The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02]

by David L. Robbins

  “Action.”

  “I’ve got a job to do, General. Pictures of the officers’ mess don’t pay the bills.”

  “You haven’t seen enough action, son?”

  “My wife call you?”

  Eisenhower chuckles. Bandy knows how to play the brave bumpkin.

  He presses. “General, there’s going to be lots of newsies here in these last few months. Guys who haven’t even got their feet wet. Me, I figure I’ve earned a leg up by this point. It’s what I came back for. The end. I want to be there. Not chasing off somewhere else far from it, looking at someone else’s photos and kicking myself. That’s for the others.”

  “I see.” Eisenhower winces, considering. “The end.”

  “Yes, sir. Can you point me? Where should I head to have the best shot? Whose army?”

  “You want me to guess.”

  “Who better, General?”

  Bandy holds still while Eisenhower mulls this request over. Without more words from either, the General’s gaze goes to the big table map. Ike calculates for moments. His hand wanders over the chart, sensing contours, troops, possibilities, personalities, enemies.

  “Action, son?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ike’s fingers wriggle in the low firmament over an area south of Montgomery’s force, north of Patton. He studies the American front line at the middle, facing the Ruhr region, site of seventy-five percent of Germany’s remaining industry, seventy percent of their coal.

  Eisenhower lifts his eyes to meet Bandy’s. The General’s look is sympathetic, paternal, as though at this last second he wants the younger man with the wife and tobacco farm at home, who has already lived in harm’s way more than most soldiers, to reconsider his entreaty for action. The look asks: Son, are you one of those unlucky men who is at his most alive in the presence of death? Bandy makes a forgiving smile.

  Like a crashing spear, one of the General’s fingers lands and sticks. Bandy leans over to read.

  Ike has spiked a spot on the northern reaches of the Siegfried Line.

  Beneath his nail is the lethal Hürtgen Forest.

  “Right here, Charley.”

  ~ * ~

  * * *

  January 14, 1945, 0700 hours

  Magnuszew bridgehead

  West bank of the Vistula River

  Poland

  there have been no orders issued for the attack. but the canny foot soldier learns to read the signs of his army the way a timber wolf reads his forest. Ilya smells food. When the cooks move their kitchens up, that means only one thing. You are going forward.

  The offensive will erupt this morning.

  The jingle-jangle of pot-laden mess wagons splits the thick mist. Last night was starry, but at midnight a heavy fog rolled in. Ilya cannot imagine ordering an attack this morning, with visibility down to four or five meters. There can be no air cover in this chilly haze. But there it is, the unmistakable aroma of eggs and frying potatoes salting the air.

  Ilya sits up in the trench. He shrugs his great shoulders. They ache, sopped with dew and cold from the riverbank night. His blanket is wet. He runs a hand over his shaved pate and slides off his woolen cap, uses it to wipe his eyes. Misha next to him has spilled from under his blanket in the night and curled into a little ball, a filthy puppy. Ilya covers Misha with both blankets now and rises. Misha mumbles and will not wake.

  Ilya tracks the smell and sound of the carts. Loudspeakers blare Russian folk music across no-man’s-land at the German lines to hide the clatter of preparations, another sure sign that the hour is near. Last night, sappers will have crawled out to clear mines from in front of the Russian trenches, and even dared go as far as they could to do the same in front of the German positions. The mist helped with that much of the operation, but this morning the attack will be more difficult without the Red Air Force Stormoviks spreading a carpet of bombs and bullets in advance. Oh, well, Ilya thinks. The artillery doesn’t need to see what they’re doing. All their targets are presighted. And in the infantry, you shoot anything facing you. Simple.

  Two dawns ago, Koniev’s First Ukrainian Front jumped off from their Sandomierz bridgehead on the Vistula a hundred kilometers to the south. They’ll slash northwest, while Ilya’s force—the First Byelorussian Front— will battle straight westward. They’ll all line up on the border to Germany, the river Oder, eighty kilometers from Berlin.

