by Wilbur Smith
A giant grain elevator stood in the heart of the city like a massive rock outcrop rising from a grassy plain. The first wave of Luftwaffe bombers had used it as a beacon, guiding them in toward their targets approaching Stalingrad. There had been virtually no opposition, but three years of almost continuous action had taught Gerhard how, in times like this, the greatest danger was complacency.
Gerhard got on the radio and reminded his men, “Stay alert. You never know with these Ivans. It could be a trap.”
“Well, if they’re hiding, they must have magic blue paint,” replied Berti Schrumpp. “There’s perfect visibility and no Ivans anywhere. Maybe they’ve given up.”
Gerhard’s former wingman had been promoted to the command of one of the squadron’s three flights. He was also the squadron’s licensed jester. None of the other men could get away with talking to their leader like that.
“Keep your eyes open anyway,” Gerhard insisted. “Don’t ever relax. That’s how you get killed.” He looked ahead, narrowing his eyes as they strained toward the east. The sky was dark up ahead, the blue smudged with black and gray. “Looks like storm clouds on the horizon,” he said. “Plenty of room for Ivans to hide in there.”
Gerhard’s voice was stern, but he could hardly blame Berti. Over the past couple of months, the Wehrmacht’s panzers had advanced flat-out across Ukraine and into the Crimea and the Caucasus, only slowing when their fuel supplies could not keep up with them. Countless more casualties had been added to the millions of Russian soldiers captured or killed trying to hold back the invasion of their motherland. Now the Führer and his senior generals felt certain that the Red Army had no more reserves left.
And then Gerhard heard Berti’s voice in his ears again, a gasp of wonder: “God in heaven . . . Look at that!”
The darkness in the midday sky did not come from thunderclouds, but from smoke, a thick black pall of it, hanging over Stalingrad.
The city had only been hit by the first wave of bombers. Gerhard was escorting the second, with a third and fourth to follow. And this was just the first of three days of mass attacks.
Stalingrad was about to be obliterated, its people and buildings wiped from the earth. Gerhard couldn’t imagine how anything could survive down there. And once Stalingrad was gone, how long could Russia itself stand?
“This is the end,” Berti said, as if echoing Gerhard’s thoughts. “The Ivans can’t take much more of this, surely?”
•••
Most of the men of fighting age had gone away to the front, so the women and children of Stalingrad had been called up to prepare the city for the coming battle. That spring, Yulia and Maria had been in a meeting of their Komsomol, or Young Communist League group, when a party official came to address them. He stood in battledress, tall and handsome, with his chest covered in medal ribbons, and the empty left sleeve of his jacket folded and pinned against his shoulders.
“Comrades,” he began. “Young, proud, Leninist women of Stalingrad,” and those words alone had thrilled the girls. To think that such a hero thought of them as his comrades!
“I have one question for you . . . Do you want to defend the Motherland?”
“Yes!” a single girl had shrieked.
And then they all joined in: “Yes, yes, yes!”
That evening, Yulia, Maria and their group of close friends signed up for duty in the city’s anti-aircraft batteries. They had no idea what they were letting themselves in for: no idea of what kind of guns they would be firing, or how they were operated.
They soon learned.
The girls worked at the Stalingrad tractor factory, whose production lines churned out tanks instead of agricultural machinery. Between shifts they were instructed, drilled and trained, day and night in the operation of a 52-K air-defense gun. Yulia, who possessed a sharp eye and a quick, mathematical mind, was chosen to be the gun-aimer. Maria, who was taller and broad-shouldered, formed part of the human chain that kept the heavy shells moving from the ammunition store to the gun.
Now, barely two months after they had first set eyes on an anti-aircraft gun, they were firing it in anger. Their battery was stationed in a gun emplacement on the northwest perimeter of the tractor factory. The huge complex was one of the fascists’ key targets and the attacks on it were relentless.
