The wounded men were evacuated from Wyglanduwka a little farther to the rear and soon we found ourselves again in an improvised hospital in some landlord’s manor. Buildings of all kinds were being used as hospitals back then, but here we were now sleeping on spring beds, not thatch. There was a large orchard around the place and those who could do it happily ate apples, pears and cherries; all I could do was watch them and good-naturedly envy them. Here, in this provisional hospital they made another, more successful attempt to feed me and I began to recover from the shellshock. Things were worse with the wound caused by the splinter.
Then I found myself in Gomel, where they began to feed me broth from a feeding bottle and my strength began to return to me gradually. After Gomel was Moscow, Evacuation Hospital No. 4641 on Usachev Street
My wound was serious, but the consequences of the shellshock were even worse, as I became temperamental for a time. My surgeon was Maria Semenovna. One day she made some sort of remark to me that my temperature was jumping around, implying that I was tampering with the thermometer in order to stay away from the front a little longer. I was indignant and said: Maria Semenovna, excuse me, but I’m no coward! Maybe you’re judging me by your own subjective standards?!’
‘ You’re insulting me! We’ll discharge you tomorrow!’
‘ Fine! Have my dentures ready tomorrow and discharge me tomorrow!’
The very next day, indeed my dentures were ready and they discharged me. Everyone was supposed to receive a one-month leave after a severe wound, but I wasn’t given one. If only I had kept my mouth shut! I wanted so much to see my family – of course I would have gone home.
So off to the front I went again. In the beginning of October 1944 after my discharge from the hospital I was sent to the 3rd Belorussian Front and assigned to the 1435th Self-propelled Artillery Regiment of the Stavka Reserve. I had to reach my destination little by little: first by train, riding for quite some time on running-boards clinging to handrails – there were no seats available, in the boxcars or on the platform cars either. I reached the front headquarters from Kaunas, and then hitched rides to the regiment aboard passing vehicles. I still vividly recall a large sign alongside one of the front-line roads:
GLORY TO THE INFANTRY – THE QUEEN OF BATTLE!
GLORY TO STALIN’S FALCONS!
GLORY TO THE ARTILLERY – THE GOD OF WAR!
GLORY TO THE VALIANT TANKERS!
FOR AN ACCIDENT – TO A TRIBUNAL!
The regiment was stationed in a forest near Wilkowiszki, resting and refitting after heavy fighting. The personnel lived in dugouts and those replacements who hadn’t managed yet to get their gear or assignments lived in tents, which sheltered them from the cold autumn rains. The whole area was well-camouflaged from aerial and ground observation.
I reported for duty on my arrival to the regiment commander. Colonel Khatchev was about 40 years of age, a slender man, taller than average, with hair just beginning to turn grey. He looked quite intelligent. He was a native of Moscow, but army service had moved him around the country for quite a few years. The colonel told me about the regiment in detail and appointed me to command of the 3rd Battery of SU-85 self-propelled guns. There were only three SU-85s in the battery, and in the entire regiment only a total of thirteen instead of the authorized twenty.
In the command dugout, I introduced myself to the chief of staff Major Krasnogir’, to his deputy Major Lebedev and to the assistant chief of staff Captain Taras Romanovich Raksha. From the headquarters, I went to get acquainted with the men in my new battery. A Muscovite Tolya Novikov and a guy from Saratov Fedor Klimov were the platoon commanders. After the recent fighting they had only one vehicle in each of the platoons. My driver was Sergeant Major Mamaev, gunlayer – Senior Sergeant Zakiy Gityatullin, gun-loader – Pavel Seregin of the same rank. I quickly introduced myself to the officers of the regiment. Captain Mariev was in charge of the 1st Battery, Captain Nikolaev commanded the 2nd Battery, and Senior Lieutenant Misha Grin’ – the 4th Battery. The 1st and 2nd Battery commanders were closer to 30 years of age.
The repair teams and self-propelled gun crews were working feverishly. The repair teams were welding up cracks and holes received during the most recent action; the crews were putting weapons, devices, and the radio back into working order, and tuning the transmission system. As I was told, they had managed to find some time for gunnery training. I immediately joined them in their efforts. We remained in the forest near Wilkowiszki for about three weeks, until 20 October 1944.
