Soviet military engineering units, sapper battalions and residents of the city worked supremely hard in preparation for a lengthy siege. The foremost edge of the main defence line (an 80km perimeter and 3.5km deep) ran through the villages closest to Odessa. This line included thirty-two battalion defence districts, company and platoon support points and firing positions for artillery and mortars. By 10 August they had managed to construct 256 reinforced-earth, brick and reinforced-concrete firing points, dug 1,500 earthworks for various purposes, and these were connected by a unified system by trenches and long, winding communication routes. The trenches were full size – that is, over 1.5 metres deep – and had walls reinforced with planks. There were also dugouts covered with three layers of thick logs. The flat expanses of the Black Sea steppes were crisscrossed by anti-tank ditches up to 7 metres wide and 3 metres deep. In front of the battle positions there were minefields and large areas with rows of posts strung with barbed or smooth wire. The second main line of defence was 40km away from the city, the third one 25–30km and the fourth 12–13km away.1
We had dreamed of fortifications like these. This dream had sustained us, both at Novo-Pavlovsk and at Novy Artsiz, as well as by the village of Starokazachye, when we were digging trenches at short notice with small sappers’ spades, at night by the light of the moon or in daytime, while being shelled by long-range enemy artillery, or when we were crossing the steppe highways with no food or water, burying our fallen comrades in bomb craters, or fighting off Nazis while trying to economize on cartridges. We believed that the chaos and disorder of the first days of war, caused by the sudden and deceitful nature of the enemy’s assault, would come to an end. When and where they would cease, we did not know, but we had no doubt that some strongpoint would shortly appear along our difficult route, some inaccessible fortress, which we, having endured our baptism of fire, would defend to the last drop of blood, and the audacious enemy would feel the true force of Russian arms.
A state of siege was declared in Odessa on 8 August. At the time, the military units of our 25th Chapayev Rifle Division, under the command of Colonel A.S. Zakharenko, were located on the Belyayevka–Mangeim–Brinovka line. We repelled the onslaught of the enemy’s superior forces and prevented the Romanians from breaking through to the south. A regrouping of Soviet forces then followed. The 54th Stepan Razin Regiment (commanded by Lieutenant Colonel I.I. Svidnitsky) – though not all of it – joined a combined detachment under Brigade Commander S.F. Monakhov which was assigned to the eastern defence sector, along with the 1st Regiment of the naval infantry and the 26th NKVD Regiment. The 1st Battalion remained in its previous position and was used as a strike force which was transferred from one sector of the front to another, to take care of enemy breakthroughs.
The core of the battalion consisted of our own 2nd Company, under Lieutenant Dmitry Lubivy. Having received the order ‘to restore the situation near village X’, we would climb into our 1,500kg trucks (though we more often went on foot), arrive at the destination and go in to attack, to drive the enemy from the positions they had recently occupied. As a rule, we normally managed to achieve this.
The company now had excellent armaments. We acquired a lot of weapons in combat: rifles of various models, machine guns (the German MP. 40, more familiar to us under the name ‘Schmeisser’), Soviet TT pistols, foreign pistols such as Mausers, Berettas and Steyrs, Nagant revolvers, DP light machine guns, and a large supply of cartridges. We had learned from our bitter experience of border skirmishes and, when the weaponry was insufficient, we created our own company caches. It was onerous to drag all this from place to place, but we did not want to surrender anything to the regimental store, although we were given all sorts of team talks.
The battle-readiness of our unit was largely facilitated by the closeness of its members’ ages, upbringing and education. Our ages varied from twenty to twenty-five. We were all Young Communist League members, mainly called up from the heavy industrial sector or, like me, student volunteers from Ukrainian institutes of higher education. Our sense of army fraternity had been shaped in the battles by the river Prut. We learned to trust one another and knew that, for us, the maxim of General Suvorov – ‘Perish yourself, but save your comrade!’ – was an unshakeable principle.
In the breaks between engagements we read letters from home together and also wrote letters together, even to our fiancés or fiancées. Everyone regarded it as his or her duty to come up with some striking or witty phrase. There were those among us who had a musical ear and a good voice, and we often sang together. The repertoire consisted of songs from the Civil War period, or from popular films: ‘The Woman of Warsaw’, ‘The Gun Carriage’ and ‘Over There Across the River’, as well as ‘Merry Wind’ from the Vainshtok film The Children of Captain Grant, ‘Broad is my Native Land’ from Alexandrov’s Circus, ‘The Blue Balloon Twists and Turns’ from the Kozintsev and Trauberg film Young Maxim, and many others.
The songs helped us in combat. There were times during heavy crossfire, when someone would suddenly sing in your ear with a hoarse voice just one line from a favourite song, or call out as he walked past, ‘Hold your line, infantry’ (from the well-known verse), and instantly your heart would feel more at ease.
Before an attack you never feel particularly well. There is a sort of vacuum in your head; your mood deteriorates. It is an oppressive and unpleasant sensation. In our company we fought against this: we would relate every possible amusing tale, recall successful combat episodes and not allow people to give in to anxiety. Then the voice of Lieutenant Lubivy would ring out: ‘Company, forward! For the motherland, for Stalin, hurrah!’ Charging together, we would dash into battle and forget about everything else in the world. Hatred of the enemy overcame other human feelings and the Romanians fled before us like hares. That is how exceptional our 2nd Company was!
However boldly we Chapayevs fought, the harsh conditions of the battle for Odessa sometimes got the better of us. The enemy enjoyed superiority in artillery and – most important – had huge military supplies for ordnance and mortars, which the city’s defenders lacked. Our gunners could only respond with one salvo to every three fired by the Germans and Romanians. Our company was once smothered by a wave of fire. It happened on the morning of 19 August. A mortar shell hit the trench parapet – not right in front of me, but about 2 metres to the left. The shock wave smashed my beloved rifle to smithereens, threw me backwards into the bottom of the trench and covered me with earth. I came to in hospital; my regimental mates had dug me out and taken me to Odessa along with other wounded and shell-shocked Red Army soldiers of the 1st Battalion.
A wonderful panorama lay before me through the window of my ward, which was on the first floor of the hospital. The branches of apple, pear and peach trees in an abandoned orchard swayed in the the wind from the sea, the yellowing leaves trembled, and the ripe fruit fell onto the ground. Little grey sparrows and black-headed starlings flew from twig to twig. They probably whistled to one another, but I couldn’t hear anything. The mute spectacle of autumn asserting itself was soothing for some reason and conducive to reflection. My hearing returned slowly. The pain in my joints and spine tormented me at night.