  Ilya reaches the A Company mess wagon. Without asking for it, he is handed a double portion. Misha will get the same when he rallies and comes for breakfast. The cooks, everyone in the company, know who stole the First Guards Tank Army banner. Others shamble forward, accept steaming tin plates, and squat to eat. On each of their coats is sewn a black-and-orange patch from First Tank. This is Misha’s doing. When the tank army’s flag was discovered fluttering on the pole outside Chuikov’s Eighth Guards HQ, a note was found pinned to it identifying the penal battalion, A Company. For days afterward the men of the company bragged and strutted, many of them holding their chins high for the first time in a long while, though they did not know who among them had pulled off the prank. The commander and commissar of A Company held a meeting, demanding to know who was responsible. Misha stepped forward. The soldiers held their breath, figuring the little coward was going to rat on their unknown hero. Misha insisted he would tell, but only if First Guards Tank Army surrendered one hundred fifty patches for the entire company to wear as trophies. “Victory must have a prize,” he intoned. The commissar gave his word. Misha thumped his own chest. “Me.”

  Misha spent three days in the stockade. When he came out, Ilya hugged him, then sewed on his friend’s First Tank patch. Over the next week, Misha told each member of the company, swearing them one by one to secrecy, that Ilya was the leader of their escapade and they could never tell because Ilya was as ferocious as he looked. Misha figured the news would filter upward to the company and battalion officers, and there would be no further negative repercussions.

  The little man’s voice grumbles through the fog behind Ilya.

  “It’s today.”

  “No question.”

  Misha collects his rations, pushes half of it onto Ilya’s plate, and sits.

  “You know who’s out there, Ilyushka?”

  “The Germans.”

  “The Ninth Army. One of the best armies in the whole Wehrmacht. General von Lüttwitz commanding. He’s the latest in a long line of great generals with the Ninth. Model and von Bock both made Field Marshal out of there. Lüttwitz is good, and he fights.”

  Ilya shakes his head, polishes off the extra eggs. “How do you know this?”

  “I ask questions. That’s what I do. Intelligence. Besides, I spent three days at HQ in the stockade. When I can’t ask, I listen.”

  Ilya sets down his plate. He pushes his gaze through the mist, past Misha, at the others gathering for their last hot meal before the assault. They’re a ragged bunch, careless with their demeanor. Their pride in the successful pilferage two weeks ago has been worn off by hard labor, cold ground, and the wait. These soldiers are resigned to being on the crest of the coming attack, where the penal company stays. And if they don’t get killed in today’s assault, then the next one. Most of them are country boys, simpletons who broke one rule too many or mouthed off to a superior. There are a few black-sheep officers, like Misha and Ilya, but those men keep to themselves. There is little camaraderie in the company; the faces change. Men are killed, go AWOL, wind up in the brig, or get a bullet in the back of the head for more serious infractions. The battalion commissar tries hard to meld them together with communist fervor. But these slumping men are just broken spirits slogging out what will likely prove to be their last days in earthly form.

  Misha says the Ninth Army is one of the best. They had better be, Ilya thinks, because they have not fought Russians before like the ones they’ll fight today. The Red soldiers and officers of the main ranks will battle hard, true enough. They’re well trained and have the finest mass of
weapons ever assembled. By this point in the war, the Reds are toughened and wise to the man. And Ilya doesn’t worry about the fighting mettle of his penal company. They’ll go all out too, either to die with some final honor attached to their names or to win their way back to their regular units, like Ilya and Misha. The German Ninth knows how well the Soviet army fights; for two years they’ve been backpedaling in front of them across western Russia and the Ukraine, starting at Stalingrad. The ruthlessness of the German retreat from their occupied territories is seared into the mind’s eye of every Ivan soldier on the front: scorched villages, brutalized women, senseless butchery. The Germans must know they will face a determined enemy today.

