Robert Conroy

by Red Inferno: 1945: A Novel

  “Who was here before us?”

  Ivan Latsis arrived and stood beside him. He was grinning at the sight. “I believe they were Siberians. I’ve heard about these Hitler Christmas Trees, but I’ve never seen one before.”

  Suslov had also heard of this particular atrocity. Some Red Army soldiers, almost always the Asian savages from places such as Siberia, had picked up the habit of murdering their victims after they were through with them and leaving them as macabre decorations on trees. A brigade of Siberians had passed through the day before, as his tank battalion had been taken out of line. This must have been the Siberians’ previous encampment.

  “God help us,” muttered Suslov.

  Latsis laughed bitterly and lit his own Lucky. “There is no God, or had you forgotten, Sergei Alexievich. Religion is the opiate of the people and we live to serve the state. You think this is horrible, don’t you? Do you want me to tell you again what the Germans did to my family?”

  Suslov did not want the story retold. “It doesn’t make this right.”

  Latsis sneered. “I can’t wait until the first American women get passed around and used as ornaments like these. The Yanks do have women in their hospitals and with their rear units, don’t they? They’ll squeal as well as the Germans when we get our hands on them.”

  “You would do this to Americans?” Martynov was shocked.

  “With pleasure,” Latsis answered. “They betrayed their true colors by becoming allies with the Germans. It was one thing for us to fight just them. That could have been an honorable war, if there is such a thing, but by making a treaty with the Nazis, they betrayed their true colors. They are as bad as the German scum.”

  They had been joined by the fourth member of their crew, Popov, the part-Asian loader. “We are wanted back at the tank.”

  “Why?” asked Suslov.

  Popov grimaced slightly. “The political officers want to give us another lecture.” At first Suslov had thought Popov was a spy for the NKVD, but he no longer did. He had proven too reliable.

  I can hardly wait, Suslov thought. Perhaps we should tell them to hold it in the shade of these trees. “Yes,” he said instead, “let us go and hear why we must win this war.”

  CHAPTER 15

  General Marshall accepted the cup of coffee from his subordinate and friend, Dwight Eisenhower. The two men were alone in Ike’s tent near Reims while Burke and a number of aides waited outside, chatting, smoking, and wondering what the great men were talking about.

  Marshall sipped his coffee. “I had planned to be here sooner, but it was necessary to travel circumspectly to avoid Red planes.”

  Ike smiled slightly. The danger from Russian planes had become a fact of life to those in the European theater, but was something new for someone coming over from the States. Marshall and his staff had also been delayed by the violent peace riots taking place in war-fatigued Britain. They were a clear message that their main ally, Britain, was no longer as reliable as she had been.

  Marshall refused an offer of more coffee. “Ike, what’s the latest on the ground war?”

  Ike lit another cigarette. “We are fighting them every inch of the way and making them pay. In a couple of days we’ll have to quit Brunswick and be back to the Leine River north of the Harz Mountains. The Reds are beginning to flank Montgomery.”

  “Can you hold them at the Leine?”

  “No.”

  The simple statement silenced both of them. Ike briefly explained that the Leine River was not a major obstacle. Even though there had been time to prepare defenses and fortifications, the river was not particularly wide or deep.

  “We can delay them,” said Ike, “but that’s about all.”

  Marshall sighed, accepting the fact. “You are still hoping to stop them at the Weser?”

  In some places the Weser, a wider and more formidable stretch of water, was only twenty-five or thirty miles west of the Leine. Neither man felt it would be long after the Russians forced the Leine that they would be on the banks of the Weser.

  Ike shrugged. “We will make a hell of an effort to stop them there. If that doesn’t work, it’ll be at the Rhine, which is about a hundred and fifty miles away from the Leine. If they cross the Rhine, well, they won’t have much left in the way of natural obstacles to stop them before Antwerp, or much left of Germany for that matter. It’ll have to be flesh and blood that stops them, not rivers.”

