The Witch of Stalingrad

by Justine Saracen

  They had only to get to the other side of the closest bomber to be out of the men’s line of sight. Rather than make a noise whispering, she simply took hold of Lilya’s arm and ran.

  It wasn’t until they reached Lilya’s hut and parted that Alex realized she’d left her glove in the glider.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The morning roll call in front of the mess hut was always informal, although on this day the atmosphere was tense since everyone knew that three of the best pilots were incarcerated. Major Kazar stepped up onto the small platform and, without making mention of their absence, gave a rundown on the recent engagements, then read out the current assignments. Since the trucks from the railroad depot had arrived, and Stalingrad had priority, they wouldn’t fly. Instead, the air and ground crews would assist the men in loading the gliders for immediate takeoff.

  No one needed to be reminded that it was almost December and the brave men fighting in “the cauldron” were desperate for food and ammunition. By fourteen hundred hours, both bombers and their gliders were fully loaded. At fourteen thirty, Alex watched them take off from the airfield, escorted by four Yak-1s, piloted by the women of the 586th regiment. None of them, of course, was Katia or Lilya.

  “I noticed you were working today with only one glove.” Alex was startled by the voice behind her. “This must be yours, then.” Major Kazar held out a fur-lined leather glove.

  The gloves were unique, finer than those the pilots wore, so she had no choice but to brazen it out. “Thank you, Major. I was looking for that,” she said, sliding it on.

  “How do you suppose it ended up last night in an empty glider?”

  “I couldn’t say, Major.” It was as defiant as Alex had ever been, but she could think of no possible excuse.

  “I believe you have surpassed your usefulness here, Miss Preston, and we have a war to fight. The train that brought the Stalingrad supplies will go back tomorrow to Moscow. See to it that you are on it.”

  *

  Choking injustice was all Alex could think of. Two top pilots and their mechanic jailed for a shampoo, and an honest journalist expelled for…for what? A bit of jealousy? And she couldn’t even say good-bye to Lilya.

  Well, a lot of that occurred in wartime, she told herself, though it was no comfort. She packed her belongings, which took fifteen minutes, then moped. Was there anything she could do to dispel the major’s wrath? Several scenarios crossed her mind, all of them appalling.

  The sound of a large plane landing roused her from her funk, and she watched from the door to her bunker as another Tupolev taxied toward the hangar. An officer stepped out. A portly one.

  General Osipenko marched with one of his lieutenants toward Major Kazar’s headquarters and disappeared inside. What did it mean?

  Alex glanced at the women standing nearby, but all of them seemed as surprised as she was. She returned to her bunk, restless and idle.

  An hour later, the buzzer sounded for a surprise general roll call. When the regiment fell in and stood at attention, General Osipenko walked down the line of women, reviewing them like a field commander before battle. Apparently satisfied, he stepped up onto the platform.

  “Comrades, I have some important announcements,” he said. “First of all, the Air Defense Force has promoted your commander, Tamara Aleksandrovna Kazar, recipient of the Order of Lenin, to the Air Force General Staff, where she will assist me.”

  Alex glanced over toward Raisa, whose expression hinted faintly at amusement. Apparently, the aviators’ complaints to division headquarters had finally borne fruit.

  “In her place, Major Aleksandr Gridniev will assume command,” he added.

  Alex saw sudden consternation on many of the women’s faces. They were to have a male commander. Was it a necessity of the war or punishment for making trouble?

  “In addition,” the general said, “seven of you have been selected to form a hunter’s squadron that will join the men at Stalingrad.” He drew a folded paper out from under his arm. “These are the names: Raisa Beliaeva, Valeria Khomiakova, Evgenia Prokhorova, Maria Kuznetsova, Klavdia Nechaeva, Ekaterina Budanova, Lilya Drachenko. The latter two will be released from punitive confinement immediately, and all will report for duty tomorrow at the usual time.” He folded the paper again. “That will be all, Comrades. You may fall out.”

  The women broke ranks slowly, and the buzzing among them told Alex they were as stunned as she was. She joined Klavdia and Raisa as they strode toward the penalty bunker. “What do you suppose happened there?”

