The Witch of Stalingrad Read online

  “So it begins,” Lilya said to no one in particular and then emptied her rucksack of its contents onto her bunk.

  She set the military items on one side: mess kit, flashlight, thick ushanka cap, first-aid kit, regulation underwear and footcloths. The smaller pile consisted of her personal items: a hairbrush, tin of tooth powder, block of prized pine soap, tiny mirror, photo of her mother, and her precious bottle of peroxide.

  She took her place in line for the toilet, and then, standing at the long trough that served as a communal sink, she did a cursory wash of body and teeth. When the buzzer sounded at nine exactly, she and all the other women lined up in the yard outside the gymnasium in the same order as they had marched in from the station.

  The October air was frigid. The wind reddened their faces and turned their breath to steam. Off in the distance Lilya could see the airfield laid out on a bare, windswept plain. Not a single tree in sight, and no hill to block the wind.

  After roll call, they filed into the regimental barbershop where long rows of chairs had been set up. A man stood behind each one with a pair of scissors. While Lilya waited her turn, women passed her anxiously feeling their bare necks. A few were sniveling at the loss of their girlish curls, which she found a bit foolish.

  To her surprise they had all suddenly turned into beautiful boys, with soft eyes and girlish lips, and she felt a strange, disorienting attraction to them. It seemed wise to keep it to herself.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  January 8, 1942

  As Alex stepped off the military transport plane in Hvalfjord, Iceland, she couldn’t help but swagger just a little. The Soviet government had granted her a visa, and George had arranged with the US Air Force to accredit her as a war correspondent with the rank of lieutenant. The photo on her press pass was atrocious, but she quite liked her uniform of a green wool blouse and slacks. Even the weight of the heavy winter parka she wore didn’t detract from her élan as she strode into the terminal.

  She collected her luggage and then realized she had no idea how to get to her ship or even how to find it. All she knew was the name Larranga. Fortunately, a man in a white uniform approached her and touched the bill of his hat.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Preston.” He shook her hand. “I’m Charles Murdaugh, radio operator of the Larranga. The crew calls me Sparks. The captain asked me to meet you and escort you aboard.”

  Pale and lanky, with rather sparse hair, he didn’t fit any of her images of sea-faring men, but she was happy to find someone who knew where to go.

  “She’s no beauty, but she’ll get us there,” he said. Taking up her suitcases, he guided her outside the terminal to an open jeep and loaded her luggage into the back. The mud-covered vehicle was no beauty either, she noted as she climbed in next to him.

  “It’s one of eight merchant ships in the convoy, the only American one. We’ll also be escorted by various armed vessels.” He started the motor and headed out from the terminal onto a road busy with trucks. In less than twenty minutes they were at the dock and she studied the vessel that would be her home for about two weeks. It was not an uplifting sight. A long, low freighter, with a superstructure at the center, it had obviously seen better days.

  He unloaded her two suitcases and they started up the gangplank. On board, rough-looking seamen were loading crates and what appeared to be engines into the hold. She glanced toward the bow where others were just securing a fighter plane with a tarp and cables and made a note to photograph it once she’d settled in.

  “I’ll take you to your quarters, but then I’m afraid I have to go to work,” Murdaugh said. He led her along the passageway and down a narrow ladder to the first level below decks. “This is deck number one. You’re on the port side,” He walked ahead of her tapping on each hatchway.

  “The compartments are numbered fore to aft, and yours is number three. The head is at the end of the passageway, and the mess deck is below decks on number two.” He set down her luggage and opened the hatchway into a tiny compartment with two steel-framed berths, one above the other. Thank God the porthole was above the water line.

  “We’re scheduled to embark at sixteen hundred, but I have to be at my post an hour before. If you need anything, you can ask one of the seamen.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Murdaugh. Uh, sixteen hundred, that’s four p.m., isn’t it?”

  “Sparks will do fine. And yes, ma’am. Four p.m.”

