Tank Rider: Into the Reich with the Red Army

THE WAR BEGINS

I first heard that the war had broken out while I was in the city, where I had gone with Vladimir Grivnin, my classmate – we had plans to go to a retro film theatre, which was at Nikitski Gate. We young boys took the news quite calmly, we thought that the Nazi invaders were about to be thrown back from the country’s borders. But exactly the opposite happened. This conflict, the harshest of all wars, would last 1,418 days for us, or 3 years, 10 months and 17 days.

On 25 or 26 June, 1941, I, along with other Komsomol members, was invited to the Baumanski district committee of Komsomol. There they suggested that we go to the Bryansk region to build fortifications. On the evening of the same day we were loaded on to a train with some personal belongings and food; we travelled westwards to build fortifications. We started to work at Kirov city in the Bryansk region. We worked twelve hours a day, and as we were not used to physical labour, we were really exhausted. We fell asleep as soon as our heads touched our ‘beds’ of hay or straw, which were made mostly in barns. We dug anti-tank ditches, dug around the riverbanks, dug trenches and set barbed-wire obstacles. In some cases we had to repair the railways destroyed during air raids and clear them from the debris of destroyed goods trains. However, our main job was to dig anti-tank ditches. The food was poor, it was not enough for us and the village population was not very kind to us. Our foreman, who arrived with us from Moscow, had to talk to the locals, mostly to leaders of the kolkhos (collective farm) or village, if they had not been drafted into the army, and persuade them to give us some food, at least potatoes. Such talks helped, but quite rarely. The German air force bombed us several times: scared, we ran in all directions like rabbits. We were young and healthy and could run fast. We did not suffer any losses, especially as the bombs exploded far away from us, but as we had not seen fire, we were quaking in our boots. We worked there for 45 days, until 8 August, 1941, and then were urgently loaded on a train and in the morning of 9 August we were back in Moscow, at Kiev station. College students were drafted in the army on the spot and were sent to different units.

When we, five to seven young men, walked into a metro train, passengers started to pay attention to us. We were dirty and ragged, in patched-up shirts and trousers, our hair grown long and dirty and tangled. However, women came up to us and started to ask us who we were where we were from. When they learnt that we were from the labour front, they, just like all mothers, started to ask us about their children, but we had not known or seen anyone that they were asking about. When I came home, there was already an official paper that said that I had been drafted into the Red Army and had to show up at the assembly point in school in Takmakov lane by 11 August. That was the assembly point for the Baumanski district military commissariat of Moscow. Some neighbours in the street and classmates also received similar call-up notes.

During the night of 12 August we were loaded on to a train, taking our places in freight wagons (for 40 men or 8 horses) and we rolled eastwards. On the way individual cars were taken away as the men were sent to different military academies. Alexander Fokin left our company this way. In the vicinity of Chelyabinsk we were quartered in tents at the Chebarkulski military camp, where army units of the Urals Military District stayed during the summer. Before the cold weather set in, we lived in that camp, mostly doing drill. We still had civilian clothes. With the arrival of cold weather we were transferred to the summer film theatre of the Chelyabinsk park of culture. Moscow also had similar summer film theatres before the war. The autumn in the Urals was cold: we were freezing in the film theatre, some were falling sick and the shoes of some men fell apart, plus the food was very bad, and some men turned to theft. After that some top brass decided to get rid of this large, unmanageable and motley crew (we were at least 500), the majority of whom went into the city in the morning searching for food. They started to send the men out to different places of service. My friends Turanov, Tvorogov and Silvanovich left. I met them only after the war in Moscow. They all went through the war and survived, although Silvanovich was crippled after being wounded. In October a strange Sergeant Major picked us, some twenty men, and together with him we went to a kolkhoz to harvest potatoes, which the locals had not managed to harvest before the first frosts. They put us in an unheated room, we were freezing at night, but we were getting so tired during the day that we did not notice the cold. That was in Urals region, and it was already mid- or late October. The villagers did not help us at all, did not give us either food or firewood, we did not even have a pot to boil potatoes in. We were constantly hungry, besides that, many of us, including me, caught cold. Our superior also did not take proper care of us; it was good that they made a decision to move us back to Chelyabinsk. I can to some extent understand the words of one woman from a village where we had been digging anti-tank trenches, who refused to give us food saying: ‘What am I going to feed the Germans with, when they come?’ But that was in Bryansk region, not in the Urals, which was far away from the Germans. Never again in my life did I meet such people – they really deserve their name choldons (a name for Russians living in Siberia; however, normally the name does not have any negative connotation – translator’s comment). We only encountered such attitudes in the Western Ukraine, but those were Bandera’s areas (Bandera was a famous Ukrainian anti-Soviet resistance leader – translator’s comment), which only became part of USSR in 1940.

