Tank Rider: Into the Reich with the Red Army

They brought the battalion’s artillery to us – two 57 mm guns that the crews man-handled forwards. They put their guns behind the company, in a small forest. Then an SU-85 self-propelled gun arrived; apparently it was from the Corps’ armour regiment, but I did not know the guys in its crew. However, the gun did not manage to fire a single shot, as a spare fuel tank on its back part caught fire. The vehicle could have been saved by merely dumping the fuel tank on the ground, but the gun crew did not even try to do it. Our battalion’s artillery crews fired several rounds on targets in the town and even knocked something out. I was observing the enemy when a mine exploded on the breastwork of my foxhole and the edge of the foxhole even collapsed. I was buried in it, and who knows where the mine splinters flew. Everything was all right, although the mine fell only a foot short of the foxhole. I was not killed – again I was lucky, which happened time and again in that war. My orderly Drozd, who had been in another foxhole, crawled up to me, dug me out, checked if I was wounded by splinters and told me that I was lucky. I had bells ringing in my head for several days, but later the ringing disappeared.

In this manner we spent almost the whole day. Finally, in the late afternoon our artillery opened heavy fire and the Katyushas fired several salvos. We also received an order to go into action. I got my company up and the neighbouring units also joined our assault. The enemy did not fire so intensively any more, and under the cover of our artillery we quickly reached the outskirts of the place. It was already growing dark. We quickly walked through the town and reached the opposite side of it; the enemy was retreating, returning fire at us. It was hard to walk in the streets, as they were barricaded with heaps of roof tiling that fell from the roofs. Artillery and mortar crews did a great job, the enemy suffered significant losses. They should have done this a long time before, then we would not have had to lie the whole day hungry in a swamp under enemy fire.

The soldiers, excited by the battle, shared their joys. We felt like having a snack, but the ‘Mount the tanks!’ order came and we moved on forward to finish off the enemy. A dark night fell. We had a snack with what we had managed to grab from the houses. There was no time to relax, we had been delayed in front of Zauhvitz, but after we captured it, the roads to west and north-west were open.

The night march from Zauhvitz went well, we just drove through some villages without dismounting tanks, sometimes opening fire from the tanks, and sometimes merely kicking the Germans out of our way, and rushed forward, without delaying and engaging the enemy.

Before that, from 22 to 24 April, the Brigade and the battalion captured Spremberg, Velzov and other towns. In late April the Brigade captured Calau, Luckau, Dahme, Belzig, Luckenwalde, Lehnin, Brandenburg, Ketzin and Potsdam in three or four days.