Armageddon (27 page)

We know what lies in balance at this moment,

And what is happening right now,

The hour for courage strikes upon our clocks,

And courage will not desert us.

We’re not frightened by the hail of lead,

We’re not bitter without a roof overhead –

And we will preserve you, Russian speech,

Mighty Russian word!

We will transmit you to our grandchildren

Free and pure and rescued from captivity

    Forever!

The men of the Red Army were drawn from every corner of the millions of square miles of the Soviet Union. A T-34 commander, Anatoly Osminov, was an eighteen-year-old Muscovite. His driver, Boris, was a Tartar. Andreyev, the loader, was an Udmurt. Gospodimov, the gunner, was Ukrainian. “Nobody cared about nationalities at that time,” said Osminov, “any more than they cared whether you were an officer, NCO or soldier. We were just all in it together.” The war proved an extraordinary unifying force for a society in which Russian had supplanted French as the chosen language of its rulers barely a century earlier. For many Russians, wartime service offered fractionally greater freedom to think and to speak than they had known in the worst years of Stalin’s Purges. “When war broke out its real dangers and its menace of death were a blessing compared with the inhuman power of the lie,” says one of Pasternak’s characters in
Dr. Zhivago
. “It broke the spell of the dead letter.” The vitality of the war years remains for many veterans a memory which made its sufferings seem endurable. Yet the poet Akhmatova herself was a suspect person in the eyes of Moscow. Yury Ryakhovsky was shocked to find a fellow officer court-martialled for quoting poetry that was deemed “politically incorrect.”

Sometimes, all the 150 girls of Lieutenant Gennady Klimenko’s signals regiment would gather for an evening to sing folk songs. Long before they finished, tears were coursing down the cheeks of men and women alike. “It is when they sing that we realise most clearly that they come from another world. They form a community then, and include us as hearers, in some immeasurable expanse,” wrote Hans von Lehndorff, observing the Russians as a prisoner. “They are living over there, for the moment at least, and everything here is as unreal to them as some circus they have been led into. When they return home later on, all their experience here will seem to them like a mad dream.”

When they were not in foxholes, men slept under trucks, in the open under blankets, or in ruined houses. When Klimenko thought of wartime billets afterwards, his most vivid memory was of the shattered glass that crackled underfoot every yard of the road between Moscow and Berlin, in a world in which few windows survived a battle. They lived chiefly off bread, cabbage soup, canned meat, milk powder and the legendary “100 grams”—the official daily issue of vodka which fuelled the Red Army from 1941 to 1945. They rolled their own cigarettes using scraps of newspaper. Many men suffered from boils caused by the poor diet. There were frequent outbreaks of disease, especially typhoid—even an artillery general died of it. Colds and ’flu were endemic, as indeed they were in all the armies, as soldiers perforce lived a semi-animal existence for months on end, denied the shelter of heated buildings, and laying their heads each night on sodden or frozen earth. Among the Russians, poor hygiene contributed significantly to the prevalence of disease, when men could seldom bathe or change clothes. Their rations were prepared and cooked in conditions of unbridled squalor.

Despite all that has been said above about the Soviet capacity for sacrifice, it would be wrong to suppose that all Russian soldiers were fired by suicidal courage or that they never ran away. Vitold Kubashevsky remarked that his bowels and those of many of his colleagues customarily collapsed before an attack, while their officer was prone to uncontrollable attacks of hiccups. One night in Yugoslavia, German officers watching on a hill observed Soviet troops occupying a town below. They ordered their Cossack unit to mount. Then the long line of horsemen charged, shouting and firing flare pistols as they scrambled down the slope. The Russians ran, throwing away their weapons as they went. This was among the last instances in the history of warfare of modern infantry succumbing to a cavalry charge. Even in the last months of the war, “tank panic” could sometimes cause entire Soviet regiments to turn and fly. “If you saw the turret of a Tiger traverse towards you and stop, you bailed out fast,” said Corporal Anatoly Osminov, commander of a T-34. The complaints of Soviet officers about the quality of young replacements reaching them in 1944–45 exactly mirrored those of their American, British and German counterparts: “One has to work and work at these men,” lamented Captain Oleg Samokhvalov. “They know absolutely nothing about fighting, military discipline, real soldiers’ spirit. Most of them having been hanging about for the past three years, hiding either from the Germans or to avoid being drafted.”

