Chapter 10
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Chernomordik
I was born on 31 December 1922 in Smolensk. In June 1941 I had finished my tenth year of schooling and was waiting to be called to Leningrad to take the entrance exams for the Frunze Higher Naval School. The romance of the sea, the handsome uniform, the cutlass and the young ladies’ admiring eyes taking in this resplendence . . . you yourself can understand. Before the war simply frenzied agitation had been unleashed among the older classes, exhorting the young men to enter military schools. Indeed, my generation, which had grown up on the hoorah-patriotic slogans and was loyal to its citizens’ duties, gladly enrolled in military schools. But the war disrupted the donning of the sailor’s striped vest. On 22 June I went to the military enlistment centre and requested the papers I needed for my enrollment in the Frunze Higher Naval School, but instead they proposed, or more accurately ordered, that our group, which numbered thirty men, enroll in the Smolensk Artillery Specialist School. It trained officers for the howitzer artillery.
Already within two weeks, the Germans were approaching Smolensk, so the school was urgently evacuated to the city of Irbit in the Urals. The 700 cadets went with the school, but in Irbit we were informed that our period of training had been reduced to 6 months (before the war, cadets studied and trained for almost 3 years in the specialist school). We were busy in the school for 14–16 hours a day, and over the six months of training, they made ‘men’ of us. Only the gunners had the opportunity to do field firing exercises with live ammunition, but overall the training, including the basic training, was on a high level. I even fired a Maksim machine gun at the target range three times, and once the Degtiarev light machine gun.
Already on 4 January 1942, I graduated from the school with the rank of junior lieutenant, and with a group of other ‘freshly baked’ artillery commanders I was sent to the Altai, to the city of Biisk, where the 232nd Rifle Division was forming up. We were split up among the artillery units. I and three other junior lieutenants wound up in the Separate 214th Anti-tank Artillery Battalion. Thus, it didn’t happen that I served with the howitzer artillery.
The battalion consisted of three batteries equipped with 45-mm anti-tank guns. Senior Lieutenant Vostrikov commanded the battery, and Motenko and Shamshiev were the political leaders. I was appointed to the post of deputy battery commander, but the platoons were commanded by lieutenants, guys who outranked me, who were graduates of the Rostov Artillery School, which prepared commanders for the anti-tank artillery units that were equipped with the well-known ‘Farewell, Motherland’ [a common nickname for the 45-mm anti-tank guns].
As you can imagine, it was January, with frigid temperatures, and we lived in the woods in tents. They fed us according to the extremely miserly rear area norm and we had no short sheepskin coats or felt boots, so our primary concern was not to freeze to death. They began combat training only at the end of April, and we focused on the interchangeability of assignments in the gun crews, so that each member could do the other members’ jobs as well as his own. The men that arrived for the division’s forming-up were primarily Altai peasants and former prisoners from Krasnoiarsk District, who had been released early and designated for the front. The atmosphere in the division’s units matched this contingent of personnel. I don’t even want to talk about it.
There was a shortage of commanders in the division, particularly in the rifle regiments. The division was commanded by Major (!) Ulitin, who by the end of the war became a general. Vostrikov was selected for the post of division chief of staff, so I had to assume command of the battery.
In June 1942 we were loaded onto trains and sent to the city of Voronezh. My friend, Il’ia Eidinov, who was killed later, in 1943, told me before our departure to the front, ‘I know that you will survive.’ For some reason, he was certain of this.
Our first battle went well for us; we didn’t have any casualties. About 300 metres from us, two tanks emerged from some woods in the wake of yet another column of retreating Red Army troops. A red banner was limply hanging above one of them. Suddenly a gust of wind unfurled the flag, and we saw a white circle with a black swastika on it. Everyone was momentarily startled by the sight .. . The fire of the battalion’s guns chased the German tanks back into the woods.
For the next half-year we held a line along the banks of the Don River, approximately 20 kilometres from the northern outskirts of Voronezh. All this time, the battalion was positioned immediately behind the infantry’s trenches. There was a catastrophic shortage of shells. As the battery commander, I didn’t have the right to open fire without first receiving the approval of the battalion commander! Our infantry was constantly being used up in attempts to seize a bridgehead on the opposite bank of the Don. The river in this place was not very wide.
I recall the fighting for the village of Khvoshchevatka in August 1942. There was a terrible incident that took place here – two of our rifle battalions broke into this village, but approximately one and a half dozen German tanks encircled them, and the majority of them were taken prisoner. The Germans led the prisoners out of the village with an escort of their tanks, which surrounded the column on all four sides. We received an order to open fire at the receding column, even though it was plainly clear these men were our comrades being led into captivity, not German infantry. I fired a volley to one side of the column. The battery’s political leader kept silent. But the neighbouring battery fired a salvo that was squarely on target . . .
My battery knocked out its first tank a month later, in fighting for the bridgehead next to the village of Novopodkletnoe. It was a medium tank and the ‘45s’ could cope with tanks of this type. Although it is said about the crews that served the 45-mm anti-tank gun that they were doomed men, it was still possible to fight with these guns, though usually not for long – until you were killed. Our fate was not envied at the front, so no one came to us voluntarily.
The 45-mm gun was low, light, and almost toy-like; it was mobile and manoeuvrable. It could easily be pivoted in any direction and could be rolled forward by manpower alone, advancing from place to place behind the attacking infantry. We had these ‘toy cannons’, which were being produced even before the war. But precisely because of their construction, they were extremely vulnerable. The short and narrow shield offered little protection to the crew from enemy fire. It was extremely awkward to fire the ‘45s’ – when firing, the artillerymen had to be either on their knees, or hunched over almost double. Until 1943 we could fight relatively successfully against tanks, but any bobble by the crew – someone was killed or wounded, or the gunner muffed a shot and the shell missed – as a rule threatened the artillerymen with death. Without exaggeration . . . tanks would succeed in overrunning the gun’s position, and with their tracks they would grind both the crew and the gun into the dust. It really was the case, ‘Farewell, Motherland’. Even when positioned in a static sector of the front, the battalion constantly suffered substantial losses, though during this period there were not a lot of German tanks in the area of Voronezh.