At dawn on 20 October our regiment went on the advance together with units of the 28th Army. We had been ordered to capture a large Lithuanian settlement called Endkunden from the march and continue the advance towards the town of Kibartay on the border with Germany. Having heard the order everyone became agitated – of course, because soon we’d be crossing the East Prussian border!
Our artillery preparation began to thunder while it was still dark. Tanks, self-propelled guns and infantry moved into the attack behind a creeping barrage. I was troubled by the possibility of encountering panzerfausts. I warned the crews to keep vigilant watch on the roadside bushes, and on any other kind of obstacle behind which a faustnik could lurk, while for myself I was wondering how we could get hold of an MG-42 machine gun from the Germans sooner rather than later. I had become used to having one and always made good use of them on other fronts: they were good for combing the terrain and for wiping out infantry and faustniki. The fighting for Endkunden was brief: the German gun crews, shocked by the surprise, had no time to open aimed fire and we crushed the guns beneath our tracks. Our battery also captured four MG-42 machine guns. We gave a machine gun to each crew and handed one over to Misha Grin’s 4th Battery.
We failed to capture Kibartay from the march and had to pull back to the start line. For a whole hour our Il-2 ground-attack planes pounded the enemy defences with bombs and delivered air strikes against pillboxes and weapons emplacements. A salvo from BM-31 heavy rocket-launchers (called Andryusha) completed the preparations for another attack: the rocket artillery battalion blanketed the enemy with 384 300mm rockets, each weighing 91.5 kilograms. The demoralized enemy couldn’t withstand such a blow and we took the town.
The self-propelled guns rolled past a large two-storey brick building on the western outskirts of Kibartay. I thought that most likely before the war, this had been the post of a border guards detachment, and again I was agitated and excited, just as I had felt near the Western Bug before; for the second time we were about to cross a national border, but this time it was the German border. As if to confirm it, soon we saw a heavily leaning steel frontier marker, with its black and white stripes faded but visible, and a board bearing the inscription: ‘ FRONTIER. USSR – GERMANY’.
The advance was suspended for the night, and our self-propelled guns moved into emplacements that we had dug. The Germans were only about 800 metres away. On that night, being the regiment’s officer on watch I had to have an unpleasant conversation with a regimental officer – the newly-promoted Lieutenant Colonel Arkhip Arkhipovich Vasilyev. I went to check the outposts and found Senior Sergeant Monin reclining. He was relaxing on sentry duty and at what a post! He’d been entrusted with guarding the regimental banner, and other colours and documents – the whole lot! I sternly warned him: Watch out or I’ll have you punished!’
I came around a bit later for a second time to check on him, and found him smoking on duty, so I gave him a second warning. Just before dawn, I checked on him for a third time – and found Monin helping to unload bread from a commissary vehicle that had just pulled up. Typically, bread was received by the cooks, and he had nothing to do with it! I removed him from his post, ordered the sentry commander to replace the guard and warned, Senior Sergeant Monin is not to be placed on duty as a sentry.’ I ordered Monin to be locked away in an improvised guardroom established in a shack.
Vasilyev summoned me in the morning. He was some kind of political officer! Vasilyev was an illiterate man, a drinker, a labourer from Leningrad by background. Somehow, though, he had contrived a way to climb the ladder of ranks, and recently he’d been promoted to lieutenant colonel. So, he summoned me and asked, ‘ Did you place Monin under arrest?’
‘I did.’
‘Why?’
I explained it to him: ‘You know yourself that regulations ban sitting and smoking while on sentry duty.’ He immediately pounced on me:
Don’t you know that he’s the battery’s Party secretary?! Don’t you know that the battery’s Party cell is subordinate to the regiment’s Party organization? That the regimental Party committee is subordinate to the corps’, the corps’ – to the army’s Party commitee? And the army committee is subordinate to the Central Committee itself! Don’t you know that Comrade Stalin is the General Secretary of the Central Committee and the VKP(b) [Vsesoyuznaya Kommunisticheskaya Partiya (Bolshevikov) – All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) -the official name of the Communist Party prior to 1952]?!!