  “I think we got the prize and the punishment at the same time,” Klavdia said. “We got rid of the tyrant but have a man in her place.”

  The detention bunker was little more than a covered hole in the ground, with benches along two of the walls and a deeper hole in the corner for urination. The worst, of course, was the lack of heat, for which the blankets provided did little to compensate.

  The three prisoners huddled together on a single bench under their blankets, and though they had been confined only about six hours, they were obviously elated at the arrival of the others.

  “Katia glanced up first. “Please tell us you’re not here just to commiserate.”

  “No. We’re here to spring you,” Raisa announced. “Osipenko just arrived. Kazar is out. Promoted ‘up’ and away. Come on, we’ll tell you the rest outside.”

  “Justice! Finally.” Lilya threw off her blanket and climbed out of the hole. “There’s more?”

  “Yeah, but it may not be so good. I don’t know,” Raisa said. “Some of us are being sent as free hunters to Stalingrad. Almost everyone on the transfer list is a woman who signed the complaint against Major Kazar. Looks like, with Osipenko’s help, she’s found a way to get rid of us.”

  “Stalingrad. Really?” Katia slowed her step.

  “Yes, really. And since the Germans have taken over almost all of the city, that’s more or less a suicide mission.”

  Katia’s lips compressed. “Maybe. But it’s also real fighting, not just this constant escort flying and defending train stations. I’m ready for it.”

  “She’s right.” Lilya nodded. “Though we have no choice anyhow. Suicide squadron or not, I’m ready to go, too.”

  Klavdia changed the subject. “I wonder where we’ll be based. I thought the Fritzes held all the airfields from here to Stalingrad.”

  “I think we still hold Akhtuba, just east of the Volga. Within range,” Alex offered, noting that she’d said “we.” But dread was sinking like clay into her chest. It was hard enough to face death standing by people you loved, but the thought of Lilya sent off to fight and die in Stalingrad, the bloodiest battle of the war, was crushing. She turned away from the group and forced herself not to drag her feet like a child as she headed back to the hangar.

  “Miss Preston,” a familiar, harsh voice called to her.

  “Major Kazar. Congratulations on your promotion,” she forced out.

  The major was expressionless, surely an indicator that she also understood she’d been dismissed, not promoted. And surely she knew that Alex knew.

  “I’m happy to inform you that General Osipenko has room in his plane for a passenger. You don’t have to wait until tomorrow for the train. He can take you directly back to Moscow.” She paused, letting the announcement sink in, then added, “Perhaps you would also like to be assigned to the Stalingrad arena. Covering that battle would certainly be a journalistic coup.”

  The major stood with raised eyebrows, waiting for a reply. Alex knew it was a poison chalice, a vengeful gift to her, for having been part of the rebellious group. Foreign correspondents had so far been barred from Stalingrad, but Kazar and Osipenko could pull strings and send her, too, on a suicide mission. If she was willing to go.

  She pondered for a moment, as Katia had, weighing the risks against the benefit of being near Lilya and perhaps getting great material. “Don’t I have to first get permission from the Press Department?”

 
“General Osipenko can arrange that and even get you a place on one of the troop planes flying to Stalingrad.”

  “I see you’ve discussed it with him.”

  “I take that as a yes,” the major said with a cold half smile and seemed to glide away.

  “Very kind of you,” Alex said to her back, then muttered, “like a cobra.”

  *

  It appeared that even suicide missions involved red tape, and although the Press Department had given permission, it was another five days before a troop transport was scheduled.

  Alex killed time at the hotel, playing cards with the other correspondents and listening to them grouse about being kept away from the big battles. She’d also gotten used to the hotel vodka and found it an effective way to ward off boredom as she watched the endless snow fall outside.

  Finally the telephone call came and she found herself in a glider packed with terrified young recruits being flown to the cauldron, as they called it. They had a fighter escort, but she wasn’t sure how much that helped. You could survive enemy strafing in a train. In a glider, not so much.