  After he left, she studied the steel bulkheads that would be her home for ten to fourteen days, and they were anything but cozy. Well, she wasn’t on vacation, and the important thing was to arrive safe in Archangelsk. She wondered if it was as nice as its name.

  *

  Damn. She’d forgotten about the twenty-hour nights. To avoid being seen by enemy aircraft, the ships traveled in total darkness, navigating by compass and asdic alone. But imagining the entire convoy creeping like blind phantoms through the pitch-black waters gave her the creeps.

  Once or twice during the very short days she ventured outside the quarterdeck thinking to snap a few photos and was astonished. Away from the harbor, the full arctic cold struck them, and every surface touched by the ocean spray turned to ice. She anchored herself near the hatchway to her compartment and stared, hypnotized, at the spectacle of the nearby ships. Covered, like the Larranga, in sparkling frost they caught the sunlight and dazzled like fairy vessels. It was impossible to associate the majestic scene with warfare.

  At night, and it was almost always night, the sight was more ominous, as they sailed like ghosts over the heaving black water. Already on the third day the wind and spray became too violent, and she retreated to her compartment. She filled the time with cleaning and preparing her cameras, two small Rolleiflexes and a large 5 x 7 Corona View with accordion bellows.

  She’d resigned herself to a week of boredom, but on the fourth day, an alarming increase in the pitch and roll of the ship awakened her. She dressed, climbed the ladder to the open deck, and regretted it immediately. With each mountainous wave the bow of the ship shot up high out of the water, hovered for an instant, and then slammed down again into the trough. The impact caused water to shoot up on both sides and wash over the bow, which seemed to strain upward once again out of the froth to repeat the violent cycle. The passageway was awash, and the seamen on deck duty had to grip the railing to avoid being swept overboard.

  She could hear nothing but the shrieking wind that rendered speech impossible. The sound was reduced but not eliminated when she pulled the hatch shut again and retreated below. She huddled, anxious, in her compartment, wondering which was worse, to be washed off the deck into the frigid water or to drown trapped in her compartment.

  By the next day, the gale had subsided, and she went topside to take a few photographs. When she opened the hatchway to the quarterdeck, she was stunned. Every surface was covered in a thick layer of ice. At the ship’s prow, the fighter plane was also encased, as if in glass, and glittered with the reflected light of the rising sun just in front of them. With its nose pointed forward, it was like a ship’s figurehead in crystal, and it made the rusty old merchant ship seem noble, their mission heroic.

  “Be careful, miss,” someone said behind her. “It’s slippery, and if you fall overboard, we can’t stop and fish you out.” She turned at the touch on her elbow.

  “Oh, Mr. Murdaugh, uh…Sparks. I was just enjoying this…vision. Is that what we’re carrying? Airplane parts?”

  “Yes, parts, and fuel, and several dismantled planes. The Russian Air Force is apparently desperately in need of aircraft.”

  He blew into his hands. “The ice happens on every trip. During the night, the spray collects on the metal and freezes. It makes us top-heavy so the men have to break it up, and unfortunately, you’re in the way.”

  She edged back toward the hatch as four seamen brushed past her with axes and bats and began to smash the slippery crust around the railings and stanchions. Ice broke off into shards and chips, and the men shoveled th
em over the side, where they floated alongside the countless other ice chunks of the Arctic Ocean.

  Murdaugh guided her back down the ladder to the lower deck. It was difficult to manage the frozen metal steps while being thrown about by the pitching vessel, but she’d learned to anchor herself at every point.

  She arrived gratefully at the door of her berth, when she heard a deafening roar, and a shuddering of the ship threw her to the deck of the passageway. A second later an alarm bell rang through the intercom, followed by “General Quarters. General Quarters. This is not a drill. This is not a drill. Man all battle stations!”

  Had a bomb or torpedo struck them? She lurched into her compartment and cowered on her berth. A tiny voice in her head lamented not being able to photograph whatever it was, but the louder voice begged for it to go away.