In general, he recounted the entire Party hierarchy for me. I replied, I know all that, but if you consider it a disgrace for a Party secretary to be a sentry and to observe the regulations, don’t put him on sentry duty. I can’t let the Germans surprise and wipe out the regiment.’
He exploded: ‘Release Monin immediately! I order you to free him!’ I replied with a certain satisfaction, I will not carry out your order. I am not your subordinate today. As the officer on watch, I report only to the regiment commander and will not release the prisoner.’
That was not the end of the story. The deputy political commander went directly to the regiment commander to complain about me. The attack was going to begin at any moment, but Khatchev summoned me. Vasilyev was present too. I reported on the essence of the matter. Khatchev agreed with me: ‘ You’ve done everything properly. However, you must release Monin. I sincerely request that you unlock him and let him out.’
So I released him. Such matters had to make you laugh to keep from crying. Vasilyev swallowed the bitter pill and to his credit, let it be said that he didn’t hold a grudge against me. Generally, though, he was a good-for-nothing and a drunkard. He couldn’t live an hour without booze.
Once I was riding with him in a Willys and he suddenly blurted out: ‘Nevertheless, it has played a major role!’
‘What?’
‘The Party!’
At the same time, he would often stop the car, walk behind a bush, take a gulp from a flask, climb back into the car, drive on, and resume praising the Party again.
On the whole during the war, there were more political officers that were simply hard to figure out. For example, one of them would give a speech, calling upon the men to do the right thing – he seems to be making sense and understands people. When he would compile a recommendation letter for awards, though, he wouldn’t fail to remember that Party members and Komsomol members were first in line for them – not those who had acted more bravely. Party status and spirit for these people were everything! Who actually did the fighting, whose blood was being spilled, whose sinews were tearing -none of that mattered to them.
The commanders? All three self-propelled artillery regiment commanders I fought under drank like hell. Khatchev’s regiment was inspected at the end of the war. Seventeen daily vodka allotments for the entire regiment were missing! Fellow officers from adjacent regiments, from the brigade and from the division used to visit him, and he never failed to entertain any of them. I really don’t think he’d been stealing the vodka rations, but somehow he always seemd to have a’ reserve’. Fortunately for Khatchev when the deficit was discovered, there was a German distillery nearby. The shortfall was quickly replenished, and he got away with it.
As soon as he got drunk, Khatchev liked to call for Masha the cook: ‘ Kharitonov, bring Masha to me!’ Kharitonov – his freckled adjutant, also a Muscovite, would find her and start dragging her back, but she never wanted to go and would shout:’ Major Mateborsky, they’re dragging me off to Khatchev!’ Mateborsky was the chief of the rear services and wouldn’t give a damn about it – this cook meant nothing to him. The deputy political commander also wouldn’t stand up for her – he was a drunkard too.
However, I have digressed. On that morning of 23 October, we resumed the offensive with no let-up. All the armour rushed forward – of course, the first German city was looming ahead of us! We captured Stalluponen [present-day Nesterov] on the same day! After that, the 28th Army and our 1435th Regiment stood on the defence until 13 January 1945.
On 13 January 1945 the East Prussian offensive began and our regiment went on the attack in the ranks of the 128th Rifle Corps.1 On 20 January we captured the city of Gumbinnen [present-day Gusev] with a powerful attack. Over these six days of fierce fighting my battery supported the infantry of the 55th Guards Rifle Division. Lieutenant Novikov’s crew destroyed three cannons and two tanks; the commander himself was wounded, but refused to leave the battlefield until a German armoured counter-attack aimed at the division’s flank was repulsed. Lieutenant Klimov’s crew wiped out a group of faustniki concealed in some bushes with their captured MG-42. My crew knocked out two enemy tanks and disabled an entire anti-aircraft battery that had been deployed for direct fire. We found out about it from a flak-gunner we’d taken prisoner. Nevertheless, all three self-propelled guns of the battery were badly damaged.
