Soviet armies were advancing in East Prussia. Months of deadlock were over, now the movement became almost non-stop. And after East Prussia Soviet eyes turned to Berlin. Yulia Zhukova remembered a night on the march: “Complete darkness, no moon or stars in the sky. Everybody around was silent and all that could be heard was the shuffling of feet and the laboured breathing of a great mass of people. Sometimes a halt would be declared, and then all the soldiers would literally collapse on to the loose snow. After fifteen or twenty minutes, however, we were again roused, and again marched onwards, dulled by weariness, lack of sleep, lack of food and the damp.” After the war, many of the girl snipers would recall how, during these huge advances, they were often asleep on their feet. Yulia Zhukova found that “eventually my consciousness switched off”. She fell asleep as she marched, and landed on top of “something big and hard”. She shone her torch and found it was the corpse of a German soldier.423
In the course of a week 31 Army advanced, with periodical skirmishes, about 100 kilometres and, after taking Heilsberg, they all assumed there would be “at least a short rest”. However, they were ordered to continue immediately on to Landsberg. The so-called Heilsberg Triangle, which consisted of three towns some twenty kilometres from each other, was heavily fortified. It was the last obstacle on the way to Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia. After the fall of Heilsberg on 31 January, the Germans launched a powerful counter-attack to the south of Königsberg, and Chernyakhovsky, the commander of the Third Byelorussian Front, was forced to delay the advance of his army’s assault force. Despite a lack of troops, Chernyakhovsky approved a plan to capture Landsberg, delegating the task to Berestov, commander of 331 Division.
In Landsberg, Yulia Zhukova recalled, the soldiers finally had a brief respite. Finding schnapps in the houses, they used their free time in their usual manner. One of the officers tactfully suggested that the girls might want to find somewhere to lie low in order not to be molested by men who had had far too much to drink. They took his advice and all moved to a pleasant little farm just outside the town. They had a bite to eat and “settled in very comfortably”.
They spread duvets on the floor and went to bed. Yulia did not know how long they slept. Fortunately, someone had to get up to go to the toilet. “Girls, Germans!” she shrieked, waking the others. They looked out to see German troops moving in an unbroken chain towards the town. Seizing their rifles, the girls “rushed back to the city”, under fire both from the enemy and their own side who, in the confusion, were also firing at them. On the highway one of the girls was wounded by a burst of machine-gun fire and was miraculously saved when they were able to stop a wagon which came careering along. Her comrades would otherwise never have been able to carry her to safety. Suddenly, Yulia found she was on her own. She could not imagine how she had become separated from the others, but later heard her companions had been stopped on the highway by an officer and ordered to take up a defensive position in the ditch. One of the snipers, Dusya Filippova, had not managed to escape from the farm in time. When they later went back the girls found her mutilated body showing signs of torture.424
It turned out that their neighbour to the left, 50 Army, had lagged ten kilometres behind the division, and 5 Tank Army of the Second Byelorussian Front had been slow to take the town of Mehlsack, and was still some distance away. This gave the Germans the opportunity to attack the division from the north, east, south-east and west, and their assault was not long in coming: Landsberg was the last major junction of roads and railways connecting the Germans’ southern group with Königsberg, and they were eager to retake it.
174 Division, which had occupied positions a few kilometres from Landsberg, was given a hard time. When the Germans advanced on them on the first day and shells were exploding all around, the girl snipers were ordered to shoot first at commanding officers. Klava Loginova and Olga Nikolaeva knew that well enough, but soon began “shooting everyone in sight”. Klava believed she “exterminated eight straight away”. Later the regiment had to retreat back into the town.425
Yulia Zhukova described the several days she and her comrades spent in encirclement as a bloodbath. Everybody who was “capable of holding a gun: the medics, quartermasters, soldiers from the housekeeping platoon, even the wounded, concussed and sick” was in the trenches. The regiment was joined later by the artillery, after they had run out of shells. Their supplies of food were finished, and at night they crawled out into the fields, which had become a no-man’s-land, to collect frozen potatoes.