In January 1943 we went on the offensive. I recall fighting for the village of Kochetovka for several days. There our 605th and 712th Rifle Regiments lost almost their entire personnel in frontal attacks. Afterward, with uninterrupted fighting, we reached the borders of Kursk Oblast. At the end of February 1943, I was reassigned to a destroyer anti-tank artillery regiment.
Experienced artillerymen were chosen for the destroyer anti-tank artillery regiments, who had performed well in preceding battles; in addition, only Communists and Komsomol members were selected. However, for example, the regiment in which I was fighting at the end of the war was formed from new conscripts, primarily those born in 1925, who didn’t know the smell of gunpowder. I’m not aware of any other selection criteria. No one looked at the personnel questionnaires or ferreted out people among the kinfolk who’d been repressed or dispossessed. I wound up in the anti-tank artillery after a rather unique affair which will seem unjust to you, but which was part of my lot at the front.
In February 1943, my battery got stuck in a village in the Kursk area because two of our vehicles had broken down. Prior to this, I hadn’t slept for two days. I collapsed in sleep on the floor of the nearest hut, when suddenly my platoon commander Malyshev woke me and said, ‘They’ve caught a Nazi police goon. What should we do with him? Shoot him or turn him over to headquarters? The local residents want to execute him.’
The only thing I managed to say in my grogginess was, ‘Lieutenant, go to hell; do whatever you want, just let me sleep.’
A couple of minutes later there was a burst of gunfire out in the yard. I went outside, and on the snow were the dead Nazi collaborator and a crowd of villagers, intermingled with my soldiers. The peasants were shouting, ‘A dog’s death for a dog!’, and saying what vermin the dead German hireling had been.
A week passed, when suddenly an authorized agent of the Special Department called me in for an interrogation and began to question me about the circumstances of the event that had taken place in the village. I told him what had happened, and the Special Department agent, smiling affably, shook my hand and wished me combat success.
But a couple of weeks later, I was summoned to division headquarters. I took a horse from a rifle battalion commander and rode to the headquarters, which was located in a rural school building. A captain walked up to me – a lawyer, and peremptorily ordered, ‘Follow me!’ He led me into a classroom, and sitting there was a session of a divisional tribunal! Three rear-area loafers were sitting there, and without listening to my explanations, they accused me of taking justice over a civilian into my own hands, asked me again the same questions from the Special Department agent’s report, and about 10 minutes later announced that the tribunal was retiring for deliberations. They returned and the chairman pronounced the sentence: ‘Eight years imprisonment.’ I exploded, ‘For what?!’ But he continued to read from the paper in a monotone voice: ‘If courage and heroism are shown in fighting for the socialist Motherland, the sentence can be reviewed and lightened at the recommendation of the command.’
That was it! There were no words about the commutation of my term in the penal battalion, or how the implementation of the sentence was postponed until after the war. There was nothing more! They turned around and walked out of the room. I sat there for two more hours, waiting for when the guards would arrive – they would tear off my shoulder boards and take away my belt and pistol. But no one came. I didn’t know what to do. I stepped outside, mounted the horse and quietly returned to my battery with no interference from anyone. I was seething inside, thinking ‘Chekist swine! If only you were all sent to the front, you osobist [the Russian nickname for the Special [osobyi] Department officers] assholes!
The battalion commander arrived; I told him what had happened, and he said in reply, ‘Fight and don’t think about this hogwash. We’ll try to look into it.’ If someone else had been in my position, likely, he would have likely gone AWOL or would have gone over to the Germans .. . but I was a Jew, a Communist, and a patriot, and the word ‘Motherland’ for me was not empty of meaning. Such a choice didn’t appeal to me.
Two weeks later, an order came down over the telephone – I was to turn over command of the battery and to appear at division headquarters. Now I was utterly confident that there was one path in front of me – to Siberia, to a prison camp. The battery’s sergeant major packed a rucksack full of food for me. I said my goodbyes to my combat comrades, passed out all my prized possessions to my friends, and headed on foot to headquarters. There I found four other artillery commanders, and we were all offered the choice to serve in the Supreme High Command’s destroyer anti-tank units. There were no rejections. I don’t know what happened further with my ‘criminal’ case. When I was demobilized, there were no tribunal documents in my personal file. But I wasn’t particularly afraid to wind up in a penal battalion; after all, I’d spent my entire war to this point in units where the slogan was, ‘The barrel is long, but the life is short.’ What difference did it make where I was killed? But let’s return to my story.
I wound up in the Separate 1660th Destroyer Anti-tank Artillery Regiment, which was under the command of a splendid man and courageous officer, Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Vasil’evich Cherniak. The regiment consisted of five batteries. These regiments didn’t have subordinate battalions, but there were destroyer anti-tank regiments that had six batteries, and among them there might be one battery of 45-mm guns, one howitzer battery, and one equipped with ZIS-2 57-mm guns. Our regiment was armed only with the ZIS-3, which had the long nickname of ‘Seventy-six millimetres’ in the army.
There were four guns in each battery, all towed by Studebakers. The four guns were divided between two fire platoons with two guns each. Each crew had seven members. The operations platoon consisted of a scout squad (a commander and six scouts), a signals squad (a commander, two radio operators and five signalmen-wiremen) and a logistical support and ammunition supply squad (the sergeant major, his artillery mechanic, and drivers); we didn’t have ammunition supply platoons. Altogether, the battery had around sixty men. Each battery was supposed to have six vehicles. All of the artillerymen were armed with carbines; only the scouts carried PPSh submachine guns. Each battery was supposed to have two light machine guns for defence against German infantry, but through the entire war I also had a Maksim heavy machine gun with a large supply of ammunition belts, which more than once bailed us out of difficult situations.
But there were a lot of differences between the destroyer anti-tank artillery regiments and regular artillery regiments. For example, we went around with the emblem of the tank destroyers sewn to our sleeves – two crossed gun barrels on a black background. In the 1186th Destroyer Anti-tank Artillery Regiment, its officers wore this emblem on their astrakhan fur caps. The same emblem was stencilled onto the cabs of the trucks. Yet the battery didn’t have its own field kitchen, although the men of the destroyer anti-tank units received increased rations. In some of the batteries they would drag around an anti-tank rifle, but this was more for reassurance as a ‘last chance’. I had a nest egg of two cases of anti-tank grenades, so that ‘If you’re going to die, at least do so with music.’
