*
“Girls, some milk for the wounded, please,” Regimental Commander Shlikhter requested. Vera Chuikova went off to look for a bucket. She had known how to milk a cow since she was little, and there was no shortage of cows here in the vicinity of Stettin.452 “From somewhere far away came the plaintive lowing of unmilked cows, like a wail of the dying,” the Night Witches, pilots of night bombers, recalled. They were bombing the Germans not far away.453 Many others later remembered those cows with bitter, redundant milk in their udders, and even Ilya Ehrenburg wrote on 1 March 1945, “If you can feel pity for any of those on the roads of Germany, then only for tiny, bewildered children, the maddened unmilked cows and abandoned cats and dogs: only they bear no responsibility for the atrocities.” These cows and other livestock were often killed by soldiers – not always for meat but often for fun. Not infrequently, after killing a pig, they would help themselves to only a couple of kilos of meat from the carcass. A political report on 31 Army mentions, “In villages it is not unusual to see a slaughtered pig weighing 80 or 90 kilograms from which only a portion of the meat has been cut off and used. The remainder has been discarded and left to rot.”454
Vera Chuikova, who in the twenty years of her life up till that moment had never been either prosperous or well-fed, was amazed here in East Prussia at the wealth on display in the abandoned German houses with their crystal chandeliers, velvet curtains, parquet flooring and carpets. She did not approve of soldiers who took satisfaction in wrecking all this. Soviet power would come to this land, the palaces would be given over to schools or used as orphanages! But, needless to say, she and her friends made up for all their years of hunger. What could be easier than to catch and pluck a chicken? In their knapsacks they had German home-cured ham and sausage, and chocolates. How nostalgically she looked back on these days after the war. Life in her village was even poorer in the late 1940s than it had been before the conflict began.
But in Prussia . . . chicken soup for the patients? No problem! You need milk? I’ll just find a cow! Vera had many occupations during the war: rescuing and bandaging wounded soldiers, shifting soil, milking cows, and even operating a searchlight. Despite being a sniper, though, she was never called upon to shoot anyone. And thank God for that, she thought. What a sin to burden your soul with.
At the sniper school in Podolsk, this short, brown-eyed girl with a lovely figure was the best shot in her platoon. In fact, she was so good that they kept her behind in the instructors’ company. She and her comrades were taken to the front on 1 February 1945. On the way their train stopped at Kovel where, along with the other soldiers, the girls were taken to see a concentration camp. They were shown the oven in which human bodies were burned, mountains of clothes and shoes, both for adults and children. For a long time Vera could not forget a pair of tiny, well-worn children’s shoes.455 It would be difficult to imagine a more effective propaganda exercise. The girls were told that experiments had also been conducted at this camp into killing people by electrocution.456
By the time they arrived at their unit, the First Byelorussian Front had reached Poznan. Their platoon was assigned to 236 Infantry Regiment, and Battalion Commander Bocharov immediately tested them to see how well they could shoot, an assessment supervised by a young lad they were told was a famous sniper. To their regret, neither Vera nor her friends could recall his name in later years, but he was “festooned with medals”. “They shot well and will not need a nanny,” he reported to the regimental commander Shlikhter. Shlikhter, however, was a kindly man and did not want to put them in harm’s way. “Girls, I am going to take good care of you. Why would I want to push you out to the front line?” he once said, and he was as good as his word. They never fired a shot in anger. The middle-aged Battalion Commander Bocharov also treated them as if he were their father.
