Tank Rider: Into the Reich with the Red Army

BAPTISM OF FIRE: THE OREL OFFENSIVE

We arrived at the HQ of the Bryansk front on 2 or 3 August, 1943, and were distributed among different armies of the front. Along with several other officers I was sent to the 4th Tank Army, which launched its attack on 26 July and was engaged in fighting, overcoming enemy resistance and advancing towards Orel. On around 8 or 9 August we arrived at the HQ of the 4th Army, which were located in a ravine with all the necessary camouflage against the enemy’s air force. During that period the army commander was Lieutenant-General V. M. Badanov. After a brief discussion with the chief of the army’s personnel section I was sent along with several other officers to the 6th Guards Mechanized Corps under the command of Major-General A. I. Akimov. From the personnel section of the Corps staff we were sent to different brigades; by that time I was only accompanied by five to seven officers from the 100 that departed from Moscow. Some were sent to the 16th Guards Mechanized Brigade, the others to the 17th Guards, while I was the only officer who was sent to the 49th Mechanized Brigade (it had not yet been awarded with the Guards title); the Brigade was commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Petr Nikitich Turkin. After some hesitation, on 13 or 14 August the head of the personnel section of the Brigade decided to send me to the 1st motor rifle battalion as a replacement. The commander of the battalion at that time was Senior Lieutenant Terenti Grigorievich Kozienko; he became Captain as late as October 1943. They sent a runner from the battalion, so that I did not have to wander around the ravines looking for the battalion HQ. With the runner I reported my arrival for further service to the battalion chief of staff Captain S. P. Mazurov. The 1st battalion had just disengaged the enemy and the men were putting themselves in order. This brief pause in the fighting was a great help for me – I was able to get to know the personnel quickly outside active operations, during a half-day break. I was appointed the platoon leader of the 2nd platoon in the first company, which was under the command of Junior Lieutenant Petr Ivanovich Titov. I fought the whole war as the 2nd platoon leader and only in September–October of 1945 was I officially appointed the commander of the 1st company.

Petr Sergeevich Shakulo was the leader of the 1st platoon, while the leader of the 3rd platoon was Lieutenant Gavrilov (I forget his first name). The machine-gun platoon leader was not there – he was in hospital after receiving a serious wound. The company’s Sergeant-Major was Vasily Blokhin, former seaman of the Pacific Navy. The company had medic Safronov, company clerk Barakovski, as well as a sniper – a big Kazakh called Jambul. The deputy battalion commander for political affairs or zampolit was Abram Efimovich Gerstein and the deputy battalion commander (personnel section) was Senior Lieutenant Maxim Tarasovich Burkov, who was killed on 16 January, 1945. The 2nd motor rifle company was under Lieutenant Afanasi Nikitovich Gulik, while the 3rd was under Lieutenant Yuri Alexeevich Grigoriev, who became the battalion’s chief of staff in May 1944.

Sergeant Major Blokhin introduced me to the assistant platoon leader Senior Sergeant Sabaev and the orderly in the company. On the evening of the same day we moved forward to our attack position in order to assault the Germans in the morning. During the night we three officers of the company were summoned by company commander Titov, who gave us our combat objectives for the attack. I did not recognize the platoon leaders in the darkness; they did not recognize me either. At dawn the company formed a line and together with two other companies of the battalion walked with a rapid step towards the hill, having no idea if the enemy was defending it. That was my baptism of fire. This was no longer training, it was war, and the enemy was in front of us. The enemy first opened up with machine-gun fire from the hill and then launched a concentrated mortar barrage on us. Just as I had in training, I ordered the soldiers: ‘Forward run’, and ran forward myself – just as I had in training. All of a sudden my soldiers were no longer in front of me. I heard voices from the side, from a ravine, where the soldiers from the company and from my platoon had already taken cover. They started to dig in. I did not even have an entrenching tool, let alone weapons – neither a pistol nor a submachine-gun; I only received weapons a couple of days later. To the right of me there was a soldier who had already dug his skirmisher’s trench, so I asked for an entrenching tool from him. I dug in and made a breastwork. I gave the entrenching tool back to the red-headed man and asked who he was. He answered that he was platoon leader from the 1st company, Lieutenant Petr Shakulo. I had only seen him once in the night and did not recognize him in daylight. This is how Petr Shakulo became my best friend for the whole war. Our friendship lasted until his very death in 1988.