The only man in Gabriel Temkin’s division to become a Hero of the Soviet Union received his award for staying to engage German armour with anti-tank grenades after every soldier around him had run. Anatoly Osminov freely admitted that in his own early battles he often soiled his trousers, as did many men in all the armies. “But you got used to it, in the same way you got used to killing people. I started off thinking: ‘How can I kill a human being?’ But then, of course, I learned to understand that it was simply a matter of killing to save oneself from being killed.” During his first battle, Osminov found himself turning white-haired at the age of seventeen, amid the relentless clatter of small-arms fire and shrapnel on his tank’s hull. “I expected us to catch fire at any minute.” Anti-tank gun officer Vladimir Gormin never forgot seeing a German standing up in his tank turret roaring with laughter at the spectacle of Russian troops running for their lives during the retreat across the Don back in 1942. But, little by little, Gormin himself learned to master fear. “My corporal often saved me—he was a veteran of three encirclements and he would crouch beside me muttering, ‘Let them get closer, let them get closer,’ as the Germans came on. I learned to keep control of myself even when I was shaking all over.”

It was never possible for a Russian soldier to report sick with trench foot or battle fatigue, as was commonplace in the west, but there were other means of escaping combat. A Soviet reconnaissance officer, Lieutenant Pavel Nikiforov, said: “If you got the wrong sort of guys in your unit, they were quite capable of shooting you in the back on your first patrol, and running off to the Germans.” By 1944, the army was receiving many young replacements born in 1926, who were poorly trained. “Some of them were very scared—they took time to get used to the business.” Even in the years of victory, some Soviet soldiers found their plight in Stalin’s armies so intolerable that they preferred to accept the mortal risk of deserting.

By 1944, while the Red Army was vastly better supplied with the essentials of war than it had been in the desperate days of 1941 and 1942, there were still few indulgences. Soviet tanks were superb war machines, but made scant compromise with human comfort. “The T-34 was not a luxury apartment,” observed Vasily Kudryashov, who commanded one. While German and Western tanks ran on petrol, those of the Soviets used diesel, which emitted black exhaust smoke that could be a deadly betrayer on the battlefield. Soviet armoured crews had been greatly hampered in the early years of the war by lack of radio—they could communicate only by hand signals both inside their tanks and between units. By 1944, however, they possessed at least platoon communications. Some T-34s were equipped with the superior 85mm gun in place of the earlier 76mm. Since the Red Army lacked tracked carriers to move infantry on the battlefield, a squad of tommy-gunners rode on every tank hull, to provide close support. Tommy-gunners could be formidably effective, leaping down to engage German infantry at close range. But they were appallingly vulnerable to enemy fire.

The Russians experienced the same problems as the British and Americans when tanks became separated from supporting infantry. Vasily Kudryashov’s T-34 company once found itself alone in the narrow streets of a small town, and suffered badly at the hands of German infantry who closed in, throwing grenades and Molotov cocktails. Kudryashov was pulled out of his blazing tank by his crew, and escaped. He was lucky. The top hatches of T-34s often jammed in a crisis. Most of his company was destroyed.

Russian tank crews usually fought “closed down,” with their hatches shut, which meant that those within the turret could see little of the battlefield. There were long, incomprehensible halts, the men dozing in their cramped seats, listening to the hiss of static from the radio until they were abruptly ordered to move again. Even experienced Russian tankers found their steel monsters claustrophobic. Ventilation was poor, and crews choked amid the lingering fumes when they had been firing their main armament continuously.