  But the men of the second echelon, the mop-up wave behind the Red frontline troops. These are men the Ninth Army has not yet seen. These are animals.

  In the past twenty months, the advancing army has liberated hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers from German prison camps. These men have been tortured, starved, and humiliated by their captors. They’ve been slaves on their own soil, and those of their comrades who escaped did so as corpses. Now the survivors have been set free to seek their vengeance, with a fanatical hatred.

  Comrade Stalin has ordered that all freed POWs fit for service be fed, clothed, issued arms, and sent back into battle. But the vozhd does not trust these men entirely; they have been in the presence of the enemy. So, they are segregated into the second tier of soldiers, behind the main attack forces. Once the enemy’s front lines have been broken, the Red Army regulars will continue to press the attack, battling their way forward, while the second echelon follows along in ever-swelling numbers.

  Ilya has seen their crazed “mopping-up” work: German soldiers bound face-to-face with wire, a grenade stuck between their chests and the pin pulled. Piles of burning corpses smoldering an hour after they dropped their weapons alive. Mutilated bodies of men left naked in subzero weather, their testicles cut off. Machine gun cross fire over open fields, blood and bullet holes desecrating white flags of surrender. More, Ilya has seen.

  Some say, “If Stalin knew, he would stop it.” Ilya is certain, Stalin knows.

  He wonders what these wild men will do once they are across the Oder, on German ground. They are not being reined in by their officers. They’re being stoked to a rage by the bellows of communist rhetoric, Kill, Kill, Kill! The revenge-taking will get worse.

  By 0730, rumbling activity is everywhere in the Magnuszew bridgehead. Ilya and Misha return to their trench dodging rolling tanks, wagon after wagon of artillery ammunition, and columns of trucks collecting bedrolls and blankets to be redistributed later. The fog makes the bustle dicey, the two hear a shrouded collision between vehicles.

  Climbing down into their trench, Misha checks everything. He counts his rounds, attaches his four-sided bayonet to his rifle, tightens his bootlaces. His small white hands flutter about like nervous, lost chicks.

  “Misha.”

  Misha does not look up from his busyness. Ilya layers a great hand over his friend’s shoulder. Misha stops fidgeting.

  “What?”

  “You stay with me. All day. All night. Tomorrow, Misha. Stay three steps behind me.”

  “I’m not a coward, Ilya.”

  “All right.” Ilya grants a broad smile. “Four steps.”

  Their laughter is buried beneath a sudden rise in the volume of the folk music blaring from the loudspeakers, there are tambourines and fiddles played by titans in the woods.

  Ilya checks his watch. 0810 hours.

  Eyes locked together, their faces turn grim. They both nod, and that is the seal.

  At 0825, a metallic din rends the fog. This is the sound of artillery pieces of all sizes—mammoth 280mm’s down to mortars, stacked wheel to wheel—loading shells. Ilya and Misha stuff cigarette butts in their ears.

  The fog begins to swirl over the westward Vistula valley. The earth of Poland seems to inhale, sucking in its breath, girding itself. The sun stays locked out behind dense low clouds. Ilya’s and Misha’s elbows touch where they watch over the top of the trench. Two million other men of varying nations, of different tongues and intent, also stare into the mist, from both sides of it.

  The first salvos rollick the ground. There is no time for echoes, the damp air is whipped, becomes frothy with reports from long barrels and turrets. The racket increases, seeming against logic not to be hundreds or even the actual tens of thousands of detonations but one gargantuan explosion that throbs but never wanes. The blast issues from the rear; Ilya turns around, the forest is full of fire-belching mouths, the fog is shredded then regroups, to be sundered again and again by orange tongues from endless death’s-heads. The shells blister past over their helmets. Misha grips his pot with both hands and pulls down. Ilya returns his gaze to the west. He sees in the mist great deeds, destruction and redemption.

