by Wayne Vansant

"As the buds of pears and apples blossom
Over the river swiftly whirl the fogs
Came out strolling,a woman named Katusha
Down the steep and rocky rivers slope."

The song lyrics above are loosely related to the graphic novel that I'm reviewing.

To quote from the website:

"This is a story of courage, survival and family; of self-sacrifice, betrayal, brutality, and suffering; it is a tale of love, told against the backdrop of the bloodiest conflict in human history: the 1941-1945 war between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia."

This book is also a view of the Second World War seen through the eyes of a sixteen year old Ukrainian girl, Katusha.

Setting the scene.

It is the evening of June 21st 1941, the heroine is graduating from her final year of school in Kiev in a scene of domestic contentment, seemingly with little concern about events elsewhere. She gets her graduation gift, an old radio, to work the following morning and whilst trying to find something to listen to, picks up a series of short phrases, staccato commands and a mysterious cry for help. Further west, Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the territories controlled by the Soviet Union had begun.

We get to meet her family in short order, Mila, her half-sister, an orphan taken in by her family during the Holodomor. She also has a younger brother Vasily, who is not such a good student and an older sister Natasha, who married "well" to a communist party bureaucrat. Her unnamed mother is a constantly present and reassuring figure, whilst her father is a kindly but busy man who had to go and work away at a tractor factory in Kharkov when war breaks out.

We get to meet another family member later on, in the unpromising venue of an NKVD dungeon. He turns out to be a central figure in the first book. This is her mysterious and somewhat roguish uncle Taras, who had escaped from the Soviet Union during the early days of the revolution, and been on a journey around the world ever since.

Without being completely spoiler-tastic, this is a trilogy, the first book covering Katusha's first year in coping with the Nazi occupation and subsequent taking up of arms as a partisan. The second book tells the story of her joining the Soviet army to become a prototype 'Tank Girl', with the final book, due out shortly, taking her to the gates of Berlin in 1945.

About the author.

Wayne Vansart is an artist who started with Marvel comics, drawing for a remarkably superhero-free series about Vietnam. After that finished, he went over to a full time career illustrating and writing, making impressively accurate reconstructions of military history. He's covered the American Civil War and Korea, but returns time and again to the Second World War, which includes his illustrated histories of the D-Day invasion of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge. His style has particularly high standards of research and realism in depicting battle scenes.

His most impressive work yet is the Katusha trilogy, which picks up a lot of themes including the rude arrival of global conflict in Katusha's cosy and ordered world.

In the first book of Katusha, his depth of research and writing from this goes further, the early part depicts the nature of a society where eyes from above were on you, and innocent conversations were listened to, as everyone was suspected of disloyalty to the state.

He's also not too shabby as an artist either. His drawings are at the realistic end for cartoon work and his characters and their emotions are very well depicted. Military geeks won't find too much to quibble about, as he draws with a very high level of fidelity for uniforms and equipment, seen at the Eastern Front during this period. Clearly the extra time spent on research has paid off.

The state they're in.

It makes it clear that loyalties in this part of the world are complicated and not easily given. Many Ukrainians considered the Nazi's as liberators from Stalin's regime, at least until the Nazi's showed their true genocidal racist colours. A number of Ukrainians were nevertheless recruited as auxiliary police and even helped out with atrocities such as the massacre at Babi Yar. The younger brother Vasily, joins their ranks but soon regrets this.

The book makes the point that the Ukrainians and Russians are not one and the same people, and the Ukrainians have suffered for this, and their strategic position between much of Russia and Europe.

Of the recent conflict in parts of Ukraine, the author states "It's free publicity, though maybe not of the right kind."

He considered that although Russia and Ukraine share a common bond from their shared experiences in the Second World War, continued Russian attempts to subjugate Ukraine may have broken it.

In the end, Katusha, or more specifically, her uncle Taras as the group's leader, make the decision that the Nazi's are the worst of the various evils and plan to fight them accordingly.

There are other deep questions of personal morality pondered here. Katusha is initially most reluctant to take a life and is bluntly told that the nice decent people in this situation tend to die first. She leads an ambush where she has to kill for the first time. When invited by her uncle to loot the corpse, she replies "No thank you, I've already taken everything he has." Other characters are differently motivated, some for vengeance against the invaders, whilst others all too easily take some pleasure in the act.

More words from me about the books.

Actual historical events are depicted with great fidelity, as the bigger picture occasionally creeps in, with General Heinz Guderian anxiously watching the rainy autumn skies as his armies bog down in the Autumn, elsewhere, Stalin issues the order "Not one step back!" The protagonists are too close for comfort to certain events, as the massacre of Jews at Babi-Yar provides the catalyst to leave their old life and go into hiding in the forest.

Katusha is done effectively and affectingly. There are a few moments where some comic superhero tendencies sneak in, such as Uncle Taras being able to pull off a last gasp escape from an NKVD execution by overpowering the guards, not once, but twice. Also her brother Vasily, who joined the auxiliary police earlier and regretted it very soon after, manages an incredibly lucky rescue of another schoolfriend Zhenya, at Babi-Yar, who was selected for the killing fields as she is Jewish. The powers of dramatic licence, how would we manage without them?

To balance that up though, there's the glamorous elder sister Natasha who gets all the bad luck. And there's a lot of it to go around in this world. Her party official husband turns out to be a philanderer and spousal abuser. He is evacuated from Kiev, running without his wife and young child who are left behind. She goes on to lose the child in a Nazi retaliatory action, and ultimately is killed as a hostage taken for reprisals after a soldier had been attacked.

I haven't got to the second book yet, but it also looks like her uncle doesn't make it to the end.

This is a trilogy, as I've stated earlier. The first part is available in it's entirety to read from the website, free of charge at www.katushagirlsoldier.com. The second book is available to buy from various places linked from the same website. The third and final book, as of the 1st July 2015, is complete, but they are still working out details with a publisher.

If this period of history interests you, Katusha is a good place to pick up on the extraordinarily brutal nature of the Eastern Front, alongside the complexities of national and ethnic identity, with a cracking good family at war story thrown in.

CiH - For Maggie 25th Anniversary - July 2015..

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