by Sven Hassel
An NKVD sergeant stands to attention and salutes Vasilij, who is marching on the flank with his kalashnikov regimentally slanted across his chest.
A white finger of light from one of the watch towers falls across us for a moment.
‘Arseholes tight, boys,’ whispers Porta. ‘I can’t stand the smell of shit!’
A column passes us. The lieutenant in charge gives Vasilij a comradely slap on the back. They both laugh loudly.
Vasilij rejoins us a little later.
‘Him lieutenant much glad. Catch big group Brandenburg commando today. Now they fetch tools grind bollocks off so they tell secret Hitler things! Him lieutenant say me come with. See prisoners make funny faces! No time, say Vasilij, big important job on. That no lie!’
On a large open square at least 500 brand-new T-34’s stand ready for the front.
‘What about organizing a couple of chariots, so we can roll home first-class?’ suggests Porta.
‘Not a bad idea,’ answers the Old Man in a low voice. ‘See if they’re armed and munitioned?’
Porta is up in the nearest tank quick as a weasel, whips the hatch off, lays his Mpi aside on the shielding, and is down the hatch in a flash.
Tiny lets his hand run gently over the broad tracks.
‘Jesus, boys, what a vehicle! If we’d only ’ad a coupla thousand of them! What a battlewaggon! See ’er slippers! An’ ’er lovely round arsepart. Just like an expensive French ‘ore!’
‘With these T-34’s Ivan’s going to win his war,’ says Stege decidedly.
‘Victory doubter,’ fizzes Heide appalled. ‘I intend to make a Duty Report to the NSFO. Comparing German weapons unfavourably to those of the enemy is high treason. It’ll cost you your head.’
‘Cut it out, Julius,’ whispers Tiny, ‘or maybe I’ll just ’and you over to the NKVD for special treatment!’
‘They’ll experiment on him and mash him together with an incorrigible Commie. They’ll get a whole new Party out of it,’ grins Barcelona, pleased at the fantastic thought.
‘Him Julius crazy in turnip,’ states Vasilij. ‘Him no understand shit! This way all political idiot. Them think them only one think right think!’
‘Not enough in there to fill the hole in a frog’s arse,’ reports Porta, twisting up out the hatch. ‘Not even gas. Julius’ll have to push us home!’
The whole section grins at the thought.
‘Your lot seems nervous,’ the Brandenburger Feldwebel turns viciously on the Old Man. ‘Reckon I’d as soon do this job alone.’
‘Hear, hear!’ comes from Porta. ‘Let’s go!’
‘Shut it! Let’s get on with it,’ snarls the Old Man. ‘Twenty minutes from now you’re all outside the gates! You know the fuse length of these pencils. The first’ll go off in half an hour. Get your fingers out, and move! If we’re lucky there’ll be a bang they can hear in Berlin!’
‘What about layin’ a chunk o’ marzipan under this lot?’ asks Tiny. ‘Then we won’t meet them at the front, anyrate!’
‘No,’ answers the Old Man. ‘Can’t afford it. We’d have to fix marzipan on the tracks. Blowing the coffins themselves is no good.’
We move about amongst busy NKVD men and workers. The factory seems to be in wild confusion.
A worker says something to us.
‘Job tvojemadj!’ answers Porta rebuffingly, and the worker hurries on.
I am sweating so much with fear that my clothes stick to my body.
Porta walks quietly into a large power station. An NKVD corporal looks after him curiously. I ready my Mpi and keep an eye on the guard. Even if I have to shoot it won’t be heard in the thunder of the machinery. The noise is so violent it makes your head throb with pain. It is unbelievable people can work here day and night without going mad.
Porta comes out of the power station wiping his hands professionally on a piece of waste. He wads it and throws it at the NKVD corporal, with a big grin. The corporal catches it and throws it back. They play at this for a few minutes. I almost scream with nervousness. Porta must be crazy.
I don’t know whether I ought to salute the corporal or not. They should have given us a better briefing on Red Army service regulations. I decide to salute in a semi-friendly way. I can’t believe he’ll bother to book me if I’m wrong so better a casually cheeky salute than none at all. Corporals, no matter the uniform, are always touchy about salutes.
He stares at me for a moment and makes a step forward, stops, nods condescendingly and waves me away. I smile a friendly smile to him but his face remains frozen. An NKVD corporal doesn’t smile to a private soldier.
