“No fear hyar, of them leaving him in captivity.”
“Tvardovskiy is probably pleased. Even the Fascists have valued Terkin highly,” Lusto remarked.
“And they wrote the same way as it’s written in our papers.”
“What do you mean ‘the same way’?”
“Their verses are very much like Tvardovskiy’s. As if he’d written it.”
“Alike? They belong in the oven!” I threw the leaflet into the fire. “Only the Black Hundreds used to yell this way, about the Jews, as the Fascists have written. They were a right wing nationalist-antisemite organisation in pre-revolutionary Russia, and Terkin would have never have written like that.”
All agreed with him. Everybody remembered the Terkin we had been used to during the years of war. That Terkin had never, under any circumstances, lost his sense of humour, or his confidence in himself and his friends. He’d never been rude. And the main thing was, it had been always sensed that he was our fellow Soviet to the marrow of his bones. Such a guy wouldn’t have become the Fascists’ henchman.
“And what else has Fritz hyar been writing?” Arkhipenko squatted down near the pile of leaflets so rapidly that it seemed to me that I heard the rustle of his raglan’s leather coming apart. “Here’s more about Terkin… And here…” It was described, with the conscientiousness of a dullard, how Terkin ate kasha, i.e. porridge, in captivity, as he glorified Hitler’s Army, ‘the new order’, as he agitated among the prisoners. These ‘verses’ caused only laughter.
We were even more amused by leaflets with statements that, the “valiant German army will never allow the Bolsheviks beyond the Dniepr,” that it would “muster forces at this line and will begin to advance again… Straight to the Urals!” “See! They want it all, don’t they?” Lusto laughed and a row of white straight teeth flashed in his weather-beaten face, typical of most flyers. “And they themselves are probably wondering where they can scarper furthest!” Korolev added.
“Well, anyway, they’ve had a bright idea with Terkin.” Bourgonov, who’d been silent for a long while, developed the idea previously expressed by Korolev. “Why do you think so, Gipsy? What’s so smart hyar? Who’s going to believe it?” Even we seemed to believe it in the first instance. The main thing is, it was all of a sudden. Terkin had vanished from our papers. The Fascists didn’t need him dead. But in captivity it is a different story. Someone might believe it. And if even Terkin had surrendered, it’s something to think about.
The days passed. There was fighting on land and in the air. South, south-west and west of Kirovograd our ground troops had encountered stiff German resistance, and had to consolidate their grip on the lines they had pushed out to. But the right wing of the 2nd Ukrainian Front was successfully advancing. In January, apart from Kirovograd, the towns of Lebedin, Shpola and Smela were liberated. On 29 January, parts of the Front joined with the troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front, near Zvenigorodka. Thus ‘POW Terkin’ hadn’t helped the Germans. On the contrary, they’d found themselves in a new pocket, later called Korsun-Shevchenkovskiy, and the Urals receded even further from them.
The advance occurred in the most difficult conditions of the wintertime, the Ukrainian rasputitsa, i.e. the season of road impassability. Plentiful snowfalls were alternating with strong thaws. Roads and fields were turning into a thick sticky quagmire. Motorcars and even tanks were getting stuck in the mud. The local population was mobilised to transport artillery ammunition, and in those days one could hear the following, “I’ve shifted two poods of shells to…” and then a place wherethesetwo poods had been delivered, by him or her, was indicated. The pood is a Russian measure of weight of about 16 kilograms.
It got hard for the fighter aviation too. It was the only aerodrome with a concrete airstrip on this sector of the front. Other airfields had softened up and become unusable. All the load of battle missions lay first on only one regiment, which was far from being fully staffed and equipped. We had to fly for distances difficult for fighter planes, and in complicated meteorological conditions. There were not enough planes and flyers for permanent patrols in large groups. We had to fly in pairs, or at best, in quartets. Apart from cover flights for the ground troops, the flyers were also on full battle alert, so as to beat off any possible Fascist bombing raid on the aerodrome or Kirovograd.
Time dragged on tediously slowly during the full-alert watches. A wet chill had sneaked into the cockpit long ago. I slipped under the jacket that I’d thrown over my parachute straps, so as to make it easy to chuck it out of the cockpit at any time. I was shivering and looking at my watch every minute. Would they relieve me soon? No… another half hour.
