On 24 July 1942 the tanks were already standing in well-camouflaged positions on the southern outskirts of Kalach-on-the-Don. The Germans were constantly bombing the 28th Tank Corps’ area with impunity; the solitary flak battery couldn’t cover all the troops and the main crossing over the Don simultaneously. Not a single friendly fighter appeared in the sky in July-August, we saw only U-2s (the soldiers called them ‘crop dusters’) in the air [the U-2 was an obsolete biplane used mostly for communications and reconnaissance in the daytime]. The Germans were dropping mocking leaflets: ‘Yesterday Obergefreiter Hans Miiller downed a Russian plane with a brick.’ We learned from passing units that our forces were retreating across the entire front, that Rostov-on-Don had just been abandoned, and again leaflets with Goebbels’ verses were raining down on us from the skies: ‘Rostov’s on the Don, Saratov’s on the Volga, I’m not gonna catch you – you’re too long-legged.’ The scoundrels were jeering at us, unaware of the retribution lying in wait for them.
So as to prevent the Germans from capturing the main crossing within the great bend of the Don River and thereby create a bridgehead close to Stalingrad, the Red Army High Command decided to strike a powerful counter-blow along the right [west] bank of the Don to the north. In a matter of days, the 1st Tank Army under the command of Major General of Artillery Moskalenko, which included our 158th Tank Brigade as well, had been formed in early July on the basis of the 38th Army.
On the morning of 25 July our troops went on the offensive. Our tank brigade, in full combat-readiness, advanced a kilometre and a half behind the other combat formations of the 28th Tank Corps and didn’t enter combat. Small burial details followed us, not having enough time to dig common graves to bury all the dead. The July heat was doing its work – there was the stench of rotting corpses. It was stuffy in the turret even with operating ventilation fans and opened hatch covers; only while moving did the engine fan gently blow through the fighting compartment. The men were tormented with thirst, and at every suitable opportunity the crew would re-fill their canteens with cold water. The nerves of everyone were strained to the limit! For the second day in a row we’d only been watching through binoculars and optical instruments as our comrades fought the enemy on the flat Don steppe! We were all waiting for our turn to engage the foe! After all, none of us had tasted battle yet! In order to give the men more training and somehow keep them occupied, I ordered: Search for targets and report to the entire crew over the intercom!’
Our forces suffered heavy losses, but failed to capture the village of Lozhki and the sovkhoz [State Farm].1 On the morning of 27 July we heard the voice of our brigade commander in our earphones: ‘Burya [Storm] 333!’ The signal for the attack! A series of green flares soared into the sky! Our engine roared, and our KV moved out towards the enemy. Two tank brigades, a rifle regiment, a mechanized brigade and our own heavy tank brigade, advancing in the centre of the battle formation, were involved in the attack. It hadn’t yet grown light –that was why we weren’t being bombed, and the tanks were slowly moving to the north, fearing minefields. To the left of us, about 30 metres distant, were the machines of platoon commander Matvey Serov and Misha Marder; Lieutenant Nazarov’s tank advanced on the right. We hadn’t opened fire yet, trying to surprise the enemy with our attack. The rifle regiment was advancing behind us, the men holding their rifles at the ready. There was still about a kilometre and a half until we reached the enemy positions, it was beginning to grow lighter, and we now could make out the outlines of trees and the buildings of the sovkhoz. The Germans hadn’t opened fire yet either, apparently conserving ammunition.2 The crews were anxiously anticipating action. Everyone wanted to strike the enemy more quickly, to end the agonizing uncertainty – for it is true, there is nothing worse than waiting! The guys eagerly pressed themselves against the observation devices, the gunlayer Vitya Belov and the loader Misha Tvorogov lit up goat legs’ [hand-rolled cigarettes] – how quickly they had learned from the old guys’ how to roll a cigarette deftly around the little finger. The smell of makhorka [cheap and rough tobacco] drifted through-out the machine.
