Last Citadel - [World War II 03] (30 page)

The afternoon hours passed, too, this way, quieter once the thunder rolled off, leaving the shuffle of feet and pages, the dry slide of wood pieces over paper. The attack was taking place fifteen miles west of Belgorod, stretching another ten miles to the west. Luis followed events with a tension in his chest he fought to hide. German forces struck the defenders between Berezov and Streletskoye, surrounding a Soviet battalion and driving off the rest. A fierce fight took place for control of Gertsovka. A German battalion commander was badly wounded and one-third of his men were hit, including the commander’s replacement. At 2100 hours Gertsovka was cleared but at a high price for both armies. Butovo to the east was taken, the Soviet garrison was driven off, but not before Russian riflemen put up a seven-hour brawl that left all of their number dead. Their epitaph was a black block pushed into Butovo over their bodies.

The three blocks of the SS Panzer Divisions did not move throughout the day, while the rest of the German lines improved their positions. Luis wanted to ask Colonel Breit if he might go out to observe firsthand the situation, but instead bit his tongue and dealt with his task. Sometimes you have to go to the bull, but often enough it comes to you.

After midnight, at on 5 hours on the morning of July 5, Luis handed a message to Colonel Breit detailing the entry into battle of the three SS Panzer Divisions. Within the next hour, these divisions destroyed half the forward outposts of the Russian 6th Guards Army and forced many others to withdraw. Luis himself slid the tank icon of his
Leibstandarte
comrades into the Red lines.

Luis was exhausted, he’d been at his station for twenty-three hours. Colonel Breit slipped out of the situation room, Major Grimm was long gone. Luis was left in charge. He told the stick-boys he would be back in a minute.

Outside, rain pelted the street, peals of thunder pounced. Operation Citadel had begun in this, glimpses of the enemy came in split-second flashes from lightning, the explosions of shells were lost in Nature’s din. The world had been torn open here around Kursk. Luis said a prayer aloud in Spanish. This was his father’s practice before the bulls and in the last five years Luis had made it his own custom against men. He asked for victory. His words trudged out into the downpour like soldiers.

* * * *

THE STRONGEST FORTRESS

IN THE WORLD

The German Supreme Command was committing exactly the same error as in the previous year. Then we attacked the city of Stalingrad, now we were to attack the fortress of Kursk. In both cases the German Army threw away all its advantages in mobile tactics, and met the Russians on ground of their own choosing. Yet the campaigns of 1941 and 1942 had proved that our panzers were virtually invincible if they were allowed to maneuver freely across the great plains of Russia. Instead… the German Supreme Command could think of nothing better than to fling our magnificent panzer divisions against Kursk, which had now become the strongest fortress in the world.

Major General F. W. von Mellenthin

Panzer battles

* * * *

CHAPTER 12

July 5

0330 hours

Vladimirovka

Dimitri tugged the tarp tighter under his chin. He’d made a makeshift hood and poncho out of the oiled sheet and let the rain tumble over him. The heavy drops pattered over his covered shoulders and crown. Even with the chattering of the rain in his ears he could hear the explosions.

The German and Red armies traded blows in this hour before dawn, preparation and counter-preparation. A thousand artillery pieces on both sides lofted shells, one at the other, like arguing spouses, while the earth, a sick and sad child between them, shivered under Dimitri’s boots. He leaned against his tank, alone it seemed, under the rain, watching and listening to the beginnings of the battle. His son and crew were in their covered foxhole riding out the storm. The rest of the tankers in the brigade were buttoned up out of the rain, too, inside their two dozen tanks or holes. Dimitri was glad to be alone with the thunders of God and man for these final minutes before the war came back to him. He said a few prayers for himself and his children. He didn’t know where Katya was. He could help God protect Valentin, but the daughter was off on her own, up in the sky doing who knew what. Dimitri had never been in a plane, the highest his feet had ever risen from the ground was sitting on a seventeen-hand horse. He didn’t know what to pray for her protection, he had only poor images of her dangers. He prayed for Katya that she remember she was a Cossack, and figured that was protection enough.

Lightning coursed overhead. He lifted his eyes to it and caught rain on his face. In the next minutes the rain eased to a drizzle. He walked to the hole where his crew slept and peeled back their tarpaulin.

‘It’s started,’ he said.

The three had been lying on their sides curled in the dirt like piglets. Pasha and Sasha had slept well, they yawned and slowly roused. Valentin was first to his feet. His eyes were rimmed, his mouth downturned.

‘Orders?’ he asked Dimitri.

‘Not yet. They’re coming, you can bet.’

Pasha and Sasha came up, the four of them in a row in their gray tanker’s coveralls. They faced south, checking the dripping sky. Then Dimitri heard not the boom of artillery but droning engines, higher than where the thunder had been. Soviet and German bombers and fighters were stepping into the fight, each side trying to pummel the other through the air before the clash of men on the ground. The four crewmen of
General Platov
leaned against their tank and gazed upward.

For thirty minutes a terrific dogfight took place over their heads. Even from three miles up, behind the thunder and lightning, the roars of German Me-109s streaked in twisted combat with Soviet bombers and Yak fighters. The Red Air Force and the Luftwaffe were testing each other the way the artillery did with their opening salvos. He felt the hard tank at his seat, the shoulders of boys pressing against him on both sides, and he knew they were next.

A blazing plane plummeted out of the clouds, trailing flame like a comet, lighting up the mist; burning pieces of it broke off and fluttered beside it until it all rammed into the ground. The plane was too far off and too engulfed by flame to tell if it was German or Russian. But the looks on the faces of Pasha and Sasha revealed this was the first war death they had ever seen. Dimitri stared at the fire in the cratered plain, and said one more quiet prayer for his daughter.

