Armageddon (24 page)

The mood within the Red Army in the autumn of 1944 was incomparably different from that of earlier years. Many American and British soldiers had seen little or no action before D-Day. Most Soviet soldiers, by contrast, had fought without interruption or leave since June 1941. They were weary, but now they were also exultant. “It never looked easy on our front,” said Corporal Anna Nikyunas, a veteran of the siege of Leningrad, “but in 1944 there was a totally different feeling: we knew that we would win.” “It was a great thing to fight during this time when at last we were on top,” said Major Yury Ryakhovsky. Lieutenant Pavel Nikiforov: “It was a wonderful life in reconnaissance in the last months of the war—lots of loot, vodka, brandy, girls
everywhere
. We wanted to get to Germany, to be there for the end.” Corporal Anatoly Osminov of 32nd Tank Army said: “It was good to be out of Russia, and fighting on enemy soil.”

“We were different people in 1944,” observed Sergeant Nikolai Timoshenko. “We had enough weapons. Our officers had learned how to plan operations. We knew our business.” Yet he added: “We never thought about the end of the war. The only thing to do was to get through the tasks of one day at a time.” Given the speed of the Russians’ huge advances, many men had no idea where they were, or even what country they were in. “Sometimes somebody would ask: ‘Where are we, by the way?’ ” said Lieutenant Gennady Klimenko, a staff officer with 2nd Ukrainian Front. “The answer would be: ‘Oh, Poland maybe.’ It was only when we reached a big city that the place name meant anything. Once, in Rumania, a division was ordered to advance on some town, and mistook another of similar name for its objective. There was an inquiry. People were shot for less.” The Red Army was no longer much troubled by the Luftwaffe, cause of such grief in earlier years. It took time for men who had known the earlier campaigns, in which advances were measured in metres, to adjust to the vast movements of 1944. “We were so used to living in the earth,” said Nikolai Timoshenko. “We felt positively disorientated out of trenches. It seemed an entirely different war.”

Stalin’s armies had progressed far in skills and equipment since the desperate days of 1941 and 1942. In attack, Russian commanders displayed much better understanding than their American counterparts of the importance of concentration—focusing a massive weight of men and armour on their main axis of advance. Soviet generals persisted with assaults after losses that would have caused any Anglo-American operation to be broken off. Even after receiving substantial shipments of American radio equipment, the Soviet armies were handicapped by poor communications. Higher commands were sometimes uncertain of what whole divisions were doing, and this remained a weakness until the end, deplored in a host of Red Army internal reports.

These were soldiers drawn from a society in which extreme harshness, the capacity both to endure and to inflict pain, had been inbred for centuries, and refined to the highest degree under Stalin. Shortly before Lieutenant Vasily Kudryashov’s tank unit crossed the border from Russia into Poland, as they halted in a village just vacated by the Germans, a woman came out of a house and presented his crew with a cake. “I’ve been waiting four years to do this,” she said. Kudryashov’s orderly Semyon came from a village fifteen miles away. He begged leave to go home and see how his family had fared. Inevitably, this was refused. Semyon sulked, in an emotional mood. When he encountered a woman in the village who was said to have slept with German soldiers, he shot her. Asked to explain himself, he said: “I suddenly thought: maybe my wife also has been sleeping with German soldiers.” Kudryashov reported the incident to his brigade commander, who said simply: “I quite understand.” This small lapse of propriety was forgotten.

The war in the east was characterized by colossal cruelties. By 1944, these had become institutionalized on both sides of the front. Hitler and Stalin nurtured in their respective peoples a systemic inhumanity which found full play upon the battlefield. German soldiers had been conditioned for a decade to regard Slavic people as sub-humans. It was not only the SS who killed Russians of all ages and both sexes with casual indifference.

