Chapter 6
Moisei Isaakovich Dorman
In June 1941 I was 17 years old. Several days before the war began I graduated from the Ten-year School No. 1 in the city of Pervomaisk and received my secondary school diploma. I decided to enroll in the Leningrad Military-Mechanical Institute. On 20 June I submitted my application forms, but I didn’t even have time to receive an acknowledgment before the war started. Over the first ten days of the war, we had information about what was happening at the front only from newspapers and the radio.
From the beginning of July, our city was bombed incessantly, because the headquarters of the Southwestern Front, a railroad hub, and a strategic railroad bridge over the Southern Bug River were located there. Thus, the German bombers had plenty of targets. When permits for evacuation began to be distributed freely to the residents of Pervomaisk, it was already impossible to leave the city by vehicle. There were no trains for displaced people. Only trains loaded with factory equipment and Red Army personnel were leaving the city. For several days in a row, we went to the railroad station, which was already badly damaged by bombings, but everywhere they chased us away from the trains, claiming that this one was a ‘special factory’ train, or that one was a ‘special’ train, which was inaccessible to refugees. Sometimes a train that was preparing to depart came under the next bombing raid. Any undamaged rail cars remaining after the attack were hitched to military trains. We had no success in finding a train. At the end of each day of frustrations, my parents, my elderly grandmother, my younger brother and little sister and I would return home frazzled and exhausted, but the next morning we’d head to the station again, trying to escape the city on whatever train we could take. I’ll never forget that sensation of impending doom and hopelessness.
On 23 July, rumours started circulating around Pervomaisk that the city had been fully encircled. But on 26 July, I coincidentally overheard that the last factory train would be leaving from the station. The entire family ran to the station, which was 3 kilometres from our home. While we were running, we twice came under bombings. The factory train consisted of open platform cars, which were densely jammed with machine tools, machine parts, rusty beams, electric motors and roughly knocked-together boxes. No one chased us from the station platform – all the railroad command and the station security had already run off. The Germans were continuing to bomb the city. Next to us, the ruins of the bombed-out locomotive depot were smoking.
The train wasn’t moving – there was no steam engine. We were praying for only one thing – that a bomb wouldn’t strike the railroad bridge. Otherwise, it would be the end to all our dreams . . . That night, throngs of retreating Red Army troops and some sort of wagon trains were passing hastily through the city. It wasn’t a retreat – it was a stampede . . . The station was bombed again and again. Those were difficult hours of waiting for some sort of miracle . . .
At dawn, the ancient steam engine Shchuka suddenly appeared from somewhere. Our train was hooked up to this locomotive. The railroad line to the bridge across the Bug was still intact, but plainly not firmly so. The train was moving very slowly, stopping constantly. Over the first 24 hours, we travelled only 10 kilometres. Beyond, the hard road to the east awaited us. Bombings, shell fire, hard living conditions and hunger stalked us for the entire duration of the trip. Many of the people on board this train got lost along the way, fell sick or stayed behind. Many crowded us at the innumerable forced halts – encircled people and refugees, who had fallen behind their own trains . . . This journey to the Volga lasted twenty days. In Rtishchevo, our train unloaded and the refugees were sent on into the deep interior of the country. Our family wound up in the town of Lys’va, and then I alone roamed around the country. Kazan’, Magnitogorsk . . . Enough endurance trials for a lifetime.
In the middle of 1942, I found out that the Leningrad Military-Mechanical Institute, to which I had sent my application papers, had been evacuated to the town of Motovilikha, close to Perm’. I went there. In the month of October I reached the Institute. I was assigned to the artillery department. Although the Institute was considered a military one, and even gave exemption from active duty in the army, all the students walked around in civilian dress.
I was famished. According to the ration cards, students were given 400 grams of bread a day. I studied in the Institute until the beginning of December. In my group there were only six guys, and other than me, all the rest of them were sons of the Institute’s teachers.
I decided to head to the front. From the Institute I received a certificate of dismissal and a waiver of my exemption from service. I went to the local military enlistment centre and started pestering to be taken as a volunteer. Over the next half hour, I passed through all the obligatory committees and I was directed to go to the 1st Rostov Artillery School, which prepared officers for the anti-tank artillery. How had this school represented itself thus far in the war? The 1st Rostov Artillery School had taken part in the summer and autumn fighting in the Caucasus, had suffered heavy casualties at Mozdok, and at the end of 1942 it had been withdrawn into the deep rear, establishing itself in the remote Urals town of Niazepetrovsk in the north of Cheliabinsk Oblast. Now it was located in an enormous, badly dilapidated church, which had probably been built back in the time of the Demidovs.1 The school had three battalions, each of which had three batteries. Each battery had approximately 120 cadets. The school’s artillery park consisted of 45-mm and 76-mm guns and 122-mm howitzers, all of which were horse-drawn. All of the artillery training and all of the practical exercises for the cadets were conducted on the Russian ‘Trekhdiumovka’ – the 3-inch Model 1902 gun.
The school selected cadets with a minimum of seven years of schooling. There were no other criteria for selection. I wound up in the 38th Training Platoon. The majority of this platoon consisted of 18-year-old guys, who’d previously been studying in secondary schools or college. Around ten of them were former criminals, young and insolent, who immediately tried to impose the prisoners’ code of conduct within the battery. There was also a group of local residents from the Urals, all over age 30. In my class there were several platoons that were fully manned by veterans who’d been sent to the school for training straight from the front.
