Tank Rider: Into the Reich with the Red Army

The battalion commander and zampolit came to us one sunny day and told us that it was time to stop sleeping and start doing business – train the soldiers. We also had to be on alert, as there were groups of stray Germans roaming the area, who tried to go to the west, having come out of different encirclements. Alex Belyakov took prisoner several stray Fritzes, and some Germans were killed when trying to resist. We started to go to a nearby field for tactical training, but we did that as a pure formality, mostly resting – the replacements had not arrived yet. The real training was still ahead, after the replacements arrived – that was when we had to train the newcomers to fight the war. So far, there were very few of us – the battalion was almost completely wiped out. It was already March and it was nice warm weather in Germany; soon afterwards we received summer uniforms, throwing away the old winter uniforms, which we had worn for over four months, since November 1944. Despite that, we would change underwear more often, mostly we had German silk underwear, as there was plenty of it in abandoned German houses. Nevertheless, on pictures taken at Prague upon my return from the hospital (May 1945) I am dressed in winter woollen trousers and a gimnastyorka tunic. Apparently, I had not changed into summer uniform – I could afford it, but the battalion’s commander tolerated this, knowing my love of warm clothes. Just like many others, in Ober I ordered leather jackboots and a woollen garrison cap for myself, although during the summer we would all normally wear field caps.

Soldiers and sergeants, who had already fought the war in the battalion, started to come back to the battalion from hospitals, and finally we were fully manned. Many soldiers were Russians who had been taken from the USSR into Germany and had worked in Germany on farms or in German industries. We had to train them a lot – we had to teach them how to fight the war. In my platoon I only had soldiers who had fought in the platoons of the company before being wounded. I was glad to see them, they knew me, and I also knew them from previous battles.

My orderly Drozd with his companion showed initiative and brought a cheese (it was of size of a car wheel), chicken and other poultry, spirits, flour, butter, sugar and even two cows. We had around 40 chickens, not to mention the other things. We organized cooking by the soldiers of the company who knew how to cook, and soon most of the soldiers of our depleted company stopped going to the battalion’s kitchen. One would come back from the training for lunch, have a bit of alcohol, a snack and then eat borscht or chicken soup, fried potatoes and roast meat of chicken, followed by tea or stewed fruits and pirogi or doughnuts. We were already sick and tired of the battalion’s kitchen with its schi (cabbage soup) or pork fat soup. In the mornings soldiers had milk with fresh white bread and cheese and something else. I was even scolded by the battalion’s commanders, because my soldiers were not eating anything from the battalion’s kitchen – for some reason they called me, not the company commander or the company’s Sergeant Major, and told me to stop the ‘mess’ and feed soldiers only from the kitchen. After that they told me that though my platoon had experienced soldiers that had seen the war, many of them were to go to other platoons and companies as squad leaders in order to bolster the green soldiers. Then they asked me: ‘Do you know why the soldiers want to be in your platoon?’ I answered, that they would probably want to be under command of battalion’s and company’s veteran. They answered: ‘No, not because of that. The soldiers say that no one gets killed in your platoon!’ After that they showed me statistics, that my platoon did not lose anyone in the previous two or three months, just had wounded that returned to the platoon later. I had not paid attention to the fact that my platoon only had old hands. The soldiers had noticed that and asked to transfer to my platoon. Actually, travelling from the Vistula to the Neisse as a vanguard of the Brigade and not having a single soldier killed was a miracle. I was unable to save my soldiers and myself from enemy fire, I just could not do it, but we escaped without fatalities. It just means that we were all extremely lucky, that’s it. Others were less lucky in the operation. On 19 March the commander of our 6th Guards Lvov Mechanized Corps, Colonel V. F. Orlov, was killed. Colonel N. D. Shuprov, commander of the 10th Guards Tank Corps, was also killed in March; the commanders of the 16th Guards Mechanized Brigade, Colonels L. D. Churilov and Ryvis, were heavily wounded. No one is insured against death at the front.