We never returned to the summer film theatre in Chelyabinsk. We were moved from one barracks to another, but the good thing was that they were at least warm. They fed us really badly: boiled root beets in hot water, and that was it. Instead of dishes we had a clean small wash-tub. It is hard to explain such poverty, it was only the fourth month of the war. We saw plenty of soldiers drafted from the reserve. They were gloomy, untidy, a set of doomed 40-year-old men, who looked much older. I never met such backward men at the front. It was amazing that they were Siberian! In early November 1941 some 400 of us were loaded on to a train in Chelyabinsk. We were all sent to Kamyshlov military infantry academy. We suffered a lot from hunger on the way to Kamyshlov. As usual, they appointed a crook as the senior man of our team; he received the food for the whole group, gave out a ration for one day and disappeared with the rest of the food – we never saw him again. Stealing was widespread in the early days of the war, while thieves were hard to catch. Hungry boys literally turned over food kiosks at railway stations, taking everything they could find. After several similar attacks they started to make stops only in open fields and not at railway stations or villages. I received some food from the guys that I knew, mostly bread.

They unloaded us in the town of Kamyshlov in the Sverdlovsk region, some 180 km to the east of Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg). The ones that arrived on that train were distributed among four companies – the 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th, which formed the fourth battalion. I ended up in the 15th company. Those who stubbornly and consistently refused to study, as well as some former criminals, were sent into army units that were in process of formation for the front in the Urals region.

We were sworn in at the academy on 16 November, 1941, and we were all officially accepted as cadets. First we received boots with puttees instead of jack-boots. We had a hard time with them – you try to wrap it around your leg and all of a sudden it slips out of your hand, and you have to start all over again. During that period almost all soldiers of the Red Army had boots with puttees, especially the infantry. They issued winter uniforms to us in the academy (that was when puttees were replaced by jack-boots): cotton foot-cloths, woollen tunics and padded trousers, a padded jacket to be worn under the greatcoat and mittens. We did not have winter hats, though, and we had to walk around in garrison caps. Some put a towel under a garrison cap when the temperatures dropped to minus 20–25 degrees Celsius. That winter frosts in the Urals region were sharp, we saw sparrows freezing to death in mid-flight – I am not making this up. We received winter hats as late as January 1942. We lived on the first floor of a huge two-storey barrack. We slept on two-level metallic beds. We ourselves stuffed mattresses and pillows with hay in the administration platoon of the academy. We were issued two sheets and a cotton blanket. There were two large Ural-style wood stoves in the opposite corners of the barrack. Every floor housed two companies of 120 men each. Companies were separated by a wide corridor, where we would all fall in for a morning inspection (form no. 20 – the code for a lice check) and an evening inspection. In the ends of the barrack building there were a storage room, officers’ room, a rifle park (or, more accurately, a rifle pyramid), bathroom and toilets. Classes lasted from 10 to 12 hours, including individual study time. The reveille was at 6:00 or 6:30, I do not remember exactly, taps were at 23:00. We would get very tired during the day, as we only had classes outdoors, so we were always hungry and sleepy. They fed us quite well. They gave us some 750 grams of bread a day, sugar at breakfast and dinner for our tea. Breakfast as a rule included porridge, a piece of butter (20 grams), tea and bread. For lunch we had soup or schi based on meat bouillon, mashed potatoes or porridge with meat for the second course, stewed fruit and bread. Dinner was quite poor – beetroot salad or a piece of boiled fish (sometimes herring) with potatoes, tea, bread and sugar. Cadets had even better food than commanders (in 1941 and 1942 officers in Red Army were still officially referred to as commanders – translator’s comment) in their own canteen. However, we were using a lot of energy and spending all the daytime in the frost outside, so our young bodies required more food and sleep. The sleeping time was insufficient for us, although we had a rest time after lunch. Some cadets could not take such physical stress and grew noticeably weaker and thinner, the others, not used to such strong frosts, had their feet frost-bitten.

