In the nose of the German plane, Oberleutnant Rudi Menzel felt cold and vulnerable.
Cold, because his electrically heated flight suit was not functioning properly and because the damned FW 189 was more full of holes than the Wehrmacht’s boots. He had remonstrated with the ground crew before the last flight for not patching up the aircraft following its brush with a Soviet La-9 several days before. Now the icy slipstream cut into his face as it was forced through the bullet-holes and into the cabin at 280 kph.
Vulnerable, because the FW 189 was slow and under-armed and he quite expected to see more Lavotchkins, Yaks and any other Red Air Force fighter he cared to think about between their present position and Chrudim, their destination, east of Prague.
His headset crackled. At least that seemed to be working; Menzel almost allowed himself to smile.
“Keep a look out for enemy fighters. Especially you, Freddi, you dozy sod. No slip-ups like last time or I’ll put in a personal recommendation to the Kommandant that you join our ground forces in the defence of the Reich. If we get bounced by Ivan we can’t expect any help from our own fighters. Just remember that.” The pilot, Hauptmann Pieter Klepper, sounded edgier than usual, Menzel thought, but he was right about Frederik Lutz. The idiot had let the La-9 get really close to them two days before because he’d thought it was one of their own FW 190s. The La-9 didn’t look anything like the radial-engined German fighter and there was Lutz almost blowing kisses at the pilot until Ivan started shooting at them. Lutz deserved to be posted to a slit trench at the front. Then he wouldn’t mistake Russians for Germans in a hurry.
Menzel got back to his map reading, every so often peering through the clouds for a landmark that would point them accurately to the Chrudim sector.
The Army had received reports of an unusually large Soviet presence in the area and had contacted the Luftwaffe to go and take a look-see. The twenty-year-old Klepper, being one of the most senior and experienced pilots on the squadron, had been asked with his crew of two to take off from their airfield at Altenburg, forty kilometres south of Leipzig, fly to Chrudim to establish the validity of the reports and, if they were substantiated, bring back pictures.
Fucking marvellous, Menzel thought. Here he was, suspended four thousand metres above the earth and heading for one of the hottest sectors on the Eastern Front. All on the say-so of some madcap intelligence officer who had received spurious reports about a Soviet armoured and logistics build-up in some shithole near Prague. So what. The Russians had been ‘building up’ their forces in the region for months and he hadn’t noticed any sign yet of a German counter-offensive.
Menzel had no faith in the Wehrmacht’s intelligence corps. For a start, Chrudim had been behind enemy lines in Czechoslovakia now for weeks. So what did the Army know? The nearest an intelligence officer or a scout party had ever got to Chrudim in the last month was staring at it on a map.
Since the big Russian breakthrough in eastern Czechoslovakia several months before, all had been chaos on the squadron. Things had become so desperate in the last few weeks that some joker at Luftwaffe Staff Headquarters had given orders for their FWs to be equipped with bombs. The mechanics jury-rigged racks under the wings and the same afternoon the lumbering aircraft had set out to bomb Soviet armour. Mercifully, their supply of bombs had run out ten days ago, so the squadron’s remaining six aircraft went back to their observation duties. It was up to the Wehrmacht and the SS to defend the homeland against the Russian T-34 tanks now.
Below their port wing Menzel caught a gleam of sunlight on metal. Shit! Yaks scrambling to meet them. He was about to alert the others when a gap in the clouds showed him that it was water and not airframe on which the early morning rays of sun had reflected. Menzel glanced at his charts.
“Crossing the Elbe now, Herr Hauptmann. We should reach Chrudim in twenty minutes.”
‘Good,” Klepper said. “Both of you. Keep alert. The Soviets must be worse than we think they are if they haven’t spotted us by now. If we get bounced by fighters I’ll head for the nearest clouds and try and shake them off. Once we get to Chrudim, the important thing is to take a look, take pictures and get the hell out.” Klepper’s intercom clicked off.
Menzel scanned the sky, looking for a Soviet air presence, but saw none. Every so often he shot a quick glance at the cloud cover above them. The cumulus had never taken on such significance before. When the Yaks came for them Klepper would have a hell of a time finding cover.
As the March sun climbed higher into the sky the clouds around them evaporated one by one.
So far, the major of tanks concluded, the maskirovka operation had been a complete success.
As the engineers erected the last of the dummy T-34s in the town square of Chrudim, Major Kirill Malenkoy sat back in the rear seat of the jeep and ordered his driver to return to HQ.
The road that led from the little provincial Czech town was lined with T-34s and even the new Josef Stalin 3s, their barrels stowed to the rear in readiness for rapid mobilization, their drivers’ cupolas pointing north-east. The dirt track met the main Prague highway about ten kilometres from their present position. But this was one armoured division that would never make it to the Prague-Berlin road, and Malenkoy smiled with satisfaction. General Nerchenko would be pleased with the progress. Who knows, maybe even Marshal Konev himself would hear of his handling of the maskirovka if the final manoeuvre proved a success. The major gazed down at his smartly pressed uniform and tried to imagine how the Order of Lenin would look amongst the other glittering medals that were pinned to his chest.
There was plenty more work to be done before the prized Order was his, though. The engineers had been instructed to erect another hundred tanks from the rough scraps of wood that had been sent forward from Ostrava by special convoy and the major could also have done with another fifty engineers to ensure that he would finish the job on time. But judging by the speed with which his existing men had put together the first four hundred dummy vehicles, he estimated that he would be finished in a few days, easily within the deadline that had been set by Nerchenko.
As the GAZ jeep wound along the muddy track that led towards Branodz, Malenkoy cast a quick glance skyward to see if there was any sign of aircraft in the vicinity. He was pleased that the thick pines that lined the road almost totally hid the track from the air. Only a crazy Nazi would take his plane low enough to see any enemy activity on that road.
Nerchenko said that he had picked him for the maskirovka because Cadet Officer Kirill Malenkoy had passed out top in his year at the Red Army Academy at Smolensk and maskirovka, the general noted, was the part of the training course for which Malenkoy had shown a particular aptitude. Malenkoy had shrugged it off modestly at the time. As a peasant’s son, one who had spent his life in the forests and fields of Georgia, he had found the art of concealment, camouflage and simulation very easy. When maskirovka became adopted as a formalized tactic of the Red Army, Malenkoy saw an opportunity for him to shine in this uniquely Soviet technique of deception and disinformation. He was now something of a specialist in the field, having masterminded several similar operations in the early part of the “final offensive”.
There were over one and a half thousand real T-34s hidden in the forests forty kilometres west of Chrudim at Branodz — the simple town also dubbed as Konev’s HQ — which could wipe the Wehrmacht in this sector off the face of the globe if they were to roll towards Berlin now. Even the SS offered little resistance, except for the maniac Waffen-SS terrorists who operated behind their lines.
Trying to flush them out was a job that Stavka left to the Siberian divisions. Fight fire with fire, Nerchenko had told him.