Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [103]
“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