The artillery regiments of the Supreme Command Reserve had no rifle companies; these existed only in the anti-tank artillery brigades. All the soldiers and officers received double the regular wage, and for each year of service in a destroyer anti-tank artillery regiment, we were credited with one-and-a-half years of service. We were supposed to receive monetary bonuses for destroying a German armoured vehicle, but we transferred all of our bonuses to the Defence Fund.
In distinction from the regular artillery batteries, we had two radios, because very often, you know, the regiment operated in separate batteries on different sectors in order to cover tank-vulnerable directions, and communications with the headquarters could only be maintained by radio. Combat training was arranged so that in each crew there were at least three men capable of replacing the gun layer in case of necessity; after all, we did take grievous losses . . .
There was one more important detail: A battery commander in the destroyer anti-tank artillery could at his own discretion expend shells from the ‘untouchable’ reserve (twelve shells per gun barrel) without seeking the permission of the regiment commander. Our standard ammunition load was at least double that of the regular artillery. We had 140 shells per gun, while the load in the regular artillery units was always much smaller. We usually had thirty to forty high-explosive shells, two boxes of canister shells, but most of our load consisted of armour-piercing and armour-piercing discarding sabot. I can still think of a number of other distinctive features unique to the destroyer anti-tank artillery regiments.
The regiment had its first fight in May 1943, but we were being used only to provide fire support to the infantry. During the Battle of Kursk, the regiment was in the second line of defence not far from Prokhorovka, and the Germans were stopped only 3 kilometres short of our positions. We had already prepared ourselves to die heroically. At the end of July 1943, our regiment took part in a hard fight with German tanks. My battery knocked out three of them, but German dive bombers simply pounded our positions into the ground with bombs and we were left without guns. In addition, just a handful of the soldiers survived.
However, my most terrible memory of 1943 is the crossing of the Dnepr River. We crossed at night by battery together with the infantry. The Germans spotted the start of our forced crossing, and with their illumination flares they turned the night into day. The surface of the river was literally boiling from the falling artillery shells and mortar rounds. Such a hurricane of fire was opened from the high, right bank of the Dnepr that no one was lucky enough to cross the river that night. Only around ten smashed boats and ferries with dead oarsmen made it to the opposite bank. How many people were killed or drowned there! The Dnepr’s current indifferently swept everyone and everything downstream – the living, the dead, fragments of boats, empty fuel drums and logs. The inhuman screams of drowning soldiers rose above the river.
Although I had wanted to become a sailor, I was a very poor swimmer, so before the crossing I knew full well that this was going to be the last day of my life. To enter this hell with the hope of surviving was a stupid illusion.
We had cut logs and made the rafts ahead of time, but when we were rolling the guns down the plank ramps onto the rafts, the Germans gave us a salvo right on the riverbank from their six-barrel rocket launchers and tore us to pieces – both our rafts and our gun crews were shredded. We, about fifteen men who had survived intact, together with some infantry soldiers rolled the two operable guns away from the bank. Over the radio I contacted the regiment commander, briefed him on the situation, and received the order to halt the crossing. Meanwhile, German fire was killing everything living on the riverbank; it was piled with the bodies of our soldiers. It is terrifying even to recall it . . .
On 19 October 1943, we were shifted to a bridgehead north of Kiev. Just at the time I was suffering attacks of malaria. One day I’d be commanding the battery, on the next day I’d be sprawled in a bunker, incapacitated with fever. I kept refusing to turn over command to someone else. Later I gradually got better.
On 3 November, we launched our offensive to liberate Kiev. The nervous stress from the realization that battles were forthcoming, and all the fuss before the coming offensive proved to be the best medicine against the attacks of malaria – they went away as if by magic. On 5 November the battery entered Sviatoshino. Further ahead lay our path to Zhitomir.
We approached Korostyshev. The battery was running low on shells, except for the untouchable reserve, and over the radio I received the order to stop next to some village 5 kilometres from the city and wait for shells to be brought up. The regiment’s remaining batteries went on ahead. Suddenly we saw a German truck with infantry and an armoured personnel carrier moving along a byroad. We destroyed them with our first volley. Our infantry came running to join us. A lieutenant among them walked up and appealed to me, ‘We seem to be surrounded; there are a lot of German infantry near the village and about twenty tanks. Take us with you, or we’ll fall into the Germans’ hands.’
We couldn’t abandon our own. We had no time to send scouts into the village. We heard the sound of a motorcycle engine and saw a German riding by in the distance. Fortunately, he didn’t notice us. I understood that if there were Germans in the village, we’d have to slip past them at high speed before they realized what was going on, but the sounds of our engines would give us away even before we reached the village. I decided to move toward the village at extremely low speed, thereby creating as little noise as possible. I deployed the infantry on both sides of the Studebakers and cautioned that in case the Germans appeared, they were to open up a storm of fire, leap into the trucks, and we would plunge on ahead at top speed. This was an extremely risky manoeuvre, but there was no other alternative; without shells, we could not successfully duel with the enemy tanks.
We approached the outlying huts. The large village was seemingly deserted. The atmosphere was so tense that I was certain that the Germans were lurking in ambush, ready to spring the trap on us, and that it would all begin at any instant.
We went into the first hut and found an old man sitting inside, trembling from fear. I asked him, ‘Are there Germans in the village?’
‘Yes, a lot, and with tanks.’
‘Show us a road where the Germans won’t see us.’
‘I won’t do it; the Germans will shoot me for this!’
I reached for my pistol and said, ‘You’re afraid that a German will shoot you, but not that a Red Army soldier will? If you don’t guide us out of here, I’ll kill you right here and now.’
This worked. The old man led us down a side road and we slipped out of the noose.
We reached the Kiev–Zhitomir highway; our regiment slipped out of the encirclement with few casualties, simply by luck. Over the radio, the regiment had been informed of the most suitable route for exiting the pocket, so it was able to escape the ring. But many thousands remained forever there, killed in the encirclement.
