Tank Rider: Into the Reich with the Red Army

Assault, assault… Many things have been written about this in literature, but an assault can be of many kinds, and the worst one among them is assaulting across an open field. First you walk, then you move forward in short rushes and as you get close to the enemy – you run as fast as you can! And the fear you go through during all this time – bullets whistling in the air, German shells and mines exploding all around. Assaulting an enemy’s position is a horrible thing for a person to do, no one knows his psychological condition during an assault and cannot honestly describe it – it would be a lie or something made up. But regardless of how scared you are, no one will fulfil your orders for you. You just run and think: ‘Will they get me or not?’ But more often you forget this as well, thinking just one thing: ‘Where is the enemy?’ If we encountered the enemy at short distance, say at 50 metres, we would cover this distance in a rush and capture the position. A platoon leader’s task is to lead this rush: ‘Forward run, open fire! Kill Fritzes!’ But if the enemy stopped us by fire at a longer distance, then the company would deploy in a line and we would only start the assault after the company or battalion commander’s order, with tanks or without them. Such an assault is scarier and there are more losses, as sometimes we did not have enough breath to run. The platoon leader’s task in such a situation is not to allow the soldiers to lie down; this is why you run shouting ‘Forward!’. The enemy would normally flee and we would jump in his trenches, barely catching our breath or continued to pursue the enemy, if we had energy for it.

The enemy fled this time too, reluctant to take us on in hand-to-hand fighting, but I decided to run as far as possible from Koretski and we ran almost to the houses of the village, where we were again stopped by intensive machine-gun fire. The platoon was pinned down. Popov was at our right flank with his platoon. There were thick bushes there, while in front of my platoon there was an open field with grass. I was lying there and saw the grass being cut down by the concentrated fire. It was good that we were lying behind a small elevation; it was very important, but some gloomy thoughts were revolving in my head: ‘They can kill me here…’ All of a sudden the machine-gun on our right ceased fire; Popov’s machine-gunners had suppressed it. The second machine-gun went silent soon afterwards. We rushed into the village; the Germans fled from it. It grew silent. Fedor did a great job and helped us out at the right moment, otherwise how long would we have to lie on the ground and listen to the grass growing? The German MG34 machine-gun was a fearsome weapon, we could not lift our heads from the ground when it fired. But thank goodness everything went well and we did not have casualties. Both Fedor Popov and I decided not to go to Colonel Koretski, and neither did he call us; apparently he had left the riverbank and carried on with his business. This is how we accidentally rescued our Corps commander – but that went unnoticed, some forgot about the case while the others simply did not know about it. A runner from the battalion commander found us and passed on the order to come back to the river and advance along it, to a place that had a convenient crossing, where the tanks and the battalion would be crossing.

On 20 April the battalion received new orders to attack in a northwestern direction towards Potsdam (a suburb of Berlin) and Brandenburg, and further towards Ketzin, thus enveloping Berlin from the west and completing the encirclement of the enemy’s troops in that city. That was the Brigade’s and the Corps’ objective. The 4th Guards Tank Army had been advancing due west, to the south of Berlin, towards the Elbe river. But the first Belorussian front under G. K. Zhukov had a hard time capturing Berlin, and Stavka redirected our Army and General Rybalko’s Army towards Berlin, or more precisely against its southern and western outskirts.

The terrain on this new direction of advance was drier; there were fewer natural water obstacles, but there were more villages and tidy German forests. We would not get more than three or four hours of sleep a day. It was already warm in Germany, so we slept not far from the roads in the grass. They fired on our column very frequently, either from woods or from any village that was next to the road. If this fire frustrated our further advance, we would as a rule dismount tanks, engage the enemy and force the enemy to retreat or destroy him. In most cases the Germans fled, leaving small arms, machine-guns and Panzerfausts behind. Such actions slowed down our advance, but on the other hand, we had to free the road from the enemy.