Tank Rider: Into the Reich with the Red Army

Anything could happen at the front. One day those of us on the three tanks travelled too far during the night and they ordered us by radio to stop and wait for the main body of the Brigade. Some soldiers went to look for food in the village and they found some. I had excellent men, they could find anything anywhere! They brought two or three containers of milk and white bread that was still warm. We had not seen white bread and milk for a long time, and had an enjoyable meal. We were sitting in the house, enjoying the warmth. All of a sudden the door opened and a Senior Lieutenant walked in. I looked at him and saw something familiar in his face. The guy was smiling with a broad smile and asked us: ‘You have something to eat, Slavs? I said: ‘Sit down, Muscovite, but we have nothing except bread and milk.’ He replied: ‘How do you know that I am from Moscow?’ I did not want to tease him and answered that he was a teacher of craftsmanship in the 1st Soviet School, which was later renamed in the 341st school, and used to be the school’s Komsorg. I studied in that school from 1931. He said that everything was right and we even recalled common acquaintances. Everyone was amazed. Could it really happen that, so far from Moscow, two men who knew each other met in the fourth year of the war. Such things also happen generally in life, not just in war. And again we could not stay there for long – we had to move forward, only forward.

In the night of 24 January we attacked the town of Kratoshin straight off from the march. We travelled through the town quickly, and there was no serious opposition from the Germans; they just fired on us at several places. They were afraid to face our tanks with tank riders. In Poland we would often travel through small settlements quickly, without dismounting tanks, firing from the tanks and throwing the enemy out of our way. On 25 January we captured the town of Gernstadt in a battle.

It was good that the enemy’s air force was not there, and we could march both during day and night. As a rule, during the night we would stop once for two or three hours. We tried to get into houses, into a warm place. There were almost no stops during the day, and even if we had them, breaks were short, no more than one hour. It was rare that we stopped for a long time to warm the soldiers. We only had food twice a day – morning and evening; if the kitchen was there, the food was hot. Thus, in order not to be hungry during the day, we made do with trophies – mostly German tinned meat and hard tack. Sometimes we saw small loaves of black bread in plastic; the bread was not too hard, but it was tasteless. We did not really like it, but we ate it anyway. Our Russian bread would also freeze in our back-packs in the frost, if you did not eat it on time.

We stayed in a large village almost the whole night. Our company was housed in the former village school. According to practice, we appointed guards and dropped to the floor. I was not even hungry, like most other soldiers – we were almost dead from exhaustion. In the morning, after breakfast (our field kitchen was still with us) we walked up to the tanks to mount them, and I saw a carcass of a pig on our tank. I asked Savkin: ‘What is this, are you looting the civilians?’ He swore by God that it was not our pig, but the tankers’. To hell with that pig, I thought, if the tankers took it. There were no owners anyway.

Almost all day long we moved on without a battle. Although we were in the German rear, there were no German troops, and we did not hear a single shot during the day. Such days were rare and we were happy, especially given the fact that the enemy’s air force was not there either. We had suffered losses in previous battles from the German air force, and although the losses were insignificant, the air force had delayed our advance. Finally we stopped, and parked our tanks by the walls of houses so that they would look like parts of huts and would not be so visible from the air. A tank crew officer walked up to me and said: ‘Bessonov, the spirit is mine, the pig is yours!’ And he pointed at the water tank that was filled with spirit. I answered: ‘Isn’t it your pig, as Savkin told me?’ The tanker replied: ‘Don’t be angry with the men. They know you and they know that you would not allow this, so they said that the pig belonged to us.’