Armageddon - Max Hastings [214]
General Otto Lasch, the able officer commanding the city’s 35,000-strong garrison, suffered acute political as well as military difficulties. Gauleiter Koch commuted into Königsberg by Storch light aircraft, to meddle in the direction of its defence. The Russians deployed 1,124 bombers, 470 close-support aircraft and 830 fighters in the air bombardment to soften up the defences. As fires raged out of control in the streets, refugees braved artillery fire to continue streaming towards the port of Pillau. Russian assault troops had to fight yard by yard through the outer defences of Königsberg, and many defenders fought with the courage of despair.
“The Königsberg battle was very hard indeed,” said Corporal Anatoly Osminov of Thirty-second Tank Army. “The fortress was a desperately tough nut to crack. Many of those Germans hung on in their trenches until we crushed them under our tracks. Our own losses were terrible.” Lieutenant Alexandr Sergeev of the 297th Infantry Regiment was startled to see civilians among the soldiers firing fiercely at them from the German lines. He was a handsome, reflective young man whose father, chairman of a collective farm, had ridden with Budyenny’s Cossacks in the Civil War. He completed training and joined 3rd Belorussian Front only in the summer of 1944, but already he found himself commanding a company at the age of nineteen, after two of his regiment’s company leaders were killed. More than half his own machine-gun platoon were casualties. The arrival of thirty-five bewildered replacements brought the company strength up to sixty. “I have never seen such violent resistance as we met at Königsberg,” he said. His own divisional commander was wounded in the head, leading one attack personally. On 28 March, it was Sergeev’s own turn, as Fifth Army launched a new assault. The spring thaw made the ground almost impassable for tanks and threw the full burden of battle upon the infantry. No rations got through on the morning of the attack. Like his men, Sergeev approached the start line having eaten only a couple of American biscuits. A Kazakh platoon commander waved to his men: “Okay, time to go!” The Russians advanced in extended line, dragging their machine-guns and mortars with them: “The men were moving forward, then they began to fall down.” When Sergeev saw the crew of a heavy machine-gun lying dead beside it, he took over the weapon himself. Seconds later, a German bullet hit the gun’s cooling-jacket, and water gushed out.
German Nebelwerfer fire was falling all around them, accounting for many of Sergeev’s men. He himself was hit in the side by a fragment which pierced his stomach. He collapsed over the machine-gun, and lay stunned and bleeding, gazing blankly up at aircraft criss-crossing the clear blue sky. “What a pity to die on a beautiful day like this,” he thought, exactly like Prince Andrei wounded on the field of Austerlitz in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Then pain attacked him, and he began to scream, cursing compulsively: “The whole front must have heard.” One side of his body was laid open and pouring blood. His men dragged him to the rear, where he was put on a horse-drawn cart and taken to a field hospital, still screaming. The rags of his tunic were cut off. He lay naked on a stretcher, staring in revulsion at a pile of severed limbs on the floor of the tent, while a nurse anaesthetized him with an ether pad, restraining the waiting surgeon: “No, no—he isn’t asleep yet.” One in a hundred stomach cases such