Russia at war 1941-1945

each, and they marched in this way to Lysianka where the two ravines met. Lysianka was beyond our front-line, inside the 'corridor'. The German divisions on the other side were trying to batter their way eastward, but now the 'corridor' was so wide that they hadn't much chance.

"They were a strange sight, these two German columns that tried to break out of the encirclement. Each of them was like an enormous mob. The spearhead and the flanks

were formed by the SS men of the Wallonia Brigade and the Viking Division in their

pearl-grey uniforms. They were in a relatively good state of physique. Then, inside the triangle marched the rabble of the ordinary German infantry, very much more down-at-heel. Right in the middle of this, a small select nucleus was formed by the officers. These also looked relatively well fed. So they moved westward along two parallel ravines. They had started out soon after 4 a.m., while it was still completely dark. We knew the

direction from which they were coming. We had prepared five lines—two lines of

infantry, then a line of artillery, and then two more lines where the tanks and cavalry lay in wait... We let them pass through the first three lines without firing a shot. The Germans, believing that they had dodged us and had now broken through all our

defences, burst into frantic jubilant screaming, firing their pistols and tommy-guns into the air as they marched on. They had now emerged from the ravines and reached open

country.

"Then it happened. It was about six o'clock in the morning. Our tanks and our cavalry suddenly appeared and rushed straight into the thick of the two columns. What happened then is hard to describe. The Germans ran in all directions. And for the next four hours our tanks raced up and down the plain crushing them by the hundred. Our cavalry,

competing with the tanks, chased them through the ravines where it was hard for tanks to pursue them.

[This appears to be one of the few operations so late in the war in which cavalry played any substantial role. Certain cavalry units, such as the famous Cossack Corps under

General Dovator (who was killed on December 19, 1941) had played a part in the Battle of Moscow and in the subsequent Russian counter-offensive, but their losses had been extremely heavy at the time. While propaganda greatly exaggerated the military

importance of the Dovator Corps, General Malinovsky, whom I saw on the Don at the

time of Stalingrad, referred to cavalry as "very beautiful and picturesque, but pretty ineffective in this kind of war—what can a horse do against a German tommy-gun?"]

Most of the time the tanks were not using their guns lest they hit their own cavalry.

Hundreds and hundreds of cavalry were hacking at them with their sabres, and massacred the Fritzes as no one had ever been massacred by cavalry before. There was no time to take prisoners. It was a kind of carnage that nothing could stop till it was all over. In a small area over 20,000 Germans were killed. I had been in Stalingrad; but never had I seen such concentrated slaughter as in the fields and ravines of that small bit of country.

By 9 a.m. it was all over. 8,000 prisoners surrendered that day and during the next few days. Nearly all of them had run a long distance away from the main scene of the

slaughter; they had been hiding in woods and ravines. "Three days later at Djurzhantsy we found the body of General Stemmermann. Soon afterwards General Konev had a

good laugh when the German radio announced, with all sorts of details, how Hitler had personally handed him a high decoration. For General Stemmermann was dead, right

enough. I saw his body as it lay there. Our people had laid him out on a rough wooden table in a barn. There he lay, complete with his orders and medals. He was a little old man, with grey hair; he must have been a Corpsstudent [Member of a German students'

duelling association.] in his young days, judging from the big sabre scar on one cheek.

For a moment we wondered whether it wasn't all a. fake; perhaps an ordinary soldier had been dressed up in a general's uniform. But all Stemmermann's papers were found on the body. They might have faked all the obvious papers, but they could scarcely have had the idea of forging a Black Forest gun licence, complete with the man's picture, and issued in 1939... We buried him decently. We can afford to bury a general decently. The rest were dumped in holes in the ground; if we started making individual graves—we don't do that even for our own people—we would have needed an army of grave-diggers at Korsun...

And there was no time to waste. The general is very particular about corpses—they must be cleared away in two days in summer, in three days in winter... But dead generals aren't all that frequent, so we could give him a proper burial. Anyway, he was the only general there with any guts. All the rest of them had beat it by plane.

"Had he committed suicide?" I asked.