Lying on sheets crisp with starch in the clean and tidy room and drinking the strong, sweet morning tea, which was served at eight o’clock, invariably with a bun, I recalled the hot steppe booming with explosions. Here, in the absolute silence, it seemed like a distant, strange and even frightening dream which bore no relation to reality. However, my comrades in arms were still there and my place was among them.
Soon a number of letters from those dear to me were passed on to me from the regiment. My lovely mother, Yelena Trofimovna, was concerned for my health and advised me not to drink untreated water from open waterways on the march. My father, Mikhail Ivanovich, recalled the First World War and the Civil War, maintaining that the Belovs were always lucky in battle. My elder sister Valentina described how her work was going at her new place of employment. They were all a long way away from me, in Udmurtia, where the Arsenal factory had been evacuated from Kiev. Pulling myself together, I sat down to write back to them, trying hard to shape the letters with my right hand, which was gradually recovering its former strength and precision. The writing was a bit rough, but at least it was heartfelt:
Valentina Mikhailovna Belova,
Main Post Office, Votkinsk, Poste Restante,
Udmurt Republic,
Dear Val,
Yesterday I made it out of the hospital into the city. I received Lena’s postcard, which took a month and a half to get from Kiev to Odessa. Lena gave me your address. Why didn’t you take her with you? I have already been in the army for a month and ten days. I have succeeded in being nasty to the Romanians and Germans and spent time on the front line. The swine covered me with earth . . . Now I am in hospital. I leave in two days and go back to my unit, where my special role is as a soldier-sniper. Unless I’m killed, I plan to make it to Berlin, give the Germans a thrashing, and return to Kiev. My calculation is simple – 1,000 Germans, and then I can hold my head up with pride. It could be said that I have set my targets and will not retreat any further. In a word, I’m not bored. It’s a merry life. If you can be bothered, write to me care of: Chopak, Research Library, 13 Pasteur Street, Odessa. It will be forwarded to me.2
On the penultimate day of August 1941, I was released from hospital for the front line with a certificate testifying to my complete recovery from severe shell shock. I decided to visit my friend Sofya Chopak, who was still working at the library. On the way there I was stopped twice by patrols to check my documents. Suspicion was probably aroused by my tunic, which had been cleaned in the hospital laundry and expertly ironed, and had raspberry-coloured parade tabs sewn onto the collar instead of the regulation khaki-coloured field ones. Or maybe it was my appearance. There were, after all, very few women in military service at the time.
In the two months since the start of the war the previously carefree and beautiful city of Odessa and its fun-loving residents had undergone an abrupt change. On some streets barricades of sandbags had been erected and squares had been equipped with anti-aircraft guns. Many shops had closed, while others had their windows crisscrossed with paper tape. Holiday resort staff had disappeared. Parks, boulevards, streets and squares were deserted. Only patrols of the Home Guard with rifles walked along the cobbled roadway. Industrial enterprises, the port, transport and communication facilities and waterworks were under reinforced guard.
The city was concerned about saboteurs – and not without reason. The Nazis had begun to bomb Odessa regularly. Several times somebody had sent them signals from the attics of multi-storey buildings and directed the bombers to their targets. The port especially suffered damage in this way.
In one incident a small aircraft with no identification marks unexpectedly landed at Odessa’s civil aerodrome. Our anti-aircraft defences had, as they say, let it slip through. Seventeen Germans with submachine guns leapt out and opened fire. They tried to seize the airport to pave the way for another landing with a large number of troops. The soldiers of the Ilyichchev Destruction Battalion came to their senses fairly quickly. The enemy were surrounded and annihilated. The aeroplane was seized. The Fritzes never succeeded with any further landings.
Sofya talked about this and much else when we met in the rare books and manuscripts storeroom of the research library. The place was really humming. The staff were filling large wooden crates with folios, leather folders containing ancient manuscripts and various valuable curiosities, numbering them and compiling descriptions. After the announcement of a state of siege in the city many cultural institutions, including the research library, began to prepare for evacuation to the Caucasus. Sofya Chopak had still not decided whether she would go too. This meeting of ours might even be our last.
I spent the rest of the day pleasantly in the friendly and hospitable Chopak household, enjoying a modest supper in their apartment in Greek Street. From 25 August the executive committee of the Odessa regional council had made the sale of fresh bread, sugar, grain and fats subject to ration cards. However, the famous market on Privoz Square continued to operate. For now it still sold everything you could want, but the prices had doubled or trebled. It turned out to be a quiet evening.
On 29 August the gunners of the destroyer flotilla leader Tashkent had smashed a Romanian battery that had been firing from the Bolshoi Ajalyk estuary. For three days it had targeted the city, the port and its main navigation channel, preventing the ships of the Black Sea Fleet from unloading new drafted battalions, weapons, ammunition, foodstuffs and equipment for the besieged Soviet forces. As well as that, the coastal army repelled yet another Romanian assault, although the Nazis did manage to get closer to Odessa – to the town of Fontanka in the eastern defence sector and the towns of Freidental and Krasny Pereselyenyets in the western sector.
In the early morning I got a lift out of the city on a truck headed for the Kuyalnik and Bolshoi Ajalyk estuaries. The command post of the 1st Battalion was located near a small village. I reported to Captain Sergienko that I had arrived back at my unit to resume service. I concluded my report with the words ‘Red Army Private Pavlichenko’. The captain smiled.
‘You’ve made an error, Lyudmila.’
‘What error, Comrade Captain?’
‘You’re not a private now, but a corporal. Congratulations.’
‘I serve the Soviet Union!’
I wanted to shout at the top of my voice with joy, ‘Hurrah!’ But the done thing was to act soberly and with restraint. Still, it was my first army promotion. Having joined the Red Army as a volunteer, I had thought about a military career, but not expected that my enthusiasm and success as a sniper would be appreciated by the leadership within just a month and a half. However, the big losses in our forces were conducive to rapid promotion up the service ladder – for those who remained alive, that is.
The conversation at the command post continued and I learned that while I had been in hospital there had been changes in our 2nd Company. First, the commander of my platoon, Lieutenant Vasily Kovtun, had lost his life and, along with him, about another thirty men. It had happened during the bloody battles on 24, 25 and 26 August near the Kuyalnik estuary. Secondly, the regiment had recently been replenished – with volunteer sailors from Sevastopol. They were desperate to fight the enemy, but had no experience of infantry service. Other volunteers had also joined us – around 100 Odessa residents.
‘I’m glad you’re back in the regiment,’ said Ivan Sergienko. ‘I was really hoping it would happen and I’ve even got some presents for you. The main one is a new Mosin sniper rifle instead of that old broken one.’