Some planes from the second squadron appeared over the aerodrome.
“Why three? They flew off as a quartet…”
“Kolya, go to the Second, and ask what’s happened. You see one’s not back…”
“No, I can’t, comrade commander. Lots of engineers from Moscow are around the place and all of them with papakhas.” I remember the papakha as a cylindrical winter military hat made of a special sort of sheep fur, astrakhan, that was commonly worn by high-rank officers in the Soviet Army. “They out-rank me! Just try leaving your spot, I’ll catch it good, and some of it’ll land on you! And all our guys have gone to have lunch.”
“Alright.” I looked at my watch. “Twenty five minutes left.”
I didn’t have to wait that long. Soon a shortish sturdy girl, with a round pleasant face, an armourer from the second squadron, turned up on the taxi path.
“I guess probably Molchanova knows what’s happened there.” I motioned towards her and called, “Shura! Come here!”
Molchanova ran up to the plane. “At your service, Comrade Guards Sub-Lieutenant!” I’d been given the Guards status for the first aerial victory.
“Who hasn’t come back there? Was there a fight? Climb up here, on the wing!”
Shura climbed up on the wing. “Gorbunov was shot down…”
I immediately imagined Gorbunov as he had been. Medium-tall, phlegmatic, he’d never been in a hurry. There were times when all the other flyers were in a vehicle, urging him on with shouts, the driver was even taking off gradually, and he would be waddling along with no intention of quickening his pace… He’d been through the fighting at Kursk, on the Dniepr, in December 1943, and now look… Molchanova kept talking, “Nikiforov, the quartet leader, said his plane caught fire, the engine began to play up, but he kept fighting. They were already on the way home, after the fight, and he was going lower and lower. There was about a hundred metres of height left, the plane turned over, crashed into the ground and exploded…”
Apparently the rudder rods had burned out… And why was he hanging on? He was over his own territory and he should have bailed out before… He had a forced landing on German territory once, but came back in a day, and here it was our land…
12
The German Communists
When Korolev and I entered the dug-out, Captain Ulyanov was sitting among the squadron officers. Well, the Regimental Party Leader had come to talk to the flyers, heart-to-heart, to pass on the latest news, to seek advice from the Communists how to organise his work better. And maybe he had come to have some fun, to laugh at the simple jokes of young people. It was a common thing to do. But why did he glance at the new arrivals so gloomily, and immediately turn towards the Squadron Party Leader, Arkhipenko?
“Well, we’re all here, tell us, Ulyanov.”
“Nothing good to tell. We’ve been feeling sorry for Chugunov. We haven’t taken him in hand properly. And I haven’t really been talking to him much. And I was relying on you. We have all been on different aerodromes. He’s been on one, I’ve been on another. Who would have helped him but you, the communists, his comrades? And you, Mariinskiy, have been accepted as a candidate. You know yourself, what kind of condition we are in. And you have to work, to worry about your mate!”
“What could I have done? The Commander, Korolev, has spoken to him many a time. W
hat do you expect from me?”
“But what’s happened, really?” Victor interrupted me. “He’s in Nikiforovka, isn’t he?”
“That’s the thing. He stayed there, got passionate towards an orderly from sickbay, but she didn’t accept his hot pretensions. It looks like he’d got into a frenzy, and emptied his pistol into her stomach.”
“He’s a beast not a man.”
“What kind of beast?” Ulyanov was surprised.
“Variegated”, Victor explained his idea. “He’s a chicken in the air and a lion on the ground!
“What’s going to happen hyar now?”
“What’s going to happen?” The Party Leader repeated the question. “We’ve let it slip. It’s too late to think about it. His case has been sent to the courts martial. Most likely he’ll be sent to a penal battalion. Eh, we didn’t put him in his place in time.”
“Why feel sorry for him? We should have sent this Aeneas away long ago.”
“We should have. No. It’s not right, Korolev. Maybe he stooped to this stuff because you’d given up on him straight away, didn’t help him out. We’re all guilty, we have a sin to answer for.”
