There was nothing unusual about the beginning of that Sunday, 22 June 1941, a day now fixed in everyone’s memory. Over Odessa a clear sky was gleaming and the hot southern sun was shining. The sea was dead calm; the smooth blue surface stretched to the horizon and it seemed as if, somewhere out there, in the distance, it merged with the equally blue sky.
My friend Sofya Chopak, who worked at the Odessa public library, her elder brother and I spent the early morning at the beach. We had decided to have lunch at a cheburek [Caucasian meat pasty] café on Pushkin Street. We planned to spend the evening at the local theatre for a performance of Verdi’s opera La Traviata and had already bought tickets.
Sitting on the open veranda of the cheburek café at midday, awaiting our order, we heard an announcement from a speaker on the street that the deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and the people’s commissar for foreign affairs, Comrade Molotov, would be speaking any minute. What he said seemed to us to be completely incredible: that day, at four o’clock in the morning, Germany had perfidiously attacked the Soviet Union.
‘Our entire nation must now be united and rally round as never before,’ Molotov’s firm but agitated voice intoned. ‘Each of us must demand from himself and from others the discipline, organization and self-sacrifice worthy of a true Soviet patriot, in order to provide for all the needs of the Red Army, the Navy and the Air Force, in order to ensure victory over the enemy. Victory will be ours!’
The speech lasted only a few minutes and at first it was difficult to make sense of what had happened. We sat at the table as if spellbound and looked at one another in a daze. But soon the waiter brought our cheburek order and a bottle of white wine. As if we had returned to the ordinary world from beyond the looking-glass, we plunged into a loud and unrelated conversation.
Meanwhile, Pushkin Street was gradually filling up. People were gathering under the speaker, engaging in a lively exchange of views. A heartfelt unease was driving them out of their homes onto the street. They wanted to see their fellow countrymen, to know how others had taken the dreadful news, to gauge the general mood, to sense the unity which the people’s commissar for foreign affairs was calling for. There was no feeling of panic or bewilderment in the crowd. Everyone was confidently saying: we will crush the Nazis!
Nobody in Odessa thought of cancelling planned visits to the cinema, theatre or concert hall, nor their traditional Sunday stroll along Marine Boulevard to the sound of a brass band. On the contrary, auditoriums were packed – at the opera, the Russian drama theatre and the theatre for young people, which were situated not far from one another on Greek Street, and at the city philharmonia. The public were also still keen to get into the circus for an act featuring tamed tigers.
We did not consider cancelling our visit to the opera either, and just after seven o’clock we were sitting in our seats in box 16 of the dress circle, watching the first act of La Traviata. The audience were invited to believe that they were located in the luxurious home of the Parisian courtesan, Violetta Valery. The stage sets, the costumes, the voices of the singers, the orchestra’s playing, the very decor of the hall with its gilded mouldings, huge crystal chandelier and the ceiling so beautifully painted by a French artist – all these elements were in complete harmony with one another. But something prevented me from enjoying this refined spectacle. It was as if it related to a different life, one which was rapidly receding from us. During the interval after the first act I suggested to my friends that we leave the theatre.
We went down to the sea. On the summer stage of Marine Boulevard the brass band was playing cheerful military marches. The sound of the trumpets and the loud drumbeats resounded over the shoreline. On the smooth surface of the watery expanse of Odessa Bay the outlines of Black Sea Fleet warships could be seen: the old cruiser Komintern which had been re-equipped as a mine-layer, the destroyers Shaumyan, Boykiy and Bezuprechnyy, and the gunboats Krasnaya Abkhaziya, Krasnaya Gruzhiya and Krasnaya Armeniya. The steel hulls, the masts and the mighty gun turrets with their long barrels were more in keeping with our mood. After all, war had been declared.
According to mobilization instructions, which were announced the following day, those born between 1905 and 1918 and liable for military service were subject to conscription in the army. Being born in 1916, I fell into this category. Having no doubt that they would take me on the spot and with pleasure, I set off for the military commissariat of the Odessa water-transport district. My meeting with the enlistment office seemed to me to be a very formal one, and I put on my best crêpede-chine dress and some beautiful white high-heeled sandals. In my handbag I had my passport, student card and graduation certificate from Kiev’s Osoaviakhim sniper school.
