Chapter 1138: Chaotic Battlefield

In a building on Vernadsky Avenue, a Soviet machine gun nest on the second floor was aimed at the wide street. The avenue, which should have been bustling, was devoid of people. In a hole on the third floor of this building, blasted open by a rocket, a cold-blooded sniper was aiming his weapon in the direction the enemy might appear.

Every street and every ruin in the city of Moscow had become a paradise for weapons of all kinds to kill. Everyone was trying every method to set traps and lay mines, attempting to use all sorts of means to kill the careless enemy.

Everything here could be a deadly presence. A momentary lapse in concentration could cost a person their life. A bullet could fly out from any corner at any time—an unexpected corner.

A German soldier, carrying his weapon, ran from this side of the street to the other. He was carrying a telephone wire on his back, used to connect the German troops in the nearby blocks. He held onto his helmet and ran desperately, because the slightest hesitation would slow him down, and he could be hit by a Soviet sniper, becoming a corpse in the middle of the road.

“Ping!” The shot still rang out, but this German soldier was clearly one of the lucky ones. The bullet ricocheted off the ground behind him, sending dirt flying, while he had already crossed the most dangerous part, tumbling and crawling to a safe position on the other side.

“Did you see the sniper’s position?” In a corner, a Sergeant, rifle on his back, asked the soldiers responsible for the local counter-sniper mission. These soldiers, also carrying sniper rifles, listed several suspicious locations.

One soldier pointed to a suspicious building and said, “I suspect the sniper is in that building opposite, but I didn’t see a muzzle flash, so I can’t confirm the specific window.”

This kind of thing happened almost every hour. Even in the twenty-first century, finding an experienced sniper’s hiding spot is a troublesome matter. High-tech detection methods are eventually needed, but their effectiveness still requires testing by time.

“Nothing to be done. Tell the troops to hold their position. We’re not good at this; leave it to the artillery.” The sergeant marked an approximate location on a pencil-drawn sketch map of the nearby blocks and handed it to a soldier in an artillery observer’s uniform. “Give this to your officer. During the next bombardment, hit the general location marked on the map.”

The soldier who took the sketch nodded and stuffed it into the leather satchel at his side. The Germans were constantly collecting intelligence on suspicious targets, preparing to eliminate these more dangerous buildings in the next offensive. The closer they got to the center of Moscow, the more they felt the stubborn defense of the Soviet troops. Barricades and obstacles were becoming more numerous, even hindering the advance of tanks and other heavy vehicles.

The Soviets used everything they could find to stop the German advance: destroyed buses and excavated rubble. Sometimes, the Soviets would dig up an entire road and use the excavated earth to build a steep-sloped rampart, to prevent German tanks from advancing quickly into the city.

Inside the German artillery command post, several officers were screening the coordinates for fire missions sent from the front lines. They carefully compared photos and the maps in their hands, calculated the correct positions, and marked them on the specialized artillery map.

“My God, there are too many targets. If we cover all these suspicious locations with artillery fire, it’s no different from destroying the entire city of Moscow,” an officer complained helplessly, rubbing his sore eyes.

“This morning, we used 105mm howitzers to destroy 30 fixed targets, but I heard 12 soldiers were still hit by enemy snipers… This afternoon, we’ve been ordered to attack 40 more similar targets. Honestly, I don’t think those snipers are just going to wait in the same place for our shells.” Another officer was removing pushpins from targets that had been shelled, while using a different color pin to mark new targets.

The map was becoming covered in target markers, which annoyed everyone in the command post. It wasn’t that their rate of fire was too slow, but that these suspicious targets were appearing in too many places. Every day, hundreds of men claimed to have been attacked by Soviet snipers, but it turned out most were just potshots.

A stray bullet hitting near a soldier could cause widespread panic. In this “every-bush-is-an-enemy” urban warfare, intelligence from the front line was not always reliable. Some units, wanting the artillery to destroy every suspicious target around them, would deliberately claim a sniper was firing from a certain location.