For the most part I have no fond memories of the school. Once I arrived in Niazepetrovsk, I spent several days in the school’s ‘quarantine’. On the very first day of my arrival, someone stole all my things, including a couple of items of great value to me: a fountain pen, which was a great rarity back then, which I had received upon my graduation from school, and what was even more upsetting, my father’s heirloom ‘Pavel Bure’ silver watch, with the inscription ‘For excellent marksmanship’, which he had received back in 1916. This loss caused me enormous pain, and I took it as a bad omen.
On 15 December 1942, the newly arrived students were taken out of quarantine and sent to a bath house. At the instruction of some officer, we ‘voluntarily’ turned over all of our civilian clothing to the Defence Fund, and in return received some receipt written on notebook paper. They gave us a shabby cotton fabric uniforms, short threadbare coats, and well-worn ankle boots with puttees. Rags, not uniforms . . .
The winter of 1942/1943 in the Urals was very harsh. Quite often the temperature fell to –50° C. [–58° F.] At night, the temperature inside the church where the cadets lived never rose above freezing. Water in a bucket turned into ice overnight. Under Soviet power the church had been converted into an agricultural storage facility; the building had fallen into disrepair and was very drafty. Each night before we slept, we had to run 8 kilometres into the nearest woods, gather logs at a cutting site, and haul them back to the school. Each cadet was obligated to bring back a log of 2 metres length. The church had rows of three-level bunks, each with a sack-mattress stuffed with straw.
We were constantly hungry. The wartime rations were meagre; the typical meal consisted of cabbage soup and a frozen potato. The bread, I’m ashamed to say, was divided up according to prison custom. One of the cadets would turn around and call out the name of the cadet who was to receive the next portion. To be assigned to a work detail in the stables was considered a stroke of good fortune; there you could eat a little linseed meal! When out of the barracks and not in formation, the cadets were forced to move only at a run. The discipline in the school was draconian. We were pressed into work details for the slightest demerit for a violation of regulations or for the most insignificant breach of rules. There were no leaves of absence, no free days or any sort of diversions.
The daily drills were mind-numbing. Each day consisted of 12–14 hours of intense drills, exercises and studies. The cadets, their moods low from the cold and the hunger, eagerly awaited graduation from the school as a deliverance from their suffering. Those who washed out from the school were sent to the front with the rank of sergeant. So it was against this backdrop that nine months of my training went by in the 1st Rostov Artillery School.
My platoon leader, Lieutenant Shornikov, who had survived the fighting in the Caucasus and was striving to return to the front again, was respected by the cadets and behaved commendably. A good man, he repeatedly filed requests with the commandant to be returned to the active army. We admired his longing. My battery commander Prishkura also made a good impression. He was an experienced and fair-minded officer. The deputy chief of the school, the German Colonel Lampel’, also elicited respect. Our school commandant was an imposing figure, a brigade commander with the last name of Kudriavtsev, it seems. He was a former Tsarist officer. The commandant had a high-bred, noble face with a goatee and an attentive, stern appearance. He comported himself in a suave, dignified fashion.
As far as the training we received at the school went, the volume of knowledge we acquired was of course not even close to being adequate for the front. At the front we had to learn much all over again. We had little gunnery practice. Only a handful of men from each battery went through qualification firing. I was the gunnery officer, who corrected the fire, only once. We fired at wooden mock-ups of tanks that were towed by a long cable only twice. We saw German tanks only in illustrations. But obviously in order to fight in the antitank artillery, experience is necessary. After all, combat against German tanks, even for those serving in a destroyer anti-tank artillery regiment or a separate destroyer anti-tank battalion, was not a constant job. Experience at the front demonstrated that in addition to destroying German tanks, a no less important task for the anti-tank gunners was to support the infantry by ‘fire and wheels’. An understanding of the combat situation, the dynamics of combat, as well as a ‘sense of terrain’ comes only through real combat experience, and unfortunately, not right away. As for all these school drills in tactics . . .
They taught us how to lay indirect fire from defilade positions. Over my one and a half years at the front, I never once fired indirectly; it was always over open sights.
Theoretically, it only required three or four days to train a gunner. The gun layer watched the range dial, and sets the sight taking into account the necessary deflection for movement. Seemingly all quite simple, but . . . Not everyone could become a gun layer. It was a demanding position that required speed, accuracy, even precision in actions, but most of all, coolness under fire. He had to aim the gun at a moving target quickly and accurately, even when shells are falling all around him with a howl, bullets are rattling against the gun shield, and the tanks are brazenly heading straight toward the gun emplacement, firing on the move. Any lack of accuracy or a moment’s delay by the gunner could cost the crew dearly. A good gunner in training sessions could hit a tree trunk with his very first shot at a range of 700 metres.
Only the friends that I made in this school helped me to overcome all these hardships of cadet life. We kept together: Nikolai Kazarinov, Kostia Levin, Valentin Stepanov and I. As it happened, after graduation from the school, at the front Nikolai and I wound up in the same anti-tank battalion, while Kostia and Valentin were assigned to a different one. Nikolai Kazarinov was killed in ‘fighting of local significance’ on 25 June 1944 in the village of Pistyn’. The battery in which Kazarinov served was repelling an attack by Hungarian infantry. After the battle, there was a sudden artillery strike and Nikolai was cut down by a shell fragment. I personally buried my friend in an apple orchard on the outskirts of the village. The soldiers saluted him with three volleys from their carbines, while I mechanically fired off the entire clip from my pistol.