We walk on through the factory as if we owned it. Porta stops and points upwards.
I look up and move quickly to one side. A giant crane is dropping a complete T-34 down on to my head.
A long row of railway wagons is shunted out of the factory. Each wagon carries a T-34. Wet paint gleams in the arcs.
Headquarters should see this, I think to myself. Then maybe they’d realize the Red Army wasn’t beaten yet by a long way. In the Zim factory alone there are enough tanks to equip five divisions. When they begin to roll then God help the Wehrmacht.
Quickly we jump onto a wagon going to Shop 9. One of my sacks of marzipan begins to slip. A passing worker pushes it back under my arm with a friendly smile. I get a firmer grip on it.
We drop off just before we get to Shop 9. The stillness outside the shops feels like a punch in the solar plexus.
In the Gun Shop, where tank turrets lie in stacks, the noise is deafening. Even a gun-shot would be drowned in it.
Porta is well in front of me, talking and gesticulating with two workpeople. It’s impossible to hear what he’s saying. Every word is drowned in the noise of the machines. We understand quite a lot of Russian but not enough to manage a conversation.
An electric locomotive shunts railway wagons into the workshop. Firemen with brass helmets run past pulling hand-drawn fire pumps after them.
A railwayman shoves me irritably and shouts something or other. ‘Job tvojemadj!’ I scream in his ear.
He shakes his fist at me. I point my kalashnikov at him. He immediately becomes friendly and apologetic. An NKVD man with a kalashnikov is always in the right.
The flats slacken speed and I duck under them. Porta is pushing a stick of marzipan under a steel-converter from which there comes a thunderous bubbling of molten metal.
A red warning lamp winks, up under the ceiling. What does it mean? Do they know we’re here?
A squad of NKVD soldiers hastens across the shop floor and out through a small door.
Porta leads a couple of wires into a fuse-box. My job is to cover him. I’ve removed the blue caps from the grenades, ready for use. Cheekily he cadges a cigarette from a worker who has just finished rolling it in a little machine.
The man grins and gives him a light. Porta offers him a cheroot.
‘Germanskij ssigara! he roars.
‘Spasibo,’24 the worker howls back, lighting up and drawing the smoke deeply into his lungs.
In Russia a steelworker like him doesn’t get many luxuries. I feel almost like warning him to get out before the explosion. Why couldn’t they have sent us to the Kremlin instead. There’d have been some sense in that!
A new NKVD squad goes by at the double going in the opposite direction to the previous one. They look excited. Have they caught any of us?
A sergeant stops and waves at us.
Porta makes a Russian gesture which is the equivalent of ‘Job tvojemadj!’
The sergeant hurries on. When a Russian doesn’t obey an order he must be covered by another order. Every Russian in uniform knows that.
A line of T-34s move out of the shop on their own tracks. We catch the tow hooks and pull ourselves up by the infantry grip. At the doors NKVD men shout at us and threaten us with their machine-guns. We wave them off with the casual Russian gesture you use when you’ve got authority behind you.
Two NKVD people tr
y to mount the tank we are on, but the T-34 increases speed and doesn’t stop until we reach a side road. A colonel goes down the column counting the tanks. We disappear quickly down a narrow passage which leads us to a large open square.
Porta sits down on a gun carriage and lights a cigarette.
‘I think things are getting dangerous,’ he says, with a forced smile.
‘In three minutes time the first caps’ll blow and the whole bloody knocker’ll crack open.’
‘Got your shit in place?’ asks the Old Man, coming over to us from the armaments shop.
‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ grins Porta. ‘Hold onto your pants, Dad, or you’ll get blown clean out of ’em.’
‘Let’s get out of here,’ snarls the Old Man. ‘It’s getting too warm.’
We jump a passing wagon train and roll out of the great factory. By the ruined flak-tower we drop off. Some of the others are already there.
Tiny shows us a cap with the green NKVD star and a colonel’s gold braid on it.
‘This’ll fetch a packet on the Reeperbahn,’ he says happily. ‘Eighteen gold teeth, too. The last six I ’ad to smash ’is face in to get!’