The ammunition consumption was driving the German logistics managers mad. Due to high tension and other reasons, frontline soldiers frequently over-expended their ammunition. Grenades and rockets were the most-consumed items. German soldiers would often kick open a door and immediately toss in a grenade—the most direct and effective way to deal with a suspicious room. The consumption of rockets was even faster, mainly because they were one of the few tools frontline troops had for “demolishing” walls.

In a place where danger could appear anywhere, keeping all locations under observation was a very reassuring method. Therefore, German soldiers often used their precious anti-tank rockets to destroy building structures and knock holes in ruined walls that blocked their line of sight.

While the artillery commanders were complaining about the endless targets, the logistics supply dump was even more chaotic. Soldiers from various companies and battalions came to collect the bullets and grenades that had just been unloaded from the trucks. Most items wouldn’t even stay in the hands of the logistics troops for more than a day.

Besides ammunition, all sorts of other things needed to be distributed: cigarettes, chocolate, soap, matches, shoe insoles, socks, sewing kits, spices, compressed biscuits, canned goods, and solid-fuel heaters. There were over a million German troops encircling Moscow, and the daily consumption of these items was astonishing. The soldiers used over ten thousand sheets of letter paper every day, and 4 train cars were designated just for transporting the wounded.

Such a massive force required a headache-inducing amount of fresh water for drinking and washing every day. The Germans had set up a special water emergency support unit, with dozens of pumps and purifiers running non-stop, just so the troops in the rear could live normally. Hundreds of chickens, ducks, cattle, and sheep procured from Ukraine and Belarus were slaughtered at the front daily, just so the battered troops rotating off the line could have a decent meal.

If you included the several tons of artillery shells fired into Moscow every day, the accounting and inventory work for these supplies was enough to make one collapse. This didn’t even include the multiplied consumption of shells and ammunition during major military operations (like the battle for Bitsa Park). A full 17,000 German soldiers were stationed at several train stations and their distribution depots, doing the work of common laborers.

They moved shells from trains to trucks, and then from trucks to the artillery pieces. They were the “logistics company” for the million German troops encircling Moscow, responsible for sorting and delivering all kinds of goods to the hundreds-of-kilometers-long front line. These soldiers were unfortunate, because they had been in the army for a year but hadn’t fired a single shot in this chaotic era. And yet these soldiers were fortunate, because many of the men who had joined up with them were already dead, while they remained unharmed.

“Logistics has delivered our shells. Tell the brothers eating lunch to hurry it up. We have a lot of targets to hit this afternoon. We might be an hour late for dinner.” Hearing the trucks outside, he knew without thinking that the shells had arrived. The artillery commander gave the order, then pressed his face to the spotting scope, observing the smoking targets in the distance.

Soon, a lively bombardment began again. The German 105mm howitzers roared once more, sending shell after shell toward the distant buildings. The sound of brick walls cracking and collapsing could be heard from streets away. The black smoke from the explosions blotted out the sky, making everyone despair.

With these booming explosions, the battle for Vorontsov Park began. The Germans bypassed the dangerous sniper-infested zone on Lenin Avenue, throwing 1,000 soldiers into this small urban green space. The battle unfolded in the dense woods and behind the benches lining the winding paths. Soldiers on both sides once again experienced the closest thing to open-field warfare in an urban setting.

Bullets sliced through branches, sending dense leaves flying. Soldiers fought the enemy from dug-out trenches and barbed-wire defenses, just like a battlefield from World War I. Men fell, bullets piercing their chests. Blood soaked into the soil, changing the color of the park’s man-made stream.

The bridge over the stream became the focal point. The Germans set up interlocking fire with 3 machine guns and, after great difficulty, brought up a King Tiger tank. Only then did they finally capture the 4-meter-long “bridge,” which was piled high with the bodies of soldiers from both sides.

Advance chapters at Nightjar Reads · nightjarreads.com