Tank Rider: Into the Reich with the Red Army

THE KAMENETS–PODOLSK OPERATION

In early January, 1944, following the order of Stavka, the 4th Tank Army was transferred to the Kiev area from the Bryansk forests. Our battalion and the tank regiment travelled to Bravary station near Kiev in one train. After this we crossed the Dnieper river by means of a temporary bridge, drove into Kiev’s outskirts and stayed in the buildings of a former technical college not far from Klavdievo station. That was in late January. We stayed there for a long time. I remember that the supply units fell behind us on the march and for some time we had awfully poor food – rye flour boiled in water without salt. We were constantly hungry. It was impossible to buy food for money, one could only exchange things for food, but we had nothing to offer for exchange. Officers had to put up with it, but soldiers were soldiers, they had to get good food – one could kick the bucket with that rye flour. Food was finally arranged by the efforts of the battalion commander and the zampolit; after a week we started to receive decent rations. In mid-February 1944 we were again loaded on to a train, and even received 100 grams of vodka before getting on it (veterans usually refer to ‘grams’ of vodka – translator’s note). That was the first and the last time that we received vodka – we never received it later. It was already late February when we got off the train at Polonnoe station. These rail journeys, both from the Bryansk forest area to Kiev and from Kiev to this station, took ages; especially long was the journey to Kiev, as it took about two weeks. The military trains were following each other at short distances, so we had to unload quickly, as the next train was about to arrive. The sky was cloudy; that is probably why the enemy’s air force was not present. We unloaded in darkness at Polonnoe station and marched on foot to Shepetovka, walking in dirt the whole night with short breaks for rest. We walked some 30 kilometres in the night and reached Shepetovka, where we went into houses and immediately fell asleep, even refusing to eat. We were so tired and exhausted that we did not even pay attention to the enemy’s artillery strikes that fell on the city.

At noon the battalion loaded on to Studebaker trucks and arrived in Slavuta. After a brief rest and meal we received an order to attack. That happened on 27 or 28 February, or perhaps even in early March. At first our battalion did not encounter any resistance from the enemy. The Germans were quickly abandoning their positions. In some places they would leave some outposts, but we would quickly defeat them. The terrain was open, without trees, cut by ravines and with a large number of settlements. That year spring came early to the Ukraine, and spring rain showers washed away the earth roads, making them hardly passable even for tanks, not to mention the wheeled vehicles. We had to walk on foot. That was where soldiers and officers suffered hellish pain – heavy mud stuck to our boots and we could barely drag our feet out of the sticky quagmire. Many soldiers carried machine-guns, boxes with ammo, mortars and mines. It was at least good that the battalion commander had ordered that the gas masks be left behind and appointed an officer who was to turn them over to the Brigade’s warehouse. Seemingly, a gas mask did not weigh much, but if one had to march on foot from dawn till dusk or even till midnight or next dawn, doing some 16 hours of marching, even a needle would seem heavy. Besides that, we could not always have a normal meal – the battalion kitchen was stuck in the dirt somewhere and could not catch up with us. It was impossible to find a dry spot during breaks, we had to sit down right in the dirt and immediately fell asleep for 10 or 15 minutes. Some soldiers even fell asleep while walking from exhaustion. One should not forget that most of the soldiers were just 18 years old.

We only survived on food provided by the population of the villages that we liberated from the Germans. At night and very rarely during the day we would make one-and-a-half- or two-hour stops in those villages to have a snack with what God had in store for us. The population welcomed us warmly, regardless of how hard it was for them to provide food to soldiers; they always found some nice treats – some villagers boiled chicken, others boiled potatoes and cut lard (soldiers dubbed this kind of catering ‘a grandmother’s ration’). However, such attitudes were common only in the Eastern Ukraine. As soon as we entered the Western Ukraine, that had passed to the Soviet Union from Poland in 1940, the attitude of the population was quite different – people hid from us in their houses, as they disliked and feared the Muscovites and Kastaps (a disparaging name for Russians in Ukraine – translator’s comment). Besides that, those places were Bandera areas, where the nationalistic movement was quite strong. They were not very eager to give us food and they could hardly ‘find’ food for us: usually it was millet and potatoes. As a rule, they would say in Ukrainian: ‘We do not have anything, the Germans took it all.’ In some cases I had to act severely and took tough measures on the villagers in order to feed five or seven soldiers. I had a German handgrenade with a long handle without a fuse; if the house owners refused to feed the soldiers, I would say something like this: ‘The Germans (Schwabs) destroyed our field kitchen, if you do not boil potatoes, the grenade explodes in an hour (or half an hour).’ This argument helped a lot! Of course, now this behaviour does not look very humane, but I did not have any other choice. From my point of view this was the ‘middle way’ – we did not loot the villages, but on the other hand, soldiers did not starve.

However, the main problem was not exhaustion, not hard conditions, not even the absence of regular food (the battalion kitchen never showed up), but the fact that the battalion went into action with almost no ammo and grenades. This was a tragedy for us. Most of the ammo and grenades we spent in heavy fighting for Voitovtsy, Podvolochinsk and Volochinsk. A rifle without ammo is just a stick. It was the only time during the war, when I screwed up and my platoon was left without ammo – I never allowed this to happen again.