There were a lot of people by the doors of the district enlistment office. It took me about two hours to get inside. The room was stuffy and filled with smoke. There were doors slamming every minute. A hoarse military registrar with a face of red and blue blotches was trying to explain something to two lads of rustic appearance who had approached him. He looked at me with a harassed expression and said: ‘Medical staff will be enlisted from tomorrow.’
‘I’m not a medic,’ I replied, but he immediately turned away, indicating that our conversation was over. However, I was not prepared to accept that and placed my sniper’s certificate on the desk in front of him. The irritated registrar said that there was no mention in his list of a ‘sniper’ category. Then he added a sarcastic comment about Osoaviakhim and women who wanted to be soldiers but had no idea how difficult it was. In a word, he forced me to leave his office.
On my return from the enlistment office, I thought over the situation and came to the conclusion that the hitch was my registered residence. My name would be entered in the list of snipers in the enlistment office in the Pechorsk region of Kiev. The previous year I had successfully competed in the city shooting competitions and passed a re-training course. Perhaps they were looking for me in the Ukrainian capital, but here I was on the shores of the Black Sea. I needed to ask the local enlistment office to make a call to Kiev.
The following day I set off again for the military commissariat of the water-transport district. The registrar greeted me much more amiably. Judging by his reaction, he already knew what a sniper was. He leafed through my passport, found the stamp registering my marriage to Pavlichenko, A.B., and asked if my husband had any objection to my volunteering for the Red Army. I had not seen Alexei Pavlichenko for three years and replied that he had no objections. My passport remained with the registrar and they began to compile military documents in an adjacent office.
On the evening of 24 June 1941, having congregated at the station, all the new recruits, some partly in uniform, others still in civilian dress, were packed onto a special military train. The train moved slowly and took a westward line through the steppe close to the Black Sea. Soon the smooth surface of the Dnyestr estuary came into view, gleaming on the right, and then we passed through the stations of Shabo, Kolyesnoye, Sarata, Artsiz and Hlavani. The train sometimes stood for a long time at the stations, and we were given food there. But nobody explained anything or told us about our final destination. They merely said that we were going to the front, and my heart was involuntarily thumping: ‘Make it quicker, make it quicker!’ The young people in our carriage were getting indignant: ‘We won’t be there in time! They’ll beat the Nazis without us!’ That was how poorly we understood the scale of the disaster which had suddenly been unleashed upon our beautiful, thriving country.
The train stopped at some small station at three o’clock in the morning on 26 June. We were ordered to leave the carriages and line up. Shivering slightly from the morning’s cold dampness, the new recruits strode out along a dirt road and by seven o’clock we had reached a fairly dense forest. It turned out that we were on Bessarabian soil, among the rear units of the 25th Chapayev Rifle Division.
I received my first military uniform here, becoming a Red Army soldier of the 54th Stepan Razin Rifle Regiment. The items were completely new, which testified to the excellent state of the division’s commissariat service and the order in which its stores were kept. They were sewn from khaki cotton material: a forage cap, a tunic with a turn-down collar, trousers flared at the thigh like riding breeches, and kirza artificial leather boots (two sizes bigger than necessary). Also issued were a belt with a brass buckle, a gas mask in a canvas bag, a small sapper’s spade in a cover, an aluminium flask (also in a cover), an SSH-40 helmet (quite heavy), a pack and, inside it, various articles such as a towel, a spare undershirt and briefs, a spare pair of foot wrappings and bags for provisions and toiletries and other items. In the rucksack I hid away my staple-fibre dress with its lace collar and my comfortable canvas lace-ups. Goodbye, civilian life!
My first army breakfast seemed very tasty: hot buckwheat porridge and sweet tea with a solid chunk of bread. The meal took place in a setting approximating to battle conditions. We could hear the sound of far-off machine-gun fire and exploding shells echoing from time to time somewhere to the west. We new recruits all jumped at the sound of the explosions, but the seasoned sergeants and sergeant-majors explained that there was no need to be afraid of a flying or exploding shell – it would never do anyone any harm. And so the day passed in conversation. We were given permission to relax but not allowed to leave the forest.
