Ilya slogs across and scrambles up the other side of the ditch. He continues to walk without a word. Misha leads the men splashing through.
They are two kilometers from their rear lines now, and the terrain has changed. Streams and canals dice their path. The blinking searchlights have finally gone off in this sector—some officer put his foot down or took a pistol and shot out a few.
The going grinds to a slow probe forward. Support tanks which have left the roads to accompany the infantry are stymied by the many obstacles and cuts in the plain. The soldiers who charged from their positions a half hour ago now have soaked trousers and mud-laden boots. They slip and tumble into invisible moats. The Germans have not used one shell to slow the advance, for the time being letting the earth do their work.
One by one, many of the tanks that can still move begin to desert the open field, hoping to find one of the few roads leading to Seelow. The men, walking blind into an obscured valley, slow their progress. Layer by layer, the advance bunches up.
Misha lays a hand across Ilya’s shoulder.
“Let’s wait till dawn, Ilyushka. We can’t see what we’re doing.”
“No.”
“Everyone else is stopping. We’re losing our tank support.”
“I know that.”
Without more comment Ilya continues to walk into the brothy night.
Misha overtakes him.
“They’ll follow you, Ilya. You know that too.”
“Yes. Aren’t they supposed to?”
“They’ll follow you and get killed. They’re not you, Ilya. I’m not you. There’s nothing ahead but Germans we can’t see. We’ll walk behind you right into their guns. You’ll keep walking and these men and maybe me will be lying dead behind you. Ilya, no. We’ve got to wait for sunup.”
Misha touches Ilya’s arm. Misha behaves lately as though Ilya will not hear him unless there is contact between them, as though words are not a strong enough bridge to where Ilya resides.
“Ilya. Can you wait?”
“All right, Misha.”
“The Germans will wait for you, I promise.”
Misha turns to lead him back to the platoon. He laughs over his shoulder.
“That’s because they don’t know you’re coming.”
Misha orders the men to take out their ground cloths and settle in. Dawn is two hours off.
Waiting for the sun, Ilya listens to the battle that is not taking place. All around in the dusty, pitch night, Red forces flounder in the muck and crisscrossing streams. On the leading edge where Ilya’s platoon waits, almost no forward progress is made; behind them the masses of men and machines wad up into an uncoordinated morass. The assault on Seelow has come unwound before the Germans have pulled one trigger anywhere on the plain.
At dawn the weather shows it will be a bright spring morning. Ilya stands on knees creaky from the damp. Men grunt when Misha prods them with his boot.
Ilya turns a full circle, surveying the situation on the Oderbruch. Six kilometers ahead, the Heights wait. The Germans there have a commanding view of the entire Red attack. They can pick their targets. In the near distance behind and beside him, Ilya spots those targets as easily as will the enemy: tanks, self-propelled artillery, and trucks clogging the roads, jammed at intersections, stuck in mud and streambeds. Infantry by the ten thousands are bunched behind them. Three-quarters of a million men and their machinery are trying to squeeze into this marshy valley. Ilya looks into the clearing sky. He sees himself with the clarity the German gunners can see him. With a jangle of weapons, he moves forward.
“Let’s go,” Misha shouts behind him. “Up, up, up!”
Within minutes the Germans on the Seelow Heights unleash their guns. The Oderbruch rocks again, but this time the shells fly into the Soviet lines. Ilya’s platoon forges ahead, just fifty men out of ten thousand in the van of the assault. Artillery rounds rocket past to strike at the mired bulk of the offensive behind them. The whooshing of shells overhead makes a hissing canopy, like trees rustling before a storm.
The ground here is drier, the sun is up, and the platoon makes better time. They draw some attention from the enemy, diving to the ground a dozen times from artillery potshots at them. They advance like this for another hour, walking while trying to discern from the scrubbing sounds overhead which shell is aimed at them. But the German guns are mostly occupied trading jabs with Soviet artillery and bombers. Ilya leads the men straight at Seelow.
They are stopped two kilometers from the slopes at the bank of a flooded canal.
“The Haupt Canal,” Misha says, displaying his ability to recall maps. Ilya looks up and down the length of the ditch, fifty meters wide. The swollen green water in it runs fast. Two hundred meters to the right there’s a stone bridge across. Another bridge is far to the left.
Ilya takes a step in the direction of the closer bridge. Another group of soldiers is already crossing it.
“Wait,” Misha says. “Ilya, no. Watch.”
In that moment the bridge is engulfed in a hail of fire and concussion. The squad on the bridge is dismembered and flung off the bridge.
“The Germans are going to have every one of these crossings pre-sighted,” Misha says. “What do you think, they’re going to let us walk right up to them?”
Below Ilya the canal water rushes by reddened. Bodies and bits float past as a warning to those downstream to stay off the bridge there too.
Shaking his head, Misha says, “We’ll have to wait for the engineers to bring up a crossing.”
Ilya looks back across the plain, and the tangle that is the Soviet offensive. The engineers will have a devil of a time getting up here through that.
