Ivan’s War (32 page)

The ghosts of pre-war infantry might well have shuddered to see what was coming next. The most conspicuous innovation, which began in earnest in the summer of 1942, was the recruitment of young women.
⁵¹
In the first weeks of the war, women had been discouraged from applying for active service roles, but a labour shortage everywhere, at the front line and in the factories, changed everything. That summer, the military expressed itself keen to recruit ‘healthy young girls’.
⁵²
To some extent the idea was to shame the men to greater effort. The other goal was to make civilian women more effective, to shame them, too, into forced labour in armaments plants or long hours working on the farms. Either way, some 800,000 women would serve at the front during the war. Smirks and official condescension followed
them. Unlike the men, they found it hard to fit their bodies into the heroic mould, to see themselves as warriors. There had been women at the front in Russia’s other wars, but never on this scale.
⁵³

Old soldiers did not know whether to call the women feminine or comradely. New female recruits suffered agonies of embarrassment when faced with field latrines (or no latrines). Their uniforms, designed for men, would never fit. They did not know whether to welcome the muscles and dirt that changed their bodies into those of troops. They curled short haircuts, washed with moss, shared tiny scraps of soap. Equally confused, the authorities introduced, on an experimental basis, mobile front-line tea shops, forty-three of which, equipped with hairdressers, small cosmetics counters and supplies of dominoes and draughts, had been deployed by August 1942.
⁵⁴
The same month, a decree was signed that authorized the issue of rations of chocolate, in place of the standard tobacco, to female soldiers who did not smoke.
⁵⁵
One veteran recalled taking a suitcase full of chocolate when she went to the front. Another was disciplined for picking violets after target practice and tying them to her bayonet.
⁵⁶

Femininity turned out to be no obstacle to certain kinds of soldiering. Among the military specialisms to which women would eventually be assigned – and at which, in the field, they could excel – was sniper training.
⁵⁷
Accounts of this hint at the level of expertise that new recruits of either sex might expect to acquire. ‘We learned to mount and demount a sniper’s rifle with closed eyes,’ a female veteran remembered, ‘to determine wind velocity, to evaluate the movement of the target and the distance to it, to dig in and crawl … I remember that the most difficult thing was to get up at the sound of alarm and to get ready in five minutes. We would take boots a size or so bigger so as not to lose much time putting them on.’
⁵⁸
Women like this, or like the aviators of Marina Raskova’s all-female 588th night bomber squadron, which flew its first missions in the summer of 1942, began to make the front pages of newspapers, setting a standard for self-sacrifice, professional pride and patriotism.
⁵⁹
However, those who were not famous struggled with a confused, physically draining role, surviving – they report – only because youth and their comrades remained on their side.

New male blood also replenished the Red Army that season. Despite the losses of the war’s first year, there were more than 6 million troops in the field at the end of 1942. Among the other population groups that the army now tapped were former
kulaks
and their families, for the law that banned them from front-line service was repealed in April 1942, but the majority were drawn from a new generation. These newest recruits had been
teenagers, children really, when the war began. They had anticipated their call-up for some months, over a year, but their expectations and mentality were unlike those of the old guard. For them, army service was not a chore hijacked by circumstance; it was a sacred duty, mortal sentence, fate. Their culture, the idiom of their growing up, had been shaped by the war itself. The process was a brutal, shocking one. Not all were eager. Some evaded service, and new laws had to be passed to force youngsters to take the oath.
⁶⁰
Few, if any, came to the front from secure, settled lives, but they had no time to mull over the discontents that had preoccupied their predecessors in the pre-war years. ‘Just three months,’ one veteran told me, describing the training camp. ‘They taught us fast. And what was there for us to complain about? They taught us, they sent us, they killed us.’
⁶¹

The training these recruits received was brutal, quick and very focused. ‘Army life is cruel, especially right now,’ nineteen-year-old Anatoly Viktorov wrote to his father. ‘In a short time you have to develop courage, boldness, resourcefulness, and quite apart from that, the ability to hit the enemy accurately with a gun. You don’t get any of these qualities as a free gift.’
⁶²
‘We work for nine hours a day – and if you add the preparation we do by ourselves it’s twelve,’ another young man told his father.
⁶³
Thousands of miles to the west, newly recruited German infantrymen were training at the same accelerated pace.
⁶⁴
The Eastern Front claimed more lives than all the other theatres of European war combined, and even Hitler’s army had to change its rules and turn out soldiers fast. However, for new recruits to the Red Army, it was no comfort to know that ‘Fritz’ was suffering a similar stress. For most young Soviets, the struggle to get through those first few weeks alive and fit was utterly preoccupying.

David Samoilov found himself in a camp for infantry officers. The man in charge of his training was a ‘bestial and innate scoundrel’ called Serdyuk. This old hand used drill to torment the new recruits, forcing them to don their gas masks and run out across the steppe at the first hint of dawn. Samoilov had to carry a machine gun on these sorties, and he remembered its weight to the ounce: ‘Base – 32 kg, body – 10 kg, armour – 14 kg.’ He also remembered the meaningless torture of reveille practice. He would be ordered to lie down, get up, dress, undress and repeat the process over and over again. The idea was to reduce the time that each recruit would need until the whole thing took mere seconds, but like all drill, the exercise was also intended to beat the wind out of a dilettante, to turn a man into a soldier. ‘Serdyuk,’ Samoilov recalled, ‘was the first personification of hatred in my life.’
⁶⁵
No one described their training camp with love. ‘We fall in for
classes, we fall in for meals,’ another officer trainee wrote to his wife in April 1942. ‘You can’t call a moment your own.’
⁶⁶