Our company commander was Senior Lieutenant Suleimenov, a Kazakh, physically strong and an excellent training officer. The company had four platoons, 30 cadets in each platoon. The academy had a total of 20 companies (5 battalions). Lieutenant Khrapovitski was leader of my platoon, the 1st, and Lieutenant Ilyin led the 2nd platoon. I forget the names of the other two platoon leaders. The majority of cadets in the 1st and the 2nd platoons were Muscovites, while the 3rd and the 4th platoons mostly had local men from the Urals and adjacent areas.

The head of the academy was the kombrig (pre-war and early war Red Army rank that corresponds to Major-General – translator’s comment) (he had one diamond on his collar tab), though the army had already introduced general ranks. We saw him quite rarely, mostly during parades, which we only had two or three times during our stay in the academy. They said that he was just recently released from jail. He had been arrested as a former officer of the Tsar’s Army, as had happened with Rokossovski, Marshal of Soviet Union, and General Gorbatov.

In mid-December, 1941, our company was sent to a winter camp outside the city, where we lived in dugouts and slept on two-level plank-beds. There was no running water there, we had to wash ourselves with snow after the physical exercises, which we had to do outside in any frost, and by morning temperatures dropped to as low as minus 30–35 degrees Celsius! We skied 18 kilometres to banya three times a month (a banya is a traditional Russian steam bath – translator’s note). We also studied drill and ceremonies: ceremonial step, turning to left, right, around and saluting (at that time they called it greeting each other and the commanders). We studied weapons, service and field manuals. We also studied tactics – we rehearsed attacks on the enemy, as well as platoon and company action in defence. Sometimes we had range practice. After a month or a month and a half we returned to barracks in the city.

We were forbidden to leave the military area and go to town, but there was nothing to do there anyway. We had a post office, a store with all kinds of small things that a soldier might need, such as threads and needles. There was also a club with a cinema and a library. On Sundays (we cadets had a day off as well) I went to the library and read newspapers there, usually Pravda; I borrowed fiction, took it to the barracks and managed to find time to read it there. We marched in formation to see movies; normally that was during the morning before lunch. I only remember one film – The Destruction of German forces at Moscow. During the other films I would fall asleep, just like so many other cadets, even though the heating of the hall was very poor. When we were on duty in the company – a cadet on duty and three orderlies – we ran to the station cafe at the time of arrival of a train from Moscow to get some wheat porridge – it was not millet, but wheat porridge. There was nothing else in the cafe. We normally had it poured into the fire bucket. Several pieces of bread were also given with the porridge. We would finish the bucket of porridge during the night, and if we had porridge left, we woke up a couple of our friends. By morning the bucket was to be cleaned and hung on the fire-fighting stand again. There were different cadets in the academy – honest, responsive, helping each other, sharing food parcels with close friends according to the cadets’ rule of thumb. Others were dishonest and did not respect even the elementary requirements of discipline. The cadets themselves dealt with thieves. In any case, the older cadets did not abuse the younger ones, or if they did, we did not know anything about it. It was easy for me to overcome the difficulties of military service, the same with the frosts. I was the third tallest cadet in the company. The tallest was Anatoly Pavlovich Zlobin – an outstanding writer after the war; he died in 2000. We were drafted from Moscow together. He was a mortar-battery commander at the front. I had good relations with all the men in the company, while in the platoon we were all good friends – we were all Muscovites from the same neighbourhood and graduated from neighbouring schools, we even had common acquaintances. We had nothing to fight about. Physically I was no worse than the other cadets in the platoon and the company. I was not outstanding, but I stood up for myself. I did not flatter anyone and didn’t tell tales. The company commander was somehow distant from us, we did not see him every day. In the evenings we had classes with assistant platoon leaders; as a rule these were older cadets, not the former schoolboys, but cadets that had entered the academy earlier than ourselves. Some men had a hard time with the studies, and two cadets could not take it. One local man, Lisitsyn, shot himself in a dugout during his company guard duty. The second guy, Vischnevski, a native of Moscow, escaped. They looked for him for a long time, but never found him. Both incidents were emergency cases for the company. Later there was a rumour that a letter came from Vishnevski, in which he wrote that he was at the front and asked not to be considered a deserter. However, the letter was not officially read to us – probably so that other cadets would not follow his example.