Ilya sits with the platoon, facing the Oderbruch. The screech of shells going to and from the Heights is an awesome canopy overhead. The Germans try to knock out the Oder crossings where the main body of the Soviet army still masses, waiting to enter the fray. The enemy try also to create havoc in the ranks of Red troops making their way across the soggy plain or stuffing themselves onto the few roads. In return, Zhukov’s bombers and big guns must eliminate resistance on the Heights so his offensive can sweep onto the road and rail junctions in the town. Once Seelow falls, Zhukov can flank the other towns arranged along the Heights. Not until the long ridge is controlled can he aim for Berlin.
Another three hours pass before the engineers make their way to the canal. For that time Ilya’s platoon hugs the ground, ducking shells fired almost straight down on them from the Heights. The morning warms with the hoisting sun, the feeling on the back of Ilya’s neck is the same heat that came from the useless searchlights of the predawn launch. Misha rolls and smokes twenty cigarettes. Out on the Seelow plain there must be dead by the thousands, while the living push and shove to go nowhere under the German onslaught.
Finally a call comes to the men waiting near the canal: “We have a bridge!”
Ilya breaks into a run, forcing Misha and the rest to follow. He ignores the sound of his name hollered from Misha’s complaining lips. He speeds his pace.
The bridge is on pontoons, wide enough for five men at a time to cross. The engineers begin work on another span a hundred meters downstream. The German gunners have not found the range yet, shells burst wide on either side in the Haupt Canal.
Ilya and the platoon make their way across, crowding the backs of the men in front. The bridge will be down soon, he thinks, judging from the closing distance of the artillery’s misses.
But now he’s across. The next obstacle will be the Heights itself.
On this side there is nothing between the canal and the foot of the slopes but even ground. Ilya and the platoon run in a pack with the five thousand of their division. After several minutes they enter a field of tall winter wheat, green and silken against Ilya’s pumping knuckles. Another two hundred meters ahead the ground rises in a series of low but steep hills. Behind these hills is the point of a spire, a church, the town of Seelow.
The wheat
field erupts. Ilya dives, hitting the ground the second a volcano lifts the men at his right into the air and tears them apart. Misha screams to the platoon, ”Down, down!”
Ilya rises even before the wet clumps of men have landed around him. He yanks the strap of his submachine gun from his shoulder to put the gun in his hands. It will do him no good, the Germans are embedded in these hills with heavy field guns, well out of range of his weapon or any weapons they have with them on this side of the canal.
Ilya charges hard over the remaining open ground. He hits the slope of the Heights first.
His chest heaves. He bares his teeth. Ilya’s legs are still. There’s nothing for him to do. It will take more aerial bombardment, more artillery, more men and nightfall before Ilya can move up.
He slams a fist into the hillside. He must wait, again.
~ * ~
* * *
April 16, 1945, 0930 hours
With the Eighty-third Division, Ninth U.S. Army
In the Barby bridgehead, on the east shore
of the Elbe River
Germany
bandy watches the word spread in the bridgehead. he takes pictures of the men when it hits.
Mainly officers hear it off the radio. Late yesterday afternoon, Bandy shared a command bunker with three of them, all young college men, when Edward R. Murrow did a CBS broadcast. The correspondent described what he’d seen that morning at a place liberated by Patton’s Third Army, a place called Buchenwald. It was a death camp, so horrible that Murrow admitted to his audience that his report strained credulity. He begged his listeners to believe him. In a shaking voice, Murrow concluded by saying he wasn’t “the least bit sorry” if he offended anyone with his telling. “I was there,” he said.
The two captains and three lieutenants around the radio talked while Bandy took their pictures. Their faces were aghast, lost in wonderment at the brutality and scope of the crime. Officers tend to be the sort of men who need to talk when they hear these reports. Each one of them, and others Bandy has been with, turn to him when he lowers his camera. They get quiet; Bandy is older and they seem to look to him to do some talking, some explaining. He doesn’t. Then they pick it up and say, This is why we’re here, you see. This is why we have to win.
Out in the field Bandy sees the foot soldiers have a different reaction. They labor over shovels and pickaxes, digging defenses in the bridgehead. They drive trucks and unload supplies. They man forward trenches peering over barrels and sights. Not from radios but fellow soldiers do they hear tales of the ovens, vast piles of civilian bodies, poison showers, they hear about Patton vomiting at Ohrdruf, the liberation of Belsen by the British, the grim walk of Eisenhower himself through the camps. When the men are told, they stop. They bury their spades in the German dirt and lean on the handles. They pull up the parking brake of their vehicles and put both arms over the wheel while their buddy leans in the window and speaks. Most of them spit, saying usually not much more than Fucking Nazis. Jesus. Some add they hope they don’t liberate one of them places. Jesus. These American fighting men pause in their work, long enough. Then they get back to it.