On 28 April 1944 at Ia°i [Jassy], my other friend and classmate, the Muscovite Valentin Stepanov was killed by an exploding mine. At the end of April 1944, also at Ia°i, a German tank overran Kostia Levin’s gun. A shell fragment nearly removed Kostia’s leg at the knee. It remained attached by only a few tendons. He attempted to cut it off with a pocket knife, but because of the loss of blood, Kostia didn’t have the strength to do it. Slipping in and out of consciousness, he managed to crawl off the battlefield, where a medic found him and rushed him to the medical-sanitation battalion. My closest, my last friend of my youth passed away on 19 November 1984. I’ve kept fond memories of Nikolai, Valentin and Kostia for all my life.
Let’s return to the school. In the summer of 1943, we were transferred to a military encampment on the outskirts of Cheliabinsk, to the so-called ‘Red Barracks’. There, upon completion of our accelerated training, we became officers and acquired the rank of junior lieutenant.
In the final week before graduation, they began to hound and push us around less; we had a certain feeling of empowerment, liberation from the crude daily oppression. On graduation day, the school commandant gave us a speech. I can still recall verbatim his parting words to us:
I congratulate you on your first officer’s rank! The Motherland will soon entrust her sons to you. Remember, the soldier should see in you not only his commander, to which he must subordinate himself unquestioningly, but also an example for imitating. Your every action will be in full view; the attentive soldier’s eye will notice everything – valour and cowardice; concern and neglect. If you even once show cowardice or display dishonesty, you will lose the respect of your soldiers, your comrades-in-arms, besmirch your name, and cover your officer’s uniform with shame. It is better to die than to be so dishonoured!
Before our departure for the front, we were given new officers’ blouses, leather boots, soldiers’ belts and greatcoats. The first to graduate and to be sent to the front were the platoons consisting of former front-line veterans.
In October 1943, they loaded us, the approximately 300 freshly baked junior lieutenants, into cattle cars and sent us into the acting army. We travelled by rail to the shattered city of Khar’kov. Here we joined the 38th Separate Battalion of the Officers’ Reserve under the command of Major Titov. This battalion was the source of replacements for officer losses in the artillery of the 38th Army. I spent one and a half months in reserve. We lived in this time according to the principle, ‘They will not send us anywhere worse than the front, and we will still command the platoon.’
I didn’t reach the front until December 1943. I was assigned to the 14th Separate Guards Airborne Destroyer Anti-tank Artillery Battalion of the 2nd Guards Airborne Division. Thus began my front-line service.
The battalion consisted of three batteries, each of which had two gun platoons. Only battalion headquarters had an operations platoon. Each battery had four 45-mm Model 1942 guns and approximately twenty-five to thirty men, including the drivers. The guns had mechanized transport; we had Willys jeeps to tow them. In the autumn of 1944, the 45-mm guns were replaced with 76-mm ZIS-3 guns, and instead of the Willys jeeps, we were given Dodge L-ton trucks. The batteries did not have their own signallers or scouts; they were all located with the battalion’s operations platoon. The battalion’s TO&E included an anti-tank rifle company of twelve anti-tank rifles, but in our battalion this company served primarily as a source of replacements for the anti-tank artillery crews, and they were rarely used for their designated purpose. There was also an ammunition supply platoon of approximately ten men with the battalion headquarters.
The battalion was commanded by Guards Major Fedor Kuznetsov. Since our battalion was separate, the commander had rights equivalent to those of a regiment commander. The battalion headquarters also had several more officers – ‘executives’ – deputy political officer Kudriavtsev, senior adjutant Makukhin and deputy commander Vishnevsky. There were also the chief of ammunition supply, the chief of finances (who was also the chief of general stores and of ration and forage supplies), the technical assistant, and the medical chief, who was a combat paramedic. Of course, there was also the staff ‘collective’ – clerks, a mail clerk, the chemical instructor, two female medical assistants, the Party organizer, procurement officers and other ‘lame-brains’. The battalion had two radios, but they never worked, and I can’t even recall whether we had any radio operators at all. In total, we had approximately 180 personnel.
As I’ve already mentioned, the battalion was equipped with the long-barrelled 45-mm Model 1942 anti-tank gun, designed by General Krupchatnikov. We called this gun the 45-mm/68 calibre. It was light, weighing only 570 kilograms. Two or three men could easily manhandle the 45-mm across a field. It was a smallish gun; we had the saying about it that it could ‘turn the soil’. It had hinged shields, one central and one on each side. The gun’s rate of fire was twenty rounds a minute. The nominal range of fire at tanks was 1,200 metres. The 45-mm gun was notable for its accuracy. It had a normal sight, not a dial sight. The crew consisted of five or six men – a commander, a gunner, a loader, and two trail handlers, who were also shell carriers. The 45-mm gun were nearly useless against tanks. The probability of knocking out a German medium or heavy tank from the 45-mm gun was close to zero. With its very first shot, the gun gave away its position, and if at this moment a German tank fixed its sights on the crew, the crew had no chance of survival; not a single man . . .
