Armageddon - Max Hastings [96]
Russian tank crews usually fought “closed down,” with their hatches shut, which meant that those within the turret could see little of the battlefield. There were long, incomprehensible halts, the men dozing in their cramped seats, listening to the hiss of static from the radio until they were abruptly ordered to move again. Even experienced Russian tankers found their steel monsters claustrophobic. Ventilation was poor, and crews choked amid the lingering fumes when they had been firing their main armament continuously.
While American and German soldiers were given special leave as a reward for battlefield achievements, in Stalin’s armies cash was offered as an incentive. An anti-tank gun crew received 2,000 roubles for every German tank it destroyed—500 to the gun commander, 500 to the gunlayer and 200 apiece for the rest. Much more useful, a crew which smashed a tank that did not burn were entitled to loot its contents. Lieutenant Vladimir Gormin and his men were thrilled to find a German Mark IV full of cognac and chocolate “and all sorts of other things we didn’t have.” They marvelled to see the leather-covered crew seats, and stripped them to make boots.
In an army in which fear played so large a part, many officers were reluctant to accept orders by telephone. They demanded written instructions, which could be preserved and produced if matters went awry. “Orders were never a matter for discussion,” said Lieutenant Alexandr Sergeev. Even when German artillery was registering on Captain Vasily Krylov’s Katyusha battery, it was unthinkable for him to shift position without a direct order. Individual initiative was discouraged. Savage penalties were introduced to stop drivers abandoning their vehicles under air attack, an almost universal practice in all the armies. When Lieutenant Vasily Filimonenko was recovering from shrapnel wounds in hospital a visiting marshal, Vasilevsky, gave him a cigarette. The young lieutenant was much too frightened of his commander to smoke it.
Except in the extremities of battle, all units assembled at least once a month for Communist Party gatherings, to be harangued by their commissars about current events. Political officers inspired the same mixed feeling as chaplains in the Western armies—some were very good, and notably brave; others were hated and despised for their hypocrisy, inciting men to do their duty to the motherland while themselves remaining at the safest possible distance from the front. Every man and woman in a key position, such as the cipher specialists in Gennady Klimenko’s signals unit, was required to be a Party member: “Ninety per cent of people joined the Party because they knew they had no future unless they did,” Klimenko said sardonically. Major Yury Ryakhovsky was telephoned in his artillery forward observation post on 23 February 1944 by an angry and bewildered divisional commander who demanded: was his regiment in serious trouble, since its batteries were throwing shells over open sights? Ryakhovsky reassured the colonel: the guns were merely firing a feu de joie on their political officer’s orders, to celebrate Red Army Day.
It is remarkable that the Soviet command system functioned as well as it did, given the ideological resistance to truth which was fundamental to the Stalinist system. In war, telling the truth is essential not for moral reasons, but because no commander can direct a battle effectively unless his subordinates tell him what is happening: where they are, what resources they possess, whether they have attained or are likely to attain their objectives. Yet since 1917 the Soviet Union had created an edifice of self-deceit unrivalled in human history. The mythology of heroic tractor drivers, coal miners who fulfilled monthly