This was when Petr realized that the lieutenant was drunk. He always seemed to be drunk before a battle. Petr didn’t know how or where he got the vodka. But he always had enough liquid courage hidden away to numb his senses and dull his brain.
Petr didn’t really mind. The lieutenant didn’t know how to work the Katyusha rockets anyway. None of them did, at least not when they had first been assigned to the battery. But Petr could read the instruction pamphlet. So eventually he figured out how to launch the rockets, which had made him the battery’s de facto leader. The arrangement worked out fine so long as the lieutenant didn’t try to interfere. And so long as the lieutenant was drunk, there was little danger of that.
Petr ignored the lieutenant and ignited the rockets. They rode in plumes of smoke off the bed of the three-axle truck, moaning and screaming as they rose into the bleached winter sky. It was strange music, the reason the Germans had nicknamed the Katyusha launchers Stalin’s Organ.
The instructions showed Petr how to launch the Katyushas, but aiming them was far more complicated. They had a range of over three miles, which meant Petr seldom saw where they landed. He couldn’t just aim and fire. Instead, he had to solve a complicated equation involving the rockets’ angles of ascent, their fuel, their acceleration, and the force of gravity. The charts and tools that came with the rocket launchers should have helped Petr with those calculations, but no one ever taught him to use them, and he couldn’t figure them out on his own. So he just pointed the rockets high enough so they wouldn’t hit his own troops, and let them fly.
Back in Petr’s rural village, his father, a former university professor and a theoretical mathematician, was teaching arithmetic at the local schoolhouse. When the Red Army conscription commission discovered that the new recruit was the son of a former math professor, they assigned Petr to the Katyusha rockets in the 285th Rifle Division. Who better to make the highly precise calculations required to aim the Katyushas properly?
Unfortunately for the Red Army, Petr hated math. He respected his father’s command of numbers, the more so because he himself couldn’t understand anything more complicated than algebra. Petr preferred the real world to the theoretical world of numbers. Especially nature. He loved trees heavy with snow, streams crusted with ice, and the absolute silence of a winter day, a day like this one.
Petr’s uncle had taught him to hunt, and the young man loved it. He loved the traces animals left in the snow. He loved outwitting them, tracking them back to their lairs. He loved shooting because he’d discovered he was a natural shot. He even enjoyed the cold.
To Petr, his father’s move from Moscow to a rural village had been invigorating. It was freedom. The army, of course, was the opposite. The army was tedium. It was taking orders and digging ditches. It was pushing trucks stuck in the mud. It was carrying heavy ammunition and supply boxes. And it was marching, endless marching. Petr’s unit had a truck, but it was for the Katyusha missile racks, not the men. Petr already felt as if he had marched all the way across Russia, and now that they were constantly in retreat, it seemed like the Germans were forcing him to march right back.
Dull explosions in the distance told Petr that the Katyusha rockets had struck some barren patch of snow, and he hurried to reload the missile racks on the back of the truck. He’d quickly learned that he was not judged by where the rockets fell but by how often they fell. The political officers who kept an eye on the army for the all-powerful Politburo couldn’t see where the rockets landed any better than Petr could. But they could know how quickly Petr and his team reloaded the battery, how long it took before they ignited the next salvo. Petr and his team had become quite good at loading rockets. So theirs was judged one of the finest Katyusha batteries on the front, even though they had absolutely no idea how to aim.
As Petr’s team finished reloading the Katyusha for him, he checked the angle of the launch rack and adjusted it slightly downward so the rockets would travel more straight ahead than upward. This way the rockets would land farther away. If Petr’s comrades managed to break through the German lines, he wanted to be sure his rockets didn’t land on them, the advancing Red Army.
He needn’t have worried. He’d barely ignited the new salvo before the Russian infantry appeared in the trees on the other side of the river before him. Like Petr they wore warm ushanka—fur hats—under their steel helmets; valenki—felt boots; and telogreika—quilted jackets and trousers. The whole uniform was dyed green and offered no concealment against the white snow and bare birch trees. But these men didn’t even bother trying to hide. They were far more concerned with running away.
They ran right for Petr.
His heart sank. Once again the Red Army was retreating. Already Petr could hear the political officer screaming at the rush of fleeing infantry, pleading with them to hold their ground, ordering them to stand fast for their country, and, pistol drawn, threatening to shoot the first Russian soldier who tried to cross the bridge to the other side of the river—Petr’s side.
It was to no avail. Russian soldiers had no fear of pistols. They feared German machine guns.
Peter heard the staccato report of those machine guns and ignited a Katyusha salvo that briefly drowned them out. The rockets exploded harmlessly in the distance. And the machine gunfire returned, closer.
Then came another sound: the rumble and clank of metal plates slapping against steel wheels. It was tank treads: German panzers. A shot boomed, louder than the machine guns, and a tree blew apart, showering burning splinters in all directions. The Russian soldiers who crossed the stone bridge were passing Petr now, dropping their rifles and grenades so they could run faster. A rout was under way.
Petr and his crew had never been in a battle that hadn’t turned into a rout, so they knew exactly what to do. They packed up the ammunition trailer while Lieutenant Gromoslavsky wheeled the truck around. Then they attached the trailer to the truck’s hitch, jumped on the running boards, and hung on tight, waiting for Lieutenant Gromoslavsky to hit the gas. Drunk or not, the lieutenant was wise enough to keep the truck’s fuel tank topped off. Their truck burned less gas than a German tank, so they all knew that the panzers would be forced to stop and refuel eventually, allowing them to outrun the surging German attack.
But the lieutenant hadn’t hit the gas, not yet. He was waiting for Petr, the only crew member who hadn’t jumped aboard. Petr looked around. One of the other trucks had failed to start. It was still facing the advancing panzers, rockets loaded and pointed up into the sky. That truck would make a valuable prize. The Germans loved capturing abandoned equipment and using it to kill Russians. And the truck stood, abandoned. The Katyusha rocketeers manning it had joined the mad dash to flee.
Lieutenant Gromoslavsky leaned out his window, shouting at Petr to jump on the running boards, warning that they would leave him behind. Petr knew it was no idle threat. He wouldn’t be the first man the lieutenant had sacrificed to save his skin. But Petr was tired of marching, and this battle was supposed to have been different. It wasn’t supposed to end in a Russian rout. It was part of a new winter offensive. Winter was to be Russia’s greatest weapon. Had it not destroyed Napoleon? Now it should be destroying Hitler. Russians were used to winter. They were prepared for winter. Their quilted telogreikas were warmer and far less cumbersome than the long coats the Germans wore.
Or at least Petr had heard that that was what the Germans wore. He’d never seen a German. He’d always been too far removed, firing his rockets from well behind the Russian lines. He’d looked forward to seeing a German, finally. The great winter offensive was supposed to end with captured German prisoners, after all. But here instead was another Russian retreat. Once again, he’d only been close enough to hear the enemy’s guns and tanks, and once again, he’d been too far away to see a single actual German soldier.