A Writer at War (15 page)

Grossman appears to have been intrigued by the minor contradictions in their accounts.

Martynov, Al[eksandr] Vas[ilievich], born 1919: ‘One can spot the whole character of a pilot in the movement of his machine. I can see if the enemy is strong and persistent. Fritzes look for simpletons. They pick them off from behind. You see what your partner is like from his character as a pilot, and his whole nature is shown by the way he flies his machine. Yet in an air battle, it is very difficult to distinguish between pilots . . . I must protect my comrade, rather than shoot down that bloody Fritz . . . You see a Fritz, how he wags his head, and you give him a couple of hot ones! Close-quarter battle in the air is a bit hard for Fritz. Close-quarter battle is a struggle to the last drop of blood. The enemy does not like fighting on a horizontal plane, or when banking. They try to fight on a vertical axis. The enemy do everything smoothly, and evade sharp bankings. It’s therefore possible to break away on the horizontal by side-slipping. Their firing is not carefully aimed.

‘Good coordination in the pair secures success. You follow your leader and he gives the signal when to break off . . . I was on fire in the air, having been hit by anti-aircraft artillery. (I had burns and was wounded.) Yet I felt no fear when I was burning. There was no time for fear. The characteristics [of a good pilot are]:

1) to know your machine and equipment in order to be able to use it

2) to have confidence and to love your machine

3) to have courage, a cool mind and a burning heart

4) to feel true comradeship

5) to display selflessness in battle, devotion to the Motherland, and hatred [of the enemy].

‘My first meeting with a Heinkel. I attacked him twelve times, he became a bit [covered with soot]. The first time is a bit scary. I’ve returned with lot of holes. Once I was completely covered with bullet-holes, like an old quail.’

Salomatin, [explaining why] he does not wait for the slower ones: ‘I want the main one, that’s why I start a fight. It’s not decorations I am after. I want to beat the Germans, even if it costs me my life.’

Salomatin then spoke of Demidov, a fellow pilot who had recently been killed in an air battle. They had remembered him in the toasts drunk after receiving a medal. It was the custom in the Red Army to place the new medal in a mug of vodka, drain the alcohol in one go and finish with the decoration clenched between the teeth.

‘Demidov [a comrade who had been killed] used to infect everyone with his courage. Baranov burst into tears when we were being awarded decorations. The first toast was to Stalin, the second one was to the dead Demidov.’

Captain Zapryagalov: ‘[On] the first day of the war in Chernovitsy, the alarm was sounded soon after four o’clock. We ran to the airfield. I took off while it was being bombed. [I later had to do] another take-off from an airfield destroyed by bombs.

‘The main thing is that we believe. We haven’t any doubts and we will help those in trouble. We weren’t the ones who started this tradition, but we follow it reverently. [The Germans] are a very strong nation in technological matters.’

Eryomin, Boris Nik[olayevich], twenty-nine years old: ‘The main principle is the coordination in pairs, and comradeship. There’s coordination and they know each other’s peculiarities. Martynov (the second in command) flies with Korol and trained him. The
second pair [consists of] Balashov and Sedov. I fly with Skotnoi.

‘One sees how the tracer ends in his black planes. The Me[sserschmitt] is long, like a pike. I looked, and saw a yellow spinner, and banked, but a bit late. I saw them firing at me, and a blue flash, and at that moment Martynov rushed at him, and he fell off me. It’s interesting, of course, one really gets carried away with it.

‘We should protect the little seagulls, they are all good people in them.’
²

‘I took off with Salomatin when the alarm sounded, and shot down [a plane]. A very nice feeling. You fly there planning all the time: ‘Ah, it would be better this way, it would be better that way.’

‘The commander explained things to me, and I understood what he wanted from me. We had agreed on the ground – if you waggle your wings – that means, prepare to attack.’