‘Thank you, Comrade Captain.’
‘The second gift is simpler. But I imagine you’ll like it too.’ The battalion commander handed me a small grey cardboard box like those in which military goods are packed.
I opened it. In it lay two brass triangles, the insignia of my new military rank. They needed to be attached to the empty raspberry-coloured tabs in the top corners of my collar. Where could he have found such tiny metal things out in the steppe which had been peppered by firearms and dug into trenches? The commander had shown concern for me and this warmed my heart. Captain Sergienko was concerned not only about me, but about all the troops of the 1st Battalion. He was a very experienced, proactive and strict officer and a fair-minded man. When Lieutenant Colonel Svidnitsky was wounded and left our 54th Regiment, we all expected that the duties of commander along with the rank of major (which was due to him in terms of service) would go to Sergienko. But the high command decided otherwise and appointed Major N.M. Matusyevich, who had a good few years on the clock and had taken part in the Civil War as a rank-and-file soldier in the 1st Cavalry Army.
At the battalion command post I attached the triangles to my tabs and set off for the firing lines of the 2nd Company as a uniformed corporal. Sergienko saw me off with some parting words to the effect that I should look out for people among the new recruits who were capable of being trained in the sniper’s art. Sadly, in the trenches only a few troops from the old contingent called out to me by name. The others observed me with curiosity. The seamen, who had been sailing the watery expanses until now, did not even want to change into khaki uniform or to take off their peakless naval caps, their dark-blue flannel jackets, blue-and-white vests and wide black bell-bottomed trousers. While they were experts on ships, they had never held a rifle in their hands and the word ‘sniper’ meant nothing to them. Turning mariners into super-sharpshooters in a short period of time was not, to be honest, an easy prospect. We began by persuading them to wear helmets, tunics and boots instead of shoes.
Meanwhile, the high command of the Odessa defence district had set some specific targets for snipers: to occupy the most advantageous positions for observation and firing, to give the enemy no peace, to deprive him of the opportunity to move freely in the lines closest to the front, and to demoralize him. There was nothing new or original in this, but the theatre of military activity itself – flat steppe with the occasional hill, almost treeless, with sparse population centres – presented few opportunities for setting up snipers’ hideouts, while camouflage could not have been more difficult.
We had to look for other methods to combat the invader. We decided to set up hideouts further from our front line, to move them forward into no man’s land, which was 400–600 metres away and closest to the enemy. We did this after thorough reconnaissance, which we carried out ourselves, closely studying the locality, determining its suitability for targeted shooting and working out how to leave the hideout afterwards and return to our own unit.
I will describe our first such sortie as an example. Everything had been reconnoitred, and at night three of us set off on the mission: one soldier with a Degtyarev infantry pattern light machine gun (DP), a sniper-terminator (that is me) and a sniper-observer (Pyotr Kolokoltsev). We had gas-mask bags filled with cartridges, and grenades hung from our belts. Apart from a rifle, each of us had a TT (‘Tula-Tokarev’) pistol – my handgun of choice, on account of its powerful cartridge. On setting up the hideout, we realized that not every shot might be the final one for the enemy. The accuracy of our fire would depend on many circumstances which were at times beyond our control.
As a hideout site we chose a thicket of quite tall, dense shrubs. It was in the shape of a diamond with a length of about 150 metres and 12–15 metres wide. One point of the diamond projected into the Romanian defensive line and ended in a shallow gully in the area of the enemy’s second echelon. The hideout lay about 600 metres from the 54th Regiment’s first line of trenches. It was quite a long distance, of course, but we had arranged with the machine-gunners that they would keep us under observation and, at a signal from us (the raising of a small sapper’s spade), they would cover our retreat.
On exiting the dugout after midnight, we took an hour to cover the distance to the hideout. The moon in the cloudless sky illuminated the surroundings, and all the pathways, uneven patches and shell holes showed up clearly. The quiet, warm, gentle Black Sea night embraced the countryside around us. Neither side engaged in the usual unsettling rifle and machine-gun fire. All around it was so nice, so peaceful! Only the likelihood of a meeting with the enemy right in the shrub thicket spoiled our mood. We had to keep a watch as we strode along and had our weapons at the ready. There turned out to be no Romanians in the thicket. Why they had not occupied it and at least stationed an observation post there we could not understand. I attribute this fact to their Gypsy fecklessness. The punctual and calculating Germans had tried and tried to teach their allies about modern warfare, but they had not succeeded.
We devoted the rest of the night to preparing our positions. We dug trenches with small parapets, reinforced them with stones and turf, placed our rifles on them, got everything to fit, and worked out the distances. The machine-gunner set his weapon up.
It grew light. At five o’clock in the morning there was some movement in the enemy lines. The soldiers walked around fully upright, talked loudly and called out to one another. At six o’clock a field kitchen arrived. Things became livelier. Officers appeared and gave loud orders. At some distance away stood what was probably a medical station; the gleaming white smocks of the medics were clearly discernible to us.
All in all, there were a lot of targets. We divided our forces: the left flank would be mine, and Pyotr Kolokoltsev would take the right side. The machine-gunner kept the centre under observation. We waited till ten o’clock in the morning, studying how the enemy behaved when they were some distance away from the front line, and then we opened fire.
The Romanians got a real fright. For several minutes they could not work out where the shots were coming from and rushed around, intensifying the panic with their wild wailing. But we had measured the range and our sights were adjusted. Almost every bullet found its target. In approximately twenty minutes Kolokoltsev and I took seventeen shots each. The result: sixteen kills to me and Pyotr had twelve. The machine-gunner, who was supposed to cover us in the event of direct enemy attack on our hideout, did not fire because there was no need.
Pulling themselves together, the Romanians opened mortar and machine-gun fire on the thicket. However, they could not see us and therefore their shooting was off the mark. We had to get away. We made it back to our own lines safe and sound, wrote a report for the regimental commander and received an official message of gratitude for our bold action.
We thought about it and decided to go again at night to the same place and lie in wait. We proceeded calmly, without getting nervous, but on arrival at the thicket we became very alarmed. On the first day we had taken water with us in bottles but not brought the bottles back with us on our return. Instead of the three bottles of water we had left behind, we discovered six bottles, and all of them had held sweet wine. The bottles forced us to consider seriously: ‘Shouldn’t we get out of here altogether?’ We also found two cartridges and a narrow furrow on the grass from a Schwarzlose machine gun. The trail led in the direction of the enemy. It was clear: the Romanian sentries had been here during the day. They had finally worked out that the thicket was a very vulnerable spot on their front line, but they had left for the night for some reason. They probably did not expect a repeat attack from the same position. We surveyed our sector again, convinced ourselves that everything was in order, and decided . . . to stay.