We had to learn in six months what we would have studied for two years in the pre-war military academy. The front needed officers for platoon-company level, as these were being killed the fastest at the front. We studied field manuals and had to learn in practice, as they say in the army Infantry Field Manual of 1936, from the actions of individual soldiers to the responsibilities of a company commander in defence and attack. This manual was abolished in 1942 and replaced by a revised manual which was based on the experience gained in the first year of war. We were also supposed to know the army manual, internal service manual, guard duty manual and drill manual by heart. Besides that we studied technical manuals, we were supposed to know the weapons, assembling and disassembling weapons, employment, failures and repair, principles of its work. We studied the Mosin rifle Model 1892/1930, the Simonov automatic rifle, the Degtyarev light machine-gun (RPD or DP) and the Maxim heavy machine-gun – the difficulty with that was in assembling and disassembling its bolt or rather lock, which was intricate. This machine-gun, just like the Mosin rifle, dated back to the First World War and the Russian Civil War, and was used until the end of the Great Patriotic War. Besides those weapons, we studied mortars: the 37 mm company mortar (later withdrawn from service), the 50 mm and the 82 mm mortars, their technical data and employment, firing conditions and preparation for firing. I should say that the level of training was poor, as the teachers did not understand the subject themselves. In general, during the war our mortar crews were really bad shooters. Of course, artillery units – mortar battalions and even regiments – were very well trained, but the infantry mortars were not that successful. Indeed, they almost killed me once! German mortar teams were very good and well trained, while their artillery was just average.

Along with all the other things we were also trained in the language of command (in comparison with other subjects I achieved outstanding success in this field) and also had political classes. Political classes were confined to lectures given by a teacher; exhausted cadets could hardly take them, and some fell asleep. I can remember it myself – I was always dozing off at those lectures, and nothing remains in my memory from them. But in general most of the time in the academy we spent on military subjects, training was intensive and we became quite exhausted. We never completed the course of preparation of fire data for the 82 mm mortar and we had to learn this in our units at the front. But I stayed in infantry and besides me at least 30 men were not sent to mortar units. We never fired live ammo from those mortars, which was wise given that apparently our platoon leaders and company commander themselves did not really know how to operate them. Except for the company commander they were all graduates of the same Kamyshlov infantry academy and had not had mortar or artillery courses during their studies, as they would have had in artillery academies. They studied the theory of shooting a mortar together with us and could not give us any decent knowledge, while we cadets did not take that mortar course seriously.

Our course was over, and in early May 1942 the cadets received their military ranks, some became Lieutenants and some Junior Lieutenants; to my great dismay, I was among the latter. I was upset, but gradually I calmed down – what was the difference, we all had to go to the front as platoon leaders anyway. 480 officers (4 companies) graduated. The graduation was passed unnoticed, just like another day – it was wartime. The barracks were empty, new cadets had yet to arrive. We said good-bye to everyone – to many of them for good. I was not even 19 years old, and we now had to lead other people, soldiers, who were older than us. The burden of responsibility that the war put on our young shoulders was especially heavy. We, young men, almost boys, had to lead at least 100 mature and experienced men; we were responsible for their lives, for orders; we had to solve moral problems, but we, the young ones, did not bend and did not break. That’s the way it was.

