There was a feeling, and all the signs were there, that something serious was being prepared. The battle ranks of our 25th Division began to consolidate. Reinforcements arrived from the draft companies transported by sea from Novorossiysk. The 8km-long defence line beside us was occupied by units of the valiant 157th Division, with which we had cooperated in the recent battles for Gildendorf, the Ilyichevka state farm and the villages of Fontanka, Alexandrovka and Bolgarka. Two new artillery regiments arrived with howitzers and cannon. We also saw some tanks: thirty-five military vehicles, including not only the Odessan NE (Na ispug, or ‘Frightener’) vehicles adapted from tractors, but also the standard BT-7 and T-26 army models. Along with our tank crews, our horsemen – the 2nd Cavalry Division – were also preparing for the advance, as used to be the case in pre-war manoeuvres. Finally, we heard that a new and, for the time being, secret weapon had appeared in the lines – BM-13 rocket installations mounted on the chassis of ZIS-6 trucks and brought to Odessa from Novorossiysk at the end of September. They could fire sixteen projectiles weighing 42.5kg in eight to ten seconds. The rockets contained a liquid explosive, so that where they landed everything would burn: earth, stones and metal.
On the morning of 2 October 1941, our military machine went into action. In the southern and western sectors a guards mortar battalion under the command of Captain Nebozhenko and the rocket installations, which had become known in the army as ‘Katyushas’, struck at the enemy front line.1
For the first minute, it seemed as if a storm was approaching, although the sky remained clear and cloudless. A sound reminiscent of distant thunder claps swiftly grew into a deafening roar. The surrounding countryside was illuminated by bright flashes, and puffs of smoke rose over the trees. With a hissing and grinding noise the fiery arrows flew one after another in the enemy’s direction. We saw huge yellow blazes of flame envelop the Romanian positions to the west of the village of Tatarka and, further to the south-west, near Bolgarskiye Khutora.
By ten o’clock in the morning the fires had died down. The Chapayev forces went into attack. To our left the 2nd Cavalry Division was advancing. In support of the advance, the Soviet coastal batteries, two armoured trains and a howitzer regiment with 152mm-calibre ordnance maintained a continuous stream of fire. Tanks moved into the gap. They flattened the trenches of the two enemy machine-gun battalions, scattered their troops and sped on to the village of Leninstal. Here the defensive line was maintained by the Border Division of the Kingdom of Romania, seasoned elite forces. But after the Katyusha onslaught they rolled back.
Stumbling as we went, we made our way across the black earth which had been baked by the hellish fire. Only an hour earlier it had been the fortified positions of a Romanian machine-gun battalion. There were dugouts, winding communication passages and firing points. In the fields around grew tall grass, hazel bushes and wild apple trees. All these had been turned to ash. We saw a good few bodies charred almost to the bone, and a strange, sweetish aroma was already mingling with a strong smell of burning. Protruding from the demolished enemy lines here and there were the barrels of defunct machine guns: German MG. 34s, obsolete Austrian Schwarzloses, and new Czech ZB 53s.
War means death, pain and suffering for millions of people. But if the enemy treacherously violates the borders of your native land, you must prepare for a harsh rebuff. You must undergo the transition from peaceful residents of thriving towns and villages to warriors who know no fear or doubt, who are capable of self-denial and the burdens of a lengthy struggle. War highlights the true essence of every person. Cowards and scoundrels commit their foulest deeds and good, courageous, honourable people perform their greatest feats.
Following me in their waterproof capes and helmets were the soldiers of my detachment – ten in all. After Major-General Petrov had presented me with the inscribed rifle, our regimental commander, N.M. Matusyevich, requested that I quickly implement an accelerated programme to train a group of riflemen capable of hitting the enemy without fail. In response to my claim that it was impossible to do this in three or four days, Major Matusyevich generously gave me a week, allowed me to choose the most capable soldiers from the entire regiment and issued 500 cartridges with light bullets for practice in target shooting.