  When she peered through the tiny porthole on her outer bulkhead, all she saw was smoke. But no further detonation occurred, and her compartment didn’t flood. The roar of distant guns told her the battle was elsewhere.

  After what seemed like an hour, the call came. “Stand down from General Quarters. All Clear. Stand down.” Curiosity overcame her fear of the unknown outside, and, grabbing her smallest camera, she climbed the ladder to the quarterdeck.

  The two men were still at the deck guns peering at the sky, and two others stood on the stern over the unused depth charges, but most of the crew stood at the port side railing staring somberly out at the sea.

  Some thousand yards away, one of the other merchant ships was sinking. Its prow bobbed at the surface for several minutes as if taking a last breath and then disappeared under the icy water. Lifeboats were already dispatched to pick up the survivors, but they came back empty. The hundreds of men floating in the frigid water were all dead, and no one bothered to collect them. Nauseous, she snapped a few photographs, though she was pretty sure the War Department wouldn’t let the magazine run them.

  When the lifeboats were drawn up and stowed in their davits, the announcement came, “Full speed ahead,” as if nothing had happened.

  “Come back inside, miss.” It was Sparks. She shook her head and gripped the railing, stunned by what she had seen and the apparent callousness of the crew. “Does that happen on every convoy?” she asked.

  “Sometimes not, sometimes it’s worse. I’ve only been on four.”

  “It’s…it’s awful.” It seemed a very banal word for what she felt. “How can you stand it?”

  He stared with her at the churning water where the ship had gone down. “You don’t, really. You just get a little more dead inside each time. Every man here is glad it wasn’t him, but nobody says so. Even if we win the war, no one who signed up for this job is going to have a happy ending. No sailing into the sunset for any of us.” He turned away, leaving her at the railing.

  The two fatalities of war, she brooded. The death of human beings and the death of the spirit. Would the war break her that way, too?

  *

  Finally, the Larranga docked. A team of Russian stevedores came on board, and while the American seamen continued to chip a pathway through the layer of ice around the vehicles on deck, the Russians brought lines into place to lift out the cargo from the holds.

  The radio operator helped her carry her luggage down the gangplank to the dock and tapped one finger to the brim of his cap as a sort of salute. “Good luck, Miss Preston. I hope things go better for you than they did on the trip.”

  “Thanks for the thought, Sparks. Have a safe trip back.” She turned away and stood for a moment, getting her bearings, smelling the disagreeable harbor odor of soot and diesel oil, then hefted her suitcases and staggered toward the reception terminal. After displaying the relevant documents and receiving a stamp on her visa, she staggered with all her luggage outside the terminal and considered how to proceed.

  When she grasped the obvious solution, she all but slapped herself on the forehead. On the snow and ice-covered ground in front of her, everyone carried their loads on runners. She approached an elderly man who was just unloading bundles of wool onto a truck from a child’s sled. When he’d finished, she offered him a sum that would have presumably paid for several such objects.

  He wrinkled his face in surprise at the offer, then appeared to grasp the extent of her need and doubled the amount. She agreed and took the sled rope with one hand while pressing the ruble notes onto his glove with the other, then pivoted around before he could change his mind.

  The sled proved its worth once she’d loaded her bags onto it, and it slid smoothly along until she located a horse-drawn cart and driver and negotiated a ride to the train station on the eastern edge of town.

  On the long ride, she gazed around at Archangelsk and found it disappointing. The name had always evoked images of a shimmering sunlit city, somehow touched by angelic forces. Perhaps in peacetime its fields, wide streets, and low wooden houses had seemed blessed by the nearby forests and the fresh air of the White Sea. But war had made it shabby; the ongoing traffic of trucks, tanks, and assorted combat vehicles moving from the harbor inland had both clogged and pitted its streets.

  At the buzzing of their engines, she glanced up to see two planes passing overhead toward the harbor. They swooped low and dropped their loads, though she couldn’t see if they struck their targets. Then she heard the metallic scream and detonation as they were shot down by flak. Had the Larranga been hit? She thought again of the ship she’d watched sink in the arctic waters and of the white bodies floating toward them. Her first sight of death. Sparks’s words came back to her, that every horror you saw or heard made you a little more dead inside. She shook off the thought and moved on, as the convoy had done.