We always had the guns ready for action; the battalion might at any moment shift us to the next axis vulnerable to tanks, and from the move we immediately joined battle. On the defence we checked the guns and prepared them very thoroughly. But on the offensive we often had no time for the meticulous alignment of the sight. Therefore our guns were always at full readiness. It was always necessary to keep the barrel clean.
Our guns were intended only for direct fire. Therefore we were always positioned close to the Germans, in the very front line, in open positions among the infantry’s combat positions. Our guns were fine in almost every regard – small, light, accurate, easily camouflaged and not prominent, as long as they didn’t fire, of course. They had one shortcoming – their lack of hitting power. We rather effectively suppressed firing positions at close range and lightly armoured vehicles. With our presence alone we emboldened the infantry, bolstered their fighting spirit, which is to say that we supported them with fire and movement. Each crew had a reserve of anti-tank grenades and a PD machine gun to combat enemy infantry, and each member had a rifle, carbine or pistol. That, in principle, is all the characteristics of a separate anti-tank artillery battalion in brief.
Our first serious encounter was during the Germans’ successful breakout from the Korsun–Shevchenkovsky pocket. We were positioned on the outer ring of the encirclement in the vicinity of the village of Kobeliaki. It was snowing. The German tanks were firing from hull-down positions in a ravine and taking shelter behind buildings. In a short period of time, two guns of our battery were destroyed. I was with a gun beside a road that was buried under snow. A platoon of SU-76s came up. The platoon commander asked me, ‘Where’s the road here?’ Everything around was covered by a blanket of snow. From behind some buildings, a German self-propelled gun appeared. We fired three rounds at it, but the shells merely chipped the armour and ricocheted away. One SU-76 moved forward about 10 metres, and right away a shell from the German self-propelled gun drilled cleanly through the SU-76, and then the Germans gave it two more rounds. Our self-propelled gunners were killed. I ran over to the gun mount; I wanted to remove the dial sight from the gun. I glanced inside .. . and there I saw someone’s severed arm. Everything was burnt out, smoking . .. and gory. The dial sight was jammed and I couldn’t remove it. Just then I realized that I had to get away from the vehicle urgently; one fuel tank was still full and if the German took another shot now, there might not be even a remembrance of me left. I made a dash away from the self-propelled gun, dropped into the snow and crawled a few more metres, when yet another German shell punched through the SU-76. Then another ten shells came flying in. It was a terrifying moment . .. The Germans poured machine-gun fire into our position, and a heavy mortar barrage began. The cases of shells behind our firing position caught fire from a machine-gun burst. I was ordered to withdraw several hundred metres to a point behind a ravine. We got the gun away. As we began to withdraw, high-explosive shells started dropping around us; front-line veterans know what sort of ‘treat’ that is . . . Suddenly the gunner, a young Tatar, remembered that he’d left the gun sight back in the firing position. He refused to go back for the sight, saying ‘I won’t go! Germans are there!’ I had to force him. That was what my first experience with combatting enemy tanks was like.
I don’t remember that there were any restrictions on the expenditure of rounds for the 45-mm guns. No one created an untouchable reserve, and I didn’t need the battalion commander’s permission when opening fire. I don’t recall that we ever had a catastrophic shortage of shells. The supply of highexplosive, armour-piercing and armour-piercing discarding sabot shells was adequate. We sought to conserve our canister shells, since we had to encounter German infantry face-to-face quite often. Canister and armour-piercing discarding sabot were shells for close-range combat. An end cap screwed onto a high-explosive shell converted it into a fragmentation shell. Eight cases of shells were normally loaded onto the Willys – half of a combat load, among which there had to be canister shells!
One could fully picture the preceding combat by the expenditure of shells. Here’s an entry about the expenditure of shells per gun in a battle on 25 April 1944, which I’ve preserved from Kostia Levin’s notebook. Altogether the gun fired 66 rounds, of which 28 were fragmentation shells, 7 were canister (which means the German infantry was quite close, not more than 200 metres away), 21 were armour-piercing, and 10 were APDS (which means they had to try to repel a tank attack from close range). At the end of a battle we were required to collect and turn in the shell casings; non-ferrous metal was in short supply in the country.
Some soldiers couldn’t stand the strain. I remember in the Carpathians, a soldier, a young fellow named Burakov arrived as a replacement. Outwardly he appeared calm, though he was extremely quiet. Everything seemed fine, but at nights he would wake us up and frighten us with wild screams, like some sort of dying wails. It turned out that one night, Burakov and three of his comrades had fallen asleep in a combat outpost, and German scouts had caught them completely by surprise. Burakov managed to hide in some bushes, having covered himself with a tent half. The Germans immediately gagged one of his comrades before carrying him away. But the Germans spent a long time strangling and knifing the other two. Either their knives were dull, or the Russians were putting up strong resistance. Burakov lay in the bushes, and nearly fainting from fear, took in this terrible scene, as the bodies of his dying friends twitched and he listened to their death rattles . . .
Each night he relived this ordeal in his dreams. He began to fear darkness almost in a total panic. With time these night fits became more frequent, and Burakov’s mind finally snapped. They took him away to the medical-sanitation battalion, and he never returned to us.
No one ever abandoned a gun in combat without an order. There were no pathological cowards in the gun crews.
