The enemy’s large-calibre artillery strikes against our defences became more and more precise. Of course, this was achieved with German spotters. They were able to direct their ordnance because the Fritzes had occupied some of the heights that dominated the area. I had wiped out about twelve of their men who were hiding in trees, on hills, and in the upper floors of buildings. But now nothing was of any use. The wall of fire directed against the defenders of Sevastopol was too great. It got to the stage where Nazi pilots had begun to pursue individual pedestrians and cars on the streets of the ruined city and on the roads leading to the front line.
The artillery attack on the staff headquarters of our regiment began suddenly. The shells fell in tight clusters and, during the third salvo, one of them hit a dugout occupied by several personnel. There was a lot of smoke, crashing and banging, and whistling shell splinters. Captain Bezrodny was killed on the spot by a head wound. However, I was lucky; a splinter left a deep gash in my right cheek, tore off the lobe of my right ear, and, as well as that, there was damage to my eardrum from the shock wave and general shell shock. I was taken to our divisional 47th Medical Battalion. For the umpteenth time that remarkable doctor, Pishel-Gayek, put stitches in a facial wound for me. The following day an order came to the medical battalion to prepare a group of wounded for evacuation to Novorossiysk, and the surgeon decided that, in my condition, I was up to the journey.
On Friday, 19 June, five submarines from Novorossiysk arrived all together in Sevastopol. They delivered 165 tons of ammunition, 10 tons of aviation fuel and 10 tons of provisions to the besieged city. They did not go back to Novorossiysk empty. They ferried the wounded to hospitals in the rear. At least one of the biggest of them – L-4 (Leninyets-4) – was able, according to the calculations of a special fleet commission, to take up to 100 personnel aboard. Built in 1933 as an underwater mine-layer, it was almost 80 metres in length and 7 metres wide. In 1942 it was commanded by Captain (3rd Class) Polyakov.
It was L-4 that unloaded in Kamysh Bay, and the soldiers of the Chapayev Division were allotted places on it. Thus, in the late evening of 19 June I found myself on a sloping shore at the edge of the steppe, exposed to all the winds. Protecting itself from the ubiquitous German air force, the submarine lay all day on the bottom of the sea. It had still not surfaced, but many wounded had assembled. The appearance of this craft from the depths of the sea was greeted by cheers of joy. The first thing we all glimpsed in the June twilight was L-4’s fairly high conning tower, then the 100mm gun that lay in front of it, and then the entire hull, long and narrow, like a gigantic cigar. The water cascaded off its rounded sides.
Finally the lids of both hatches opened up and the submariners emerged onto the metal deck. The craft was in the middle of the bay and the wounded were to be carried out to it on a motor launch still moored at a wooden wharf. The chief sergeant major, a broad-shouldered man of short stature, took a list out of his pocket and began to read it, with the aid of a torch. The wounded formed a line; there were both some who could move by themselves and others who needed the assistance of the medical orderlies and nurses.
The launch could take about fifteen people. It had to make a number of trips to pick up everyone from the wharf. The water in Kamysh Bay remained calm, and we transferred from the launch to the submarine fairly quickly. The sailors helped us and escorted us to the open hatch beyond the tower. Further on we had to descend by a very narrow flight of stairs to the sixth, catering, sector, where some cork mattresses had been spread out on the floor. You could lie or sit on them, but walking on them was not recommended. I set my kitbag down near a metal partition and looked around. The area had a low ceiling and was poorly illuminated by two lamps.
Beneath us, down below, the diesel engines were quietly humming. At night it remained on the surface and by day it submerged to the maximum depth. L-4 had been in transit for three days when the Nazis detected our boat. Enemy torpedo boats launched depth charges and planes dropped bombs. Underwater, their explosions were highly audible and sounded like sharp blows on the hull of our warship. It shuddered, the lamps in our section blinked, went out, and then flashed on again. The air temperature rose to 45 degrees and it became very stuffy. When a number of wounded lost consciousness, they were all given oxygen cartridges. These helped them to hold on till the following evening, when the submarine surfaced, the hatches opened and the fresh sea air penetrated the narrow, cavernous corridors and quarters.
