Chapter XXXIV: Revelation
*Author's note: Warning, this one gets pretty dark
After eight years of the worst war in European history, the syndicalist regimes had fallen, imploding under pressure from all sides. With the war in the Americas, Africa and the Pacific over, all eyes turned to the eastern reaches of Europe where the final chapter of the Weltkrieg was playing itself out.
Donner und Blitz: June – July 1946
The spring campaigns for both the Moscow Accord and Reichspakt had proven inconclusive. Now, German high command awaited the transfer of all military units not required for occupation duties (or the Irish Civil War) to the east. With the full strength of the German army at their disposal for the first time in the war, Oberkommando Ost began drawing up plans for a ‘Grand Offensive’ to take place in mid-summer 1946. While Goltz wished to focus the offensive east of Smolensk to break open a path to Moscow, German high command denied this. Some of the heaviest defenses in the whole world now lay between the two cities. Even if these were bypassed and Moscow captured, it would likely not mean the end of the war.
Ableitung III b had long since penetrated Russia, though only recently had the extent of the enemy’s industrial plant become understood. The dehumanization of and mass deportations to the trans-Ural factory cities of millions form the Ostwall nations supercharged the already thrumming ascent of the enemy’s war economy. The sheer figures of Russian output were mindboggling, surpassing German ones by over three times. Thus, both the Reichspakt’s political and military leadership agreed that the capture of a few more cities, even Moscow, would not suffice to end the war. The weak point of the enemy, Kurt von Schleicher recognized correctly, was its will to resist. What was required now was an event that made the futility of the enemy’s position so utterly undeniable that its people would give in regardless of who led them. A visual manifesto of unprecedented magnitude was required.
To enable this doom, air supremacy was necessary. The Luftmarschall of the Luftstreitkräfte, Manfred von Richtofen, was given the task of winning air supremacy over central Russia. The two branches of the German air forces, the tactically based Luftwaffe and the strategically-focused Luftstreitkräfte, were once more brought under the singular control of von Richtofen. To complete his task, the Luftmarschall would be able to call on more than 9,000 fighter aircraft, 4,000 tactical bombers and fighter-bombers and 1,600 strategic bombers. These figures included a thousand jet aircraft (many pilfered from France and Britain).
Luftmaschall von Richtofen, the ‘Red Baron’,
aged 53
The hardest work of breaking the Russian air force’s back had been completed in the preceding year, but now von Richtofen’s aerial armadas swept left from the skies. This could only be achieved for a limited time, however, for fuel supply issues still bit. What naval fuel production could be diverted to the higher quality fuels required for aircraft had long since been switched over but there were still limited reserves for such a wide-ranging operation.
The Reichskanzeler held a meeting on June 8th, the day after Norway’s fall, to inform his top eastern commanders and Luftmarshall von Richtofen of the reasoning for the massive air campaign. There, to this limited audience, he revealed the development of a secret wonder weapon which required dominance of the air to deploy accurately and effectively.
The Seeds of Summer Glass
Unbeknownst to all but a very tightly knit circle, the German government (together with Austria-Hungary) had established the ‘Revelation Program’, 'Der Offenbarung Programm', to create the world’s first atomic weapons in 1942. To achieve this, the Program had enlisted the services of an impressive, multidisciplinary array of scientists and weapons manufacturers. Included amongst the chemists, metallurgists, biologists, mathematicians, ballistics engineers, and geologists. The stars of the show of course were the physicists: Lise Meitner, Hans Bethe, Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Diebner, Abraham Esau, Fritz Strassman, Neils Bohr, Erich Schumann, and Albert Einstein among others.
The Revelation Program had already produced the world’s first atomic bomb, codenamed Sommerglas [ENG. Summer Glass]. Sommerglas, with a yield of 14 kilotons, had been detonated successfully in the Namibian desert in March 1945. Since then, the network of uranium enrichment reactors and warhead assembly plants had produced an additional five bombs with eight more on the way.
At the time the first several bombs had been prepared it had seemed like they might be used against the syndicalists. The heavy factory complexes at Toulouse were chosen as the initial target, though this spurred a debate amongst the Reichskanzeler’s inner circle. Economic State Secretary Carl Friedrich Goerdeler reminded the assembled that under the terms of the Halifax Accords Germany would have to in part fund the rebuilding of France. Already creaking under the cost of the war, German finances might not withstand the reconstruction of yet another entire city. Besides, by that stage Paris was about to fall and German troops had all but triumphed in the Metropol.