The ceremony of swearing the military oath took place on 28 June. Senior political instructor Yefim Andreyevich Maltsev, military commissar of the 54th Regiment, came to us. He talked about the combat history of the 25th Chapayev Rifle Division (which was commanded in 1919 by the legendary Civil War hero, Vasily Ivanovich Chapayev), about the glorious rifle regiments: the 31st Furmanov-Pugachov, our own 54th Stepan Razin and the 225th Frunze Domashkin Regiments. In 1933 the division had become the first in the Red Army to be awarded the recently established supreme order of the USSR – the Order of Lenin. It was an acknowledgement of its outstanding feats on the Civil War fronts and its glittering achievements in military training during peacetime.
Then came the command: ‘Attention!’ The banner of the 54th Regiment was brought out before the assembled troops. With emotion in our voices we repeated the words of the ‘Red Army Soldier’s Oath’: ‘I, a citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, entering the ranks of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, solemnly swear to be an honest, brave, disciplined and vigilant soldier, and strictly preserve military and state secrets.’ We then put our signatures on sheets bearing the printed text of the oath and, by doing so, were transformed into people whose lives now completely belonged to our homeland. We were divided between the units of the 54th Regiment. I ended up in the 1st Battalion, 2nd Company, 1st Platoon.
The platoon was commanded by Lieutenant Vasily Koftun, who had graduated from the Mogilyov military infantry college the previous year and was younger than me. The first thing he asked was why I had volunteered for the army, for war was not women’s business at all. I took out my ‘magic wand’ – my graduation certificate from the Osoaviakhim sniper school. The lieutenant was extremely sceptical about it and said that he would petition the battalion commander, Captain Sergienko, to transfer me to a medical platoon, because the only work women were capable of at the front was as medical orderlies.
We went to the command post of the 1st Battalion. There, the same conversation was repeated: why, what for, and did I realize how dangerous it was, and so on. In response I talked about my father, who had served for some time in the Samara Division (later the 25th Chapayev Division) during the Civil War and met Chapayev, about my work at the Arsenal factory, which fulfilled orders from the People’s Commissariat of Defence, and about the military history of our country, which I had studied in detail in the history faculty of Kiev University.
Ivan Ivanovich Sergienko, a thoughtful, experienced and serious man, heard me out attentively and ordered Kovtun to forget his inept idea of transferring sniper Pavlichenko to the medical section. I was overjoyed: ‘Comrade Captain, I am ready to take possession of the weapon that is appropriate for me.’
‘But we have no sniper rifles, Lyudmila,’ he replied.
‘Well, then a standard Three Line.’
‘We don’t have those either.’
‘How am I to fight, then, Comrade Captain?’ I asked in bewilderment.
‘For you new recruits the main weapon for now will be the spade. You will help the soldiers to dig trenches and communication routes and to restore them after artillery shelling and bombing raids. Apart from that, we will issue you one PGD-33 grenade in case the Nazis break through. Are you familiar with the mechanism of this grenade?’
‘Yes, Comrade Captain.’
‘Excellent.’ He smiled. ‘No other action is required of you at the moment.’
I have read many reminiscences of the first days of the Great War for the Fatherland. They were written by generals commanding large military units, by officers in charge of regiments, companies and platoons, and by political staff. Because the battles unfolded along the entire length of our borders, the participants in the engagements drew completely different pictures. There was, for instance, the Brest fortress, whose defenders continued resistance for almost a month. There were also ferocious two-week tussles which ended in near panic withdrawals with the loss of whole corps and divisions, the abandonment of military machinery, and the encirclement and surrender of many detachments of Soviet troops. For example, this happened on the north-west, western and south-west fronts. There, in the course of three weeks, the Nazi German invaders advanced distances between 300 and 600km across the territory of the USSR. But our 25th Chapayev Division was located on the southern front, on its extreme left flank, occupying an already prepared line of defence of about 60km along the river Prut. Here the situation developed differently, more favourably for us.