I had to remember how the sessions at our sniper school in Kiev were conducted. I tried to look at the new group through the eyes of my dear teacher. We did not need those who were too self-confident or too temperamental and impatient by nature. It was not at all difficult to test their eye: here’s the rifle, here are five cartridges, and there’s the target. Have a go!
However, it would not be fair to omit one particular feature of my experience of being in charge. The future riflemen (from other companies) did not at first know that Sergeant Pavlichenko was a woman, and they reacted to my first appearance in front of the squad in a way that was, to be blunt, unorthodox. Quite sharply, but without resorting to unprintable abuse, I took them in hand and subsequently employed very stern methods with the lazy, the slovenly and the not so bright. I had army discipline and order on my side. I soon convinced my subordinates that folk proverbs such as ‘A chicken’s not a game bird and a woman’s not a man’, ‘The woman’s path – from the door to the hearth’, ‘Long of hair, but short of brain’, and other aspersions would have no currency here. I shot better than all of them, I knew a lot about the war, and they had to submit to me unquestioningly.
It goes without saying that the group included soldiers who varied in their ability to take instruction but were able to pick up the basic skills; the rest I sent back to their detachments. Among those who had the potential to become real snipers I would single out two men: Fyodor Sedykh, a young hunter from Siberia, and the Kazakh Azat Bazarbayev, who was, strange though it may seem, a resident of the city of Saratov. They were both naturally endowed with an excellent eye and they had a suitable disposition – very calm. Unfortunately, Bazarbayev lost his life early on, being caught in a mortar attack. Fyodor Sedykh fought with me at Sevastopol.
Making our way through the burnt fields, we looked gloomily around us. The losses and destruction suffered by the Romanians gave us no joy. There is nothing pleasant in such a horrifying triumph of death over life, even if it is the death of a reviled enemy. ‘Look and forget,’ I thought, stepping over the collapsed trenches and avoiding the smouldering fragments of dugouts and gun placements and the blackened remains of human beings.
After a while a new battle was bound to commence on the area disfigured by the salvoes from the guard battalion of mortar bombers. It was at this point that Major-General Petrov, now commander of the coastal army, deliberately halted our forces’ advance. The enemy had withdrawn only 1.5km or so and retained a huge numerical advantage: against the four Soviet divisions the Romanians had eighteen.
On the large-scale map (3 versts per dyuym, or 0.9km/cm) which Captain Sergienko showed me, Height 76.5 was marked as the command post of the enemy machine-gun battalion and was referred to as the Kabachenko homestead. The foe had now abandoned this place. The village of Tatarka,2 located approximately 0.5km away from it, remained a strategically important point. It lay on a road leading from the town of Ovidiopolye to Odessa, a broad, well-built highway with a hard surface. Not far away there were railway tracks. Our 54th Regiment faced the task of defending the village. First, though, we had to set up advance posts and observation points. The battalion commander had chosen the Kabachenko homestead to be one of them. Three shaded squares on the map indicated the dwelling places. Visible through binoculars were a single-storey building under a red tiled roof, a fence, a large orchard and a gentle slope rising from the house to the south-west. By securing it, one could keep a watch on the road and carry out targeted fire in the event of an enemy advance. Sergienko gave orders for us to be issued with 200 cartridges each. Then he asked me to hold out there as long as possible. Tatarka was considered a close satellite of Odessa (the distance to the city was over 10km) and we would have to fight desperately for it.
I raised my hand to my helmet: ‘Yes, Comrade Captain!’
On approaching the homestead, we saw an almost completely burnt-out truck and an overturned motorbike and sidecar. The bodies of soldiers in their pudding-basin helmets were also strewn around here, and along the sides of the narrow dirt road which had been destroyed by shells. The track led directly to some gates, which were wide open. By the gates themselves there stood a 2-tonne Malaxa armoured transport (a Romanian assembled version of the elegant French Renault UE) with a torn left caterpillar track. Attached to it as a trailer was a wagon with caterpillar tracks, and it contained sacks, barrels, crates and a big canvas bundle. Like the village buildings, the armoured transport had hardly suffered at all from the shelling, except that its crew were missing. Both semi-circular armoured turrets were open and the petrol engine was still warm.
