“Yes, thank you, Comrade General Secretary.”
‘Bastard!’
And in the moment, she changed.
1133 hrs, Tuesday, 18th March 1947, Medzany, Czechoslovakia.
‘At last!’
Across the battlefield, the hammering rain reduced in intensity, allowing men to see a little further than the fifty yards or so that had been the case during the first two attacks.
Officer’s and NCO’s voices rose in unison, shouting the motto of the elite unit.
“Go for broke!”
The Nisei threw themselves forward for a third time, encouraged by the lessening fire from the Soviet positions.
The Soviet cavalrymen, without horses for as long as they could remember, stood their ground and died in their scores, fighting with shashkas in hand when ammunition ran out.
Occasionally one Cossack would get lucky and cut a Japanese-American down, but invariably they died where they stood, shot down safely from distance.
A knot of Cossacks formed around an officer and those with ammunition shot down attackers, causing the assault to peter out once more.
The major in charge pulled his men back and called in the air support that had now, finally, become available.
A number of Takeo’s men would still be alive had the weather cleared in time, but it didn’t, and he had lost comrades who had journeyed with him from Hawaii through Italy to the heart of the eastern border of Czechoslovakia.
Four USAAF Thunderbolts swept in from the west and deposited their HVAR rockets on the remaining enemy positions, as steered in by the Nisei’s attached Forward Air Controller.
The man knew his trade, as did the American fliers, and a hole was blasted in the last line of defence.
For their part, the cavalrymen of 3rd Battalion, 22nd Guards Cavalry Regiment, showed great valour and tried to patch up their line as best they could, but the FAC played his trump card, and three A-25 Shrikes, recently configured for ground attack, flew in a staggered line formation and deposited gallons of napalm across the Soviet lines.
Chikara Takeo checked that the FAC had no more aircraft inbound and sprang to his feet.
“Let’s go! Go for broke!”
His men followed suit and they swept forward into the oily smoke, dispatching a screaming burning soldier here and there.
Instinct saved Takeo as he flung himself sideways, a hideously burned Cossack lunging out of the smoke with a smoking and broken rifle, its bayonet still efficient enough to catch in the trigger guard of his carbine and wrench it from his grasp.
The crazed man failed to disentangle his weapon before one of Takeo’s men put three bullets into him, releasing him from his tortured world.
His saviour screamed and went down clutching his shoulder as a bullet came out of the smoke and smashed into the joint, wrecking it completely.
Without ceremony, Takeo grabbed the Garand and slipped a spare clip out of the crying soldier’s pouch.
The attack was again losing momentum, more so because of the choking smoke and fumes than any stiff resistance on the part of the Cossacks.
The ground, churned by artillery and mortars, and already affected by heavy rain and the continuing thaw, was horrendous underfoot, clogging and sucking at the feet of the men struggling through it, which also the Nisei’s advance.
Again, the surviving Cossacks rallied behind an officer and even launched a small counter-attack, which brought the FAC away from his radio and to the more earthly arts of self-defence.
He used his carbine to defend himself but, even so, desperate enemy made it to his position and hacked him to death, although neither of them lived for more than the briefest of heartbeats more.
As the smoke cleared, Takeo look out over a landscape the like of which he had never seen before.
The bodies were everywhere, and in the many and unusual positions of death that high explosive can create.
The cratered landscape was no more or less than he had expected, given the barrage that had been laid down before his attack.
It was the tree stumps that created the incredible feeling of some distant planet’s surface, combined with the small fires that burned brightly, sometimes vegetation, often something that had once lived and breathed.
He produced his binoculars and scanned the ground, seeking out further opposition before he moved on to his final objective atop the daunting Height 570, topped with the ruins of the ancient Saris Castle.
There seemed to be nothing, at least, nothing alive to stand between him and his final yards of advance.
Not until just below the summit did his eyes detect anything that looked like a threat.
The rain started again and the cloudy sky again turned milky yellow and full of threat.
“Major! Major!”
Takeo turned to see his headquarters group close up.
“From Colonel Petersen… he expected you to be on the objective by now.”
Takeo smiled widely.
“What did he actually say, Akio?”
“Err… you’re to get your ass on that goddamned fucking hill pronto or you’ll have a new job overseeing latrine details.”
“That sounds about right.”
He checked the hill again, carefully studying the route he had chosen.
“OK, we go with Able Company leading on the left there. Tell Captain Ishuri to wait for me. I’ll be there to lead the attack.”
Takeo suddenly remembered the Garand in his hands and helped himself to some of his radio operator’s ammo as he talked.
“Contact Baker and Dog to provide covering fire on the top and right side. I want one platoon from each assigned to my headquarters as an additional reserve… straight away. Get the sniper section set up…”
He scanned the battlefield for a suitable area and immediately remembered one, a modest range of what were probably once farm buildings at the bottom of the slope, now virtually levelled by the battles that had rolled over them during the last few years.
“Get them set up there a-sap.”
Akio Tanuga made swift notes.
“I’m off to prep Able… let them know I’m coming, Lieutenant. I’ll deal with Charlie on my way. Get the others set up and let me know when we’re all ready to roll. If Petersen calls, tell him I’m leading from the front.”
Takeo ducked beneath a protruding branch and caught his sword’s handle, halting his progress.
“Whoa Major.”
Tanuga grabbed the handle and extracted it from the embrace of the fallen tree.
“Good to go, Major.”
“Thanks.”
Takeo sprinted across the muddy battlefield to where Charlie Company sat in close reserve, waiting for instructions.
1150 hrs Tuesday, 18th March 1947, Saris Castle, Height 570, Veľký Šariš, Czechoslovakia.
“Steady, comrades, steady now. Remember who you are!”
Those who had known the man during the Patriotic War would have been staggered at the change in him, from miscreant and troublemaker to a leader of men, men who would follow him to and through the gates of hell, which was about where they presently found themselves.
Captain Vasily Egonevich Kazakov had come a long way since he had killed his own officer in front of the Gurkha positions all those months previously.
22nd Guards Cavalry Regiment had seen a great deal of fighting and had paid for its experience in rivers of blood, so few of those left having been there at the start.
Such was the 22nd’s reputation that it had been kept reinforced whilst other regiments in the Corps had been allowed to wither, often supplying the reinforcements that kept the 22nd alive.