Private Aleksandr Karp was assigned to the artillery, leaving to train as soon as he had finished school in the summer of 1942. ‘Reveille is at 5 o’clock,’ he wrote to his grandmother. ‘We wash and all that. Breakfast at last, which usually consists of some kind of kasha with a hunk of sausage, butter, sweet tea and bread, which is never quite enough. Immediately after breakfast, lessons, without going back to barracks. We work for eight hours until lunch.’ After a few weeks, he had graduated from basic square-bashing to the more sophisticated study of weapon assembly and disassembly, target practice, geometry and mathematics. Time was always reserved for political education, which at this stage included reports on the war. The classes ran without a break. By early afternoon, the men were ravenous. ‘Lunch is usually something like soup with grits,’ Karp continued, ‘admittedly with fat, and then for seconds either that kasha again with that same sausage or else dumplings with gravy.’ The men were then shepherded off to spend their afternoon preparing for the next day’s classes, at the end of which came supper. ‘Bread and butter (25 g) and sweet tea (half a litre).’ ‘All our lessons,’ Karp wrote, ‘are in the open air. We have to sit for eight hours in scorching sun, which sometimes means that nothing sticks in our heads … We’re getting used to it a bit now, but we’re all terribly tired.’
⁶⁷

Karp had just left home. He was not interested in vodka or tobacco. Instead, like many others of his age, the young man craved milk, sweets and bread. He was always hungry. He traded some of his rations for sugar and sneaked out of field exercises to buy milk and dried fish from the local peasants.
⁶⁸
That autumn, he begged his grandmother to send more money. Men who had cash could quell their hunger with the berries and nuts that nearby children brought to sell at the barracks. Theft was a problem; new recruits soon learned to hide money and even food. They also had to dodge the bullies who threatened to beat their possessions out of them.
⁶⁹
It was tempting to raid the supplies from local farms, and in Karp’s unit, men stole out at night to dig potatoes from outlying fields. They made small fires and boiled them on the spot, using their helmets as saucepans. More enterprising youths stole chickens or took shots at wild hares. Karp’s own diet was so poor that within weeks he had come out in septic boils.
⁷⁰

As in peacetime, not all the farmwork that the men performed was unofficial. ‘They’ve sent us to the collective farm,’ Karp reported in October. ‘We have in fact been told to dig potatoes. The work is very hard. It was all made far worse this time by the fact that it was very cold and there was even rain
with hail in it from time to time. The earth was cold and wet and it was terribly hard to dig in it, looking for spuds … We were all black and filthy, knackered. We worked without a break. They gave us half an hour for lunch. We ate it with the same dirty hands that we had been digging with. The mud poured down our hands and faces and into our mugs … but there was nothing much to eat then anyway.’ When Karp was given time off to recover from another bout of boils, he noted that he would be let off ‘the building work, my lessons, and mucking the horses out’. 

Sappers from the 193 Dnepr rifle division building a shelter, 10 December 1943

 

It was not what they had signed up to do, but at least the digging was good practice for their real work. In November, Karp experienced ‘the toughest day of my training’. He and his mates were dumped on the cold steppe and left to make an earth dugout in which they had to spend the night. These shelters,
zemlyanki
, were a core part of the Red Army’s survival plan. They could be quite elaborate, with curtained-off rooms, an iron stove and even a window. But all were dug into the earth, concealed with turf or branches, stuffy, cramped and thick with the
makhorka
that almost everybody smoked. The description that an infantryman sent back to his wife that spring was typical. ‘We live like moles, in the earth,’ he wrote. ‘The walls are made of planks, and so is the roof, although there is no floor or ceiling. We sleep on planks as well, two-storey bunks … It’s just a bit uncomfortable when there
is a lot of noise, because up to four hundred people have to live in here.’
⁷¹

The digging, then, was not a trivial task, and Karp’s team had yet to learn the real knack. ‘We were saved by the fact that they gave us warm things,’ he wrote. ‘Padded clothes and
valenki
. But all the same we froze to our bones.’ It was particularly bad for each man as he did his sentry duty. Coming back inside ‘it became clear what a great thing a campfire is. That night, we all took it in turns to freeze.’
⁷²
The trainees grumbled, but so, unfortunately, did the inspectors who reviewed their work. That autumn, a report written with new standards of training in mind found infantry and gunner recruits wanting in almost every area. It also noted that their discipline was weak, that they were too fond of slipping away without permission and of sleeping at their posts, and that their manner to superior officers was rude.
⁷³
‘We studied for ten years in school,’ wrote Karp sulkily. ‘And now we have to start all over again, working without a break. I’m sick of it. On the other hand, we can’t expect that what’s ahead will be any better.’
⁷⁴

The irony was that most, in fact, expected nothing less. Recruits climbed patiently into the trains that took them to the Volga or the north because they could see no future except through war. The humiliation of the training camp would end, the waiting finish, and they would begin to do a real job. They could also get their revenge, and not just on the invader. The prospect of combat and death loosened the hold of duty, party and the whole communist state. Samoilov remembered his own journey to the front. He and his comrades travelled with the hated senior, Serdyuk. As they put miles of track between their company and the old camp, their tormentor seemed to withdraw into his thoughts. ‘The tragedy of the tyrant,’ Samoilov noted, ‘lies in the fact that his power is never limitless.’ On that train, the balance would shift. It was a story that would be repeated elsewhere as insulted men began to weigh their own value. The hope – or fear, depending on your rank – was that the battlefield would level former differences out. A group of Uzbeks gathered round Serdyuk one evening. Their teeth flashed in the semi-dark, their bodies, muscled from years on the steppe, crowded their victim like the walls of a cell. ‘We’re going to the front, aren’t we?’ asked one of them. Serdyuk looked up into a fixed, confident smile, the ‘slant-eyed glance of Tamurlane’. As soon as he arrived at the unit’s reserve base, he asked to be transferred to another group.
⁷⁵