No more fighting occurred that day. The Fascists obviously didn’t consider it necessary to cover their surrounded troops. Strictly speaking, they’d never been covering their ground troops. The German aviation might not appear over the front line, for two or three hours, but then a large group of bombers and fighters might arrive. This way, they would try to build up aerial superiority over the front line, at least for a short period of time. And their transport aviation preferred the worst kind of weather, when it would be feasible to sneak into the pocket unnoticed. Then they’d bring up ammunition and crosses, to evacuate generals and senior officers under cover of low cloud, thick haze or snowfall. On one of these foul days, Gulayev came across a Ju-52, a three-engine transport plane. Of course the Junkers didn’t go any further, and stayed on the spot where they met. But the Fascist transport aviation would stay on the ground in fine weather.
By evening, the continuous roaring of engines on the ground, the hum of aircraft that had begun with the dawn over the aerodrome, had begun to quieten down. By that time, nearly the whole of the fighter and bomber aviation of the Front had moved down. The sun went down and the skies turned to grey immediately. There was nothing else to do at the parking bay for us.
“Zhen’ka, let’s go to the mess-room!”
“Let’s go. But I have to pick up my jackboots first. He promised they’d be fixed today.” My kersey jackboots, supplied to me in early April 1941, when I entered the flying school, had fallen out of action back in the Reserve Regiment in Ivanovo. Back then, in the Reserve Regiment, my military shirt got rotten and came unravelled, so I used to get by only in a flight jumper made of camel wool, and had to tie up the jackboot heels with wire. There were no uniforms in the flying school. Looking like that, with the jumper and boot-legs, I left for the front with the 27th Fighter Regiment. I was provided with a shirt in Voronezh where we were initially based, but no jackboots were available. Then the skilled Regimental boot-maker sewed up tarpaulin jackboots for me, out of a parachute bag, using the heels from my old disintegrated kersey jackboots. These tarpaulin jackboots were very comfortable, light, sewn just for my feet. They had a single but important drawback. I could wear them only in dry weather. That’s why when the season of mud and slush had begun at the Zelenoye aerodrome, I had to stay at home for two days, for I couldn’t even leave the hut the squadron was lodged in. And it was hard to expect that it would dry up soon. Although the sun shone, in the winter it couldn’t triumph over the Ukrainian road slush too soon, when abundant snowfalls and drizzling rain had turned the ground into impassable mud more than half a metre deep.
Suddenly on the second day Chugunov came into the hut. “Here! Arkhipenko ordered me to pass you my jackboots, as there is nobody to fly!” Chugunov took off his jackboots. Why didn’t they take him, Chugunov, into the group, whilst there is nobody to fly? I thought. But an order is an order. I put on Chugunov’s jackboots, which turned out to be of size forty odd or, say, three sizes bigger than my feet needed.
With difficulty, dragging the jackboots, which were striving to fall off my feet, out of the stale chernozem, i.e. black humus top-soil, I got to the aerodrome. Nobody was going to send a vehicle to pick me up, but the distance was only two or three kilometres. It would have been a trifle on a dry road, but across the mud, and in such jackboots, it seemed at least twenty.
“You’re here!” Arkhipenko met me in the dug-out. “But the sortie’s been cancelled.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’ll stay here with you. I’ll ride back with everybody else. I may not be able to make it back on foot in these irons, or I’ll leave them in the mud and get back barefoot.”
“Alright. Relax for now.” The squadron commander agreed. And then added, “You know, a serious sortie to Znamenka had been planned, but no one wanted to fly with Chugunov, and I had to call you up.” “I understand that. But Chugunov needs to smell gunpowder one day!”
“He does! But not here, not in such small groups. He will do in one flight more harm than a dozen ‘skinnies’. You wait, and we’ll make him fight!”
Not a lot of time had passed since then, but much water had flowed under the bridge. The combat-ready remnants of the Regiment had moved to Kirovograd, but Chugunov had stayed at the old aerodrome to fly a fighter plane fixed up after repairs to Kirovograd. I was not worried about what he wore on his feet back there. It seemed to me it was fur-lined winter flying boots. I continued to sport his jackboots.
