The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (70 page)

He files down the column of Nazis, aiming his camera in every face, waiting, waiting for the profanity inside each man to surface. And it does. Bandy snares it on his film like flypaper. With every portrait, he senses the approach of his own finish line, like the poor prisoners who want only to reach the barbed wire, the outer limit of their existence at this prison. With every fresh film pack, Bandy senses a growing exhaustion.

History has been his livelihood. War—the individuals who wage it and the ground they fight for—has been his passion and art. For nine years Bandy has served as handmaiden to history. Now he can go no farther. Not if these are the abominations he must report.

He takes another picture, flips the film pack over, and steps in front of the next Nazi. Are these humdrum-looking men really abominations? Or is their touch of massacre, is the Russian taste for vengeance, is the American tolerance for politics and its millions of victims, just business as usual for the conduct of history? Has Charles Bandy,
Life
magazine photographer—with all his travels and pictures and his notoriety for bringing home the truth in images—simply not seen the truth until now? Is cruelty the actual face of history, the way vileness lurks in the faces of these lined-up Nazis? Bandy has hidden behind his camera so long, he’s atrophied his own eyes.

All the history he’s shot around the world has been the crushing of the nameless, the conquest of the weak, the exalting of the victor regardless of how he became so. How could Bandy have allowed himself to see it all as tidy and glorious, rewarded with medals and honor? How could Bandy have taken half a million photos of so little truth? Why would he spend one more day in the service of such heartless masters as war and history?

He’ll take fifteen, twenty more pictures, then he’s finished. He feels used, monumentally fooled. This will be his closing gallery. Again—and this is more evidence that he’s done this chore long enough with his life— Bandy sees only one man looking back at him from the two dozen Nazi faces. One loathsome man, the conductor on the passage to hell. The historic face in front of his viewfinder is normal, a mask, abhorrent.

Bandy prepares to squeeze the shutter.

The man lifts his chin and sucks his cheeks. He spits past the camera, venom striking Bandy’s brow.

Without thought Bandy lets fall the Speed Graphic. The camera cracks on the ground at his feet. Before it rolls to a stop he attacks the Nazi. He throws his hands around the man’s neck to slam him against the brick wall. The German defends himself. Bandy chokes with all his might. The Nazi flings his own fingers around Bandy’s throat.

Bandy feels nothing but what the Nazi feels, hatred.

They are the same now, one man.

* * * *

ELEVEN

April 28, 1945, 8:50
a.m.

Wilmersdorf, Berlin

nd now the enemy is children.

Four hundred boys in black school uniforms push down the street toward Ilya’s position. Each one carries against his shoulder a
Panzerfaust,
like a bat for a big game to be played.

Misha reaches for the binoculars. Ilya shrugs the little man off and keeps the field glasses. The boys can’t be more than fifteen years old. They don’t march in lockstep. Ilya hears no song of bravado from their ranks. They just come. Hitler sends them.

They cannot know what they’re walking toward. Six more blocks, amassed in the ruins where Misha and Ilya are perched, wait five hundred artillery pieces. Seven thousand men and guns. Horse carts loaded with enough ammunition to slay these boys a thousand times each.

Ilya is one of the killers of Berlin. He will kill these boys if he has to. He takes no joy in the thought.

Since taking Seelow, Ilya has seen the German defense buckle. On the Oderbruch the enemy fought ferociously. Soviet losses in the valley were terrible. Costly too was the taking of the ridge of towns along the Heights. Once on the plateau, the assault lurched into the far eastern suburbs of Berlin. Here there were mostly summer cottages, individual wood-frame houses set in their own yards and gardens. Plenty of open space, parkland, and fields helped the Red Army move quickly through these districts. The buildings made poor strongholds, roads were wide and plentiful. The German army reeled backward towards Berlin, without the artillery and ten thousands of men they left behind on the Heights. The Russians poured in, saturating every block and avenue.

Before entering Berlin, Chuikov’s Eighth Guards whirled south, to strike the city in its underbelly. Three days ago Ilya’s company rode on the backs of First Tanks into the city limits, entering the Neukölln district. Here the density of the buildings thickened. Ilya’s men fought past manufacturing plants and tracts of five-story, nineteenth-century rental barracks. Eighth Guards surrounded Templehof Airport, knifed through Schöneberg District, then wheeled north into Wilmersdorf. North lies Charlottenburg. After that, the giant Tiergarten. At the eastern rim of the park stands ground zero, the symbolic center of German government, the Reichstag. The watchword for the assault is speed. Zhukov has announced, when the Soviet flag flies from the roof of the Reichstag, the battle and the war will be over.

Ilya has been surprised to find the fight for Berlin so disjointed. It was not what he, Misha, or the generals expected from the capital of Hitler’s regime. Once the clash of nations came to Berlin, they were all prepared for another Stalingrad—a Hitlergrad, the last chapter to the vicious campaigns of the steppe and citadels, the river crossings and titanic tank struggles. Instead, Berlin is like a drunk in a fight; it can’t organize its blows, swinging wild punches. The defenders are a mixed and ill-equipped bunch. Captured units consist of regular soldiers, old Home Guardsmen, Hitler Youth, firemen, and policemen, all fighting side by side without commanders. The war has been reduced to sporadic street combat, and street fighting is what Ilya pioneered and endured at Stalingrad. Now that he’s in Berlin, he knows the outcome of every skirmish before it starts, prescient like a jungle animal returned to the jungle. But this morning he faces children in battle, and he doesn’t know what will happen in the next five minutes.