I still carried the PPSh submachine-gun in the Orel and Kamenets-Podolsk operations, but I got tired of carrying it around. In the battles that followed, my weapon was a German Walther pistol that I found in Kamenets-Podolsk; sometimes I carried a second pistol as well – of smaller calibre. I had to run around a lot. A soldier is a soldier, no one wants to die, and so he might lie down and hide, while my task was to get him up. It was easier to run around with a Walther. I was not supposed to fire; after all, it was the soldiers’ job to fire, while my job was to organize them. I loved my Walther. I did not like the Parabellum, as the lock was unreliable. The Walther was a good gun, fired well and precisely, and there was plenty of ammo for it. I would not have the gun in my hand during the battle; I would run around with a small entrenching tool in my hand. I had to use the tool both for its intended purpose, and sometimes to tap the butts of ‘too-long-on-the-ground’ soldiers. Besides that, I always carried a couple of excellent Russian F-1 hand grenades. We did not like the German grenades – one was the size of a chicken’s egg, the other one, with a long handle, was very inconvenient to carry, and both of them were weak. I also had a Finnish knife, but I lost it later.

In action I tried to keep close to the first platoon leader Petr Shakulo and he tried to stick close to me. Normally it was us two who solved the problems in the course of battle. We rarely saw company leader Titov, even more rarely battalion commander Kozienko. I do not recall a single case when we had lunch together with Titov or even had a talk during lunch. I will be honest and say that those battles before 20 March, that is until we reached Skalat, have not remained clear in my memory. Sixty years have passed, and of course I have forgotten many things, but some events are still firmly entrenched in my mind.

From the company commander I received a mission to capture a village – a kolkhoz named after Voroshilov, which was on some high ground. The platoon assaulted the village by crossing a ploughed field, and our feet sank into the soaked soil, we could barely move our feet. We tried to run under fire, but got exhausted very quickly – an overwhelming feeling of indifference set in, an awful apathy; we walked towards the Germans, paying no attention to their fire. We walked silently, but stubbornly – a kind of ‘psychological’ assault. The enemy could not stand this and fled. When we reached the village, there were no traces of Germans. We stayed in that village for several days. For some reason, I do not remember why, I was the only one from the company to stay in the village with my platoon. I had to feed the soldiers, and I talked to the village elder, who used to be the chairman of the kolkhoz before the war. I requested him to provide houses where the soldiers could stay, and food. At first he did not ‘get’ me and brought only potatoes, so I had to ‘explain’ to him that besides potatoes soldiers needed other staples – meat, lard, cereals, sugar (that village had a lot of it). As I stayed with my orderly in the man’s hut, I also warned him that I was to receive better food than the soldiers, not just some soup. Everything was done in the best possible way and the soldiers were fed well.

Well, food and accommodation were taken care of, but I did not forget that we were at war, so I had a defensive position built, just in case, in order to be ready to repel possible enemy attacks. We had little ammo though; for example, I had only some twenty rounds in my submachine-gun, my soldiers had even less, but we had a Maxim heavy machine-gun from Lieutenant Kolosov’s platoon with a full ammo belt (250 rounds). We relied on the machine-gun and antitank rifles from the anti-tank rifle platoon of our battalion that stayed next to us.

On a quiet and sunny day we saw an attacking line of soldiers approaching us. We quickly prepared for action and occupied the trenches. The assaulting infantry opened fire, but did not inflict losses on us. I ordered the soldiers to hold their fire and let them come closer, but when they charged shouting ‘Hurrah’, we realized that these were fellow Soviet warriors. Soldiers of my platoon jumped out of the trenches, also shouted ‘Hurrah’, and waved their hands. The assaulting soldiers realized that we were not Germans, ceased fire, folded the line and walked up to us. We got acquainted and had a smoke together. It was some infantry company, not from our 4th Tank Army. Incidentally, we managed to get some ammo from them.

After a day or two, fresh and rested, we left this hospitable village and continued our march in the same dirt and mud. Our offensive was almost 24 hours a day. During short night rests we could not always recover, and the catering during the offensive was quite bad. The local population in the Eastern Ukraine was not rich, bread was especially scarce, but as I have mentioned, they were very well disposed towards us. Once our battalion passed a village and stopped for a short rest at a more or less dry spot not far from the village. Apparently, there were no Germans in the village. We saw peasants coming form the village, mostly women. A local priest headed the procession; people carried banners and other church paraphernalia. We all stood up, honouring them. Women ran up to us, weeping, kissing and hugging us. The priest addressed the battalion commander Kozienko and on behalf of the villagers invited us to the village to celebrate the joy of liberation from the Germans. Kozienko thanked him for the invitation and said that we had no time to party – we had to move on, chasing the Germans further – not only from their village, but also from other villages and from our land. We thanked all the villagers and the battalion marched on. In another place, when we were really hungry, we encountered a column of former partisans, who had fresh bread and lard. The partisans shared these riches with us, and all the personnel were fed – it became a nicer walk.

Despite all difficulties, the battalion stubbornly pressed forward, mostly on foot. The 2nd and 3rd battalions of the Brigade were somewhere on their own missions, while the tank regiment had not caught up with us yet – it was delayed during unloading at Polonnoe railway station. Trucks and tanks arrived later and the speed of our advance increased. Our battalion liberated Podvolochinsk, and then Volochinsk, the 2nd battalion with the tank regiment captured Manachin and Golshintsy on 5 March, while the 3rd battalion occupied Voitovtsy. Heavy fighting took place for those settlements; the young soldiers did an excellent job in these battles. At first I doubted the abilities of some of the soldiers because of their shortness; I considered them not fit for war, but they turned out to be able to take hard physical pressures and go into battle right after a march. They turned out to be the right kind of soldier – fast, smart and brave, skilful in handling their weapons. I relied on them and they relied on me, as they knew that there would be no unnecessary losses among them. The main thing for a soldier is to trust his commander, be provided with all necesseties and know what he is fighting for. That is it!

Artillery, armour and trucks – mostly Studebaker trucks that had been stuck on the roads – gradually caught up with us, and for some time the battalion had an opportunity to advance on Studebaker trucks. These trucks replaced our Soviet-made ZIS-5 trucks, which had been the main truck of the country before the war and were already somewhat obsolete. We had a break from the unceasing marching on foot.