all the Reds, then. Too bad, even if Fujita hadn’t really believed it would. The Russians were just too good at covering up and digging in. Well, no help for it. He jumped into his assigned boat. The whole squad made it in. He cut the rope that tied the boat to the riverbank. “Come on!” he yelled, and started paddling like a man possessed. The rest of the soldiers paddled with him.

He didn’t want to go into the river. With the heavy pack on his back, he’d sink like a stone. And the water that splashed up onto him said it was bitterly cold even now. Russian machine guns on the far bank yammered out death. Tracers snarled past the boat. Bullets kicked up rows of splashes in the stream. One holed the boat, miraculously without hitting anybody. Water jetted in.

“Stuff something into that!” Fujita shouted to the closest soldier. The man did. Fujita didn’t see what. He didn’t care. As long as the leak slowed, nobody would.

Mud grated under the boat’s keel. The Japanese soldiers jumped out. They ran toward the closest machine-gun nest. The sooner they knocked out those deadly toys, the longer they were likely to live. One of
them exploded into red mist fifty meters from the enemy strongpoint. “Mines!” everybody else yelled. Fujita wanted to run very fast and to stand very still, both at the same time. He might have guessed the Russians would use mines to protect their positions, but he didn’t have to like it.

A couple of more men went down before the Japanese chucked grenades into the dugout through the firing slit. Even that didn’t do for all the Russians. One fellow staggered out all bloody, his uniform shredded. He raised his hands over his head.
“Tovarishchi!”
he choked out. Fujita had heard that in Mongolia.
Comrades!
, it meant.

He shot the Russian in the face. “You can’t shoot at us and then quit, bastard,” he said. From everything he’d heard, machine gunners everywhere had a hard time giving up. And he might even have done the Russian a favor. He was inclined to think so. What greater disgrace than surrender was there?

Japanese soldiers stormed into the woods. They soon discovered their artillery hadn’t done everything it might have. The Russians had more machine guns farther back from the Ussuri. They had snipers in camouflage smocks high up in the trees. They’d hidden more mines to slow and to channel the Japanese advance. And they had riflemen waiting in rear-facing foxholes invisible from the front, men who stayed quiet till the Japanese went by and then shot them in the back. Those fellows had as much trouble surrendering as machine gunners did.

Airplanes dueled overhead. In among the trees, Fujita couldn’t see how the aerial combat went. When bombs fell on the Red Army positions ahead, he felt like cheering. When explosions came too close to his own men, he swore. He thought the Russians were taking more punishment than they were giving out, but he wasn’t sure. Maybe he was just rooting for his own team.

Halfway through that mad afternoon, a runner told him, “You’re in command of the platoon.”

“Huh?” he said. “What happened to Lieutenant Hanafusa?”

“He caught two in the chest,” the other soldier answered. “Maybe he’ll make it, but…” A shrug said the odds were bad.

Fujita sure wouldn’t have wanted to catch two in the chest, or even one in the toe. But if the platoon was his—at least till another officer showed up—he had to do his best with it. They were still at least a kilometer from the day’s planned stop line. He needed to find out what was up with the other squads, too. “Forward!” he called. That was never wrong.

“M.
oscow speaking,” the radio announced. It was 060 0. Sergei Yaroslavsky drank a glass of sugared tea, hot from the samovar. Pilots and navigators jammed the ready room at the Byelorussian airstrip. A Stuka could have taken out the whole squadron with a well-aimed bomb. The Nazis were sleeping late—or later, anyhow. The Soviet flyers hungered for news, not least because it might tell them what they would be doing next.

Smoke from almost as many
papirosi
as there were Red Air Force officers in the ready room blued the air. Somebody got up and made the radio louder. When he sat down, someone else patted him on the back, as if to say
Good job!
Yes, they were all jumpy this early morning.

“Comrades! Soviet citizens! Our motherland has been invaded!” the news reader said solemnly. “Without provocation, without warning, the Empire of Japan has launched a multipronged attack against the Siberian districts of the Russian Federated Soviet Socialist Republic of the peace-loving USSR. Severe fighting is reported in several areas. All
drives against the Trans-Siberian Railroad have already been blunted or soon will be—so Red Army commanders in the field have assured General Secretary Stalin. Under his leadership, victory of the Soviet workers and peasants is assured.”

Sergei nodded. So did almost everybody else in the ready room. Some officers, he was sure, had no doubts that what was coming out of the radio was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And if you
did
have doubts, looking as if you didn’t was even more important. People couldn’t suspect what they didn’t see.

The announcer went on and on about towns bombed from the air, atrocities on the ground, and numbers of Japanese soldiers killed. Except for civilians, he said not a word about Soviet casualties. There must have been some; chances were they were heavy. Sergei was sure he wasn’t the only one to notice the omission. Notice or not, the Red Air Force officers went right on nodding.

“Foreign Commissar Litvinov has pledged that this war against the Japanese will have a result different from that of the Tsar’s corrupt regime in 1905,” the newsreader finished. Sergei cheered and clapped his hands. So did everyone else. Nobody could be proud of Russia’s performance in the Russo-Japanese War.