As soon as the action ceased the regiment deputy commander for technical services Major Suma rode up to the battery with a repair team. They repaired all the vehicles in about four hours. The major directed all the welding work himself. He was quite a chubby man, but he acted with surprising energy and speed! He demanded the same from his subordinates and considered it as a matter of honour for the maintenance and repair men to have every armoured vehicle ready for action.
The advance of our troops continued. On 22 January the city of Insterburg [present-day Chernyakhovsk] was taken. Our regiment became involved in the fighting for Insterburg too, but now with Lieutenant General Galitsky’s 11th Guards Army, the 3rd Belorussian Front’s second-echelon formation which had been committed to develop the attack towards Konigsberg.2 The Nazis were not only defending tenaciously, but also launched two counter-attacks. Having good positions, our regiment together with the Guards repulsed both counter-attacks without losing a single vehicle.
Without any pause in the operation we continued the advance the next day and captured the village of Gross Ottenhagen after a brief, but hard fight. During this action the regiment lost one SU-85; Kolya Polyakov’s self-propelled gun burned out together with its entire crew. Two more self-propelled guns were knocked out, but were recovered and repaired during the night.
On 29 January, fierce fighting erupted for Tarau, a major railway station. Enemy anti-tank guns and Nashorn tank destroyers blocked the advance of our troops. My battery was advancing on the left flank of the shock grouping. A large wooden house was burning in front of us, creating a dense cloud of smoke. I ordered the commanders, Follow me!’ and plunged through the wall of smoke with my battery. Once on the other side, I led the battery behind the brick station house, putting us on the enemy’s flank.
From here we opened heavy fire on the defending enemy. The experienced German gunners quickly began to pivot the gun barrels towards us. They managed to knock out Fedya Klimov’s vehicle, but realizing they’d been outflanked and were now receiving heavy fire from two directions, they withdrew, leaving two smashed anti-tank guns and a badly damaged tank destroyer behind. We captured Tarau Station, but there were now only eight operational self-propelled guns left in the regiment. The army commander ordered the regiment to remain on this line and wait for replacements. The 11th Guards Army continued the advance along the Pregel River, but now without us.
That evening the regiment commander summoned his subordinate officers to a spacious building of the rail depot and gave us our orders:
We will have to stay here at Tarau Station until we receive more self-propelled guns. Everyone is to exercise utmost vigilance! Encounters with German units escaping from pockets are not excluded. The chief of staff will organize reconnaissance in neighbouring areas and patrols both within and outside the regiment’s location. Remember, and explain to your troops: these are not Nazis, but civilians. In this regard, deputy political commander Vasilyev is to conduct educational work with the personnel and the local population.
We had to wait about a month for the replacement vehicles to arrive and were pretty much surprised when two steam engines pulled into the station with T-34/85 tanks on open platform cars. Twenty-one tanks instead of the expected self-propelled guns! It soon turned out that the regiment commander had already received an order from the front commander Marshal Vasilevsky to hand the arrived equipment over to the 1435th Self-propelled Artillery Regiment. Essentially our self-propelled gun regiment was being converted into a mixed tank/self-propelled gun regiment, since we still had eight SU-85s. The staff’s intense work on forming crews and units began with the stipulation that at least one or two seasoned veterans would be present in each crew. The remaining self-propelled guns were combined into two batteries with four vehicles apiece. The battery commanders remained the same. Grin’ and I -now without vehicles – were appointed as commanders of the 1st and the 3rd Tank Companies. Senior Lieutenant Nugin Muflikhanov became my tank commander. The driver was Sergeant Aleksandr Nesterov from Orel Oblast, the gunlayer Ananiy Markov was from the Nenetskiy National District. Sergeant Fedor Tardenov from Omsk Oblast was the gunloader, and the radio operator – machine-gunner Corporal Ivan Lesovoy, was from Sumy Oblast.
