Armageddon - Leon Uris

Igor put the field glasses to his eyes. In front of the rows of cannons, divisions of tanks were deployed and ready. What seemed to be a million infantry and horsemen swarmed through the forests, on the roads, through the fields toward the hazy outlines of the northern suburbs of Berlin.

One by one, fire control up forward called for the artillery to shoot test rounds. Forward observation posts called for necessary adjustments. With the coming of darkness the tempo increased until every firing piece in the line began to rain steel into Berlin in the most concentrated artillery saturation of a single target in the history of warfare. The guns recoiled angrily, launchers hissed their rockets away in a deadly arch, and black smoke erupted on the horizon from tortured Berlin. The guns leaped back a dozen at a time making the earth shake violently and the sky was lit with ten thousand flashes of lightning from the muzzles and the roar became horrendous. A hot wind blew up to the knoll from the unnatural agitation, bringing to their nostrils the smell of burned gunpowder.

Igor Karlovy and his two officers were becoming numbed by the fury and the vodka. Boris Chernov shook his fist toward Berlin and cursed and Feodor cheered and screamed encouragement.

“Kill the Nazi bastards!”

The barrage reached a new savagery. Igor Karlovy stood still as a statue. The light flashes reflected in his eyes and brought to him the memory of other fires....

Igor Karlovy was in Leningrad in his memory and he stood on the Sovietsky Prospekt staring over the frozen Neva River. Then it was German and Finnish guns pouring it on Leningrad and the fires were all around him. He saw Children’s Home #25 crumple under a direct hit! He ran toward it. The screams of agony reached his ears. The children had been caught unawares.

DEATH TO THE NAZI BABY MURDERERS! An enormous sign hung over the entrance of Factory #67. Above the sign, a portrait of a woman worker holding a mutilated infant in her arms. All over Leningrad signs and slogans snarled at the Nazi tormentors, and other signs and slogans exhorted the workers and soldiers to put up superhuman efforts.

“Look, Colonel, look!” Feodor cried, throwing his arms about Igor. His drunken tongue wagged freely. “Look at the fires in Berlin! Kill the bastards!”

How long! How very long had Igor Karlovy waited to see this glorious moment. Berlin burning! Berlin in mortal pain! How many times did he believe it would never come. All of those terrible days gone by are memory now ... all thirty months of the siege....

“Death to the Nazi bastards! Rapers of our motherland!”

When Igor Karlovy was transferred to Leningrad in 1941 it was a confused and frightened city. There was terrible shock among the people with the realization that the Red Army was vulnerable.

The first weeks of the campaign against the Finns had ended in disaster. The Finns, dressed in white, skiing as ghosts in the snow, and using their forests for cover, butchered the onrushing Reds. Here, the Russian steam-roller tactics did not work. Until the Russians learned to fight the Finnish way, they were slaughtered by an enemy a fiftieth their size.

There was Soviet indignation against the Americans, who overtly took the side of the Finns just because a few dollars had been paid yearly on an old war debt. The Americans didn’t understand that Finland had military positions on the Karelian Isthmus at Leningrad’s throat, and that the Finnish dictator, Mannerheim, had been sleeping with the German staff. For the Soviet Union not to challenge these Finnish positions would have been to court suicide.

Just as the Finnish campaign ended, Igor Karlovy went to Leningrad. The city had a meaning, like Moscow itself. Not only was it a great Soviet cultural center and seaport, but the cradle of the October Revolution. With the Soviet Armed Forces reorganizing, it was a time and a place for a young officer to make his name.

The sneak attack by Germany against the Soviet Union came in June of 1941. By September, thirty German divisions and the revenge-seeking Finnish Army were pressing on Leningrad.

The masses of the city were confused and angry! Never before had the leaders heard so much open bitterness against the regime. The masses cried “betrayal.” They had been duped into thinking the Red Army was invincible and further betrayed because Leningrad was literally defenseless and without stores.

Then passivity overcame them. It was not that they welcomed the Germans, for they knew they would be dealt with harshly, but that, with great relief, they knew the Communists would soon flee.

The panicked Communist leaders were packed and ready to go when ordered by Stalin to stay, and Leningrad was commanded to hold no matter what the cost.

A million workers from factories and schools and the Army went out to build a great belt of defenses against the approaching Nazi armies.

Yes, it was a time a young Red Air Force engineer could make a name. Although primarily concerned with runways, air traffic, and air installations, the needs of the day took him into other fields of engineering. Igor Karlovy demonstrated a type of initiative and inventiveness desperately needed in the construction of defenses. It was he who conceived a plan to dismantle the unfinished stadium and use the thousands of concrete slabs on the perimeters.

By the time the Red Army had fallen back into Leningrad, the Russian people had come to learn that the German was no liberator. Driven by sheer fear, tens of thousands of men and women formed into defense battalions and manned the parapets.

Within sight, feel, and smell of Leningrad, Hitler went against the advice of his generals and ruled against a street fight. With the Finns as an ally, Germany set siege to the city. Hitler was certain the siege would break the Russians just as demoralization, bombardment, and starvation had worked in Warsaw and other unfortunate cities of Europe. Hitler felt the Russians were subhumans so the will to resist would quickly be crushed from them. One of the monumental sieges of all time had begun.

The Red Army artillery continued the bashing of Berlin in unabated fury into the night. Young Feodor was passed out drunk. Boris Chernov slept in the back seat of the car. Igor Karlovy alone retained the watch, for he was sober and the pain of memory now stuck sharply.

He recalled the unmerciful agony of the winter of 1941. Leningrad was cut off from Russia except for a single passage over Lake Ladoga at their backs. There were not enough ships on the lake to either evacuate the old and young or to bring in sufficient fuel, food, and ammunition, and they were forced to cross under the guns of the enemy. The Communist leaders, harangued from Moscow, in turn harangued the masses.

In those days, a Red Air Force engineer slept little. Igor was involved in the building of a half-dozen small airstrips to attempt an airlift of supplies. The plan fell woefully short.

When Lake Ladoga froze he and the other engineers performed the perilous feat of cutting roads over the top of the ice to keep the meager convoys of trucks and sleds moving. There was that grim day when all the wooden homes in Leningrad were ordered dismantled for firewood and the peat bogs around the islands had to be worked by battalions of women under German artillery fire.

Yet, somehow, the people bore it. The Russians demonstrated their limitless capacity to endure suffering. In Leningrad, as in all of Russia, practically no civilian goods were produced. The workers were compelled to labor unbelievable numbers of hours for the meagerest existence. In the hinterland twenty million men and women were armed and trained in the nation’s singular dedication to survival.

In Leningrad ration cards became the key to life and the means of controlling the masses and inducing more labor from them. Inside every factory, labor battalion, and army unit was the political commissar, the party member, political intelligence, and the informer to apply unrelenting pressure and fear tactics. There was a shortage of almost everything except slogans and portraits of Stalin. The news of German atrocities was pounded into the brains of the masses day and night. There was no respite even in this hell. As coal reserves diminished, power failures stopped industry, transport, light, and heat.