The first time I had to take command of a battery was in March 1944 at Proskurov. During a battle, a ‘ChP’ [an accident or extraordinary event of some sort] occurred, when the commander of the 2nd Battery Senior Lieutenant Saltykov suddenly disappeared. Several hours later he was found in a haystack. He was not responsive and babbling something incomprehensible. They took him to a hospital to find out whether he really had lost his mind, or whether he was playing the fool in order to hide his desertion. But it was easy to go mad in the anti-tank artillery. Saltykov never returned to us from the hospital. I was appointed battery commander, but in June 1944 I returned to my duties as a gun-platoon commander, and didn’t become battery commander again until several months later.
The new battery commander arrived from the reserve. He had previously served as a commander of a howitzer battery in a regiment of the Supreme Command Reserve, but at Kursk he’d been severely wounded, and after a year of roaming from hospital to hospital and in the reserves, he was returning to the front lines. The battery headquarters was occupying a position at the foot of an elevation that we called ‘The Mare’.
Suddenly I saw the battalion chief of staff Captain Makukhin approaching in a Willys. I was more than surprised. Staff officers never showed their nose at the front, and the last time I’d seen Makukhin at the battery’s position was in February, and moreover, it was during a lull in the fighting. Seated next to him was a tall, handsome, mustachioed middle-aged captain. He was wearing a sparkling new uniform, brightly polished calfskin boots, and a cavalryman’s sword belt that was a rare sight at the front. There were combat Orders and two medals on his chest. His appearance was no-nonsense and inspiring. As was my duty, I briefed the chief of staff – the situation was quiet, we had full ammunition, there’d been no losses in the battery, and that we were holding firing positions along the spine of the ridge, and so forth.
Makukhin gave a dismissive wave of his hand and said, ‘I’ve brought you a battery commander.’ The new battery commander started to take over my duties. However, from the outset my Jewish name, Moisei Isaakovich, disturbed him, rather than the Russian Mikhail Ivanovich, for example. Then he asked me to point out the battery commander’s bunker to him. When he learned that I didn’t have a separate bunker, and that I was sleeping together with the crew of the No. 2 gun in their trenches around the emplacement, he was totally shocked. His reaction to what he’d heard was the following: ‘You’re undermining discipline and the officer’s authority! Never mind, I’ll restore order here!’
Our new battery commander assembled the battery’s personnel and in a well-staged command voice warned that he would not tolerate any violations of military discipline or regulations. That same day the battery’s soldiers got to work building an enormous new bunker for the new battery commander, with separate compartments for the orderly and switchboard operator.
Indeed, this battery commander started to live like a lord and master, striking everyone with his arrogance and unreasonable exactingness. He almost never made an appearance at the firing positions .. . He regarded the men in a condescending manner, with a clear air of disdain. All of his captious faultfinding was strictly by the book. The men began to grumble that some sort of prison warden had been sent to oversee us. The battery’s soldiers grew to despise and hate the battery commander.
At the time, it was quiet at the front. Suddenly the battery commander went absent and returned to the battery with a woman! He brought to the front a young village woman about 19 years of age, who’d already had time to bear him a child in the rear! He’d met her in the hospital, where she had been working as a nurse. Just think of it – bringing a civilian to the front! Later this battery commander went completely off his rails.
He became jealous of one of the gun-crew commanders over the attention he was paying to his lady, and one night, finding a moment when he thought no one was around the gun, he surreptitiously stuffed the gun barrel with sod. The gun barrel was supposed to burst with the very first shot, killing or maiming the entire crew. And for that, I’d have been shot or sent into a penal battalion. It’s a good thing that the guys had noticed the battery commander screwing around in the gun emplacement.
We quickly cleaned the barrel. Soon an order arrived from the battery commander’s observation post: ‘Reference point ‘‘X’’, a German observation post in some woods. Open fire!’ This scoundrel and cold-blooded killer wanted to watch as the entire crew together with the gun was blown into the sky.
We fired four rounds, three of which were right on target. Soon the battery commander showed up at the firing position, and through his teeth hissed:
So, Dorman, it turns out that we have a clever guy in you! However, you’re too young to test your strength against me and not man enough to do it. Never mind, I’ll get back at you; no one escapes me!
Thus I had to serve alongside this piece of shit. The artillery battalion commander Kuznetsov knew everything that was going on; likely had had an ‘official snitch’ in our battery. Aware of the growing conflict within the battery, Kuznetsov transferred me to take command of the operations platoon in place of the recently killed commander. This battery commander continued to create a lot more trouble ‘behind the scenes’.
Later, when the general offensive began, the following event took place. In the autumn of 1944, now in eastern Slovakia, the battery’s soldiers quietly shot this battery commander during an artillery barrage. He had driven the guys into a state of absolute fury. They reported that the battery commander had been killed by a shell fragment. The battalion commander was fully aware of what had actually happened and who had fired the shot (as did, incidentally, many of the artillerymen), but thank God he didn’t let on that he knew.
After the death of the battery commander, I was ordered to return to the battery and again take command of it. Then the division’s SMERSH deputies arrived to investigate. They were unable to uncover anything. So they sat in the battalion headquarters and started to haul in witnesses for interrogation. At the time, we were in the front lines, in a lowland area, while the Germans, occupying stone buildings of a large estate, were keeping our positions under machine-gun fire. A call came over the telephone from headquarters, demanding that we urgently send witnesses back for questioning. The guys had to crawl to the rear under a torrent of German machine-gun fire. One of them, who just might have cracked under the questioning, was wounded in the leg on his way back to headquarters, and he was immediately taken to the medical-sanitation battalion instead.