There was now about a kilometre between us and the enemy, and the Germans, having discerned that tanks in large numbers were advancing towards them, opened a storm of fire. The German fire was extremely accurate! One shell exploded about 20 metres ahead of our tank. Almost immediately a second shell glanced off our left side; our 47-ton vehicle rocked and the flame of the explosion illuminated the fighting compartment – it seemed that the tank was ablaze! But the crewmen wouldn’t budge from their places; no one wanted to reveal that he’d been scared, and everyone was anxiously waiting for my order. I saw the flash of the gunshot but failed to spot the well-concealed gun and for this reason I ordered the driver: ‘Tolya! Forward with zigzags!’ Then to the gunlayer and the radio operator: Viktor, Nikolay! At the gunners, from the machine guns! Fire!’
Map 1. The attack of Krysov’s platoon of KV-1 tanks, 25 July 1942, near the X let Oktyabrya State Farm.
The tanks accelerated and began to rumble across the field, making sharp manoeuvres and not letting the enemy gunlayers fix their sights on us. Shell strikes continued glancing off the right and left sides, doing no serious damage to the hull – the machine kept rushing towards the enemy guns! All our tanks fired their main guns and machine guns on the move and during short halts. The Germans began to feel not quite comfortable at the sight of the oncoming wave of tanks, and the accuracy of their fire dropped significantly. About 500 metres remained until the village, and I ordered the crews: ‘Tolya, stop beyond the hill! Viktor! There’s a gun just under the tree! Anti-personnel shell, sight mark 6! Fire!’
‘Anti-personnel ready!’ the gunlayer replied. The shell exploded a bit in front of the target. I made a correction: Sight mark 7! Fire!’ The fascist gun fell silent, and, obviously, for good!
‘Tolya! With zigzags, at full speed! Forward!’
In order to take a good look around, I quickly spun the periscope. Two tanks were burning to the right. Platoon commander Serov’s tank to my left was motionless; I guessed that it had struck a mine, because the commander had thrown open a hatch and tossed a smoke grenade out in front of the tank, to give the appearance that the tank was ablaze. Misha Marder’s tank, like our own, was weaving at full speed towards the enemy position. A second gun concealed in a shack was now firing at our tank. The Germans managed to hit us three times before we reached the enemy trenches, but the shells hadn’t penetrated the armour. One shell struck the spare 90-litre oil drum, which was clamped onto one side. A flame engulfed the whole left part of the motor-transmission compartment.
‘Tolya, crush the gun!’ I ordered the driver as I grabbed the fire extinguisher and, leaning out of the hatch, put out the fire. Just 50 metres remained to the shack with the gun! Viktor, reverse the turret!’ I ordered the gunlayer.
Less than a minute later, the tank heavily rocked, and we could hear the loud sound of grinding metal from beneath the tank. Scattering logs and planks, our tank rammed through the shack.
‘Tolya! Reverse!’ I ordered the driver. ‘Let’s give cover to the platoon commander!’
Our infantry was already going into a bayonet assault, shouting ‘Urra-a-h!’ The Germans faltered and, declining hand-to-hand combat with bayonets, began to pull back to the northern outskirts of the village under covering machine-gun fire through their communication trenches, hurling hand grenades as they went. I will remember for the rest of my life the image of our attacking wave of riflemen as it advanced, their bayonets glittering dully in the rays of the morning sun. There were also submachine-gunners among the attacking infantry; they fired short bursts at the enemy trenches as they approached them. When our infantry reached the enemy position, only three soldiers clambered out of the trench with upraised hands.
Just as the fighting subsided, platoon commander Serov’s tank pulled up alongside ours. Indeed they had struck a mine, but had quickly repaired the broken track. Meanwhile, the enemy artillery barrage was intensifying. Luftwaffe aircraft also appeared overhead. From a water tower, three enemy machine guns fired directly on our platoon. Serov gave the command to wipe them out. Each of us fired an armour-piercing round and the machine guns fell silent.
