by Ben Bova
"But Berlin?" he asked Kinder. "Why don't they just drop us into an erupting volcano and get it over with?"
Kinder put his fists on his hips and stared the men into sullen silence. They were grouped around him by the black iron stove in the middle of the wooden barracks. Hollis, Jarvick, Loller, Sanderson —he knew these guys. They griped the way all soldiers do, but they were steady and reliable. Even Kaplan, with the nastiest tongue in the platoon; Kinder knew he could count on Kap when the bullets were flying. It was the new men he was worried about. Kids.
Teenagers. They looked damned scared.
"Now listen up," he said, once the grumbling had stopped. "Patton's making a breakthrough and racing for Berlin. The Russians are on the east side of the city, ten, twenty miles away at most. Our job is to block the main highways comin' out of the city to the west, so's the Krauts can't move troops from the east to go against Patton."
"Holy Jesus Christ on a crutch," somebody muttered.
Kinder gave them his best lopsided grin. "Come on, now. You dogfaces are official heroes, aintcha? The Screamin' Eagles.' 'The Battered Bastards of Bastogne.' Now you're gonna be the first guys into Berlin. It's a fuckin' honor."
Hollis shot back, "Why don't you tell McAuliffe to let somebody else have the fuckin' honor this time?"
"You know what they say," Kinder replied, unruffled.
"The shortest road home . . ."
"Is through Berlin, yeah I know."
The men dispersed slowly to their bunks, muttering, grumbling. Hollis saw Jarvick sitting on the edge of his bunk, bent almost double over a flimsy sheet of V-mail paper he was writing on.
"Last will and testament?" Hollis wisecracked.
Jarvick looked up, his face showing surprise and something close to anger. But he calmed down immediately.
"No," he said. "Just writing home."
"To the wife?"
"Yes. Don't you have somebody to write to?" It was commonplace that the troops wrote more letters on the eve of a major action than any other time.
"Me? Sure, I got hundreds of women I could write to,"
Hollis replied, standing over Jarvick, grinning crookedly.
"That's my problem. I don't which of 'em I should start with."
"Maybe you ought to publish a newspaper for them,"
Jarvick said.
Hollis laughed. "Now that's not a bad idea. Not bad at all."
Jarvick watched him walk away from the bunk and head for the inevitable card game that was forming up. Not a care in the world, he thought. But he knew better. Hollis is just as scared as I am. Me just disguises it better.
For several moments Jarvick watched Hollis make his way through the barracks, attracting fellow gamblers as he went. Then Jarvick stared down at the fountain pen in his hand. He had kept it supplied with ink, one way or another, all the way from Iowa. Me knew what he wanted to write: the kind of letter that Cyrano de Bergerac wrote to Roxane.
"Goodbye, my love, for today I die."
The censors would never let that through. Even if he put it in as a quote from literature, they wouldn't know who Cyrano was. Jarvick took a deep breath and began to write:
"Dearest Judine: I'm fine. We've been based in a barracks for a change, with a real roof over our heads. It's quite comfortable. ..."
Me wanted to tell her that the war would probably be over by the time she got this letter, but he figured the censors would black that out too. Me wanted to tell her that he would be home very soon, but he feared terribly that he would arrive home in a coffin.
Lubben, 20 April
Some fifty miles southeast of Berlin, just outside the town of Lubben on the River Spree, Sergeant Alexei Alexandrovich Petrovitch lay on his belly in a roadside ditch, pressing his face into the dirt, clawing with his bare hands toward the center of the Earth.
The German artillery barrage was a complete surprise; the Germans weren't even supposed to have any heavy artillery remaining. But the shells were suddenly falling all around him, blasting the ground into a chaos of smoking craters.
They're not supposed to have any guns left, Petrovitch snarled to himself as he hugged the moist warm earth. They told us there was nothing facing us except old men and boys armed with obsolete rifles.
The long angry sigh of incoming shells. Petrovitch clawed deeper at the ground, fingertips already bleeding. He had no idea of how many men in his squad might have been hit. He had no idea how long they had been pinned here by the German artillery. It seemed like years had gone by with no relief.