We approached the house and knocked on the door. For a long time they would not open to us. Then, when I called out that the Red Army were here, the doors finally opened. The woman of the house appeared, aged about fifty and wrapped up to her eyes in a grey headscarf. I explained who we were. She was surprised to see soldiers under the command of a woman, but after that, conversation became somewhat easier. I listened to her bitter complaints about the occupation forces, who had been behaving disgracefully in the village for two weeks, and her reproaches against the military units of the Red Army which had withdrawn too quickly from there in September, leaving the local population at the mercy of the Fascists.
She was right, this woman. Standing before her, I accepted responsibility for the people’s commissar of foreign affairs, Comrade Molotov, who had unexpectedly signed the non-aggression treaty with Germany, for the way the Nazis had insolently broken it, for the high command of the Red Army, who had failed to rout the aggressor’s forces in battles on the borders, and for those soldiers and officers of ours who had been absent during the sudden attacks by enemy tank divisions and aerial bombing strikes. But the war was not over, I told her. The war was just beginning. We had been holding the line at Odessa for over two months and thousands of the invaders had already found eternal rest on the Black Sea steppes. Not far from her village we snipers of the 54th Stepan Razin Rifle Regiment would set up an ambush and bury another two or three hundred of King Mihail’s wild warriors.
‘My name is Serafima Nikanorovna.’ The woman opened the door wide before me. ‘Come in. You are welcome to what we have.’
Thus began my acquaintance with an ordinary peasant family, the Kabachenkos, consisting of husband, wife and three children: two sons a year apart and an elder daughter. They were neither rich nor poor and they cultivated an orchard, a vegetable garden and a field on which they grew wheat and kept domestic animals and fowl. They had not evacuated at the outbreak of hostilities because they were concerned for their farm, as the land needed constant care and attention. For this they had paid dearly. The Romanians turned the house upside-down from the attic to the cellar, looking for gold and other valuables – a Singer sewing machine or a bicycle. They also rounded up all the chickens, stuck the pigs and drove the cow and calf away to who knew where. Probably the soldiers in the royal army had never been fed so well.
They also committed another criminal act which Serafima Nikanorovna told me about with tears in her eyes. Cruel abuse by the victors against the wives, sisters and daughters of the vanquished goes back to the traditions of the primeval tribes of many years ago. Women were then considered one of the legitimate spoils of war and their fate was not an enviable one. I had read descriptions of these atrocities in historical chronicles, but did not think that ‘civilized Europe’ would also bring this barbarous custom to our land. The eyes of Maria, the seventeen-year-old daughter of the house, had a martyred look as if sprinkled with ashes; they looked at me with hope. What words she was expecting from me, I do not know. I decided to tell her about the recent battle.
Beyond the gates of the house lay a field which had been incinerated by the rocket shells of the Katyushas. Black dust remained from the rabid Romanians in their pudding-basin helmets. They had been consumed by fire like torches and fallen to the earth, a stream of ash. Nobody would bury them, for that was not necessary, and nobody would remember their faces and names. Their vile seed had become mingled with the dust, vanishing into the hard earth, and would never give rise to posterity. This was the way Fascists ought to die, leaving no trace of their being on our beautiful planet.
‘Are you a good shot?’ Maria suddenly asked sadly.
‘Yes. I’ve got a rifle with special gunsights.’
‘Kill them. However many you see, kill them all.’
‘I promise I will.’
‘Our Lord Jesus Christ knows all.’ The girl devoutly crossed herself and looked at the icon hanging in the corner. ‘I will say lots of prayers, and He will forgive you.’