  Both men paused and pondered the potential cost.

  “Get me more troops,” Ike said simply.

  “Not likely,” said Marshall. “The only available force is Clark’s Fifth Army in Italy, and it was stripped and nearly cut in half to support the campaign in France. The Fifth is a mere shell of itself and cannot supply the reinforcements you need, especially since the Italian Commies and the Italian government have decided to start killing each other.

  “Do you have any good news?”

  “A little,” Ike said. “Potsdam is still holding out. They were attacked by a pretty large Russian force, but they managed to defeat it although they took a lot more casualties and the city is pretty well destroyed. There is long-term concern about supplies since we’ve had to stop airdropping, but right now they’re in pretty good shape.”

  “Good. Now, what about the Germans?”

  Ike paused, then brightened slightly. “Well, with very few exceptions, the German armistice is going well. German units under General Blaskowitz are passing through the British on their way to Holstein and the Kiel Canal defense line without incident, and are joining some other Wehrmacht units under the overall command of Kesselring. Only a couple of fanatics have caused any trouble and just about anyone with an SS background has tried to disappear, probably to South America. Some other German forces are lying low in Austria and likewise behaving themselves.”

  Ike leaned forward. Marshall stiffened. He knew what his general was going to say. “General Marshall, what do you think about incorporating German military units into our defenses? We have hundreds of thousands of them as prisoners and a large number of units are still fairly intact. The Germans will fight for their country if we let them and all they need are weapons. It’s repugnant, but necessary if we are to win this war.”

  Marshall nodded. He had already come to that unwelcome conclusion. However, there were problems that transcended politics, problems that Eisenhower was overlooking.

  “Ike, we can scarcely take care of our own boys. We do not have the resources to organize, equip, and supply any large numbers of Germans, at least not in enough time to influence the fighting now going on.”

  “I know. But I would still like to use them where and how I can. We could put existing German units into defensive positions and let them fight for their homes. I think they would fight like bandits to get the Soviets out of Germany after all the atrocities the Reds are committing.”

  “I will talk with Truman. His meeting with Speer may have given us the opening we need. And yes, it is repugnant.”

  Ike brightened. However small, a weight had been taken off his shoulders. “Did you hear what happened to Goering?” he said, changing the subject with a grin.

  Marshall smiled despite his own fatigue. Ike’s grin really was infectious. “No.”

  “Well, a couple of our MPs caught him as he neared the Swiss border. The fool was disguised as a woman. A magnificently fat, ugly woman. What a marvelous ending for the Third Reich.”

  Marvelous indeed, thought Marshall. Now all he had to do was confront Truman.

  ELISABETH SMILED TENTATIVELY. “Jack, which of us smells worse?”

  Jack Logan grinned. They were seated outside her shelter on a low cement wall. She was lightly touching him, and he found the gentle intimacy to be intoxicating. The question, however, was not one he had expected.

  “Lis,” he said. He liked using the diminutive he’d heard Pauli call her, spelled with an s and not a z. She had smiled when he first started using it, so he had continued. “I think both of us s
mell, and rather badly, but where I come from we usually wouldn’t have brought it up. Discussing body odor isn’t some quaint European or Canadian custom, is it?”

  She chuckled. “I think you’re right about both of us being offensive, and no, it’s not something I usually talk about with handsome young men, but it is becoming a problem. Now that it’s getting warm, the shelters are almost unbelievably rank.”

  Water in the civilian part of the perimeter was either carefully rationed or nonexistent. Despite the nearness of the Havel and a number of ponds, there was a real shortage of water for anything other than drinking and cooking, and then only after boiling. Russian snipers had made life too dangerous for those who would have even dreamed of bathing in the polluted river, and the number of wells dug by engineers and others had not yet met the hygiene needs of the population.

  “I got a shower last week,” he volunteered.

