by Noel Hynd
Above the girls in the branches of a tree, several birds rustled as they settled into the forest again. Then they flapped away. The noise drew the attention of the Russian commander. He took several cautious paces toward the disturbance with his weapon upraised and ready.
Anna and Lena cringed. They could hear the Soviet officer pushing ever closer through thick brush. Anna spotted a rock at her feet. Impulsively, she picked it up and hurled it. It rattled many branches as it flew through the near woods.
Lena gasped. Both girls emerged from cover and saw the Soviet officer no more than ten meters from them but looking in the direction of where the rock had landed. There was a moment that none of them would ever forget, a moment that was frozen in time when the colonel looked back and their eyes locked.
Anna was the first to raise her pistol and squeezed her trigger several times without aiming. The Soviet officer had dropped to the ground in the half-second before Anna fired her first rounds. He rolled away, sticks and branches ripping at the flesh of his arms and face, but successfully evading any bullets.
Lena fired next, shooting blindly. She sprayed the area. But none of her shots found the target she sought. At the same time, they could hear the shouts of Russian troops and knew more soldiers were rushing in their direction. The girls could also hear the rumble of one of the tanks shifting positions.
Anna turned and was the first to move, Lena behind her. They ran madly, keeping crouched and low to the ground, zigzagging along a path they knew. As their slain father had known, the two sisters knew these woods well and the Soviet invaders did not.
The Russians threw hundreds of rounds of ammunition after them, but the woods were now their protector. The foliage absorbed the shots. The shooting was so loud that it covered the sound of their escape as they pushed through dense stretches of the woods, unencumbered by equipment.
The Russian troops spent another half hour searching in vain for the girls. But they had already joined a path their knew, the one that led to the protection of their secret cabin. Unser geheimes Haus.
Colonel Kovalyov reassembled his tank and artillery unit. They left one tank and a squad of soldiers behind to block and eradicate any civilians or slower members of the German army fleeing Demmin. They continued along their path to the small rural city, killing on sight any German stragglers they saw.
They were nothing if not ruthlessly efficient.
Chapter 38
Berlin – July 1948
Cochrane spent his second, third, and fourth days in Berlin walking in his former neighborhoods. He returned to the area where Bettina had lived and wandered the streets looking for any small, old establishments that might have survived. He found little. He asked questions but no one in any surviving café, restaurant, or bake shop recognized the frau’s name or a description of her.
Racking his memory, he recalled that Bettina had been friendly with the government gauleiter in charge of her block. He returned to her block and inquired of the ladies digging through the ruins, engaging in conversations in exchange for cigarettes as the Trummerfrau continued to work and as Cochrane stepped carefully around sharp debris. No one had any information. The Trummerfrau looked at him as if he were crazy.
At one point, he climbed through the area where he believed Frau Schneidhuber’s home had once stood, a rickety but cozy place filled with music, books, and intelligence before it had been bombed into oblivion. He remembered how she had maternally nurtured young Frieda, whom Cochrane had been trying to get out of Germany, in the few days they had spent there.
Stepping through the debris, trying not to break an ankle, Cochrane overturned a few piles of bricks, hoping he would not find body parts. He saw quickly that anything of value was gone. The area had been thoroughly picked over.
“Shoe leather,” Major Pickford had called it. Shoe leather it was, this operation so far. For all his careful packing, Cochrane swore to himself that he should have brought another pair of shoes from England - something more comfortable, perhaps. His dogs were barking.
Cochrane attempted to navigate the transportation system but failed. He found a trolley that should have taken him back to Tempelhof, but it made an unexpected diversion deep into the Soviet Zone before he could jump off. Apparently, there was a schedule and a route, but the driver took it only as a suggestion. Cochrane struggled back to his home base, bribing an old German in a horse-drawn cart, a junkman, to take him back to the Western Zone in exchange for three American dollars.
The only public transportation that functioned dependably was the local inner-city S-Bahn, the electric trolley system controlled by Soviet soldiers. The Russians claimed they ran it as a public service. But Cochrane eventually found out the truth.
Cochrane had fallen into the habit, toward the end of each day, of stopping into a café called the Bar Ritter across from the main landing field at Tempelhof and engaging in conversations with other customers as well as the barman, a fortyish German, who seemed to be as close to a manager or owner as anyone on the premises. There was one skittish teenaged girl who seemed to be a waitress. The girl looked enough like the barman to be his daughter. Cochrane assumed that she was but didn’t ask. He also assumed the girl had good reason to be afraid of the world, men in particular.
When Cochrane mentioned the S-Bahn transportation to the barman, he informed him that the S-Bahn was no public service at all. “Native Berliners are harassed if they ride it,” the man explained in German. “It exists only so that Russians have cheap transit from their offices in Berlin center to Karlhorst and Potsdam.”
“What’s in Karlhorst and Potsdam?” Cochrane inquired easily over some weak coffee.
“The Soviets have their top military offices in Karlhorst and the political section in Potsdam,” the man answered.
“Oh? Is that officially known?”
“Top secret and all native Berliners know it,” the barman answered. “Now you do, too.”