We opened fire at noon. It was a repeat of the previous day’s scene: I had ten kills, including two officers, while Pyotr Kolokoltsev got eight. This time the Romanians quickly recovered their composure and began to fire back at the thicket with two machine guns. The rounds came closer and closer to our trenches. We ceased fire, withdrew, moved inconspicuously to one side and approached the machine-gunners from the flank. From a distance of 100 metres we took five shots with our sniper rifles and wiped out the squad. Pyotr liked the enemy machine guns; they were quite new and all the components shone. In brief, we took one machine gun away with us and buried the breechblock of the other. The regimental scouts later found it from our directions and took it as their own trophy, along with the machine gun. There were ample boxes of cartridges lying around, and the Austrian machine guns went on to serve the Red Army.
It would have been irrational to use this spot as a sniper hideout for a third time. Therefore, we found another one: a white house which was half destroyed and had been abandoned by its residents. It stood in the same neutral zone, about 400 metres from the thicket. Having occupied it, we observed the following scenario from the attic the next day: at 7.30 in the morning the Romanians unleashed a furious mortar attack on the thicket and thrashed it for about thirty minutes without a break. It is no bad thing when the enemy wastes ammunition to no purpose.
For the twenty-six Romanians who would remain forever in the Odessa steppe (while my overall total was approaching sixty-five) I did not feel that I was due any reward. In the first months of the war we did not expect any decorations and thought more about defending our native land against the frenzied invaders. Later, in 1943, after the establishment of the soldier’s Order of Glory, it was awarded, third or second class, to those sharpshooters who had wiped out ten or fifty to seventy enemy soldiers and officers. For example, fourteen young women who were graduates of the central women’s school for sniper training were given similar double decorations, first and second class. Only Sergeant Major Nina Pavlovna Petrova, though not a graduate of the central women’s sniping school, received the Order of Glory in all three classes: third, second and first (the last awarded posthumously). Her tally came to over 120 Nazis.
Within the 54th Stepan Razin Rifle Regiment the most celebrated heroine at the siege of Odessa was not me, but machine-gunner Nina Onilova. An orphan who was brought up in a children’s home and worked in an Odessa factory, Nina came to us as a twenty-year-old in the second half of August 1941, along with other volunteering residents of the city – initially as an orderly in a medical company. Soon she requested a transfer to a field unit because she had studied machine-gunning within the Osoaviakhim educational organization. She was registered with our battalion and served in the 1st Company. So it goes without saying that we knew each other.
Not having witnessed her feats myself, I would like to turn to the recollections of those Odessa veterans who saw Nina both on the field of battle and away from it.
‘They first began talking about her after the battle by the village of Gildendorf,’ writes Vice-Admiral Azarov.
At a critical moment Nina and her number two in the detail, Private Zabrodin, wheeled their machine gun out into an open space and struck at the attacking enemy. Their firing was on the mark. The Fascists went to ground and those who remained alive hastily crawled away to their own side. The attack was repelled.3
‘When I returned to base, the head of the political section, Senior Battalion Commissar N.A. Berdovsky called in,’ recalls Lieutenant-General Trofim Kolomiyets.
With him was a girl of short stature in a Red Army uniform. Catching my inquisitive eye, Berdovsky introduced her: ‘Machine-gunner Nina Onilova of the Razin Regiment. During the defence of Odessa she was wounded and evacuated to a hospital in the rear. Now, she says, she’s fit and well . . .’ So that is what she was like, this Nina Onilova, who was nick-named Chapayev’s ‘second Anya’4 and had shot hundreds of Fascists. To look at – just a young girl with a round suntanned face, laughing eyes and charming, with a slightly embarrassed smile . . . In the coastal army, there was probably not a single soldier who had not heard of her.5
The Young Communist League organizer in our regiment, Yakov Vaskovsky, described the actions of the gallant Nina in greater detail in his own memoirs:
A further enemy attack caught me at the command post of the 1st Battalion. Battalion commander Ivan Sergienko, who was observing the field of battle through a crack in the wall, suddenly shouted menacingly into the telephone receiver: ‘Why is the machine gun on the left flank not firing? Check it immediately. Fire it yourselves if necessary!’ This was addressed to the company commander, Lieutenant Ivan Grintsov. He ran along a trench on the left flank. The situation was truly dangerous. Apparently noticing that the fire there was not as strong, the attacking Fascists had begun to move towards that side. The machine-gun detail was new, having only just joined the battalion, and the company commander had not had time to get to know the personnel before the battle.
Running up to the machine-gunners, Grintsov saw that the first one was bent over and not moving, while the second was standing around at the back, as if nothing was the matter. ‘Still too far away. Let them come a bit closer . . .’ said the first machine-gunner in a completely calm tone, without turning around. But there were only some 70 metres to the enemy ranks.
Grintsov could not restrain himself and shouted: ‘What are you doing? They’ll pepper you with grenades any minute!’ He was ready to push the gunner out of the way in order to open fire himself. But at that moment the machine gun started up. The enemy troops were gathered on a narrow sector. The first round mowed down almost half of them. They were so close that they had nowhere to hide The last ones fell about 30 metres from the machine gun. There was a shout of ‘Hurrah!’ from our trenches. Nobody in the company, it seems, had seen machine-gun fire like that.
‘Well done!’ Grintsov exclaimed. ‘Just look how many Fascists are lying there! A medal’s not good enough for you!’ The gunner finally turned to the company commander, who beheld before him a young woman, sun-tanned, with a cheerful round face and hair cut short like a boy . . . Soon the entire regiment knew about machine-gunner Onilova, ‘Chapayev’s Anya number two’, and then so did the entire 5th Rifle Division . . .6
Nina Onilova received the Order of the Red Banner – quite soon, too, in December 1941, on the front at Sevastopol. According to data from the defence of Odessa, on that occasion some ten soldiers from our glorious and courageous regiment, which had sacrificed itself for the city and borne significant losses in battles with the Fascists, were awarded decorations.
To be honest, not all of us were ecstatic about Nina’s tactical innovation. Captain Sergienko was particularly nervous. Onilova occupied a single machine-gun nest, but he was responsible for the entire battalion’s front line. Summoning the gunner, the battalion commander praised her for her boldness, but warned her that firing from such short distances during frontal attacks by the enemy was a very big risk. Moreover, a separate group could burst in from the flank and pepper her with grenades. The Maxim fixed machine guns in the regiment were quite old, of pre-revolutionary vintage; their mechanism frequently failed when under a heavy load, and, if that happened, nothing would save Nina and the other troops with her. She was not starring in the film Chapayev, in which the Whites never made it to the Red lines. This was real war and situations on the battlefield could develop in different ways.