At sunset on 22 June 1942, L-4, already on the surface, entered Tsemes Bay. The city of Novorossiysk, which was spread out 25km along the shore, received us cordially. The wounded were placed on three 1.5-ton first-aid trucks and taken to hospital. I gazed at the horizon, where the sea was lit up by the rose-coloured light of the setting sun, and thought about what was now happening far away from here on the firing lines of Sevastopol, where my regimental mates, the gallant Chapayevs, had remained. I did not know at the time that this would be my last day of war.
Razed to the ground by the Nazis, the burning city continued military action against the invaders. Hundreds of wounded were evacuated from there to Novorossiysk. These trips were carried out by the destroyer-leader Tashkent, the destroyers Bezuprechny and Bditelny, the patrol boat Shkval, the harbour minesweepers Vzryv and Zashchitnik, and twenty-four submarines. The tales of the soldiers evacuated to the Caucasus left us in no doubt: the Sevastopol defence district would be seized by the enemy very soon. I enquired about the 25th Rifle Division and the 54th Regiment, but nobody could answer my questions. There was just one lieutenant, with his right hand bound in bandages up to the shoulder, who said that he had seen the commander of our division, Major-General Kolomiyets, with soldiers in Inkerman, by the left bank of the Chornaya river, getting ready to repel an enemy attack. I found it hard to believe him. The estuary of the Chornaya river, which flowed into the gulf, had been deep in our rear.
On Saturday fresh newspapers were brought to the hospital wards as usual. On the front page of Pravda I read a report from the Soviet Information Bureau:
By order of the Red Army supreme command dated 3 July, Soviet forces have abandoned the city of Sevastopol. For 250 days the heroic Soviet people had beaten back numerous attacks by the German forces with unparalleled courage and tenacity. Over these last 250 days the enemy had fiercely and continuously attacked the city from both land and sea. Cut off from terrestrial communication with the rear, faced by difficulties in transporting ammunition and provisions, with no aerodromes at their disposal and, consequently, insufficient air cover, Soviet infantrymen, sailors, officers and political instructors performed miracles of military valour and heroism in the cause of defending Sevastopol. In June the Germans threw up to 300,000 of their soldiers, over 400 tanks and up to 900 aircraft against the courageous defenders of Sevastopol. The principle objective of Sevastopol’s defenders was reduced to tying down the Nazi German forces as much as possible on the Sevastopol sector of the front and annihilating as much as possible of the enemy manpower and technology.
For those like me, who had been wounded in the course of the third assault and were now completing treatment in Novorossiysk, the words ‘forces have abandoned Sevastopol’ sounded strange. Apart from three brigades and two regiments of naval infantry, seven rifle divisions had been involved in the defence. If thousands and thousands of soldiers and their officers had left Sevastopol, where had they gone? Where were the divisional staff headquarters, the rear units, the medical battalions, the road transport, the artillery? Where were the operational regiments and battalions? The northern Black Sea area, the Crimean peninsula – it had all been captured by the Germans. It meant our personnel must be here in Novorossiysk, Poti and Tuapse. But no one had seen them.
No official report at the time mentioned that, at the beginning of July 1942, about 80,000 of the city’s defenders had remained in the field by the Chersonese lighthouse and become prisoners of the Nazis. This tragedy of the Great War for the Fatherland was hushed up for a long time. As we talked among ourselves, we rank-and-file participants in the defence tried to analyse the reasons for it, to find an explanation (or justification) for the actions of the supreme command, the commander of the Sevastopol defence district, Vice-Admiral Oktyabrsky (he had been flown out of the burning city along with several other generals and senior officers) and the commander of the coastal army, Major-General Petrov (together with members of his staff he had left Sevastopol at night on a submarine and arrived at Novorossiysk on 4 July).
Had there been a plan at the fleet staff headquarters, worked out before these sad events, to evacuate the forces of the Sevastopol defence district from the Crimea to the shores of the Caucasus? Could it have been carried out amidst the total domination of the enemy air force?