The girls were by now experienced soldiers, but the morale of many of the new recruits was perilously low. One time, Yulia was crawling across a field when she heard someone to one side calling for help. She crept over and saw “a very young soldier” of Asiatic appearance. She dragged him back to the trench, finding this diminutive infantryman surprisingly heavy. Other soldiers helped pull the wounded boy into the trenches. He suddenly opened his eyes, felt himself all over, and exclaimed joyfully, “I all okay!” It turned out he was not injured at all, just scared witless. Yulia “could have throttled him”.426
They were allowed to go to dry their clothes in Landsberg, where they could also warm up and get some sleep. When it was the turn of Yulia and her friends, the young girl, sitting on the floor in a well-heated house, wrote a desperate letter to her aunt: her unit was surrounded and she was very scared because she did not want to die at the age of nineteen. She did not die, and the letter miraculously survived and was eventually received by her Aunt Nastya who, for years afterwards, would gather her neighbours and read it aloud to them. They would “all sob and wail”, which really annoyed Yulia. One day she stole the letter and burned it.427
On 7 February, units of the Second Byelorussian Front broke through to the encircled group at Landsberg. What rejoicing! “We embraced, we laughed and cried, and tossed our deliverers in the air!” Of the 400 people in Yulia’s defence sector, only ten remained unscathed: the rest were dead or injured, concussed or ill. After standing there on the defensive for several more days, Yulia and her friends were ordered to remain in Landsberg and tend the wounded.
31 Army moved on, advancing on Königsberg, but Yulia never fired another shot at the front. The same was not true of Klava Loginova, who was to fire her sniper’s rifle quite a few times more, even as late as May 1945.
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Sasha Yekimova and Volodya Yemelianenko had informed the commander in early January that they wanted to get married. At the front this statement, although it had no official validity, was known as “formalising a relationship”. Their marriage was solemnised at the Katyusha unit and all Sasha’s friends, except Roza, were there. When she came “home” on 8 January to the women’s platoon, Roza was scandalised: “I don’t recognise the place! My friends Sasha and Tosya have both got married!”428 Sasha, when she had free time, often went to see Volodya. At the end of February, however, the Katyusha missile troops were moved further away. Volodya finally managed to come and see Sasha on 8 March, International Women’s Day. He found only her grave: she had been killed a few days earlier and her friends had been unable to contact him.
That day, Kalya Petrova, who was Sasha’s partner, was ill and Dusya Kekesheva went out hunting with her instead. Dusya was pregnant and due to be sent back to the rear at any time. In publications about Sasha she is said to have been sniping that day in no-man’s-land, but this was not the case: Sasha and Dusya were in the trench as usual. When they failed to return, a search party went out in the evening and discovered their corpses. They had been killed during a German raid, apparently at dawn just as they arrived. In order not to make a noise, the Germans had cut their throats, “so deeply that their heads were barely still attached”.429 Dusya’s body lay in the trench, and Sasha was found in a ditch nearby: she had evidently tried to escape but been caught. Kalya and her friends brought the bodies to their dugout and bandaged Sasha’s and Dusya’s heads in place. “We did not want to bury them looking like that.” They slept soundly that night in the dugout next to their friends’ corpses, having long since ceased to be afraid of human remains. The following day, Sasha and Dusya were buried with military honours, with a volley fired in the air, and in coffins. The other girls’ sadness was heightened by the fact that it was clear that the war would soon be over.
Volodya Yemelianenko was given Sasha’s possessions. Kalya told him the details. He stood for a time by the grave, wiping tears from his eyes, and went back to his unit. Shortly afterwards, Kalya heard that Volodya had been wounded, was in a field hospital, and wanted her to visit him. She went and stayed talking to him for an hour. He seemed to her not to be too severely wounded, but the next day or the day after she heard he had died. Volodya’s friends gave Kalya his diary and letters, evidently feeling that, after Sasha’s death, she was the person closest to him at the front. In his diary Volodya had written all about Sasha: how he had seen her for the first time, how they got to know each other, how anxious he had been that she might not share his feelings. Kalya took great care of the diary, and brought it back home with her at the end of the war.430
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Tamara Rogalskaya learned after the war that many of the girls in the third cohort of the Women’s Sniper School never got the chance to fire at the enemy. She considered that she had been luckier. This young Leningrader, who found herself in early spring 1945 hunting in a half-ruined grain elevator near the town of Elbing, knew for certain that she wanted to shoot Germans.431 That was precisely why she had gone to the army enlistment centre, and why she had graduated from the Central Women’s Sniper School with top marks.
The time had come to take revenge on the Germans for many things: for the two years she had spent under siege in Leningrad, when all that saved her from starvation were the rations she was issued for working at a military factory; for the destruction and depopulation of her city where, as a member of a Young Communist brigade, she had had to go round apartments searching for children whose parents had died. The children would be collected and sent to an orphanage, carried on stretchers if they were not able to walk themselves. She wanted revenge for the members of her family who had died, for her brother who had been killed in action in 1944. Tamara was just eighteen when, in 1944, she enrolled on a snipers’ course in Leningrad. “Will you volunteer for the women’s sniper school?” they asked her at the recruitment centre. “Too right, I will!” she replied.
