Armageddon - Max Hastings [95]
The only man in Gabriel Temkin’s division to become a Hero of the Soviet Union received his award for staying to engage German armour with anti-tank grenades after every soldier around him had run. Anatoly Osminov freely admitted that in his own early battles he often soiled his trousers, as did many men in all the armies. “But you got used to it, in the same way you got used to killing people. I started off thinking: ‘How can I kill a human being?’ But then, of course, I learned to understand that it was simply a matter of killing to save oneself from being killed.” During his first battle, Osminov found himself turning white-haired at the age of seventeen, amid the relentless clatter of small-arms fire and shrapnel on his tank’s hull. “I expected us to catch fire at any minute.” Anti-tank gun officer Vladimir Gormin never forgot seeing a German standing up in his tank turret roaring with laughter at the spectacle of Russian troops running for their lives during the retreat across the Don back in 1942. But, little by little, Gormin himself learned to master fear. “My corporal often saved me—he was a veteran of three encirclements and he would crouch beside me muttering, ‘Let them get closer, let them get closer,’ as the Germans came on. I learned to keep control of myself even when I was shaking all over.”
It was never possible for a Russian soldier to report sick with trench foot or battle fatigue, as was commonplace in the west, but there were other means of escaping combat. A Soviet reconnaissance officer, Lieutenant Pavel Nikiforov, said: “If you got the wrong sort of guys in your unit, they were quite capable of shooting you in the back on your first patrol, and running off to the Germans.” By 1944, the army was receiving many young replacements born in 1926, who were poorly trained. “Some of them were very scared—they took time to get used to the business.” Even in the years of victory, some Soviet soldiers found their plight in Stalin’s armies so intolerable that they preferred to accept the mortal risk of deserting.
By 1944, while the Red Army was vastly better supplied with the essentials of war than it had been in the desperate days of 1941 and 1942, there were still few indulgences. Soviet tanks were superb war machines, but made scant compromise with human comfort. “The T-34 was not a luxury apartment,” observed Vasily Kudryashov, who commanded one. While German and Western tanks ran on petrol, those of the Soviets used diesel, which emitted black exhaust smoke that could be a deadly betrayer on the battlefield. Soviet armoured crews had been greatly hampered in the early years of the war by lack of radio—they could communicate only by hand signals both inside their tanks and between units. By 1944, however, they possessed at least platoon communications. Some T-34s were equipped with the superior 85mm gun in place of the earlier 76mm. Since the Red Army lacked tracked carriers to move infantry on the battlefield, a squad of tommy-gunners rode on every tank hull, to provide close support. Tommy-gunners could be formidably effective, leaping down to engage German infantry at close range. But they were appallingly vulnerable to enemy fire.
The Russians experienced the same problems as the British and Americans when tanks became separated from supporting infantry. Vasily Kudryashov’s T-34 company once found itself