As a result, Onilova was not often permitted to employ her innovative method and was forced to observe service instructions to the letter. However, it no longer mattered. The widely distributed newspaper of the 25th Division, The Red Army Soldier, and then other military publications, printed enthralling tales about the deeds of this courageous girl, and political staff concerned with propaganda within the army made great capital out of the image of this remarkable machine-gunner who was inspired to great feats by the romantic heroes of the Civil War.
But nobody saw anything romantic in the sniper’s art at that time. In the first place, the word ‘sniper’ was alien and incomprehensible. Secondly, the operations of a machine-gunner and a machine gun were full of action and looked much more interesting than firing from a hideout. A round of fire crackled and a swathe of the enemy instantly dropped to the ground. The way a sharpshooter could take out an officer in an advancing line, thereby choking the attack, could not be so picturesquely presented. Thirdly, there were the snipers themselves. What sort of people were they? Taciturn, unsociable, even morose. They were incapable of describing in detail precisely how they hunted the enemy (not that they were allowed to do this, incidentally, having signed the official secrets clause).
At the beginning of September 1941 (3 to 5 September, I believe) we found out that, while remaining in the eastern sector of the Odessa defensive district, our regiment would be temporarily joining a newly formed rifle division, initially known as the 1st Odessan and then given the number 421. Our old acquaintances ended up with us: the 1st Regiment of the naval infantry under the command of Colonel Y.I. Osipov, now the 1330th, and the 26th Regiment of the NKVD, now the 1331st and strengthened by troops from the former fortified district No. 82 as well as an artillery regiment, a sapper battalion, a machine-gun battalion and some other units. The position of divisional commander was occupied by G.M. Kochenov. Staff headquarters were in the Kuyalnik hospital and its advance command post was located in the village of Ternovka. The division was faced with the task of maintaining a front 17km in length and resisting two fully manned Romanian infantry divisions. We beat back their attacks all day on 6 September and on the 7th we went on the offensive ourselves. The Romanians retreated between 0.5 and 2km to the north on the various sectors of the front, leaving on the field approximately 700 dead and seriously wounded troops and officers. About 200 of them ended up as our prisoners, and ordnance, mortars, machine and submachine guns and a lot of ammunition were seized.
The following day, 8 September, the Romanians fell upon the 3rd Battalion of our regiment, which was taking up positions on the isthmus between the Khajibeisk and Kuyalnik estuaries. We hurried to the aid of our regimental mates and, with our combined forces, drove back the enemy attack. Fierce fighting with strong artillery shelling continued on 9, 10 and 11 September. It was then that the former border guards, the courageous and disciplined troops who had now become the 1331st Rifle Regiment, broke through ahead. They established themselves firmly on the line between Bolgarka village, Avgustovka village and the northern bounds of the village of Protopopovka.
In clashes like this, when huge masses of forces were fighting on a flat plain, what was the sniper to do? The answer was simple – to occupy previously set up fortifications (there were some in this area) with other troops and to carry out targeted fire from their trenches. All the more so since the enemy were advancing regardless of any losses.
At this point I witnessed a scene that was almost fanciful in the context of the Second World War. The Romanians had mounted a ‘psychological’ attack. First, as was usually the case, the artillery boomed away for about twenty minutes. The Soviet soldiers and officers waited it out in well-equipped deep dugouts and trenches. No great damage was inflicted on the 54th Regiment. Then silence descended. The troops returned to their positions and began to look into the distance. There, something unusual was happening.
The sounds of stirring music reached our ears. We saw that the infantry in their pudding-basin helmets were not spreading out across the steppe, but, on the contrary, sticking together in close, dense columns, standing shoulder to shoulder and marching as if on parade, raising their feet high to the rhythmic beat of the drums. Somewhere in the second or third column a banner was billowing over the soldiers’ heads. Keeping their distance and shouldering their unsheathed sabres, the officers were striding along in the gaps between the columns. On the left flank was a priest in full parade garb. His gold-embroidered gown, glinting in the rays of the bright autumn sun, looked strange against the background of the monolithic military formation. Three church banners followed him, carried by Romanian soldiers. The priest, it subsequently turned out, was Ukrainian.
It was not without some amazement that I viewed the attacking force through binoculars. They were approaching closer and closer. Soon it became evident that the soldiers were drunk. They were not maintaining their formation so strictly and their marching was not all that precise. But would it be possible to force sober men to walk out onto an absolutely flat, easily targeted plain, even if they were convinced of their racial superiority over those they intended to exterminate? They had probably been endowed with confidence in victory by one other circumstance: their large numerical superiority. Marching against our 1st Battalion, in which no more than 400 were left, to the sound of loud music from a military band, was an infantry regiment of peacetime proportions – 2,000 bayonets.
Inexorably, the distance was growing shorter. The Romanians approached to within 700 metres and our mortar battery launched a first strike against them. Fountains of earth soared up to the sky amidst the sandy grey columns. Their formation broke down for a while. But, leaving their dead behind them, those still alive closed ranks and continued the advance. At the officers’ command, they upped their pace and took their rifles in their hands. The blades of the bayonets gleamed like lightning against the dusty expanses of the steppe.
I waited patiently until the first enemy column drew level with a fence at the edge of a maize field. I drew a preliminary firing diagram and marked out the distances along it. The fence was 600 metres away from my trench, some wolfberry thickets were 500 metres, and a lone tree with a broken crown was 400 metres away. The soldiers of King Mihai I were now unknowingly moving into the field of direct fire.
A direct sniper’s shot is an entirely amazing thing! For this shot, the trajectory of the bullet did not rise above the target for the entire distance of the shot. For instance, as in the given situation, by using a setting of 6 and aiming at the heels of the marching enemy soldiers, it was possible to fire several shots without resetting the telescope sight. The enemy would be hit first in the leg, then, on coming closer, in the stomach, and, closer still, at 300 metres, in the chest, and finally in the head. Then, as they approached still closer to the sniper, the order would be reversed – chest, stomach, leg.
I had developed a favourite method of shooting by then: hitting the enemy between the eyes or in the temple. But as I looked at the infantry armada marching to the beat of the drum, I thought that this time a shot to the head alone would be an impermissible luxury. The main thing now was to fire and fire and fire, just to stop the psychological attack of drunk soldiers, who had no idea what they were doing, to prevent the Romanians from reaching our trenches. After all, with their five-fold numerical advantage, they would simply trample our valiant battalion into the ground and wipe out all my comrades in arms.
