Tank Rider: Into the Reich with the Red Army

TRAINING FOR A NEW OFFENSIVE

After the end of the Orel operation the battalion had just 28 or 30 officers left, among them five company commanders, ten platoon leaders and thirteen staff officers – the remaining sixteen were either dead or wounded. The signal platoon leader – chief of communications of the battalion – was among the wounded staff officers. Only ten out of 22 platoon leaders were left. Just six of these ten lived to see Victory Day, and I was among those six. Just three company commanders survived the war. At that time we were all young: the platoon leaders were 20 or 21 years old. Company commanders were 26 to 27 years old, the battalion commander was 29. Most of the officers were young men in their twenties.

The autumn was dry and warm, which allowed us to build dugouts for the incoming replacements and ourselves before the cold weather set in. We found metal barrels to make stoves and metal pipes for chimneys; however, we could not find doors for the dugouts, and we had to cover them with rain-proof capes. Officers and enlisted men started to arrive. The battalion commander in person distributed them among the companies. Lieutenant Kolosov arrived at our company as a machine-gun platoon leader. Young soldiers arrived at the company, born in 1925, just boys and middle-aged Azeri men, older than 30 or 35 years. They could not speak very good Russian and could hardly understand an order, but after some time started to understand orders without a translator. The Azeri men fought well and I had no complaints about them. Sergeant Major Vasili Blokhin left for the 3rd company, assistant platoon leader Sabaev was appointed Sergeant Major of the 2nd company on my recommendation. Mikhail Karpovich Bratchenko, machine-gun crew leader from the battalion’s machine-gun company, became the company’s Sergeant Major. We fought almost till the end of the war together with him.

An intensive training period started after the arrival of replacements. The personnel arrived from the replacement regiment; they were not from civil life and had some skills, but we had to teach them many things, especially firing the PPSh submachine-gun and the RPD (sometimes called DP) light machine-gun. We never had rifles in the battalion, just submachine-guns. After the cold weather set in, we were issued winter uniforms – valenki (felt boots), vatnik (padded jackets) and trousers, winter hats, woollen helmet liners and tarpaulin mittens with three fingers, warm underwear, woollen foot cloths. Officers were issued sweatshirts, fur vests and sheepskin coats. I did not take the sheepskin coat – the Germans knew that officers were dressed in sheepskin coats and tried to kill them first. Besides that, I was warm enough in a padded jacket. I did not wear the helmet liner and felt boots either. As ill luck would have it, the supply unit personnel could not get the winter hat for me and I had to wear a civilian hat of my size, of a reddish colour.

We had all kinds of training for the personnel. After the first snowfalls we even learnt to ski, although many did not know the first thing about skiing. I was reasonably demanding in my relationship with the soldiers, I tried to be just and did not try to find small faults, I treated every soldier as an individual. Most of the soldiers were 18 years old in 1943. They were not strong physically, mostly small and frail youngsters, so I tried to adjust the training programme to meet their physical and health capacity. Day and night we trained them for the future battles. We taught them things that they would need in combat at the front. We knitted the units together in tactical training, trying to cultivate a sense of comradeship. Soldiers had to adjust to each other; they had to understand how a platoon or company attacked in order to assist each other. That was the main thing. We had to build a core, to have a team, not a group of individual soldiers. We paid most attention to training at the platoon-company level. We had political classes as well – conversations and political information.

We considered that removing ‘tank fear’ and training soldiers to knock tanks out with hand grenades was a crucial point in the training. We did a ‘tank test-drive’ for that purpose. Soldiers would sit in trenches, while a T-34 would roll over the trenches once or twice. Boys were happy to see that it was not that scary and they were happy to see how brave they were. We had a little combat training with live ammo in attack and defence. I would often tell them about life at the front, sharing my combat experience. I went through the war all the way to Berlin with some soldiers from that replacement of 1943.

We all felt that our combat training was about to end. By then the soldiers had learnt skills, such as handling weapons, and grew stronger; I could see bravery and confidence in their eyes. Some of them were appointed squad leaders or even assistant platoon leaders. A short period of time passed – just two and a half months, and one could see the military bearing in them, the young boys had transformed into soldiers that I could lead into battle.