Lieutenant Salomatin (Sedov’s wingman), born 1921: ‘Their leader was coming straight at me, but I didn’t turn my plane away. He broke off and turned away. Ramming him would have been more convenient. It is nothing, when there is one against one. One is afraid to be attacked by a horde of them, but when there is a group, you forget everything, you get really agitated: “They are flying to bomb our troops!”’

About ramming: ‘It is very good and expedient to exchange a fighter for a Junker. But I wouldn’t give out the title [Hero of the Soviet Union] for such an action. Anyone can do it. I have long been thinking about ramming, about striking [the enemy aircraft] with my propeller. It can do a lot of damage.

‘I went for them and drove into the middle of them, nearly touched one of them with my wing. I was coming out of the sun, and they didn’t shoot. I almost collided with another one and shot him down from a distance of twenty-five metres. Then I turned back and started shooting at anything.

‘The second flight – the leader was about two metres under my belly, and a blast of slipstream hit me. I dived and escaped from nine Messers. I started to hurry, in order to knock out a Messer tailing one of our ‘Yaks’ (Lieutenant Skotnoi was flying it), but I couldn’t make it in time. [Skotnoi] went into a glide, but I managed
to send two Messers away. He landed. I made two circuits so that they wouldn’t kill him. I saw that he was alive and waved my hand at him.’

[Skotnoi:] ‘We went at one another head to head. He pierced my radiator, and I set him on fire. I went to help Eryomin. One Me[sserschmitt] set my oil tank and fuel pipes on fire. My plane was burning on the inside, and there was a lot of smoke. I dropped in altitude. Sedov covered me. I didn’t get any burns myself, only my boots were burned. I climbed out, and waved at Sedov [telling him that he could go]. My plane was completely burned out.’

1
Arkady Gaidar, famous and much-loved children’s writer, commanded a regiment at the age of eighteen during the Russian Civil War. In 1941, after the Germans invaded, he went to the front as a correspondent.

2
The plane affectionately known as the
chaechka
, or ‘little seagull’, was in fact the Polikarpov I–15, a very small fighter with gull-shaped wings which never stood a chance against a Messerschmitt 109.

Grossman was with the 37th Army, near Servernyi Donets, forty kilometres south-east of Kharkov. They faced the German Sixth Army, which was now commanded by General Friedrich Paulus and which Grossman would encounter at Stalingrad.

Visit the division commanded by Colonel Zinoviev, a Hero of the Soviet Union, born 1905, and a peasant. ‘I am a
muzhik
,’ he says of himself. He joined the Red Army in 1927 and served with the frontier guards troops in Central Asia. He commanded a company during the Finnish Campaign. He spent fifty-seven days surrounded by the Germans (a feat for which he received the medal Hero of the Soviet Union).

‘The most frightening thing of all,’ Zinoviev told us, ‘is when they are crawling. You shoot at them with machine guns, fire mortars and artillery. You crush them, but they crawl, they crawl. And now I try to persuade my soldiers: “Crawl!” He has studied at the [Frunze] Academy, but it is hard for him to speak fluently. He is shy and stumbles over his words. He is ashamed of being such a simple man.

The division consists entirely of miners. All the men come from the Donbass. Germans call it the ‘Black Division’. The miners didn’t want to retreat. ‘We won’t let a single German cross the Donets.’ They call their commander ‘our Chapaev’.
¹

In the first battle the division was attacked by one hundred German tanks. The miners stopped the attack. When the Germans
breached a flank of the division, the divisional commander galloped on a horse along the front line shouting: ‘Miners, forward!’

‘Miners don’t retreat!’ the soldiers shouted in reply.

‘They sleep in the forest when it’s minus 35° centigrade. They aren’t afraid of tanks. “A mine is more frightening,” they say.’

The divisional commander’s creed is: ‘The key character here is the Red Army soldier. He sleeps in the snow and is prepared to sacrifice his life. And it isn’t easy to sacrifice one’s life. Everyone wants to live, including heroes. Authority is gained through daily conversations. A soldier must know his task and understand it. One has to speak to soldiers, and sing and dance for them. But authority shouldn’t be cheap, it is hard won. I learned this in the frontier units. And knowing that soldiers trust me, I know they will fulfil all my orders and risk their lives. When it is necessary to take a little town or block a road, I know that they will do it.’

