Wham! The block of flats jerked as if some giant had kicked an upper story. Wham! It shuddered again, convulsively. Those were two HE rounds from a 122mm gun. The Stalin had had a friend trailing it, and the friend was cranky. One more might bring the place down.
Wham! That one almost brought Gustav down. The other heavy tank had lowered its cannon. Another way to flatten a building was to knock out the props so the top fell in.
Coughing, deafened, ghost-white with plaster dust, Gustav didn’t wait around for another love tap. He got the hell out of there. He could fight the war from the next building over. If the Russians wanted this one so much, they were welcome to it, as far as he was concerned.
In the last war, he might have won the Knight’s Cross for killing a heavy tank with a Molotov cocktail. Here, he got to stay alive. That was a better decoration, in case anybody wanted to know what he thought.
–
“What’s the trouble up there, Comrade Sergeant?” Pavel Gryzlov asked. “How come we aren’t going forward any more?”
“I’ll have a look, Pasha,” Konstantin Morozov said. He flipped the cupola hatch open and stuck his head up to see what was going on. He knew he needed to keep doing that. He also knew Dortmund was full of snipers. In the last war, Nazi snipers had loved blowing tank commanders’ heads off. So had Soviet snipers. Things wouldn’t have changed since.
He ducked back down. “Something’s burning, dammit,” he said. “I don’t know for sure it’s a killed tank, but it’s that kind of smoke. And a killed tank in a place like this means a traffic jam.”
“I don’t like standing still in the middle of a place like this,” the gunner said. “Too many bad things can happen.”
“I know,” Konstantin said. “But unless I crawl up the back of the next tank ahead and start humping it, what am I supposed to do?”
A bullet clanked against the tank’s side armor. The people who’d fired it could do that from now till doomsday without hurting anything. But, where there were riflemen, there were liable to be pricks with bazookas. And a bazooka wouldn’t clang off the armor. The shaped charge in the rocket’s nose would burn through.
With a sigh, Morozov took his PPD off the brackets where it hung and opened the cupola hatch again. He glanced to the left, the direction from which the shot had come. All he saw were ruins. Like the other German cities he’d come through, Dortmund seemed far richer than a Soviet town of the same size. The shops looked fancier. They’d been looted, but even what was left was of higher quality than anything you could get back home. All the cars Morozov saw were abandoned hulks, but there were many more to see than there would have been on a Soviet street.
Dortmund had been heavily bombed during the last war. The Red Army and the imperialists were still banging heads for it now. Not all the old damage was repaired. It had new damage to go with it. The buildings still put to shame the cheap concrete blocks of flats that sprouted like toadstools near the statue of Lenin in any Soviet town’s main square.
A foot soldier in Red Army khaki came out of one of those battered buildings. He carried a Kalashnikov in one hand and a bottle in the other. By the way he wobbled as he walked, he’d put a serious dent in the contents of the bottle. A silly smile on his face, he nodded to Morozov. “How the fuck are you, Comrade Tank Commander?”
“Well, I’m here,” Morozov answered. “Looks like I’m stuck here, too, till they clear away whatever’s on fire up ahead.”
“That’s a shame!” The infantryman was drunk enough so it seemed tragic to him. He looked down at the half-empty bottle in surprise, as if just remembering he had it. He probably was. “You want what’s left of this? Can’t hurt, not as long as you’re stuck anyway.”
“Sure. Bolshoye spasibo!” Morozov said.
The foot soldier stood by the tank. Boris leaned toward him. The guy had to toss the bottle. Gribkov caught it. Now that the foot soldier had a free hand, he waved and staggered away. Morozov guessed he was more interested in a place to sleep it off than in meeting the enemy.
More power to him if he is, Konstantin thought. He ducked down into the tank gain. “Look what I found,” he said. The liquid in the bottle was amber, not clear. He’d drunk schnapps before. He liked vodka better, but schnapps would cure whatever ailed you.
“Good job, Comrade Sergeant!” Pavel Gryzlov gauged the bottle with an experienced eye. “Plenty in there for a good knock for all of us.”
“Just what I was thinking.” Konstantin yanked the stopper, tilted his head back, and drank. The schnapps was harsh but strong. Warmth exploded out of his belly. He passed the gunner the bottle. Gryzlov also drank. He gave Mogamed Safarli the schnapps. Safarli was an Azeri, and so certainly a Muslim. He drank as eagerly as any Christian, though. Then he crawled forward to let Yevgeny Ushakov put paid to the bottle.
Ushakov’s voice came back through the intercom as the loader returned to his place: “I killed it. Thanks!”
“Pass the body back here,” Morozov said. “I’m going to look around again, so I’ll chuck it out.”
He threw the bottle onto the sidewalk. Watching it smash, he nodded to himself. No enemy would send it back full of burning gasoline. Just then, the T-54 in front of his belched more stinking black smoke from its exhaust and lumbered forward.
“Hey, Zhenya!” Konstantin called over the intercom. “They’re moving!”
“I see it, Comrade Sergeant.” The driver put the tank in gear. Whatever rubble lay in the streets, the tracks rolled over it with effortless ease. They ground most of it to dust.
A recovery vehicle had pulled a burning tank off into a side street to let the rest of the Soviet armor advance up the wider way the tank had blocked. It was a Stalin: the hardest tank to kill that the USSR knew how to make. Hard didn’t mean impossible, though.
The Soviet Union might have been able to make tanks that were tougher yet. But it couldn’t have made them in numbers worth putting in the field. In the last war, German tanks had had far more advanced engineering, most ways, than the good old T-34. But when there were five or six T-34s for every highly engineered Tiger or Panzer IV or Panther, what difference did that make? Quantity took on a quality of its own.
To Soviet planners, tanks were as expendable as bullets or rations. That was hard on the crews, but it made sense from a military point of view. Why waste too much quality on something that was sure to get smashed up pretty soon anyway? Turning out two or three of the pretty good instead of taking the time for the best worked out just fine.
In the same way, a swarm of half-trained soldiers spraying lots of lead in front of them would eventually wear down the smaller number of hardened professionals who faced them. The men who lived through their first few battles would learn their trade and leaven the new swarm that got seined into the Red Army after them.
That kind of approach had worked for Stalin the last time around. It was expensive, but the USSR had more men and more machines than it knew what to do with (by the way some generals performed, that was literally true).
A head popped up in the ruins. The helmet on the head was an American pot. Konstantin saw that just before he saw the bazooka tube on the broken masonry. He squeezed his PPD’s trigger at the same time as the tube spat fire.
He never found out whether he got the American or German or whoever the son of a bitch was. The bazooka slammed into his T-54’s frontal armor. He thought it hit near or on the patch the repair crew had welded on. The blast that consumed his crewmates flung him out of the turret and through the air instead.
He just had time to realize that his boots and the legs of his coveralls were on fire before he hit the sidewalk, hard. The thick leather tankman’s helmet probably kept him from fracturing his skull. He rolled and beat at himself, trying to put out the flames before they burned him too badly.