“Here in the east,” wrote Colonel-General Hermann Hoth of the German Seventeenth Army in an order to his men, “spiritually unbridgeable conceptions are fighting each other: German sense of honour and race; and a soldierly tradition of many centuries, against an Asiatic mode of thinking and primitive instincts, whipped up by a small number of mostly Jewish intellectuals.” The American historian Omer Bartov writes: “Increasingly during the last two years of the war, [German] troops at the front came to see themselves as the missionaries of the entire German nation, indeed of Western civilization as a whole. Rational evaluation and clear perception of events were replaced by intense terror from and rage against a faceless, monstrous enemy.” Neither Germans nor Russians readily offered quarter, save when prisoners were required for intelligence purposes, or more slaves were needed for their respective mines and factories. At Dr. Nikolai Senkevich’s field hospital, a group of captured Germans refused to answer questions from their interrogators: “We simply took them 100 metres off, and they were shot.” Sergeant Nikolai Timoshenko said: “The rule of war is that you go into battle, you see the enemy, and that enemy is not a human being. Putting your hands up isn’t going to save you.” Only a minority of Germans who attempted to surrender reached PoW camps. “We killed prisoners just like that,” said Captain Vasily Krylov, snapping his fingers. “If soldiers were told to escort them to the rear, more often than not they were ‘shot while trying to escape’.” Lieutenant Pavel Nikiforov: “There was no serious control over the treatment of prisoners. If they were sent back to regimental headquarters, they were usually shot on the way.” Vitold Kubashevsky hated shooting prisoners, and found himself striving to avoid any eye contact with the doomed men, but like everyone else he fired when he was told to do so—which was invariably the case with Waffen SS captives.

It is interesting that such an attitude reflected the vision of Russia’s greatest novelist a century earlier. Leo Tolstoy argued that the taking of prisoners maintained a sham of humanity amid the reality that war “is not a polite recreation, but the vilest thing in life. Our attitude towards the fearful necessity of war ought to be stern and serious. It boils down to this: we should have done with humbug, and let war be war, and not a game . . . If there were none of this magnanimity business in warfare, we should never go to war, except for something worth facing certain death for.”

The history of German barbarity within the Soviet Union since 1941 was familiar to every Russian soldier. Many had experienced its manifestations at first hand. Russians were repelled by Germans’ pretensions to represent a superior civilization. “They are completely shameless,” a Russian war correspondent, Alexei Surkov, observed with disgust. “They strip naked in front of women to wash. They mount women like stallions. They fart at table when they eat. Do they behave in this way at home?” Stalin’s soldiers were encouraged to keep “ledgers of revenge,” recording German atrocities, and to match these with notes about their personal contributions to levelling the account. Political officers held “Revenge Meetings,” fostering the same spirit.

The draconian retribution that fell upon those who flinched or failed was an important force in sustaining Russian will. Russians have always prided themselves upon the extravagance of their own emotions and behaviour. Nikolai Lvov, the nineteenth-century poet–engineer, applauded his people’s spontaneity:

In foreign lands all goes to a plan

Words are weighed, steps measured.

But among us Russians there is fiery life,

Our speech is thunder and sparks fly.

The Red Army often displayed courage and determination far beyond anything that could have been asked of American or British troops. Yet its achievements on the battlefield seem all the more remarkable given its manic indiscipline. Even the relentless efforts of firing squads proved unable to deter excesses that often became suicidal. Huge injections of alcohol alone rendered service in the eastern war endurable to many of those who took part. Yet institutionalized alcoholism could be deadly to men in possession of weapons. Lieutenant Vasily Kudryashov’s orderly started a drunken fight following an argument about—of all things—which tank possessed the thickest armour. A pilot shot him dead. In a cellar in the Hungarian town of Tokay, Kudryashov saw the bodies of three soldiers who had drowned. After piercing a vast vat of wine with tommy-gun fire, they drank themselves insensible, then lay collapsed upon the floor until a torrent submerged them. Recklessness with vehicles was a source of many Russian casualties. “Brake or die,” proclaimed a Red Army sign posted on many roads in Yugoslavia, but scores of Russian truck drivers cheerfully ignored it—and died. Vladimir Gormin once saw three successive Dodges in a column surge over the same precipice. Such behaviour seems of a piece with Orlando Figes’s description of the historic Russian experience: “long periods of humility and patience interspersed with bouts of joyous freedom and violent release.”