Severe frost. The snow is creaking. Icy air makes one catch one’s breath. The insides of one’s nostrils stick together, teeth ache from the cold. Germans, frozen to death, lie on the roads of our advance. Their bodies are absolutely intact. We didn’t kill them, it was the cold. Practical jokers put the frozen Germans on their feet, or on their hands and knees, making intricate, fanciful sculpture groups. Frozen Germans stand with their fists raised, or with their fingers spread wide. Some of them look as if they are running, their heads pulled into the shoulders. They are wearing torn boots, thin
shinelishki
[greatcoats], paper undershirts that don’t hold the warmth. At night the fields of snow seem blue under the bright moon, and the dark bodies of frozen German soldiers stand in the blue snow, placed there by the jokers.

Again, [frozen] Germans standing up. One of them is in his underwear, in a paper jersey.

In a village which has just been liberated, there are five dead Germans and one dead Red Army soldier lying in the square. The square is empty, there is no one to ask what’s happened, but one does not need this to be able to reconstruct the whole drama. One of the Germans was killed with a bayonet, another one with a rifle butt, third one with a bayonet, two were shot. And the soldier who killed them all was shot in the back.

Grossman, who preferred working with just a couple of colleagues or on his own, had to join a much larger group of war correspondents.

The
izba
is crowded with dozens of people. There’s confusion, the headquarters is in the process of setting itself up. A beautiful girl is there in an overcoat which is too big for her, a big
ushanka
[fur hat] which keeps falling over her eyes, and huge
valenki
[felt boots], but one can tell there is a sweet, slim girl underneath all this ugly grey stuff. She is standing there looking lost, not knowing where she can sit down. She is holding a red handbag in her hands. This lady’s handbag, which has seen better days, looks stunningly sad in these grey military surroundings. A soldier slaps her on the back jokingly, but with full force. Suddenly she begins to cry. ‘Forgive me, Lidochka,’ the soldier says to her. ‘I’m a miner, I’ve got heavy hands.’

Back in peacetime, we always used to put on the wrong galoshes in the hall. Now, about fifteen photographers and reporters sleep in one
izba
, and there’s a terrible confusion all the time – ‘Whose
valenki
are these? Whose foot bandages, mittens, hats?’
²
Everything looks the same to people who were civilians the day before. This does not happen with soldiers.

The owners of the
izba
told us how the Germans fled from the village under the fire of our artillery. They were carrying their belongings which they hadn’t had time to pack; they were panic-stricken, some fell into the snow and sobbed.

‘We had a German here who brought with him a cat from Poltava [Sixth Army headquarters]. The cat knew him. When he walked into the house, the cat would run to him and rub against his boots. He fed it with fat, pure fat. And when they fled, he took the cat with him, he was so fond of it.’

‘The divisional doctor was quartered here. He used to work all night. He worked like an ox. He wrote and wrote and then shouted into the telephone like a raven: “Kamyshevakha! Kamyshevakha!” and carried on writing, regardless of the light. He worked like an ox. And he would shout at his orderly: “Why is the Russian so quiet?” He liked it when I chopped wood in the mornings. They would wake me up specially.’

A woman told us: ‘She was a good cow, and young. [The Germans] caught her because they wanted to eat something fatty.’

The artillery commander gave the order: ‘At the retreating whores, fire!’

Gun-layers and mortarmen, such as this one wearing a
pilotka
fore-and-aft cap, would sometimes receive flamboyant fire orders from their commanders at moments of triumph. When they reached Berlin, it would be: ‘At the lair of the Fascist beast, fire!’

Colonel Zinoviev allowed Grossman to go through the divisional war diary over the previous months.

[October]

Komsomol Secretary Eretik had wanted, when dying from a serious wound, to throw a grenade, but he didn’t have enough strength. The grenade exploded in his hand, killing him and some Germans.