However, the guys from the ground service battalion had procured some leather and I was supplied with some of it. The same craftsman who had sewn tarpaulin jackboots for me before, had already been working with it for two days. I wanted to get the new ones quickly, and to be ‘like other people’. With the available boots, I had no chance to have a walkabout or to go dancing. During the times of mud and slush in Nikiforovka, Molchanova had invited me, several times, for a walk in the evening, but I kept refusing due to such a prosaic reason as a lack of jackboots. Then the invitations ended. I found out somehow that she was being courted by a mechanic from the second squadron. And she was returning the favour. However, good relations between us remained, although she had begun to call me very formally, “Comrade Guards Sub-Lieutenant,” instead of a friendly “Zhenya”.
The boot-maker came up to my plane one day when I was sitting battle-ready in the cockpit.
“Comrade Commander! Come to my place tonight and try the jackboots on. They’re ready!”
“Thanks! I will! Where are you based?”
“The first house where the barracks are, I’ve got a room up on the fourth floor there.”
There were five, five-storey brick buildings, on the edge of the aerodrome. Apparently they had been built at the same time as the concrete airstrip, and had been allocated to the Air Force personnel based on the aerodrome. Fortunately, neither our troops during the retreat, nor the Germans, had blown them up. There were headquarters, the barracks of the junior technical personnel, mess-rooms and warehouses for the ground service battalion. The officers were lodged in a large suburb of Kirovograd, neighbouring the aerodrome.
“You won’t be long up there, will you? I’ll tell them to serve for you as well,” Victor said when we came up to a doorway of one of the few intact four-storey houses of the military block.
“I’ll try on the jackboots, grab them and go down.”
“Be quick!” Victor pushed the door and went into the mess-room and I began to walk up the stairs to the fourth floor. The junior technicians’ barracks was there. When entering the room I heard the tedious whining hum of Fascist bomber engines.
“Ah, Comrade Sub-Lieutenant! Sit down, I’m just finishing.” The boot-maker was sitting on a bench at a low table, on which a ‘Katyusha’ was burning. Leather cuttings, skeins of thread, knives, hammers, boot-trees, and nails were scattered, and he was ham
mering the last tacks into the heel of the right jackboot. “Try the left one, and I’ll finish this one.” He took out a jackboot from under the table and passed it to me.
I shifted a stool closer to the fire, unbuttoned my jacket to make it easier to bend down, and examined the jackboot carefully. Sewn out of soft Russia-leather, it looked like chrome, and had it all over the standard army-issue kersey ones worn by all the flyers. “Well, now we’re alright!” I smiled to myself and sat down.
It was a matter of a minute to throw off the hated fur-boot, to bind my foot, and to pull on the new one. I stood up, stamped my foot and even smacked my lips with pleasure, for the jackboot fitted my foot like a glove. “How is it?” The boot-maker raised his head and looked at my feet.
“Goo-…” Ka-boom, ka-boom, ka-boom! The rumble of the first explosions, coming from the nearby plane parking-bays, cut me off in mid-stream. Then everything merged. The thunder of one explosion rolled over another. Somewhere nearby anti-aircraft guns were barking ‘yap-yap-yap’. All this was intermixed with the jingling of broken glass, and people’s cries coming from behind the window tightly curtained by a blanket. The walls of the house were moving as if in an earthquake. And the boot-maker’s perplexed voice sounded very mundanely amidst this cacophony. “They’re bombing us,” he whispered, as if he wanted to say, “Not enough nails…” and rushed to the exit.
“Where are you going? You won’t make it anyway!” I shouted, but he was off and away.
I wrapped a binding around my other foot and pulled on the right jackboot. Some more explosions resounded. The bombs were falling further away, closer to the centre of the aerodrome. Obviously they were pounding us with heavy bombs, heavier than ‘two-fifties’. I’d heard the explosions of smaller ones before, but these were much more powerful. There was no point thinking about it. With both jackboots on, I walked downstairs, and went out of the house. Staff officers crowded near the doorway, discussing the raid. But it had already ended, and the Heinkels were leaving westwards. It was quickly becoming dark, and there was no point going to the aerodrome to see the raid results. Besides, all the flyers had moved one after another to the mess-room for dinner. After dinner, the whole first squadron headed back to its base. The hut it was billeted in was about two hundred metres from the house in which I had just been, and had changed my boots.
Red Star Airacobra Page 14