After darkness fell, we left the ravine and dug in at an open spot right in front of the hill, trying our best to camouflage our narrow foxholes from the enemy’s air force and from observation. During the night we received an order to repeat the assault on the enemy forces defending the hill. A night assault is a special type of combat, it is complicated and requires the close co-operation of all battalion units, even between the individual soldiers of the company; it also requires bravery and fearlessness.

The assault began well until we reached a barbed wire entanglement and the company had to lie down in front of it. How could we overcome the obstacle? We did not have wirecutters. It might well be that several soldiers could sneak under the entanglement together with me. But what about the rest? Would they follow? It was impossible to see in the darkness. Would they help me or would I help them – that’s the main thing in night combat. I did not know what to do and I sneaked out to look for Shakulo and Gavrilov, the two other platoon leaders of the company. The Germans were lighting up the area intensively with missiles, and I managed to find them. Lieutenant Nikolai Konstantinovich Chernyshov, platoon leader from the 2nd company, was also there with them. We all decided to withdraw to our starting positions.

We reported that we had failed to complete the mission and received a repeated order to seize the enemy’s trench. To give spoken orders meant making myself and other soldiers a target for the Germans. Even without any noise from our side the Germans were delivering horrible flanking machine-gun fire with tracer bullets that shone brightly in the darkness. We prepared our soldiers for the new assault and discussed with the other platoon leaders how we could best fulfil the order. I noticed that two Kazakh soldiers from the platoon did not join the platoon during the assault and stayed in their foxhole. I warned them strictly that they could be severely punished for cowardice. Incidentally, during the daytime assault my assistant platoon leader Sabaev also fell behind, saying that he had stomach-ache. That was the only time in my life when I told another person: ‘If this happens again, I’ll shoot you.’ Sabaev got the message, and in the second night assault I ordered him to check the foxholes, see if anyone had stayed behind and then join the assaulting line with those that he found. He fulfilled the order and no longer had stomach-ache.

The second assault was also unsuccessful. However, the Germans only spotted us when we got right under the entanglement. They tossed hand-grenades at us and opened machine-gun fire. A handgrenade went off next to me, but in the heat of the battle I did not pay attention to it. After that the Germans opened fire with mortars, even though they knew they might hit their own troops. Again we had to withdraw with losses. My garrison cap was torn and I found out that I was wounded in my head by grenade splinters. Sabaev bandaged my head.

In daytime, after an unimpressive artillery preparation and with the support of three T-34 tanks, we again assaulted the enemy’s trench and were again thrown back. The tanks were knocked out because of the failure of the crews: they had abandoned the tanks before they were knocked out and so the tanks kept on rolling empty towards the enemy. This really happened, I did not make it up and I never again saw such a shameful episode in the whole war.

During the night we assaulted twice more, and again it was in vain. To add trouble to our misery, a platoon of sixteen men led by a Lieutenant went missing in the 2nd company of the battalion during the night. They were looking for the platoon for several days, mostly at night, but never found them. Men just disappeared and no one knew where they went. These things also happen in war, war is always war.