That is not to say, of course, that all sorts of things did not go on. They had more to put up with than just the misbehaviour of soldiers who, during the advance, would use the stereotelescope to peep at them when they went into a crater to relieve themselves; or harassment from soldiers and officers, especially when they were drunk. As part of 69 Army they would march 30–40 kilometres a day on foot carrying a heavy load. Crossing the Oder was sheer hell. They were on the receiving end of terrible shelling, even, on occasion, from their own Soviet Katyusha rockets and artillery. (“Girls, sit in this crater. A shell doesn’t hit the same spot twice,” Bocharov instructed them.) One girl was blown up by a mine when, just before the German surrender, she went on to a bridge to wash her hair. Their work with the wounded was endless and could be very trying. To all intents and purposes they became nurses, bandaging and evacuating the wounded during battles. Vera thought it was a pity they had had no medical training at sniper school. What an ordeal she found dressing a terrible leg wound a soldier suffered during the crossing of the Oder, She had first to pull cloth and padding out of it that had come from the warm quilted trousers the soldier was still wearing even though the weather was no longer cold. To cap it all, beside himself with the pain, he lashed out at Vera’s head. She often wondered after the war which of the men she had rescued and bandaged survived. Had she actually saved anyone’s life?457
It was on the Oder that Vera Chuikova became a searchlight operator. In mid-April 1945, the First Byelorussian Front was to storm the Seelow Heights, a heavily fortified ridge on the left bank of the old channel of the Oder and the last obstacle on the road to Berlin. The Germans were prepared to defend it to the last and had assembled 200 guns there to cover a single kilometre of the front line. Marshal Georgy Zhukov, commanding the Front, decided on a night-time assault using searchlights to shock and blind his opponent. In these final days, the demoralised German troops were still clinging to the hope that a much-rumoured miracle weapon would save them. At the same time they were frightened by whispers of a new Soviet armament even more terrible than the Katyusha rocket-launcher system. Part of Zhukov’s calculation was that they might well mistake an exceptionally powerful artillery bombardment, accompanied by searchlights, for the mystery Soviet weapon. He had already tried carrying out an operation with searchlights in a counter-attack on the Germans during one of the most difficult moments of the fighting at Stalingrad. That had not proved a great success, but now he decided to try again, this time with a large concentration of aircraft and heavy guns, together with more powerful searchlights, borrowed this time from the anti-aircraft defence forces.
An officer who took part in the assault recalled,
Water was lapping in our shallow trench, people were standing in mud with assault rifles in their hands. Machine guns were rolled out to their positions. Huge trucks drove up to the trenches, bringing searchlights to the front. We had not seen this kind of armament before and did not know what their role could be . . . Fifty of my guardsmen boarded tanks and were thus detached from the battalion. Suddenly the searchlights were switched on. For a couple of seconds, we saw the enemy’s trench and, in the distance, the Seelow Heights, but at that very moment the artillery struck and everything in front of us was shrouded in smoke, through which all we could see was the sparkling of explosions.458
Vera Chuikova had no idea what those searchlights were for. Nobody had explained the thinking of the top commanders to the troops. Her platoon was summoned and told they were to give moral and practical support to the girls operating them, as they were very young and had no front-line experience. Vera Kobernyuk’s sniper platoon was given the task of supporting searchlight operators from Yaroslavl.
Sniper Raisa Serebryakova recalled how terrible the cannonade was. “It was impossible to hear even what someone standing right next to you was saying.” A flare was the signal to activate the searchlights. At three o’clock a white beam, the signal to attack, “shot vertically up into the sky”.459 The monstrously intense barrage seemed to last for ever. The Germans remembered it as having lasted two and a half hours, but in fact it went on for only half an hour.
Vera Kabernyuk later recalled that many of the searchlight operators were killed or injured when the Germans opened fire on them with long-range artillery. The snipers replaced them. Vera and her comrades believed, in line with what they were told by their commanders, that the searchlights had made a great contribution to the success of the attack.460 “The Germans were in complete panic. They believed walls of fire were coming at them,” Raisa Serebryakova claimed. Soviet General Vasiliy Chuikov, in command of 8 Army, was less enthusiastic about them: “I have to say that when we were admiring the power and effectiveness of the searchlights at the test site, none of us could accurately predict how they would work in combat. It is difficult for me to judge their effectiveness on the other fronts. On the sector of the front for which our 8 Guards Army was responsible, I saw the searchlights’ powerful beams blocked by the billowing curtain of fumes, smoke and dust raised above the enemy’s front line. Not even searchlights could penetrate it . . .”461
Zhukov sent two tank armies to support the attacking infantry, but they were not able to break through. It was only late on 17 April that 8 Guards Army succeeded in penetrating the defences of the Seelow Heights. Someone who took part in the assault remembered how “Every 6–10 metres along the length of the enemy trench lay our soldiers and officers who had fallen trying to take the Heights.”462 In the fighting on the approaches to Berlin, the Red Army suffered a third of a million casualties, killed or wounded – as many as the Americans lost in the entire war.