  Once she was seated on one of the side benches, she glanced around at the pale young faces and felt a wave of sympathy. They were so young, superficially trained, she knew, and some of them weren’t even armed. She shuddered, imagining the unarmed ones being thrown into battle, waiting for their companions to die so they could pick up a fallen weapon. The baggy white camouflage that covered their winter uniforms made them seem ghostly, as if they were already in their burial shrouds.

  But was she any better off? All she had was a camera case.

  Mercifully, they did not come under fire on the way to Akhtuba. It was night, but the snow-covered landscape had a dull blue-white and slightly mysterious luminescence of its own, and the towing bombers landed their load of troops and supplies on the airfield without incident.

  A sergeant stood at the open door of the glider and prodded the troops under shouts and threats toward four transport trucks covered only in canvas. Two other trucks waited while a team unloaded the supplies and ammunition from the second glider.

  Shivering in the icy December air, she headed toward the low buildings at the edge of the field, her boots crunching on the snow.

  Akhtuba Air Base 473 was the most primitive one she’d seen. Mere flattened dirt, hardened to stone by winter cold, formed the underlayer. The hangar was smaller, lower, and camouflaged, though now that, too, was covered with snow, which rendered it nearly invisible from above. A short distance away, pits had been dug into the ground, she guessed, for storage of fuel and ammunition. On both sides of the field, anti-aircraft guns pointed at the sky.

  The planes were lined up for servicing, and she saw, to her shock, where the servicing mechanics emerged from. Their shelters couldn’t even be called bunkers but were rather hastily dug trenches alongside the airfield. No trees or bushes protected them from the wind and blowing snow. She saw no sign of a mess hut or covered latrine.

  The air, though icy, had a sooty odor, and in the distance, on the western side of the Volga, a dull-red glimmer beneath a layer of smoke told of a city on fire.

  She reached the single large shed that she assumed was the headquarters and asked for the commander. In the corner, a senior officer studied a map, and she waited until he glanced up.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, sir. General Osipenko sent me to take photographs, and I wonder if I can get a ride to the front.”

  He looked at his watch with apparent exasperation, and she was sorry to have brought him yet another problem to solve. “All right,” he grumbled. “We’ll try to get you out before dawn and put you down somewhere near headquarters.” He turned to a soldier waiting nearby. “Would you summon Lieutenant Budanova?”

  “Katia Budanova. I know her, and Lilya Drachenko, too. Is there any chance I could speak with her?”

  “Lieutenant Drachenko is in the air,” he said brusquely, ending the conversation.

  Alex stepped back and waited silently, but in just a few moments, Katia appeared at the dugout door and saluted casually.

  The officer glanced up. “Lieutenant Budanova. Please have one of the U-2s fueled up and take Miss Preston to General Chuikov’s headquarters. Someone from the map room will show you the exact location.”

  “Yes, sir. Will that be all, sir?”

  “That is all.” He saluted in return and turned immediately back to the map he’d been studying.

  As they passed through the doorway, Katia bumped elbows with her, a gesture that told Alex she’d passed some kind of friendship test. “So, what reckless impulse made you come to Stalingrad?”

  It was a comfort to see Katia, who was a bit like an older sister—or brother—to Lilya, and she smiled. “Couldn’t stay away. Moscow’s gotten too quiet these days.”

  “Crazy like a Russian. Well, to the cauldron. Just give me a minute to get the coordinates of the headquarters.”

  Katia stepped into a blocked-off corner of the bunker, which obviously had been designated as their map room, and emerged a moment later with a map. She held it under a lamp, studying it, then folded it and slid it inside her flight jacket.

  “Got your bags packed?”

  “My bags,” Alex said, holding up a single case that contained everything she required for a week. The rest of what she’d need in the Russian winter was already on her body.

  Almost lighthearted, she strode alongside Katia and returned the elbow bump. “Hey, did you see Pravda last week? My photo of you and Lilya showed up on the second page. Apparently you’re both heroes now.”

  “Yes, they showed it to us here. I’m sure both our mothers were happy to see we were still alive.”