‘You push deep in snow hole,’ says Vasilij, with an Asiatic grin. ‘Vasilij set bomb. Chemical grenade. Hold tight to snow. You no want fly Hong Kong, get eat for German puppy-dog in “Little Hen”.’ A siren sounds alarmingly and NKVD troops swarm suddenly onto the thick walls above our heads.
‘Stoi koi,’25 comes confusedly from the factory streets.
‘What the devil are they up to, now?’ enquires Porta fearfully, looking up at the high wall.
‘Got all yours?’ the Old Man asks the Brandenburger Feldwebel.
‘Any of you shit missing?’ snarls the Feldwebel to his men.
‘All here,’ comes the reply after a quick count.
‘Mon Dieu, something must have happened to make them sound the alarm,’ says the Legionnaire, nervously.
Shots crash suddenly from the walls. Violent explosions can be heard from the town.
The firing increases. The night is ripped open by an intense, crackling sheet of fire.
‘To the river!’ screams Barcelona, excitedly.
‘Njet, njet!’ shouts Vasilij, warningly. ‘Back railway. Shitty NKVD all run river! Hell much danger meet there! NKVD much annoyed now!’
A flare bursts over our heads and illuminates the scene with a ghastly blue-white light.
Porta drops into a deep bomb crater.
‘Lie still!’ he whispers warningly to me. ‘Don’t move!’ The flare seems to last for ever. I get cramp in one leg, but daren’t move. Finally it dies. I dig myself down into the snow with both hands and feet. A Brandenburg Obergefreiter rolls panting down to us. His face has been slashed open showing his teeth in an unnatural grin.
‘Why did you volunteer for the Crazy Club?’ asks Porta, giving him a suck at a grifa.
‘We were told to,’ answers the Obergefreiter. ‘It was in Poland. We were only a battalion then.’
‘We’re always “told” to do everything,’ sighs Porta tiredly. The whole of the western sky flames a blinding yellow-red. A long thunderous roar, followed by a colossal blast of air, rolls over us, blankets us! Three more explosions follow in quick succession. Then comes a wave of heat like a breath from hell’s ovens. Then all is quiet. A whole row of searchlights go up on the walls.
Countless beams wander nervously over the terrain. An LMG hammers long bursts towards the big sewer where the Old Man wouldn’t let us take cover.
An automatic cannon starts up, spitting tracer shells over towards the hospital. They have obviously no idea of where we are.
‘Two minutes!’ whispers the Old Man. ‘Get your hands down! It’ll be like a volcano erupting!’
The Brandenburger Feldwebel scratches himself nervously under the arm.
A long string of orders can be heard through the firing. Vasilij listens in a half-crouching position.
‘NKVD no shoot more! Saboteur pigs caught! Better we go dam quick! NKVD much annoyed now! More annoyed when we blow factory!’
‘Stay down!’ snarls the Old Man furiously. ‘Don’t move!’
A new order comes from the tower.
‘Him commander say, they no shoot more, go get crazy dam Nazis, shave balls off slow,’ translates Vasilij, casually.
A squad of NKVD soldiers doubles out of the gates. Only a few of the guard have emerged when the blow comes. A hollow long drawn-out explosion sounds inside the factory and suddenly the night is light as day. A blinding fountain of flames flashes up towards the sky. For a fraction of a second we see the NKVD soldiers silhouetted against a fantastic blue backdrop. Then they’re gone but only to appear again against the background of an even greater white glare. All other sounds are drowned in a long series of thundering explosions. A giant hand seems to lift the ground and a rose-red mushroom cloud roils up and spreads out above the factory. In only seconds everything is changed. We are thrown through the air like leaves and whirled down the slopes leading to the Moscow river. None of us can grasp what is happening. Sobbing, deafened, blinded and with blood streaming down our faces we slowly find one another again.
The first I see is Tiny. He is digging the Old Man out of a giant snowdrift. At first we think the Old Man is dead, but, thank God, he is only knocked-out.
‘Some bang!’ gasps Porta, crawling out of a deep hole. A shell splinter has cut a permanent parting straight across his thick red hair.
Tiny nearly goes mad when he finds a hole in his water bottle. All the vodka has run out.