Somewhere in the middle of March, our regiment arrived in the area of the 11th Guards Army’s 16th Guards Rifle Corps and was attached to Major General Maksimov’s 11th Guards Rifle Division. We spent the rest of the month advancing towards our ultimate objective Ponart, an ancient East Prussian town located just south of Konigsberg. We had to break through five separate lines of pillboxes. The walls of those pillboxes were so thick that the shells of the tanks and self-propelled guns had little effect on them. We were forced to adopt the following tactics: interpreters and demolition teams would carefully approach the pillboxes, while our tanks bypassed and encircled them. Once surrounded, the defending occupants would be given a chance to surrender through the interpreter. Those who refused would be blown up together with the pillbox by emplaced demolition charges. The tactic proved to be slow but effective, without allowing enemy counter-attacks. Of course we were fortunate that we encountered neither tanks nor assault guns in these fortified districts.
At the end of March we captured the city of Godrinen and continued our advance, approaching Konigsberg. Bloody fighting began. We would have to overcome two powerful defence lines, reinforced by tanks, assault guns and large numbers of artillery pieces. The regiment commander summoned the officers:
Push your way through and don’t turn! If you expose your flanks to fire, you’re going to get burned! According to intelligence information, somewhere around here there are two Tigers – they may be concealed in shacks or even inside buildings. That’s why you must destroy both shacks and houses. The main thing, though: don’t let the faustniki get close! Rake every suspicious place with machine-gun fire from a safe distance.
Having heard the regiment commander’s advice, I summoned the crews and informed them about the hidden Tigers and the combat tactics we should employ, and then added recommendations based on my own experience:
Do not fire on the move; there’s little chance of hitting your target and we have to conserve ammunition. We’ll fire from short pauses and halts made at the gunlayer’s order whenever he catches a target in his gunsight. Forget about using the scale on the turret ring: a target might shift away before a gunlayer can take a reading and get back to his gunsight. If we spot a tank or anti-tank gun, we’re going to race towards it at full speed, with zigzags. The speed affects the gunners – they get unnerved; the manoeuvres will throw off the aim of an enemy gunlayer, and glancing hits are not dangerous for a tank.
On the morning of 5 April, the preparatory artillery barrage began, in which the famous Katyusha and Andryusha rocket-launchers took part. Then a funny thing happened. A battalion of Andryushas fired one salvo, and a launch frame flew out together with a missile! The Germans shouted over the radio: Russians – you’ve gone crazy. You’re hurling shacks at us!’
After a most intense artillery preparation, we went on the attack. The regiment commander’s tank followed the combat formation of tanks and self-propelled guns, and from time to time issued orders to the units in the clear: it was simply impossible to use the code tables during combat.
My company was moving on the left flank. The tanks raced at high speed across a field, slightly weaving. Shells were exploding all around us. Glancing hits kept shaking the tank time and again, making us cringe. Thank God, though, that I didn’t notice any panic among my comrades – and this was the main thing for success in combat!
Having leaped across the enemy trench line, we were now flying towards the artillery positions. Our infantry behind us was already engaging the enemy in fierce hand-to-hand fighting – those who had rifles worked with bayonet and rifle butt; others tossed hand grenades, while submachine-gunners who had run out of ammunition slashed at enemy heads with their submachine-gun barrels. The Germans began to pull back via communication trenches, unable to withstand such a fierce onslaught. The smoky haze from burning houses screened the tanks from anti-tank fire, and I ordered: ‘ Company! From a stop by the fence! At the shack, by salvo! Fire!’
The shack began to burn immediately, and the tank hidden inside it caught fire too. It jerked backwards, but stopped, engulfed in flames. However, it wasn’t a Tiger – it was a Nashorn! None of its six crew members leaped out of it. The enemy guns were gradually neutralized as a result of the six-hour combat, although the enemy managed to knock out three of our tanks and a self-propelled gun. However, we had captured the first line of defence!
Incidentally, I had the opportunity to fight in SU-122 self-propelled guns for a long period of time, then in the SU-85. This may be controversial, but I can say that I preferred the self-propelled gun to the T-34/85, for it was 30 centimetres lower and lighter by one ton.
The tanks and the infantry took up favourable combat positions on the line attained and stopped. About two hours after the fighting stopped, our maintenance and repair team came around in two emergency repair vehicles -as always Major Suma with his deputy Captain Kulomzin was with them. All the damaged machines were put back into combat-readiness overnight, while the crews worked through the night to dig emplacements for the tanks. It was hellish work! The rocky ground refused to yield to the shovels and we had to move dozens of cubic metres of earth, or there would be no shelter for the machine from artillery and aviation. My new crew proved their worth superbly, though. In retrospect, I can say that the hands of tankers and self-propelled gunners were blistered throughout the war from all the constant digging.
