“Vera, you’re drenched in blood!” her friend exclaimed in horror. Vera Barakina looked down and saw that her greatcoat was in shreds below the waist and soaked in blood. Her boots were full of blood too. She felt dizzy.
In the course of several months on the Karelian Front, a static engagement on former Finnish territory, Vera had experienced no major battles or severe bombardments.441 The battles began for her only in January, on the Third Ukrainian Front when she was in Hungary. She believed that, in the advance to the Danube, she had “taken out” at least twenty people. The infantry regiment with which the snipers were advancing suffered heavily: by the time it crossed the Danube it was down to about a quarter of its strength.
The river there was broad but shallow, and the girls walked through it up to their waists in icy water, with both hands raised above their heads holding their rifles. The German fire was not heavy and as she emerged on to the other bank Vera was thinking only about how and when she would be able to dry out her wet clothing and boots at least a little. The severe bombardment began only when they reached the shore. Their commander died immediately, and a sniper called Sasha had a finger severed by shrapnel. Some of those around her fell, and the others, crouching down, ran forwards, Vera among them. She was quite unaware of having been wounded until they were a considerable distance from the river and assembled at the line of the German trenches and one of the girls suddenly asked her, horrified, “Vera, what’s that?” “What?” “How have you kept going?” Her friends quickly pulled off the shredded greatcoat, bandaged her over her clothes, and carried her on the greatcoat to the field hospital. There they “undressed me and started poking”, giving her alcohol as an anaesthetic. Thankfully, her stomach wound turned out to be fairly superficial: the shrapnel had first struck a button on her coat, her “saviour-button” as she dubbed it. After a period lying on her back, Vera Barakina returned to her unit and fought on until the victory, although not as a sniper. Her Anatoly, who the preceding winter had been seriously crippled, wrote to her from hospital that he was waiting for her. Vera wanted only for the war to be over, so she could get back home to him. He was one of very few infantry lieutenants fortunate enough to survive the war. Most of those that did had, like him, been invalided out after being seriously wounded. He was also lucky to have escaped the scourge that pitilessly scythed down the Soviet Army as they advanced through Europe: methyl alcohol. Methyl alcohol, or methanol, was used for a wide range of technical purposes; it was also highly dangerous if ingested. A person who drank it would begin to suffer visual impairment, which could lead to blindness, vomiting and convulsions. If he was lucky he might only be disabled for life, but it was more likely that, after imbibing even very small doses of this alcohol, he would suffer an excruciating death.
Accidents caused by drinking alcohol unfit for consumption occurred both before and after the war. In 1944 and 1945, however, when Soviet troops were fighting on foreign soil, and when among the goods they captured there were so many carboys – and sometimes whole railway tanks – containing unknown liquids, such instances assumed epidemic proportions. Entire units rendered themselves unfit for duty. The orders from above became more and more stern, and the penalties could see you brought before a tribunal that had authority to pronounce the death sentence. The official line was that it was prohibited for troops to consume captured food and drink on the grounds that they might have been poisoned by the Germans. While it is not impossible that there really were cases of that, in practice, almost 100 per cent of poisonings were caused by methyl alcohol. Despite such orders being issued on all fronts, and severe punishment of those who disobeyed them, there was only an insignificant improvement in the situation by May 1945. In a bulletin from the quartermaster service of the First Byelorussian Front on 6 May 1945, instances of poisoning are said still to be on a massive scale. For example, “In 3 Assault Army, the abuse of methyl (wood) alcohol resulted in the poisoning of 251 persons, causing 65 fatalities. In 49 Army, 119 persons were poisoned after drinking spiritous fluids, of whom 100 died. In 46 Army and 5 Artillery Division, 67 service personnel were poisoned after drinking captured fluids, 46 of whom died. The organisers (of the booze-up) were the officers.”442
But Russian men, as the Russian saying goes, will drink any liquid that is flammable. Even the girls were convinced that in wartime, especially in cold temperatures, it would be hard to get by without alcohol. They did not spurn their “hundred grams”. In Klava Loginova’s platoon the commander, Anya Matokh, insisted the girls should take a couple of sips, “twenty grams”, before going out to hunt in order to keep warm, especially in winter. The remainder Anya kept faithfully, to be used when they came back from their positions for rubbing frozen hands and feet. In the summer they swapped their hundred grams with the men in return for chocolate.443
“Did my Anatoly drink it?” was the first thing Vera Barakina asked the soldiers in his wagon when she ran there during a stop. The moment it halted, she heard that many in his company had been struck down. The infantry division had been redeployed from the Karelian Front, up near Finland, all the way to the Third Ukrainian Front, and its troops had whiled away the endless journey as best they could. For the men, as always, that meant doing everything conceivable and inconceivable to get hold of alcohol. The soldier pointed to Anatoly, who was snoring on straw. Vera thought he seemed all right. She gave him a shake but, after muttering something, he fell asleep again.
