Tank Rider: Into the Reich with the Red Army

At midday a regiment of 37 mm anti-aircraft guns, eight guns and eight trucks, quickly rushed pass our positions. I have no idea why the regiment commander sent them there. The trucks stopped in the open, the guns turned their barrels towards the enemy and opened fire on the village. They did not fire for long, as the Germans returned fire with artillery and all the crews were killed or wounded, and almost all the guns were destroyed. Then the commander of the regiment arrived on the scene – he was drunk and could barely stand on his feet. An orderly soldier was with him. This Colonel behaved in a strange manner: first he ran out into the field, but the Germans fired on him and he had to return to the gardens. After that he started to run back and forth along our line and try to get the battalion to attack. As we did not have any orders from our command for attack, I ran off to get out of harm’s way, to the combat outpost and lay down there. The Colonel was getting more and more angry, waving his pistol in the air, cursing and shouting, but no one from our battalion reacted and no one was going to obey him. The Colonel got so mad that he grabbed the submachine-gun from his orderly and executed 3rd platoon leader Lieutenant Antipov on the spot in his foxhole. Antipov was around 35 years old. He was a calm and slow person who had just recently arrived in the battalion. He was a quiet and regular officer. I wanted to kill that Colonel or at least wound him; I even ran forward, a bit closer to the enemy, so that my shot could be perceived as a German one, especially given the fact that they continued firing at us. But my hand did not lift against my countryman. I could not do it; I just did not have the stomach for it. The deputy chief of staff, Senior Lieutenant Mikhail Romanov, also wanted to shoot the Colonel, but, apparently, he also did not have the stomach to shoot a Soviet citizen, even such a filthy one. Soon after that officers from the anti-aircraft regiment staff came running and took the Colonel away by force to their HQ. I never saw him again, but our comrade was killed, not in battle, but by a drunken bastard. This Colonel also destroyed his regiment by being drunk – a sober person just could not do such a stupid thing. There are really some bastards in this world… I heard later that the Colonel was eventually brought before a court-martial.

After the Colonel was taken away by his staff officers, a female medic came along with a wounded soldier from an anti-aircraft gun crew. She ran several more times to the destroyed guns, each time coming back with a wounded soldier, carrying him on a raincoat or on her back. She was creeping there under enemy fire and apparently got tired, or maybe she was scared. Anyway, she sat on the bottom of my foxhole and burst into tears. After she calmed down a bit, she asked for a smoke and then for a drink. She stayed in the foxhole for a little while and then again went on to rescue more wounded, saying farewell with: ‘Lieutenant, wish me luck, so that I might survive this bloodbath.’ A brave girl.

Soon afterwards the battalion left that area, and again we drove on tanks in the night to complete our tasks. However, that night march ended up with a comedy, as people say, enough to make a cat laugh – we were driving almost the whole night (the tank riders were dozing off) and came back to exactly the same place from which we had started our march in the evening. I do not remember such an embarrassment for the Brigade’s or the tank regiment’s staffs in other operations. It is quite impossible to get lost in Germany: all roads have road signs with names of localities, directions and distances. This was how we again lost time, again falling behind our schedule. Then we had to speed up and complete the mission. That time I was not in front of the Brigade – another company was the Brigade’s vanguard. War is war, all kinds of things happened, even funny things. Regardless of how hard it was for us, junior officers and privates, we had our sense of humour. As soon as we had a break from fighting, one could hear laughter, jokes and stories – Lieutenant Grigori Kes, the machine-gun platoon leader from the battalion’s machine-gun company, was especially skilful in that. A happy and cheerful person, he was respected by all.