Only by dawn did we have our vehicles emplaced, and it was just in time! Junker bombers came over almost as soon as we had finished. The regiment’s positions were pounded from the air, but there was not a single direct hit.
The next day, the 11th Guards Rifle Division and our 1435th Self-propelled Artillery Regiment resumed the advance on Ponart. We had to break through a second, even more formidable defence line. The aviation and artillery preparation lasted for an hour and a half; we felt the earth shake even in our jumping-off positions. Battling our way through the defence line, we emerged on the southern outskirts of Ponart. Heavy street-fighting broke out – we were opposed by tanks and assault guns, and our infantry fired intensely from submachine-guns and machine guns at garrets, cellars and ground-floor windows, where tank hunters could be lurking with their panzerfausts.
The infantry division operating on the main axis received reinforcements in the form of ten JS-2 heavy tanks, which successfully engaged some Tigers in a meeting clash, while we, using our tanks and self-propelled guns, covered their flanks and tried to develop the success by driving into the depths of Ponart. The enemy artillery and tanks were firing fiercely, and our tank company came to a stop, returning fire from behind shelter. The advance stalled. I decided to emerge on the flank of the German tank formation by advancing my tank along a ravine and through some bushes. I thought by knocking out a few German tanks from this flank position, I could get the company moving again. However, my crew had managed to destroy only one German tank when two Panzer IV tanks turned up from somewhere behind us and set my tank ablaze.
‘Abandon the vehicle!’ I ordered the rest of the crew, and immediately tossed out a smoke grenade. As we were leaping from the burning machine, a German machine gun opened up, and although it was firing blindly, a bullet clipped my left shoulder. We started belly-crawling back to our friendlies, stopped in the ravine and Sasha Nesterov, my driver-mechanic, quickly bandaged my wound. By nightfall, when the fighting had ceased, I found Irina Krasnogir’ – the regiment’s senior surgeon, and now it was her turn to treat the wound and apply a thick bandage. I begged her not to tell her husband – chief of staff Krasnogir’ – or the regiment commander about my wound, so I could stay with my men. They never found out about it.
We continued fighting on the southern outskirts of Ponart for three days! The whole city was on fire, multi-storeyed buildings were collapsing, trees were falling, but the Germans kept resisting tenaciously and rejected our offered ultimatum. However, on the afternoon of 8 April, a large group emerged from a casemate in our sector. When they came closer to us, I began to talk to them in German, but they turned out to be French. They told me: We’re from Alsace and Lorraine.’ We took them prisoner. I told them about the current situation and they rejoiced to hear that we would take Berlin soon. Of course they’d been fighting on the German side, but they’d been conscripted, and they didn’t want to fight for the Germans or especially to die for them. They sympathized with us, but couldn’t do much about it. The Germans were brutal and might have shot them had something gone not to their liking.
On 9 April, the garrison of the fortress city of Konigsberg capitulated. After the capture of Konigsberg, our regiment was relocated to the vicinity of Pillkallen [present-day Dobrovol’sk] and stationed on an urban estate. We had to be at full combat-readiness, for entire enemy regiments and battalions were trying to break out of encirclement towards the Baltic shore, hoping to be evacuated by sea. In addition, the Germans were bringing in fresh troops by sea to try to open an escape route for surrounded units. In general we had to keep a sharp lookout and be ready for any contingency!
According to intelligence the enemy was planning a landing near the city of Rauschen [present-day Svetlogorsk] on the Baltic coast. On 7 May, when this information arrived, the regiment commander ordered me to move out with a rifle battalion and to occupy the city.
That night we slipped over to Rauschen. The city was being defended by a garrison, and from the sea it was being guarded by gunboats and apparently coastal pickets. The coastline here was quite high – perhaps about 100 metres. We dug emplacements for the main and reserve positions – generally speaking, we made ourselves ready.
