Ivan's War

by Catherine Merridale

  The threats were real. The 13th Army held back from evacuating its allocated zones, but when troops of the 38th returned to the villages where the first crowds had gathered, they met an armed, furious mob. On 13 October, they were driven back by the entire population of one village, by women brandishing pitchforks and shovels. The next day, neighbouring villagers attacked the soldiers again, knocking out one man’s teeth and cracking another’s skull. However, the soldiers had new orders by then. With the help of NKVD troops, they arrested the most active members of the resistance. They also shot some of the others in the legs, a measure which soon terrified the crowd. But it was not good for military public relations. The region’s leaders, working with the generals themselves, now faced the task of restoring local people’s faith in their defenders. The NKVD would be used for evacuating citizens in future; the Red Army itself would not be sent to confront Russian peasants.59 Its reputation as the people’s vanguard would need some careful nurture in the coming weeks.

  Fortunately, a string of real victories, beginning with Stalingrad, was soon to reinforce the army’s image as a liberator. The first appearance of Soviet troops in a town or village that the Germans had abandoned was often greeted with tears of exhausted, desperate relief, whatever followed when the NKVD set to work. But it would be a long time, if ever, before some of the villagers round Kursk would trust authority again. Their fears were grounded in cold fact. In May and June 1943, just weeks before the epic confrontation of the war, General Rokossovsky himself would set his battle plans aside to consider the unsolved disappearance of two cows. It was not the first such case. Three had vanished less than a week before. They had gone missing from farms near soldiers’ billets. And then there were all the official irregularities. ‘In recent days,’ he read, ‘eighty cows have been taken from the population [in the twenty-five kilometre front-line zone], but only thirty receipts for these have been issued. The collective farms have also lost a hundred and fifty horses and almost all their transport equipment. All this,’ the general would read, ‘disrupts the agricultural work of our collectives.’60

  Fighting was clearly only one aspect of the war effort as a whole. Food was a real problem everywhere. The army took the lion’s share, and soldiers often ate better than they had done back in their homes, but civilians faced serious want. In 1943, the government printed 10,000 copies of a leaflet telling people how to cook nettles. Two scientists produced another that discussed the calorific possibilities of feral meat. ‘When they kill animals for fur,’ it began, ‘hunters often forget that there is useful meat on the carcasses.’ The scientists pointed out that squirrel meat contained more calories than any other kind save that of the polecat, and certainly far more than pork. Admittedly, a typical squirrel yielded just 200 grams of meat (or so they claimed), but the flesh was palatable, unlike that of wolves, whose pungent carcasses were fit only for pigs. To test this last contention, a commission had gathered at the Academy of Sciences that spring to approve the flavour and nutritional value of a range of creatures from foxes to gophers and mice.61 While the academicians dined, civilians were going hungry. ‘We have had to sell a lot of our things,’ Vitaly Taranichev’s wife, Natasha, wrote to him that March, ‘because everything has become very expensive. It’s enough to say that we spend twenty roubles every day on half a litre of milk for Kolya.’ Their infant son needed the food. ‘If we took that milk away from him, we’d be condemning him to complete emaciation.’62

  In front-line regions, the hunger was greater still. There were no men left to rebuild the ruined buildings and barns, restore the roads or sow that year’s new crop. At the start of the agricultural season in 1943, average sowings in individual districts in the Kursk area looked set to fall to less than 10 per cent of their 1941 levels. But the region needed grain to feed its own people, and the army would need food to keep men on their feet. Women worked like animals, sometimes harnessing themselves to ploughs. The land itself was wrecked, and it would not recover quickly in the years to come.

  Once again, the soldiers had to roll up their olive-green sleeves and dig. On 12 April, an order to troops on the Central Front required them to help farmers to sow the spring crops, do the ploughing, deal with lambing and transport seed grain to the farms. They were to do this, the order added, ‘without detriment to their military duties’. 63 Meanwhile, presumably without detriment to food production, civilians were formed into militia squads and sent to dig trenches and clear abandoned German mines. ‘It is a shame, when you travel around the liberated villages,’ a Red Army soldier wrote to his family that June, ‘to see the cold attitude of the population.’64 The whole region was plunged in a struggle for survival. The armies that would fight near Kursk trained and prepared in scenes of medieval brutishness.