  “So far, so good, eh? And where are the others? Raisa, Klavdia, Valeria…?”

  Katia became solemn. “Raisa and Klavdia were shot down. Valeria Khomiakova went back to the 586th, and the others transferred to another male regiment. It’s just us two now.”

  The announcement of the two deaths drained the cheer from their conversation, and they trudged through the snow to the U-2. It looked terrifyingly fragile. To dispel the gloom, Katia pointed below the plane. “Skis instead of wheels. They attached them at the end of November. A lot harder to stop on those things, though. Sometimes you land and just keep sliding.”

  “I’ll drag my feet,” Alex said, following Katia as she climbed the wing to her cockpit and set on a pair of headphones. “Hey, you’ve got communication now.”

  “Just between pilot and navigator. We still can’t hear anything from the ground.”

  Katia started the motor and they taxied along the runway, skidding slightly and making a wavy line in the shallow snow with their pontoons. After a remarkably short trajectory, they lifted off the ground with a sideways lurch.

  Alex had forgotten how cold the open cockpit of a U-2 could be. When she’d flown with Lilya back in May, the wind had been an annoyance, but now, in December, it assaulted her face like needles. Her goggles, fur ushanka, and high woolen collar protected most of her, but the skin below her goggles and around her mouth was exposed. At first her skin burned, then grew numb. Would she ever be able to move her lips again?

  They flew over a stretch of snow-covered land, then what she judged to be the Volga River, though it was frozen and just as white as the surrounding landscape. Smoke wafted across it in several places, and in the predawn light she could just make out the movement of men crossing with sledges.

  Katia flew up the Volga a few hundred meters and banked left.

  “Right below is the Red October Factory. That’s still heavily contested, though our men seem to have claimed more of it.” Alex leaned over the cockpit edge and, without removing her goggles, snapped a series of photographs.

  “And that black spot right ahead is Mamayev Hill. The Germans are on one side of it and the Russians on the other.”

  Alex snapped several more shots of the hill, ghostlike in the faint orangey light. In the east, the rising sun ignite
d the sky in reds and pinks, indifferent beauty over the slaughter below.

  “Where’s the Luftwaffe? Shouldn’t they be attacking us?”

  “They’ll be out in a few minutes. They have fewer patrols these days, probably because we’ve managed to cut off some of their supply lines and they’re low on fuel. They’re still a menace, though.”

  Katia banked again, giving her a good view of the shore, then descended at a sharp angle. The landing skis bumped over the lumpy ice and they skidded to a stop. “All right, old girl. Here we are. Chuikov’s headquarters is right over there, dug out of the Volga bank. You see it? Near the burnt-out truck.”

  “Yes, I see it.” Alex climbed over the side of the cockpit. Just before she scrambled over the wing onto the ground, she leaned in and kissed Katia on the cheek. “That’s for both you and Lilya. Take care of yourself, and her.” Then she leapt onto the frozen river that gave back a dull sound under the hard sole of her boot.

  “I’ll be back tomorrow.” Katia waved and, after a run of no more than two hundred feet, lifted into the air again.

  Alex stood for a moment, suddenly anxious. Beyond the western riverbank the city smoldered. Clouds billowed here and there over a dirty orange glow, and after the popping of the U-2 had faded, she could hear the crackle of small-arms fire.

  The smoky pink sky provided enough light for her to make her way over the wreckage along the bank. But she hadn’t gotten far when two heavily padded figures ran toward her with rifles pointed at her chest. She stopped and raised both hands.

  “Journalist,” she shouted, holding up her pathetic little press pass, but at least they didn’t shoot.

  When they were face-to-face, one of them held out a mittened hand. Alex presented her papers, but the figure brushed them aside. “Zoia Kaloshin,” a woman said, pumping her hand while her comrade, who now also appeared to be a woman, held her papers up to her nose.

  “Can you take me to General Chuikov’s headquarters? I’m supposed to report to him.”

  Just then a shell exploded behind them on the river, blasting a hole in the ice. Debris rained down on them.