On 22 June 1941 the Romanians, who were allies of Nazi Germany, tried to cross the river and were repulsed. The following week passed with minor skirmishes and artillery duels, during which the Chapayevs continued to hold their positions. There were also attempts to push the military action onto the enemy’s side. One battalion of our regiment (based in the town of Kagul) made a landing on Romanian soil and there routed two Fascist companies, taking about seventy soldiers and officers prisoner. Our troops also captured the Romanian city of Kilia-Veke, where eight pieces of ordnance and thirty machine guns fell into Russian hands as trophies. The Romanian units that had crossed the Prut on 23 June were also suitably repulsed and around 500 enemy soldiers surrendered in this engagement. All in all, over a period of eight days, from 22 to 30 June, the enemy lost up to 1,500 men and failed to capture an inch of Soviet land.1
Then events took a different turn. During the first days of July our defences on the river Prut were breached much further to the north, in the Iasi-Beltsy and Mogilyov-Podolski sectors. With their great advantage in manpower and technology, the invaders quickly mounted an advance and the southern front began to come apart at the seams. This resulted in the ‘Bessarabian loop’, from which the 25th, 95th, 51st and 176th Rifle Divisions had to be rescued. Therefore, the middle of June saw an arduous retreat across the Black Sea steppes with persistent rear-guard battles.
On 19 July our valiant regiment was located on the line from Cairaclia to Bulgariyka; on the 21st on the line from Novo-Pavlovsk to Novy Artsiz; on the 22nd on the Artsiz line; on the 23rd on the line from Karolino-Bugaz to the Dnyestr estuary. On the 24th the regiments of the division were to be found on various lines: by the village of Starokazachye, by Height 67, Cherkesy, and by the village of Sofiental.
We conducted the retreat in so-called ‘stages’. Some units covered the retreat, others withdrew, and others prepared new firing positions. It worked in this way: the 31st Pugachov and 287th Rifle Regiments defended, the 54th Razin Regiment withdrew and the 225th Domashkin Regiment dug in. Then the military units swapped places: the Domashkins would fight, the Pugachovs withdrew and the Razins dug trenches.
The withdrawal sometimes took place in the daytime, sometimes at night, to avoid strikes by German and Romanian aircraft. We travelled in road vehicles, but there were not many of them in the regiment – just eighteen in all – and, besides, nine of them (1.5-ton GAZ-AA from the Gorky works) belonged to the medical company. There was, however, a large number of two-horse carts (officially 233, but, in the middle of July, approximately a third fewer). We also made forced marches on foot.
The steppe spread out on both sides of the road, like an open book. It lay before us on the warm July nights, quiet and mysterious. But during the day it boomed with cannon volleys, lit up with fires and exuded the smell of burnt gunpowder. The population withdrew from Bessarabia with us.
Agricultural machinery (combine harvesters, tractors, sowing machines and so forth) moved along the roads. There were whole caravans of trucks carrying big wooden boxes; apparently, factory equipment was being evacuated. Collective farmers drove herds of livestock, and lumbering along the roads with them were lines of carts carrying household items. This is to say nothing of the multitude of women with small children, teenagers and old men dejectedly trudging along the dusty roadsides, apprehensively glancing up at the sky and shuddering at the artillery cannonades.
Often there would be a ‘Frame’ circling over the steppe roads – the twin-engine Focke-Wulf 189, which the Germans called Fliegende Auge (‘Flying Eye’) but was known in Red Army slang as the Rama (Frame) on account of its construction: twin-boom, with a separate crew gondola placed centrally. It carried out reconnaissance, directed bombers to the columns retreating towards the river Dnyestr and served as a spotter for long-range artillery fire.2 The ‘Frame’ did not fly quickly, but it flew quite high. All attacks on it by our red-starred Yastrebki [TN: ‘hawks’, commonly applied to fighter pilots] came to nothing – not that there were many such attacks.
The Nazis carried out regular aerial raids. They struck at the roads and the villages adjacent to them. We saw fields of wheat completely incinerated, and residential houses, storage facilities, administrative buildings and production premises destroyed by bombs, and machinery burnt out and abandoned. Sometimes before our very eyes Junkers 87 ‘Stuka’ bombers would suddenly drop out of the clouds, swoop down on the roads, and bomb and machine-gun the civilian population, who had no way of defending themselves. All this resembled not so much a normal war, where armies of equal strength fight each other, but rather the deliberate extermination of our people.
We, their defenders, either hid in the forest or headed east along the same roads. The ordinary people, seeing we were offering them no assistance, bitterly protested: ‘To hell with you! Why aren’t you fighting the enemy? Why aren’t you standing up to them?’
