Russia at war 1941-1945

As for the 'bag', our policy was to slice it into bits, and deal with each bit separately. In this way we wiped out village after village in which the Germans had entrenched

themselves —it was bloody murder. I'm afraid some of our own villagers perished, too, in the process: that's one of the cruellest aspects of this kind of war.

"Anyway, four or five days before the end, the Germans had only an area of about six miles by seven and a half, with Korsun and Shanderovka as its main points. By this time the whole German 'bag' was under shell-fire, but they still held out, because they were hoping for the miracle to happen—the miracle of Hube's breakthrough from outside. But all these German high hopes rapidly began to fade out. And then Korsun fell, and a tiny area round Shanderovka was all that was left.

"I remember that last fateful night of the 17th of February. A terrible blizzard was blowing. Konev himself was travelling in a tank through the shell-battered 'corridor'. I rode on horseback from one point in the corridor to another, with a dispatch from the General; it was so dark that I could not see the horse's ears. I mention this darkness and this blizzard because they are an important factor in what happened...

"It was during that night, or the evening before, that the encircled Germans, having abandoned all hope of ever being rescued by Hube, decided to make a last desperate

effort to break out.

"Shanderovka is a large Ukrainian village of about 500 houses, and here Stemmermann's troops—he was the last general left in the 'bag', the others having fled—decided to spend their last night and to have a good night's rest. Konev learned about those plans, and he was determined to prevent them at any price from having a rest, and effecting an

organised escape—or any kind of escape—the next morning. 'I know this is a hell of a night, with this blizzard blowing, but we must get night bombers to deal with the

situation,' he said. He was told that, in weather like this, it was practically impossible to do anything with bombers, especially with so small a target as Shanderovka. But Konev said: 'This is important, and I cannot accept these objections as final. I do not want to give any orders to the airmen, but get hold of a Komsomol air unit, and say I want

volunteers for the job'. We got a unit composed mostly of Komsomols; all without

exception volunteered. And this is how it was done. The U-2 played an immensely

important part in this. Visibility was so bad that nothing but a slow low-flying plane like the U-2 could have achieved anything at first. The U-2s located Shanderovka in spite of the blizzard and the darkness. Not for a moment did the Germans expect them. They flew down the whole length of Shanderovka and dropped incendiaries. Many fires were

started. The target was now clearly visible. Very soon afterwards—it was just after 2 a.m.

—the bombers came over and the place was bombed and blasted for the next hour. Our

artillery, which was only three miles away now, also concentrated its fire on

Shanderovka. What made it particularly pleasant for us was our knowledge that the

Germans had chased every inhabitant out of Shanderovka into the steppe. They had

wanted the place all to themselves for their sound night's rest. All the bombing and shelling compelled the Germans to abandon their warm huts, and to clear out.

"All that evening the Germans had been in a kind of hysterical condition. The few remaining cows in the village were slaughtered and eaten with a sort of cannibal frenzy.

When a barrel of pickled cabbage was discovered in one hut, it led to wild scrambles.

Altogether they had been very short of food ever since the encirclement; with the German army in constant retreat, they didn't have large stores anywhere near the front line. So these troops at Korsun had been living mostly by looting the local population; they had done so even before the encirclement.

"They had also had a lot to drink that night, but the fires started by the U-2s, and then the bombing and the shelling sobered them up. Driven out of their warm huts they had to

abandon Shanderovka. They flocked into the ravines near the village, and then took the desperate decision to break through early in the morning. They had almost no tanks left—

they had all been lost and abandoned during the previous days' fighting, and what few tanks they still had now had no petrol. In the last few days the area where they were concentrated was so small that transport planes could no longer bring them anything.

Even before, few of the transport planes reached them, and sometimes the cargoes of

food and petrol and munitions were dropped on our lines.

"So that morning they formed themselves into two marching columns of about 14,000