  “I got Pauli cleaned up a couple of days ago, but it’s been a while for me. An occasional sponge or wet cloth helps but not that much, and I haven’t been able to wash out my clothes. I’m not sure how you can stand being near me.”

  “It’s not exactly a problem, Lis. Remember, I’m used to living in a bunker with a dozen of my closest and most aromatic friends.” Besides, nothing as trivial as body odor was going to keep him from seeing Elisabeth Wolf.

  He looked forward to her company on the brief times they could be together. Finding a young and intelligent woman to talk to and think about was something totally unexpected in a combat area. It was a luxury to be cherished. Besides, she really was pretty and he really was fond of her. The handful of kisses they’d exchanged made him think they were beyond the stage of simply liking each other.

  After the Russian attack, Jack had been sick with worry that something might have happened to Lis and Pauli, but could not leave his post to check them out. As a result of the battle, so much of the city of Potsdam not already in ruins was either destroyed or in flames. Thus, he was greatly relieved when she and the boy simply showed up at the bunker, smiled and waved from a short distance, and left. It occurred to him that she might have been relieved as well at finding him safe and unhurt, and he found that thought comforting.

  “God, it’s got to be rough for you,” he said. Pauli was asleep on a mat a few feet in front of them. He was pale; it was obvious that no one was getting enough sunshine.

  “Rough? No, Jack, as I said before, this is not rough.”

  He laughed. Having learned English from a Scottish-Canadian mother, she tended to pronounce his name as “Jock,” which she denied and he found amusing.

  She squeezed his arm. “Stop it.”

  “All right, but I am worried about you. Are you getting enough food?”

  Now it was her turn to laugh. “Jack, even on the reduced rations your army is providing, we are eating better than we have in a year or more. We endured more hunger and privation in Berlin from the bombings and the Nazis than anything that has occurred here. We have learned to cope.”

  He had heard some of the stories. He knew that her father, when he was not working as a diplomat, had been a block captain in charge of providing shelters for everyone in the apartment where his family lived. He was also in charge of the surrounding buildings. Elisabeth had told him how they and most people in and around Berlin were so terrified of being trapped and buried alive by falling rubble that they all dug tunnels to the other buildings and locations as possible escape routes. In a way, Berlin became a city of tunnels, and this was beginning to happen in Potsdam.

  Jack also knew that her father and Pauli’s parents had been killed in the more recent bombings, while Elisabeth’s mother had died from a fever the year before. Yes, he realized, the life she had now was not as rough as it had been or as rough as it might be in the future, should the food run out or the Russians attack in real force.

  She rested her head on his shoulder. “In its own way, Jack, this is the nicest time I’ve had in a long while. I just want to enjoy it while I can.”

  He took her hand in his. It was astonishingly thin, yet she said she was eating better. “Me too.” It seemed trite, but he didn’t know what else to say.

  “Jack, did you have a girl back home?”

  “Not really.”

  He thought briefly of Mary Fran Collins. They had dated a few times before he’d gotten drafted, even went to bed the week before he shipped off to basic training. There had been a couple of letters from her, but they had stopped. Or had he stopped writing her? He couldn’t remember. It was another world.

  “How about you?” he asked.

  She sat up and looked at him, wondering what his reaction would be. “There was a young man. I was very fond of him, but mainly as a very nice and decent friend. He was a good student and naïvely thought the army would never take him because he was short, nearsighted, weak, and had a serious stomach disorder. Ulcers. Well, the Reich was very well organized and they drafted him into a regiment that consisted entirely of people with stomach disorders. Can you believe that? An entire regiment of people with bad tummies? Last year he was on his way to Normandy, where the regiment was stationed, when his train was strafed by your planes and he was killed. Poor little Hans never had a chance.”

  “I’m sorry.” He wondered how many times he would use that phrase.

  “Before he left, I let him be my first lover, my only lover. We were so innocent I still don’t know if we were doing the right things.”