  Soviet refugees, a mother and son, rest on their journey, April 1942 (courtesy of the State Archive of the Russian Federation)

  The battles that they were about to fight would turn the air itself to flame. If tanks represent a certain kind of modernistic dream, then Kursk would see its revelation as apocalypse. The fighting round the salient was set to involve more armour, more machines, than any other in the entire war. That summer, the black-earth steppe of Kursk province would bristle with a total of 70,000 guns and mortars, 12,000 war planes and an epic 13,000 tanks and mobile artillery pieces.65 Vast numbers of troops, including tens of thousands of riflemen, were also gathered round the zone. To guarantee the success of this most vital blow, the Germans brought fifty divisions to the region, including hand-picked SS troops of certified Aryan stock and (more importantly) proven military skill. In all, there were 900,000 German officers and men around the salient by midsummer, but the Soviets were ready to meet them. By late May, they had 1.3 million troops in readiness behind the maze of criss-crossed lines.

  By the time these partners would engage each other in July, they had been at war for two entire years. The relationship had been ugly and violent, but like any other it had forced the two sides to learn from and even to mimic each other. For the Germans, what this meant was a new focus on the technology of armour. In 1941, they had possessed no tank that could match the manoeuvrability of the Soviet T-34. They also had nothing to compete with the mighty KV heavy tank, whose armour was almost invincible to anti-tank guns of the time. Their success against these machines owed more to the poor training of Soviet tank crews, and to the Red Army’s general unpreparedness, than it did to any German technological sophistication. Berlin’s answer was to develop two machines, the Panther and the Tiger I, respectively the most advanced medium tank in the field and the most invincible heavy tank of its time. The Panther was less prone to catch fire than the T-34, it offered crews much better visibility, and the radio that was designed for it stood a real chance of working. The Tiger I, meanwhile, was fitted with the fearsome German 88 mm anti-aircraft gun. It threatened to be deadly, not just difficult to destroy. In addition to these metal giants, German factories were now producing a self-propelled gun, the Ferdinand, as well as stockpiles of field-tested types of mortar, rocket and flame-thrower.66

  They could demand creative new designs, the best of German engineering, but what the Wehrmacht could not wring out of their leader was more time. In the entire war, German manufacturing industry would produce no more than 1,354 Tiger I and 5,976 Panther machines.67 By 1943, the Soviets were turning out T-34s at a rate of over 1,200 a month.68 One of the Red Army’s advantages that summer was that it had a greater number of field-worthy modern tanks. The Germans might possess a limited stock of truly fearsome machines, but for numbers the Wehrmacht would still rely on obsolete, much older models. The calculation was deliberate on the Soviet side. In 1941, the Red Army had lost nine tenths of its tanks in a matter of weeks, and it had also lost its main production centres in Kharkov and Leningrad. As the tank factories were reconstructed to the east, it was decided to focus on existing models and to turn them out in bulk, a prudent move in view of the disastrous rates of loss that Soviet crew
s continued to sustain. With a few modifications, the T-34 would continue as the Soviet mainstay through the war.

  Refinements, let alone entirely new designs, would have meant delays in the factories and new training challenges for the men. Only a limited amount of innovation was permitted, even after the defeats of 1942. The T-34 was adapted to improve visibility, though tank drivers remember seeing only dust and smoke. A small number of new weapons improved the Soviet arsenal of armoured vehicles and artillery. The most important of these was the SU-152 mobile assault gun, which was designed to carry a 152 mm howitzer. Nicknamed the zverboi, or ‘beast basher’, it was the only Soviet armoured vehicle that could defeat the Panther and the Tiger I in the field.69 This was important, since these newest German tanks were deadly even for heavy KVs. The technological balance between the adversaries had shifted, and the Soviets no longer led the field. But they would not run short of armour again. In this case as in almost every other, the Red Army’s approach to technology was to churn it out and keep it simple.