The images of awful destruction and enormous personal grief echoed in our hearts, with a pain that was impossible to ignore. Some became depressed, some lost faith in victory and dreaded the future. But I thought of vengeance, inescapable and irresistible. The intruders from the west who had wickedly violated the peaceful life of my native land would have to pay a severe penalty and I would be able to punish them – as soon as I got my hands on a weapon. But the armament situation was not good. There were shortages not only of shells for regimental and divisional artillery, but even of rifles.
In the memoirs of Vice-Admiral Ilya Azarov, who was a member of the Military Council for the Odessa defence district in the summer of 1941, there is a chapter with the revealing title ‘Give us Weapons!’ He described how he searched army storerooms for rifles, submachine guns, and standard and light machine guns during the breakneck Nazi assault and was everywhere denied. It was only by chance that he managed to arm one newly formed military unit on the southern front: ‘We had fifty learners’ rifles . . . all with perforated cartridge chambers. The factory closed up the holes at our request. Most of the rifles could be put into action. We tried them out on the firing range and, to our joy, they turned out to be fit for use.’3
A standard Mosin rifle, 1891/1930 model, fell into my hands in the second half of July after our regiment had been subjected to heavy artillery fire on the Novo-Pavlovsk to Novy Artsiz line. It was very frustrating to have to observe the course of battle with just a single grenade in one’s hand. But it was a million times more bitter to have to wait until your comrade, standing beside you, was wounded and his weapon passed into your hands. A shell splinter severely injured a regimental colleague who had taken cover in a trench. Drenched in blood, he handed his Three Line to me.
After some preliminary artillery fire, the Romanians prepared to attack and, together with the other soldiers of our 1st Platoon, I placed my rifle on the parapet of the shallow trench, set the back sight on mark 3 (that is, for a distance of 300 metres) and pulled back the bolt. Thrusting the bolt forward ensured that there was a cartridge in the chamber, and a light bullet, known as ‘Ball L’ or Model 1908, was awaiting its release. On the command of Junior Lieutenant Kovtun we opened fire. The company light machine guns also went into action. The outcome of this minor engagement was decided by our successful counter-attack. Climbing out of our trenches, we drove the Fascists back quite a long way. The battlefield was ours, and the troops of the 54th Rifle Regiment went about gathering up the weapons of the enemy dead. The trophies included 7.9mm-calibre vz. 24 Czech Mauser rifles. Our cartridges did not fit them, so we were also required to take the cartridge bags from the bodies. Of course, this only partially solved our soldiers’ weaponry problems.
Seeing me with a Three Line over my shoulder, Junior Lieutenant Kovtun came up to me. I was afraid he would order me to hand it over to one of the soldiers. But after the recent victory against the enemy, the platoon commander was in a good mood.
‘So, you went on attack with the others, Private Lyudmila?’
‘Exactly so, Comrade Commander!’ I reported back.
‘And how do you feel about it?’
‘Excellent, Comrade Commander!’
‘Did you get to fire?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I used up the whole cartridge clip.’
‘Fine. The sergeant major will re-register this rifle in your name. We’ll see what kind of sniper you are.’
‘I’d rather have a weapon with a telescope sight, Comrade Commander,’ I said. ‘Then the results will be different.’
‘I can’t promise that at the moment. But at the first opportunity I’ll try to fulfil your request.’ The junior lieutenant smiled, and I knew that now I would definitely be part of the sub-unit entrusted to him.
Meanwhile, the retreat continued. The Chapayev troops reached the western bank of the river Dnyestr, crossed it and on 26 July we took up defensive positions on the eastern bank, on a line: Gradenitsa–Mayaki village–Frantzfeld–Karolino-Bugaz. To the north lay the fortifications of the Tiraspol fortified district No. 82.4
They had been erected long before the war and were not badly equipped, with concrete, reinforced-earth, and stone firing points, dugouts and deep trenches. Located here in caponiers and semi-caponiers were around 100 pieces of ordnance of various calibres and several hundred standard and light machine guns. UR-82 also included underground storage space containing various military equipment.