In the battery, everyone sighed with relief. In fact, such things happened at the front.
An anti-tank gun commander must have certain qualities. Our entire war was nothing but laying direct fire on targets. So the role of the gun commander in the anti-tank artillery was even more important than in the heavy artillery, where fire was conducted from defilade positions or from covered positions, where commanders don’t see the enemy and received all the firing data from the observation post or through signals from the commander of the operations platoon. Ours was a different job. The gun commander had to determine the data for gunnery himself, had to control and correct the fire, and while doing so make sure his men remained calm and confident, even when enemy tanks and submachine gunners were just 100 metres from the firing positions. Thus, the gun commander in the anti-tank artillery had to be a brave man with nerves of steel who was able to think on his feet.
I remember almost everyone who I happened to serve together with at various times. In December 1943, when I arrived at the front line and took command of the gun platoon, Volovik and Baturin commanded my two gun crews. Volovik, a guy from Moscow who was 26 years old, commanded the No. 2 gun; he was an educated and highly cultured man, who before the war had managed to finish his schooling and was preparing to teach in Moscow’s Liuberetsky District. He was a very courageous fighter. Senior Sergeant Baturin, a former lathe operator in the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory, commanded my No. 1 gun. He was an old-timer with the artillery battalion, having fought with it since the summer of 1943. The commander was knowledgeable and charismatic, but he was a very bull-headed character. As a man he was coarse and vain, with a surly disposition; he was always trying to emphasize his pre-eminence, and behaved arrogantly, rudely and at times, insolently. It wasn’t easy to command such a man. Both Volovin and Baturin returned to the battery after being wounded, which in itself was a heroic act. After all, no one came to us voluntarily.
My Senior Sergeant Stukach, my assistant platoon commander, knew how to handle people. I could always rely on him.
Junior Lieutenant Volodia Pir’ia came to us at the end of 1944. He was killed absurdly, accidentally blowing himself up on his own grenade.
Gun commander Mal’kov – he was a kind man, but he knew how to be strict. The soldiers loved and trusted him. He called his own and other soldiers ‘Tootsie’, so everyone in the battery called Mal’kov, ‘Tootsie’. He was killed at the end of 1944. The Germans were attempting to infiltrate the battery’s positions and Mal’kov was mortally wounded by an explosive bullet in the neck. He didn’t make it to the medical-sanitation battalion.
My orderly and signaller Nikitin seemed like an old man to me at his age of 46. He was a simple man, distinguished by his natural tact, wisdom and unfeigned kind-heartedness. He had a son at the front, a guy my own age, so he fussed over me like his own natural son.
The gunner Kovalev before the war had worked as an assistant chef in a Khabarovsk restaurant. He was knowledgeable of both the French and Chinese cuisines. He carried around a beautiful wooden box that held an assembly of culinary tools which we’d never seen before. He was always dreaming about becoming the personal cook of some general. However, Kovalev made no effort to get out of his front-line assignment, and he conscientiously served as a 45-mm gun layer. This was a noble act.
I also recall Rakhmatullin, from the Tatar Autonomous Republic, who commanded the No. 4 gun and was killed at the end of the war. Then there was the driver Zaiko, a former sailor. He was a splendid soldier and comrade, one of the best drivers in the battalion. He returned to the battalion after being wounded. It was a rare case when a chauffeur, who was always in great demand everywhere, wanted to return from the hospital to a unit, where he almost daily had to drive up under direct fire. He often came under German fire as he moved up to a position and pulled away from it.
I remember Lieutenant Volosov, who had served in a howitzer regiment until he’d been wounded, but after the hospital he’d wound up in a destroyer antitank artillery battalion. With us, he was wounded again. I hope he survived.
I recall so many other men; a battery sergeant major Alimov, who came to us from an anti-tank rifle company; he was a cheerful, brave, boisterous Regular who joined the Army in 1940. Then there was the experienced gunner, a former schoolteacher from Kazakhstan’s Chimkent, Khairulla Kerimbekov, with whom I was friends. Sergeant Kokotov was a unique personality. Before the war he’d been a docent at a pedagogical institute. In the war he’d been a captain who had served as the commander of the anti-aircraft battery that guarded army headquarters. An imposing, stately, intelligent man, he outwardly seemed like a general. He wound up in a penal company, but survived his time as an orderly to a penal company commander. He came to us as a sergeant.
Doshly was a clever man. Something always seemed to be going wrong for him – either the muzzle brake on his ZIS-3 gun would malfunction just before a battle, or his tow vehicle would run out of fuel. This comrade knew how to survive.
There was the Kuban Cossack Sinel’nikov, a gun commander who was also a cavalier with two Orders of Glory. He was a superb hunter. Once a column of prisoners was passing us, and among them Sinel’nikov spotted a ‘Vlasovite’, who’d been serving as a wagon driver for the Germans. It turned out that this guy had been a former village neighbour of Sinel’nikov’s. Sinel’nikov beat the hell out of his traitorous neighbour, but he didn’t kill him – and he didn’t allows others to do it either.
I do recall many others. But if I continue to list them, you’ll quickly tire of it.
