Armageddon - Max Hastings [341]
It would be foolish to suppose that every man of the Red Army welcomed the opportunity for glory thrust upon him by the Oder crossing and the battle for Berlin. Most had been fighting for a long, long time. Like American and British soldiers, as victory beckoned, they began to cherish the possibility of survival, of going home. “In the last days of the war,” wrote Gabriel Temkin, with Twenty-seventh Army near Lake Balaton, “everybody, much more than ever before, was thinking about life and death—his own.” “We’d all had enough,” said Corporal Nikolai Ponomarev of the 374th Rifle Division. He had been wounded twice, and was now increasingly fearful of being sent to the Far East to fight the Japanese when the German war was over. “In the last month, especially, one felt that one wanted to get home alive,” said Vladimir Gormin of 3rd Ukrainian Front. Their loneliness was compounded by the fact that the Red Army was now so far from its homes that its men could no longer pick up Russian stations on their radios.
Zhukov and Konev cleared a zone fifteen miles deep behind their front of all civilians, as they prepared for the battle. They found themselves facing severe difficulties with a flood of new replacements, some of whom reached the armies with only a week’s military training. “Many have proved unstable in action, and indeed cowardly,” reported 1st Ukrainian Front on 7 April. “There have been cases of self-inflicted wounds. One rifle battalion containing 75% replacements broke and ran. Its officers shot five men on the spot to restore order.” Konev’s staff reported cases of mutiny which seem astounding given the inevitable fate of those involved. On 6 April, Privates Tarasyuk and Cheburko “categorically refused to take the military oath, asserting that they were Evangelists.” Cheburko said: “I follow in the footsteps of Christ. I will not take up arms or kill people.” The two men were dispatched immediately to a military tribunal. Another soldier who wounded himself before the battle began was shot in front of his unit. Yet the Political Department continued to record extraordinary instances of dissent. One soldier named Kaleshov, a former captive of the Germans, was rash enough to grumble that Russia’s rulers “betrayed us in 1941 and they will betray us again now . . . I was better off as a German prisoner.” Konev’s staff complained that they were desperately short of clothing and equipment for replacements. Sixty-five thousand uniforms ordered in January had still not been delivered, and young soldiers were parading in rotten boots, without tunics or even underclothes: “They don’t look like soldiers.”
Yet, fortunately for the Red Army, there were some men still eager for glory. Lieutenant Nikolai Dubrovsky’s commanding officer of the 136th Independent Artillery Regiment rushed his unit forward to Zhukov’s front as soon as he was ordered to move there from East Prussia. The colonel was desperate to qualify for the Berlin campaign medal. Although Dubrovsky himself had been drafted at sixteen in 1942, he had thus far been fortunate enough to see no action. He felt far less emotionally committed to the struggle than many men: “I wanted to fight, because everybody else was fighting, but I felt no hatred for the Germans—I was too young to be embittered.” The gunner officer was lucky, first, to come from eastern Russia, which the 1941–42 German onslaught never reached; and second, to serve in a heavy artillery unit, where personal risk was small. From his brigade’s Fire Control Centre, Dubrovsky was responsible for calling down 152mm howitzer fire on Hitler’s capital from a range of twelve miles.
In this last period of the war, the Soviets’ reputation for savagery cost them dearly. In the west, many German soldiers were embracing captivity. All but the most committed Nazi fanatics knew