  At the Yaroslavl-Moskowsky railway station, she climbed from the wagon, loaded her luggage once again onto the sled, and towed it to the entryway. Inside, she elbowed her way into the crowd and studied the posted departure schedule.

  To her relief, one more train was leaving for Moscow that day, in two hours. She purchased a ticket and directed her attention to food. Fortunately, bread was available from a state-owned shop inside the station. It was gritty and tasted of sawdust, but she made herself eat it and wondered if it was a preview of her new diet.

  She boarded the train at four in the afternoon, though the winter sky was already pitch-black. The train was packed, and she managed to move forward only by shoving the heavy suitcases in front of her. She held the child’s sled under her arm, and when the crowd ahead of her would move no farther, she found she had at least achieved a space by a window. She made herself comfortable sitting on her suitcase and placed the sled in front of her knees.

  The chatter of the people around her and the clackety clack of the train wheels blended into a soothing white noise, and in the warmth of the train corridor, she became drowsy. She pulled her woolen air-force cap down over her forehead and leaned her head against the window. She dozed, woke, and dozed again, repeatedly.

  Twenty-eight hours, and four agonizing trips to the filthy train toilet later, she watched as the train pulled into Yaroslavsky Station, Moscow. Dull-witted, hungry, and stiff she stepped down from the car with all her luggage. She hoped living in Moscow would be easier than getting there.

  *

  The Hotel Metropole was within sight of the Kremlin, so all she had to do was find a tram that she could struggle onto with her sled and luggage. She accomplished that too, and finally, there it was. Red Square.

  She knew from news reports that the German advance had stopped just short of Moscow and that the Russians had even mounted a counter-offense, but when she stepped off the tram, it wasn’t at all what she’d imagined.

  All the famous buildings were camouflaged. The walls of the Kremlin were painted to resemble a row of low houses, while Lenin’s tomb had been made up to look like a village cottage. A strange zigzag pattern was painted the length of the main street, and it took her a moment to realize it was supposed to look like housetops when seen from above.

  The
golden domes of the Kremlin churches, which would otherwise have been highly visible, were encased in dark timber boxes, and the bright green of the other buildings’ roofs was darkened to brown. How effective could it be when the snaking curves of the Moscow River were so distinctive from the air, and any map would reveal the location of the Kremlin atop the highest bend? Not to mention the forest of barrage balloons that cried out “target here.”

  Red Square itself had anti-aircraft artillery emplacements at both ends, though the snow-covered outline of a small crater revealed that at least one bomber had gotten through.

  Only the Hotel Metropole, across from the Bolshoi theater, was not camouflaged, and she trudged toward it across the icy square amid lethargic Muscovites.

  The double doors of the entryway opened to the cavernous lobby where the air, though still cold, was a relief from the deadly outdoor temperature. Her sled seemed out of keeping with the hotel elegance, so she left her luggage by the entryway and proceeded to the desk.

  “I believe I have a reservation that was made by the US War Department.”

  “Yes, madam,” the elderly clerk said with exaggerated deference. “And your name is…”

  “Oh, sorry. Preston. Alexandra Preston.”

  “Ah yes. Here it is. Welcome to Moscow.” He took her passport and wrote out a lengthy registration, then handed her a large brass key. “Room 315. I’m afraid you’ll have to carry up your own bags.”

  She nodded, concealing consternation, but as she turned away a figure stepped into her field of vision. Tall, unhealthily thin, he wore a pinstriped business suit and tailored coat. His face was long and pale, and his hair, when he removed his hat, was thin.

  “Miss Preston. So glad you could make it,” he said, to her surprise, in English. At her befuddled expression, he added, “Harry Hopkins, at your service.” He offered a long, smooth hand and she shook it. “President Roosevelt’s envoy,” Hopkins added, sensing her uncertainty.