The explosions shook the ground and he heard the evil whine of shrapnel whizzing through the air. This isn't supposed to be happening! he screamed silently to himself.
We're supposed to be advancing, not pinned down by artillery the enemy isn't supposed to have. The captain will be furious that we haven't been able to move forward. The political commissar might start shooting sergeants again.
The earth-shaking roar dwindled somewhat, like a thunderstorm moving slowly away. Cautiously Petrovitch raised his head and peered over the ridge of the ditch into the black night. He heard the softer sigh of outgoing rounds fired by the Red Army artillery units far to the rear.
Counter-battery fire; about time. The distant horizon lit up with explosions, orange and white and a sullen glowering red. Good! Let the Nazis get a taste of their own medicine.
But once the distant rumbling thunder died away, Petrovitch heard a sound that froze his blood. The roar of diesel engines, the clanking jingling of caterpillar treads.
Tanks! Coming toward him. The Germans weren't supposed to have any more tanks, either.
"Tanks!" he whispered hoarsely to his right and then his left. In the darkness he sensed his men hunkering down deeper into the ditch.
"Their last half-dozen panzers," one of the men muttered acidly. "Again."
"Heavy weapons platoon to the front," he heard an officer calling.
No one responded. The heavy weapons men, with their antitank rockets, must have been hit hardest by the artillery barrage. Most of the rounds had fallen behind Petrovitch's unit, where the rocket men had been moving up.
"We'll have to stop them ourselves," Petrovitch said to the men on either side of him. "Pass the word."
Stop tanks with machine guns and hand grenades? Not likely. But that was all they had. They had used the last rounds for their Siminov the day before, on what their political officer had assured them was absolutely "the last half-dozen of the Panzers."
The seconds ticked by and the sound of the approaching tanks grew louder. Petrovitch kept hoping they would hit another section of the line, but something in his guts told him they were coming straight for this spot, exactly where he lay trembling and wide-eyed, staring into the darkness for his first glimpse of approaching death.
And there they were, huge monstrous clanking growling fortresses of moving steel, prowling through the night, long gun barrels poking out like the probing feelers of giant beetles. Tiger tanks, moving Hke dinosaurs of steel, lords of the battlefield.
Petrovitch's machine gunners started shooting at the tanks, to no effect. He saw sparks flare where the bullets bounced off the heavy armor. The machine guns in the tanks began to reply, red sputtering gouts of flame sending bullets splattering into the soft earth along the ridge of the ditch. Petrovitch heard men cursing and screaming over the yammering chatter of the machine guns. One of his men leaped up and ran at the tanks, grenades in each hand, instantly cut down by the showers of lead flying through the air. The grenades went off in dull thumps and a brief flash of white, harmless to the tanks, fatal to the soldier bearing them.
One of the Tigers came to the ditch not twenty meters from where Petrovitch lay. He pulled a grenade from his belt, yanked the pin and hurled it at the exposed bogey wheels and tread. He pushed his face into the dirt as the grenade went off, felt white-hot shards of shrapnel rake his back.
There was no pain. No time for it. The tank had ground to a halt, although others were rumb
ling past the ditch, across the road, and deeper into the night. Petrovitch jumped up, roaring with exultation, and raced to the crippled tank. The grenade had blown off its tread; it could not move, although its crew was still alive inside and its forward machine gun was blazing. The turret was turning slowly in his direction.
Petrovitch ducked under the long cannon barrel and clambered up onto the front of the Tiger. Poking the muzzle of his submachine gun into the first eye slit he saw, he fired off a few rounds. Screams from inside. In training, he had been shown an empty tank painted white inside; his instructor had fired a single pistol shot through one of the open ports. The bullet ricocheted off the steel walls inside until almost all the white paint had been scraped off.
Petrovitch climbed up to the turret and fired a few more rounds into the eye slit there. No more screams. The first burst had done the job. Then he realized how lucky he was that his bullets had not set off the ammunition inside the tank.
"Comrade sergeant! Your back! It's a mess!"