Down by the river, and over by the hospital, we find most of ours, but eight Brandenburgers are missing. We find one of them smashed to pieces under an ice-floe. Gerhard, one of ours, a farmer from Friesland, who’d been promised leave when we got back, has disappeared completely. Caught in the final blast wave, probably. All that’s left of the Zim factory is a black smoke-cloud rising, thick and choking, from a jumble of concrete blocks and twisted girders. The torpedo factory across the street is a volcano of flame. The snow around us begins to melt, and water floods down from the heights. The heat is almost insupportable. The whole top floor of the hospital has been shorn away as if by a giant knife. The railway station is gone and a telegraph pole has driven through the roof of the ferry-house and down into the ground like a giant spear. We can see no people. They must have been pulverized. Our marzipan has started a terrible chain of explosions. The action has been more effective than could ever have been imagined.
‘What in the world happened?’ asks the Old Man quietly.
‘Merde alors! We must have set off some ammunition stores,’ guesses the Legionnaire. ‘But there must have been highly inflammable material there as well. That chalky-white fire on the other side of the river looks like phosphorous.’
‘Poor bastards,’ says Barcelona. ‘I’m sorry for them. They never wanted this lousy war any more than we did.’
‘We bang factory good!’ says Vasilij, with a soft chuckling laugh. ‘Me see inside. All kaput! Shitty T-34 gone. Railway gone. Biggest boom Vasilij ever hear in life! Get maybe big Order for big boom!’
‘Order, mon camarade!’ snarls the Legionnaire. ‘I’ll be more than happy to get back alive! Let’s get moving! They know we can’t be far away.’
‘Bye-bye, chums!’ shouts Porta. ‘Must rush!’ He’s already on his way in a cloud of snow.
As we cut across the Danilovskaya Quay, air raid sirens begin to howl. Hundreds of searchlights rake the sky, and anti-aircraft guns begin to bark viciously.
‘Crazy Commie think we air-raid,’ grins Vasilij unworried. ‘Best for shitty NKVD it not Brandenburger make big boom! Natschaljniks26 in Kremlin annoyed with crazy NKVD, they let factory go boom under nose! Hard find good excuse save turnip!’
‘Listen!’ says Porta, stopping abruptly.
‘JU 87s, Stukas,’ says Tiny.
‘No, Heinkels,’ contradicts Stege. ‘They don’t knock like JU 87s.’
‘Jesus’n Mary!’ says Barcelona. ‘There’s a hell of a lot of ’em. It won’t be pleasant being where they drop their load!’
A fiery umbrella of explosions raises itself above the Kremlin. Most of the AA seems to be placed there.
A nerve-tearing howl splits the night.
‘Stukas, all right!’ says Porta.
Bomb explosions sound from the northeast.
‘Move!’ the Old Man hurries us.
‘Past Danilov churchyard best,’ suggests Vasilij, ‘so we come Serpukhovsky Boulevard. Go down to Krovjanka river, so straight home! Gorky Park much shitty Commie soldier! Best not see us. Vasilij think we home morning night. If not, we dead with NKVD! Great Kunfu know! Him say, maybe: Shitty Nazi soldier go home, not leave pretty head Ljubjanka.’
‘All very simple,’ sighs the Old Man tiredly. ‘With God’s help and a little sweat you can manage most things.’
We lose our way and suddenly find ourselves in the middle of Smolenskaya Place and can see right down to the Kremlin.
For a moment we stand in amazement and look at the bulbous towers, shining like diamonds in the winter morning sun.
‘Looking at that could make a man almost want to be a Russian,’ says Porta, enchanted.
Vasilij is suddenly nervous. He has the Mongol’s sure instinct for danger.
‘Not look shitty Kremlin too much! Dam dangerous! There all half-Commie chop to dog meat! Big tricky Commie NKVD sit there, warm arsehole! We get shitty quick out here! Chita man say: See Kremlin no see much more in life!’
We cut down to the Moscow at the Borodinsky Bridge. A whole line of lorries filled with prisoners is standing there. They’re obviously emptying their nets here. There are quite a lot of uniforms among the prisoners on the vehicles.
‘Shitty dam NKVD HQ,’ says Vasilij, ‘not good go there! Them arrest general if no like face! Vasilij lousy captain! Kick arse captain like butcher kick stray dog! Vasilij shout, wave them! You run dam fast Smolensky Street! Them think we chase bad men! No lose turnip, maybe!’
We run as fast as our legs can carry us down the narrow street. Vasilij is just behind us, running as if his feet had wings.
