The shelling opened right on time. The noise was titanic. The Kwantung Army was firing everything it had, and firing as fast as it could-so it seemed to Fujita, anyhow.
Hanafusa's whistle shrilled. "Let's go!" he said. They raced out of the dugouts and ran for the boats waiting on the river. As soon as they got in, got over, and got out, they could start fighting a more ordinary kind of war.
Russian shells were already dropping on the Japanese side of the Ussuri. The barrage hadn't stunned all the Reds, then. Too bad, even if Fujita hadn't really believed it would. The Russians were just too good at covering up and digging in. Well, no help for it. He jumped into his assigned boat. The whole squad made it in. He cut the rope that tied the boat to the riverbank. "Come on!" he yelled, and started paddling like a man possessed. The rest of the soldiers paddled with him.
He didn't want to go into the river. With the heavy pack on his back, he'd sink like a stone. And the water that splashed up onto him said it was bitterly cold even now. Russian machine guns on the far bank yammered out death. Tracers snarled past the boat. Bullets kicked up rows of splashes in the stream. One holed the boat, miraculously without hitting anybody. Water jetted in.
"Stuff something into that!" Fujita shouted to the closest soldier. The man did. Fujita didn't see what. He didn't care. As long as the leak slowed, nobody would.
Mud grated under the boat's keel. The Japanese soldiers jumped out. They ran toward the closest machine-gun nest. The sooner they knocked out those deadly toys, the longer they were likely to live. One of them exploded into red mist fifty meters from the enemy strongpoint. "Mines!" everybody else yelled. Fujita wanted to run very fast and to stand very still, both at the same time. He might have guessed the Russians would use mines to protect their positions, but he didn't have to like it.
A couple of more men went down before the Japanese chucked grenades into the dugout through the firing slit. Even that didn't do for all the Russians. One fellow staggered out all bloody, his uniform shredded. He raised his hands over his head. "Tovarishchi!" he choked out. Fujita had heard that in Mongolia. Comrades!, it meant.
He shot the Russian in the face. "You can't shoot at us and then quit, bastard," he said. From everything he'd heard, machine gunners everywhere had a hard time giving up. And he might even have done the Russian a favor. He was inclined to think so. What greater disgrace than surrender was there?
Japanese soldiers stormed into the woods. They soon discovered their artillery hadn't done everything it might have. The Russians had more machine guns farther back from the Ussuri. They had snipers in camouflage smocks high up in the trees. They'd hidden more mines to slow and to channel the Japanese advance. And they had riflemen waiting in rear-facing foxholes invisible from the front, men who stayed quiet till the Japanese went by and then shot them in the back. Those fellows had as much trouble surrendering as machine gunners did.
Airplanes dueled overhead. In among the trees, Fujita couldn't see how the aerial combat went. When bombs fell on the Red Army positions ahead, he felt like cheering. When explosions came too close to his own men, he swore. He thought the Russians were taking more punishment than they were giving out, but he wasn't sure. Maybe he was just rooting for his own team.
Halfway through that mad afternoon, a runner told him, "You're in command of the platoon."
"Huh?" he said. "What happened to Lieutenant Hanafusa?"
"He caught two in the chest," the other soldier answered. "Maybe he'll make it, but…" A shrug said the odds were bad.
Fujita sure wouldn't have wanted to catch two in the chest, or even one in the toe. But if the platoon was his-at least till another officer showed up-he had to do his best with it. They were still at least a kilometer from the day's planned stop line. He needed to find out what was up with the other squads, too. "Forward!" he called. That was never wrong.
"M.oscow speaking," the radio announced. It was 060 0. Sergei Yaroslavsky drank a glass of sugared tea, hot from the samovar. Pilots and navigators jammed the ready room at the Byelorussian airstrip. A Stuka could have taken out the whole squadron with a well-aimed bomb. The Nazis were sleeping late-or later, anyhow. The Soviet flyers hungered for news, not least because it might tell them what they would be doing next.
Smoke from almost as many papirosi as there were Red Air Force officers in the ready room blued the air. Somebody got up and made the radio louder. When he sat down, someone else patted him on the back, as if to say Good job! Yes, they were all jumpy this early morning.
"Comrades! Soviet citizens! Our motherland has been invaded!" the news reader said solemnly. "Without provocation, without warning, the Empire of Japan has launched a multipronged attack against the Siberian districts of the Russian Federated Soviet Socialist Republic of the peace-loving USSR. Severe fighting is reported in several areas. All drives against the Trans-Siberian Railroad have already been blunted or soon will be-so Red Army commanders in the field have assured General Secretary Stalin. Under his leadership, victory of the Soviet workers and peasants is assured."
Sergei nodded. So did almost everybody else in the ready room. Some officers, he was sure, had no doubts that what was coming out of the radio was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And if you did have doubts, looking as if you didn't was even more important. People couldn't suspect what they didn't see.
The announcer went on and on about towns bombed from the air, atrocities on the ground, and numbers of Japanese soldiers killed. Except for civilians, he said not a word about Soviet casualties. There must have been some; chances were they were heavy. Sergei was sure he wasn't the only one to notice the omission. Notice or not, the Red Air Force officers went right on nodding.
"Foreign Commissar Litvinov has pledged that this war against the Japanese will have a result different from that of the Tsar's corrupt regime in 1905," the newsreader finished. Sergei cheered and clapped his hands. So did everyone else. Nobody could be proud of Russia's performance in the Russo-Japanese War.
After a pause, the announcer talked about fighting in the Soviet west. "The rasputitsa has made movement difficult for both sides," he admitted. That wasn't the smallest understatement Sergei had ever heard. Eastern Poland and western Byelorussia were somewhere between swamp and bog. The Germans still occasionally flew off paved runways. The Red Air Force was grounded.
"In western Europe, the fighting in France has reached what the Germans call a decisive phase," the fellow went on. "The French government denies German claims that there is fighting inside the Paris city limits. The French and English admit heavy fighting continues east and northeast and even north of the French capital. They state they still hope to halt and eventually repel the latest German thrust, however."
He spoke with an air of prissy disapproval, like an important man's plump wife talking about the facts of life. As far as the USSR was concerned, the imperialists were hardly better than the Fascists. But the Soviet Union and England and France had the same enemies at the moment. Expedience could trump ideology.
And, sure enough, the newsreader sounded a little warmer when he said, "British and French bombing of German territory seems to be picking up-judging, at least, by the outraged bleats emanating from Hen Goebbels. If one listens to the Germans, their opponents take care to bomb only schoolhouses, orphanages, and hospitals."
Sergei chuckled. Then he wondered why he was laughing. Yes, German propaganda was pretty ham-fisted. But wasn't what poured out of Soviet radios just as clumsy?