Stukas plummeted almost vertically from the sky like furious black crows diving for scraps of food, traveling at such a speed that the heavy 85mm gun could not track them. Their banshee screams had terrified Yulia as much as the impacts of the bombs. Meanwhile, the heavier bombers, rank upon rank of them, droned across the city.
An instant later, the bombs tipped from the fuselage and dropped faster and faster as gravity took hold. That massed sprint of explosives toward the earth had been as overwhelming as the howl of the Stukas at the start of the day, but now Yulia thought of nothing but the aircraft in her sights, their height and course, and what had to be done to hit them.
She was a speck of defiance, like a scurrying cockroach in the rubble of the most ferocious air assault the Motherland had ever seen.
Maria, meanwhile, was now no more than a human machine, repeating the same routine, hefting the shells passed down the line, over and over. To begin with, the fear had energized her, but as she became inured to terror she was vulnerable to exhaustion. Later still, she felt as though she had separated from her body. Her mind was elsewhere, while the muscles and joints of her back, arms and legs were screaming with pain; fatigue had disappeared, and death itself might just as well be another state of mind.
Hour by hour the air became more foul with smoke and dust. The girls tied bandanas around their mouths and noses to make it easier to breathe. They were coated with sweat and grime until they resembled coal miners deep underground. In the brief gaps between waves of bombers, they were given water to drink and hunks of black bread to eat. Only when they stopped to consume these meager provisions did they notice how parched their mouths had become, or the way that hunger was clawing at their empty bellies.
Their officer was a junior lieutenant, a young man called Morisov, who was barely older than them. He would shout encouragement at the crews under his command when the guns were firing at a good, fast rate and scream abuse when they slackened. At some point in the early afternoon, he produced a vodka bottle for them all to share, and stimulant pills that he promised would give them fresh energy and courage.
The pills worked. When the next attack began, the girls set out with renewed determination. Everything was faster, from the traversing of the barrel to the transport of the shells. Then they saw a new danger: German fighter planes, a swarm of them, peeling from their formation and hurtling down toward them.
•••
Fighter pilots hated ground-attack missions. The earth was their enemy: to dive toward it went against all their instincts. Up on high they could dodge, weave and spin their way out of trouble. But a ground-attack required a steady course toward the target, never wavering from the onslaught of the guns below, all pointing in their direction.
Gerhard’s squadron had been ordered to protect the bombers they were escorting. There was no danger from the air: for all his warnings, there were still no Russian aircraft in the sky over Stalingrad. Down below, however, many of the anti-aircraft batteries had survived the Stukas’ assaults and their aim was getting better all the time. One bomber after another was dropping from the sky. His duty was clear.
His squadron was flying over the industrial district to the north of the city. He saw a cluster of guns massed on the perimeter of one of the giant factory complexes. The air above them was thick with the black pom-poms of exploding shells.
Gerhard spoke into his radio: “Prepare for ground attack. The targets are the gun emplacements by the factory, two o’clock, low. Attack in flights of four, left echelon formation.”
The twelve aircraft rearranged themselves into the three diagonal lines, each with the flight commander in the top right-hand position.
/> “Ready?” Gerhard asked. He waited less than five seconds to receive a positive reply, then called out the German hunter’s cry, “Horido!” and banked hard right, peeling away from the other planes and diving toward the blazing inferno of Stalingrad.
The Messerschmitts dropped almost five thousand meters from the sky, till they were scraping the roofs of Stalingrad’s tallest buildings. Then Gerhard flattened out, took his bearings from the bomb-battered silhouette of the factory, adjusted his course a fraction and raced toward the guns.
Beneath his wings he saw the ruination the bombers had inflicted: a cityscape of craters, hollowed-out buildings and obstructed roads. Each crater would provide a soldier with a place to take cover. Another, smaller factory flashed past that must have been constructed from glass and steel. The glass was there no longer, but the steel pillars, girders, struts and window frames lay in a great expanse of twisted, contorted, interwoven metal.
No man could possibly clamber over those ruins, he thought. No tank could smash its way through them. The craters and broken buildings were like an assault course within which any number of defenders could take cover.