While American and German soldiers were given special leave as a reward for battlefield achievements, in Stalin’s armies cash was offered as an incentive. An anti-tank gun crew received 2,000 roubles for every German tank it destroyed—500 to the gun commander, 500 to the gunlayer and 200 apiece for the rest. Much more useful, a crew which smashed a tank that did not burn were entitled to loot its contents. Lieutenant Vladimir Gormin and his men were thrilled to find a German Mark IV full of cognac and chocolate “and all sorts of other things we didn’t have.” They marvelled to see the leather-covered crew seats, and stripped them to make boots.

In an army in which fear played so large a part, many officers were reluctant to accept orders by telephone. They demanded written instructions, which could be preserved and produced if matters went awry. “Orders were never a matter for discussion,” said Lieutenant Alexandr Sergeev. Even when German artillery was registering on Captain Vasily Krylov’s Katyusha battery, it was unthinkable for him to shift position without a direct order. Individual initiative was discouraged. Savage penalties were introduced to stop drivers abandoning their vehicles under air attack, an almost universal practice in all the armies. When Lieutenant Vasily Filimonenko was recovering from shrapnel wounds in hospital a visiting marshal, Vasilevsky, gave him a cigarette. The young lieutenant was much too frightened of his commander to smoke it.

Except in the extremities of battle, all units assembled at least once a month for Communist Party gatherings, to be harangued by their commissars about current events. Political officers inspired the same mixed feeling as chaplains in the Western armies—some were very good, and notably brave; others were hated and despised for their hypocrisy, inciting men to do their duty to the motherland while themselves remaining at the safest possible distance from the front. Every man and woman in a key position, such as the cipher specialists in Gennady Klimenko’s signals unit, was required to be a Party member: “Ninety per cent of people joined the Party because they knew they had no future unless they did,” Klimenko said sardonically. Major Yury Ryakhovsky was telephoned in his artillery forward observation post on 23 February 1944 by an angry and bewildered divisional commander who demanded: was his regiment in serious trouble, since its batteries were throwing shells over open sights? Ryakhovsky reassured the colonel: the guns were merely firing a
feu de joie
on their political officer’s orders, to celebrate Red Army Day.

It is remarkable that the Soviet command system functioned as well as it did, given the ideological resistance to truth which was fundamental to the Stalinist system. In war, telling the truth is essential not for moral reasons, but because no commander can direct a battle effectively unless his subordinates tell him what is happening: where they are, what resources they possess, whether they have attained or are likely to attain their objectives. Yet since 1917 the Soviet Union had created an edifice of self-deceit unrivalled in human history. The mythology of heroic tractor drivers, coal miners who fulfilled monthly production norms in days, collective farms which produced record harvests, was deemed essential to the self-belief of the state. On the battlefield, in some measure this perversion persisted. Propaganda wove tales of heroes who had performed fantastic and wholly fictitious feats against the fascists. Vladimir Gormin was reprimanded for reporting after an action that his anti-tank unit had failed to destroy any German tanks. A new return, citing two panzers destroyed, was duly composed and dispatched to higher command. “The statistics were always ridiculous. It was pretty hard to tell the truth,” said Gormin.

Yet somehow, through a morass of commissar-driven rhetoric and fantasy, Stalin’s armies hacked a path to victory. Most Soviet intelligence reports of the 1944–45 period are notable for their common sense and frankness. In 1941, the Russians sought to interpret the war in ideological terms. Interrogators addressed captured German soldiers about “the need for class solidarity.” Gradually, these delusions fell away. Von Paulus, Hitler’s vanquished commander at Stalingrad, observed acidly to his captors: “You should know that Germany’s workers and peasants are among the most prominent supporters of Hitler.” Though the enemy continued to be described as “the fascists,” hatred became extended to the German nation: “Those who had recently been brothers in class struggle became beasts who could only be killed,” in the words of a Russian historian. A Red Army nurse, Sofia Kuntsevich, wrote: “I had so much hatred stored up. I thought: what are we going to do to these people when we get to Germany? I wanted to see the mothers who had given birth to these monsters. I thought that they would never be able to look us in the eye.”