The Soviet high command counted on halting the wave of the enemy advance here, pulverizing the Romanian and German infantry divisions on the banks of the Dnyestr, and then driving them back to the western frontier. I write in detail about UR-82 because its military stores came in very handy for the 25th and 95th Rifle Divisions. Our 54th Regiment at last received some Maxim medium machine guns, Degtyarev infantry (‘DP’) light machine guns, Three Line Mosins and SVT-40 autoloaders, and totally replenished its ammunition stocks. And I was finally given a completely new (the factory grease still on it) Mosin sniper rifle with PE (Emelyanov) sight.
However, our generals’ plans for a radical turning point in the military situation based on UR-82 were not fulfilled. The Romanians and Germans, with their five-to-one numerical superiority, were bearing down strongly. Fierce battles were fought from 26 July to 8 August on the boundaries of the Tiraspol fortified district. Then the military units of the southern front were forced to withdraw to the outskirts of Odessa. The Soviet defence now lay along the line connecting the population centres: Alexandrovka–Buyalyk–Brinovka–Karpovo–Belyayevka–Ovidiopol–Karolino-Bugaz.
Belyayevka, 8 August 1941 – this was the time and place of my wartime sniper debut, so to speak, in the war. I shall never forget that day. Belyayevka was quite a large old village established by the Zaporozhye Cossacks near Lake Byeloye, about 40km from Odessa. A significant part of the settlement comprised rammed-clay cottages with roofs made of reeds. There were also some stone structures: a church, a single-storey school and several houses which, before the Revolution, had probably belonged to wealthy locals. One of them now housed the rural council offices. After a lengthy engagement, the western part of Belyayevka remained occupied by the troops of the Romanian king, Mihai I. Despite our substantial losses, they did not advance at all. By evening our 1st Battalion had secured a position on the eastern side of the village. Captain Sergienko called me up to the command post and pointed to the far end of Belyayevka. Visible there among the overgrown trees was a large house with a porch which had a ridged roof, well illuminated by the setting sun. Two men came out onto the porch in officers’ uniforms and helmets reminiscent of rustic pudding basins. The kingdom of Romania had bought up these steel items for its army from their Dutch suppliers before the war.
‘Looks like that’s the staff headquarters. Can you reach it?’ asked the battalion commander.
‘I’ll try, Comrade Captain,’ I replied.
‘Go on, then.’ He stepped away from me, ready to observe me in action.
Our stay near UR-82 had been a more or less relaxing week and, after withdrawing to the rear, I had been able to bring my new sniper rifle into battle condition. To accomplish this I had had to strip the rifle completely and do some work on its components. For example, I had removed the wood along the whole length of the handguard groove, so that the woodwork no longer touched the barrel, I had filed down the tip of the gunstock, so that the barrel fitted snugly, bedded the barrel properly in the fore-end, and inserted padding between the receiver and the magazine. To ensure that the various parts of the bolt mechanism worked properly, it was recommended that they were carefully worked over with a small needle file. The trigger mechanism of the rifle needs to be efficient, reliable and stable.
The clear and windless weather which had settled over the steppes of the Dnyestr’s east bank was conducive to adjusting rifles, first with open sights and then the telescope. The first stage was undertaken at a distance of 100 metres from a square target measuring 25 × 35cm. For the second stage the rifle was fixed on a stand (or something similar) to ensure its immobility. The objective was to regulate the telescope sights with the aid of the open sights.
The rifle was over my shoulder and from my belt hung three leather pouches containing cartridges sorted by type: the first with ‘Ball L’ light bullets, M1908; the second with yellow-tipped ‘Ball D’ heavy bullets, M1930; and the third with special ‘B-32’ armour-piercing-incendiary bullets, with a black tip in front of a yellow band. I took the rifle in my hands and looked through the eyepiece of the telescope sight. The horizontal line covered the figure of the officer descending the steps, approximately down to his waist. I set myself an equation from the course in practical ballistics which we had done at the school and the solution was: distance to the target – 400 metres. Placing a cartridge with a light bullet in the chamber, I looked around to select a place to shoot from.
The captain and I were in the middle of a peasant hut which had been destroyed by a direct hit from a shell. The roof was smashed in, and stones and charred splinters of beams were spread around everywhere. It did not appear possible to fire from a lying position. I decided to shoot from behind the wall, on my knee, using a strap: to rest on the heel of my right boot, to lean on my left bent knee with my left elbow, and to let the strap under the left elbow carry the weight of the rifle. Not for nothing did Potapov often remind us of the snipers’ saying: ‘It’s the barrel that fires, but the gunstock that hits!’ A lot depends on the position which the marksman adopts when holding the rifle.