The next day I was laid low with malarial fever and I was sent to the nearest medical-sanitary battalion. While I was lying there, I heard the trample of many feet, as if dozens of people were running past. I glanced out the window and saw our soldiers, who were fleeing head over heels away from something. I looked out a different window and saw a German tank sitting about 40 metres away. I leaped out a window and started running toward the forest. I was running, stumbling, falling, and running once again. Only when I reached the woods did I become completely exhausted. Somehow I found my regiment. It was better to be sick ‘at home’.
Our regiment received replacements and was given a short time to rest, and then the ‘condemned men’ resumed their march to the west. For the Kiev– Dnepr River fighting, only two men of our regiment – I and Isaev – were nominated for Orders of the Red Banner. Isaev received his Order several months later, but instead of the ‘combat banner’ I received the Order of the Patriotic War 1st Degree.
In January 1944, with constant fighting, losing men and equipment, replenishing them both and then losing them again, we approached Shepetovka, close to the old border of the USSR. Just 12 kilometres short of Shepetovka, on the outskirts of a village called Velikie Derevichi, the battery’s advance to the west bogged down. The Germans launched a strong counterattack. We set up three guns to fire to the front, but the fourth, as usual, we deployed in a camouflaged position off to one side, about 300 metres away from the rest of the battery. This gun was assigned to conduct flanking fire at the vulnerable side armour of any enemy tanks advancing toward us.
On 15 January, two German tanks crawled out of some nearby woods. We immediately knocked out one and the other crawled away back into the woods. A short time later, four panzers emerged and came straight at us, firing on the move. A line of German infantry was advancing behind them. Our infantry started to run away without a glance back. It seemed just like 1941 again. However, this Red Army infantry unit hadn’t seen fighting before and primarily consisted of recently mobilized collective farmers from the liberated territories. The commander of this infantry regiment came running up to me: ‘Dear man! Cover us, I beseech you, I beg you!’ Almost crying, trying to be heard over the thunder of the guns, he kept pleading – ‘Give us cover, while I rally the regiment! I’ll nominate you for the ‘‘Red Banner’’!’
From the right flank, three more German tanks appeared. A direct hit on the flanking gun sent it flipping into the air. The gun’s crew was killed. We managed to knock out two more tanks, and the Germans fell back to their jumping-off positions.
I understood that they would attack again and ordered the battery to change positions. At dawn the next day, a large group of German tanks advanced down a parallel road. One of the tanks detached itself from the column. Not seeing the battery in its previous location, it moved on, straight toward our new positions. To do so, he had to cross a bridge. I decided to wait and to disable or destroy it on the bridge, in order to block the road to the other tanks. We in fact crippled it as it reached the middle of the bridge. It rolled forward a bit, shedding a track in the process. A short time later, a German prime mover appeared to tow the immobilized vehicle off the bridge. But we also knocked out the prime mover. Then all the tanks turned in our direction and opened fire at us. They plastered one gun position, killing the entire crew. A second gun was still operable, but the crew had been totally disabled.
I started to run over to this gun together with my orderly. There was a flash of yellowish-red flame directly in front of me and fragments whistled past me . . . Jumping to my feet again, I rushed to the gun’s position, but here there was a second explosion. I was tossed to one side. Fragments riddled my right hand, and fingers were hanging by their tendons. My orderly had taken a fragment in the belly and was on the ground, moaning.
Several soldiers of the operations platoon rushed over to us. I ordered them to render aid first to the orderly, because his wound was more severe. I tried to bandage myself. The driver of our Studebaker came running up, detached a piece of a board from a pile that was located nearby and laid my hand on the wood, fixing my fingers to the palms. He wrapped my hand to this self-made splint with a grease-soaked rag over the unchanged bandaging material. I left the battlefield, went to a medical-sanitary battalion, and then to a hospital. All the guns in the battery were knocked out, and all the members of the gun crews were killed or wounded. That’s the way combat was .. .
In February 1944 I received a letter from my mother, and in it I found a ‘note’ written by the regiment commander, which said that I had been fighting well, that I’d been recommended for two Orders of the Red Banner, and so forth. They had sewn my fingers back to my palms, but they didn’t flex or move. I also couldn’t flex my wrist; all the bones in my hand had been shattered and deformed.
Upon my discharge from the hospital, I beseeched the doctors not to invalid me out of the army; I spun some story that I couldn’t live without the army. They took pity on me and assigned me to the second category of invalids and sent me to a reserve artillery regiment in my native city of Smolensk, where I assumed command of a training battery.
I arrived there and reported to the colonel that commanded the regiment. He rejoiced and said that it was no use crying over spilled milk, and that it was good that an officer with a lot of combat experience would be serving under him. But I asked him to release me for the acting army, and return me to my own guys. The response? ‘About face! You are present for duty!’
I then went to the deputy political commander, showed him a letter from my regiment, and said that I, as a Communist, couldn’t stay in the rear while the war was going on; that I wanted to defend the Motherland, that the Germans had slaughtered my family and I was obliged to take revenge.
The commissar lost his temper: ‘And does this mean that in the rear I’m not making a contribution to the war effort?! Do you think that because you are a hero and wear an Order that here you’ll be showing us where each man is to serve?!’ But he had a talk with the colonel.
The next morning, the regiment commander summoned me and said:
Listen, battery commander. I respect your desire to return to the front. But what will you, an invalid, be doing there? Fine, go – but be aware that we never saw you here in Smolensk, and we won’t give you any sort of papers. Take care of yourself.
In May 1944 I found my regiment. No one stopped me on my way to the front and nobody checked my papers. The old officers of the regiment rejoiced over my return to active duty. They decided to ‘cheer me up’ as well. They told me, ‘Go to headquarters. Go admire your new Order.’ Then they informed me that a message had arrived at the headquarters about presenting me with the Order of the Red Banner for my last battle, but that the chief of staff Major Bykov had rewritten the award list and had inserted his own name in place of mine. So they were suggesting that I go and take a look at my Order that was decorating someone else’s tunic. In the war, this happened often: some men would risk their lives, but others would receive the Orders. But to seek justice in the army isn’t worth the effort.
I had no wish to serve next to a swine like Bykov. I asked if our regiment commander Cherniak had remained silent, having found out about chief of staff’s ‘stunt’. They answered that Cherniak had left at the end of February to assume command of the 640th Destroyer Anti-tank Artillery Regiment, which was located 20 kilometres from our current position. I said goodbye to the guys, then dropped by to visit my old battery. However, only three men of the executive staff remained of my old battery. At that moment, I had no assignment and I was ‘free as a bird’.
