Tank Rider: Into the Reich with the Red Army

I still carried the PPSh submachine-gun in the Orel and Kamenets-Podolsk operations, but I got tired of carrying it around. In the battles that followed, my weapon was a German Walther pistol that I found in Kamenets-Podolsk; sometimes I carried a second pistol as well – of smaller calibre. I had to run around a lot. A soldier is a soldier, no one wants to die, and so he might lie down and hide, while my task was to get him up. It was easier to run around with a Walther. I was not supposed to fire; after all, it was the soldiers’ job to fire, while my job was to organize them. I loved my Walther. I did not like the Parabellum, as the lock was unreliable. The Walther was a good gun, fired well and precisely, and there was plenty of ammo for it. I would not have the gun in my hand during the battle; I would run around with a small entrenching tool in my hand. I had to use the tool both for its intended purpose, and sometimes to tap the butts of ‘too-long-on-the-ground’ soldiers. Besides that, I always carried a couple of excellent Russian F-1 hand grenades. We did not like the German grenades – one was the size of a chicken’s egg, the other one, with a long handle, was very inconvenient to carry, and both of them were weak. I also had a Finnish knife, but I lost it later.

In action I tried to keep close to the first platoon leader Petr Shakulo and he tried to stick close to me. Normally it was us two who solved the problems in the course of battle. We rarely saw company leader Titov, even more rarely battalion commander Kozienko. I do not recall a single case when we had lunch together with Titov or even had a talk during lunch. I will be honest and say that those battles before 20 March, that is until we reached Skalat, have not remained clear in my memory. Sixty years have passed, and of course I have forgotten many things, but some events are still firmly entrenched in my mind.

From the company commander I received a mission to capture a village – a kolkhoz named after Voroshilov, which was on some high ground. The platoon assaulted the village by crossing a ploughed field, and our feet sank into the soaked soil, we could barely move our feet. We tried to run under fire, but got exhausted very quickly – an overwhelming feeling of indifference set in, an awful apathy; we walked towards the Germans, paying no attention to their fire. We walked silently, but stubbornly – a kind of ‘psychological’ assault. The enemy could not stand this and fled. When we reached the village, there were no traces of Germans. We stayed in that village for several days. For some reason, I do not remember why, I was the only one from the company to stay in the village with my platoon. I had to feed the soldiers, and I talked to the village elder, who used to be the chairman of the kolkhoz before the war. I requested him to provide houses where the soldiers could stay, and food. At first he did not ‘get’ me and brought only potatoes, so I had to ‘explain’ to him that besides potatoes soldiers needed other staples – meat, lard, cereals, sugar (that village had a lot of it). As I stayed with my orderly in the man’s hut, I also warned him that I was to receive better food than the soldiers, not just some soup. Everything was done in the best possible way and the soldiers were fed well.

Well, food and accommodation were taken care of, but I did not forget that we were at war, so I had a defensive position built, just in case, in order to be ready to repel possible enemy attacks. We had little ammo though; for example, I had only some twenty rounds in my submachine-gun, my soldiers had even less, but we had a Maxim heavy machine-gun from Lieutenant Kolosov’s platoon with a full ammo belt (250 rounds). We relied on the machine-gun and antitank rifles from the anti-tank rifle platoon of our battalion that stayed next to us.

On a quiet and sunny day we saw an attacking line of soldiers approaching us. We quickly prepared for action and occupied the trenches. The assaulting infantry opened fire, but did not inflict losses on us. I ordered the soldiers to hold their fire and let them come closer, but when they charged shouting ‘Hurrah’, we realized that these were fellow Soviet warriors. Soldiers of my platoon jumped out of the trenches, also shouted ‘Hurrah’, and waved their hands. The assaulting soldiers realized that we were not Germans, ceased fire, folded the line and walked up to us. We got acquainted and had a smoke together. It was some infantry company, not from our 4th Tank Army. Incidentally, we managed to get some ammo from them.