They didn’t make it . . .
The sun was setting, illuminating the muted feather grass of the steppe with weak, slanting rays. Moving back, the Romanians carried away their wounded, but the dead (up to 300 of them, it seemed) remained behind. Stepping over the bodies of the fallen enemy with Lieutenant Voronin, who had replaced our now wounded former company commander, Lieutenant Lubivy, I sought out ‘my own’ kills and put them down in my sniper’s notebook. As well as me, our machine-gunners and other riflemen of the second company had also fired with great success. Everyone had the same rifle cartridges, calibre 7.62mm. I regarded as my own those who had bullet holes in their head, neck or the left side of their chest. There were nineteen of them, including seven officers and one non-commissioned officer.
‘Were you specifically aiming at the officers?’ asked the lieutenant.
‘Yes. That’s what the instructions prescribe.’
‘An excellent result, Lyudmila.’
‘I serve the Soviet Union.’
‘They decided on a psychological attack,’ said Voronin pensively. ‘Did they not feel anything for their men?’
‘They simply regard us as weaklings.’
‘Two attacks in an hour. And now they’ve rolled back a kilometre. Neither sight nor sound of them.’
‘It’s the volatile Romanian nature,’ I joked. ‘Attack in a bunch with a lot of noise and clamour and, if victory doesn’t come, run away as fast as your legs will carry you.’
Lieutenant Andrei Alexandrovich Voronin had graduated from the Kirov Leningrad Red Banner Infantry College in 1939, served before the war in the Volga military district and had recently ended up in Odessa with the drafted reinforcements, but he had no front-line experience. He was very interested in sniper operations and asked about various details. It was the lieutenant’s intention to reward me for accurate shooting with an out-of-turn promotion in military rank, and he did this. I became a junior sergeant and was full of respect for the young officer. He came from a dyed-in-the-wool Leningrad family. His father, a history scholar, worked at the Hermitage and wanted his son to follow him, but Andrei had dreamed of a military career from childhood. Nevertheless, he had a good knowledge of history and we sometimes talked about the deeds of our bellicose forebears.
I strove to live up to the new order from the company commander as well as I could. He sent me on a mission to wipe out the enemy machine gun which was directing truly accurate and lethal fire from the direction of Gildendorf village,7 making it impossible for our troops to raise their heads.
During the last ten days of September the Soviet high command was preparing to inflict a blow on the enemy in the eastern sector, using the forces of the 421st and 157th Rifle Divisions. The latter arrived in Odessa from Novosibirsk on 17 September, a force of over 12,000 troops and artillery consisting of twenty-four 76mm-calibre field guns, thirty-six 152mm-calibre howitzers plus a triple supply of ammunition.8 This was of huge assistance, because the regiments of the 421st Division had almost no cannons (three ordnance for a kilometre-long front line versus eighteen on the Romanian side). According to the plan, the advance was to be supported by our air force, the 37th and 38th Coastal Batteries, and also the ships of the Black Sea Fleet with their cannons. The villages of Gildendorf, Bolgarka, Alexandrovka and the Voroshilov collective farm lay in the sector of the main thrust. It was up to our two battalions of the 54th Regiment, along with the five battalions of the 157th Rifle Division, to take Gildendorf by storm.
The troops of our regiment had earlier driven the enemy out of the cemetery situated about 200 metres from the southern tip of the village. There were trees growing in the cemetery: five tall maples with spreading crowns and thick ash-grey trunks which had managed somehow to survive the bombing raids and artillery attacks. The difficulties involved in camouflage on the steppe receded here. From the book Combat in Finland I knew that in the Karelian forests the Finnish snipers, the so-called ‘cuckoos’, engaged in targeted shooting at our forces while hidden in the branches of the trees – pines, firs and spruces. Why couldn’t I make use of this experience?
The lieutenant approved my plan. All evening I embroidered my new camouflage jacket with its green hood and brown pattern. The sergeant major had given me some shreds of camouflage netting and somebody’s old tunic, which I cut up into ribbons and short strips. Shaggy ribbon came in handy for covering the rifle barrel. I distributed the rest of it, along with maple leaves, twigs and clumps of grass, so that it lost its former clear outline and began to resemble the garb of a wood sprite or a marsh devil.
One and a half hours before first light I set off for the cemetery. The residents of the village of Gildendorf, settlers from Germany, were not altogether poor people. With German thoroughness they had established not only the village but also – not far away from it – the churchyard with its straight paths and graves with stone monuments and fretted grilles. Trees shaded the eternal resting place of Gildendorf’s first burgomaster, the worthy Wilhelm Schmidt, who had died in 1899 according to the inscription on the marble monument. Planting my legs on the black slab, I began to clamber up the trunk of a mighty maple which leaned over the tomb.
My equipment comprised only the most essential things: a Mosin sniper rifle with PE sight, a belt with two ammunition pouches full of cartridges with ‘L’-type light bullets and black-tipped ‘B-30’ armour-piercing bullets (because I was intending not just to shoot the machine-gunners but to put their fiendish machine out of commission), a flask in a cloth cover, and a Finnish-type army knife. I did not take binoculars, nor a steel helmet, because my hearing had deteriorated following the shell shock and the helmet made it difficult for me to detect faint sounds.
Just before sunrise a gust of wind blew. The maple leaves began to rustle, but the thick branches spreading out from the tree’s massive trunk did not even sway. Setting my feet on them, I set up my rifle conveniently on another branch at roughly the same level as my shoulders and looked through the eyepiece of the telescope sight at the village. Its one street, lined with single-storey stone houses, a mill, a church and a school, now lay plainly visible before me. In an orchard surrounding a large dilapidated house I saw an MG. 34 all-purpose German machine gun on a tripod and boxes of cartridge belts next to it. The machine gun had telescope sights. So that was the secret of its devastating impact! Well, you noxious Fascist dogs, I’ll teach you . . .
At seven o’clock in the morning the guard changed. However, the soldiers with rifles did not interest me. I was waiting for the machine-gunners. They appeared later – three Romanians in sandy grey jackets and kepis with their funny crowns stretched to form a double peak, front and back. First they busied themselves with the machine gun, then they sat under the trees and began to treat themselves to the large, golden-yellow pears, masses of which were lying around under the trees in the orchard.