German eyes had turned to Britain next, but upon further inspection it was clear that Great Britain would be contested soon and mostly at cost to the Entente. Better to let what was likely to become a postwar rival in the Imperial Commonwealth weaken itself fighting what would be its own future subjects. Italy was considered, but if both France and Britain were defeated its collapse was a matter of months if not weeks. As the syndicalists fell in quick succession of one another, the Reichskanzeler decided that the war with Russia should be resolved by the end of summer. Luftmarschall von Richthofen had his timeframe.
The Push to the Borders: June – July 1946
At the June 8th conference, Field Marshal Goltz and Chief of the General Staff Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord presented plans for their next offensive. The Reichskanzeler would take this opportunity to reveal the secret of the Revelation Program and explain its significance. The commanders of the eastern front immediately intuited atomic weapons as battlefield tools that could be used to break through the titanic Russian defenses before Moscow. Schleicher agreed, but only in part. He warned his generals that they were developing ‘Kremlin tunnel vision’. This new breed of weapon had vast implications for the world that went far beyond the military sphere. These new ‘atomiks’ would be used on targets of both military and political value.
The Reichskanzeler wished to eject the Russians from most of Ukrainian soil before unleashing this new Armageddon on them. While Schleicher stated that his reasoning for this was to collect more evidence of Russian crimes against humanity and thus justify the use of the bombs, the reality was that he wished to take away what few bargaining chips Savinkov (or whoever succeeded him) might have left – should Ukraine be liberated, the only Reichspakt nations still under Russian control would be Azerbaijan and Georgia.
Regardless, to carry out the pre-bombing campaign a truly gargantuan force was assembled on the eastern front – the largest in all the war. The main theater would be the Russian front, which saw assembled between the Baltic and Black Sea more than 2.4 million German soldiers. The order of battle for Germany would be Army Groups White (Guderian), Red (Schörner), Brown (Falkenhorst), Gray (Hoth), Orange (Blomberg), Purple (Loringhoven), along with the western newcomers from Army Groups Ivory (Manstein), Green (von Bayern), Teal (Rommel) and Mauve (Witzleben). Added to this were a further 2.3 million soldiers from across the Reichspakt.
There would be two further peripheral theaters, one in Scandinavia and one in Anatolia. In the southern theater, the 240,000 Germans of Army Group Burgundy committed along with 1.5 million Reichspakt coalition soldiers. In Norway-Sweden, only recently liberated, small scale battles and skirmishes were unfolding along the Artic Circle, with a composite battle group some 50,000 strong deployed.
In all, as June settled into July, the Reichspakt had deployed 6.5 million men under arms between the White Sea and the Mediterranean. It was perhaps the greatest force ever prepared in human history. Facing it was the Moscow Accord’s armies, which totaled nearly 5.3 million distributed in a proportional manner. Though their quality was poor, especially in infantry, the fortifications that the Accord had settled into were strong. Multiple concentric lines of defenses that had been established before Moscow and across the Ukrainian steppe and beyond into central Russia. As ever, field works had proven a strength of the Russian military.
On July 1st, the plan agreed on June 8th kicked off with thousands of Manstein’s planes asserting air dominance over western Russia. It had been here that most of the remaining Russian air force had been located and here where it would die.
Roving about in hundreds of squadrons of twelve, German aircraft combined with other Reichspakt planes to ‘blot out even the clouds’. Beneath this coverage, the Grand Offensive thundered into existence beneath a creeping barrage that expended a total of 1.4 million shells a day for the first week and a half. This massive stockpile had been gathered in the time between offensives, with confiscations of ammunition from the defeated syndicalists contributing greatly. Mostly concentrated in the southern bend of Egorov’s salient and Ukraine, German tanks encountered hard battles during the first week of July before managing to acquire some limited breakthroughs.
Reichspakt forces would tear through one line at multiple locations, dig in, wait for reinforcements to enter the breach which would then begin clearing enemy strongholds in the rear, then reinforce the advanced line. Siege artillery and aircraft would be brought up, the next set of enemy positions surveilled and bombarded, then the whole process would be systematically repeated. This would continue bloody mile by bloody mile through most of July, until at last by the 27th Reichspakt forces stood on the northeastern Ukrainian border. Only the far eastern sliver of that country along with the Crimean Peninsula now stood in Russian hands.