“Oh. Danke,” Cochrane said.
The S-Bahn did have one purpose useful to ordinary Berliners, the barman further explained. “Hamsters,” as he called them, or hoarders, took what Western currency they could get and rode the S-Bahn trains deep into the Soviet Zone to buy from black markets and farmers, The goods on sale, other than produce, was mostly war booty from Eastern Europe, which had now landed in the hands of Russian black marketers. The food markets sold farm produce now because the final stop of the S-Bahn was in farmland. West Berlin was bordered by industrial areas. There were vice areas at the end of the S-Bahn, also, offering a variety of other ways to drop currency into Soviet hands.
Soviet soldiers patrolled the trains, however. They laughed, confiscated the newly purchased goods of private citizens and harassed the women. They were supposed to turn the booty over to their commanders, but the grunt soldiers usually skimmed a good part of it.
“So things are corrupt in the East, just as they were under the Nazis?” Cochrane asked.
“Maybe worse,” said Cochrane’s new source with an ominous laugh. “I don’t let my daughter ride that train. I’d never see her again. I wear a Mauser when I ride it, myself. It can be dangerous, the Eastern Zone.”
“I understand,” Cochrane said. Cochrane refrained from asking about the girl’s mother. He guessed she had been killed in the war or abducted in the first months of Soviet occupation.
“Very dangerous,” the man added.
“I understand,” Cochrane said. “I have a daughter myself.”
“You are British?” asked the man behind the counter.
“American,” Cochrane said, offering a handshake. “I’m William.”
“I’m Helmut,” the server said. “You’re like the old dead Kaiser. “Wilhelm. William.”
“We share a name. That is all,” Cochrane said with a laugh.
Despite adversity, the bartender continued to show a sense of humor. “Things could be worse,” he said to Cochrane when the current state of Berlin became a topic.
; “You mean if the Fuhrer were still here?” Cochrane asked.
“No. What if the Yanks ran the blockade and the Russians ran running the airlift?”
Cochrane laughed. So it went for several days. Helmut even showed off his knowledge of English, something he had picked up in the last few months. There had been an increasing amount of customer traffic from the airport across the street, Anglophones who wanted to get out somewhere, anywhere, on a summer evening.
Each evening at eight in the neighborhood there was a RIAS truck at prominent street corners. It would blast out the news on a loudspeaker. Crowds would come together in the near darkness then return home for maybe one hour of electricity. The news was the same each night, almost word for word Cochrane noticed.
No political breakthrough. No chance that the blockade would be lifted. But the crowd coming together lifted many spirits. Cochrane could feel it. American soldiers mingled with Germans and DP workers mingled with everyone, standing out in their grimy black work clothes. After the sound trucks departed, some of the overflow from the crowd stopped by the Bar Ritter for a cheap glass of Moselle wine, substantially adding to Helmut’s profits for the day.
Cochrane fell into the habit of going to listen to the sound truck, eavesdropping on conversations, and then coming back to the Bar Ritter to talk and again listen. Nightly, he would survey the assemblage of people, which included Soviet soldiers in uniform and cargo-working Germans and DPs from the Tempelhof staff.
There was a lot to keep an eye on during the evenings. British, American, and Russian air traffic controllers, discouraged from fraternizing by their bosses, crowded around shared tables and swapped horror stories in English and German. There was a little group of pilots, too, though usually they were in the middle of a workday and couldn’t linger too long. He spotted Olson and Taylor, almost always together, Marino, who had turned into a lone wolf, and Lieutenants Bobby Stuber and Charley King, the guys who were frequently bitching about downdrafts and overloaded cargo. Stuber and King usually flew in tandem, also.
From Helmut, Cochrane also learned that electricity was rationed to four hours a day. Small businesses such as cafés and would-be restaurants chose to have their four hours during the evening. That meant that employees had to walk home in the dark. All public transportation ceased at six PM. For men and women going home, the trudge was long, dark, and dangerous. Bands of former soldiers who had been busted out of the Red Army had formed gangs of hold-up men. Men walking home were held up at the point of a Mauser C96 or a Tokarev TT-33.
Women were robbed, dragged into alleys, and assaulted, often at knifepoint. The gangs of dismissed Soviet soldiers – brutish men who were useful as military thugs but for whom the professional army had no use postwar - had “official” hunting hours for female victims: seven to midnight. Police were rare and American and British soldiers were advised to not get involved, no matter what they saw happening to local civilians. The Eastern Zone worse than the Western, and the gangs loved to prey after dark in the far reaches of East Berlin near the vice section and – ironically – where the rumored political prison and military headquarters were located.
The proximity of gang strongholds to the Soviet military nerve center at Karlhorst suggested to Cochrane a nefarious link: the gangs and the vice establishments had links to the Red Army military. Otherwise, why wouldn’t they crack down on them? It was something he felt in his gut but couldn’t prove because he had not seen it close-up. But from his more than two decades as a spy, a notion overtook him.
