Armageddon - Max Hastings [180]
The deluge of foreign equipment which had descended upon the Red Army caused some difficulties for those obliged to use it, especially American radios. Yulia Pozdnyakova, a signaller, puzzled desperately over the English-language instruction manuals for the sets she was expected to operate, together with the English labelling on their controls and dials. To confuse matters further, she was attached to a Polish formation of the Red Army, most of whose men spoke little Russian. She was horrified at being ordered to wear a Polish uniform. Her own family were descended from old Russian nobility, and indeed her grandparents had fled from the Bolsheviks, never to be seen again. Her father died in 1930. She lived with her mother and stepfather until they were arrested for “political crimes” in 1940. She and her two sisters found themselves alone in Moscow.
When the war came, though she was only fifteen she enlisted in the Red Army, claiming to be two years older. She discovered a companionship in its ranks which had been entirely missing from her lonely childhood at home. “I always felt an orphan, but you cannot be entirely lonely when you are eating every day from the same soup pot as a lot of other people.” The soldiers called her “the kindergarten kid.” She had a good musical ear, a sense of tone and timing which proved invaluable in learning Morse transmission. Yet the campaign was always an experience of discomfort, fear and bewilderment for a girl of seventeen. “We weren’t living proper lives. We were simply surviving, and doing a job that had to be done.” Corporal Ponomarev said: “In January 1945 we could see the end in sight, which seemed wonderful.” He himself had been a soldier since 1940, fighting from Moscow westwards with all three Baltic Fronts at different times, twice wounded. Now, he yearned to finish the business and go home to Omsk to fulfil his ambition to become a doctor.
Though the Red Army was incomparably better supplied in 1944 than it had been earlier in the war, shortages remained endemic. Lieutenant Valentin Krulik’s unit found itself without lubricants for its weapons, and tried to substitute sunflower oil. This was not a success. All its tommy-guns jammed. The favoured Guards divisions were generally well provided, but lesser Soviet formations still relied heavily upon scavenging for equipment, vehicles and above all food. Early in 1945, units were given advance warning that they would be required to carry out the harvest on German territory when summer came, to reduce the requirement for bringing flour from Russia. As far as possible, the Red Army lived off the land, in the manner of European armies centuries earlier.
Its enemies, however, were in a far worse case. On 11 January, an OKW report on the condition of Germany’s forces acknowledged that morale was low in many units. On all fronts, there were serious shortages of clothing, machine-guns, motor tyres, trucks. Army Group E revealed that it had been forced to destroy much of its own artillery because it lacked means to move the guns; “the men’s ability to march is handicapped by the number of worn-out boots.” Fifteenth Army reported shortages even of mess-kits and horses. All units lacked men, and especially trained NCOs. Army Group Centre said that many replacements were inadequately trained in the use of weapons, and physically unfit. Klaus Salzer, an eighteen-year-old paratrooper, wrote home describing how a local farmer had invited him and some comrades for a great Christmas dinner—the last of his young life, as it happened—with chicken and pork and roast potatoes: “When you haven’t had a lot of food for ages and that sort of feast is put in front of you, it’s hard not to stuff yourself,” he told his parents. “A lot of us were horribly ill next day as a result.”
After an acrimonious argument about the deployment of reserves, Hitler surprised Guderian by becoming suddenly calm and declaring emolliently that he respected his Chief of Staff’s anxiety to strengthen the line in Poland. Guderian said bluntly: “The Eastern Front is