We launched the attack suddenly, with no artillery preparation. The garrison put up fierce resistance. The action lasted for two hours, and three of our tanks were irrevocably destroyed before the Germans finally withdrew. There were many dead enemy troops and we took 200 soldiers and officers prisoner. We emerged on the coastline and the enemy’s naval forces engaged us. We had to repulse the gunboats’ attack. We sank two of them; the others withdrew and disappeared out to sea.
The town seemed to be desolated – not a single citizen! A dead place! Apparently all the civilian population had been evacuated by sea.
It was the same in other towns. The population was badly frightened. Initially, when we entered East Prussia, we saw German leaflets and posters that said: ‘ Death or Siberia!’ They were afraid of Siberia and its extreme colds. Later, as we approached the Oder and the Germans were conducting total mobilization, their propaganda shifted to other slogans – everywhere there were posters with a Red Army soldier drawn from the waist up, wearing a helmet with a star on it. Below the figure were crossed bones and the slogan, ‘Victory or death!’ As a result, most of the population fled as we approached, and rarely would someone stay.
We strolled along the streets of Rauschen and did some sightseeing. It was purely a resort town, well-furnished for leisure. Asphalt roads snaked down the slope to the sea. In the centre of the city there was – I remember it well even now – a large, rectangular pond; perhaps it is still there.
We returned to Pillkallen on the evening of8 May. The next morning, 9 May 1945, we woke up early from excited shouts. Chief of staff Major Krasnogir’ ran into the officers’ quarters and shouted: ‘ Guys! That’s it! The war is over! That’s all! It’s the end!’
We rushed outside, and it is hard to describe all that was going on out there! Everyone was firing into the air from all sorts of weapons. There was dancing, leaping, and accordions were playing! The regiment commander ordered the preparation of a celebratory dinner. Our commissaries displayed a lot of zeal, and our two regimental cooks, Masha from Michurinsk and Fedor Yashmanov from the Vyatska region managed to prepare a lavish feast. Masha, who was respected by all of us, did her best and prepared a splendid Ukrainian borsch and some cold appetizers. Using whatever we had available – meat, potatoes and American Spam – Fedor even managed to prepare two second courses! Our comedian Sergeant Shokhin from Moscow Oblast parodied Fedor’s unusual accent to everyone’s delight: Felloos! Come oon, get your stoof, goo away and don’t be ooffended!
The chief of rear services Mateborsky and his deputy Gulev supplied drinks, and everyone was given not the usual front-line ration of 100 grams of vodka, but a full glass. Only later did I realize that we had fired our regiment’s final shot on 8 May 1945 back in Rauschen.
Peacetime finally arrived, but there were troubles and incidents. We received an order to forage locally for food, so vehicles began to roam all over East Prussia picking up hens, geese, piglets, calves, grain, peas; in general, anything and everything edible. Only just recently, we had been warned not to eat anything obtained locally, which had supposedly all been poisoned. Of course we cleaned out all the local sources of food very quickly. So, we had to contrive something.We began to form fishing crews and switched to eating flounder quite willingly. The most difficult was the situation with the bread supply, especially when the breadpans at the bakeries were greased with motor oil because of a lack of butter.
Then ‘ChP’ [Russian initials for extraordinary occurrences’, which can mean any sort of accident, disaster, or unfortunate event] incidents began to intrude. Three of our sergeants raped a 12-year-old German girl called Kristal.
I must acknowledge that rapes did take place. It was so disgraceful that I don’t even want to talk about it now. There was a Muscovite among us called Zhora Kirichev, a self-propelled gun commander. Back when we had entered Gross Ottenhagen, the infantry had continued on ahead, but we had to stop to refuel and replenish our ammunition. While there, some sergeant major was escorting about 300 German females down the street. Zhora was ogling the women. The sergeant major called out to him, Go ahead and take the cutest one!’
Zhora didn’t hesitate and picked one out. He took her away, and several days later came down with a case of the clap. At the time there was a standing order: once you caught VD, you would be sent into a penal battalion. A doctor treated Zhora and recorded that his case was an exacerbation of an old illness. Otherwise he wouldn’t have escaped being sent to a penal battalion. He was teased over this for quite some time later: ‘You’re a fool! You should have chosen the ugliest one – you would have gotten away with it!’