The rain stopped before the breakfast wagon creaked past at 0430. The men were given all the portions they wanted of warm porridge and powdered eggs. Sasha and Pasha ate with appetite, Dimitri and Valentin picked at their plates and did not talk. He watched his son and thought how little there was left this morning - the morn of the battle - of their blood relation. They’d sagged into becoming more private-sergeant than father-son. That is wrong, Dimitri thought. Again he did not know what to say or do, and the closer the war came, the more urgent and less capable he felt. He clamped his lips around his fork and pulled his eyes from Valya. Sasha and Pasha were dim boys, Dimitri knew how to negotiate them. But Valya, so intelligent and moody, he was a complexity beyond Dimitri’s ken, like a woman with his hurt feelings all the time. Always there was something beneath the surface brooding or baking. Christ! Dimitri thought, let it go, boy! Look at the battle flashes coming closer, look at that poor cooked bastard in his crashed plane out there flickering on the steppe, tick tick tick, it goes so fast, Valya, slow down, lick some honey, laugh, and shed tears. Dimitri shoveled his eggs into his mouth but spit the last bites out. He grew edgy. He wanted the fight for the Oboyan road to be here now. Something he could get his hands on, like a plow or a sword, two leather reins, the steering levers of his tank. Something he could handle. Valentin, he could not.

He smacked Pasha in his meaty shoulder.

‘Come on, big one,’ he said, ‘let’s take one more look at the shell bins and be sure where everything is. Sasha, you oil your machine-gun, count your ammo belts. Up, lads.’

Dimitri slid into his hatch and started his engine. The
General
awoke for him.

The morning passed this way, scrambling over their machinery, going over drills and tactics. Valentin joined them after a while, climbing into his seat and barking orders to Pasha, the boy on his knees on the rubber matting. Valentin spun his turret, checked his optics, tested the intercom, arranged his maps. The crew of four filled the tank with flurrying activity, the crackle of voices in earphones, and pretend enemies. Dimitri nodded at the progress of the two new boys. Valentin handled them with precision. All was ready.

At 1015 hours, word came down the echelon of tanks. The Germans had indeed burst out of their positions north and south. The push for Kursk was on. The initial reports here on the Voronezh Front were that the German 4th Panzer Army had a head of steam into the advance trenches of the first defense belt, manned by 6th Army. Third Mechanized Corps, with its ten thousand men, two hundred T-34s, and fifty self-propelled guns, was ordered to rush south to their prepared positions outside Syrtsev, stretching west for eight miles through the village of Luchanino to Alekseyevka on the Pena riverbank. The Germans would likely punch through 6th Army’s forward positions and reach the river by tomorrow morning. They’d be bloodied and angry by then. Dimitri and the other tanks of his division were assigned to bleed them some more at the second defense line.

The Corps’ commanding officer, Major General Krovoshein, issued a terse statement to his fighters, flyers were handed out down the line by runners. The simple sheet read:
The road to Oboyan must be defended. The Germans are coming with everything they have. The battle for Kursk is the Nazis’ last hurrah. See to it they break their damn necks.

Dimitri slipped through his hatch and settled into his driver’s seat. Red-faced Sasha nestled next to him behind the machine-gun. Pasha sat above, to the right of Valentin’s place in the cramped turret. Valya stood with his head out in the air behind his raised hatch cover. The
General
idled, a glint of sun diced between parting clouds and fell through Dimitri’s open hatch. The T-34 line to his left rolled in front of him. Dimitri did not wait for Valya’s order to move out. He loosed his new tank, willing it silently to do well, to honor the name it bore, it had brave ancestors. Metal and men all across Dimitri’s narrow horizon lurched forward into breaking daylight and clumping mud.

* * * *

July 6

0240 hours

Syrtsev

Only the dead slept this night.

There was nowhere to drive. The
General
sat hull down in a defensive trench with only the turret showing, and Dimitri’s nerves keened. The tank’s nose was buried; in front of his driver’s hatch loomed the dirt wall of the berm, obscuring his small slitted aperture. Drifting in from Valentin’s raised hatch, falling down the boy’s shoulders like dust, came a darkness ruptured with the roar of artillery and falling bombs. This was all the light to reach Dimitri beyond his own green glowing dials. The interior of the tank jittered with flashes that were no longer far on the horizon but dead in front of them. Dimitri’s ears and the quaking of the seat under him told him the bursts were on all sides in the earth.

Valentin and Pasha worked the big gun, taking part in the barrage, the punch and counter-punch exchanges with the Germans only a few miles away. Dimitri glanced over at Sasha, also with nothing to do but wait and put up with explosions. The young gunner smiled at him, to show he was brave. Dimitri was in no mood for dull gallantry; he despised sitting still, waiting for a lucky German artillery round or night bomber to slap them on the back in this hole. The air in the tank was rank with propellant fumes, the night was warm and the dank ground sweated out the rains of the past two days. This was not how a man fights, he thought, hiding in a duck blind, trading shots like poltroons cowering behind cover.

The Germans had breached the first defense lines of 6th Guards. Tonight the enemy caught their breath south of the second defense belt, lofting shells to keep the Red forces across from them pinned down in their positions while sappers cleared lanes through the minefields. Valentin and the rest of their 3rd Mechanized Brigade fired at muzzle flashes, to keep heads down on the other side, too.

Several cramped hours passed and Dimitri chafed in his seat.

When enough racket and rattling time had passed, just minutes before Dimitri could boil over and jump out of the tight tank just to breathe some clean air, Valentin’s voice ordered him and Sasha to help replenish the
General’s
ammunition from the bunkered ammo they’d buried a week ago near their position. Dimitri thanked God and rose in his open hatch to hoist himself out.