“They’re bringing a shitstorm, Georgie,” reported the CO of the Nineteenth Armored. “I don’t think any American unit has ever come under this kind of artillery fire before. Bob Jackson had his boys dig in pretty well during the siege, so they’re doing okay. But we’ve taken a lot of casualties, more than a hundred killed since the bastards started shooting. Can’t we hit those guns with some bombers?”
“Ike has asked for clearance—I guess it has to go all the way to the president. But he’s hoping to get use of the Nineteenth Air Force.”
“Georgie, these are my boys,” Wakefield said. The strain showed in the lines around his eyes as he fixed his gaze on his army commander. “I’ve had a lot of them since Normandy. I’m goddamned if I’ve got them all the way here just to make them sitting ducks for a bunch of fucking Russki guns.” He looked at Patton, then said in a deceptively mild tone, “If you want to wait on some fucking chair warmers for permission, that’s your business, but I thought Third Army took care of its own.”
“Now listen here, you son of a bitch,” Patton said, his own anger rising to the surface, “You know good and goddamn well that I am moving heaven and hell here. I have screamed at every fucking bastard I can get to take my phone call, and if I could reach my hand through the wires I’d have throttled five or six people by now. Got it? And if that ain’t enough to suit you, hell, Henry, if Ike can’t get us some air support, I’ll climb into a goddamned transport and bomb the cocksucking Russian bastards myself! Does that fucking suit you?”
Wakefield nodded, pulled out a cigar, and lit it. “It’s a start.”
CCA HQ BLOCKHOUSE, POTSDAM, GERMANY, 0849 HOURS GMT
“That was General Wakefield.” Ballard didn’t try to soften the news; his men would realize the truth in any event. “No word yet on air support. But we can’t afford to give ground. We’re going to have to tough it out right where we are.”
He didn’t release the string of curses that rose in his throat, but it wasn’t easy to meet the eyes of the men in his headquarters staff. They were down in what had been some kind of holding tank in the cellar of the slaughterhouse. Everyone was haggard, sweaty, and unshaven. The explosions of the enemy barrage were an unending background, sometimes near, other times right on top of them.
The building itself had been half demolished by the shelling of the last twenty-four hours. Ballard looked out periodically, and saw that this entire strip of Potsdam, where Nineteenth Armored had dug in, had been pounded severely.
As usual, CCA was the front line of the division, with CCB deployed in reserve. They were positioned along one side of a moderately wide city street, an avenue that extended from the wide Havel River on their left flank to a long lake, the Sacrower See, on the right. Over the months of the siege, the men had fortified positions in houses, down in cellars within stone and concrete buildings wherever possible. They had laid logs and timbers over their emplacements in anticipation of shelling, secured rear entrances and escape routes, scouted fields of fire, massed ammunition and supplies.
But nobody had expected anything like this. This was a version of hell, where steel and fire fell from the sky in a relentless rain, promising the threat of obliteration at any moment.
The door at the end of the long chamber opened, and Smiggy dropped down the steep iron steps, quickly pulling the hatch closed after him. His coat of dust looked dry and powdery, as compared to the oily film on the men who’d been cooped up in here for the last few hours.
“Any sign of troop movements?” Ballard asked.
Captain Smiggs shook his head. “Just the damned guns. They’re coming from all along the southwest. I think most of the batteries are massed right in the middle of the city, on those open lawns by the resort hotels.”
“All right—good work,” Ballard said. “I’ll go out in an hour.”
“Hey, listen to that.” Major Diaz, CO of the artillery battalion, held up a hand.
Ballard noticed it right away, the pounding of the guns abating, slowing to a sporadic blasting over the space of a minute or two.
“I see airplanes!” cried a PFC manning one of the watch stations around the upper rim of the HQ. “Lots of airplanes! They’re our boys—attacking!”
Ballard was the first one up the ladder. He pushed his way through the hatch, out into the open air. Shell holes pocked the ground, and the high stone wall around the yard had been knocked down to half its height in a number of places. Rocks, bricks, timbers, and other debris—he stepped around a broken teapot, saw a cracked picture frame on the ground—were scattered everywhere, the litter of the long barrage.
In the sky, American fighter-bombers made a cloud as thick as the mosquitoes on a summer night, swarming down on the Soviet positions in wave after wave of devastating bombing runs. Other fighters battled through the air, dogfighting with the hundreds of Russian aircraft that were snarling into the fight. Now the sound of new explosions thundered through the air, vibrated in the ground …
But finally the explosives were falling on the other guys.
HQ, FIRST BELORUSSIAN FRONT, ORANIENBURG, GERMANY, 1344 HOURS GMT
“Do you mean to tell me that it was a plane crash that caused all this?” Marshal Zhukov’s voice was low, but that only served to make the messenger—a two-star general from his communications section—more nervous.
“Yes, Comrade Marshal. An American fighter crashed, apparently as a result of a collision in the sky. It landed on our main exchange in the Potsdam area, knocking out not only our communications with the First Ukranian Front, but also our connection to the American SHAEF, in the west.”
The marshal snorted, a sound of contempt. “And then this General … ‘Benko’ … of the Second Guards Tank Army decides to commence the attack?”