Bandy sees that the insanity of the camps is too much for the troops to deal with right now. He records on film their eyes and set mouths while they lay this new knowledge next to the recent death of their President Roosevelt, with mental wreaths and markers they’ll revisit another time, when there’s less work to be done, less danger contemplated for the next few days. These men have always been resolved to win; the accounts—grim as they are—don’t make them more so. But Bandy’s camera catches them work a little faster, dig a bit harder. He figures it’s got to be for FDR and, sure, for the victims on the radio, just like it’s for their parents and sweethearts at home, for their buddies who aren’t here anymore and for the ones who are.
Bandy, too, spits. He’s seen war, aggregates of death, perhaps more than any one man in any army. But nothing he’s witnessed in his nine years as a combat photojournalist in two dozen lands compares in scale and savagery to these reports. Everyone knows the Germans have mistreated the Jews. There have been stories of labor camps, concentration camps. But genocide? Is this modern man’s idea of war?
Bandy is revolted. Worse—and this he hesitates to admit—he’s deeply disappointed.
He’s begun to feel the urge to fight. Today he wants to take a gun and shoot a German, shoot a bunch of them.
His compulsion has always been to observe, to record. For most of his adult life Bandy has digested violence and inhumanity, internalizing them first, then spitting them out through his pictures. How much more, he wonders, can he run through his system before he rots from the inside?
Bandy’s surrounded by thousands of weapons. Across the Elbe twenty thousand more rumble his way. Someone will hand him a gun when the shooting starts. It’ll be easy.
He knows he’s nearing his limit.
He has to get to Berlin.
It’s still about history, about taking the photos and getting the headlines. But now it’s more. He wants an end, and Berlin is where the end will be.
Bandy’s been given his own jeep by the Rag-Tag Circus. He spends his morning driving around the perimeter of the Barby bridgehead, shooting the men and their preparations. In the last twenty-four hours, this tenuous riverside position has become almost impregnable. The Eighty-third Division is powerful just by itself. Now, side by side with them on this shore of the Elbe are the Hell on Wheels boys of the Second Armored.
It sticks in their throats, but the Second Armored got beat to the Elbe by the Circus. Bandy turns his jeep around in the dust and heads to the riverbank, to take pictures of the massive division crossing their rivals’ Truman Bridge.
There’s been no shortage of gloating by the Circus. Their Barby bridgehead has held. Yesterday the Second made two manful tries to gain a foothold on this shore a few miles to the north. They were evicted by the Germans before they could get their pontoons strung together. The battalion holding the bridgehead was attacked by panzers, and without their own armor to counter were forced back across the Elbe. So far the enemy hasn’t attacked this Barby bridgehead. Bandy thinks the bridgehead is already too big and well defended. It’ll stand against anything the Germans bring.
The word among the troops is that as soon as the Second has reassembled on this side of the river, these two divisions of the Ninth U.S. will push shoulder to shoulder for Berlin. Overnight, a second bridge has been floated on the Elbe, and with the manpower available from other nearby divisions west of the river, the Americans can quickly assemble a strike force of fifty thousand well-supplied and heavily armed men. The mood in the expanding bridgehead is somber but electric. The sounds are diesel and determined. Bulldozers grade the river slope to flatten paths for the heavy trucks towing big field guns. Bandy’s been told that an advance patrol of the Eighty-third has already reached the town of Zerbst, just forty-five miles from Berlin. Ten miles east of this patrol is a big, fat, four-laned Autobahn aimed smack at Potsdam and Berlin. The American force gathering along the Elbe appears confident, organized, and unstoppable.
There’ve been reports that the Reds have started their assault. According to Allied radio they’re meeting stiff resistance all along the line, especially outside Seelow. No way, Bandy thinks, are the Germans going to lie down in front of the Russians. They’ll fight tooth and nail. But if Eisenhower lets these men of the Ninth push one last time, Bandy believes he can ride a jeep right into the middle of Berlin before the Reds get any traction. The Americans can cover their own fifty miles before the Russians can take their forty. Bandy’d lay that bet with anyone. By tomorrow evening, next day at the latest, he can be filing his pictures and captions from the enemy capital. The war will be over.
He pulls the jeep up on the riverbank. He takes out the Speed Graphic and a dozen film packets. Across the Truman Bridge and its cohort span, the Second is a slow-moving giant. As a barb, the impatient men of the Circus took one of the buses they c
onfiscated from Barby, painted it red with yellow flames at the wheel wells, and offered it to the Hell on Wheels division as a token to hurry them up. Bandy heard the rumor that the Second stuck a tank round in it.
Bandy catches images of GIs crowded onto the beds of half-tons and hanging like barnacles off of tanks. Passing his jeep at the foot of the bridge, they wave and shoot Churchill’s V for Victory. A lot of the soldiers shout, “Hi, Mom!” at his camera. The men and boys crossing the Elbe buoy Bandy’s spirits. The Second looks like a proper army division, without the mishmash of private vehicles the Eighty-third has pressed into service. Bandy admires the verve of the Rag-Tag Circus, but the sight of a classic armored column rumbling into Germany girded to the teeth is awesome. He finishes the last of his Speed Graphic film, then stows the camera. He sits in the jeep and waves back, watching the Hell on Wheels Division come.
The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] Page 42