In their memoirs, however, the generals wrote about the success of the offensive, and one of them, Lieutenant General Fyodor Lisitsyn, even mentioned Vera Kabernyuk and her comrades, including Vera Artamonova, whose military career began, along with that of Vera Kabernyuk, at Velikiye Luki, and who ended the war with eighty-nine kills and a number of medals to her name. “The girl snipers came to our aid: Lieutenant Artamonova, Sergeants Kabernyuk, Popova and Vlasova,” Lisitsyn wrote in his memoirs. “During our troops’ attack on the first line of the enemy defences, the fascists subjected the dazzling searchlights to heavy fire from long-range artillery. Many of the operators were killed or wounded. Nevertheless, the lights continued to shine. Those incapacitated were immediately replaced by girl snipers, who saw their combat mission through to the end.”463
Articles about Vera Kabernyuk note that for rescuing a vehicle she received a commendation in Order No. 359 of 2 May 1945, signed by Stalin personally, and that her mother, Anisia Petrovna, had a letter sent to her in her Altai village of Zonalnoye by the commander of Vera’s unit in which he congratulated her on having such a distinguished daughter. Biographers mention also that Guards Sergeant Kabernyuk and her comrades-in-arms celebrated Victory Day by the walls of the Reichstag.
That is absolutely true. Vera and the other snipers from the Central Women’s Sniper School took no part in the battle for Berlin, but nonetheless they were in the city immediately after the German surrender, and wrote their names on the Reichstag. Vera Kabernyuk was the daughter of an “Enemy of the People”* shot in 1937. Her regiment’s SMERSH officer, a decent man, gave her strict orders back in 1943 to keep her mouth shut and avoid drawing attention to herself: loose talk, or even just a joke or careless word that others might get away with, could destroy her. Now, standing at the Reichstag as one of the victors, having returned to the ranks after being wounded and suffering concussion, having demonstrated that her parents had brought her up to be a true patriot, she believed that life would be different when she got home and that she would no longer have to be afraid of her own shadow.
*
In mid-April 1945, 31 Army was transferred from the Third Byelorussian to the First Ukrainian Front, with whom they were redeployed to Czechoslovakia after participating in the Berlin operation. “Redeployed” is perhaps putting it too grandly. In reality, having travelled as far as they could by rail, they marched for several days through the Carpathian Mountains towards the town of Legnica. At first they proceeded at night, resting during the day and, not permitted to make fires, existing on dry rations. After a while the command evidently decided there was no need for concealment, so they marched during the day too.
Battalion Commander Mikhail Denishchev died on 19 April, when the army had almost completed its redeployment. After a night’s march they had all slept together during the day in a single tent: the battalion commander and his orderly, Klava and six of her sniper friends. In the evening they set off again. Klava told the others about a dream she had had, in which the sole came off her left shoe. One of the girls said, “That is a warning that something bad is going to happen.” They were all as superstitious as most Russian people are, and even more so because they were young and saw death almost every day.
The sniper platoon was marching uphill behind the main body of the regiment. A column of tanks was coming towards them and suddenly all movement stopped, before starting again. Then Mikhail’s orderly came looking for Klava, bearing terrible news. Denishchev had been fighting in the war since 1941, survived his tank being hit, and had returned to action after his injury. Now, with victory in sight, he had died absurdly. The battalion commander had decided to ride a horse that had not been properly broken in, despite his orderly’s warnings. Frightened by a tank, the horse reared up and threw him straight under the vehicle’s caterpillar tracks, which split his skull open. When Klava ran forward, she wailed at the terrible sight she encountered. Her friends made their way to the scene of the tragedy and comforted her as best they could; they had to keep up with the regiment. Mikhail’s body was placed on a cart and, in a daze, Klava walked beside it, the other girls and soldiers behind.