“That would seem to be the case, Comrade Marshal. There was a colonel of intelligence … a Colonel Krigoff … who was in an observation post, and reported signs of an American attack. Apparently he convinced the army CO that there was immediate danger.”
“I remember this Krigoff,” said Zhukov. “He has already cost me two generals. We will come back to him, but for now, tell me: What has been the American reaction to this sudden attack?”
“They have not withdrawn, and nor have they fired back. Perhaps they do not want to risk revealing their guns—we are facing a division here on the Potsdam isthmus, and even reinforced they won’t have more than thirty or forty heavy artillery pieces. Benko opened up with something like a thousand guns, so the Americans might have realized that counterbattery fire would be futile.”
“Sometimes everything is futile,” breathed the great soldier under his breath.
“I beg the marshal’s pardon?”
“Nothing. But tell me about the air battle.”
“The American tactical bombers finally attacked this morning. We assume it took some time for their General Eisenhower to get authorization for the air strikes. Once they came in, they were furious—more than a thousand sorties in the first hour.”
“Surely the Red Air Force intervened?”
“Of course, Comrade Marshal. Our own fighters flew heroic resistance, and as of this afternoon the air battle was still raging. We have lost many planes, also shot down many enemy aircraft.”
“But in Potsdam, the Americans are sitting tight, eh? Then I think we should turn up the pressure a little bit. We will wait a day, perhaps, but then I shall have General Benko resume his bombardment after dark tomorrow, and move a few battalions of tanks forward by dawn. We’ll see how the Yankees like our T-34s.”
“Yes, Comrade Marshal, at once!”
“Oh, and General?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Tell this Colonel Krigoff that I would like to see him.”
LOS ALAMOS, NEW MEXICO, USA, 2232 HOURS GMT
Oppenheimer came into the lab, shaking his head in exasperation. The reaction was dramatic enough that many of the other men left their tables, microscopes, and Geiger counters to come over to the di
rector.
“What is it?” asked James Conant, the young chemist who had been president of Harvard University at the start of the war.
“A call from Groves, of course. Excuse me, General Groves.” The peevishness was not like the director, and served to further focus his men’s attention on him.
“Well?” Conant pressed.
“They need the gadget in England, as soon as we can get it there. We aren’t going to have time to do the Trinity test—the first test will be the first time it’s used.”
“That’s ridiculous! You can’t be serious! Impossible!” The objections, not surprisingly, came from all corners of the lab, enough of a hubbub that more people gathered in the hall outside the door.
“The shaped charges need more design, more testing!” protested Conant loudly. “We don’t even know if we can make them work.”
“They have to work,” Oppenheimer said coolly. “It might be impossible—there are days when it seems this whole damned project is impossible! But we all joined this operation to help our country win the war. Now, by God, it looks like we have the chance to do just that.”
3 JULY 1945
CCA, POTSDAM, GERMANY, 0550 HOURS GMT
It was after dawn before the final medical jeep pulled away, hauling the last of the wounded toward Third Army hospital. The dead, more than two hundred of them, had been claimed by the graves registration section. Ballard, for his part, had spent the last half of the night ensuring that the CCA positions that had been smashed during the barrage were patched together, reinforced if possible. Wakefield had sent up a company each of tank and infantry from CCB, and the colonel had integrated these into his defensive position.
That position had been in a relatively pastoral neighborhood, even after the Americans had moved in and made necessary defensive improvements, piling barricades, clearing fields of fire, and so forth. For three months they had stayed here among gardens, verdant trees, and clear reflecting pools. Following the barrage, the place had become a moonscape of rubble. None of the buildings were intact, though a few walls still stood, as well as many chimneys. Everything was coated with dust, and any standing water had been rendered into mud.
But those buildings, the shells of them that remained, had saved the lives of a lot of his men. If they had been in foxholes or trenches in the open, he couldn’t imagine how many would have perished. As it was, two hundred killed out of four thousand was not terrible. Amazingly enough, only two tanks had been destroyed by the Soviet shelling, each by a direct hit. More than a score had broken treads or other damage, but by dawn feverishly working mechanics had repaired all of these.
Now, as Ballard made his way back to HQ, he looked at the brightening sky. During the previous day, the men of the Nineteenth Armored had cheered each successive wave of air strikes, thanking God and the flyboys for the respite from the shelling. He still couldn’t quite believe that the guns had fallen silent like that, but it was not something he was inclined to question very much.
As the quiet continued through the long night, he found himself hoping that it had just been a crazy mistake, some fluke, not the start of another great war. It was a bad memory, certainly, and the reminders lay in the ruined landscape all around.
“Halt! Oh, sorry, Colonel.” Ballard looked up to see one of the new guys, a green private from CCB, hunkered down in the rubble and pointing a rifle at him. Nervously the man turned his weapon away, while the colonel saw two of his comrades in the shadows nearby.
“No need to apologize—it’s good to be alert.”
He felt sorry for these fellows, knew they had just come over to Europe in time to get surrounded by the Russians. He told them to be careful, to keep their heads down, and to do what the veterans did.