I had vivid recollections of the operation to transfer the many-thousand-strong coastal army from Odessa to the Crimea, which was brilliantly carried out in October 1941. But much had changed since then in terms of the balance of forces in the Black Sea area. The Germans had sunk a good number of our ships (a cruiser, four destroyers, four large transport vessels, two submarines). For instance, the cruiser Chervona Ukraina, the beauty and pride of the Black Sea Fleet, had sunk after an attack by Nazi bombers in Sevastopol’s South Bay on 12 November 1941. The motor vessel Zhan Zhores, which I was familiar with, had been blown up by a magnetic mine on 16 January 1942, in the area of Feodosia. The motor vessel Armeniya, with over 5,000 wounded and evacuees aboard, was struck by a torpedo dropped by a Heinkel 111 bomber on 7 November 1941, not far from Yalta, breaking up and going to the bottom in a matter of minutes with all her passengers.1
True, people had been saying under their breath that in the underground quarters of the 35th Shore Battery, the final refuge for senior officers, they had conducted themselves in different ways prior to departure for unoccupied territory. Vice-Admiral Oktyabrsky felt no pricks of conscience, while Major-General Petrov, on learning the scale of the catastrophe which had overtaken his forces, tried to shoot himself with a pistol. He had been prevented from doing so by a member of the coastal army’s military council, Divisional Commissar Chukhnov. I believe this to be true.
After my first meeting with the general in the autumn of 1941 in the village of Dalnik near Odessa, I formed the most favourable impression of him. Petrov seemed to be completely devoid of that arrogance and superciliousness characteristic of some of those in command in the Red Army; he was very democratic and showed his concern for Red Army soldiers not just by what he said, but by what he did. To him we were all like his own children. I remember that in Sevastopol, when he wanted to commend the rank-and-file participants in the defence who had shown widespread heroism in repelling the second German assault, he gave an order for the printing of 10,000 honorary certificates and signed each one personally. They were then presented to soldiers in companies and battalions.
Petrov’s character was possibly best understood by the Red Star newspaper correspondent and celebrated war writer and poet Konstantin Simonov, who visited the major-general at the command post of the 25th Chapayev Division:
Petrov was an exceptional man in many respects. He combined enormous military experience and professional knowledge with a high level of general culture, a huge breadth of reading and a devoted love of art, especially painting. Among his close friends were some outstanding painters who were not blessed by official recognition during those years. While treating his own dilettantish efforts at painting with a measure of reserved irony, Petrov nevertheless possessed a distinctive and sure taste.
He was a decisive man by character and in moments of crisis he could be harsh. However, for all his absolute ‘militariness’, if one can use such an expression, he realized that strict military subordination involved a certain constraint on human dignity, and he did not favour those who were particularly excited by this subordinating aspect of military service. His courage was of the lumbering, unhurried style, the kind that Leo Tolstoy particularly valued in people. And, generally speaking, in Petrov’s conduct there was something of the old Caucasian military officer as we imagine him from Russian literature of the nineteenth century.
I never thought that fate would grant me another meeting with the commander, but this meeting would be of special significance. Moreover, it took place completely by chance, in the Novorossiysk commandant’s office, where I turned up with a document from the hospital testifying to my recovery.
The general himself hailed me. I turned. At first sight Petrov’s appearance distressed me. He was grim-faced and seemed extraordinarily weary, but he shook my hand, smiled and began to ask who was here from the soldiers and officers of the former Chapayev Division. Petrov informed me that the division itself no longer existed. It had perished at Sevastopol, its staff papers were burnt, its seals were buried somewhere on the shore of Kamysh Bay, and its standards had been tossed into the sea. Tears welled up in my eyes at this news. The general looked at me closely: ‘Do you remember your regimental companions in arms?’
‘How can you not remember them, Ivan Yefimovich?’ I replied, wiping away my tears with a handkerchief. ‘How many days were we under fire together!’
‘Was it a while ago you were wounded?’