After a pause, the announcer talked about fighting in the Soviet west. “The
rasputitsa
has made movement difficult for both sides,” he admitted. That wasn’t the smallest understatement Sergei had ever heard. Eastern Poland and western Byelorussia were somewhere between swamp and bog. The Germans still occasionally flew off paved runways. The Red Air Force was grounded.

“In western Europe, the fighting in France has reached what the Germans call a decisive phase,” the fellow went on. “The French government denies German claims that there is fighting inside the Paris city limits. The French and English admit heavy fighting continues east and northeast and even north of the French capital. They state
they still hope to halt and eventually repel the latest German thrust, however.”

He spoke with an air of prissy disapproval, like an important man’s plump wife talking about the facts of life. As far as the USSR was concerned, the imperialists were hardly better than the Fascists. But the Soviet Union and England and France had the same enemies at the moment. Expedience could trump ideology.

And, sure enough, the newsreader sounded a little warmer when he said, “British and French bombing of German territory seems to be picking up—judging, at least, by the outraged bleats emanating from
Hen
Goebbels. If one listens to the Germans, their opponents take care to bomb only schoolhouses, orphanages, and hospitals.”

Sergei chuckled. Then he wondered why he was laughing. Yes, German propaganda was pretty ham-fisted. But wasn’t what poured out of Soviet radios just as clumsy?

That was something a good Soviet citizen wasn’t supposed to notice. After all, didn’t
Pravda
mean
Truth?
Maybe only someone who was serving in the military—maybe only someone serving in the military who’d spent some time in a foreign country—would notice the discrepancies. Once you spotted a few lies, though, you started wondering what else you heard was malarkey.

Across the table, Anastas Mouradian sat there smoking
papirosi
one after another. Did irony fill his liquid black eyes, or was that only Sergei’s imagination? Anastas was going to get in trouble one of these days. Anybody who looked ironic in the middle of the morning news was bound to get noticed. The only surprise was, it had already taken this long.

When the announcer shifted to increased production and overfulfillment of the Five-Year Plan’s norms, the officers started to relax. This was only fluff; they’d already got the meat from the news. If you were careful, you could smile about this stuff without risking too much.

At last, music replaced the news. “Two fronts,” remarked the flyer from Siberia, the guy who came from a thousand kilometers north of Irkutsk and laughed at the cold weather here. Quickly, Bogdan Koroteyev added, “It’s not what we wanted, of course, but it’s what we’ve got.”

“We’ll win anyhow,” Anastas Mouradian said. Sergei nodded vigorously. He grinned at his crewmate. That was how you were supposed to talk! He had his doubts whether Anastas meant it, but what did that have to do with anything? The picture you showed the outside world was more important (to your survival, anyhow) than whatever you carried deep inside your heart.

“You’d better believe we will,” Lieutenant Colonel Borisov boomed. “We can whip the little yellow monkeys with one hand tied behind our back, and as soon as things are dry here we’ll show the Nazis and Poles what we can do.”

No one argued with the squadron commander. For one thing, he
was
the squadron commander. For another, what he said was bound to be the Party line. Russia hadn’t beaten the Japanese the last time around, but it was easy to blame that on Tsarist corruption, as the radio announcer had. The Red Army
had
performed well in recent border clashes.

Well, it had if you believed the news. Sergei wished he hadn’t started wondering about what he heard on the radio and read in the papers. It made him wonder about everything. Oh, well. What could you do? Doubting the official stories might give you a better notion of what was really going on. What was the phrase in the Bible? You saw through a glass, darkly—that was it. In the USSR, that was likely to be your closest approach to truth.

No enemy planes came overhead. If German or Polish bombers had taken off from paved runways, they were harassing other Soviet fields. And the SB-2s here couldn’t fly even if the pilots wanted to. As
with the winter blizzards, the flyers had nothing to do but sit around and wait.

Somebody pulled out a bottle of vodka. It was early to start drinking. Sergei thought so, anyhow. By the way Bogdan Koroteyev tilted back the bottle, he started at this heathen hour all the time—or maybe he hadn’t stopped from the night before. Sergei took a swig, too, when the bottle came his way. Why not? You didn’t want to look like a wet blanket or anything.

NEWSBOYS HAWKED THE
VÖLKISCHER BEOBACHTER
on every street corner in Berlin. “Decisive battle in France!” they yelled.
DECISIVE BATTLE IN FRANCE!
the newspaper headline shouted in what had to be 144-point type. The photo under the headline showed three
Wehrmacht
men, rifles in hand, leaping over some obstacle in unison. Except for the weapons and helmets, they might have been Olympic hurdlers.
NOTHING CAN STOP OUR INFANTRY!
the subhead boasted.

“Paper, lady?” asked a towheaded kid of about fourteen. If the war lasted long enough, he’d put on the same uniform the soldiers on the front page were wearing.

See how you like it then, you little son of a bitch
, Peggy Druce thought. Aloud, all she said was,
“Nein, danke.”
In another block or two, she knew she’d have to do it again.