She heard from the soldiers that they had all got drunk after an older sergeant had given them alcohol he had obtained somewhere. Both soldiers and officers suffered, and several dead bodies were unloaded from the train. A dozen others were at death’s door. The more cautious ones drank a little, sensed there was something wrong and did not continue. Anatoly was lucky. One of the soldiers told Vera that, after a couple of sips, he had been sick and that had saved him.
*
In March 1945, Lida Bakieva, the snipers’ deputy platoon commander, was invited to a gathering of the army’s best soldiers. Such gatherings had become popular from 1942 onwards and were organised for different types of troops, different military specialities or, like this one, just for outstanding soldiers. As a decorated sniper with a tally of over seventy kills to her name, Lida unquestionably came into that category.
The event was a considerable distance away in East Prussia. Lida first walked, then got a ride in a horse-drawn cart, and for the last part of the journey she sat in the back of a truck covered with tarpaulin with other soldiers on their way to the rally, and a colonel who was on his way home after being wounded. They also had with them a cinematographic technician, who was being sent to film the proceedings. It was terribly cold, and the colonel, who was bringing felt boots home for his daughter, took pity on her. “While we are on our way, my dear, put on these boots,” he said. Lida changed her footwear and put her own boots next to the cinematographic equipment. A German aircraft suddenly appeared and began firing at them. In his haste to escape the strafing, the driver took an ill-starred turning in the dark and the truck overturned. Lida groped in the gloom for her boots. When she and the colonel arrived on foot in the town where the meeting was being held, she realised that one of the boots she had put on in the confusion following the crash, a man’s size 43, belonged to the truck driver. She managed to find him, to his great joy, because he was finding her own, far smaller, boot highly unsatisfactory.
At the rally, Lida was presented with a brand new sniper’s rifle. But why would she need a new one when the old one had been zeroed in perfectly? Lida had no wish to part with a rifle she had had since sniper school. For a couple of weeks she dragged two rifles around, before presenting the new one to her sergeant.
Lida Bakieva raised her tally during the siege of the fortress at Breslau. Her unit was there from February 1945 until the end of the war. They managed to take Breslau only at the beginning of May, after an almost three-month siege. Lida continued shooting for decades after the war and it became her favourite sport. She took part in competitions and travelled all over the U.S.S.R. with various teams, including Kazakhstan.444
*
By early April, the Second Byelorussian Front had succeeded in eliminating the Heiligenbeil Cauldron, where the German 4th Army had been surrounded on the Balga Peninsula. This was the last German stronghold before Köningsberg. On 6 April troops of the Third Byelorussian Front, who were keeping Königsberg encircled, went on the offensive. The assault began with a huge artillery bombardment. Colonel General Kuzma Galitsky recalled, “The earth shook from the roar of the cannons. A solid wall of exploding shells came down on enemy positions along the entire front of the breakthrough. The city was shrouded in thick smoke, dust and fire . . . Through a brown haze you could see our heavy shells demolishing the earthworks covering the defences of forts, and sending wooden beams and lumps of concrete, rocks and the twisted wreckage of military equipment flying into the air. Katyusha missiles roared over our heads.”445 At the beginning of the assault bad weather prevented Soviet aircraft from playing a full part, but in the following days “Ilyushin-2 ground attack aircraft, ‘The Black Death’”, were constantly overhead.446 The city garrison and the Volkssturm divisions (a German national militia established during the last months of the Second World War, largely made up of old men and young boys barely into their teens) cut off in Königsberg fought to the last: there was no line of retreat. The townspeople and refugees trapped in the city hid in cellars. Overcoming one line of defence after another, the Russians fought their way to the fortress.