I went in search of the 640th Anti-tank Artillery Regiment. Once I found it, I dropped by Cherniak’s bunker to see him. At first he couldn’t believe that I had returned. He embraced me and declared that we would serve together until the final victory, and that he would personally deal with all the bureaucratic paperwork connected with my assignment to the regiment. He placed a battery under my command. There was still one more joyful meeting. In this regiment, my old neighbour in Smolensk Ruvim Iakovlevich Dolin was serving as the chief of intelligence. He had been the city chess champion, and before the war we had played a lot of chess together. Ruvim was two years older than me and had graduated from the Smolensk Artillery School back in 1941.
Soon there was an incident that I still have difficulty explaining – I abandoned my guns and retreated without orders. What doesn’t happen in war? Sometimes I considered myself battle-seasoned, fully familiar with the smell of gun powder, that I wouldn’t duck at every passing bullet, that I had gone through fire and brimstone, and that I was now a hardened veteran, a key player. There you have it, and it all amounted to nothing. But it happens that the devil can snare even men such as that. For no apparent reason, your heart sinks into your boots; you can become anxious inside, and it becomes difficult to suppress your fear.
It happened near Zolochev. My battery had been ordered to support the infantry that was attacking L’vov. Having dug-in on the northwestern outskirts of Zolochev, we repelled an attack by German infantry and armoured halftracks. Either this was a diversionary manoeuvre by the Germans, or they were attempting to find some way to bypass our unit and had unexpectedly bumped into us, but we repulsed their attack. Then suddenly it became quiet. After the thunder of combat, the sudden silence that fell over the battlefield seemed deafening, even though our ears were still ringing. A little later we caught the sounds of a battle going on somewhere in the distance. But on our sector, the silence at first alarmed us, but later lulled us.
I sent out scouts to clarify the situation. Having returned a short time later, the scouts reported that they’d seen neither any Germans, nor the infantry that we were supposed to be supporting with our fire. The infantry had vamoosed and hadn’t let us know about it! The Germans might show up at any minute. I not only became unsettled, I’ll even say it directly – I was scared. Experienced front-line soldiers are always uneasy over silence at the front. When combat is going on, everything is clear: the enemy is there and you are here. But when it is quiet . . . what sort of intrigue is hiding behind it? Where will the attack fall, and in what strength? Our anti-tank guns were quite vulnerable, and even doubly so without infantry protection. If the Germans appear on the flanks or from the rear, you won’t have time to turn the guns around or dig out the trail spades before the entire crew is killed! There was a reason why we were called ‘condemned men’.
So, there was this silence. There was no enemy out in front of us. Our trucks, without which we could not move the guns, were far to the rear, under cover. But we still had dozens of boxes of ammunition with us. No communications – the cable had been severed. The radio operators, together with their radios, had been blown to pieces the evening before by a direct shell hit. I had no orders. The entire responsibility for the battery, for the men, was on my shoulders, and at that moment I felt strangely uneasy. I was alone . . . You might think that I was getting cold feet at that moment. I looked at my men in the battery and I pitied the guys . .. How many of my comrades, how many of my soldiers had I already lost over two years of war! Almost all the soldiers in the battery were still 19-year-old lads. And now, it didn’t just smell of encirclement, it seemed more simply the case that they’d soon fall upon us and destroy us, and in the regimental roster they’d write – ‘Missing in action’.
I made a decision. I ordered the dial sights and breech mechanisms to be removed from the guns and buried, for the boxes of ammunition to be hidden in a nearby barn, and for the guns to be abandoned in a ravine and concealed by branches! My order was carried out.
We managed to catch up with our own, which had fallen back 5 kilometres, and I reported to the regiment commander about what had just happened. He shot me a look that sent chills down my spine.
‘You abandoned your guns! You want to go in front of a tribunal?! March back to the front with the infantry and don’t come back without your equipment!’
I took the men of my battery and we headed back to join the infantry in the trenches. I was thinking that I’d had it from the shame, aggravation and malice I’d brought down upon myself. Well, that was OK with me. I was guilty. But how were the men of my battery guilty that I, their commander, was marked down as a deserter? So we crouched together with the infantry in the trenches and for two days we repelled German attacks. It wasn’t easy to fire a rifle with only one functioning hand, but I quickly adapted to it. I prayed to God that I’d be killed; my conscience had started to torment me. I had indeed abandoned the guns, not my men, but nevertheless . . . Two days later the Germans began to retreat, abandoning their own equipment. I set off back to the place where I’d left the guns like I’d been scalded. I couldn’t believe my eyes – my precious guns were still there, none the worse for it. In joy I started kissing the guns. We dug up the breech mechanisms and dial sights, cleaned them, retrieved the ammunition cases from the barn, and went on the attack together with the infantry, now with our guns.
My soldiers understood why I’d made the decision regarding the guns and knew that I had risked my honour and head. All the soldiers came up to me and the Party organizer said, ‘Comrade Captain. Thank you, so that if we survive this war we can tell our children about you.’
Years later I understood what kind of Man the regiment commander was. Man, capitalized. He had seen me before in battles and knew that I wasn’t a coward. He had drunk from the bitter cup of war, had seen much, and knew that a man wasn’t made of iron and his nerves weren’t made of steel. A man can falter and buckle because of fatigue, overstress, and the constant expectation of death. But at the slightest provocation we would put him in front of a firing squad before the entire formation, as an example and lesson to others. We should have instead sought to inspire his self-confidence, and helped him straighten himself back up.
So many men were thoughtlessly and needlessly killed. Without adequate weapons or with no weapons at all, the untrained and totally green troops were hurled into the slaughterhouse of war, thrown under the tracks of German tanks, if only to plug a hole, or so that these tank tracks would go into a skid on the crushed human bodies and find no traction in their blood. The high commanders paid for their own faults and stupidity, for their own negligence, with the lives of others. To this day I think with gratitude of Lieutenant Colonel Cherniak. He could have simply had me shot in front of the formation, or in order not to dirty his own hands, he could have submitted my slaughter to the Special Department and the tribunal.