Reichspakt troops at the Ukrainian – Russian border marker
Further north a prong had been forced in the direction of Moscow some eighty kilometers from Vyazma. From here, German bombers were able to receive full escorts to and from Moscow, though losses to anti-aircraft guns were heavier than expected. Beyond the Moscow axis, heavy battles at last forced Feliks Egorov’s armies out of their salient threatening the Baltics. The general, now promoted to marshal, skillfully withdrew his men but this was of little comfort to him. The Baltics were now forever out of his reach and he knew it. As Russia’s most celebrated commander in the second half of the war, Savinkov had grown wary of this general. Egorov’s politicking was well-known in Stavka circles. It had been his intrigues which had led to his ascension from mere corps commander to leader of the
Baltic Front. Despite being a relative unknown at the beginning of the war, Egorov risen relentlessly and even replaced one of Savinkov’s favorite allies, Vyacheslav Naumenko, after openly betraying him by refusing to reinforce his offensive during the Second Baltic Campaign. Back then, Savinkov had refused to punish Feliks, allowing his star to rise to engender jealousies and competition amongst his commander, but he had never trusted the general again.
For his own part, Egorov had become increasingly disgruntled with the lack of support he had received from Moscow. His
front had been continually undersupplied and undermanned yet overperformed compared to his three other colleagues. This was a fact Feliks had shared openly and loudly amongst his men, garnering their personal loyalty in a way unmatched by any other commanders in the Russian army. Egorov blamed the Black Baron, Pyotr Wrangle, whom he felt had left him and his men out to dry, drawing his men’s ire on the generalissimo of the Russian forces. He also had a personal animus toward Denikin who equally disliked Egorov. As he withdrew before the German summer onslaught, Egorov began to shepherd supplies for his own purposes as he felt Savinkov’s position became increasingly untenable.
With the utter destruction of the Russian air force and the restitution of most of Ukraine, Kurt von Schleicher decided that his requirements had been fulfilled. He would pass authorization for the use of nuclear weapons to Luftmarshall Richtofen. As this occurred, commands were passed to the army group commanders ordering them to pause their attacks, though to be prepared to resume the offensive ‘within several days’.
Richthofen had delegated locational planning to a targeting committee which included staff members from all army groups and the General Staff. Data was collated and on August 3rd the targets chosen. The date set was August 12th. It was the eight-year anniversary of Russia entering the Second Weltkrieg. The attack would be codenamed Operation Rache [ENG. Revenge].
The Drive to the Borders, July 1946
The Day of Seven Suns: August 12th, 1946
It had been a hot these last months across western Eurasia. In Kazan, Tambov, Saratov, Samara, Belgorod, Yaroslav and more the grass had lost its spring luster and adopted a high summer brown. The trees were thirsty and the skies blue. It was some time since the last rainstorms had blown over, leading wildlife to congregate around the rivers and lakes to quench and cool themselves. In Moscow, where the mercury had reached the mid-30s centigrade, people too had retreated indoors where possible.
One person in particular, Boris Savinkov, had retreated from the Kremlin to his summer dacha on the shores of Lake Pleshcheyovo, about a hundred and twenty kilometers from his capital. It overlooked the medieval Monastery of St. Nicetas and its onion-domed 18th century chapel. The dacha was a secretive place, though its existence, if not its importance, was known by German intelligence. It had never received a bomb or even an overflight thus far. Even so, Savinkov’s regime had established a vast underground network of bunkers there where Stavka occasionally met.
On the 10th of August, the Vohzd had ordered Anton Denikin, commander of the
Ukrainian Front, to report to him at this place. Denikin suspected that this meeting would lead to his execution. Despite serving as one of the most capable commanders in Russia since the very first day of the war, his formations had been mostly forced out of Ukraine. Savinkov had grown to admire Denikin during the Russian Civil War and his early successes in the Second Weltkrieg, but by now the increasingly paranoid and maddened Vohzd had resorted to blaming everyone around him for recent setbacks. He indeed intended to murder Denikin to set an example to Stavka of what happened to those who retreated from objectives they had been ordered to hold. Denikin delayed as long as he could, claiming ill health, but eventually could prevaricate no longer. Early on the 12th, he traveled to the Pleshcheyovo Dacha having already written out his will and last testament and taken his last rites. Ironically, for what the day was about to become, going north when he did saved Denikin’s life.