The battalion commander was buried when they reached Legnica. The scouts found some suitable materials in a shed and the girls made an abundance of flowers and wreaths. It was the end of April, but Klava remembered clearly that there had been no real flowers at the ceremony. Mikhail was given a solemn funeral in the presence of the regimental commander and his deputies, and a volley was fired into the air. Klava was heartbroken. She refused to take his watch or any of Mikhail’s other belongings, asking for them to be sent to his mother. She kept only his ID photograph. On the ninth day she returned to his grave with the girls, along with the logistics officer and a drill sergeant who had been friends of Mikhail. Klava remembered how comforted she was by the wise, calm words of Anya Matokh: “Stop crying now, Klava. It can’t bring him back.” Anya’s words were perhaps so etched in her memory because, within a few days, Anya was no more.
And the war continued, regardless of Klava’s sorrow. The army was tasked with capturing the town of Jablonec, but the Germans were not going to surrender without resistance. Indeed, they carried on fighting fiercely even after the surrender on 9 May. On the night of 25 April, the snipers’ regiment took up defensive positions in the village of Javor. The alarm was raised that night. In the room they had been allocated on the first floor of the regimental headquarters building the girls were sleeping almost fully dressed, so when they woke up they had only to put on their tunics and boots. A minute later they were down at the windows on the ground floor. The Germans had broken through on the neighbouring stretch, which was being defended by a penal company, and their unit was surrounded. There were soldiers in trenches. The snipers took up positions at the windows and were soon firing at Germans running around close to the house. Then, just fifty metres away, a German self-propelled gun appeared and Klava, standing by the window with Tanya Markelova, saw the muzzle slowly turning in their direction. “It’s going to fire. We’re done for,” Klava just had time to think. A German stuck his head out from behind the gun and Klava and Tanya both shot at him. They did not see him fall because at that moment the artillery piece fired at them.
They heard afterwards that the shell had hit the wall. The blast threw them aside, the room filled with dust, and bricks fell all around them. They were completely dazed and could hardly hear. Some of the scouts they knew ran into the house to show them which way to run. “Snipers, we’re surrounded!” they shouted, pulling Klava and Tanya out of the half-ruined house by the hand. “Where’s Anya Matokh?” Klava suddenly remembered. “Over there!” Tanya pointed. Anya’s body was sitting by the wall, with her severed head beside it.
Klava and Tanya ran after the scouts, while being shot at from the bushes. “Jump!” the soldiers shouted: ahead of them was a high fence: how they got over it, Klava could not imagine.
They took up a defensive position behind the fence, and soon another unit broke through to relieve them. Klava had no doubt the scouts had saved their lives, and when she met up with them again several days later, ran to say, “Thank you so much, lads!”
Not long after, when the First Ukrainian Front had taken Jablonec, Klava went back to that house in Javor to look for Anya and her own belongings, which had been left behind on the first floor where the girls had been sleeping. Anya’s corpse was no longer there, and Klava was unable to find out who had buried her. Of her own belongings, all Klava found was a photo of her sister, Tanya, with a boot print on it. She was very sad to lose her knapsack, which had all her front-line possessions in it, all her photos and letters from her family. The only photos of the war she had left were those she had sent to her sisters and mother, and also the picture of Mikhail, which she kept in her breast pocket.464
*
“Anything could happen in the war. Nina Tolchenitsyna died ridiculously but I survived,” Anna Sokolova wrote many years later. Like numerous others, she bitterly regretted the loss of comrades who died in the final few exchanges, and was tormented by feelings of guilt that it was not she who had died. Her regiment had to cross a pontoon bridge over the River Oder near Moravská Ostrava and Germans were shooting from the other side. “The water was icy, it was cold and slippery, and the current was very fast,” Anna recalled. In the melee, Nina was lightly wounded, but fell from the bridge and drowned. What a stupid way to die! The river there was very shallow, “hardly up to your ankles”. What killed Nina was the fact that they were all completely exhausted after marching “day and night in full kit”.465 They had already seen so many people die, but those deaths in the last days of the war they could never forget.