‘No, in the middle of June. Shell shock, shrapnel in my cheek, and half my ear blown off.’
‘What’s next?’ He looked closely at the scar still noticeable on my cheek.
‘Back to the front, Comrade Major-General. Like everyone.’
‘Lyudmila, do you have a particular ambition?’ the commander suddenly asked, in a completely unmilitary fashion, in a quiet, friendly voice. ‘Tell me. Don’t be shy.’
‘Of course I have.’ I sighed. ‘Only how can I fulfil it now? The regiment is shattered, the officers are dead, the documents have been burnt . . .’
‘So, what ambition is that, Comrade Senior Sergeant?’
‘The most ordinary kind. I want to be an officer.’
‘You mean, to have the rank of junior lieutenant?’ he asked.
‘Yes. I think I have earned it.’ For some reason I had decided at that moment to be absolutely candid with Petrov. ‘I want to continue in the army. I like the military and I can shoot well. Over this last hard year I have learned to command troops, to think about them in combat, to be responsible for them. Apart from that, I have still not got even with the Nazis for the deaths of my army friends, for the deaths of totally innocent peaceful residents. The Nazis must be punished for everything they have committed on our land.’
‘That’s a great ambition,’ said Petrov pensively. ‘I like it. But you are mistaken if you think that it can’t be fulfilled. In three days I am leaving Novorossiysk for Krasnodar, for the headquarters of the North Caucasian front. Commander-in-Chief Marshal Budyonny has asked me to recommend some Young Communist League heroes from the defence of Sevastopol. You will come with me. The chief-of-staff of the coastal army, Major-General Shishenin, will prepare the necessary papers. He is based here. I have no doubt that the marshal will willingly sign an order to award the rank of junior lieutenant to Senior Sergeant Lyudmila Pavlichenko in recognition of her feats in the defence of the city from the Nazi invaders.’
The following day a Sevastopol Young Communist League group was formed. We received documents and new uniforms and, with the commander, set off by plane for Krasnodar, where we were put up in the hotel of the Krasnodar Territory Party committee. We nervously awaited the meeting with the legendary Civil War hero, Semyon Mikhailovich Budyonny, speculated on how it would go and wondered what the commander-in-chief would ask us and what we should tell him.
The reception at the headquarters of the North Caucasus front was very cordial and quite informal. Knowing about the glorious feats of the 1st Cavalry Army’s commander in the struggle against the Whites, we imagined we would be facing some stern hero from Russian folklore. But we were greeted by a man of about sixty, average height and strong physique, cheerful, affable, with a good-natured smile hiding behind his bushy moustache.
Petrov introduced the young participants in the defence one by one: two machine-gunners, three artillery gunners, one mortar bomber and four infantry, including me. Budyonny questioned each of us briefly, then shook our hands, said some positive words, basically thanked us for the tenacity and courage we had shown in combat, and presented the awards.
The old cavalryman took my hand in a firm grip. He looked at me with a jolly smile and asked: ‘What’s your combat tally up to now, Senior Sergeant?’
‘Three hundred and nine dead Fascists, Comrade Marshal.’
‘Well done, Lyudmila! You’re a superb shot. You made a considerable contribution to the defence of the city.’
‘I serve the Soviet Union,’ I answered.
‘And, to be sure, the squares of a lieutenant’s rank will also look good on such a beautiful woman,’ said Budyonny, leaning slightly towards me. ‘As will the Order of Lenin.’
‘Thank you, Comrade Marshal.’
I was given a little box bound with a velvet ribbon and the booklet that accompanied the Order.
It was difficult to find words to describe the feelings which gripped me at that moment – insane joy, exultation, excitement. The Order of Lenin, established on 6 April 1930, was among the highest awards in the USSR. It was presented for particularly outstanding services and the fact that the senior command had rated my modest achievements in this way aroused within me both pride and embarrassment at the same time. I remembered those who had bravely fought with me on the firing lines of Odessa and Sevastopol, but had not lived to see this glorious day.
