Soldiers Must Die

CRACK OF DOOM (313 pp.)--Willi Heinrich--Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($3.95).

Willi Heinrich is a 37-year-old German novelist whose specialty is the look, smell and sound of military defeat. He came by his competence honestly and bitterly as an infantry soldier in a fearfully mauled German division that bit deep into Russia, withdrew its remnants in broken retreat. Five wounds, Heinrich's personal quota, do not necessarily make a war novelist, but his first book, The Cross of Iron (TIME, April 23, 1956), proved that no contemporary novelist was better than he at the grisly business of describing the meat grinder of infantry combat. Crack of Doom, another look at the disintegration of German military power, is also an advanced reader for other writers about war on how to do closeups of men fighting hopelessly toward ends that are totally beyond their comprehension.

Now it is December 1944, and the Russians have driven the Germans back into Czechoslovakia. Only diehard Nazis still hope that Hitler's secret weapons will somehow turn defeat into magical victory. Czech partisans are rampant behind the German lines, settling old scores with pro-German civilians, cutting off groups of soldiers, even capturing the division commander who is trying to stem the Russian surge through the Carpathian passes.

For Sergeant Kolodzi the war has reached a harrowing personal climax. He is a soldier of the Wehrmacht, fighting on his home ground where his mother and his girl still live, where his father, killed by partisans, is buried. Kolodzi knows the war is finished, that the smart thing to do is to desert, get his mother and girl to safety before the Russians drive into his home town. But Kolodzi is also a first-rate soldier with a feeling of loyalty to his fellows. When he hears the opening roar of the massive Russian artillery barrage, he leaves the arms of his fiancee to return to a hopeless mission against the partisans.

Author Heinrich is at his best as he describes the last-ditch stand of decimated German regiments against Russian divisions led by a hundred tanks. Towns burn, civilians are blown to bits, whole battalions are destroyed as they try to carry out orders from an incompetent division adjutant. Over the ghastly scene the snowy Carpathians loom like symbols of nature's indifference. But Heinrich neither needs nor uses literary symbolism. With a spare, brutal directness of language, he is able to show how men fight and die, convey the pressing of a trigger, the spreading stain of blood in the snow. Crack of Doom makes one thing overpoweringly clear: Infantryman Heinrich was there, and he didn't miss a thing.

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