  Jack laughed softly. “Lis, there’s not too many wrong things two lovers can do.”

  She flushed and giggled. “He was so terrified that he would never come back. We would make love and later he would sob with fear and I would hold him and comfort him. I was immensely saddened by his death, but I did not love him.” She touched his chin with her finger. “Are you shocked?”

  “No,” he answered, tapping her finger with his.

  He had no idea what Mary Fran Collins was doing right now and didn’t care. He briefly wondered if the lovemaking between him and Mary Fran had been like what Elisabeth and Hans had done, an act of desperation rather than love. What concerned him now was Elisabeth Wolf.

  She reached across his chest and grabbed his arm tightly. “Sometimes I feel so greedy. I don’t want my life to end like this. I want to grow up. I want to have a real lover, a husband, someone strong and gentle like you. I want children. Do you know I haven’t even had a period in a year because of the lack of food? I don’t know if I’m still a woman.”

  Jack held her to him and felt her shudder. “It’s okay, Lis.”

  She relaxed slightly. “When I was little, I wanted to be a ballerina. I studied dance for years. I was heartbroken when I found that I really didn’t have the talent. Then I decided I wanted to be a scientist. A biologist. To everyone’s surprise, I found I had a natural talent for it. Now I wonder if I’ll ever see the inside of a school again.”

  “Me too,” he said and explained about his years in night school in a dingy junior college in Port Huron. “I was at the point where I had to make a decision. Should I declare my schooling finished and get a job, or should I move away and complete my education at a four-year school?”

  “What did you want to be?”

  “Either a lawyer or a teacher. Maybe I’d compromise and teach law. At any rate, there’s a world for us if we can only get out of here.” He sighed. “Lis, you wouldn’t mind putting your head back on my shoulder, would you? That is, if you can stand the smell of me?” She smiled and complied and they held on to each other with a quiet desperation.

  A LITTLE WAY off and unseen by the young couple, General Miller walked with Major General Rob Wayne, the commanding officer of the badly mauled 54th Infantry Division. They had been inspecting some of the damage caused by the Russian attack.

  Miller paused. “Rob, isn’t that one of your boys with that German woman?”

  “Yep. And if my memory serves me, it’s one of the boys you gave a field commission to.”

&nbs
p; “And Rob, don’t we have a nonfraternization rule that forbids Germans and Americans from socializing with each other?”

  Wayne snorted. “Yeah, Chris, we sure do. But why not pass a rule outlawing rain on Sundays? Everyone’s living with the knowledge they could be dead at any time, and those two aren’t the only ones who’ve found each other. They are young and lusty and lonely and scared to death all at the same time. Just a couple of days ago they endured an afternoon of hell and another couple hundred of our boys became casualties along with a large bunch of civilians. Hell, if those two or any others can make the day a little more pleasant for themselves, well, why not.”

  Miller laughed. “Rob, are you telling me my rule isn’t being followed?”

  “Shit, Puff, it’s being totally ignored! By the way, nobody’s gotten any mail in a helluva long time either. I know your nonfraternization rule is the same as Ike’s, but nobody’s paid any attention to that one either. Look, I’ve told my boys to watch out for prostitutes and thieves, but if two kids want to sit in the sun and hold hands and talk nice to each other, well, God bless ’em. Besides, my old friend, just who the hell is our enemy nowadays? It sure as shit isn’t Germany anymore, is it?”

  Miller thought of his own family back in the States. When would he see them again? Once again, rules were meant to be broken. Seize the day, went some saying, and it was right. Tomorrow you could be dead.

  GENERAL MIKHAIL BAZARIAN seethed with inward rage as the pale-skinned young Russian colonel fussed with the papers he’d taken from his briefcase. The man had been poking around his command for a day now, and had become a total nuisance. It was made endurable only by the fact that the little shit was from Zhukov’s staff, and was not NKVD or from Stavka, the interservice general headquarters outside Moscow.