The losses among the destroyer anti-tank gunners were heavy. After one-and-a-half years of service in the battalion, not more than 25 per cent of its initial complement of men remained, and this includes the command staff. From among my own soldiers, of those who arrived in the battalion in December 1943, only Volovik, Nikitin, Baturin and Zaiko served out the war in the battalion and survived. Of the seven platoon commanders who were serving in the battalion at the beginning of 1944, I was the only one to survive. Our platoon lieutenants were very frequently killed.
In January 1945, we were engaged in ‘fighting of local significance’. The battalion was in bad shape. Only one gun and seven men remained of my battery. In making the crossing of the Oder, we lost four guns and thirty men, and these were considered light casualties in that operation. When on 1 May 1945 the battalion entered Moravska Ostrava, it had only eight ZIS-guns and fifty men. In fact, we continued to suffer combat fatalities in the first days of May 1945. A battery lost several men killed in action on 5 May, when searching for the lost banner of a rifle division in some Czech woods and they encountered Germans that were retreating to the west.
At the end of the war, the infantry was not at all pitied, nor were we, the anti-tank gunners. The ethical level of many of the senior commanders was low. It was useless to search for kindness, humanity or unselfishness among them. It was these militarily incompetent commanders, who for the sake of Orders and their own careers repeatedly hurled their subordinates into the very jaws of death. It was senseless, heartless, and for nothing.
The destroyer anti-tank artillery battalion began to be used as a shock unit; we no longer felt any difference from the infantry. We would joke, saying that perhaps we could weld a bayonet to the radiator of our trucks. They frequently used us even without the support of rifle teams. How many times the artillerymen had to engage in rifle combat with their own personal weapon!? Let’s just say that one could realistically have a chance to survive only in the heavy artillery of the Supreme Command Reserve.
Death was always nearby. So many times I had narrow escapes from death without even realizing it. I understood this only after the war. It would have been shameful to be a coward; after all, the battery’s soldiers were watching me. I managed to fight the fear of death, but I was certain that I wouldn’t escape alive from the battles. Many men in the depths of their souls concealed the hope of returning alive from the war, or at least meeting a quick death, without prolonged agonies. I was ready for the worst.
We were under constant stress. It was especially hard to return to the front after a short break. Then when you’re sucked into the fighting, there’s no longer the inner or physical strength to ponder the possibility of death.
I was often lucky. Fair enough if you were killed in combat, but death was everywhere and always stalking us. I remember once we were driving through the Carpathians. The sappers had already checked a narrow road and had given the all-clear sign for our passage. My truck was leading the column. Suddenly there was an explosion of a mine beneath a wheel. The truck blew apart, killing everyone on either side of it. Only the driver and I by some miracle remained unharmed. Another time, I was sleeping in a slit trench at the front, together with two other soldiers. It was cramped. Nearby there was a haystack. I got up, walked 15 metres toward the haystack, and suddenly behind me there was an explosion. It was a direct hit on the slit trench. I got away with merely a shell splinter.
There were other incidents. In Czechoslovakia, in street fighting I once ran into a burst of machine-gun fire at almost point-blank range. I remained alive, but my field service cap had a bullet hole in it. Another time there was a combat action in some cemetery and I was running along a wall. A sniper fired .. . and the bullet just singed my chin.
In the Ukraine at the end of March 1944 I dreamed that I’d been wounded in the stomach by a shell fragment and that I was dying. I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. I took this dream as an omen and decided that it was going to take place. So until the very end of the war, in combat I constantly tugged my map case in front of my stomach, thereby protecting myself from the fragment that had been predestined for me. That’s how I tricked fate . . .
There were also a lot of absurd, unexpected deaths. There might not be any fighting going on, but people were still getting killed. In December 1944, soldiers of the battery were cooking something in a pot for themselves. In place of firewood, they were using empty ammunition cases. They failed to check one thoroughly and tossed it onto the fire, without noticing that it still contained a shell. There was an explosion and three men were badly wounded. At Shepetovka, on the outskirts of the village there was a still smouldering, smoking house. We went inside to get warm, but also at the same time to drive away lice. One wall collapsed suddenly and one of our comrades died from the burns he received.
I remember a couple of times when a soldier attacked a panzer with grenades. Once, a German tank became immobilized in front of our positions. But both guns of my platoon had already been destroyed by German panzers, and the crews were totally exhausted. A drunken soldier from the anti-tank rifle company went after the tank with a bundle of grenades. Just 20 metres short of the tank, he was cut down by a burst of machine-gun fire.
No one could escape his fate. Our postal clerk Volchkov, a man who never took part in fighting, was marching on foot in the column. He laid his submachine gun under the canvas of the anti-tank rifle company’s wagon. When he later reached into it to retrieve it, the breech-mechanism lever apparently caught on something. There was a shot, and Volchkov took a bullet in the stomach from his own submachine gun, which killed him.
We had a guy named Zabrodin, a former welder in a tank factory. He was conscripted into the army in 1942. Zabrodin’s wife found out that there was an order about recalling defence-industry specialists from the front; she spent a long time running around the rear area making appeals to chiefs, and she eventually reached a chief designer, from whom she wangled a summons for her husband to a factory in Cheliabinsk. The factory was in need of qualified specialists. Zabrodin soon had all the documents required for demobilization in his pocket. He needed to ‘shove off’, but he wanted to make sure he procured some new boots first. Zabrodin went running to the storage depot, but on the road to it he was severely wounded. He died on the way to the medical-sanitation battalion. Such is fate . . .