I should say that the 2nd and 3rd battalions of the brigade also failed to advance during their attacks; their attacks were repelled with heavy losses in personnel. The enemy firmly held on to the dominant hill. The next day he sent his air force against us. From dawn till dusk, all day long, in wave after wave, German bombers dropped their bomb load on us. Soviet fighters were nowhere to be seen, so the German air force had every possible chance. Anti-aircraft guns tried to repel the air raid, but were also suppressed by the bombers. Besides bombing, the enemy opened artillery and mortar fire on us. We had the impression that the Germans were preparing for an attack, but it never came. Apparently, the enemy had been given the task of inflicting casualties on us to try and stop our attempts to capture the hill. And that is exactly what happened. That was my first experience of such a heavy air raid. It was pure hell; it is hard to find a comparison for it. You are just lying in your foxhole and waiting for death, bombs are exploding all around, the ground is shaking and you are shaking. I was frightened to death and wanted to run away from that hell, but I was a commander and had to stay with my soldiers. One has to know how to overcome fear. There are no fearless men, fear is natural, but some people are able to overcome it; others shiver but remember their responsibilities and get over it. The third type of people grows numb with fear and they literally lose their minds. Such people run anywhere just to hide, creating panic among others. These people are especially horrified by the enemy’s air force.

The twilight of that horrible day set in. The sun was setting and the enemy’s air force ceased its air raids; the artillery and mortar fire had stopped even earlier; it probably lasted just around one hour, or maybe even less. Time goes by slowly in such hell. One by one, the soldiers started to crawl out of their foxholes. Sabaev and I got out of the trench to check the soldiers in the platoon. I also spoke to the other platoon leaders and we counted our losses. To my surprise, the losses were lower than one might think considering the condition of our positions. Both mine and the other platoons in the company had insignificant losses. The 2nd and the 3rd companies of the battalion were the worst hit. The ground around our trenches was churned up with bomb craters, some foxholes collapsed and buried the soldiers that were in them, but they survived. My assistant platoon leader Sabaev had left a bag-pack and a helmet lying on the breastwork, which were hit with splinters – the helmet was pierced in several places. We were all thirsty, during the whole day we did not have a droplet of water. We were summoned to company commander Titov; his trench was some 150–200 metres from the front, on a ravine slope. We had some water at his place and asked to bring water to the front, to the soldiers. Titov cursed violently us for failing to complete the task and informed us that we were to retire from the sector and the brigade was transferred to another sector of the front.

We reported our losses from the air raid to Titov. I think we did not have anyone killed, but ten to twelve men were wounded and shell-shocked. Before dawn, still in darkness, the company quietly abandoned its positions. We marched for some 5 or 6 kilometres and stopped for a break in a ravine. A field kitchen drove up, we were fed and went to sleep. The day passed by. Battalion commander Kozienko summoned the officers in the evening and scolded us for not being able to capture the German trench and to overcome the barbed wire fence. However, he added: ‘There was no barbed wire entanglement. You just thought it up.’ The company commanders unanimously reported that there was an entanglement, but the battalion commander insisted on his version.

After our fruitless attempts to capture the hill we tried to launch attacks along different sectors of the front, but all those attempts failed and sometimes we pretended to launch the attack in order to distract the enemy’s reserves.

It was unbearably hot on those August days of 1943 in the Orel area, and we mostly moved on trucks during the night. There was a huge amount of dust on the roads, our feet sank into it as if it were cotton. By morning we were all covered with thick layer of dust. In an attempt to turn the area around Orel into a wilderness, the enemy burnt entire villages during his retreat, putting everything that he could to the torch. Just chimneys remained after the fire – a horrible, depressing view. Surviving civilians had to come back to those ashes. The Germans blew up railways and broke sleepers with a special machine, snapping them in two. Before their retreat the Germans, as a rule, would set village houses on fire. From the black pillars of smoke that rose from the burning houses we knew that the Germans were about to retreat and we could advance without resistance from their side, capturing the village as it burned. On 13 September, 1943, on the order of the front, the entire personnel of the Brigade, except for the officers, were transferred to other units to replace losses. Our company had just the sergeant–major, clerk, medic and company commander’s orderly, as well as my assistant platoon leader Sabaev. However, we continued to move along the front on trucks at night, sometimes with lights on, as late as 15 or 18 September. It was explained to us that this was done to deceive the enemy. During those days all units of the 4th Tank Army disengaged and went into reserve, concentrating in the thick forests around Bryansk in the vicinity of Karachev.