As the
Ukrainian Front commander traveled from Moscow airport to Savinkov’s residence, six German bombers were being loaded with the first atomic arsenal ever intended for human victims. These would begin departing from three different airfields at about seven in the morning. Four were calculated to drop their bomb loads on operational objectives within fifteen minutes. These would be intended to support the field armies by causing maximum chaos within Russian lines. In two cases, these were the thickest of the defensive networks where many divisions were dug in. In the next two instances, heavily defended logistics hubs were targeted. Unfortunately for the people living there, these happened to be in the center of two cities.
The sixth and final bomber, aiming for a strategic target, climbed to high altitude for a longer flight. Despite a transitioning high-pressure front bringing fresh winds from the southwest, conditions were optimal for this plane to reach its target 440 kilometers away within an hour.
Each of the six planes sailed toward their targets unharried. The Russian air force had long since ceased to exist as a threat to bombers flying as high and as fast as these. The seconds ticked into minutes, and at ground level in five different locations keen-eyed observers might spot the silhouette of a distant, dark, lone aircraft approaching. In Belgorod and Bryansk, air raid sirens went off. Above the lines of the Vyazma Strategic Defense Zone, with its thousands of kilometers of trenches and bunkers, a single bomber wasn’t enough to warrant concern. Men went about their morning routines as normal, huddling around samovars for tea, lining up for bread, freeze-dried fruit or if they were lucky, a cut of nondescript meat.
At 07:18, the first bomb fell from the sky. Eyewitnesses describe seeing a second, even more powerful sun turn the sky from azure to white. What clouds there were evaporated ahead of the shockwave which flattened houses, trees, fences, ripening crops, barns, and the hundreds of tents and pre-fabricated structures which served as the staging point for 53-ya Strelkovaya Diviziya [ENG. 53rd Rifle Division]. The bomb had exploded 225 meters (739 feet) above the ground. The fireball expanded to 274 meters (900 feet) and gave off a core heat of over 1 million degrees Celsius, igniting everything for a kilometer around. The surface of the fireball was reminiscent of the sun at over 6,000 degrees centigrade. Thousands of men at the staging point suddenly disappeared, vaporized by the heat or killed by ionizing radiation and gamma rays that burst blood vessels and internal organs. Paint on vehicles and buildings boiled, crackled and dripped off surfaces.
Anatomy of an atomic fireball – snapshot taken during the Sommerglas test, Namibia
The shockwave raced outward at 1,300 kilometers per hour (800 miles per hour), tossing ancient oak trees and modern tanks like the bath toys of a child. The blast wave caused massive damage up to eleven kilometers away. Thousands were crushed as pillboxes and concrete fortifications crumbled. Thousands more suffocated as they were buried in the trenches they manned were filled in with tons of dirt and debris. The small towns that just so happened to be located around the field fortifications were pancaked by the concussive blast. Nearby copses and primeval forests, dry from the August heat, exploded into a conflagration, blackening a sky already darkened by a towering mushroom cloud.
Moments later, a second, then a third atomic explosion occurred south of the original bomb, hitting similar targets: the staging sites and heavy field fortifications of Vladimir Kappel’s 54th and 59th Armies. The bombs achieved similar results. Many of the bulwarks that had been built up over the last few months lay in ruins. Seven Russian divisions had lain near the three explosions. Together, they suffered catastrophic casualties, leaving gaping holes in the defensive line of Kappel’s
Western Front. Worse was to come.
South in the city of Bryansk, another explosion bloomed like a violent, alternate sun. Five Russian divisions had been positioned in and around the city, which now lay on the frontline. The bomb had exploded above the Bryansk Drama Theater, instantly blotting it and many of the city’s other cultural heritage sites from existence. The nearby city parks erupted into starry incandescence. Clothes and flesh burst off human frames, leaving charred, malformed bones mixed in with the ash from everything around them. Birds and insects were remembered to have spontaneously exploded in midair. Across the river Desna, which momentarily evaporated in the vicinity of the city center, the forests caught fire even as they collapsed beneath the concussive blast.
Bryansk had been home to 215,000 before the war but was now packed with 310,000 people, many of them refugees from the countryside. The Vohzd had ordered the civilian population to remain put in the hopes that a city full of women, children and old men would stiffen the resolve of his soldiery. Many of these people had been put to work on the outskirts of the city digging trenches, anti-tank ditches, emplacements and hauling supplies to soldiers from the train station in the city center. Many were on their way out to the day’s work at 07:31 when the bomb hit.
