Ivan’s War (50 page)

April and May are often warm in the Crimea, but in Belarus, more than 500 land-locked miles off to the north, the wind across the marshes is still cold and sour. In 1944, the state that was called Belorussia was a desert; bleak, snow-covered, wasted by two armies and three years of war. Nikolai Belov had been trapped for nearly six months in its landscape of ice and mud. As an officer, he could not complain about his lodgings. He had a cabin lined with local logs, not an oozing dugout; unlike his men, too, Belov was well supplied with food and heating fuel. But the monotony of the Belorussian winter depressed him, the endless pine and fetid swamp suggesting shipwreck. He was bored, apathetic and restive. To pass the time, he tried to read biography, starting with a life of Napoleon. In April 1944, he finished the second book of his war. Its hero was a Georgian general who had fought and died at Borodino. The general’s name was Bagration. If Belov had known what Moscow was planning next for him, he might have smiled at the irony.

Operation Bagration, which he was just about to join, was one of the largest military campaigns of the entire war. Far to the west, the Allied forces under Eisenhower were preparing to launch their own great attack, Overlord, the forcing of the English Channel and the start of a long push through France. But the Soviet campaign to drive the German army out of Belorussia was no less ambitious than the D-Day landings. It was also more costly, and ultimately, more momentous. Planned for the early summer, it would be delayed by endless wrangles over supply and logistics. In the end, with a symmetry that was unintended, it was launched on 22 June, the third anniversary of Hitler’s Barbarossa.
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Like Barbarossa, too, it would tear through the country like a storm. If it had not been for Stalingrad, and then for Kursk, Bagration – which Stalin named for his Georgian fellow countryman – might well have looked like the war’s greatest turning point.

In fact, the operation on the Soviet Union’s western marches virtually escaped the kind of epic treatment that historians would later accord to Stalingrad and Kursk. For one thing, it was overshadowed, in western
Europe and the English-speaking world, by the drama that was taking place at the same time in northern France. Bagration was also swallowed by the triumphs that came after it, as if, in some way, it was no more than a grand prelude. But above all, the army that would fight it, though still the Red Army, could no longer pretend to be the gallant underdog. Before Bagration, Soviet troops were still working to liberate their own country. When it was over, they were poised for conquest, facing westwards across Europe in a manner that – in central European minds at least – raised spectres of an alien horde. The story of the Soviet Union’s patriotic war would be much easier to tell if it could have a happy ending. But what came after Bagration, in keeping with the brutal nature of the times, was not the shapely stuff of fairy tales.

Zhukov and his colleagues had learned a great deal since 1941. The planning of Bagration showed just how much they could achieve on a grand scale and also how far they had moved ahead on issues like co-ordination, secrecy, deception and detailed tactical preparation. The Red Army was also by this stage the best-armed ground-based force in Europe. Among the tons of weaponry that it deployed that spring, there was an average of 320 artillery pieces for every mile of the front line.
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But the background to Operation Bagration was no less tense, no less demanding on a human scale, than the months leading up to Kursk. The miracle was that soldiers who had been in action for months, if not for years, were able to galvanize their minds and bodies to fight on at all.

That winter, most of the men were bewildered, tired and shocked. ‘The patriotic wave of the summer and autumn is receding,’ the hopeful German spies wrote to their masters in Berlin in January 1944. Within the ranks, consensus favoured rapid peace. The soldiers seemed to want no more than just to drive the fascists off their soil. Taking the war abroad, fighting for other lands, was not worth months of hardship or another winter in a trench.
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The older men now longed for home, while new recruits, many of whom were not Russians, tended to lack the sense of purpose of the patriots of 1941. Almost all had reason to complain. Many now marched with injuries that would bedevil them for ever, shortening their lives. The war had changed more than their bodies, too. By this stage it had swamped their thoughts, altered their language, distorted their tastes. It left each of them so exhausted that they could sleep at their guns, in clammy trenches, on the backs of tanks. They could sleep anywhere, in fact, but few were given chance enough. Most front-line troops had scarcely rested since the whirlwind of the previous autumn.

Red Army soldiers on the Central Front sleeping after battle, 1943 

 