My God, what if we haven’t destroyed Stalingrad? What if we’ve made it impregnable?
Gerhard had almost reached the battery. The guns had been depressed so that they were firing directly at the oncoming fighters, like cannons blasting at charging cavalry. He was close enough to see their crews. They were women.
Luftwaffe pilots had long since become accustomed to attacking Russian aircraft operated by female pilots and gunners. But that didn’t stop them finding it abhorrent and unnatural. Every instinct told them that war was a man’s business, that women’s role was to create life, not take it. But the Russian Front had no time for sentiment. It was a brutal, implacable slaughterhouse in which one was either the butcher or the meat.
Gerhard tightened his jaw and banished his scruples. His plane was armed with three MG/FF cannons, firing high explosive 20mm rounds that could tear an enemy aircraft apart. The stationary anti-aircraft guns and their unprotected crews were far easier targets. Gerhard pushed down on the trigger button and saw three lines of explosive impacts hit the ground ahead of him, like sewing needles punching into fabric, heading straight toward the nearest gun.
•••
The girls were screaming, but Yulia couldn’t hear them for the hammering of the German guns and the roar of aero-engines so close overhead that she felt as though she could reach up and touch the bellies of the fighters that were wreaking such havoc on the gun emplacements.
She saw a girl blown in two, her legs ripped from her torso by the force of the bullets. Another was picked up and flung against a wall five meters behind her. The havoc around her was worse than anything the Stukas had inflicted.
Yulia kept her nerve. She knew she would only have time for one shot and she was determined to make it count. The fascists had to pay a price for their murderous invasion. She waited until the barrel of her gun was fully depressed and her gun sights were filled by one of the leading aircraft in the fascists’ formation.
She fired.
Her shell obliterated the onrushing aircraft. Yulia threw herself to the ground as the blazing wreckage hurtled overhead and smashed against the side of the factory. She lay there as the rest of the aircraft completed their run.
Then, as quickly as they had arrived, the German aircraft were gone and the deafening noise of their attack was replaced by an eerie silence broken only by the cries and moans of the wounded. Yulia looked around for Maria, the fear rising in her belly as she failed to see her friend amidst the smoke, the dust, the wreckage and the fallen bodies. Then a figure emerged out of the murk. Her blonde hair was matted with blood, which had poured down her forehead and one side of her face.
“Maria!” Yulia screamed and ran to her friend, who was walking unsteadily, with a blank look on her face. The skin beneath the blood and grime on her face was chalk-white. Yulia ran to Maria and took her in her arms. She looked at her head and gently untangled her hair to reveal a deep cut across the crown of her head. At first glance it looked like a serious wound, but Yulia realized that the bone beneath the torn skin was unbroken. Maria was dazed, but she would survive.
Yulia heard Morisov’s voice. “You two, get back to your posts.”
The young lieutenant was rounding up the survivors and reassembling them into teams to man the two remaining guns.
“My friend is injured, Comrade Lieutenant. She needs medical treatment.”
“An orderly is seeing to the wounded,” Morisov replied. “He is dealing with the most serious cases first. He will attend to your friend when her turn comes. But for now, she can walk. Therefore she can fight.”
He walked up to Yulia and held out another one of his magic pills. “Give her this.”
The girls walked back to their gun, trying not to look at the bodies strewn in their path. Maria took her place in the shell-line. Yulia waited until the gun barrel had been elevated again and looked to the sky. Barely two minutes later another wave of enemy bombers appeared above their heads and the battle resumed once again.
•••
When they got back to Tazi, the pilots debriefed and headed to the mess to drink to the memory of the pilot who had been shot down in the attack on the anti-aircraft guns. Berti Schrumpp did his best to lighten the mood.
“My God those Russian men must be useless,” he scoffed. “There’s nothing their women can’t do better than them.”
“Maybe they’re cleverer than you think, sir,” a newly arrived junior pilot called Otto Braun had retorted. “They get their women to do all the dirty work.”