I planned to take three shots, no more. And one of them would be at the breech of the machine gun. Inserting a cartridge with a light bullet into the barrel bore, I closed the bolt and pressed my face close to the telescope sight. The target, the head of the tall soldier sitting near the MG. 34 tripod, was situated between the two black lines and only seconds remained before the shot was taken. But suddenly there was some sort of commotion in the orchard. The machine-gunners leapt up, lined up, and froze at ‘attention’. A minute later some officers in peaked caps came up to them. One of them looked most interesting: a cigar in his mouth, a gold strip along the edge of his cap, a braided loop hanging from his right shoulder, a brown leather satchel at his side and a long whip in his hand. All in all, he had a haughty and authoritative air.
I knew the distance: about 200 metres. The wind had died down. The air temperature was approaching 25 degrees. I took as my target not the soldier, but the man with the braided loop, held my breath, counted out to myself, ‘Twenty-two – twenty-two,’ and smoothly pressed the trigger.
The Romanians heard the shot. How could one not have heard it in the heavy morning silence? Still, it probably did not immediately cross their minds that a sniper was operating. The adjutant (for the braided loops are part of their uniform) did not even cry out as he keeled over. They began to fuss around him – quite pointlessly, as the bullet had hit him between the eyes. I managed to reload the rifle twice and both machine-gunners also ended up on the ground. The armour-piercing bullet from the fourth shot struck the breech of the MG. 34 and put it out of commission.
The enemy had recovered their senses by now and were pounding the cemetery with mortars and rifle fire. Bullets and mortar splinters whistled around me. I clung to the thick trunk of the maple, but soon realized that it offered poor protection. A clump of five trees was not the equivalent of an age-old Karelian forest in which it was difficult to pick out anything among the shapes of the giant pines. Pieces of hot metal were flying like a lethal swarm, knocking down leaves and breaking the thin twigs. My heart grew cold from a fearful feeling of danger, but there was no confusion. It is the new recruit who believes, ‘This cannot happen to me.’ A soldier who has been under fire thinks instead, ‘This could happen to me, so I need to be more careful.’ Anyone who has witnessed the death of his or her comrades a number of times is aware, ‘This ought to happen to me. But it will not happen if only I can get out of here.’
I had to jump straight away – even just to the ground, about 3 metres below. So as not to break the expensive optics, I hung the rifle on a branch which was sticking out much lower down and then I plunged down, almost as if I had been hit. I fell awkwardly, striking a gravestone with my right hip, and could not get up because of the severe pain. Voronin sent in some soldiers, and they helped me to get back on my feet and took me to a dugout.
The advance began at nine o’clock of the morning on 21 September 1941, preceded by a lengthy artillery barrage. It seemed as if the earth was shaking from the salvoes of Soviet ordnance and mortars. My regimental mates were preparing for an attack on Gildendorf and I was lying in a dugout, suffering the pain in my right hip and reflecting on the fact that what was written in Combat in Finland was of course true, but nevertheless, in applying other people’s experience, you need to use your own head and analyse local conditions. The raid on the cemetery and the sharpshooting from the tree now struck me as downright hazardous. But, as the proverb says, all’s well that ends well!
Sometime towards eleven o’clock the enemy were driven out of Gildendorf and even out of the Ilyichevka state farm. In a disorderly fashion the Romanians were withdrawing their forces to the north, abandoning dead and wounded, arms and ammunition on the battlefield. Our troops began to survey the newly seized positions and found in the village orchard a shattered German machine gun and, next to it, two soldiers and an officer with bullets through their heads. This was my contribution to the overall victory, and Lieutenant Voronin acknowledged that I had done much to assist the 2nd Company.
He ordered medical orderly Yelena Paliy, a student in her second year at the Odessa medical institute, who had joined the Red Army as a volunteer in August, to handle my treatment, which the disciplined Lena carried out with great diligence: she gave me tablets for pain relief, placed cold compresses on my liver and put me on a special diet of buckwheat porridge boiled without fats. But what helped me more than the porridge were the care and attention which my regimental mates lavished upon me as a reward for taking out that enemy machine gun. They brought me treats: juicy golden pears from the orchard, toilet soap and flacons of eau de cologne from a cart captured from the Romanians.
The company commander also visited me. He told me that the haughty man with the braided loops whom I had shot had turned out to be the adjutant of the dictator Antonescu himself, Major Gheorghiu Karaga. Important staff papers, letters, photographs and a diary were found on his body. The major had written of the grave state of the Romanian army, which had met fierce Russian resistance near Odessa. The diary was transferred to the staff headquarters of the coastal army, and from there to Moscow. Fragments of it were published by the newspaper Pravda in October 1941.
A memento of the episode with the five maples in the cemetery at Gildendorf remained with me in the form of a silver cigarette case with beautiful chasing and engraving on the lid, which carried a picture of a beautiful woman in a luxurious hat with ribbons and feathers. It had been found on the dead Romanian major and Andrei Voronin gave it to me as a trophy when he visited me. I pressed on the button, the cigar case opened, and we beheld the long thin brown cigarettes packed densely inside. I offered them to the lieutenant. He declined, saying. ‘I don’t smoke. Have you been smoking long, Lyudmila?’
‘No. I learned at the front. Sometimes it helps to relieve the nervous tension.’
‘Does that happen often?’ asked the company commander.
‘Usually after an operation, when the enemy has been annihilated. When waiting in a hideout I don’t feel any emotions. I simply wait and think about making sure the rifle doesn’t miss.’
‘You think about your weapon?’ asked the lieutenant in surprise.
‘Of course. For a sniper her weapon is almost sacred.’
Our conversation was interrupted by the appearance of Lena Paliy. She brought in three mugs of hot tea, generously sweetened with honey (a gift from local residents to the valiant troops of the Red Army), and we indulged in memories of life before the war. Andrei proved an interesting conversationalist and gave us a vivid account of the Hermitage. He loved this museum and knew its collections, especially the collection of Scythian gold, which his father devoted himself to studying. I, in turn, described how, following my first year at university, I had gone on archaeological practical work at excavations near the town of Chernigov. There I had seen a spherical-conical iron helmet from the tenth century, numerous arrow-and spear-heads and fragments of chainmail uncovered.
I regret that I am unable to draw a more detailed portrait of the commander of the 2nd Company, Andrei Voronin. Our acquaintance did not continue long. He was a colourful representative of that generation of young people who grew up in the post-revolutionary years, studied at Soviet institutes of higher learning and then went through the crucible of the Great War for the Fatherland. True patriots, they were noble, bold and staunch people who unthinkingly gave their lives for its freedom and independence. Andrei acted in the same way. He held the position of company commander for barely more than a month. He lost his life in the battles around the village of Tatarka while rousing his troops for a counter-attack. An enemy bullet pierced his heart and we buried him in the village cemetery under a red star made of plywood.