Instantly, 19,000 had perished. By the end of the day, 32,000 more would join them, succumbing to wounds, dying beneath the rubble or perishing from the fires and radiation that persisted in the area. By the end of the week, with no emergency services able to support such a cataclysm, the death toll in Bryansk had climbed to 89,000. Of the Russian army stationed in and around the city, only about half the strength of four of the divisions able to report for duty once the dazzlement receded. The fifth division, which had been on rotation in the city itself or given guard duties for the railheads and army stockpiles there, had simply disappeared.
A similar situation would occur in the smaller city of Belgorod. With only 86,000 people, Belgorod was nonetheless served as the anchor for the 63rd Guards Army’s four divisions. Given its smaller geographic spread, the bomb had a correspondingly higher impact on casualties per capita. Between the military and civilians in Belgorod, 54,000 would die from incineration, radiation poisoning, wounds or secondary effects over several days. As the mushroom cloud rose, the city had been wiped off the face of the map. Belgorod had been Anton Denikin’s headquarters location, a fact that had been established by Ableitung III b’s infiltration of his army group. The Germans had missed the commander by a mere 7 hours.
The mushroom cloud above Belgorod
The same mushroom cloud as witnessed twelve kilometers away
It was the single deadliest morning in human history. Those who survived it did not know it yet, but their suffering had marked the beginning of a new age. The chaos was too raw for the victims to understand what had happened to them. German soldiers who witnessed the sky bursting open miles ahead of them seemed to sense it, however. Awe rippled up and down both frontlines like a shiver down the spine. The insanity of the Second Weltkrieg had climaxed. Five of the worst weapons ever devised had been used – and still, the day’s abyss was yet to come.
The sixth bomber flew high and steady, its windows glinting in the summer sun. On the horizon, its target slowly came into sight; the crisscrossing gray-brown of human development expanding across the landscape to slowly fill up most of the horizon. Snaking through its heart was a river that gleamed golden in the morning light; the Moskva.
The morning had seemed like any other. At 08:15, heat was already rising and the chirping crickets beginning to fade into whatever cool, dark spots they could find to shelter from the coming midday sun. People were on their way to work, many to the factories that were sprinkled throughout the city. They were emerging from the ‘Bloki’, the endless rows of apartment buildings constructed in the last several years to house the Moscow’s rising population, which had crested to 4.8 million.
As the war had gone on, the Vohzd had used the Kremlin less and less, preferring his bunkers and dachas. Still, the ancient fort remained abuzz with activity, especially on a Monday morning as it was on August 12th. Many officials of the ruling national populist Union for the Defense of the Motherland and Freedom (SZRS) were still in holding events in the Kremlin, including the Savinkokv’s number two, General Secretary of the Party, Dimitri Shepilov. Only a few hundred meters away, in the red-brick Russian Revival architecture of the State Duma building, the legislature was meeting to provide the rubber stamp ratification on the latest of the Vohzd’s laws. As usual, the new laws were being read out by another SZRS official, the Party Executor, Victor Mikhailovich Baidalakov.
At about 07:45, reports of a string of cataclysms began filtering in from the west to the Chief of Staff to the Vohzd, Nikolai Ustryalov. Nikolai, a long-time compatriot of Savinkov, typically remained in Moscow whenever his master was away to watch over the workings of the state – most especially Shepilov, ensuring that none were conspiring against the Vohzd. Ustryalov could not make sense of the reports. Some claimed a natural disaster. Some claimed that the Germans seemed to have detonated a ‘hundred thousand bombs at once’. He made his way to the Grand Kremlin Palace where Shepilov was running through the agricultural analyses from the Ural oblast to discuss what was happening. At about the same time, 08:17, the air raid sirens began blaring. Ustryalov wrote later that he looked up and could see a single bomber far overhead. His adjunct, a Natsgvardia major, disregarded the bomber with disdain, thinking it a spy plane taking photographs. Ustryalov, unnerved by the reports of disasters in the east, insisted they go to the bomb shelter under the Kremlin Armory anyway. This would save his life, leading him to become one of the few that survived within a kilometer of the blast.
At 08:19, the German bomber, the
Anton, would release its payload and frantically pull away from the expected vicinity of destruction. This bomb, the most powerful of the six, yielded 30 kilotons of explosive. It detonator’s timer would malfunction and trigger a mere 61 meters (200 feet) over the northwest corner of the Kitay-Gorod neighborhood, 300 meters further down than intended.
