Chapter 9
Aleksei Prokhorovich Voloshin
I was born in 1920. My parents were living in Tambovsk Oblast. In 1921, as the Russian Civil War raged, my parents fled to relatives of my mother near Kanev. I graduated from the 10th grade in 1938 and applied to the Sevastopol Naval Specialist School. I passed all the entrance exams, but at the medical board they detected a heart murmur and rejected me. That same year I enrolled in the Odessa Institute of Water Transport.
The war caught me in Bessarabia. At first the talk was that we had to go to sign up, or else the war would end without us. This didn’t last for long. We returned to Odessa and headed voluntarily to the military enlistment centre. As students of a technical higher education institute, we were assigned to train at the Odessa Artillery Specialist School, which prepared artillerymen for the super-heavy artillery. Then there was an evacuation. At first we went on foot to Nikolaev, and then by railroad to Kamyshlov. My training continued until February 1942. I acquired the rank of lieutenant and soon found myself as the commander of a platoon in the 54th Heavy Artillery Howitzer Regiment of the Supreme Command Reserve. I was commanding a battery’s only howitzer, for which there was not a single shell.
In March 1942 I was wounded in an artillery barrage, but already in April, after recovering, I became the commander of the operations platoon of a battery of the 62nd Army’s 1104th Artillery Regiment, which was equipped with 152-mm howitzers. Soon I became the battery commander. On the Myshkova River I destroyed my first tank. Having noticed a German troop concentration, I requested four shells from the regiment commander. I prepared the firing data and with these shells I blanketed the enemy. One of the shells landed squarely on a German tank, which burst into flames. The regiment commander had a drink together with the army commander in a dug-out to celebrate the regiment’s first destroyed enemy tank, but they didn’t even summon me. I thought that I would get the ‘For Courage’ medal, just like the battalion commander was wearing, but they awarded me the Order of the Red Star. I wasn’t pleased.
We crossed the Don in retreat. A small ferry carried the guns across the river, but we had to swim. The chief of staff, who had served back in the First World War, said, ‘Take apart a fence, place your stuff – your trousers, combat blouse, pistol and belt – on a board, and swim. Don’t rush to save someone drowning, because he’ll take you down to the bottom together with him.’ We agreed that someone would help me if I was lightly wounded, but if I was badly wounded they’d keep swimming and leave me to drown.
Soon after we crossed the Don, I was transferred to the 10th NKVD Division’s 271st Rifle Regiment to take command of a battery of 76-mm infantry support guns .. . I can say with complete confidence that my most terrible memories of the war are from the fighting withdrawal to Stalingrad and the defence of the city. The Germans had an overwhelming superiority. Their airplanes were constantly overhead. Our air force never made an appearance, while our entire anti-aircraft artillery was wiped out at point-blank range in ground combat. Thus, you had to find any sort of little hole or depression and you’d try to burrow your way even more deeply into the ground with your chest. Even so, I was wounded in the middle of September, and didn’t take part in the brutal, inhumanly savage street fighting, in which nearly our entire division perished. True, though, over the time I was with the division, I once participated in a bayonet charge . . . there were only sixteen men left in the battery, and only eight came back alive from the attack.
I was wounded in the leg just above the knee. They brought me out of Stalingrad across the Volga aboard a ferry. I heard later that when the division was withdrawn to the east bank of the Volga, only 191 men remained of the 10,000 that had entered the battle.
They brought me to Tomsk. There I spent three months recovering from my wound. I very badly wanted to return to the front, because I was bored and hungry. Each week they showed two films for the patients: Chapaev and Svetlyi put’ [Shining path, but also known as Tanya – a socialist Cinderella story about the rewards of hard work and loyalty to the state]. I received my discharge from the hospital in January 1943. On that same day, the hospital director had received a telegram from Lieutenant Colonel Tsygankov, the artillery chief of the 10th NKVD Division, or as it was now designated, the 181st ‘Stalingrad’ Rifle Division, with a request to return me to the division after I healed.
With difficulty I made my way to Cheliabinsk, where the division was in the process of reforming. Soon we were loaded onto troop trains and at the end of February we disembarked in the vicinity of Elets. From there we conducted a ten-day rapid march to a point near Sevsk, where the Germans had encircled a cavalry corps. The regimental battery that I was commanding was being towed by horses, but we had only two horses per gun instead of the requisite four. At times the crews had to help haul the guns through the snow. It was hard. Snowdrifts blocked the roads. The local population was mobilized to clear the roads. Once we met Colonel General Rokossovsky. He was driving by and stopped. He shouted, ‘Who’s the commander?’ I went running up to him and reported, ‘Lieutenant Voloshin, commander of a regimental battery of the 271st Rifle Division.’
‘What’s this? Why are you moving so slowly?’
‘We don’t have horses, and there are snowdrifts.’
He drove off. The next day an order arrived: ‘Get horses from the state farms. Give them a receipt, stating that their horses will be returned.’
I remember going up to one collective farm chairman. He told me, ‘We only have three horses.’
‘We’re taking them.’
He pointed at one: ‘This one’s lame.’