There was no staff deputy of the Special Department in the battalion, but ‘these guys’ never left our battalion alone without oversight. All the soldiers hated the Special Department deputies, and the old soldiers called them ‘Gepeushniki’, or GPU-men.2 But we all sought to avoid saying anything superfluous in the battery. The snitches were as thick as blackberries around us.
Once we were holding a defensive front in the Carpathians. We had no infantry in front of us. There was no intact front line. There were numerous gaps between our batteries and their gun positions. All around was wooded, rough terrain, with hills, valleys and ravines. It wouldn’t have been difficult to penetrate into our rear, and one could have likely passed through the entire division – no one would have noticed. It was almost a half-kilometre between our No. 1 gun and No. 4 gun.
At night there were artillerymen crouching in listening posts surrounding the guns in an all-round defence. On one of these nights, a team of German scouts broke into the positions of the 3rd Battery, which was positioned on an adjacent hill to our right, and they quietly slaughtered the crew of the left-flank gun and took the gun commander Samylin prisoner.
Immediately, Special Department officers arrived in vehicles. They accused gun-platoon commander Junior Lieutenant Znamensky of criminal dereliction of duty, saying that he hadn’t checked his outposts at night, and they put him in front of a tribunal. The sentence busted Znamensky down to private and sent him into a penal company.
There and then they took steps to ‘strengthen’ our combat spirit and vigilance. They arranged a public execution in the neighbouring 115th Rifle Regiment. Two men, a sergeant major and a soldier, were shot for fraternizing with the enemy. There was a rare, isolated farmstead that hadn’t been devastated out in no-man’s-land, and our guys were going there for milk and butter. The Germans also fell into the habit of going to the farm to get some food. There, they peacefully conversed with our soldiers, and both sides observed a truce. These two Red Army soldiers were accused of betraying the Motherland. I still recall how they were shot.
In the autumn of 1944 we received ZIS-3 anti-tank guns. These guns were twice as heavy as the 45-mm guns and it was much more difficult to handle in the direct fire mode. They were unwieldy guns with a large rectangular shield. They were visible with the naked eye from a range of 3 kilometres. Because of this, in one way or another we drew a lot of enemy fire – machine-gun, mortar and artillery. We didn’t require any special training in order to fight with these guns. We had one gunnery practice, and that was all.
Back in action, as always, we leaped out into our positions, deployed the gun and began firing. After the third round, the trail spades are shifting in the loose soil, but we didn’t bother digging them down into the earth. We simply chocked them with logs.
The first tank we knocked out with the ZIS-3 was in Poland. An infantry company, around 40 men, was dug-in around 300 metres in front of us. A German medium tank popped out from behind the lee side of a hill and began to overrun the infantry. We hit it with our first shell. The tank began smoking and rolled behind a hillock, where it burned out.
The infantry regarded the anti-tank artillerymen with respect, because we were a shield and a big help for them, an additional chance to survive in the slaughterhouse of war. On the march whenever we drove past the infantry, an exchange of traditional greetings would begin: ‘Don’t kick up the dust, infantrymen!’ In response we’d hear, ‘Eh, Farewell, Motherland! Your barrel is long but your life is short.’
In combat at the front, the infantry was always happy when we were deployed next to them, but at the same time, all the infantrymen preferred to be occupying positions a little removed from our guns, understanding quite well that with the first shot the 45-mm artillerymen would draw fire and become goners. To be positioned next to us was a great risk. It also happened that because of our proximity to the Germans, our own artillery would take us as the enemy and we’d receive ‘gifts’ from them.
It has been said that before each battle, regimental staff officers and political workers would arrive at the firing positions as replacements for those crewmen who’d become casualties. But it is hard for me to believe that such a process ever existed anywhere. No one would ever come to us during combat – neither staff officers nor any kind of Party organizers or deputy political officers. No one wanted to be around us during a fight. If such a thing did happen in some anti-tank artillery regiment, then most likely it was the result of a direct order from the regiment commander.
I never saw the battalion’s chief of staff anywhere near our firing position for four or five months. The same could be said about the others. Our deputy political leader was a former newspaperman from some regional office. We also had a Party organizer, a Georgian. They knew how to deliver fiery speeches eloquently, but they didn’t take part in the fighting.
The hardest episode of the war for me was in March 1945, at Lake Balaton. We were making a fighting retreat; there were around 50 of us, infantrymen and artillerymen. The Germans encircled our wounded men, who were located in a shallow depression in the ground about 100 metres from us. We were unable to break through to extract them. For a long time, the wounded were yelling to us, ‘Finish us off, brothers!’ This cry has haunted me through my entire lifetime.
For me, war is the most significant, the most powerful experience in life. In it I learned the value of human life, and witnessed how cruel and pitiless a man becomes in war. War cannot be forgotten. I still often dream about it . . .
Notes
1. The Demidov family was an extremely prominent and wealthy Russian family in the late 18th and 19th Centuries, well connected politically to the Tsar, and which used its wealth to promote science, culture and public infrastructure across Russia.
2. GPU stands for the Main Political Directorate of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the dreaded NKVD.