Originally established in the 1500s, the quarter was densely packed with buildings and artefacts of historical and cultural significance, including 18 parish churches, a cathedral, winding streets filled with tenements, warehouses and offices, the ‘Trading Rows’ filled with shops and market stalls, Moscow’s first university (the Slavic Greek Latin Academy), the Chambers of the Romanov Boyars, an opera hall, the art nouveau-style Metropolitan Hotel filled with priceless paintings and sculpture and more. Even the keys to Berlin, captured in 1760 during the Seven Years War had been housed in a museum here. All this would vanish in an instant, reduced to superheated particles by a fireball 342 meters (1,122 feet) across.
The bomb’s epicenter was only 700 meters off from its target of the Kremlin. Despite this ‘escape’, eight of the eighteen Kremlin towers, from the Petrovskaya to the Spasskaya around to the Troitskaya were crushed by an overpressure wave which hit them at 1,000 kilometers per hour, toppling over like matchstick cabins. The ancient Ivan the Great Belltower suffered a similar fate, as did the Kremlin’s Court of Justice, the Arsenal and the Chudov Monastery which had been founded in 1365. Other buildings of the Kremlin received extreme damage. Two of the three cathedrals and the Church of the Twelve Apostles would burn to cinders over the course of the day. The Grand Palace would largely survive the blast, though its two northern-facing facades were torn open, lacerating General Secretary Shepilov to death. Part of the Armory building would partially collapse, trapping Ustryalov and his comrades under rubble. It would take two and a half days before they were dug out, delivering them from the worst of the radiation.
The beautiful, Easter Egg colored onion-domes of St. Basils Cathedral were almost instantly destroyed along with the rest of the church, leaving naught but its charred foundations visible. The State Duma building where the Russian Senate had been meeting was similarly obliterated. Despite making their way to the bomb shelter when the air raid sirens went off 337 of 459 the legislators were killed. A majority of those within 1.5 kilometers of the blast who survived and managed to surface from beneath the wreckage received doses of over 500 rem of ionizing radiation. The few who survived the day would likely die within a month, typically coughing or vomiting up viscera until they bled out, suffered massive organ failure or heart attacks. This number included Party Executor Baidalakov, who perished six days later in hospice care in Khimki. It was a fitting end for the man who’d overseen the detention and relocation of millions to the squalid conditions of the ‘Colonies’.
Above it all, the mushroom cloud’s stalk loomed almost nine kilometers high. The head of the cloud, an irradiated ovaloid three kilometers wide by four kilometers tall, hung over the city for an hour before losing shape. Some who saw it claimed to witness malevolent, demon faces laughing in its roiling smoke.
People would receive third degree burns across 16 square kilometers, or up to two and a half kilometers from the blast site. Within 14.4 square kilometers, many of the residential buildings crumbled. Buildings made of the summer-dry wood burned easy. The fire would spread throughout the day, creating a localized microclimate that incited yet more fire as the conflagration drew in more fresh air from the surrounding areas. Soon, rather than winds gusting out of the blast zone they were rushing towards it. With so many windows and roofs blasted open, the flammable contents of buildings were easy to ignite, especially since the air was thick with red-hot ashes. The day’s winds, which had continued to pick up to gusts of thirty miles per hour, stoked the disaster into a tragedy of unparalleled proportions. A cyclonic firestorm had begun.
Many who had survived the blast fled the subsequent flames by taking cover in the underground metro. Thousands would asphyxiate as oxygen was sucked out of the tunnels by the ravenous conflagration. Above ground, survivors who attempted to flee in confusion found themselves sinking in melting asphalt. Many would be converted to human torches as globules of molten glass came raining down, burning their clothes and hair. People attempting to take refuge in the Moskva River around the Yakimanka and Zamoskvorechye districts were killed as the fiery debris choked the waterway, crushing frail human bodies. Some bedraggled survivors trying to take shelter in those non-wooden buildings still standing were baked alive as the stones and concrete heated like the confines of an oven. The intense winds created tornadic activity with massive pillars of twisting fire reaching up a thousand feet or more. Stacks of corpses were blown together toward what few walls remained, forming meters-tall slag heaps of partially fused human remains. Blackened skulls rolled downhill like a sick parody of bowling balls. Mankind’s innovation had given birth to a waking vision of hell.
