Sevastopol

A year ago a powerful German siege army, reinforced to 14 divisions, for the third and last time in eight months attacked the Russian naval base of Sevastopol. Not long after the assault began, a young playwright, Boris Voyetekhov, arrived as special correspondent for Pravda. His book (The Last Days of Sevastopol; Knopf; $2.50) on Sevastopol's final struggle, tells the story of one of the great delaying actions that have defeated German strategy in Russia.

The hell created by the Germans at Sevastopol came in the midst of the lovely, flower-scented early Black Sea summer, the season when in the old days the nobility, in the new days the people of Russia had taken their vacations along that coast. Voyetekhov gives a paradisal picture of the peace he left behind him in the Caucasus: "Beside whitewashed, tin-roofed houses, on cottage chairs under cherry trees, were sitting the most beautiful Russian women--Kuban Cossacks." Voyetekhov went into Sevastopol aboard a destroyer at night, finding the half-wrecked city in flames. Milling around the dock were women & children whom the destroyer was to evacuate when it had unloaded its cargo of men and munitions for Sevastopol.

"No restriction had been put on what could be transported. Even plants were allowed. Only in this way could the stubborn reluctance of the people of Sevastopol to leave their beloved city be broken down. . . . The Navy understood this, and with solicitude sailors carried up the gangway ancient models of sailing ships, knickknacks, family portraits framed in lifebelts, old seascapes." When the destroyer left, before dawn, Voyetekhov went underground to Naval headquarters, nerve center of the defense. Among the activities directed there was a system of salvage from sunken supply ships in the harbor. Divers were sent out every night to bring up baskets full of shells, food and medical supplies. Voyetekhov's narrative here includes one of several bits of transparently invented dialogue:

Diver: "To go into that cabin where, if I open the door, dead bodies of children will rush toward me--No, I can't and I won't."

Commissar (wisely): "That means you are letting living children die for the lack of food and bandages."

The only trouble with this incident is that by the author's own account it could scarcely have occurred. Ships brought supplies into Sevastopol and unloaded them; the empty ships took women & children out.

In Voyetekhov's book are several previously unreported facts, such as that a body of the defenders on the south fought their way past Balaclava and into the Crimean hills to join the partisans; that the last handful of defenders on the north dove into the sea and swam toward death when their ammunition was gone; that ruined Sevastopol had a quisling named Vasily Nikitin, appointed "Burgomaster" by the Germans. It is more illuminating to know that Voyetekhov found "No pasaran," the motto of Madrid, scrawled on a wall in Sevastopol; that "Snakes!" is an exclamation of Russian soldiers; that Russian bureaucracy is detached enough to allow Voyetekhov a story at its expense. Another good story, more or less at his own expense:

"[The commander of marines] went to the table, looked at a piece of paper a sailor had left there, read it, tore it up and asked in a grim voice:

" 'Who wrote this?'

" 'I did,' replied a young fellow who was writing in a log.

" 'Who told you that we are heroic participants in the defense of Sevastopol?'

" 'But why do the newspapers say so?'

" 'Newspapers? When we have been dead a hundred years, my honorable friend, then it will be decided with the greatest of precision what we are. . . . Prepare an order expunging from regimental conversation such uncouth expressions as "Germans leaked through," "We are surrounded," "heroic Sevastopol," "drunken enemy" and other such nonsense and forbidding them from being spoken even in a state of intoxication. Do you understand, heroic clerk?'

'"Yes, sir.'

" 'Then let us go to the trenches.'"

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