But during a battle, I never saw men in my destroyer anti-tank artillery regiments abandon their guns or flee from fire. I saw men go insane. I also saw men whose hair turned grey in an instant from horror. We once came under a bombing attack, and four of us jumped into a trench. Fragments tore off the legs and head of the officer lying on top of the pile. When the bombing ended we, soaked in another man’s blood, clambered out of the trench, and saw that the hair on the head of one lieutenant of the operations platoon had turned entirely grey. But we had no readily apparent cowardice in the batteries; everyone one knew what was expected of us and we were ready to do our duty. The artillerymen and anti-tank crews were fated to look death in the face every day and every hour and to not yield to it.
I remember well how the destroyer anti-tank artillery units were organized for combat – and the tactics we used in battle against German tanks. If we were committed to a direction that was vulnerable to tanks as a full regiment, then the regiment commander chose where to place the batteries. All the batteries but one were pushed forward to fire over open sights, often out in front of the infantry’s positions. One battery would remain in reserve in a defiladed position. We could effectively knock out tanks only at ranges out to 500 metres. Two of the batteries would take positions on the flanks in order to hit the side armour of the German tanks.
However, as a general rule the regiment was parcelled out and each battery operated independently. We would arrive in our assigned sector of defence at night; I would choose the firing positions for each gun; foxholes, slit trenches, gun pits and bunkers for the ammunition would be dug; and alternate positions would be set up, communications lines would be laid, and everything would be camouflaged. For the soldiers this was the hardest work. In the winter we would work up a sweat chopping at the frozen soil. In the spring and autumn we would have to set up positions amid the muck and clay. Digging in is one of the most hated recollections of any artilleryman. We didn’t bother to set up dummy positions; this was an accepted tactic only when with the full regiment. By dawn, the battery was already dug-in, the vehicles had been driven to the rear, and a fierce battle was waiting for us, a battle not for life, but to the death.
In certain regiments, it was a practice to leave only three men in the firing positions: the commander, the gunner and the loader. The rest of the crew waited in trenches for when it would be necessary to replace comrades that had fallen. This was done to avoid excessive losses, but in my opinion, there was little sense in this practice. In an open firing position there was no refuge, neither in the trench or in a foxhole, nor around the gun. We had a tradition in the 640th Destroyer Anti-tank Artillery Regiment that the Komsomol organizer and the regiment’s deputy political leader, as well as the majority of staff officers, would come to the batteries during a battle, bring up shells, replace the wounded and dead among the crews, and take prone positions in front of the guns with the machine guns. Whether this was good or bad, I don’t know, but it was an act of self-sacrifice and characterized the fighting spirit of the antitank artillerymen. Only a few men would remain at the regiment’s observation post, those genuinely necessary to organize the battle and to coordinate the batteries in action.
The guns were deployed at a distance of 30–50 metres from each other, so it would be possible to give voice commands and also as a means to enable dense blocking fire on a certain sector. The fourth, flank gun would set up about 300 metres from the battery’s main positions. A telephone cable extended from each gun, and each crew had an assigned phone operator with a field phone.
The ammunition cases were positioned according to the following scheme: close to the gun on the left – armour piercing; to the right – armour-piercing discarding sabot and canister shells. High-explosive shells were kept about 20 metres behind the guns, but when necessary they were dragged to a closer point. All the shells were cleaned of factory grease beforehand. Even in the winter, no one ever repainted our guns, for example, in a white colour. My scouts occupied machine-gun positions in front of the guns; we didn’t particularly rely upon the infantry at hand. In reserve, in each battery there were antipersonnel and anti-tank mines. If there were no infantry positions in front of us, over the night the scouts would emplace mines in front of each gun. If it was necessary to change positions during a fight, the guns were manhandled to the new position; the Studebaker trucks were never driven up to the battlefield. Anti-tank rifles were only used in destroyer anti-tank artillery brigades; they had a separate company of anti-tank rifles.
We meticulously prepared for combat. Without exaggeration, they placed our lives on the map. One can picturesquely compare the destroyer anti-tank artillery regiments to gladiators, but when the armoured bodies of German tanks are moving toward you, belching death, here there is no association with Ancient Rome.
Several times a position selected at night, in the darkness, proved to be a bad one, but there was no time to change it and one had to accept combat in the position you found yourself. The battery commander would choose the target, and he would also give the order to open fire. If the battery commander was killed, then the platoon commander or gun commander would fight independently. The destroyer anti-tank artillery regiment’s tasks were diverse. Of course our main assignment was to combat tanks. But often we were used to support our attacking troops with our fire, or were positioned next to the regimental artillery in order to solidify the defence. Allow me to refuse to discuss the question of the effectiveness of the guns when combating infantry or tanks; I don’t want to assess whether the ZIS-3 or ZIS-2 was better, or the firepower of various artillery systems. We’ll leave these nuances to armourers and specialists. I’m a practical man and I’m not cut out for academic debates and computations. Incidentally, at the front we sought to avoid talking about this subject. You fought with what you were given.
A bit on the subject of the German tanks: prior to 1944 we fought primarily against Pz-III and Pz-IV tanks. A heavy tank would advance in front, and behind it the medium and light tanks would form a wedge. But later, in 1944, things became much more complicated. I participated in several battles where the Germans made massed use of Tigers and Panthers, which I will tell you was an unpleasant ‘treat’. The Germans were smart and sensible fighters; they didn’t hurl their panzer units to their total destruction in head-on attacks, as was our style. They fought in battalions. Now the Germans would usually launch medium tanks in front that would fire on the move, without stopping, while Tigers or self-propelled guns would be stationary behind them. They waited until we would open fire and disclose our positions. A bit more on their equipment: At a range of 1 kilometre, we in fact could do no harm to a heavy tank, while their self-propelled guns or heavy tanks would simply and calmly shoot us up. One had to contrive some way to outlast such nightmares as the Ferdinand or Marder self-propelled guns. You watch through binoculars as a Tiger begins to get you in its crosshairs, and your heart sinks into your boots. The German tankers were superbly trained, especially in gunnery. Thus our preliminary calculation in the destroyer anti-tank artillery regiments reduced to 1 to 1; each of our guns, prior to its destruction, should knock-out one German tank. Everything that followed depended on dumb luck, providence, serendipity and the artillery crew’s level of training. Well, of course the number of German tanks attacking the battery was very important. Once the battery held out in combat against thirty (!) German tanks. We lost a lot of guys then, but the Germans did not pass! There was another incident; just four German tanks came at us and a duel began. We overlooked a flame-throwing tank that moved in behind us, approaching from the rear through ravines. I still don’t understand why the German delayed in squirting us with flames; he was just 50 metres away from us. To our great fortune, the German tank bogged down in a deep crater, which seemingly toppled it onto one side, and two of my scouts blew it up with grenades, earning Orders of Glory for this feat.