I ordered a soldier to lead the horse around. It in fact was lame. I told the chairman, ‘We’ll take two horses. Here’s your receipt.’ He had tears in his eyes. What was that slip of paper worth to him? He had to plough the fields within a month. That’s how we scraped together horse teams for the battery.
We approached Sevsk. Along the road we began to encounter dead horses on the left and right of it, all upside down – they’d frozen. We began to take the saddles from them. Our boots were now badly worn and in lousy shape. So we removed the saddles in order to make boots from the leather. That’s what we did.
The regiment took up defensive positions to the right of Sevsk. While on the defence, once the battery had to make a combat probe to obtain intelligence. In general, both we and the Germans fought poorly there. We were louse-ridden. In the rifle companies, half the men came down with typhus. I had eighty men in my battery, and half of them became sick. The spring was a cold one. The soldiers packed the available houses to the point where they were almost sleeping in several layers. At the end of March 1943, I also became sick. I spent the entire month of April bedridden in the medical-sanitary battalion. My hair fell out. But nevertheless by the end of April I was on my feet again and began to walk around. I remember I wanted to jump over some fallen branch in my path, but my foot caught it and I fell – my legs were so weak. I was hungry all the time. There was meat, because there were a lot of dead cows and calves, but there wasn’t any salt, and beef without salt isn’t tasty. So at one point, I and another battery commander went to see the battalion commander. He treated us to some tasty meat.
‘Nikolai, where did you get the salt?’
‘This is horseflesh.’
The other battery commander ran outside and threw up. After all, before the war, horsemeat was considered inedible.
I remember once the battery commissar left to get some additional training. So I wrote him a letter asking him to send me some salt. He managed to obtain some and sent these large granules of very coarsely ground salt. I remember you’d take one of these granules into your mouth and you walked around sucking on it. It was such a delicacy!
In general, our living conditions at the front were satisfactory. Or one could say they were mediocre, though the command thought things were fine. But back in 1942, we had to forage to stay alive. We begged for food from the local population wherever it was possible.
In May 1943 we were pulled out of the front lines, and in June we were withdrawn into the rear of the 13th Army. The German Kursk offensive never reached us – they were used up, and already on 15 July we went on the offensive. My battery was supporting a rifle battalion. It advanced somewhere about 3 kilometres and got tied up in combat. I decided to catch up with them. We crossed a small brook that flowed in the bottom of a ravine, and climbing a hill on the opposite side, we spotted two German tanks advancing in our direction. We quickly deployed the guns, camouflaged them, and when the tanks had approached to within about 200 metres, we set them ablaze. I decided that the job had been done and that we could move on up ahead. We limbered the guns and climbed to the top of the hill, where we fell into an ambush. The German tank with its first round smashed the No. 1 gun. I only watched as the arms and legs of the gun crew went flying in different directions. A shell struck the No. 2 gun’s carriage limber. I started to run over to the No. 3 gun in order to stop it. I was shouting, ‘Stop!’ My orderly stuck out his leg and tripped me. I fell. Dropping down beside me, he said, ‘That’s all, Comrade Lieutenant; you won’t make it in time.’ In fact, the German tank also destroyed the No. 3 gun. The No. 4 gun was still below the crest and remained undamaged. We laid there for a little bit, and then hauled away the No. 2 gun.
After thinking over the situation for a while, we decided to knock out this tank. One platoon commander had been killed, but I ordered the remaining one to take the two guns and bypass the tank. It was beginning to get dark. In the twilight we managed to slip past the tank and deployed the guns approximately 100 metres away from its shelter behind a mound. After a few minutes, it started up its engine and started to back up toward us. We fired a volley and it burst into flames. The Germans tried to clamber out, but we shot them down. We then limbered up our guns and moved on a short way before stopping for the night. We set up a hasty defensive position.
In the morning, the regiment’s artillery chief came driving up.
‘Where are the knocked out tanks?’
‘Over there.’
‘Good man! How many guns did you lose?’
‘Three. One is only lightly damaged.’
‘You’ll go before a tribunal!’
‘A tank was in ambush. We knocked it out.’
‘Then why did you fall out here? Your job is to support the infantry!’
At that point the division commander Major General Aleksandr Andreevich Saraev came driving up: ‘Who knocked out those tanks? Where is this fine fellow? Come here, son.’ He kissed me on both cheeks and told his chief of staff, ‘Put this man up for the Order of Lenin.’ My immediate superior had been threatening to send me before a tribunal, and this commander was recommending me for an Order! In fact, they replaced the Order of Lenin with the Order of the Red Banner.
Soon we advanced to the southern outskirts of Chernigov, having forced a crossing of the Desna River. There was a large German garrison in the city, supported by tanks. Scouts reported that they had counted approximately 100 armoured vehicles. It was decided to organize an assault battalion of Slavs in each regiment. (In the vicinity of Slutsk the division had received a large batch of replacements from Central Asia. These soldiers fought poorly – if one got wounded, twenty of them would bring him off the battlefield.) These assault battalions were reinforced with all of the division’s artillery and combat engineers.