Soon the enemy planes ceased their bombing, as our troops had closed upon the enemy defence line. The corps’ command, regrouping, directed our brigade towards the sovkhoz farm where the main enemy panzer group was positioned, while the 55th Tank Brigade together with a machine-gun battalion began to encircle the sovkhoz from the east. The ensuing combat was fierce, but fleeting. The Germans had light Panzer III tanks and medium Panzer IV tanks; we had KV and T-34 tanks, though one-third of all our tanks were light T-70s – the latter could operate only against infantry and artillery.
A Panzer IV tank quickly moved in our direction. ‘Armour-piercing! At the tank in line with the chimney! Continuous aim! From a short halt! Fire!’ I simultaneously ordered the loader, the gunlayer and the driver.
‘Armour-piercing’s ready!’ Misha reported.
‘Lane!’ [slang term for a brief halt for firing from level ground] Tolya yelled out and stopped the tank.
‘Shot!’ the gunlayer reported and pressed the trigger.
The German gunlayer beat us to the punch by just a fraction of a second, and his shell struck the front of our tank. The machine shuddered; a bright flash illuminated the fighting compartment. Fortunately, the tank had 105mm of frontal hull armour – otherwise we would have burned out in a blue flame! However, the German tank blazed up after the hit by our shell! Serov’s crew set fire to a tank too. Misha Marder made short work of an armoured personnel carrier. Meanwhile our infantry was sweeping through the sovkhoz settlement, taking one building after another. Then, without letting the enemy regain its senses, they captured Lozhki with a resolute attack.
On 28 July savage fighting developed near the village of Lipologovo. A major enemy grouping had concentrated here, which was moreover occupying very advantageous positions on a range of small hillocks divided by deep ravines impassable for tanks. The capture of this line was achieved, but only with heavy losses. About thirty tanks remained operational in the corps; our brigade also lost half its strength. The 28th Tank Corps command took extraordinary measures: a large batch of replacement tanks arrived together with a rifle division and two regiments of Katyusha rocket-launchers. The corps’ units spent 29 July repulsing several counter-attacks, while preparing to launch a counter-blow.
Two regimental volleys of Katyusha rockets signalled the resumption of the advance. Many crews for the first time were seeing the Katyusha’s fire, and our admiration for this deadly whirlwind flying towards the enemy knew no limits! Leaving behind all their equipment, the Germans rushed for shelter, which we didn’t hesitate to exploit. Rushing forward, we overran a German tank park without any resistance and captured about thirty intact Panzer IV tanks – the machines were standing without any crews and with working engines! We also captured many anti-tank guns, mortars, armoured personnel carriers and other vehicles. We hauled all of this equipment back to Lozhki.
Suddenly pulling themselves back together, the enemy opened strong artillery and mortar fire from the second and the third line of defence. Junker aircraft also joined in: arriving in waves of twenty to thirty aircraft each, they began to pounce on our formations. The fighting on the Lipologovo line continued for another entire week, up until 5 August 1943. On that day the 1st Tank Army was dissolved: it had carried out its task of not allowing the enemy to advance through the bulge of the Don River to Kalach-on-the-Don.
By now, the Red Army was on retreat across the entire front. Throughout the rest of the summer and autumn our brigade, now attached to the 64th Army, remained on the defence on the left flank of the Southeastern Front, which was renamed the Stalingrad Front on 28 September.
We had to repulse the onslaught of enemy panzers time after time, attack after attack from the south and west. On 23 November, our forces closed a ring around the German Sixth Army of General Paulus in Stalingrad. In order to free the trapped Sixth Army, the Germans formed Army Group Don commanded by Field Marshal von Manstein. The Fourth Panzer Army, commanded by General Hoth, which was included in this army group and was reinforced by infantry and artillery units, was operating on our axis.