Many official Soviet sources claim the city was taken with minor losses on the Soviet side, but eyewitness accounts do not bear this out. First Lieutenant Anna Saikina of the medical service, an operational dressing nurse in a field hospital in the forest five kilometres from Königsberg, never forgot the “unending stream of the wounded”. When she got into the city after the assault, she was struck by the “unfamiliar Gothic architecture” and, despite the huge destruction, the “perfect order and cleanliness to be seen in places that remained intact”.447 She was taken aback by German neatness.
This pronounced neatness and thoroughness, as well as the manifestly robust German economy, evoked not jealousy in the troops, but bafflement and rage – just as it had elsewhere in East Prussia. The commander of an infantry platoon, twenty-year-old Nikolai Chernyshev, related how after the battle he and his soldiers ran from the streets into empty apartments and “from inertia smashed everything to pieces with rifle fire: windows, mirrors, crockery”. The soldiers’ hands were shaking and, by making mayhem, they “let loose their tension”. In those days, the young sergeant saw no point in “taking ordinary soldiers prisoner: they could give us zero information.”448 The only prisoners worth having were staff officers who had been captured in the city’s fort. It is not difficult to infer that many German soldiers of no value as squealers ended up in the mass graves at Königsberg.
Some way from the city, 31 Army was advancing on the Frisches Haff lagoon. The weather was bad on those days, the sea rough, the sky overcast, and rain alternated with snow. The German troops that were desperately fighting here were being pushed towards the Baltic Sea. Their situation was desperate, the only hope being to cross the Frisches Haff bay to a narrow spit of land, the Frische Nehrung, and make their way to Danzig. However, the spit had already been cut off from the other side, and this narrow strip of land was packed with frantic troops and refugees. Many of them were doomed.
People had begun to flee along the spit in January when the Red Army entered Prussia. Countless people died without reaching the coast – from cold and hunger on the way, the shelling, or at the hands of the pursuing Russian soldiers. How many more died that winter on the ice of the lagoon from bombing, falling through the ice, or collapsing and freezing to death! Even those fortunate enough to reach Danzig were not yet out of danger: Soviet submarines were waiting for vessels leaving the port. The most appalling tragedy happened on 16 April 1945 when, around midnight, the submarine L-3, under the command of Captain Vladimir Konovalov, sank the German transport ship Goya with 7,200 people, including 6,000 refugees, on board.449 Fewer than 200 people were rescued.
Many years after the war, Klava Loginova and Anya Mulatova learned that they had been taking part in the Königsberg offensive quite close to each other, only in different divisions. Anya’s unit had reached the lagoon when their commander called several girls, including Anya, and ordered them, while there was a lull in the fighting, to run to the quartermaster platoon for more magazines for the assault rifles. They went off but were soon lost, having no idea where the quartermaster platoon was. Fierce shelling began, and Anya became separated from the others. She decided to shelter behind the wall of a ruined house and wait for the bombardment to finish before continuing the search or going back. She heard cries to her right, and turned to see a wounded soldier lying in a swamp across the road from her. He was crying out in terrible pain for help, but the firing was too intense for Anya to get to him. She decided she would go over as soon as it was safe, but the wounded man fell silent. “He must have died,” she thought. She stood there and cried, not so much from fear, although the situation was certainly frightening, but because someone had been in pain so close to her and had now, apparently, died without her being able to help him. “Oh, Mum, how they are hurting us here!” she murmured repeatedly, weeping.
The shelling stopped and she ran back to the lagoon. Where were Tasya and the other girls from her platoon? Anya Mulatova had no idea, but it did not matter. There was no one she recognised around her. Infantry soldiers were running alongside so she joined them.
The beach was littered with wrecked and abandoned army equipment, and German soldiers whose only retreat was into the sea. The Germans threw themselves in desperation into the icy water to swim out to the spit, or perhaps just to drown – a fate considered preferable to capture. Anya saw one blow himself up with a hand grenade.450
When Klava Loginova’s regiment reached the lagoon, a major battle was raging. As often happened, when wounded soldiers saw the girls they called to them, “Nurse, help!” Klava and Olga could hardly start explaining that they were not nurses. Together they bandaged wounds and dragged the injured to safety. There was no sign of any other nurses or orderlies. When Klava later watched films about the war where a nurse pulls the wounded from a battlefield, she reflected she had never herself seen one running side by side with the soldiers into combat and helping them after they fell.