No emergency services could operate in these circumstances. What salvation there was to be found was in individual and personal heroics. Men and women who charged into certain death to save loved ones or even those they didn’t know. People who shared what little food they had amidst the blackened flotsam of their lives. The children who were small enough to worm their way into rubble to bring succor to those buried under collapsed buildings. Those who brought buckets of water from burst pipes to the victims of a thousand manmade maladies. Those who shared the scant shelter available with fellow human beings. One particularly poignant scene was the Mass of Patriarch Anastasius I, who had survived the devastation. Two days after the bombing, the Patriarch would convene an outdoor mass before the wreckage of the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Survivors began appearing until a crowd of hundreds had formed. Many fables and claims of miracles have arisen from his moment, with dozens of claims of burns being salved arising.
Patriarch Anastasius I (Anastasy)
Beyond providing comforting words, Anastasius would begin directing what some form of support by dispatching priests, deacons and other churchmen into the countryside to rally the peasants from the countryside to bring food and help into the city. These first grasps of self-organized efforts would be the defining moment that would see the coming meteoric rise in political importance of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Germany had dropped The Bomb on Moscow knowing full well Boris Savinkov was not in residence there. Killing the Vohzd had not been the goal. Sending a message had. Kurt von Schleicher recognized that he would need someone to negotiate Russia’s surrender, and thus once Savinkov’s absence was confirmed, he had affirmed the targeting committee’s choice of Moscow.
Events would soon deny Schleicher the jubilation of receiving Savinkov’s surrender.
The Reaper’s Due
As the worst of the disaster faded, men from the Moscow Military District Garrison began appearing to help with firefighting activities. Many of these had arrived spontaneously, but by Wednesday the entire division of Natsgvardia (ENG. National Guard) arrived to spearhead relief efforts had arrived. They would communicate the scale of the monstrous event back to Wrangle, who was by now also receiving detailed reports of the other bombs that had gone off in the west. Darker still were the details of the various breakthroughs the Germans were making as a result. By Thursday, it was clear that the entire central Moscow administrative okrug was utterly ravaged and unsalvageable. Inestimable amounts of religious, cultural, and historical treasure were lost. What the blast had not devastated the firestorm had.
As the dust settled the toll could be ascertained. Over 522,000 people in Moscow had died between August 12th and 15th, with many tens of thousands more in the months to come. Over one million more would suffer injuries of varying kinds, many which would go untreated for weeks due to the dearth of healthcare facilities and medical experts. The effects of radiation sickness would be suffered by some for days, for others, decades.
Altogether, the six bombs had slain nearly 700,000 people, injured twice that number, and rendered millions homeless. It was a tragedy unparalleled in history and evidence that humanity’s powers had far exceeded its wisdom.
The ruins of Moscow, nine weeks later
Battle in the Black Rain: August 14th 1946
The Black Baron had been at Stavka headquarters in Tula when the bombs hit. He, along with the entire General Staff, were taken aback by the sudden chaos over the radio waves. Dozens of junior officers were dispatched to locations across the front to confirm what seemed to be impossible. When corroboration did come, it arrived just as the German forces resumed the offensive. Vast, gaping holes had opened in the frontlines through which the enemy’s armored forces were pouring. Wrangle would attempt to raise Savinkov multiple times on the 12th, but the Vohzd was silent. Savinkov was unable to internalize the events that had just taken place, completely removing himself from reality. With the Vohzd absent and most of the party leadership in Moscow missing and presumed dead, the General Staff began to wonder if they might be the last vestige of centralized control in the country.
On the morning of the 13th, Reichskanzeler von Schleicher sent a broadcast on open radio waves to all of Europe explaining the significance of what had just happened. He stated that more bombs would be dropped on Russian cities were a surrender not forthcoming and that he was willing to reduce all of Russia to cinders before Christmas.
The Stavka argued all day about whether Germany had more such bombs while all along the front Russian forces fought desperately. Kappel would call eight times throughout the day demanding the release of the mobile reserve but Wrangle refused, holding firm that the time had not yet come. At about noon, another message would come in over the wireless: the Siberian ‘Colony’ of Iskupleniye [ENG. ‘Redemption’] was in open revolt, incited by news of the atom bombs. The vast throngs of German, Ruthenian, Ukrainian, Central Asian and Baltic the slave laborers had wrested control of the local garrison and looted it of weaponry. Worse, they had taken possession of the railyard unopposed, putting Krasnojarsk and even Novosibirsk in danger.