The Germans rarely used infantry in panzer attacks; it was only in the movies that you see dense German lines advancing behind the tanks, spraying everything in front of them with submachine guns fired from the hip. What can you kill with a submachine gun at 300 metres? The German infantry would hug the earth and wait for when the tanks would break into the battery’s positions, and only then, at a run, would they advance. Armoured halftracks often supported the tanks. Once, my gun crew was all disabled, so I manned the gun alone and destroyed three halftracks. As for the classic assault by infantry dismounting from tanks, this was purely a Red Army tactic. I extremely rarely saw any German infantry mounted on armour during an attack. This meant almost certain death. My younger brother Arkadii, who fought as the commander of a company of tank-riding submachine gunners, was wounded several times and managed to earn two Orders, until he was discharged from the army for disability after his latest severe wound. He told me after the war what losses the tank-riding companies suffered. It is difficult to relate, but they were worse than any penal company. The Germans, however, conserved both their men and equipment; this is a fact, and that is simply that. The notion that ‘human blood is water’ was ours alone.
In combat it is difficult to anticipate where the tank will go. Much depends upon the skill of the driver, and moreover we didn’t know all the folds in the terrain out in front of us. The most favourable moment to catch a German tank in your sights was when he stopped in order to fire a series of shots from a brief halt. It was important to allow the tank to approach closely, as we said, to within ‘pistol-shot range’ – then there was a chance to survive. Tigers had to be hammered from several guns simultaneously at a range of 100–150 metres.
My last battle against attacking German tanks was at the beginning of March 1945. They collided with three regiments of destroyer anti-tank artillery deployed side-by-side, so they were unlucky, while we came out of this fight with small losses. By April 1945 we were transferred to Czechoslovakia. There, the Germans were digging their Tigers into the ground. My battery bumped into two such dug-in tanks in the mountains. We were pressing infantry of a Russian Liberation Army division, ‘Vlasovites’, toward sheer cliffs, and we were hollering at them, ‘Komsomol-paratroopers, this is your final jump!’ We appeared in time to deploy our guns and lent the infantry a hand. Together with the infantry troops, we advanced, manhandling our guns forward with their help, and ran smack into these ‘Tiger pillboxes’, dug into the earth on a hilltop. We were saved from certain death by a forward air controller who was attached to the regiment and who was with my battery at this moment. He called for Il-2 ground-assault aircraft, and they swept our path clear. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be speaking with you now.
Well, altogether my battery in the 640th Destroyer Anti-tank Artillery Regiment destroyed 15 German tanks and self-propelled guns between May 1944 and March 1945. That wasn’t a bad performance indicator.
The losses in the destroyer anti-tank artillery regiments were quite heavy, but many more men were killed while serving in the infantry. My comrade served in a rifle division, in which after the Kerch landing not more than thirty-seven men remained in the infantry regiments, not including the staff officers. In our destroyer anti-tank artillery regiment, we faced a similar situation four times, where all the remaining guns were merged into one battery, but we continued to carry out our assignment until the last man and gun. Just a few of the battery’s veterans survived the combat journey from Tarnopol’ to the Elbe River, and I can remember their last names: Sergeant Major Lisitsa, Sergeants and Privates Ivanov, Tkachuk, Iskanderov, Borisov, Avdeev, Nesterenko, Lebedev and Ziberov. I remember my gun platoon commanders Repin and Ulanov, but they arrived in the battery already after we had crossed the Polish– German border. But in general, it was considered the rarest thing to survive three combats with tanks in the destroyer anti-tank artillery regiment. We understood this, and we sought to sell our lives as dearly as possible, and we managed to destroy German tanks.
I now no longer recall that the artillerymen carried any good luck charms. As in the infantry as well, it was considered taboo to remove any objects from our own dead. Even when someone took the boots off of a corpse, it was believed that he was testing fate. A classic superstition was our belief that ‘13’ was an unlucky number.
As regards presentiments, if a man suddenly closed up, walked around gloomily and didn’t converse with anyone – it was a sure sign that he’d soon be killed. Or on the contrary, if someone suddenly starts laughing without any real reason, that was another ‘alarm bell’. Many sensed their approaching death. You can’t escape fate, much less in a destroyer anti-tank artillery regiment.
The issue of German prisoners and the German population is a complex one. We didn’t take German tankers alive. If you looked at the treads of a German tank, you’d see the flesh of your comrades on it and everything coated with Russian blood. We shot the tankers right away as they were abandoning their burning tanks, not allowing them to escape or to raise their hands and surrender. The Germans incidentally did the same thing. But no artilleryman ever touched infantry prisoners. Their life was in the infantry’s hands, and their treatment was up to them.
With respect to the local population, I don’t recall that someone among the soldiers of my battery robbed a German or raped a German woman. My guys had a conscience. On the other hand, I consider it excessive to idealize or shed tears over the subject of the ‘poor’ German civilians. Here’s a simple example. In May 1945, we were not far from Prague. Next to us was a howitzer-artillery brigade of the Supreme Command Reserve. If I remember accurately, it was the 98th Brigade. I had a talk with a Jewish lieutenant from this brigade, and he informed me that three weeks prior, the 3rd Battalion of this brigade had been totally wiped out. A large group of retreating Germans had suddenly fallen on the battalion’s positions, emerging from some woods, and our men didn’t even have time to defend themselves. A crowd of civilians were moving with the Germans, among which were many armed adolescents and women. And they pitilessly finished off and shot our wounded soldiers from their rifles and lady’s Brownings. The only survivors were one female phone clerk, who received ten (!) bullet wounds, and one of the battalion scouts, who managed to crawl into the woods and from there witnessed this entire terrible and nightmarish scene. I don’t think it necessary to add anything else.
