Mila 18 - Leon Uris [45]
German land forces ran double and triple envelopments, executed picture-book tactics; massacred, trapped, overwhelmed, sliced, overpowered the near-defenseless but proud enemy. The new book called for the disregard of even the token humanities customarily observed in the organized art of murder known as war.
Death spewed from the skies.
Within hours of the German border violations, the Polish air force, tiny and outdated, was shot to pieces on the ground. Within hours, rail lines were ripped up and supply dumps smoked skyward and hot bridges sizzled as they buckled into rivers. Cities and villages without so much as a gun to fire were leveled into smoldering rubble heaps.
The Luftwaffe, which had learned to violate open cities in Spain, turned all of Poland into one big turkey shoot. It shot down Polish troops fleeing for cover and Polish peasants working in the fields and Polish children in the schoolyards and Polish women nursing in maternity hospitals and Polish nuns at Mass.
Through the Carpathians from Czechoslovakia, List shoved his armor through the mountain passes and turned the Krakow flank at that place where the Gleiwitz radio station hoax was perpetrated. In the center, Reichenau was given the honor of unleashing the greatest mass of iron-treaded monsters, and on his left Blaskowitz enveloped a pocket on the flatlands near the industrial heart of Poznan. And Von Bock and Von Küchler lashed out from northern flanking positions in Prussia and Pomerania and there was no more pesky Polish Corridor.
Indeed, the book had been rewritten. It was the ultimate in mechanical and technical murder. The butchery of Poland—the slaughter of two hundred thousand of her army and scores of thousands of her civilians and the rape of her land—was a new German masterpiece.
Captain Andrei Androfski was knocked senseless by his first sergeant and dragged from the scene of the flaming death of Company A. With a half dozen survivors, they found horses and managed to get back to the Grudziadz base, where an even greater catastrophe had befallen the Ulanys. At Grudziadz, one third of Poland’s forces had been foolishly concentrated for a counterattack which was never delivered. The Germans enveloped them with ridiculous ease and, having trapped them, chopped them to bits. The large Westerplatte Saliant was formed by a double envelopment trapping the Polish marines. Soon, the last of Poland’s cavalry charges was made. With the Polish eagle still waving in defiance, a foolhardy attack tried to break the ring of iron around them. The Germans ungallantly ripped the Ulanys to shreds. The Westerplatte Saliant collapsed. The remaining Ulanys staggered back from Grudziadz to Torun. And ... a last weak gasp, one more charge at Wloclawek, and they were done.
There was no rest, for the German monster clamped its jaws tighter and the saber teeth pressed toward Warsaw at the end of only a week.
Captain Andrei Androfski had four horses shot out from under him in seven days. He was gored with arm and leg wounds and his body covered with bruises and filth. He and First Sergeant Styka were two of a handful of survivors when the brigade finally surrendered after Wloclawek.
On the night of September 7, before the Germans could fully organize prisoner compounds and complete the disarming of the Poles. Andrei, Styka, and four others broke out of their area and under cover of darkness gambled they could swim the treacherous upper Vistula River.
Two of them drowned. The remaining four hid in a forest the next day and at night crawled along the ditches of roads filled with German patrols.
At dawn on September 9 the four found refuge in a peasant’s hut on the outskirts of Plock, a third of the distance back to Warsaw. Beyond normal exhaustion, hunger, thirst, and close to death from his festering wounds, Captain Andrei Androfski allowed himself the luxury of collapsing.
Styka sent the other two men into Plock to fetch a doctor. He hovered over Andrei, who was terribly still and a chalky yellow shade. Andrei had spent the last ounce