Finally, later that same day, Boris Savinkov called. He gave orders to hold the line on pain of death. He demanded that National Guard units be placed all along the front line as blocking detachments to kill anyone who ran. Wrangle could hardly believe what he was hearing. He argued that the Germans might have more atom bombs and extrapolated on the Natsgvardia being needed to help reform a line much further back than the currently compromised one. If the dozens of armies in the frontline remained where they were they risked being surrounded. If reinforcements were simply sent in piecemeal these too would get cut apart. Geographical features were needed to re-anchor a firm defense.
The Vohzd manically declared that only through sheer will could the Motherland overcome such adversities and that if they did not do this then his wrath would be more terrible than anything the Germans could conjure. Wrangle shot back
“Everything is disintegrating! Should I follow these orders, you will have ruined the Motherland more completely than any single person has done before!”. Those in the room, listening on the radio set, squirmed as the line crackled with static for almost a minute. At last, the Vohzd spoke, ordering Wrangle to the Pleshcheyovo Dacha to discuss this further, then hung up. As Denikin had, Wrangle believed summons meant his death. The Black Baron decided he would travel to Pleshcheyovo, but not alone.
Taking only those he trusted, Wrangle flew north at low altitude under cover of darkness to Vladimir. There, he would enact the contingency he had long planned; the usurpation of the levers of power. At Vladimir, he had long since placed there a unit of men loyal to himself who now accompanied him on the two-hour drive north to Savinkov’s dacha.
The movement of tanks, trucks and horsedrawn artillery could not be kept secret for long. At Pleshcheyovo, Savinkov quickly deduced Wrangle was mutinying. All military forces in the vicinity were recalled, though only a garrison brigade and some SZRS party paramilitary forces were nearby. A disoriented Anton Denikin, held in a cell for two days, was marched in front of the Vohzd who explained the situation. The dazed Field Marshal had thought he was about to be killed. Instead, he was told to organize the defense of Pleshcheyovo.
The battle would open in the dawn twilight of the 14th about a kilometer from Savinkov’s dacha with the paramilitary force ambushing the leading elements of Wrangle’s column. A tank in the column’s front was hit with an anti-tank ‘stovepipe’. As the vehicles behind attempted to move into the forest, two more hit mines. Seconds later, a grenade was lobbed into the open bed of a truck carrying ammunition. It exploded, engulfing a squad of cavalrymen. In a little under an hour and a half, Marshal Denikin, perhaps the State’s greatest defensive commander, had improvised a plan of resistance around the Vohzd’s compound. Ironically, two Marshals of Russia were duking it out in their own country with forces miniscule compared to what they tended to command. Nonetheless, this would mark the origin point of the Second Russian Civil War.
Despite a poor beginning to their venture, Wrangle’s forces far outnumbered by the Vohzd’s defenders and maneuvered out of the forest and into the open fields before the town of Pleshcheyovo. In the distance, the dacha stood on a bluff overlooking the countryside and lake. Wrangle’s men would have to fight through the town to reach it, and so they began dismounting for urban combat while the field artillery pieces unlimbered and loaded. Despite sunrise by this time, was dark, with thick cloud cover being exacerbated by the smoke from Moscow still billowing northwest with the wind. At 06:38, a black, sooty, apocalyptic rain began.
Back in the dacha, Boris Savinkov sent an emergency radio broadcast to the nation. He proclaimed that Pyotr Wrangle had betrayed the Russian State and attempted to take his life. He ordered that all loyal citizens should hunt down Wrangle, his family, friends and any compatriots that had sided with him. Having effectively called for a
Damnatio Memoriae against the military’s leader, he named Anton Denikin as new Commander-in-Chief of all armed forces in the hopes that this would keep the army onside. Denikin, out commanding his forces, would not even hear of his promotion until that night.
As the thunder of artillery rent the morning air, Boris Savinkov decided to evacuate his dacha and make for Ivanovo. He would travel in a convoy with multiple lookalike vehicles aiding his escape. The motorcade would have to pass through Pleshcheyovo to escape, but with the fighting still on the other side of the village it was deemed more than doable. Only, a Wrangleite artillery officer would spot the headlights of the column through his field glasses and think it incoming enemy reinforcements. He gave his battery the orders to open fire on it. By sheer luck, one of the shells hit Boris Savinkov’s car. The car’s bullet-proof skin was pierced by the 122mm howitzer shell, instantly killing the Vohzd of the Russian State.
Russian had been decapitated. The floodgates had been opened, and through them poured the chaos of the Russian Anarchy, a second Time of Troubles.