On 12 December 1943, Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army went on the offensive. Over the course of a day, its LVII Panzer Corps commanded by General Kirchner advanced over 40 kilometres, crossed the Aksay River, a tributary of the Don, and approached the Verkhne-Kumskiy farmstead. Only about 50 kilometres remained before it would reach the Myshkova River. However, near the Verkhne-Kumskiy farmstead, it faced General Trufanov’s 51st Army – a motley collection of units and formations gathered together by Stavka representative Vasilevsky and Stalingrad Front commander Colonel General Eremenko from various units and formations. The main shock force of this army was represented by General Volsky’s 4th Mechanized Corps, which combined the remnants of several tank brigades. The 51st Army, undoubtedly the weak link in the ring of encirclement around Stalingrad, comprised about 100 tanks, 147 guns and mortars, and 34,000 men.
A fierce engagement commenced! We fought for six days to prevent Hoth’s panzer army from reaching the Myshkova River. The Verkhne-Kumskiy farmstead changed hands several times. We fought with no sleep and rest, and, it may be said, with no food either.
The 4th Mechanized Corps commander General Vasiliy Timofeevich Volsky distinguished himself as a talented commander. He managed to detach thirty tanks and a rifle regiment from his meagre reserves and sent this force to the opposite bank of the Aksay River, into the German rear, so as to make a show of encirclement and force the foe to take up an all-round defence. This group partially consisted of the tanks of our 158th Brigade; its commander Colonel Egorov led the raid into the enemy rear.
Once across the river, as our first order of business we dug emplacements for the tanks, and the infantry dug foxholes to shelter themselves from bullets, shell splinters and the icy, bone-chilling wind. The Aksay River was not too wide – only 25 metres – which enabled us to keep harassing the enemy with gun and machine-gun fire, and the infantry – with fire from submachine-guns and rifles.
Over six days of action the group destroyed thirty-two enemy tanks, but lost fifteen of its thirty armoured vehicles in return. This was done in spite of the fact that we had to count every shell! We used ammunition as sparingly as we could, knowing that we couldn’t rely on our supply lines. The situation was even worse with our rations - we ate dried crust, washing it down with cold water. On 17 December we had used up the last of our ammunition and had nothing left with which to fight. Brigade commander Egorov summoned the officers and made a statement:
I express my gratitude to all the crews for their performance in combat. Our grouping has fulfilled the assigned task: the enemy advance has been stopped. The enemy didn’t dare to advance to the Myshkova, reckoning that we would fall on his rear. Let s pay a tribute to our fallen comrades ...
We all took off our head coverings. Colonel Egorov continued:
Tonight, we will withdraw back to our lines. We’ll cross the Aksay over the enemy s own pontoons. A captured yazyk [literally, a ‘tongue’; slang for a prisoner taken for interrogation] divulged that the Germans have not removed their crossing, for they expect the arrival of the last battalion of a tank division.
Having waited for the darkness we set off for the crossing. Marder and I were covering the withdrawal with our two tanks. We were the last to reach the pontoon bridge and had already crossed the most exposed part, when strong cannon fire struck us from behind.
I found time to tell Misha over the radio: ‘We’re on fire!’ Then I heard his reply: ‘We’re on fire, too.’
The Germans had managed to set both of our tanks ablaze by hits on the rear. One shell struck our transmission, and the engine caught fire. At the same moment, flares lit up the crossing and the riverbank. A storm of fire ensued! There was no chance to leap out through the turret hatches – everyone would be mowed down! We slipped out underneath the tank through the emergency floor hatch in the middle of the fighting compartment, having first grabbed the most necessary stuff: submachine-guns, ammunition drums and hand grenades. We also removed a machine gun, first-aid kit, and camouflage cloaks, and then hid in waiting beneath the tank. My entire crew was alive, not even wounded.
But how were things with Mikhail? In the light of the flares, I watched as Marder’s crews made their way out of the tank, also via the emergency hatch – it meant that the guys were alive. Remaining concealed, we waited; just when would the Germans get tired of launching flares?!
