Inferno - Max Hastings [245]
In the village of Tarasevichi, by the Dnieper, Vasily Grossman met a teenage boy. “They are so frightening, these old, tired, lifeless eyes of children. ‘Where is your father?’ ‘Killed,’ he answered. ‘And mother?’ ‘She died.’ ‘Have you got brothers or sisters?’ ‘A sister. They took her to Germany.’ ‘Have you got any relatives?’ ‘No, they were all burned in a partisan village.’ And he walked into a potato field, his feet bare and black from the mud, straightening the rags of his torn shirt.” A million such encounters forged the mood of Russia’s soldiers as the time approached when they would enter the territories of Hitler’s people. The Soviet propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg wrote: “Not only divisions and armies … [but] all the trenches, graves and ravines with the corpses of the innocents are advancing on Berlin.” A Soviet propaganda slogan said: “The soldier’s rage in battle must be terrible. He does not merely seek to fight; he must also be the embodiment of the court of his people’s justice.”
Grigory Telegin wrote to his wife on 28 June 1943: “I received the letter telling me that your brother Aleksandr was killed on 4 May … My heart has become like stone, my thoughts and feelings reject pity; hatred towards the enemy burns in my heart. When I look through my sights, firing point-blank at these beasts on two legs, and see their split skulls and mutilated bodies, I feel a great joy and laugh like a child in the knowledge they will not come back to life. I will describe a typical day in action. 5 June. The rising sun’s rays are reflected in flashes from our tank turrets. Droplets of fog hang like crystals on the leaves of the trees. Three green rockets signalled the attack. At 0700 our tanks advanced in column, then extended into line in a clearing. We could clearly see the wooden houses of the village.”
Russian shells were exploding in the German positions. The attackers glimpsed figures running towards the rear, prone bodies crushed beneath their own tank tracks. But mines and antitank guns caught first one Soviet tank, then a second, then a third, which burst into flames. Telegin continued: “My heart sickens at the thought of my friends, still firing from the burning vehicles. Anger and hatred drive us on, overtaking the stricken tanks. We crush enemy machine-gun pits and anti-tank guns with their crews.” Reaching the far side of the village, he saw German trenches ahead, between woods and ditches impassable by tanks. Identifying nearby the tank of his friend Misha Sotnik, he ran his own T-34 alongside. They switched off their engines and held a brief shouted exchange. Agreeing to advance one on each side of the German trenches, they started up again and lurched onwards.
During the ensuing struggle, a direct shell hit wrecked Telegin’s machine gun and optics. As the hours dragged on amid smoke and dust, the crew became so thirsty that some men at times drifted into unconsciousness. Then the engine overheated and died. Stranded under fire, they took another direct hit which concussed the driver and caused Telegin briefly to pass out. “We gasped like fish, our lips cracked, mouths dry. We opened the driver’s hatch and saw ten metres away a crater filled with water. Bullets buzzed around us, but I rolled out of the hatch, crawled towards the water and drank. I brought water for my comrades in messtins, and we revived.” For the next ten hours they remained prisoners of their stinking, sun-baked steel box. Then, at last, the driver’s experiments with the choke were rewarded, and the engine roared. “We pulled back. An ambulance drove up, and I saw a familiar silhouette on a stretcher. It was Misha Sotnik, a sub-machine gun bullet in his head. Unable to hold back my tears, I kissed Misha’s blue lips and said farewell.”
Even when the tide of war had turned, and indeed until the last months,