The Germans had turned the industrial city of Elbing into a powerful stronghold that blocked approaches to the Bay of Danzig. Pillboxes were set up in houses, trenches dug in the streets, and fortifications were also built on the approaches to the city. It seemed that Elbing was ready for a hard-fought defence – the kind of environment in which snipers thrived.
In March 1945 a young German infantryman, Karl-Heinz Schmeelke, sitting in a trench full of mud somewhere near the Balga castle in East Prussia, wrote in his diary, “No one dares to look out of their burrow during the day: the Russian snipers will pick off anyone who risks it.”432
By this time the Red Army had tens of thousands of snipers, including a significant proportion of women. During the fighting in East Prussia, sniper fire played a major role in further undermining the morale of an already demoralised enemy.
Girls of the Women’s Sniper School’s third cohort reinforced 184 Infantry Regiment of 56 Division in February. In very early March, Tamara and her partner Klava Pakhomkina first went hunting from the grain elevator in a small town somewhere between Elbing and Danzig. They were escorted to their positions by none other than Nina Petrova.433 This middle-aged woman was still working as a sniper, and by the end of her career would have trained hundreds of others.434 However Petrova did not regard these already highly-trained girls as pupils: her task was only to familiarise them with conditions on the front line.435
In the regiment, Petrova, a thin, very athletic woman, was known as “Mother”. Her biographer describes her as a caring, emotional person. Tamara Rogalskaya had no sense that she possessed strong feelings, perhaps because she spent little time with Petrova. She recalled Petrova as a stricter, more strong-willed and disciplined person than the women commanders at the school in Podolsk, and Petrova was only a sergeant. The girls heard that she would shortly be going to collect her third Order of Glory: first class, the highest level.
There was a sheep pen in front of the elevator. (The girls remembered a splendid dinner of buckwheat with lamb.) Beyond that was some kind of a lake or pond, Tamara did not remember. Further on, some 600 or 700 metres away, were the Germans. The Russian snipers reached the elevator in dashes across open ground, following Petrova. When the sheep saw them, they started running about “as if they were signalling to the Germans”.
Petrova positioned them by large windows and went on to see to others. It was dark in their building and the Germans, lit up by the sun, were a perfect target. As often happened with girls when they first arrived at the front, Tamara forgot all about danger and leaned out of the window almost to her waist in order to get a better view of the enemy. Suddenly she heard a strange sound: “thwack, thwack”. Bullets! She immediately fell back and, remembering that bullets could penetrate a metre and a half of brick, crawled behind sacks of grain and sat leaning against them. Instantly, “like a madwoman”, Petrova ran through the entire elevator building shouting, “Who got fired at?” Scared witless, Tamara just sat there and “could not catch my breath”. After her baptism of fire, she and Klava observed the Germans all day without opening fire, obeying Petrova’s orders.
Then the hunt began, both from the elevator and out of a trench they were taken to by scouts who knew ways through the defences of barbed or electrified wire. Tamara opened her tally by shooting from the elevator. When she fired, she not only saw the German had fallen, but some sixth sense told her she had killed him. Her hands began to shake, then her whole body. Shooting someone for the first time felt “odd, different”. “You carry on, I can’t do any more,” she told Klava. The only emotion she felt after killing her second German, however, was satisfaction.
Soon after that the offensive began, with huge treks of 50–60 kilometres. First they were told they would be attacking Berlin, but then they were diverted towards Swinemünde on the coast. During the advance Tamara heard that Nina Petrova had been killed.
On 14 March 1945, Petrova had been awarded the Order of Glory in person by General Fedyuninsky, commander of 2 Assault Army. As he was signing the lists of awards he noticed what he thought must be a mistake: Sergeant Nina Petrova, sniper, who was to receive the Order of Glory, First Class, appeared to be fifty-two years old. Summoning his chief of staff, he questioned him about Sergeant Petrova and decided he would like to meet her. Petrova appeared in padded trousers that had worn through at the knees, having nothing else to change into. When she declined a glass of vodka, he joined her for coffee and asked her about her life and career at the front. Sniper Petrova’s tally was over 100. As they parted, Fedyuninsky, who was not noted for sentimentality (telephonist N. Nikulin remembered one of his conversations over the phone during a combat operation: “Fucking Ada! Go forward, will you! If you don’t, I’ll have you shot! Bloody hell!”), embraced and kissed Sergeant Petrova. In addition to her medal (she was only the second woman to become a Full Cavalier of the Order of Glory), she received a watch with an inscription from Fedyuninsky, and a new sniper rifle.436 Petrova died shortly before the victory in May 1945, trapped in a truck that fell off a bridge. By that time she was already a grandmother, but sadly she never got to see her little granddaughter.