Some commanders – we were no longer cadets – some 25 to 30 men, including me, stayed in the academy. They told us that we were supposed to undergo training as tank-hunter platoon leaders in the anti-tank rifle platoon. No one really knew what this might involve. Afterwards we received an explanation in the form of a manual. It stated that in every rifle battalion, first a platoon and then an antitank rifle company were to be formed to engage the enemy’s tanks. The academy received two anti-tank rifles – the first one a Degtyarev model and the second a Simonov, the semi-automatic one, as well as anti-tank grenades. We rarely fired the rifles, as we had to spare the ammo, and threw dummy grenades instead of live ones. Then, in early July 1942, we were sent to an army unit.

We did not go straight to the front but ended up in the 365th Reserve Rifle Regiment of the 46th Reserve Rifle Brigade at Surok station in the Mariiskaya region. They trained replacements for the units at the front in that regiment. Red Army soldiers did basic military training, mostly shooting and tactics – the usual actions of an individual soldier in squad and platoon. Lieutenant Zhukov, a man from our academy and a Muscovite, and I were sent to a sniper company. A 40-year-old, Junior Lieutenant Chudakov, who was called up from reserve, was the company commander. I became platoon leader; I had 30 men as my subordinates. They were all of different ages and nationalities, and many of them had already lived a long life. At first I was a bit uncomfortable giving orders to older men and I felt frustrated, but later it all seemed normal. The platoon leader’s wage was 600 roubles a month; 50 roubles were deducted as a military tax and we got 550 roubles in cash, but we did not have anything to spend the money on, as there were no shops in the regiment. Outside the regiment there was a rationing system, and market prices were very high: a loaf of bread was 200–250 roubles; half a litre of vodka or moonshine was 250–300 roubles – that was all we could get for our wage.

Besides shooting and studying weapons in the sniper company we taught the men to dig in with a small entrenching tool, camouflage in terrain, advance in short rushes, throw grenades, mostly RGD-33s, and to charge with the bayonet. They sent younger men who were enthusiastic about marksmanship to the sniper company, and they tried to reach my level of skill, but there were very few men in the regiment who could shoot better than me. Although we did not have real combat experience, we taught our subordinates to do the things that we knew and could do after graduation from the military academy. The training period for snipers was extended in comparison with the training period of a private from an infantry company. After two or three months of training, or sometimes even less, men were sent as replacements to the combat units, but the regiment’s officers, or more correctly commanders, were rarely sent to the front. For example, I spent at least one year in the regiment (from June 1942 to April or May 1943). During the summer and autumn of 1942 I was twice sent as an escorting officer for marching companies to the combat units, first to Mozhaisk area, and the second time to Voronezh area. The task of the escorting officer was to deliver the company without losses in personnel (there were cases of escapes). Sometimes the political officer of the company accompanied the company commander. Marching companies were normally brought to the divisional or regimental HQ, where men were distributed among units. Officers also started to leave for the front from the 365th Reserve Regiment; officers that came to the regiment were from hospitals, where they had been recovering after wounds, sometimes serious ones. It was time for me to leave the regiment. I had been stuck in that regiment for a long time, but I obtained experience of leading men and received advanced knowledge of military science, and I also became an excellent shooter. I did not have any good friends left in the regiment – many of them had left already, and I was happy to leave the reserve regiment.

In late May 1943 I was sent to the personnel section of the Moscow Military District. They sent me and other officers to a battalion of the officer reserve in Kuchino, in the vicinity of Moscow, where the battalion was stationed. I did not stay there for long, just around a month. We did almost nothing there and tried to get sent to the front as quickly as possible. In late July 1943 we, around 100 officers, were sent to the Bryansk front. We started our journey from Moscow by train, then we hitchhiked and then even had to walk. That was the time of the Kursk battle – one of the largest battles of the war. Our counter-offensive started successfully, but because of bloody fighting in defence and then in attack units suffered heavy losses both in men and officers. This is why the units of the Bryansk Front desperately needed replacements.