David Robbins - Last Citadel

The lull in the firing lasted the remainder of the morning. Valentin pitched in and the General was soon reloaded. Dimitri was done with chatter among the two new boys – they had their jobs and their destinies and he had his. Valentin was quiet as usual. Bordering the few miles between their second defense line and the Germans was the once-narrow Luchanino River; this was normally a summer creek, just a branch of the larger-flowing Pena. This morning the Luchanino was swollen with the past few days’ rain. It was no longer an obstacle the Germans could merely step across, they would need to bridge it. Between the villages of Syrtsev and Luchanino, the ground on both sides of the river was flat terrain, mostly carved into cornfields. The crops had been spared the bombardment of the night, the shells had arced over the tall stalks. According to Valentin’s maps, these were dense minefields. Dimitri tried to imagine a place in the world that was not mined or armed. He could not, because every place he’d ever been in his life was today at war. The cornfields, simple and honest stands of maize, had at this moment enemy sappers crawling on their bellies to burrow at the roots. The little village of Luchanino, not much different from his own village in the Kuban, was today glutted with guns to beat the enemy away from the river. The river, rippling and oblivious, would run scarlet before the day was up.

Dimitri looked over to the tank trench dug weeks ago by Just Sonya and her citizens of the steppe. He wondered where the woman was right now. Quickly he added her to the list of people he asked God to protect, and wondered if he wasn’t taxing God’s patience somehow, there must be a million men asking for the same right about now.

His son, standing in the turret, spyglasses up, screamed, ‘Down!’

Dimitri dove to the rain-soft ground one second before he heard the whistle. A round hit twenty meters behind him, rocking the soil, spraying a black shower distressingly high.

‘What was that?’ he shouted up to Valentin, clambering with Pasha and Sasha for their hatches.

‘Tank.’

‘Tank? Jesus.’

A Tiger, he thought. An 88 mm cannon. It must be. It’s here .

‘Jesus,’ he said again to himself, diving into his driver’s seat.

Behind him Valentin dropped into his own seat and buttoned his hatch. Boots came down to Dimitri’s shoulders. Both toes tapped in fast unison. Crank the engine .

Dimitri pushed the starter and the General shuddered. Valentin on the intercom ordered Pasha to load an antipersonnel shell, and Dimitri again stared into the blankness of the dirt wall. He wanted to ram the gears into reverse and get the hell out of this ditch but first the German assault had to come closer, the T-34s had to stay hidden and protected to get off the best shots against the enemy charge.

Dimitri worked himself into a sweat, flexing his hands in and out of fists, rapping his knuckles against the hard, close armor around him. Sasha never took his eyes off him. Dimitri fought the urge to yell at the boy to take his red face around or catch a smack on it. Valentin and Pasha worked well in the turret, firing another dozen shells in quick succession. They were aiming at German artillery positions or troops advancing down to the river. Lobbing rounds at armored tanks from this distance would be a waste. Valentin, his foot on the firing pedal, his eye to his periscope, muttered to himself: ‘Hang on, hang on, hang on… safety off… and…’

The tank shook with the report.

‘No.’ Valya had missed. ‘Five degrees left.’

The turret whined, Dimitri heard his son’s hand ratchet the long gun’s elevation wheel. ‘And…’ Another shell exploded out of the barrel. Dimitri reeled in his seat. ‘No. Shit. Another round! Now!’ The turret rotated one or two degrees. Pasha rammed another shell into the breech, then scurried in his racks for the next round.

This went on for minutes. Valentin and Pasha fought the war while Dimitri ground his teeth and glared at green gauges and dark nothing. Sasha wrapped himself in his thin arms and collapsed into his space. The motor idled with restive energy, the General wanted to get moving, too. A tank was not designed to be motionless, it was a mobile platform for a big gun. Dimitri idled with the General , popping, joggling and anxious.

Explosions jarred the ground around their T-34. Valentin and the rest of their tank squad buried on either side of the General continued to trade shots with the German big guns across the river. At last, in the wake of a few very loud and close shells, Valentin gave the order. The words were accompanied by the dancing of two boots on Dimitri’s shoulders.

‘Let’s back up. Fast. They’re getting our range.’

Dimitri jammed the gear shift into reverse and hit the accelerator. The tracks spun and everyone in the tank pitched forward from the backward speed he used to get out into the daylight. In a second, a shaft of sun glowed in Dimitri’s vision block. He leaned his forehead into the padded periscope and through the rectangle of glass watched the tank shed its dirt sheath.

When the General was on level ground, Dimitri caught his first glimpse of the battleground before and below him. The cornfields on the southern bank of the Luchanino were trampled under the feet of many thousand running soldiers. They ran in a wide column; their sappers had cleared a big channel for them through the mines. German fusiliers ran to the riverbank to secure it for their pioneers to bring up bridging equipment. Across the river from the attackers, on the north bank, the village of Luchanino was lost under a pall of Soviet gunsmoke, a thousand steel throats screamed at the Germans to go back! Behind the men rushing to the fattened stream, Dimitri saw tanks rolling forward. At this distance the enemy were little more than dots against the ripped-up earth of the steppe. But the rounds falling on all sides of the General shook the ground with awesome force, and this from miles away!

Valentin shouted, ‘Driver, right!’

Dimitri jammed the tank into first gear. Valentin headed him west across the ledge of high ground looking down on the river villages. Valentin opened his hatch to stand in the shattering morning. Dimitri leaned forward and propped up his own hatch, widening his view. His jaw hung at what he saw.

Five of his brigade’s tanks were in ruins, smoking charnel even in their protective ditches. The German cannons had reached out and blown them to pieces. Two of the tanks were in flames, shafts of greasy fumes throbbed into the heating day. The others were just dead, crumpled like paper boxes into themselves, a gaping hole in each askew turret knocked from their fittings. This was why Valya had pulled the General out of its redoubt, to get back the tank’s best defense, to become a moving target.

Dimitri charged ahead along the ridgeline. The other four tanks in their squad plus a half-dozen others had dislodged themselves from their dirt casings and were doing the same, back and forth like giant picnic ants around a stomping foot. What now? The T-34’s 75 mm gun couldn’t even dent the German tanks across the river, the General’s main gun barrel wasn’t long enough to generate the shell speed needed to penetrate their heavy tanks, not from two miles, not even from one mile! But even from this distance those big, unseen Tigers and Panthers had the power to sit back and knock a T-34 out. The morning was a shooting gallery for them, and all Valentin and the others could do was hunker and fire spitballs or dash around in a dither. This is our first meeting with Hitler’s new tanks, Dimitri thought, and judging from the results, the little Austrian bastard was right to wait for them!