He could only wonder why it was not a topic of discussion among the Western diplomats and intelligence officers in Berlin: namely, that just as rape had been a method of warfare, conquest, and terror as the Red Army advanced across Eastern Europe, the tolerance of vice and street thuggery in the nighttime world of Soviet-occupied Berlin created a flow of Western currency into the hands of the army. It was unofficially official policy. Whether or not the money got shipped back to Moscow was a separate question.
On the Monday of his second week in Berlin, Cochrane returned to his base at Tempelhof in the evening and there was news, but of the frustrating sort.
The municipal medical facility in the Eastern Zone that had been Frau Schneidhuber’s most recent address was closed to the public. Major Pickford had requested access for a Mr. Lewis to possibly identify missing persons from the Western Zone. He had requested it three times, in fact, and the first two requests had been ignored. Now the Soviet administrator finally denied the request. No surprise there.
Chapter 39
Berlin – July 1948
As the first half of July passed in Berlin, the situation worsened. Lack of food and power threatened to bring Berlin to its knees again after the city had struggled for three years to get back up on its feet and put the war in the past. Grumbling intensified among the population, stoked by the propaganda of the Soviet regime.
Russian apologists asked in their press, “Could things be any worse under the Soviet regime?”
“They could be far worse,” Cochrane grumbled one morning.
Much went wrong. The bulldozers would return to try to flatten the landing field. After that, the rains would return, and the cycle would repeat. Aircraft and motor vehicles churned the damp grass of the airfields into mud, then sometimes became bogged down and had to be rescued by tow trucks. Sometimes the tow trucks sank in the quagmire and had to be towed by yet other tow trucks or small cranes. Crews without boots waded through rescue points in heavy sludge. Even foul weather gear was a problem. There were no raincoats and no protective clothing. Sometimes flight crews tramped to their aircraft in boots that became sodden, then froze to the surfaces of the aircraft on the freezing night flights back to the Western Zone.
Nonetheless, morale was high. On July fourth, American crews forwent their Independence Day holidays and continued to work at full pace. Ground personnel worked back-to-back eight-hour shifts. Delivery drivers, fueled by coffee and pep pills, worked twenty to twenty-two-hour shifts, then slept for seven hours, had a meal, and returned to duty. Carpenters and construction crews formed out of nowhere and rows of Nissen huts came together in a minor miracle at the edge of the airfields. Men and women slept on floors. DPs and German veterans and anyone else who had been lucky enough to be hired were constantly disturbed all night by others looking for a sliver of space to sleep. The average participant saw it as a challenge. The older recruits had been through far worse in combat and the younger recruits were there to prove how tough they were.
“Do what you can,” was the advice du jour. “Every extra sack of flour feeds a Berliner and keeps Ivan Ruskey away from the city.”
The Americans could adapt more easily to the new mindset. The French had been invaded and occupied. The English had been bombed. The Americans and Canadians, though sobered by the war and having fought heavily against valiant German defenses, had no such bitter personal memories. It was easier for the ex-warriors from North America to readjust their thinking.
“I’ve got a guy in my ground crew named Oscar,” Victor Marino said one day. “Big blond bastard. Looks like a Nazi recruiting poster. I should hate him but I don’t. He flew a Messerschmitt. He claims he had sixteen kills of American and British aircraft. Now he carries bags of flour for me and a kid-American sergeant from Podunk and repairs engines.”
The coal shortage, which the Soviets did everything possible to make worse, had the precise consequences the Soviets intended. Coal powered the electrical generators of the city, and a reduction of coal meant a reduction of power produced. Hence, trolley buses, electric trains, and the U-Bahn – the subway or underground railway – were limited to half days: from six in the morning to six in the evening for all public transit. Buses could not pick up the slack. More than half of the city buses were in repair yards or off the sides of main roads, stranded and waiting for parts that didn’t exist, tires that hadn’t yet been ordered, and repairs that no one knew how to make.
The city ad
ministration limited private homes and apartments to four hours of electricity per day. The schedule would stagger sometimes from neighborhood to neighborhood. Sometimes residences drew electricity from ten PM till two AM, meaning that cooking and heating could only take place when working people needed to be sleeping.
Power cuts also meant that radio services were cut to a few hours a day, depriving the British and the Americans of the ability to broadcast their version of world events, including those in Berlin. The temporary answer was the broadcasting vans, set in motion by the British and the Americans. The vans traveled to various neighborhoods and blared the news. But the vans ran on fuel, also, of which there was little.
Tommy Olson and Glenn Taylor spent two days working with a priority ground crew in Wiesbaden to pick up gasoline generators flown in for telephone exchanges and hospitals and shuttling them to Berlin. Olson and Taylor had become a team. They flew in and out of Gatow, the British base, as well as Tempelhof. The Brits had planes to put in the air but not as many pilots, so American cockpit crews often flew in and out of the British base.
Olson and Taylor flew C-47s almost exclusively. They worked well together. A romance developed. Tommy became “one of the guys” to the other aviators very quickly, shooting the breeze freely in the commissary and officers’ club. At least the subjects she gabbed about in the air were less anxiety-ridden than talking about the Yaks that buzzed the Americans and British several times a day or the barrage balloons with their steel wire tethers that threatened to kill them from propeller entanglement six to eight times a day.