Shakily, Petrovitch slid back down to the ground. One of his men, so new to the squad that the sergeant had not yet learned his name, was staring wide-eyed at him.
"Never mind my back," he shouted gruffly. "There'll be infantry coming up behind the Tigers. Get the men back into a defensive line along the ditch. Quickly!"
The soldier scuttled off into the night. Petrovitch surveyed the situation. The tanks would continue their penetration; they were going after the artillery and other rear elements. He smiled grimly. The officers and staff men at headquarters were going to have to do some fighting, for a change.
Then he took a deep, painful breath. So will we. The infantry will be following the tanks.
He took a step away from the tank, but his legs no longer had the strength to hold him up. He collapsed face first onto the ground, unconscious and bleeding heavily.
Kustrin, 20 April
"Counterattack?" Field Marshal Zhukov spat out the word. "Where?"
"Just east of Lubben," said his aide, a flimsy yellow sheet of paper from the radio operator in his fist. Zhukov noted that despite the grim expression on the redheaded captain's face his hands were not shaking.
"Lubben? Exactly at the seam between our front and Koniev's!"
"They always have had excellent intelligence."
The other officers and men in the low-roofed dugout were silent, watching their commander. There was no battle to be heard outside, nothing but the eternal chirping of crickets in the shattered remains of what had been a forest.
Zhukov strode to the map table and bent over it. "What strength? What direction?"
The captain peered at the yellow sheet for a moment, then answered, "There are no details."
Zhukov snatched it from his hands. The typing said:
"Heavy counterattack before Lubben. Artillery and tanks. Request permission to withdraw to river."
Hitler truly is mad, Zhukov thought. To send what few remaining tanks he has into a counterattack. We'll stop them at the Neisse and chew them up just the way the Americans did in the Bulge.
Then he remembered. It was the Americans and the British at the Bulge. Montgomery and Bradley worked together then. I'll need Koniev's help to destroy the salient. With him hitting them from the south and me from the north, we can wipe out the last of Hitler's panzer forces.
But I can't order Koniev to attack the southern flank of the salient. The orders will have to come from Moscow.
From Khrushchev, if he's still in charge of the Red Army today. They keep changing everything in Moscow. It's all a turmoil back there.
Cottbus, 20 April
Field Marshal Koniev was also bending over a map in his forward headquarters, on the back of an American truck, with sides and roof of armor plate: slow, but mobile.
"So they're counterattacking at Lubben," he said, "Good. Excellent."
His staff clustered around him in the poorly ventilated truck. Cigarette smoke hung heavily in the air. From outside came a distant booming that sounded almost like thunder, but too regular and too prolonged to be anything natural.
"Zhukov will need our help on the southern flank of the salient," said one of the officers, a heavyset graying man with the thick features of a peasant.
"Or we could move here," said the colonel on Koniev's left, tracing a line across the map with the stub of an amputated finger, "along this axis, and pinch off" the Nazis."
Koniev shook his head. "Have any orders come in from Moscow?"
"Not yet. It is too soon. The counterattack began only five hours ago."
"And already Zhukov is pulling back to the Neisse?"
"Yes. He's drawing the Nazis in, apparently. Then he'll cut them off and annihilate them. With our help, of course."
Koniev straightened up. He was much taller than the others, and younger than anyone with the rank of colonel or higher.
"Comrades, our goal is not to help Zhukov but to take Berlin. This Nazi counterattack is a blessing for us. We will move across the River Spree now, while the Hitlerites are busy annoying Zhukov. Then we drive north, along the Luckenwalde-Potsdam-Berlin line. We can be in Berlin within a few days!"
"But the counterattack? Zhukov needs our help."
"By circling around the counterattacking Nazis we cut off their supply routes. That will take the pressure off Zhukov. Let him deal with the salient while we drive to Berlin."
The oldest man in the cramped compartment, a general who had been at Leningrad and now served as Koniev's chief of communications, gave the field marshal a somber frown.
"We must get approval from Moscow for this," he said.