The battle for the Sandomir bridgehead was my hardest fight. My battery was the first to cross the Vistula together with the infantry, in the vicinity of the village Purku-Gorn. Our crossing went smoothly for us; the battery lost only three soldiers wounded. We quickly threw up defensive positions and were immediately attacked by German infantry. We repulsed this attack and advanced another couple of kilometres, expanding the bridgehead. A short time later we heard the sound of engines. From out of some woods, two tanks cautiously crawled out onto a hilltop. They were moving slowly, lumbering across the uneven ground. I gave an order not to fire. I immediately realized that this was a reconnaissance probe. Having moseyed around a bit at a discrete distance from our camouflaged battery, these armoured ‘boxes’ retired. A short time later, a Tiger appeared, and confident of its own invulnerability, it advanced directly toward the battery. As soon as it exposed its side armour to the detached gun positioned on the flank, we dropped our camouflage from the guns and opened fire, and the Tiger was knocked out. Immediately another tank emerged from the woods, and accelerating, it overran the position of the flank gun and began to spin in place, grinding everything into the dirt with its tracks: the gun, the crew and the boxes of ammunition. At the same moment, engines started up in the woods on the hill; the Germans were preparing to attack. My intuition didn’t fail me. Thirty tanks moved out and lumbered toward the battery. I understood that with my three remaining guns, I couldn’t resist such an attack, and that this would be my last battle. In the best case we would only knock out several tanks, before they swept us away with fire and we’d be crushed beneath the tracks of this iron wave. The German fire intensified and our communications line was severed in multiple places by shell fragments. In addition, as always, for some arbitrary but constant set of circumstances, fragments from the very first German shells smashed the radio. We needed help and right away.
The German panzers halted 700 metres away from us and for some reason marked time there. My one chance had appeared. I sent a scout back to the riverbank with a written message, not even knowing whether he would manage to reach regiment headquarters in time. The main thing was that he not be killed on the way. The crews were frozen at their guns, ready to open fire. Eight tanks led by a Tiger resumed their advance toward the battery. We let them close to within 300 metres and opened fire. The Tiger got the jump on us by a second and the crew of the No. 1 gun was knocked out by a direct hit. Captain Ruvim Dolin, who was located with the battery, rushed to the unmanned gun and alone opened fire at an approaching tank. He put it out of action with his first shot. However, firing at a second tank, he missed and was immediately blanketed by the return shot. His exploit didn’t ease the battery’s situation.
Our infantry abandoned their trenches and in a word, skedaddled. German tank fire quickly destroyed the battery’s remaining guns. One German tank came at my trench, where I was located with a signalman, and overran us, covering us with dirt. Fortunately for us, men of the battery quickly dug us out. I heard the hum of approaching motors in the sky; our Il-2s were approaching. The aircraft circled in behind the German tanks and bombed both them and our position simultaneously. The German attack was broken up. Thus the battery was saved from complete destruction. We lost twelve men killed and eleven wounded, and three guns were destroyed. The battery destroyed five German tanks. As later became clear, the scout I had sent had reached his objective, and the regiment commander had requested air support from higher command. We held this position for several more days. The remnants of a rifle battalion, twenty-five men, drifted into our positions and took up a defence 2 kilometres south of us.
We buried our dead on the battlefield. Two of them, Panichev and Endrikhin, were my good friends . . . We had to fall back to find other friendly units. I sent out a scout team, and having returned, they reported that they had found four guns, two of which were disabled. There were no crews, but the position had ammunition. We didn’t have our Studebakers, so we had to haul the guns back ourselves, as well as our wounded. We had just exited a village when we bumped into Germans that were attempting to encircle us. At a frantic pace, our fatigue seeming to have evaporated, we deployed the guns and set up an all-round defence. We barely managed to beat back their attack.
In the twilight hours, when we were slipping away from the Germans, we again came under fire. I yelled at the soldiers to get down. From the sound of the automatic firing, I realized that our own guys were firing at us. I tied a piece of bandaging to some stick and raised it over my head as if we were surrendering. The firing stopped. An officer walked out to us with a German machine pistol in his hands.
‘Who’s there?’ he shouted, looking at us suspiciously.
‘Friendlies, coming out of battle.’
‘Documents?!’
Having checked our documents, he added, ‘We thought that the Germans were pressing us again. We’ve just repulsed two attacks.’
Over the radio that the infantry had with them, I got in touch with my regiment. They sent Studabakers to retrieve us. Having loaded the wounded and shells onto them, we hitched up our remaining gun and the two we had stumbled upon, and soon we were back with the regiment. Cherniak greeted me with tears in his eyes.
He said, ‘I had already written you off. We reported to army headquarters that one battery was fighting in a village. But when you fell silent, we decided that was it; your number had come up. We sent an order for you to retreat, but I guess the messenger didn’t reach you.’ We came out with forty-eight men.
For Sandomir I received the Order of Aleksandr Nevsky, and I don’t hold any grudges toward anyone because I didn’t receive the Hero title. Back then, many of the men put in for the highest distinction received a ‘Star’ instead of the Order.
On the matter of anti-Semitism in the army, to my great fortune I never encountered it. In our group of thirty men, yesterday’s school graduates, who went into the army in June 1941, there were twelve Jews, and I was the only one to survive the war. Of the Russian guys in that same group, only Zhenia Mukhin and Vasia Alekseev, who served in the howitzer artillery, survived. Perhaps someone else made it through the war intact, but simply didn’t return to Smolensk after the war and didn’t let it be known. In the 45-mm anti-tank battery, in addition to me, there was one other Jew, a gun commander, and he was severely wounded in October 1942. In the destroyer anti-tank artillery regiment, at one time three of the five batteries were commanded by Jews. One soon was killed, and another, Grisha, was wounded in the legs and left the regiment. I’ve kept his photograph that he sent from the hospital as a keepsake. I don’t recall conflicts over nationality in my battery either. My orderly was from Dagestan, and the bravest scout, one of my three soldiers who each had two Orders of Glory, was a Bashkir – Galiman Iskanderov. Two of the gun layers were Kazakhs. But of course the majority of our soldiers were Slavs. So no one antagonized anyone else over an ethnical characteristic. We fought, and we didn’t go into checklists and prejudices.