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125 Division was advancing on the main axis, the principal route to the German capital. “To Berlin!” the commanders had announced. The situation had been so near to hopeless so many times earlier in the war that it was hard to believe now that they were so close to defeating the Germans. How they wanted to survive until the end of the conflict, to see victory, and to come back home.
Of the ten girl snipers sent to 125 Division in March 1943, only five were left in March 1945. After the war Taya Kiselyova remembered Marina Shvetsova with gratitude. Marina was a sniper a couple of years older than her, pretty, intelligent, and invariably cool-headed. Marina, “a lovely woman”, gave great support to Taya and the rest of them on a tiny bridgehead on the far side of the Neisse in March 1945 during the two most terrible nights and two most terrible days of her war, and perhaps of her lifetime.
The Oder is quite narrow where the Neisse flows into it. The infantry regiment, which had been reinforced with a squad of snipers, crossed it during the night on ice, which, in February, was precariously thin. The Germans detected their presence, although not immediately, and opened fire with machine guns. The regiment had no machine guns of its own, but the commanders were ordered to defend the position. There were Germans on both sides of them, but no order to retreat was given. “Stalin has given orders to hold this position,” the commander told them. “The advance on Berlin is under way and we have to tie up German forces here.” The regiment was effectively encircled for two days. (“What, Stalin is giving orders to a single regiment?” Taya wondered in perplexity.) During their first night there, on the west bank of the Neisse, they heard the cries of the wounded nearby as the Germans finished them off: a company had retreated and its casualties had been left behind. As was often the practice, women from the company had been left to tend the injured, a nurse and a sniper. They also screamed that night, horribly, as they were tortured. One of them, Taya later learned, had been pregnant. The girl snipers were surprised that one of the victims still had her watch on her wrist: her tormentors had no need of loot.
If Taya had had any doubts about the wisdom of an agreement she had concluded with her comrades immediately after arriving at the front (“If anything happens, you must shoot me rather than let me be captured alive”), she now had none. It was better, far better, to die, she decided, after what she was told by a soldier who had seen the bodies of those girls.
The snipers spent two days together with the soldiers in a large barn on the edge of a village. They had plentiful stocks of food, brought from the deserted local houses whose cellars were full of provisions. The next day, retreating German tanks went by. The girls’ commander, who was lying with a small group of them in a ditch on the edge of the village, noticed that the tanks were being followed by a car, containing, perhaps, a V.I.P. When they opened fire and disabled it, a general jumped out and managed to escape. The car was left behind, and they were all greatly interested to examine its former owner’s possessions and photographs. None of them knew German, however, so his letters went unread.
On the third day of the operation a pontoon bridge was built, and although it was under incessant German artillery fire, their neighbouring units were able to cross and ferry over artillery pieces too heavy for the ice.437 The girls’ regiment was withdrawn for respite, and given reinforcements to enable them to continue.
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They faced more battles and more losses. During the attack on Breslau, Chief of Staff Captain Sagaidak signed an order proposing an award for sniper Bella Morozova. She was put forward for the Order of the Patriotic War posthumously, as were the company’s Head of Reconnaissance Kaifman, Battalion Commander Trofimov and Cypher Clerk Sverdlov.438 “Bella is dead,” the girls were told. It seemed that a German sniper had wounded the battalion commander, and when Bella ran to help, she had been shot in the face.439
Bella Morozova did, nevertheless, receive her award in person, having survived her terrible injury. Captain Sagaidak recalled, “Very much to my surprise, when we were already in Czechoslovakia, somewhere near Waldenburg, I met Bella in one of the companies, alive and with her posthumous award.”440 Sagaidak himself had seen Bella’s personal file crossed out with two slashing red lines, yet here she was, alive. “There stood a rather thin, fair-haired girl in a sergeant’s uniform, with badges for her injuries and the Order of the Patriotic War on her tunic. She smiled strangely, and tried to show only one half of her face.” The bullet had penetrated her temple, passed through the nasal cavity, and taken out her eye. Bella was only nineteen, and told her friends that when she saw her face after the bandages were removed she just wanted to die. Nevertheless, she found the courage not only to go on living, but to insist on being sent back to work at the headquarters of her own regiment. Scout Gennadiy Kuritsyn, a boy the girls had been fighting alongside for a year in the same regiment and who had long been in love with Bella, did not change his mind because of her disfigurement. They went on to have a family and live a long life together: one of the few front romances with a happy ending.