"By all means!" Koniev said grandly. "Send them our plan at once." Turning to his chief of operations, a much younger man, he added, "Start the forward elements at dawn. I want to be across the Spree and moving north by northwest before Moscow wakes up."
"Suppose Moscow orders us to help Zhukov against this counterattack?" the old general asked.
"I will tell Moscow that we are doing precisely that—by driving on Berlin," said Koniev.
Chapter 24
Berlin, 20 April
"It goes well," said Hitler, bending over the tabletop map.
General Heinrici nodded. "Surprisingly well. They did not expect a Panzer attack."
"And Koniev is giving no indication of moving to help Zhukov, is he?"
"None whatsoever, my Führer."
Hitler clapped his hands together and rubbed them happily.
"You see, Heinrici? I give myself the best birthday present of them all. We have them on the run."
Heinrici smiled. It certainly seemed so. Zhukov's front lines had been penetrated and the Russians seemed to be falling back in disarray. Not a route, but not a planned, orderly retreat, either. It all depended on what Koniev would do.
And then there were the Americans.
"My Führer, I should remind you that the Americans have crossed the Elbe and are driving toward Berlin."
"A feint," Hitler said, contemptuously. "Eisenhower is trying to frighten us into moving troops away from the eastern front. Nothing more than a feint."
Heinrici was going to say that intelligence reports indicated this "feint" might be General Patton's entire Third Army. But at that moment the doors at the far end of the situation room banged open and Goebbels came in, little gnomish man with a slight limp.
"Happy birthday, my Führer!" Goebbels proclaimed.
Eva Braun and Frau Goebbels were right behind him, with Martin Bormann and a crowd of officers, clerks, and SS guards. Eva was carrying a small cake glowing with candles. Others bore trays of food and buckets of champagne.
Heinrici gave up all attempts to continue the military discussion. Hitler was fifty-six years old this day, though he appeared twenty years older. He could not blow out all the candles, he had not the breath even for the five that were perched on the cake. His hands shook as he accepted a cup of coffee. He could not remain standing for more than a few minutes.
&nbs
p; Let him rest, Heinrici thought as an SS guard held a stool for the Führer to sit upon. He's carried all these burdens for so long. Let him rest for a little while, at least. If he's going to pull off a miracle and save us all, it won't hurt to let him have a few moments of happiness and rest.
Heinrici accepted a fluted glass of champagne: French champagne, he noted. And there was caviar from the Caspian.
He looked at the silver trays of food, the finest from every part of Europe. All the nations we had conquered, he thought. We had all of Europe in our grasp, but now it has been wrested away from us. And Germany herself is being ground into dust by the advancing Allies.
The general shook his head wearily. This isn't war anymore, it's destruction, pure and simple. We should surrender and get it over with. Even the miracle of Stalin's death won't help us, not with Patton breaking through and heading for Berlin.
For a moment he thought that if only the Führer were somehow removed, taken out of the picture, then Germany might be able to make an honorable peace with the Allies.
But not with him in power, Heinrici knew. And he knew he would do nothing to remove his Führer. He had only contempt for the cowards who had stooped to assassination and botched even that. We have all sworn an oath of loyalty to the Führer himself, a personal oath that no man worthy of a general's rank could even think of breaking. No matter what. We were with him when he was winning, and now we must remain with him. To the death.
Goebbels, meanwhile, was giving a speech extolling their Führer' s many virtues, dwelling on the victories that had swept all of Europe and promising better days to come.
"Even now," said the propaganda minister, "the Bolsheviks are reeling back in confusion and retreat, thanks to our Führer's masterful military genius."
Everyone dutifully toasted Hitler's military genius. Even Heinrici, who knew that the counterattack on which Goebbels placed such high hopes would soon run out of steam.
Then Hitler started a rambling, reminiscent talk about the old days when the Party was so small that their entire headquarters could fit in a clothes closet. Eva laughed and beamed at him and ate three pieces of cake. Everyone seemed happy. Except Bormann. To Heinrici, the Führer's secretary looked like a wild boar: big undershot jaw, darting feral eyes. A dangerous man, always scheming, always trying to protect his master from bad news.
