Free War Stories III by Oliver L. North Page A

my purse and jammed it in my pocket. I also had a little compass in my purse, but it was left in the airplane.
    When I was a little girl, my uncle, a pilot, had told me, “If you have to bail out, after you jump, count to three—one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three. Then pull your ripcord. That way your parachute won’t get caught by the plane on the way down.”
    I remember jumping out of the airplane and counting, “one thousand one, one thousand two,” and some inner voice said, “Pull it!” So I pulled the D-ring on the parachute. It deployed and I swung once and came down in what is now a lake outside of Hobson, Montana, at six o’clock at night on June 19. I got out pretty late, but safely.
    I was down in this big crater, so I picked myself up, rolled up the parachute, climbed up to a road, and waited for someone to come by to take me into Hobson, Montana, and then to Great Falls.
    As to my airplane, it could have been sabotage. Flight Safety investigators said that it looked as if someone had put impurities in the gasoline. But I was flying again a week later.
    The aircraft delivered by the ALSIB “backdoor route to Russia” would soon become a critical component in wartime aid to the Soviets. But in the winter of 1941–42, the 2.5 million Russians surrounded in Leningrad had to fend for themselves.

    To shore up the Leningrad defenses—and prepare for a counter-attack in the spring, Stalin sent forty-six-year-old Georgy Zhukov to hold the line against Wilhelm von Leeb’s Army Group North. Stalin had relieved the politically reliable and competent Zhukov as chief of staff because he had recommended the evacuation of Kiev before the garrison could be surrounded. By the time Kiev fell, a quarter of a million Russian and Ukrainian soldiers were dead—and more than 650,000 others were prisoners of war.
    To ensure that the Leningrad did not suffer the same fate, Zhukov mobilized the population to dig more than 600 miles of earthworks, 400 miles of anti-tank ditches, and thousands of bunkers. In November 1941, 10,000 of Leningrad’s residents died of starvation. In December the number was 50,000. And by January 1942, with temperatures falling to 40 degrees below zero, the monthly toll reached a gruesome 120,000 dead. One million civilians ultimately perished in the long and bitter siege—but Zhukov’s defenses held.
    As the siege of Leningrad began, Hitler issued Führer Directive No. 35—reinforcing Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Center—and ordering that all available resources be used to advance on Moscow in what he called Operation Typhoon. When Russian pilots reported that German Panzers were closing on the capital, panic ensued. On 10 October, Stalin recalled Zhukov from Leningrad and ordered him to repeat for Moscow what he had done in the north.
    Though more than a million Muscovites had been evacuated to Stalin’s “provisional capital” at Kuibyshev, 500 miles to the east, Zhukov organized the remaining population. In an extraordinary feat of manual labor—most of it performed by women with picks and shovels, often under air and artillery attack—they planted nearly a half-million mines and dug hundreds of miles of trenches, tank traps, and bunkers.
    As at Leningrad, Zhukov’s defenses held. By the first week of December, the German offensive against Moscow was spent—and the exhausted Wehrmacht soldiers, still clad in summer uniforms and forbidden by Hitler to withdraw, began to dig in and prepare as best they could for the dreaded Russian winter.

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    Hitler shaking hands with Fedor von Bock.

    By 7 December 1941, the day that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the German army held a front that ran in a nearly straight line from Leningrad on the Gulf of Finland due south to the Crimea on the Black Sea. At that point, German troops controlled more than 40 percent of Russia’s