I hit the first target with the third shot and the second one on my fourth attempt, having loaded the rifle with one of the scarce cartridges containing the ‘D’-type heavy bullet. I cannot say I was nervous or hesitant. What hesitation can there be after three weeks of desperate retreat under enemy bombs and shells? Still, something got in the way of my concentration. They say this sometimes happens when a sniper first makes the transition from shooting practice at cardboard targets to firing at live enemy.
‘Lucy,’ said the battalion commander sympathetically, looking through his binoculars at the enemy officers lying motionless by the porch, ‘You need to conserve cartridges. Seven on two Nazis – that’s a lot.’
‘I’m sorry, Comrade Commander. I’ll get it right.’
‘Do try. Or else, visible or invisible, they’ll be crawling in like cockroaches. Apart from us, there’s nobody to stop the invaders.’
In the meantime, the Romanians felt like victors.
On 8 August 1941, the dictator Ion Antonescu declared that, having routed the Russians, on 15 August 1941 his valiant troops would enter Odessa and march in triumph through its streets. There were grounds for such euphoria from success. Having seized Kishinau on 16 July, the allied German–Romanian forces moved quite quickly from the Prut to the Dnyestr and in thirty-three days they had seized a significant amount of Soviet territory, which they called ‘Transnistria’, as if it had belonged to the Romanian kingdom from ancient times. Now they were preparing to purge it of Russians, Ukrainians, Jews and Gypsies (that is, to exterminate them in concentration camps), to hand over their lands and houses to the officers and soldiers of their own army, to forbid the use of the Russian and Ukrainian languages as ‘demeaning the dignity of the great Romanian nation’, to remove all monuments, to rename all towns and villages in accordance with their own wishes and, in particular, to call Odessa ‘Antonescu’.
The Romanians were keen to enter paradise on the back of someone else’s efforts. If it had not been for Hitler’s Germany with its mighty industry, superb military technology, well-mobilized and battle-seasoned armed forces as well as Operation Barbarossa, there would have been no point in King Mihai’s subjects dreaming of any ‘Transnistria’. In 1940 the Soviet Union took back Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, which had been snatched from Russia by the Romanians during the turbulent days of the Revolution and Civil War. Back then the royal forces had retreated very rapidly before the advancing units of our 5th, 12th and 9th Armies, avoiding military clashes and abandoning their weapons stashes.
Now their triumphal road across the Black Sea steppes had aroused in the troops of this backward, semi-feudal state the illusion of victory over its fearsome northern neighbour. Probably, the royal generals had decided that the Red Army was demoralized and would not offer further resistance. This illusion cost the Romanians dearly near Odessa.
Through the eyepiece of my telescope sight I often saw their swarthy, hooked-nosed, half-Gypsy, half-Oriental features. Antonescu may have maintained that the Romanians were heirs of ancient Rome, but from the fifteenth century the Wallachian kingdom had in fact been under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. If anyone had an influence on the nation’s population, it was the Turks, who had maintained garrisons in major cities almost to the 1870s, had their own trade and forced the Romanians to serve in their army. There were still many Gypsy bands roaming freely through the towns and villages of that peasant country.
Clad in uniforms of a sandy grey colour and pudding-basin helmets or cloth kepis with a comical double-peaked crown, at the beginning of August 1941 the Romanians conducted themselves in an extraordinarily confident and carefree manner, displaying contempt for the rules of war. They strode around their lines fully upright, made no attempt to maintain military security in all areas, conducted inadequate reconnaissance and deployed units from the rear (medical battalions, kitchens, tethering posts, strings of carts, workshops, etc.) close to the front line. In a word, they created excellent conditions for sharpshooters. It was not surprising that my sniper’s tally grew day by day.
It goes without saying that Antonescu’s order to capture Odessa on 15 August 1941 remained unfulfilled, although the 4th Army under General Nikolae Cuperke numbered over 300,000 soldiers and officers and had eighty military aircraft and sixty tanks at its disposal. There were also some detachments of the 72nd Infantry Division there. To counter them our side had thirty-five aircraft, between five and seven tanks in good working order and 50,000–60,000 troops.