For those who survived it, Kursk had been intoxicating, and the onward march to Orel and Kharkov the progress of heroes. There was a pause in September, and sometimes even a few days when front-line divisions were in the same place for long enough to write letters or mend their boots. ‘I’m giving my lice a chance to sleep,’ Belov wrote on 9 September. For the first time in weeks, he sat for an entire afternoon. The fighting had not stopped, but now, as a staff officer, it was Belov’s job to organize it all. He hated the work, longed for an active role and pined for the men’s company and for the next jolt of adrenalin.
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He was already addicted to war, just as he was also repelled and wrecked by it. But he would find plenty of action in the next few months. By early October, Belov’s division had reached the river Sozh, which flows south into the Dnepr through the city of Gomel. ‘We are making war on Belorussian territory,’ he noted. By late November, they were almost on the Dnepr itself. It was progress, it was another step towards triumph, and yet it was still wretched, grinding, hard. ‘We’ll have to spend the winter in the woods and marshes,’ he wrote on 28 November. ‘We began our attack at ten o’clock. In twenty-four hours we’ve made about six kilometres. We’ve got no ammunition or shells. There isn’t enough food. The rear units have fallen behind. A lot of people have absolutely no footwear at all.’
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Belov’s staccato notes sketch the bare outlines of collective misery. The Red Army was preparing to deliver the last blow that it would need to strike 
on its own soil, but many troops were in a poor state for campaigning. The host of men that seemed so alien when it reached Europe, whose vanguard excited such terror, was indeed filthy, stinking and unkempt, but few soldiers would choose to be that way. They did not dwell on their wretchedness, perhaps, because it was by now so much a part of life. By the end of 1943, daily realities like lice, rheumatic aches and unhealed sores were too familiar to note. Few soldiers saw a dentist at the front, though many city-bred young men regretted – for a week or two – that toothpaste was so hard to find. Eventually, like everyone else, they got used to a different kind of mouth. Toothache joined haemorrhoids and conjunctivitis on the list of irritations that soldiers just lived with, as they lived with rats. In March and April, unhealed wounds and bleeding gums announced the first scurvy. No orders from Moscow could produce cabbage when the stores were down to tea and dry buckwheat. The early spring was the worst time, after the long winter and well before the first green crops had grown. And early spring – late March in the Crimea, May in Belarus – was also the season of the mud.

That April, as always, migrating geese skimmed east across the Pripet marshes to their nesting sites. Belov heard his first lark. For three months, however, he and his men had been stuck fast, waiting for orders, digging in ‘like moles’.
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It was a pause, but not a rest. For one thing, they were still obliged to move from time to time, though each location was as uninviting as the last. For another, there were still plenty of enemy shells. ‘Fritz does not let us poke our noses out,’ Belov complained. ‘Everything is shot up, even at night it’s dangerous to move from one building to another.’ It was also wet. ‘Everything is melting,’ he complained. ‘There will be a terrible amount of mud here, and it won’t clear up till June.’
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He was right about that. ‘Time is going slowly again,’ he wrote in April. ‘The days drag endlessly. There’s nothing worse than defence.’
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That spring’s inaction – or rather, the dull round of lectures, drill and training – simply cleared space for the sour thoughts to surface. Whatever followed in the next few months, that late winter and spring were bleak for almost everyone. ‘Enthusiasm for a military advance,’ a German report claimed, ‘is still out of the question.’ Among the men, resentment found its expression in demands for home leave, brawling, and a rash of self-inflicted wounds.
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Belov indulged his depression, a lassitude mixed with resentment at his wasted life. ‘In the last while I’ve been feeling an acute tiredness from the war,’ he wrote in mid-December. ‘It must be because of that, I suppose, that I dream of my family and of my peacetime situation every night. But it’s all useless, of course. The war isn’t going to end this winter. My head aches.’
A month later, his letters home were ‘sour, scrappy’. He had never, he wrote, experienced such apathy.
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Even the news – the liberation of Novgorod and the final relief of Leningrad – evoked no real joy. Ermolenko, stationed in Ukraine to the south, felt much the same. ‘After three years of war,’ he wrote in May, ‘the Soviet soldier is tired, physically and morally.’
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Fatigue like this was too common to excite medical concern. Belov fell ill with a severe cold that spring, but the doctors discharged him after three days in a field clinic. They had to treat too many cases of tuberculosis to waste time on anyone whose lungs were sound. The medical attitude to tribulations of the mind was similarly brisk. Stress, let alone a complicated diagnosis like PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, was as foreign to the Red Army’s medical orderlies as the hysterical indispositions of the bourgeoisie. A generation before, Russia had led the world in its understanding of battle stress, drawing conclusions based on conflict in the Balkans and Far East, but individual trauma, like individual desire, was a concept alien to Stalinism.
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Soldiers were part of a collective; good morale their duty, not their right. Those who complained, malingered or showed signs of cowardice were likely to face punishment – a bullet or the
shtraf
battalion.

The Red Army’s dismissal of psychiatry in this war – or rather, its obliviousness towards it in the field – means that few records about this aspect of morale have survived. Without them, it is easy to forget that these soldiers were prey to the same emotions as their allies. It was the men’s attitude towards such feelings, not the human stress response itself, that varied between armies. Belov would not have thought to call his apathy a sign of battle strain. He would never have dreamed of attributing the suicides and ‘accidents’ that proliferated as the war dragged on to its traumatic burden.
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Unlike their British and American counterparts, the only kind of mental disorder that wartime authorities in the Soviet Union would always recognize was one that had a clear organic cause. The rest were weaknesses, personal failings, something to cover with shame. Unnumbered thousands of soldiers, weak with exhaustion and repeated stress, were executed for desertion in the field.
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Other mental casualties vanished from the records when they were killed; too tired, perhaps, or too confused, to survive yet another round of shells. Psychiatric wounds were real enough, but only extreme cases, including instances where men developed schizophrenia after their call-up, were recognized.
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Estimates vary, but it seems likely that only 100,000 of the Red Army’s 20 million active-service troops would eventually be counted as permanent casualties of the mind.
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