A German doctor, Hans von Lehndorff, painted a vivid word portrait of the more primitive soldiers of the Red Army, when he observed them as a prisoner. “They are utterly insensitive to noise,” he wrote.

Some of them stand the whole day in the garages, working all the available motor-horns. The radio blares without a stop in their quarters, until far into the night. Lighting circuits are installed at top speed, and where there is glass left in the windows, holes are shot in the panes so that the wires can be led through. One is repeatedly astonished at the rapidity with which they hit on the simplest way of attaining their purpose; the immediate moment is all that exists for them; everything must serve it, no matter whether what they ruin in the process is something they will be in dire need of the next minute. One is perpetually dumbfounded by their total lack of any relationship to things which, to us, are a part of life itself. One ends by giving up thinking of them as creatures of one’s own kind, and gradually assumes the attitude of lion-tamer . . . To show fear is to fare worst of all with them, it provokes them visibly to attack. Audacity, on the other hand, can get one a surprisingly long way. The most hopeless pol-icy of all is to try and make them like you . . . The Russians have no use for such arts; they use people of that sort for their own purposes and openly despise them . . . It never occurs to them to look upon us as anything resembling themselves, and our claims on their humanity find hardly any echo in them. The fact that they drive cars, fire rifles, listen to the radio, and are trained to many other of our tricks, still creates no living bridge from man to man.

Some writers have sought to argue that by 1944 the Red soldier was man for man a match for his counterpart of the Wehrmacht. The truth seems more complicated. At the highest level, Soviet generalship was much more imaginative than that of the Western armies. Zhukov was the outstanding Allied commander of the Second World War, more effective than his Anglo-American counterparts, master of the grand envelopment. Several other Soviet marshals—Vasilevsky, Konev, Chernyakhovsky, Rokossovsky—displayed the highest gifts.

On the ground, the Russians excelled at night fighting and patrolling. Every German soldier who moved from the Eastern Front to the west remarked upon the dramatic change he experienced, that he could move freely during the hours of darkness, when the Americans, especially, were content to leave the front in peace. The Russians harassed the enemy relentlessly. Night patrols sometimes slit the throats of German sentries and left the mutilated bodies to provide food for thought among their surviving comrades. Lieutenant Pavel Nikiforov, a Soviet reconnaissance officer, derived pride and pleasure from his hours watching the German lines through his periscope, observing the enemy eating, sleeping, washing, defecating. “I always felt that I knew the Germans better than most men, because I had spent so much time so close to them.” The Germans respected Russian exploitation of well-camouflaged massed anti-tank guns in defence. Lacking any counterpart for the hand-held bazooka, PIAT or faust, Soviet infantry would drag anti-tank guns into attacks immediately behind their spearheads.

The Russians’ command of artillery was superb, though it relied for effect upon weight rather than accuracy of fire. Their principal weapons, including the T-34 and Stalin tanks, together with their 1944–45 aircraft, were as good as or better than anything the Western allies possessed. They had developed one weapon unique to themselves, the Katyusha, which the Germans greatly feared. A battery of the rockets deployed on trucks could deliver in seconds a barrage of 192 projectiles, each weighing 120 pounds, which carpeted a front 400 yards wide, to a depth of 300 yards. Katyushas could be effective up to four miles, but they were dangerous to the firer as well as to the enemy, especially if he was careless with fusing. The rockets were not remotely as accurate as the German Nebelwerfer multiple mortar. Katyushas not infrequently savaged their own infantry if a launch rail became bent or a stabilizing fin fell off. Lieutenant Alexandr Vostrukhin took the precaution of crawling under his tank whenever outgoing rockets were flying overhead, “just in case.” But their moral effect on the enemy was devastating. Just as British and American airmen would chalk rude messages on their bombs, so Russian crews scrawled on their rockets: “This is for my mother and sister.” When Lieutenant Valentin Krulik first saw massed Katyushas in action, he was awed by “this incredible wall of fire, which the batteries kept up for most of the day.” The batteries were seldom employed casually. They were almost always used to support a big attack or a desperate defence.