Chad Thumann - The Undesirables

This was how Inna found out about the potato field where Karen found herself now, facedown on her stomach and freezing. It was also how Inna had gotten hold of the shovels.

They were military shovels, so-called entrenching tools distributed to the soldiers along with their uniforms and rifles. And the soldiers didn’t willingly part with them. Inna’s sister, a machine gunner, explained the importance of the shovel before she relinquished it to them. She described how she had been admonished about the lifesaving qualities of her humble shovel during her time with the training battalion. “When given the order to halt,” her instructor had howled at her, “you must lie down and immediately start digging!” In three minutes she was expected to dig deep enough so that she was lying flat, and enemy bullets would whiz harmlessly over her head. But that wasn’t good enough. Unless given the order to advance, she was expected to keep digging, so that eventually she could kneel in her trench and then stand. Even then, if not given the order to advance, she had to keep digging, always to her left, never to her right. Every member of her squad was taught to dig left so that they wouldn’t interfere with each other’s labor. Eventually all that digging would result in communications trenches connecting her comrades’ foxholes to her own. It was in that manner that the trenches protecting Leningrad had been dug. And Inna’s sister knew that if her superior officers ever caught her without her shovel, she could be beaten or worse.

But the promise of potatoes was too great a temptation even for soldiers. When Inna promised her sister’s fellow soldiers a share of the harvest, they agreed to lend her their precious shovels. They had to be returned, of course; nothing as valuable as a shovel could simply be given away in Leningrad. Inna distributed the shovels to Sasha and Karen, keeping one for herself. Then they began to plan the raid, referring to one another as the First Potato Army.

It was a dangerous raid. The potatoes were behind German lines. Karen, Inna, and Sasha didn’t only have to cross under the German guns covering no-man’s-land; they also needed to sneak past German patrols. They had waited for a moonless, overcast night.

The darkness was their only advantage. They’d spent so much time without electricity in Leningrad that they were used to seeing in the dark. The Germans, however, seemed entirely dependent on machines and electric light. Karen, Inna, and Sasha had seen the headlights of their Opel trucks long before they heard the engines. That had given them plenty of time to jump off the road and roll into a frozen ditch, where they hid until the trucks passed.

Then, finally, they reached the potato field unseen. It was time to get digging, and they worked with all they had. Until they heard something and crouched in the dark.

German soldiers were coming their way. They nearly walked right into Karen, Inna, and Sasha—almost catching them by surprise, but the crunch of their boots on the icy topsoil gave them away. Karen and her friends immediately stopped digging and dived onto their bellies, onto that frozen ground, where Karen wondered and worried how long they could hold out, facedown, the heat draining from her.

“What do you intend to do after the war?” The question came from Jillian Croogar, a young American newspaper reporter working for the Los Angeles Times. Miss Croogar had been allowed access to Petr while the Soviet Union’s newest hero was recovering in a field hospital.

It was now January of 1942. Native Russian reporters had already visited him. Desperate for good news, they interviewed him for Pravda, Russia’s mouthpiece for Soviet propaganda. The story they wrote had made Petr out to be a supersoldier, a warrior so dedicated to his great leader, Stalin, that he fearlessly held back an entire German tank battalion and destroyed two of the Wehrmacht’s most expensive war machines.

The Pravda story made Petr famous. Even this American reporter had heard of him, so Soviet propaganda ministers directed her to his bedside. “Get married, perhaps?” the reporter suggested. “Start a family?”

Petr stared at Jillian. The answer was so obvious that he didn’t quite understand the question. “After the war?” he repeated, making sure he understood just what the reporter was asking.

“Yes, after the war.” Miss Croogar nodded, her pencil hovering over a steno pad. “You got a sweetheart back home waiting for you?”

Petr shook his head. “Nothing.”

“Nothing? You mean no one,” Miss Croogar corrected him, scribbling in her pad. “No matter. You’re a hero now. I’ll bet the girls will be lining up for a kiss—”

“No. I mean nothing. I won’t do anything after the war.”