Ilya hands over the binoculars to Misha. The weapons these boys carry are powerful. They can’t be allowed to come much closer.

The schoolmates have taken up arms because their government can’t defend them. German soldiers have begun to desert in mobs. Ilya finds uniforms discarded in the ruins. SS extremists roam from cellar to cellar looking for soldiers hiding out with civilians. Many Home Guardsmen choose to face their fates beside their families and run home to them, strewing into the streets armbands and vintage Dutch rifles. Deserters are found hung in public squares or shot in the back, with signs laced around their necks reading:
we still have the power.
As a result, the defense has no predictable nature; the fights are rarely more than delaying actions, ranging from flimsy to fanatical.

The responding Soviet tactic in Berlin is straightforward and harsh. General Chuikov, the hero of Stalingrad, has decided that Berlin is not going to become a Hitlergrad. At the first hint of resistance from any building or block, artillery hammers the enemy position to rubble.
Katyusha
missiles mounted on American Ford trucks spit racks of phosphorus rockets at point-blank range, igniting firestorms. Giant 203mm cannons crank their barrels even with the sidewalks to unleash rounds as heavy as a truck. A thousand shells pour onto gardens, public squares, anyplace where defenders make themselves known. One machine-gun burst, a sniper in a single window, can bring a whole building down with no thought of the residents on the other floors or in basement shelters. The Russian officers holler at the troops, ”Use your weapons!” “Fire at will!” “We’ve got plenty to spare!”

Once the bastions are in ruins, Red tanks move in, smashing down barricades and blowing up what they can’t roll over. Obstacles put in the streets to slow the Russians down, like buses, tramcars, carts loaded with rocks, are blasted to pieces rather than driven around. The tanks fan out in search of targets, emptying their magazines at will, knowing there is plenty.

After the tanks comes the infantry. Foot soldiers flood into the demolished blocks with guns, grenades, knives, and fists. Ilya has few equals in this. Again, he leads the men by deeds, leaving the orders to Misha. He keeps his platoon off the streets, guiding them through holes in walls, connecting cellars, alleys, back gates. Ilya’s instincts keep his men alive. They learn fast, and they become lethal. Once an area is secured, they move on, pressing north toward the city center. In their wake, the artillery hauls itself, forming up to demolish the next targeted Berlin street.

Misha exults at the carnage of the city. All the men do. The drunk in the fight is on his knees, not yet facedown, and the less he hits back the harder they strike him, the more abuse they lavish on him. By laughing, cursing, stealing watches from citizens—even at the old folks staggering past him, Misha shouts,
“Uri!”
and points to his own wrist; under his coat he wears German watches up to his elbows, all of them set two hours ahead to Moscow time—Misha shapes the men’s attitudes with his actions the way Ilya does in combat. Ilya keeps his counsel on this. He kicks aside bricks, stays low, and surges forward.

The children come closer. They’re within three blocks now. A runner hustles into the rubble behind Ilya and Misha.

“Comrade Lieutenant, Comrade Sergeant.”

Misha answers. “Yes?”

“What do we do?”

“About?”

The soldier is flustered at this answer. The problem is clear.

“These boys, Comrade. There are several hundred of them.”

“I know.”

“They’re armed, Comrade Sergeant.”

“I know this too.”

The soldier shuffles. The black boys come nearer every second.

Misha asks, “What do you think they’ll do with their
Panzerfausts?”

“Comrade?”

“When they see our tanks and artillery? What will they do? Do you think they’ll come up and bang on our tanks with them? Like sticks?”

“They’ll ... I suppose they’ll fire on us, Comrade.”

“Well, then.” Misha opens his hands like a sage explaining something simple. “It’s a good thing we saw them first, isn’t it?”

Ilya reaches to Misha’s hand and takes the binoculars. He is going to override what Misha is about to say.

But Misha grins at Ilya. He tells the soldier, “Find a way to disarm them. Fire flares to tell them our position. Send a few rounds over their heads. Let’s scare them out of it. They’re kids in knee pants. They ought to be spanked. That’s all.”

The soldier is pleased with this order. He turns to rush out through the debris and spread the word before anyone can pull a trigger.

Ilya stops the soldier. “Nikolai?”

Misha makes a large, comic face. Ilya knows someone’s name?

“Yes, Lieutenant?”

“If they don’t scare easily. Children or not.”

The soldier takes in this bitter notion. Ilya is satisfied.

“Go on.”

The soldier hurries out.

Little Misha says nothing. He moves to the opposite wall and slumps against it, sticking out one leg, raising a knee; he looks rakish. He pulls out his tobacco pouch to roll another cigarette. Ilya watches Misha’s hands; the man is deft, forging the cylinder tight and even. He tosses it on his lips with the cavalier flip of a seasoned smoker, some bigger man than he is. Ilya envies Misha’s chameleon abilities. He’s grown a scar. He smokes more than any of the men. Misha outswears them, drinks vodka swallow for swallow with the largest country boys. He affects a brave swagger, issues orders, spouts strategies in the middle of battle. The men enjoy, embrace, even follow him. He says what they want to hear, like that order to frighten the schoolboys. In five months, Misha’s transformed himself from a coward to a charismatic.