They would drag another injured soldier to safety and run on. When the bombardment was heavy, they would fall to the ground and crawl. But where were the troops from their own regiment? Under fire, Klava and Olga realised that they recognised none of the soldiers around them. In front were bushes and pits, and further on up a mound were the German trenches and bunkers. The German fire was heavy and the regiment they were now with had seen its headlong progress halted when it reached the line of trenches near the sea. There had been many wounded and the others lay down, in no hurry to launch a new attack.
Klava and Olga lay there, nudging each other in the ribs and wondering whether to stand up or not. In the end, Klava decided: “Olya, let’s go! If we get killed, too bad, but the men will follow us.” They did not get up at once, first letting the artillery do its job. Then the commander again called them to attack. Klava and Olga stood and saw that the soldiers behind them had got up too. As they advanced they came to a bunker, and a soldier ran to them and said, “There’s people crying out in there!” Soldiers with rifles went and opened it, to find wounded German soldiers. These wounded Germans had not been firing at them and, at least while Klava was there, they remained unharmed. The soldiers drove out the walking wounded: “Schnell, schnell!” A young, ginger-haired German soldier, lightly wounded, thin faced, came over to Klava. He raised his hand in the communist Rot Front salute and smiled at her anxiously, saying “Sniper gut, gut!” He was right to be afraid: Russians had lost faith in the international solidarity of the working class very early on in the war. The German pointed and, as best he could, explained there was a store of some kind, and chocolate there. The soldiers immediately made off in that direction, but Klava and Olga, more disciplined, shouted to them to stop. “Where are you going? There are mines everywhere!” The ginger-haired German shook his head: “Mines – nein!” and went into the store himself. He pulled out a big box of chocolate for the girls and opened it: “Bitte!” Needless to say, Klava and Olga could not take the box with them, and their knapsacks were in the baggage train, so they just stuffed their pockets with presents for the other girls.
The battle ended, the wounded were collected, and the soldiers told the girls the commander wanted to know which unit they were from. They had ended up in 608 Regiment “and we don’t have any girls,” the officer explained. He asked who their battalion commander was. They told him and the officer phoned through to their headquarters, where people were worrying about them. It was night, but the commander of 608 Regiment instructed an orderly to escort the girls back to their regiment, and radioed that they should be put forward for an award. Very proud of themselves, they went back, only to be met with a torrent of abuse from the battalion commander. “What if the Germans had got you?” he yelled. Klava knew why he was so concerned about them, and about her. Battalion Commander Mikhail Denishchev had a soft spot for Klava that he made no attempt to hide. She liked him too: he seemed to her very grown-up and mature. He was a sturdy, good-looking man with brown hair and hazel eyes. Just as importantly, he was also a courageous commander.
The girls spent the night in a small room in a house. They were stunned by the decor and furnishings. This was real luxury. For the first time in her life, Klava encountered down pillows and duvets. They opened the wardrobes and admired the beautiful long dresses hanging there. The next day, the unit was shown round Königsberg. The city was badly damaged, and Klava remembered only the church, which had somehow remained untouched.
After the capture of Königsberg their division was taken by train to the First Ukrainian Front, and on the way Battalion Commander Denishchev continued to press his suit. “Well,” he said, “Shall we get married?” Klava did not entirely trust him; there were plenty of men eager to take advantage of young girls. They might register their relationship, only for it then to transpire that he had a wife and family in the rear. But Mikhail, when Klava asked him directly whether he was already married, only laughed. “No,” he said, “I had no time to get married before the war. I have only my mother in Nizhny Novgorod.” “Right. I’ll think about it,” Klava replied.451
Mikhail was no longer alive when, still at the front, Klava was awarded a medal “For Valour”. She had to wait for the Order of Glory, Third Class – for setting an example and getting those soldiers to attack – until after the war. When she met Olga later on, Klava heard that she too had been awarded the Order of Glory.