Tank Rider: Into the Reich with the Red Army

At dawn on 22 April we approached a high railway embankment and were stopped by intensive fire. We could have quickly destroyed the German delaying force and moved on forward, but the problem was that the passage under the railway bridge was filled with sand and fortified with big logs, connected with metal girders. We did not manage to destroy that barricade. The tanks turned to the right and drove to look for a place to cross the railway, while we, the tank riders, were thrown off so we could break through the defences on the embankment. That time it was the 2nd and the 3rd companies and Lieutenant Popov’s machine-gunners that captured the embankment. I crossed the embankment after the 3rd company. Lehnin village was behind the embankment; the 2nd and the 3rd companies assaulted the village right from the embankment, while I moved a bit to the right with my company, on the road that went out from that village. Three or four T-34 tanks arrived at the scene in that moment, and sitting on one of them was our political officer Captain Gerstein. The tanks stopped, Gerstein jumped off the tank and for some reason shouted: ‘Bessonov, quickly get on the tanks, quickly!’ We ‘saddled’ the tanks and moved forward. I was on the first tank with some of my men, while Captain Gerstein and the rest of the company were on the other tanks. I do not remember where the battalion commander and company commander were at that time. We rode on tanks for some time and all of a sudden came under fire from trenches on the right side of the road. The tanks stopped, I ordered: ‘Dismount! Fire! Fire!’ and the whole company ran towards those trenches, firing nonstop from our submachine-guns. Right in front of me there was a Fritz in a trench. I tried to cut him down with my German submachine-gun, the one that used to hang over my bed during training, but apparently during the skirmish at the embankment some sand had got into the bolt. I jerked the bolt, pulled the trigger, but it did not fire. The German did not think long, grabbed his rifle and aimed at me. I had a thought flashing in my head: ‘This is the end, Bessonov, your life is over.’ Right at that time a submachine-gun burst sounded in the air and the German dropped dead to the bottom of his trench. It turned out that it was Drozd who cut him down with a Soviet PPSh submachine-gun, which never jammed in battle, in any situation. Why the hell did I carry that German submachine-gun? We jumped across the trenches, some Germans fled, while the rest were killed. Andrey took away my submachine-gun, took out the clip and threw the submachine-gun away. He gave me the clip, as its ammo could be used in my Walther pistol. We lay down after capturing the trenches, as we were too exhausted to run, but then Gerstein arrived at the scene and ordered: ‘Forward, Bessonov, don’t stop, we must capture those houses! Come on, get soldiers up and attack. Faster!’ I had never seen him in the attacking line before that.

I got my soldiers up and we rushed into those houses, which were some 250 or 300 metres away. There were just three or four houses there. The Germans fled; even their two self-propelled guns drove away at high speed on a road that had trees planted on its sides. The alley went to the village, which we could see at some 300 metres. One self-propelled gun managed to knock out one of our T-34 tanks in an ambush. The tank was burnt out and the whole crew was killed. All these things happened before our eyes – it was so horrible that I do not even want to write about it. We moved forward a bit and dug in by a hedge that edged an open field that stretched to the next village. I sent one squad down the lane to check out where the Fritzes were, but the squad came under fire and dug in on both sides of the lane. The 2nd and 3rd companies of the battalion arrived and dug in on our left flank. We did not have any further orders. We had time to feed the soldiers. We found some food, cooked it and satisfied our hunger.