Soon a group of enemy scouts appeared. We squeezed ourselves into the ground, but the Germans passed us without stopping. At last everything quieted down. We crawled towards Marder’s burning tank and met Marder’s crew crawling towards us. Misha told us that he had overheard the German scouts saying: ‘That’s ten Ivans burned up.’
We had to find our way back to our lines. We looked at the map in the light of a pocket torch [flashlight to American readers], determined a route, and headed out. Before dawn we came across a ravine and decided to hide in it for the day. We made a shelter to take cover from the wind and, having concealed ourselves, stiffening from the cold, we spent the entire day in the shelter. When it became dark, we took off again. A north-easterly wind was blowing, kicking up a blizzard from the ground snow. Misha Marder walked out in front so that in case we bumped into any Germans, his knowledge of the language might bail us out. We walked a little behind him, stretching our frozen legs. We had become chilled through over the day of motionless waiting for nightfall, although we all were wearing winter garb: valenki [felt boots], quilted pants, quilted jackets underneath greatcoats, and fur-lined tankers helmets on our heads.
We noticed a column of smoke rising from the ground ahead of us. Having approached it, we discerned a whole row of dugouts, with a sentry strolling about. The German was scared at first, but Marder threw up his arm in the fascist salute: ‘Some of your own!’
The guard had just begun to raise his arm in response, when my gunlayer Misha Tvorogov clubbed his head with a submachine-gun, and the German toppled over. We didn’t throw hand grenades to avoid raising an alarm.
We walked further and suddenly encountered a security patrol. This time we had no choice – we pelted the enemy with hand grenades and now openly rushed towards our own lines. It took the Germans some minutes to work out what was happening, then they opened machine-gun and later – mortar fire. Some of us were wounded, but we all reached our trenches. Misha Marder was badly wounded in the back, and we immediately sent him to the medsanbat [Russian abbreviation for medical-sanitation battalion]. A shell splinter became embedded in my right forearm, but I refused to go to the medsanbat.
It had taken us more than a day to get back to our lines, and, one might say, we d been lucky – we were all alive, though some of us had been wounded. I know nothing of the further fate of Misha Marder. We returned to the farmstead, to our regiment.
The Germans continued to be hesitant to try to bull their way into Verkhne-Kumskiy: we still had tanks there. However, we had suffered very heavy losses; that whole farmstead was drenched in blood. Just then the corps commander ordered a retreat to the Myshkova River. On the same night that we had returned from beyond the Aksay, our troops began to withdraw to the Myshkova under the cover of tanks, and took up a defence there. We reached the river in the night from 18 to 19 December. On the morning of 19 December the troops of Malinovsky’s powerful 2nd Guards Army and the 2nd Mechanized Corps arrived in our deployment area.
Having taken up the defence, Malinovsky’s army immediately went into action. Now together with them, we repulsed all the attacks of von Manstein’s forces.
During the heavy fighting near Stalingrad my tank had received many dents and had destroyed a lot of enemy equipment and troops, but then, in December 1942 it had been burned out by a German shell. I refused to go to a hospital and together with other commanders who had been left without tanks I was sent into the reserve and wound up in Sverdlovsk, in the personnel department of the Urals Military District. Here I received a new assignment – to lead a platoon of SU-122 self-propelled howitzers in the 1454th Self-propelled Artillery Regiment.
The regiment consisted of four batteries with five self-propelled guns each, plus the regiment commander’s T-34 tank. The regiment also had a company of submachine-gunners, a reconnaissance platoon and a number of auxiliary units, such as supply, repair services, signals, medical services, etc. Being compact in numbers, the self-propelled artillery regiments were very mobile; they could be deployed to areas of an enemy tank penetration within a matter of hours or even minutes, and were capable of destroying the enemy by fire from standing positions. On the offensive, they supported tank attacks. Getting a bit ahead of myself, I can testify that it was difficult or almost impossible for enemy tanks to force their way through our battle lines, where medium or heavy self-propelled guns were standing on the defence.