After the victory gained on 21 and 22 September over units of the Romanian 4th Army in the sector of the Odessa defence district, the Soviet high command planned to inflict an equally powerful blow on the enemy in the western and southern sectors. We received the order to transfer our base to the Dalnik village–Tatarka–Bogarskie Khutora line, and, in this way, we were finally reunited with two other battalions of the 54th Rifle Regiment, taking our place in reserves of the 25th Chapayev Division. Our path lay through Odessa and we rejoiced at the prospect of seeing the splendid Black Sea city which we were defending.
The overall picture was no cause for joy. First we went through Peresyp. There, only the electricity station was operating and the factories stood with their workshops smashed and their chimneys fallen. The town itself had suffered severely from bombing raids and artillery attacks. We walked along the roadway; the footpaths were occupied by women and children. They held in their hands kettles, jugs and buckets and gave us water to drink, treated us to cigarettes (I recall the brands, Kiev and Litka), and they called to us with welcoming, tender and encouraging words. Only later did we realize that they had shared with us their meagre water ration, which was a total of one bucket of water per person per day.
At the new base we were given a week to relax and I was called over by Captain Sergienko. He said that he had sorted through the reports of the company commanders and checked the documents, and it turned out that my sniper’s tally was over 100 dead Fascists. I confirmed this information. The battalion commander teased me a little for my excessive modesty, suggesting that it was up to me to remind him of such an achievement. I thought to myself, ‘And what would that have proved? Dozens of times reckless heroes have before my very eyes thrown themselves with grenades at Romanian tanks, fired away down to their last cartridge in the trenches and beaten back the swarming enemy with bayonets and rifle butts in hand-to-hand combat. When has anyone from the high command voiced appreciation of their feats? But they are not bitter in the slightest, for it is not for medals and decorations that we are standing here on the bare steppe under hellish fire.’ Sergienko had perhaps somehow guessed my train of thought. He smiled, said that he would soon put everything right, and I would have a trip to the divisional staff headquarters in the village of Dalnik. I did not particularly believe him and answered, ‘Yes, Comrade Captain!’ and forgot about our conversation.
I had to go, all the same. At that time, I knew nothing about the new commander of our division, Major-General Ivan Yefimovich Petrov; I had no particular regrets about that. Between a divisional commander and the commander of a detachment in an infantry regiment, which was what I had become thanks to Lieutenant Voronin, there was an enormous gulf. Would generals be bothered with junior sergeants?
Petrov’s adjutant invited me to enter. Inside the room I saw before me a man of about forty-five, taller than average height, lean, red tinges in his hair, with a brush of coarse hair on his upper lip and a face that was commanding, intelligent and decisive. He wore pince-nez and his tunic was decked with cavalry shoulder straps, because he had until recently been in command of the 1st Cavalry Division, which was then fighting near Odessa. From first glance he appeared to me to be a natural-born military man, an officer from a family of officers. Only later did I discover that he had the most proletarian roots. His father was a cobbler in the town of Trubchevsk but had managed to give his son an education. First he graduated from grammar school and then the Karachev teaching seminary, and from there, in January 1917, he ended up in the Cadet College of St Alexei in Moscow.
The general looked at me calmly, almost with apathy. ‘Comrade Junior Sergeant,’ he said in a low, hoarse voice, ‘in recognition of your services at the front the high command is awarding you a sniper rifle inscribed with your own name. Strike the Fascists without mercy.’
The divisional commander’s adjutant handed me a newish SVT-40 rifle with a PU telescope sight, which was shorter and lighter than the PE sight. Beautifully engraved on the metal tube was: ‘100. For the first hundred, to Jun. Sgt. Pavlichenko, L.M. from the commander of the 25th Div., Maj.-Gen. Petrov, I.Y.’
‘I serve the Soviet Union!’ I solemnly responded and then brushed my lips against the jet-black barrel, after which I stood it by my side.
The general looked surprised at my action. However, it was not just a weapon, but an award, a sacred object, given to me to fight a sacred war and to wreak vengeance on a treacherous enemy. Petrov stepped forward; I met his attentive and interested glance.
‘Have you been in the army long, Lyudmila Mikhailovna?’ he asked.
‘No, Comrade Major-General. I joined as a volunteer at the end of June.’
‘And what were you before that?’
‘I was studying at Kiev University. History faculty, fourth year.’
‘You handle a rifle superbly,’ Petrov remarked.
‘I graduated with distinction from the Osoaviakhim sniper school in Kiev,’ I reported clearly.
‘Are you Ukrainian?’ He asked this in a strange, disgruntled tone.
‘No, Comrade Major-General!’ I replied quickly, for these questions of nationality always irritated me. ‘I’m Russian. My maiden name is Belova. I am Pavlichenko only by marriage.’
‘Simply amazing, Lyudmila.’ Petrov strode around the room. ‘I once knew a Belov, Mikhail Ivanovich, but it was during the Civil War. He was a commissar in a regiment back in the days of Chapayev. A man of extraordinary courage. It was along with him that I received the Order of the Red Banner for the attack on Ufa and Belebei. We smashed the Whiteys to smithereens!’
‘That’s my father, Comrade Major-General.’
‘A remarkable encounter!’ said the divisional commander and turned to me with a jovial smile. ‘So family traditions are alive and well. I think you resemble your father not only in character, but also in your looks.’
‘That’s what everyone says, Comrade Major-General.’
Of course, as a divisional commander, he had many urgent things to do, but he considered it necessary to treat the daughter of an old comrade in arms to a cup of tea and to ask about our family, my father’s life in peacetime and my service in the 54th Regiment. I responded briefly and clearly, as appropriate for a soldier.
‘They don’t try to upset you?’ asked Petrov, in concluding the conversation.
‘No, Ivan Yefimovich. They are kind to me and offer help if needed. Particularly since I love military service.’
‘Well done, girl!’ The general shook my hand firmly on parting.
I went back to the 1st Battalion’s lines as if I was floating on air and immediately informed Captain Sergienko of the high command’s gift, boasted about the rifle with the inscription of commemoration, but said nothing about the private conversation with Petrov. It seemed to me that my personal acquaintance with the divisional commander was no great matter. Better to remain a sniper than to be known among one’s regiment as the girl enjoying the protection of the high command. However, the major-general did not forget our meeting. Three days later an order came through from the divisional headquarters awarding me the next military rank of sergeant.