On the evening of 19 September we formed them up, and at 0100 we attacked. We had made an agreement with the infantry that we would tow the guns with the horses up to the nearest buildings, and then unhitch the teams and lead them away, while soldiers would take over and help the crews manhandle the guns further. In general, the infantry loved it when the artillery was nearby. If a gun is beside them, they aren’t so afraid and will hold their positions. In this night battle my battery knocked out five tanks. We liberated the city by 0600. We rested, reorganized and moved on toward the Dnepr. By now I had become the regiment’s artillery chief.
We forced a crossing of the Dnepr River at the village of Gliadky, advanced another 4 kilometres, and seized the large village of Kolyban’. We deployed the guns so that several guns could fire at the same tank from multiple directions. Just beyond the village ran a railroad embankment. The sappers mined it.
On the morning of 28 September, the Germans counterattacked. I ran over to the 1st Platoon of my former battery; it wasn’t where it should have been. It had pulled out and the infantry had followed them. The platoon commander had recently arrived from a cavalry regiment. That’s the sort of fighter he was. I chased him down: ‘Why are you fleeing?’
‘The position is better here. If the tanks come, I’ll knock them out.’
‘Go back! I’ll shoot you!’
We hitched infantry to the guns and hauled them back toward their previous positions about 500 metres. At this moment tanks appeared. We allowed them to come a little bit closer and then opened fire. We knocked out three Pz-IVs. Two panzers attempted to cross the railroad embankment and hit mines that immobilized them, and we finished them off.
The German attack shifted a bit to our left and hit the neighbouring 292nd Regiment. I was ordered to send a battery of 76-mm guns to their assistance. The Germans managed to penetrate the 292nd Regiment’s lines and overran the command post. We deployed the guns and opened fire. I directed the fighting, running from gun to gun. I was running through a ravine with a sergeant, the battery’s Party organizer. There was a haystack in the ravine. We ran around it and nearly bumped right into two Germans with rifles. In my shock, I pointed my submachine gun at them and then froze for a moment, before instincts took over and I gave them a burst – they fell, but I continued to fire at them.
In this action the battery knocked out another six German tanks. Altogether over the day, we destroyed eleven tanks. For this I was nominated for the title Hero of the Soviet Union.
I remember, we drove to a Komsomol conference. I gave a speech, and then one battery commander spoke up and said, ‘You think that he knocked out eleven tanks, but he was just in the right place at the right time. The tanks came at him. If they had attacked my sector, I also would have knocked them out. This isn’t his achievement; it belongs to the Germans who launched the attack.’
In the summer of 1944, I knocked out a Ferdinand1 north of Lutsk in the vicinity of the village of Rozhishche. We were holding a defensive position, and it was camouflaged on a hill about 2 kilometres away. It knocked out several of our machine-gun nests and a 45-mm anti-tank gun. Suddenly the regiment commander is summoning me and he tells me that the division commander had decided to introduce an attached battalion of Valentine tanks into our sector, while I was to secure its entry with my artillery. The tank battalion commander, a captain, came up to me. I cautioned him, ‘Be careful, there’s a Ferdinand out there.’
‘What’s that to me? I’ll get it. I have fifteen tanks.’
‘Oh, yeah?! A Ferdinand can destroy any tank at a range of 2 kilometres.’
‘So what, I’ll outflank him there on the left.’
He promptly formed his tanks into a column and moved out. He had gone approximately a kilometre when the Germans opened fire. It allowed the first two tanks to pass into an area of low ground and started with the third Valentine. At that point, it was simply ‘Boom’ – and a tank would go up in flames, ‘Boom’ – and there would go another one. It walked its fire down the column and destroyed thirteen tanks! The division commander roundly cursed the regiment commander: ‘Where is your destroyer of tanks? He’s lost thirteen tanks and a gun! If he doesn’t destroy this Ferdinand, I’ll strip him of his Star.’ Even though at that time I still didn’t have a Star.
So that evening I set out with one gun platoon to go around this hill, before deploying the guns about 300 metres from the self-propelled gun’s presumed position. When it became light, we opened fire at its tracks and undercarriage. We fired five or six rounds. It attempted to move, but lost its tracks. Now immobilized, combat engineers crept up to it, set an anti-tank mine beneath it, and blew it up. They said that later, someone wrote ‘181st Division’ on it and sent it to Kiev to be put on display.
In June 1944, I received a grazing wound to the belly. At first I lay in Kiev, before the doctors decided to send me to Moscow. Directly at the train station, I began bleeding from the wound in my stomach and I wound up in a hospital. There they found me and invited me to the Kremlin to receive the Star of Hero of the Soviet Union. After the ceremony I was received by the Chief Marshal of Artillery Nikolai Nikolaevich Voronov. The Marshal proposed to enroll me in the Artillery Academy. I didn’t even begin to refuse. That autumn in the Kremlin, the American president’s close adviser Harry Hopkins, the US Ambassador in Moscow W. Averell Harriman and a military attaché presented me with a Silver Star, which had been bestowed upon me by a decree of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Note
1. Translator’s note: from the details in his story, this does appear to be a German Panzerjäger Tiger (P) Elefant heavy tank destroyer, so I have not placed the title Ferdinand (the heavy tank destroyer’s original name) in quotation marks.