SOON AFTER seven o’clock in the evening, a staff car drove at speed onto a German airfield near a small copse of stunted, dust-covered oaks and braked sharply beside a twin-engine plane. The plane’s engines were already running; the pilot had started them when the staff car first reached the airfield. Wearing a flying suit and holding a side cap in one hand, General Richthofen, commander of the 4th Air Fleet, emerged from the car. Ignoring the greetings of the technicians and mechanics, he strode up to the plane and began to climb the ladder. He looked strong and vigorous, with a broad back and muscular thighs. Sitting in the seat usually occupied by the radio operator, he put on an aviator cap with headphones and then, like all airmen preparing for a flight, took a quick, casual look at the people he was leaving behind on the ground. He fidgeted for a moment, then settled into position on the hard low seat.
The engines howled and roared. The grey grass trembled, a huge plume of white dust shot out, like glowing steam, from beneath the plane.
The plane took off, gathered height and flew east. At an altitude of 2,000 metres, the plane was met by its escort of Fokkers and Messerschmitts.
The fighter pilots would have liked to chat and joke on their radios in their usual way, but they knew that the general would hear what they said.
Half an hour later Richthofen was flying over the burning city. Lit by the setting sun, the cataclysmic scene was clearly visible 4,500 metres below him. In the fierce heat, white smoke had risen high into the sky; this bleached smoke, purified by height, had spread out in wavy forms much like white clouds. Below these white clouds rolled a heaving, seething ball of thicker, heavier smoke; it was as if some Himalayan peak were slowly dragging itself out of the earth’s womb, spewing out thousands of tons of hot, dense ores of different colours—black, ash-grey and reddish-brown. From time to time a hot, bronze flame would shoot up from the depths of this vast cauldron, scattering sparks for thousands of metres.
It was a catastrophe of almost cosmic dimensions. The giant blaze had spread almost to the border of the Kazakh steppes.
There were moments when the earth itself could be seen, with small black mosquitoes above it, but dense smoke instantly covered everything over.
The Volga and the surrounding steppe looked grey and wintry, blanketed by a sombre fog.
The pilot felt suddenly anxious; through his earphones he could hear Richthofen almost gasping for breath. Then he heard him say, “Mars . . . this must be visible from Mars. It’s the work of Be-el-ze-bub.”
In his numbed, slave’s heart the Nazi general could sense the power of the man who had elevated him to these terrible heights, who had entrusted to him the torch with which German planes, on this last border between Europe and Asia, had kindled a blaze that would enable German tanks and infantry to advance towards the Volga and the giant Stalingrad factories.
These minutes and hours seemed the greatest triumph of totalitarianism’s most merciless idea—that of pitting TNT and aircraft engines against women and children. To the fascist pilots defying the Soviet flak and soaring over this cauldron of smoke and flame, these hours appeared to signal the fulfilment of Hitler’s promise: German violence would triumph over the world. Those down below—listening to the planes’ sinister hum, suffocating in smoke as they sheltered in cellars or among the incandescent ruins of their homes—appeared to have been defeated forever.55
But this was not so. A great city was perishing, but this did not mean that Russia was being enslaved—still less that she was dying. Amid the smoke and ashes the Soviet people’s strength, love and belief in freedom was still obstinately alive, even growing stronger—and this indestructible force was already beginning to triumph over the futile violence of those trying to enslave it.