Then he crossed his fingers, and suggested that they dig their foxholes a little deeper.
4 JULY 1945
HQ, FIRST BELORUSSIAN FRONT, ORANIENBURG, GERMANY, 0952 HOURS GMT
Marshal Zhukov seemed to be in a foul mood, an ugly enough mood that even his most loyal aides were afraid to go near him. Colonel Krigoff would have given anything to huddle with the aides, several rooms away from the great general, but he couldn’t do that.
He, in fact, had been summoned to see the marshal in person.
He entered the office and saluted, waiting while the marshal finished a very leisurely read of some loose papers. Finally, Zhukov looked up, studied Krigoff’s face for a minute, then allowed his gaze to slowly trail down the intelligence officer’s body. Krigoff felt as though he was being measured for a coffin.
“Colonel Krigoff.” The marshal sounded very tired, or very bored.
“Yes, Comrade Marshal Zhukov! Reporting as ordered, sir!”
“Do I understand that it was you who claimed the Americans were attacking, in the Potsdam sector three days ago?”
“Comrade Marshal, I can understand how my observations were misconstrued at army headquarters. Many airplanes were crashing in the area, and when I made this report, it was interpreted to mean that … er … I had observed enemy tanks in movement. I apologize for the error.”
Krigoff didn’t know if the NKVD was waiting outside the headquarters to take him away right now, or if Zhukov had some more imaginative punishment in mind. The colonel’s knees felt weak, but he forced himself to stand straight and still. He was a dead man, he knew, awaiting only the means of his execution. For some reason, the knowledge left him strangely numb; he was surprised that his career had come to this, and still not sure how it had happened.
“It occurs to me that this might be an opportunity, a unique, and historical, opportunity,” the marshal said slowly, pensively.
Of all the things Krigoff expected Zhukov to say, that one didn’t even make the list. Still, he allowed himself to see a faint, wonderfully shimmering, thread of hope.
“I am afraid I do not understand, Comrade Marshal.”
“It is not necessary for you to understand, Comrade Colonel. It is enough for you to know that, as of nightfall tonight, I shall order the bombardment to resume. The bombardment that was commenced because of your erroneous assertion.”
“Yes, Comrade Marshal, of course.” What did this mean?
“I have grown tired of this waiting game. We are in need of a resolution, and I am going to use you, Colonel Krigoff, to bring this about. We have resumed our bombardment in the night. This morning, the Americans will undoubtedly strike back with their tactical air forces. It so happens that our direct line of communications with SHAEF remains out—it will not be repaired, until I give the order.
“And when the American air forces come down on us again, I shall commence a general attack, around the entire perimeter of Berlin. We will not rest until every block, every building, every stone of that city is under our control. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Comrade Marshal!” Krigoff lied. How was he responsible for this?
“If the attack succeeds, and I believe it will, then there will be plenty of glory to go around. But if it fails …”
Suddenly the colonel of intelligence saw, with incredible clarity, the role he was to play.
“If it fails,” Zhukov repeated, “then all the world shall know that the attack was only a little mistake.
“A mistake, Colonel Krigoff, made by you.”
LOS ALAMOS, NEW MEXICO, USA, 2340 HOURS GMT
“Be careful with that!” General Groves snapped, as one of the men slipped on a stairway and almost dropped the toolbox he was carrying.
“Why don’t you come outside, General?” said Robert Oppenheimer delicately. “I think we’re just in the way, here.” The director of the lab took the portly general by the arm and casually escorted him out of the hall and into the summer evening. The stars were brilliant, as they so often were atop this mesa, but neither of these men had any interest, tonight, in the view.
“I don’t like this, sending it off without a test,” Oppenheimer noted for approximately the two hundredth time.
“Me
neither,” Groves conceded. “But we don’t have a—hey, watch that ramp! Dammit, you’re going to roll it right onto its side!” Oppie trailed along, sighing in exasperation.
The general started toward the trucks, berating the forklift operator and everyone else who was in range. Sometimes a job could only get done right with direct supervision, and this seemed to be one of those times.
Finally, the components of the gadget were loaded into the three different trucks. One contained the plutonium core itself, the small lump of strange new metal that might—might—be compelled into a chain reaction by the right combination of pressures. The second truck contained a natural uranium tamper, a larger shell into which the core would be embedded. The third component, in the last truck, was the means of applying the pressure that might just cause the core to explode. This was a larger sphere of explosive, type Composition B, designed to be wrapped around the plutonium core. The theory was that this shaped charge would be so precise that it would compress the mass of the plutonium core enough to cause it to go critical—that is, to start a chain reaction that would result in the instantaneous release of God only knew how much energy. Of course, it had never been tried before, so they couldn’t know for sure if it would work.
Finally the loads were packed, and cinched down, and inspected. A dozen jeeps and cars started out in advance of the truck convoy—they would lead the caravan all the way to Wendover, a ten- or twelve-hour drive—and another group of light vehicles would follow along behind. Groves, of course, would ride in the first truck.
“All right—I want two hundred feet between each truck. And we don’t go faster than forty-five, got it? Everybody ready?”
Fox at the Front (Fox on the Rhine) Page 62