Armageddon - Max Hastings [83]
The mood within the Red Army in the autumn of 1944 was incomparably different from that of earlier years. Many American and British soldiers had seen little or no action before D-Day. Most Soviet soldiers, by contrast, had fought without interruption or leave since June 1941. They were weary, but now they were also exultant. “It never looked easy on our front,” said Corporal Anna Nikyunas, a veteran of the siege of Leningrad, “but in 1944 there was a totally different feeling: we knew that we would win.” “It was a great thing to fight during this time when at last we were on top,” said Major Yury Ryakhovsky. Lieutenant Pavel Nikiforov: “It was a wonderful life in reconnaissance in the last months of the war—lots of loot, vodka, brandy, girls everywhere. We wanted to get to Germany, to be there for the end.” Corporal Anatoly Osminov of 32nd Tank Army said: “It was good to be out of Russia, and fighting on enemy soil.”
“We were different people in 1944,” observed Sergeant Nikolai Timoshenko. “We had enough weapons. Our officers had learned how to plan operations. We knew our business.” Yet he added: “We never thought about the end of the war. The only thing to do was to get through the tasks of one day at a time.” Given the speed of the Russians’ huge advances, many men had no idea where they were, or even what country they were in. “Sometimes somebody would ask: ‘Where are we, by the way?’ ” said Lieutenant Gennady Klimenko, a staff officer with 2nd Ukrainian Front. “The answer would be: ‘Oh, Poland maybe.’ It was only when we reached a big city that the place name meant anything. Once, in Rumania, a division was ordered to advance on some town, and mistook another of similar name for its objective. There was an inquiry. People were shot for less.” The Red Army was no longer much troubled by the Luftwaffe, cause of such grief in earlier years. It took time for men who had known the earlier campaigns, in which advances were measured in metres, to adjust to the vast movements of 1944. “We were so used to living in the earth,” said Nikolai Timoshenko. “We felt positively disorientated out of trenches. It seemed an entirely different war.”
Stalin’s armies had progressed far in skills and equipment since the desperate days of 1941 and 1942. In attack, Russian commanders displayed much better understanding than their American counterparts of the importance of concentration—focusing a massive weight of men and armour on their main axis of advance. Soviet generals persisted with assaults after losses that would have caused any Anglo-American operation to be broken off. Even after receiving substantial shipments of American radio equipment, the Soviet armies were handicapped by poor communications. Higher commands were sometimes uncertain of what whole divisions were doing, and this remained a weakness until the end, deplored in a host of Red Army internal reports.
These were soldiers drawn from a society in which extreme harshness, the capacity both to endure and to inflict pain, had been inbred for centuries, and refined to the highest degree under Stalin. Shortly before Lieutenant Vasily Kudryashov’s tank unit crossed the border from Russia into Poland, as they halted in a village just vacated by the Germans, a woman came out