In our Communist family we had grown up as atheists, of course, and the speech about the forgiveness which God would grant me for my accurate shots at the enemy, according to Maria Kabachenko’s prayers, meant absolutely nothing to me. But in later years, in peacetime, when I heard snipers referred to as supposedly cold-blooded front-line killers hunting poor defenceless Fritzes, I recalled the appeal of that unfortunate girl: ‘Kill them!’ Perhaps the quiet voice of Maria and a thousand victims of this war like her would echo once again and be heard not as an explanation for our actions but as an indisputable command. Back in those days we swore to fulfil it as a sacred duty. And fulfil it we did, not sparing our own lives.
Being in very sombre spirits, I left the house and went into the yard to check how my troops were preparing for the enemy attack. Two soldiers were fiddling around with the Malaxa armoured transport. They were trying to start it, but the engine remained silent. Corporal Sedykh reported that some valuable things had been found in the caterpillar trailer. Apart from two barrels of petrol and a crate full of some spare parts, they had discovered a canvas bundle containing a brand-new MG. 34 German machine gun still in its factory grease. Attached to it were two spare barrels, an asbestos glove designed for changing the barrels during battle, a tripod and boxes containing cartridge belts. It was simply extraordinary!
We had all long learned how to make use of trophy weapons. The machine gun significantly strengthened the firepower of the detachment entrusted to me, and Sedykh and I began to speculate as to where the best position for it would be. Fyodor suggested digging out a deep trench on the slope of the nearby rise, from which a good view of the valley and the road would open up. I agreed with his proposal.
Apart from the machine gun, the petrol and the spare parts, the trailer contained three sacks of grain, flour and sugar. The soldiers looked at me questioningly. They were useful foodstuffs, it would appear, but what use could we make of them with no utensils? I decided to hand the find over to the woman of the house. At first Serafima Nikanorovna did not believe we could be so generous, but in return I asked her to cook the soldiers a hot dinner.
Fyodor and I made our way across the slope, which was overgrown with young trees. There really was an excellent view of the whole valley and the road bisecting it. On the left side of the road lay a small wood and, on the right, a few hills. Beyond the hills the roofs of the houses in the village of Tatarka were visible here and there.
Stepping carefully across the withered autumn grass, we approached the first trench. The soldiers had chosen the right place for it. Behind them was a hillock overgrown with wild roses. The sun illuminated it from the side, so that a thick shadow lay on the ground. It camouflaged both the trench and the soldiers sitting in it. The trench was already 1 metre deep, but I ordered them to dig further, down to 1.5 metres, and then to reinforce the parapet with stones, so that we would be able to fire both standing and prone. Leading away from it was a shallower trench designed to allow the riflemen to move (crawling along the ground) to a different position. It was not going to be possible to set up a real battle line here with a large number of firing points and communication passages; we did not know how much time we had at our disposal and we were hurrying to make at least something resembling infantry fortifications.
After posting sentries we returned to the house in the afternoon at the invitation of the hostess. She had cooked dinner and set the table with what could be called a festive touch: a bottle of cloudy rustic homebrew, plates and cut-glass goblets, and some hors d’oeuvres consisting of sauerkraut and mildly salted gherkins. Not just the food but the way it was served up and the presence of the whole Kabachenko family warmed the hearts of the front-line troops. During combat and marches we had often pined for the comforts of home.
The Romanians did not attack and the day concluded quietly, peacefully and quite splendidly.
For the following two days at the homestead we kept the road in our sights and inflicted some losses on the enemy: we stopped two army trucks by hitting their wheels with armour-piercing bullets and, with our trophy machine gun, we drove the infantrymen who jumped out of them into the woods. Then, with our sniper rifles we brought down three motorcycles with sidecars. Eventually, some Romanian tanks of Czech LT vz. 35 design appeared on the road. Not all of them, it seems, had been burnt up by the defenders of Odessa, who had deftly showered these war machines with Molotov cocktails. The tanks opened fire with their cannon on the slope of the rise where our trenches were located. They were not on target, though, as the snipers were well camouflaged. But it is impossible to fight against tanks without grenades and those Molotov cocktails. They went past us and, further on, right by the village of Tatarka, our regimental artillery dealt with them.