My medal, which bore a portrait of Lenin, was made of platinum and was numbered 7606. It was attached on the left side of my tunic with the aid of a pin and a special screw. Only since 1943 has the Order been worn on a pentagonal disc, fastened to a red silk ribbon with two yellow borders.
The leaflet, containing the printed text of Order No. 0137 to the forces of the North Caucasus front, dated 16 July 1942, read:
On behalf of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet, in recognition of her exemplary fulfilment of combat orders on the battle front against the German invaders and her valour and courage demonstrated therein, Senior Sergeant Pavlichenko, Lyudmila Mikhailovna, sniper of the 54th Rifle Regiment of the 25th Rifle Division, is awarded the Order of Lenin.
Commander of the Forces of the North Caucasus Front, Marshal of the Soviet Union, S. Budyonny, Chief-of-Staff of the North Caucasus Front, Major-General Zakharov. Member of the Military Council of the North Caucasus Front, Admiral Isakov. For the head and military commissar of the personnel department of the North Caucasus Front, signed, Senior Battalion Commissar Kosikov. Issued in four copies.2
The order awarding me the rank of junior lieutenant is also dated 16 July 1942, but the formal promotion to officer rank occurred at the army warehouse of material allowances for serving personnel. It gave me no little satisfaction. The tunic was not a cotton soldier’s tunic, but made from part-wool gabardine, with raspberry-coloured tabs on the collar, which were delicately trimmed with gold embroidery, a square of red enamel in the middle of the tab and the infantry emblem – two crossed rifles – in the corner. In place of the forage cap scorched by the unbearable Crimean sun I had a peak cap with a raspberry-coloured border and a black varnished peak. The overcoat was of woollen cloth rather than thick unpressed fabric. And the boots, of course, were of real rather than artificial leather. The belt had a shoulder strap and a holster for a pistol with an officer’s brass buckle in the shape of a pentagonal star.
The question of my subsequent service arose. I adhered to the old army proverb: ‘Don’t ask for it and don’t turn it down.’ It was all the same to me wherever I was sent. As another army saying put it: ‘You won’t be given less than a platoon and you won’t be sent further than the front.’ A new German advance was under way and its goal had been determined: Stalingrad. But in the personnel department of the North Caucasus front they took a different view of my career as an officer. I was appointed commander of a sniper platoon in the 32nd Guards Parachute Division. To be frank, I was frightened in no small degree and began to explain that I had been scared of heights since childhood, they made me dizzy, and, on top of that, I did not know how to do a parachute jump.
‘Don’t you worry, Lyudmila Mikhailovna,’ I was told by a foppish young captain sitting behind a desk piled with papers. ‘The order for the formation of the 32nd Guards Parachute Division within the airborne forces was received literally only a day or two ago. You won’t have to fly anywhere. We haven’t enough transport planes. In the current situation the parachute units are merely our elite, or best infantry.’
‘With no aircraft?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘And where is the division located?’
‘You will travel to the Moscow military district. There, in August they will begin to form eight new parachute corps, using for the sake of confidentiality the same organizational insignia as before. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, Comrade Captain.’
‘Call at the next office. You are supposed to receive a guard’s badge, as you are now commander of a platoon in a guards’ unit, and a sniper’s badge, which was established in May of this year as an award for sharpshooters who have especially distinguished themselves.’
An interesting coincidence followed. Major-General Petrov was also about to fly to Moscow to report to Stalin. He told me this at a reception at the staff headquarters of the North Caucasian front, which concluded with minor refreshments for the Young Communist League soldiers who had been presented with orders and medals. It was then that I thanked Ivan Yefimovich for everything he had done for me. A word in the right place at the right time could have significant weight. The major-general just smiled. His grey eyes behind the lenses of his pince-nez did not seem as tired and sad as on the day of our last meeting in Novorossiysk. The pain of loss was gradually easing and becoming less acute. We had to think about fresh battles with the enemy, who was still trampling Russian soil as before. But we did not know if we would again have occasion to fight together. That was probably not important. The saga of Sevastopol bound all who took part in it with certain invisible but indissoluble ties.