  The smoke from the barrage adds its sheath to the fog until visibility is almost nil. The sulfurous powder stench waters Ilya’s eyes. He has hunkered beneath bombardments before; at Stalingrad in August of’42 the Germans razed the city with a two-day artillery and airborne assault. Buildings there crumbled into brick hills and twists of metal, flames scoured every inch. Ilya, like every infantryman, has sat out several artillery attacks. But neither he nor any Soviet soldier has ever found himself beneath the sort of concentration of shells the Germans endure right now.

  If you’re not killed outright or sliced by shrapnel or whizzing debris, you’re dazed. If you can see at all, your vision is blurred. Perhaps your ears and nose bleed from pressure bursts. Without question you have lost men in your company; officers in targeted bunkers lie in clusters, their orders silenced. Confusion courses through the lines. With what vision and hearing you retain, you will soon see and hear the charging screams and raking gunfire of an attacking Russian horde. With what nerve you can summon, you must rise and defend your life.

  The pounding of the guns and the explosions of shells plague the ground. Waiting for the break in the bombardment and the signal to charge, Ilya replays in his head his knowledge of General Zhukov’s strategies. The massive barrage will range up to seven kilometers deep into the enemy lines. Swaths of earth one hundred fifty meters wide are being left untrammeled by the artillery; these are lanes the infantry and their close support tanks will rush down in the initial attack to the Germans’ first line of defense. Once the infantry has engaged, they will punch holes in the enemy fortifications. Then the full tank armies will uncoil to drive through these breaches, fanning out into the German rear, disrupting communications and support and disorganizing reserves. If the Soviets move forward with enough speed, they’ll bar the paths by which the enemy’s forward forces might retire. With luck and momentum, they might also beat the Germans to their own prepared retreat bastions and prevent organized stands. The tank armies will continue to press ahead. The infantry will do its best to catch up, leaving the fearsome second echelon behind to solidify gains and silence further resistance.

  The initial wave will not be the whole gathered force of the Soviet infantry but rather swarms of forward battalions in attack teams. Their job will be to overwhelm the outermost German defenses and reconnoiter. Engineers will clear mines. German strong points that survived the opening salvos will be sighted for more artillery. The fighting will be at close quarters.

  The penal battalion of the Eighth Guards Army is in this vanguard.

  At 0855 the guns rest. The barrage lasted for twenty-five minutes. It was shorter than Ilya expected. It’s the mist, he thinks. Why waste shells when you can’t see what you’re doing? Time to send in the men and rifles. Have them deliver their intimate brand of firepower.

  Ilya’s legs and feet tense. The river valley in front of him seems choked, too packed for him to spring out of this trench and run into. The land is already welling with the thickest mist and smoke, echoes of the hot-barreled weapons behind him rumble like summer thunder. The fog bristles with hatred. There is blood to be spilled in there
.

  Needles prick Ilya’s skin. His stomach has something alive in it. It is always this way before the attack.

  He stares ahead, does not look over to Misha. He will protect Misha, but he will not crawl into the man’s grave for him.

  Life, Ilya thinks. Thank you, you are beautiful. I cherish you. Now, help me embrace you, and take you from others.

  From somewhere, it doesn’t matter, an order is given. Charge.

  Ilya fleers back his lips, baring his teeth. Now he turns to Misha. The little man startles at Ilya’s face only for a moment, then takes its tone for his own. He opens his mouth, scrunching his eyes and cheeks. Together they scream, “Urrahh!!”

  Around them ten thousand soldiers shrill their courage. Ilya erupts from the trench in a bound, Misha seems to levitate beside him, and they gallop into the fog. Ilya carries a PPSh submachine gun, with a rate of fire of nine hundred rounds per minute. He is loaded like a mule with extra clips, grenades, a trenching tool, knives, binoculars, but he does not feel any of his burden. Across his back is strapped a Moisin-Nagant rifle, the same model rifle Misha points and fires at nothing. Ilya fires a burst too, just to feel the machine gun, to run behind the bullets, to be drawn into the vacuum of their plunge.