Fierce military action unfolded near the village a little later: on 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13 October 1941. Success favoured now one side, now the other. The Romanians would manage to put pressure on us, and then the valiant Soviet troops would once again charge forward and drive the enemy soldiers out of the rustic cottages at the edge of the village. One who took part in these engagements was our ever-watchful Young Communist League organizer, Yasha Vaskovsky, who wrote about it in his memoirs:
On 9 October the 1st Battalion of the Razin Division drove the enemy out of the outlying village of Tatarka. The foe offered resistance, but hand-to-hand combat resolved the issue in our favour. The remnants of the units expelled from Tatarka began to withdraw towards Bolgarskiye Khutora; however, we had already cut off their path and sixty enemy troops put their hands up. Then, between Tatarka and the Sukhy estuary, the 33rd Romanian Infantry Regiment ended up being encircled on the same day. For two hours the fierce clashes continued, with attacks and counter-attacks. The enemy left 1,300 men on the battlefield, dead and wounded, while 200 surrendered. We seized the regimental standard, operational documents and seal, and a lot of armaments. It might also be added that the success of my regimental comrades in this sector was largely determined by the operations of the guards mortar battalion under Captain Nebozhenko. The Romanians could not withstand the rocket bombardment and withdrew.3
A very serious situation developed between 10 and 13 October in the southern sector of the Odessa defence district. The 10th Romanian Division began to advance in full complement on Tatarka and tried to break through against the forces of our 25th Chapayev Rifle Division and the 2nd Cavalry Division. Following an intensive artillery attack, three enemy battalions managed to capture the advance trench line, got through to our rear, and ended up by the embankment of the Odessa–Ovidiopolye railway line. More substantial enemy forces could have moved into the breach at any moment. The 1st Battalion of the 54th Regiment, a battalion of the 3rd Regiment of the naval infantry, the 80th Separate Reconnaissance Battalion under the command of Captain Antipin, and a motorized rifle company on armoured vehicles – we all received the order to move immediately out of reserve to the site of the engagement. the fire of three batteries was also concentrated on the enemy, from the 1st, 239th and 411th and also the No. 22, ‘For the Motherland!’, armoured train.
The trenches were defended and the Soviet infantry began to occupy their former firing positions. For a while there was silence. But the Romanians were preparing to attack and soon began a mortar bombardment. At first the bombs fell behind the forward line, then in front of it, and then the odd salvo hit it, raising clouds of dust and smoke. With a waterproof cape I tried to cover the gift from Divisional Commander Petrov – the SVT-40 sniper rifle. I had taken it on the assault because we anticipated a frontal attack on our battalion. In such a case the ‘Sveta’ – as the self-loading Tokarev rifle was called in the army – offered a clear advantage thanks to its rapid fire and ten-cartridge box magazine, which could be simply and quickly replaced during battle.
We had weapons like that in our battalion, but not in great quantity – although, according to the 1940 official schedule, it was already supposed to be replacing the Mosin rifles. In fact, we had 984 SVT-40s and 1,301 Three Lines. There were different views about the ‘Sveta’. Some liked its automatic features, based on the action of the propellant gases which always accompany the bullet as it flies along the barrel. They entered a gas port situated over the barrel and pushed against a cylinder with a long rod. The rod was joined with a tappet, the other end of which rested against the bolt. But someone rightly criticized the excessive complexity of this device and the difficulties of looking after it in field conditions. Perhaps somewhere in the northern regions or at sea a self-loading rifle would be a top performer. But on the Black Sea steppe, in trenches dug out of dry, soft, crumbling earth, the risk of dirt in the mechanism – which consisted of 143 small, fine, and very fine components – was quite large.