“He’s got you there, Berti,” Gerhard said.
“Ah, must be the wisdom of youth,” Schrumpp had conceded.
“Then there’s no need to worry, old man. That won’t last long around here.”
“True enough,” said Berti. “Take it from me, Braun, my boy, you’ll soon be a stupid, drunken old man, just like the rest of us . . . If you’re lucky.”
•••
The last of the bombers had departed. The sun was low in the sky. Yulia and Maria lay around the anti-aircraft gun with their surviving comrades, unmoving, barely conscious, seemingly no more alive than the corpses that were strewn across the tarmac all around them.
Morisov sat on the low wall that surrounded the emplacement, his head slumped on his chest, hardly able to keep his eyes open. He felt a vibration in the earth. It was not the distinct shock of an exploding bomb, so much as a persistent quivering. Then he heard the noise, that combination of a low, rumbling engine and the metallic clattering of steel tracks that even to a soldier who was still as green as the freshest spring grass could only mean one thing.
Tanks.
And they were coming closer.
Morisov caught the sound of small arms fire and hand grenades.
He reached for his helmet, then ran across to the gun, shouting, “Tanks! Tanks!”
The girls got to their feet, uncertain what to do next. They had been trained to fire their gun at aircraft. They had no idea what to do about armored vehicles.
Morisov, however, was a bright enough lad, even if he was just three weeks out of his service academy. He knew that the 85mm guns he commanded were essentially the same weapons that were mounted in the turrets of the T-34 tanks that were the Red Army’s most fearsome weapon. The T-34s could knock out any panzer the Germans had ever put on the battlefield. This gun could surely do the same.
“Depress the barrel!” he shouted at the girls. “Prepare to fire at ground level!”
The battery had been set up beside one corner of a crossroads. From where the girls were positioned, there was one road in front of them and two others to either side.
As the barrel of the 52-K slowly descended, like a clock-hand sweeping from twelve to three, Morisov examined the crossroads. Many of the buildings on all sides had been hit by bombs. Some were on fire, others destroyed, others
pock-marked. Debris, some in lumps of brick or concrete the size of large boulders, littered the street.
From behind him, the boy-officer heard shouts and running feet as a group of Red Army soldiers rushed by. One of them peeled off toward the emplacement.
Morisov saw that the running man was a captain. He leaped to attention.
“They’re coming from over there!” the captain shouted, pointing down the road in front of them. “You must knock out the enemy armor. Our lives depend upon it!”
Before Morisov could acknowledge the order, the captain was haring away across the crossroads. He caught up with his men and waved them toward the oncoming Germans.
All around, the sound of battle grew louder. Yulia was adjusting to the sensation of looking through sights that were pointing in a new direction. For the first time in hours she felt afraid. She was struck by a new fear that she might wet herself and be ashamed in front of her friends. She looked around and saw nothing but filthy faces and terrified eyes. Yulia was not alone. They all knew dread.
The clanking and rumbling was growing louder. The street ahead was filled with a mist of dust and cordite as the battle drew nearer. Then came men, Russians, fleeing down the road, taking up new positions, hiding in doorways, ducking behind piles of rubble, anywhere they could find cover.
As the noise of the tanks became ever more deafening, a long, thin barrel emerged from the filthy haze, and the broad, squat, brutally geometric form of a Panzer IV tank appeared, two more on either side, slightly behind it, advancing in an arrow formation.
German infantry, in their coal-scuttle helmets, were coming up behind the panzers. Red Army soldiers were throwing hand grenades at the tanks, but the explosions couldn’t stop their advance, which continued forward in a slow, grinding, unstoppable tide. There were machine guns mounted in the body of the tanks, beneath the turrets. They poked to one side and then the other, firing at any sign of Russian life.
Two terrified elderly women were hiding in a doorway. One of them was clutching a young child against her skirt. Yulia saw a machine gun point in their direction. She saw it pause, and then the mighty flickering at its barrel as it cut down the women and child like a sickle through corn.