Now Miss Croogar looked confused. “You gotta do something—”

“I think he means that he will continue to serve his country,” interrupted Miss Croogar’s Russian advisor. Stalin and his Politburo didn’t trust foreign journalists, so they assigned “advisors” to watch over them. The advisor’s truest purpose was to prevent Miss Croogar from writing anything that might embarrass the Communist Party.

“I’ll never survive the war,” Petr declared with complete confidence.

It was not the answer Miss Croogar was expecting, but she only hesitated a moment before writing down his response. “What makes you think so?”

“You said I’m a hero, yes?”

Jillian nodded. “That’s why I’m here.”

“Russian heroes always die.”

Miss Croogar paused and stared at Petr. This interview was becoming far more interesting than the propaganda puff piece she had expected. “Why’s that?”

“Because they’re always given the most dangerous jobs.”

The advisor nodded at that. “They’re fearless. It is part of the Russian character.”

No, not because they’re fearless, Petr wanted to say. Because they’re expendable. He didn’t dare say it out loud, though. He knew better than to criticize the army or the government, especially with an official right there at his bedside. Petr was slightly surprised that he had even consciously summoned the thought. He had grown adept at burying his thoughts, especially potentially subversive ones, deep in the back of his mind.

Miss Croogar continued to stare at him in the silence. He had the odd sense that she could read his mind. But it wasn’t disturbing. It actually felt comforting somehow.

“Is John Wayne joining the army?” Petr asked.

Miss Croogar looked confused. “Who?”

“John Wayne,” Petr said earnestly. “Your paper, it is from Hollywood, right?”

“Los Angeles, not Hollywood.”

“That’s not the same thing?”

“Not exactly. And John Wayne’s an actor, not a soldier.”

Petr was disappointed. “I’ll bet he’d kill a lot of Germans.”

Miss Croogar smiled. “But not a lot of tanks,” she replied, referring to Petr’s heroics. “You just gave me an idea…” She scribbled something down on the pad of paper. “I’m gonna call you the Russian John Wayne.”

Petr turned red with embarrassment. “Don’t do that.”

Miss Croogar smiled and winked. “Already done.” She folded up her steno pad, shoved it in her breast pocket, and patted it before standing up. “You Russians are always so pessimistic. You’ll survive this war, you’ll see. You’re the Russian John Wayne now. John Wayne never dies.”

Petr didn’t respond. He only watched as the reporter and her government escort exited the hospital.

Despite Miss Croogar’s claims to the contrary, Petr’s suspicions about his impending doom were confirmed by his subsequent transfer. The political officers now believed that his talents were being wasted in the Katyusha battery. He was a tank killer, they thought, and should be trained as such. So that same January, with his legs fully recovered, Petr remained in a rear training battalion. They would teach him to fire the new PTRD antitank rifle.

The PTRD was a simple weapon. It was basically a giant rifle that fired a huge bullet. Fyodor, Petr’s new teammate, told him not to shoot it at a tank’s turret or engine but at something more vulnerable.

Fyodor Malenkov was a short, stocky man who used to work on a collective farm east of Moscow. Judging from his round face and almond eyes, his ancestors had likely come from somewhere in the Asian steppes. Fyodor had taught himself to drive and maintain his farm’s single tractor, and this was the skill that convinced Red Army recruiters to make him a tank driver. He was trained in the operation of the T-28 infantry support tank, an obsolete vehicle quickly being replaced by the new T-34s. Such experience gave Fyodor unique insight into what tankers feared.

Armored vehicles were claustrophobic, loud, uncomfortable, and confusing. Their thick steel plating was supposed to protect their crews, but, psychologically at least, the opposite was true. “I always felt vulnerable,” Fyodor once confessed to Petr, “as if I were driving a gigantic bullet magnet straight at the enemy lines. Once I saw the tank right next to me simply disappear, blown from the inside out by hidden artillery. Another time we were assigned to recover a vehicle that had been hit by a flamethrower. It was still hot, and the corpses inside smelled like roast pork.” Life as a tank crewman meant constant uncertainty and terror, Fyodor explained. “One moment you’d be leading an assault, seemingly invulnerable in your steel coffin, and the next moment you’d be a puddle of burned flesh.”