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By Root 976 0

Anatoly Osminov’s T-34 in Thirty-second Tank Army was so desperate to escape combat that he drained the radiator, causing the engine to overheat. Osminov threw the culprit out of the tank at pistol-point. The man ran away, and was later found wounded. The NKVD placed the entire crew under arrest pending trial. Afterwards, the others were acquitted, while their former commander was sent to a penal battalion. He was lucky. Men found guilty of samostrel—self-inflicted wounding—were customarily shot in front of their units like deserters, after digging their own graves. The regiment formed three sides of a square, and the command was given to the firing squad: “For our motherland . . . At the enemy . . . Fire!” Offenders were buried with a sign on their graves declaring “eternal shame on the coward who has betrayed his comrades and his motherland.” Vitold Kubashevsky, a survivor of a penal battalion who witnessed many such executions, found himself quite unmoved by them: “One felt no pity. At the front, all one’s sensibilities were dulled.” Notice of crime and punishment was sent to a man’s former factory or collective farm. The official Soviet view of penal battalions was simple: men were needed to perform military tasks which were likely to result in their deaths. Was it not appropriate that such duties should fall upon those deserving of death?

The image of the Soviet soldier as an unfeeling brute was justified by the immense rabble of Mongols (that is, from Central Asia) and conscripts from the eastern republics who followed the spearheads. But many men in Russian uniform shared the same misgivings about the experiences of battle as their American, British or German counterparts. Gabriel Temkin was appalled to see his friend Grishin torn open by a shell splinter: “I saw him crouching and squeezing his bloodied guts as if trying to push them back into his open belly. Pale and sweating, his lips trembling as bloody foam came from his mouth, he was half-conscious when I bid him farewell. He died on the shaking horse-drawn cart, even before reaching hospital.”

Although the Luftwaffe was a mere shadow of its former self by the winter of 1944, it still produced spasms of devastating activity. Twenty-two-year-old Vasily Kudryashov was conducting a fighting reconnaissance of a river crossing with two platoons of T-34s, tommy-gunners on their hulls, when German aircraft caught them in the open. Kudryashov ordered his crew to jump down and take cover beneath the hull, but he himself was still on the hatch when bomb fragments caught him in the leg and took off his foot. It was the eighth tank he had lost in action since 1942. Official notice was sent to his mother that he had been killed, but mercifully she had never received it when he returned home from hospital six months later. “I went away a boy and came back a man,” he said, “but I also possessed the sadness of a cripple.”

Even a surgeon, Nikolai Senkevich, never entirely reconciled himself to the sight of corpses that had been crushed beneath tank tracks, or of great sheets of white ice strewn with huddled dead. One day during an advance, he was appalled to come upon three abandoned German trucks, piled high with bandaged bodies—obviously wounded men who had died at a dressing station. His own field hospital handled almost 3,000 men in three days during an action in 1944. “It was a question of making very swift decisions about who had a chance of living, and concentrating on them. Some men already had gangrene. They were just left to die.” The Russian doctors were too short of morphine even to end the agony of doomed men. Combat fatigue, Senkevich professed, was unknown to the Red Army, and certainly not officially acknowledged: “I never saw such a case. By that stage of the war, people were feeling quite cheerful.” Yet Sergeant Nikolai Timoshenko described seeing men faint from fear. In the Red Army as in all armies, the real fighting in every battle was done by a small minority of men. Many others did little nor nothing save to attempt to stay alive. By the time it was