David Robbins - Last Citadel

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.

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.

Dawn had come. Beside the tank, Dimitri gazed over the disrupted, smoking plain. The day would be dry judging from the dawn sky, the earth slippery. In a wide band behind him among the splotches of craters were the dug-in positions of the 90th Guards Rifles. Arrayed left and right was his own brigade, and stretching beyond them to the Pena River the rest of his mechanized corps. Spikes of gun barrels large and small bristled in every place his eyes lit, out of foxholes and tank holes and artillery bunkers. He turned his eyes south, down from the high ground where he and his brigade were dug in, and there they were, black barbed dots two miles off, the Germans with the same needles poking out of the earth, aimed at him. In the past forty-eight hours, the Germans had already fought their way ten miles north from their jump-off lines. This morning they had one prize in mind: the Oboyan road, the artery to Kursk and the latchkey to German victory. Now they sat behind a river two miles south, meaning to come get their road. Dimitri stood in the way.