The rifle would begin to ‘snap’ (for instance, it would not reload or it would barely expel the used cartridges) if the pressure of the powder gases changed. It also depended, incidentally, on the weather, on the air temperature. In that case the marksman had to regulate the aperture in the gas port manually, to make it bigger or smaller. Apart from that, the ‘Sveta’ also misbehaved when covered with thick grease or if dust got into its mechanism. Among the deficiencies of the SVT-40 I would also mention its bright muzzle flash upon firing (on account of a barrel that was 100mm shorter than the Three Line) and its loud sound, which immediately gave away one’s location. It was superbly suited to clashes with the enemy in the field, when artillery, machine guns and mortars were operating. However, to put it bluntly, it increased the danger of a marksman being detected by the enemy in a single-person hideout, in a forest, for example. Among the sniper fraternity, though, the ‘Sveta’ had its admirers.
In the summer of 1942 Senior Lieutenant Vladimir Pchelintsev, who was fighting on the Leningrad front, gave me his pamphlet How I Became a Sniper, which was published in a limited edition in Moscow and distributed on the front as an instructional and publicity manual. It contains a photograph in which Pchelintsev is demonstrating the SVT-40 mechanism to new recruits. He writes:
I am indebted to my weapon for my initial success. A rifle is a soldier’s best friend. Treat it with care and attention, and it will never let you down. Protecting your rifle, keeping it clean, eliminating the slightest faults, greasing it moderately, regulating all its parts and adjusting it properly – that is the attitude a sniper should have towards his weapon. At the same time it does no harm to be aware that, for all their standardized parameters, there are in principle no identical rifles. As the saying goes, each one has its own character. This character may manifest itself in the tautness of the various springs, the ease with which the bolt slides, the weight of the touch required on the trigger, the state of the bore, its degree of wear and tear, etc. On a number of occasions I have returned from the ‘hunt’, hungry and shivering with cold and the first thing I have done is to set about cleaning the weapon, putting it in order. For a sniper this is law.
This is all correct – ‘protecting your rifle, keeping it clean, eliminating the slightest faults.’ I tried to use a waterproof cape to protect the ‘Sveta’ from the dust which descended like a cloud on my trench, but, apparently I was not quick enough. There was no response when I pressed the trigger. I had to eliminate this fault. I bent over the rifle, but my helmet got in the way. Cursing the devil, I took off my steel helmet and put it down on the bottom of the trench, then grasped the bolt handle. The mechanism seemed to start to yield.
At this point a new salvo of mortars descended; splinters whistled past in various directions. One of them struck my face, on the left, under the hairline. The blood flowed copiously down my forehead, closed my left eye, got onto my lips, and I felt its salty taste. I managed to take a first-aid bag out of my tunic pocket and somehow wind a bandage round my head. The blood flow eased, and then the pain started up; the wound burnt, stung, and it seemed as if it was tugging at the skin all over my head.
Everything around me began to sink into a fog. I pressed my faulty rifle to my breast and leant my back against the trench wall. Splinters of mortars and enemy bullets were whistling over it. Somewhere to the side, one of the company’s fixed machine guns had started rattling, and our battery of 45mm cannon entered the fray with a loud ‘V-vakh!’ Judging by the sounds, the Romanians had gone on the attack. But I could not contribute to repelling them. Some strange, oppressive thoughts haunted my brain, ‘Must wait . . . Must wait . . . Must wait . . .’
‘Comrade Sergeant, are you still alive?’ the voice of medical orderly Lena Paliy called out.
‘Still alive, but wounded in the head.’
‘Oh my God, I’ll come and help right now.’
Seeing my face and tunic covered with blood and my bandaged head, Captain Sergienko ordered Lena to take me to the divisional medical battalion, since the doctors there were better. Besides, the 47th Medical Battalion , which was attached to the 25th Division, was situated only 5km from the lines of the 54th Regiment. My inscribed rifle, which, as before, I did not let out of my hands, suddenly did me a good turn. At the triage station of the medical battalion Lena Paliy pointed to the inscription on the metal tube of the sights and declared that Sergeant Lyudmila Pavlichenko of the 2nd Company, 1st Battalion, 54th Regiment, was personally acquainted with Major-General Petrov, commander of the coastal army. Without asking a single question, the military doctor handed her a red chit indicating authorization for an urgent operation.