Personnel from the 5th Reserve Tank Regiment, which was stationed in Sverdlovsk, were used to form the four batteries of self-propelled guns – the mobile unit of the 1454th Self-propelled Artillery Regiment. The head-quarters unit was supposed to join the regiment later. I was the last to arrive in my 3rd Battery, which was commanded by Senior Lieutenant Vladimir Shevchenko. Everyone in it had already undergone re-training from a tanker into a samokhodchik [self-propelled gunner], and I had to master the equipment and armament of the vehicle in just one week. This was an intricate artillery science: to study the panoramic sight, the rules of firing from covered positions; to be able to prepare all settings for firing using limited data; to plot a parallel fire plane and to adjust the fire given the deviation of explosions from the line of sight.
On the last night before the departure from Sverdlovsk I just couldn’t fall asleep. Not because I was anxious or because it was hard to sleep on the tightly-stuffed straw mattresses that butted up against each other on the upper level of the plank bunks. It was simply that the memories of the Chelyabinsk Tank School and the fighting near Stalingrad were sweeping over me, and my wounded arm was troubling me a bit ... ‘Reveille!’ The command rang out, interrupting my uneasy thoughts.
It took us an hour to have a shave, wash, wolf down a quick breakfast, and to set off on foot by battery towards the Uralmash [Ural Machine Building] Factory still before dawn. The snow produced little squeaks beneath our jackboots. We passed a field, a small copse of trees, and soon found ourselves in the factory yard, where we saw in the pre-dawn twilight our train with the self-propelled guns under tarpaulin covers. Sentries of the special guard dressed in sheepskin coats and valenki stood along both sides of the flat cars. It took no more than half an hour to load the batteries equipment and gear and to board the personnel onto the teplushki [boxcars fitted with plank bunk beds for passengers and a small iron stove for heating], whereupon our train, pulled by two steam engines, rolled out onto the main line and headed westward. We rode at a high speed down the ‘green street’ [a term for a rail under one-way traffic rules during wartime]. I remember only two stopovers at stations where the engine crews were replaced.
Once aboard the teplushka, we stoked the iron stove right away. Through the white shroud of falling snow, we could see station platforms flashing past through a gap in the secured doors; the eyes had no time to make out the names of the stations and we noticed only rare travellers on the platforms. All along the way we sang the then-popular songs – ‘The Dark Night’, ‘In the Dugout’, ‘For the Holy War’, and ‘The Spark’. The gunlayer from the battery commander’s self-propelled gun, Senior Sergeant Sasha Chekmenov, commonly led the singing in our battery, but when we sang Ukrainian songs, our battery commander himself, Senior Lieutenant Shevchenko, was the song leader.
The train arrived at Pushkino Station near Moscow on the second day of our journey. Here we were met by the regiment s command and the headquarters staff officers. We unloaded the self-propelled guns by the dim light of the station lanterns and drove them into some woods about 25 kilometres from the railroad. Once billeted in some village dachas, we undertook combat training and breaking-in the crews and units under conditions that approximated actual combat as closely as possible.
The main emphasis in the process of breaking-in the crews was placed on driving the vehicles across difficult obstacles; firing from short halts, especially at moving targets; and on ensuring that each crew member was able to carry out the role of other crew members. Even Private Emelyan Ivanovich Besschetnov (we called him ‘old fellow’ for he was already over 40), who was the breech operator, could capably drive the self-propelled gun and was a good shot as well, even though he had never served in the tank units before. To tell the truth, however, he was a tractor driver for a collective farm before the war. Our training finished with tactical exercises and gunnery.
On the night before 15 June 1943, the regiment was roused by an alarm and hastily transferred by rail to Kursk. We arrived on the right, northern flank of the Central Front where the 48th Army was defending. The regiment was allocated a sector of the defence in front of Zmievka.