So, it was unsafe to go for the German women. I refused to rape because of moral principles. When three of our sergeants perpetrated the rape, Khatchev summoned me and ordered me to conduct an investigation. How could I do it?! I didn’t even have a dictionary!
I arrived at the girl’s house, and became acquainted with her mother, Anna. Then I conversed mostly with her. Rather I should say that I spent about three days trying to question her; it was difficult to communicate without a dictionary. If I didn’t know the right word, I had to find some way to express it. It was like trying to get to Berlin via Vladivostok.
I conducted the investigation after a fashion and took an interest in their traditions. Anna told me that people there met each other the same way as in our country – say, at a party. Then they’d go out together, and eventually get married. However, if a husband determined that he wanted a divorce, he had no right to do so until he had found another husband for his wife.
Anna was smoking cigarettes, so I asked her: ‘Warum Sie rauchen?’ [Why are you smoking?] She explained that she had begun to smoke after her husband’s death, and now she couldn’t give it up.
They showed me a vestry book [Kirschbuch] – a large, thick book filled with the genealogy of the people’s lineal lines recorded over several centuries: birth dates, marriages, death dates. A huge church seal was on every sheet, verifying the validity of the records.
Unlike townsfolk, who had fled as we approached, the peasants had remained – how can one abandon his farm, his animals? So we socialized with the farmers. On the whole, what can I say? They were more civilized. First of all, how responsible and orderly they were, and all this in the countryside! Everywhere it was neat and clean, everything was in its proper place, so unlike our corner of the world, where everything is always so messy that it is embarrassing to walk through it, even in the city, not to mention the village. I checked out a cattle shed once – all the cattle were thoroughly groomed. Every farmstead had a diesel engine, and it did all the work: threshing, milling the flour, and producing fodder for the cattle. Everything was mechanized! A farmer just had to switch various attachments – and all would go swimmingly! Secondly, they made our Michurin out almost to be a god of some sort.3 Their every peasant was a follower of Michurin. Their wheat was so bountiful. You’d climb up into a garret and find an enormous pile of grain. Simple peasants were hybridizing cherries with currants! One more thing – fine asphalt roads ran everywhere. You could drive to any village, town or city, from the smallest to the largest, on asphalt roads.
Our soldiers said nothing about the local life, preferring to hold their tongues, because it was forbidden to praise anything German. I kept silent, too.
I wrote out a report on the results of my investigation for the regiment commander and presented them verbally. Khatchev placed those three sergeants under arrest for five days – and that was it! Apparently, he spared them because he knew that the Germans used to rape our women and girls too.
On one September day we posed for photographs for keepsakes, and handed our tanks and self-propelled guns over to the units which would be staying behind in East Prussia. Then the self-propelled gun crews left for Nikolaev, the tankers – to Slutsk, and I was sent to Leningrad, to the Higher School for Officers ...
Time goes by. Already sixty years have elapsed since the last salvoes of the Great Patriotic War, and a lot has changed in the country and in the life of all of us over this time. Fate scattered the brothers-in-arms to different corners of our immense country. It’s been sad to find out at each reunion that someone else has passed away. However, every reunion was an exciting event, full of discovering new details about past battles, revealing new facts and events of which we were not only unaware, but couldn’t even imagine. The final day of each reunion always wound up with a farewell party, featuring the unforgettable ‘ front-line 100 grams’. By now our joint trips to the battlefields have slipped into the past, and about fifteen years ago our reunions in Moscow also ended. It is sad that twenty years ago I used to send more than a hundred Victory Day greeting postcards, and now I send only ten of them . . .
However, all those who have passed on are still alive for me. They live in my heart and in my memory, and this book was written mostly on the basis of memories that still recall the way my combat comrades looked back in those fateful forties’. They have also preserved their military valour and their indescribable front-line bonds. Even now, with a stirring in my heart, I can see my brothers-in-arms on the attack, just as if it happened yesterday – and I bow my head before the living and the dead.