*
“Sniper! Sniper!” cried the young soldier everybody called Kolenka. He was dying from a severe stomach wound, suffered on 8 May, and wanted Taya Kiselyova, who was helping out in the hospital as a nurse, to sit with him. Taya sat down and held his hand. “Just be sure not to give him any water!” she was warned by the doctor as he walked along the corridor, as if there was still hope. Tears ran down Taya’s face from time to time. She felt so sorry for this young soldier, dying when the war would be over any day now. “Hold on, Kolenka!” What else could she say to him?
Taya liked it in the hospital. She was thinking that when she got back home she would study to be a doctor. She did simple bandaging and helped at operations. A couple of times she fainted after inhaling anaesthetic, which was administered very primitively: they just poured it on a shirt and put the shirt over the patient’s face. “What sort of assistant have I been given!” was the surgeon’s indignant reaction.
Here, on the border between Poland and Czechoslovakia, the Germans continued to resist furiously, and many wounded were being brought in, even after the official German surrender. Among them was an officer who had been courting Taya, Deputy Battalion Commander Ilnitsky. “Fate has brought you together,” one of the nurses murmured. Mstislav Ilnitsky was ten years older than Taya, educated, from a good family in Leningrad, genial and polite. By nature he was no mindless disciplinarian and enjoyed the respect of his soldiers. The girls, seeing him gallantly give her a flower after a battle, were jealous and hissed that he was far too good for her. She knew she loved him, however, only when she saw him lying, severely wounded, in hospital. It was so painful to see grievously injured soldiers die in those days, having lived through a war that was now over.
Ilnitsky too called in his delirium for a girl sniper. When the regimental commander came, he ordered Taya to go and sit with him: “He is calling you. Go!” She sat down by his bed, and the wounded man clutched her hand and would not let go. Taya believed that she had pulled him through. They were together to celebrate the victory in the hospital.466
*
At the beginning of May 1945, the Night Witches were flying from an airfield to the north of Berlin: more precisely, from a meadow near the town of Brunn. There was almost “nowhere to fly to”, because everywhere the enemy was surrendering. They were sent to bomb only one group of enemy soldiers, in the region of the port of Swinemünde, where “German troops were hastily getting out on steamers across the Baltic.” Reconnoitring the zone of operations, they flew a triangular route in daytime, trying, understandably, to deviate in the direction of Berlin to see for themselves the “lair of the fascist beast”. They saw before them “a huge, grey, half-ruined city. Smoke was coming from everywhere, and in places fires were still burning. The sky was almost completely overcast with smoke and the sun shone through it with a thin yellow light.”467 Was the war really coming to an end?
Tamara Rogalskaya’s regiment had been turned northwards from Berlin in early May, and it was their task to finish off the Germans on the ground at Swinemünde. They had to row across the water, and although they had massive artillery support from the mainland and also from the air, it was a terrifying and perilous crossing. Everybody knew that the fighting would soon be over, but there was no let-up in the German firing. Going into the water up to their waists, the girls climbed into the boats. Tamara got in first, all too aware that she was a very poor swimmer. When they reached the other side, the girls heard that Pavel Yarygin, a battalion commander in their division, had been killed. He had been a cheery young man who sang beautifully and was greatly liked by the girls. When the port of Swinemünde was taken, they joined up with another regiment from their division. The soldiers were shouting, “Victory! Victory!” and the girls thought they were referring to the taking of the port.
Tamara and her friends were able to join in fraternising with the Allies, who had also reached the town. Almost none of them had seen a foreigner before, or ever would again. They were amazed to find the Americans so varied: some were white, others black. The Americans for their part were shocked by the sight of young women with assault rifles (they did not have their sniper rifles during this advance). Tamara remembered two soldiers, one white and one black, going “Bow-wow!” when they saw them. The girls thought that was very funny. Some of them, like the Russian soldiers, gave the Americans a big hug. They all had a sense of overwhelming happiness.468 How they had dreamed this day would come, that “we would live to see the end of the war, and see what a great life there would be afterwards . . .”469
* The cliché employed during the 1930s to describe the victims of Stalin’s purges.