Ivan’s War (42 page)

Tank crews were not the only men who died. Brigades of riflemen and artillery, including Lev Lvovich’s unit, were also sent to hold the tanks. When all else failed, infantrymen would hurl grenades and flaming bottles at the monsters in the spirit of the old war films. They also tackled German infantry, sometimes in hand-to-hand combat. They found the footsoldiers less awe-inspiring than élite tank men and SS. Some of them (and probably some Russians, too) were drunk, their courage stoked with quantities of schnapps,
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but that did not make the fighting less deadly. ‘The sky thunders, the earth thunders, and you think your heart will explode and the skin on your back is about to burst,’ a woman combatant told Alexiyevich. ‘I hadn’t thought that the earth could crack. Everything cracked, everything roared. The whole world seemed to be swaying.’ But this was just the setting for what followed. Hand-to-hand fighting, she remembered, ‘isn’t for human beings … Men strike, thrust their bayonets into stomachs, eyes, strangle one another. Howling, shouts, groans. It’s something terrible even for war.’
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What kept Lev Lvovich going was not his abstract sense of duty but the concrete, the specific hourly goals. Orders would come, he said, ‘to aim for this bank or trench, to focus on this oak tree, aim three fingers’ width towards the left … That sort of thing helps very much.’ It also helped that he was too proud to allow his men to understand that he, too, was afraid.

At least 700 tanks lay charred and twisted on the battlefield by nightfall. The fighting would continue for two more days, but it was the first that decided the outcome of the battle, and also of the whole campaign. Prokhorovka would come to rank in Russian myth beside Kulikovo Pole, the field where Dmitry Donskoi defeated the Golden Horde in 1380, and Borodino, the site of the great battle against Napoleon. Like them, it was regarded as a place where Russia’s sacred destiny was saved. But as then, too, the human casualties were huge. For weeks to come the air for several miles would reek of bloated corpses, decomposing human flesh. Parties of sanitary workers and local volunteers helped to remove the wounded from the area. High-tech gave way to the old world as the heavy bodies were piled on to waiting horse-drawn carts. Local teams would also help to dig mass graves for the soldiers. There is no village in the district that does not maintain such
a site today. Unless the Germans retrieved them in time, their own dead would be buried later, piled into massive pits not for the sake of dignity but to prevent infectious disease. Meanwhile, it would be decades before the area was cleared of mines, discarded weapons and metal debris. To this day, children are warned not to explore the woods. The fields were turned to desert, but they bore a bitter crop.

A medical orderly loads a soldier’s body on to a horse-drawn stretcher, 1943 

 

There was not one but several battles at Kursk, arrayed across at least two fronts, but the campaign was regarded as a single struggle by both sides. On the same day as the defence of Prokhorovka, 12 July, the Soviets launched a counter-attack in the north, striking westwards at Orel. In anticipation of this, and to the Red Army’s relief, a portion of Hoth’s assigned tanks had been diverted north before the Prokhorovka battle.
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But the Germans had not prepared for the storm that was to come. At midnight on 11 July, Belov wrote a hasty, excited entry in his diary: ‘We’re going to attack … at Shchelyabug.’ It would be two more weeks before he managed to record another word. As he would put it on the twenty-fifth, ‘There has been absolutely no possibility of making notes in these past days.’ The Red Army had fought its way across the heavily defended German lines. The aim was to disrupt the German central front.
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Belov’s regiment suffered extremely heavy losses – more than 1,000 men – in fourteen days. The compensation was that they were now within twelve kilometres of German-occupied Orel.
They had also ‘killed a lot of Fritzes, which is really great’.
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The battle for the old city was yet to come, but the enemy had been pushed back far behind the lines it held before the campaign had been launched.

Dog teams transporting the injured, August 1943 

 

 

To the south, meanwhile, Slesarev also found a moment to scribble a note home. ‘You will know from the newspapers,’ he wrote to his father on 18 July, ‘that stubborn and fierce battles are taking place here. We’re beating the Fritzes good and proper, the battles don’t stop day or night. You can hear the “music of war” twenty-four hours a day.’ On the twenty-seventh, he was even more sanguine, his tone an echo of the party’s own victorious mood. Indeed, his letter of that day reflects his new-found status as a real communist. Like hundreds of other tank men, Slesarev applied to join the party on the field at Kursk, marrying his own perception of progress, social justice and victory to the ideological message of the
politruks
. ‘Hundreds of planes,
thousands of enemy tanks, including Tigers and Panthers, have found their grave on the fields of battle,’ he wrote. ‘Tens of thousands of Fritzes have fertilized the Ukrainian earth. The Germans are retreating. The moment to settle our account with them has come.’
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Behind the brave words, there were plenty of exhausted, frightened, even disaffected people. German sources suggest that the rate of Soviet defections increased sharply when battle was joined – from 2,555 in June to 6,574 in July and 4,047 in August.
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The haemorrhage was no longer one-sided, however.
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As the Red Army sensed its approaching triumph, morale among the German ranks was crumbling fast. The process had begun among the non-élite troops well before the campaign’s launch. ‘The SS officers are surprised by the levels of pessimism in our division,’ a lieutenant, Karl-Friedrich Brandt, wrote in his diary on 6 July. If the SS frightened the Soviets, its arrogance and privilege offended German soldiers in the Wehrmacht’s ranks. ‘The very sight of them stirs in our troops, exhausted and strained as they are, a sense of utter class hate,’ Brandt went on. ‘Our soldiers have been drawn from whatever pitiful dregs can still be scraped together in Germany. They [the SS] are drawn from the finest human material in Europe.’
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That summer saw the first large-scale humiliation of those ‘dregs’. As the Soviets pushed forward, Brandt and his men fled so fast that they could not even pray over their dead. ‘We are not even in a condition to establish where each of our men lies any more,’ Brandt wrote on 1 August, ‘because we haven’t been able to snatch away their papers or their soldier’s tags. We have not even had the water with which to wash the poison of the corpses from our skin … How fortunate were the men who died in France and Poland. They could still believe in victory.’
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Now that belief was growing on the Soviet side. On 2 August, Belov went into action for a second time. Three days later he was in the vanguard that would liberate Orel. ‘Last night the Germans withdrew altogether,’ he wrote on 5 August. ‘This morning we arrived in the western outskirts of the city. The whole of Orel is in flames. The population is greeting us with exceptional joy. The women are weeping with joy.’ The next day, his regiment, like all the others in the division, was renamed an ‘Orel Regiment’ in honour of the great campaign.
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That night, too, far away in Moscow, the first 120-gun salute of the war was ordered to mark the triumph. ‘I express my thanks to all the troops that took part in the offensive,’ Stalin’s telegram declared. ‘Eternal glory to the heroes who fell in the struggle for the freedom of our country. Death to the German invaders.’
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To the south, on the road to Kharkov, Slesarev was also on the move.
Belgorod had fallen to Red Army troops on the same day as Orel. Now the formations on the Voronezh and Steppe Fronts were racing southwards in pursuit of even larger goals. Slesarev’s mood was bittersweet. On 10 August, his dearest friend was killed, the man with whom he had fought closely from the very first. But the cause he died for was no longer vain. ‘We’re crossing liberated territory,’ Slesarev wrote to his father, ‘land that was occupied by the Germans for more than two years. The population is coming out to greet us with joy, bringing us apples, pears, tomatoes, cucumbers and so on. In the past, I knew Ukraine only from books, now I can see it with my own eyes: the picturesque nature, lots of gardens.’
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Just for an instant, the Red Army could revel in its own hard-won success. On 25 August, it recaptured Kharkov.

Infantry and tanks near Kharkov, 1943