  There was more to Soviet preparation, however, than mere numbers. Indeed, in individual confrontations around Kursk, including the decisive battle near Prokhorovka, the two sides had roughly equal numbers of machines within range of the fighting.70 It was the human, not the technological factor, that weighed heaviest that July. Self-sacrificial, almost suicidal courage was crucial for the victory at Kursk, as the number of Soviet casualties – 70,000 dead in the defensive phase alone – would testify. Equally important, however, was the Red Army troops’ increasing mastery of war. Co-ordination between tank crews had been improved by intense training, while military thinking about the deployment of armour had also moved on. The tank was now a weapon in its own right, not a gas-guzzling substitute for a horse. Five new tank armies, of which Slesarev’s was one, were created in the early months of 1943.71 The skills of the tank crews in these new formations were also improving. Slesarev had begun his military service as an artilleryman. Selected for promotion in 1942, he trained for nearly a year before receiving his first tank command as a lieutenant. A fellow tank lieutenant, twenty-two-year-old Ivan Gusev, described the pressure of his work that summer. ‘Every hour is taken up with fussing over the machines,’ he wrote to his family in June 1943. ‘Sometimes you forget the time and date, you forget everything.’72

  The crews that men like Gusev and Slesarev commanded had trained with record speed, but they, too, had been forced to focus more thoroughly than any of their predecessors. Since the evacuation and restructuring of production, the main tank schools were now located near the factories that made the tanks. The process, like all production lines, was economical and specialized. Individual men were trained only to work in the specific model – the T-34, for instance – to which they were to be assigned. Each man, whether gunner or mechanic, was also trained for one specialism within the crew.73 At this stage in the war, the entire round of training like this would take less than three months, though it was later extended. It turned out fresh tank men, in other words, as fast as the Germans could slaughter them.

  The job attracted some of the best recruits, especially young men from the towns. In part, it was the glamour of the huge machine. If farm boys had been brought up to imagine themselves driving tractors, lads from the towns might well have dreamed of dashing over open country in an armoured giant, controlling its movements with wheels and levers and monitoring the outside world through a bank of dials. Even the Germans would eventually learn to respect soldiers of this outlook. ‘The Russian townsman,’ wrote the SS general Max Simon, ‘who is highly interested in technical matters, is just as well suited for the modern tank arm as the Russian peasant is for the infantry… It was amazing to see the primitive technical means with which the Russian crews kept their tanks ready for action and how they overcame all difficulties.’74

  The tank men’s skill was not just a matter of knowing where to put the spanner. The other quality that Simon observed among these sons of the factory was their determination. ‘An added factor,’ he wrote, ‘is that the Russian worker usually is a convinced communist, who, having enjoyed the blessings of “his” revolution for decades, will fight fanatically as a class-conscious proletarian. Just as the Red Infantryman is ready to die in his foxhole, the Soviet tank soldier will die in his tank, firing at the enemy to the last, even if he is alone in or behind enemy lines.’75 Gusev, who certainly was a communist, put it more personally. At the end of a long day, he told his family, ‘you lie down to sleep late in the evening, you feel a terrible exhaustion in your whole body, you know that you have carried out a great and difficult task, but your heart is full of gladness, a special kind of sensation, a sort of pride or internal satisfaction. These are the best moments of all.’76

  A man like this fought for the family and land he loved, he fought for broadly communist principles, but he also fought because he was beside his dearest friends. Friendships among tank men were often very strong. They would spend hours together in a confined space; they shared responsibility for their machine; they often made a tank their own by painting it with slogans – uplifting and uncontroversial messages included ‘Where there is courage – there is victory!’77 More seriously, crews also had to keep the monster in good working order. Gusev’s best friend was another tank lieutenant who had shared a rough fortnight with him that spring when he and three other men had been assigned with Gusev to a captured German tank. ‘We didn’t know a thing about the machine,’ Gusev wrote. Battered and worn, she was ‘capricious’ anyway, and on their first day the Soviet crew managed to travel only twenty-five kilometres in twelve hours. ‘We tinkered with her all day, dirty, hungry and cross.’ They had no rations with them, ‘not even a crust of bread’. The weather outside was filthy, the roads almost impassable on foot, and Gusev expected that the lieutenant, who was in charge, would order everyone to leave the moribund machine and march. Instead, he worked with them for twelve days to repair the tank. ‘In those twelve days,’ Gusev wrote, ‘we would have turned grey if we could have done. There’s no way of writing what we went through.’ The friends were more like brothers by the time he wrote.78

  Tank crews were also bound together by the threat of a collective death. After the infantry, whose service was almost guaranteed to end in invalidity or death – or, as they would quip, in ‘the department of health [zdravotdel] or the department of the earth [zemotdel]’ – armoured and mechanized troops faced the most certain danger.79 Of the 403,272 tank men (including a small number of tank women) who were trained by the Red Army in the war, 310,000 would die.80 Even the most optimistic soldiers knew what would happen when a tank was shelled. The white-hot flash of the explosion would almost certainly ignite the tank crew’s fuel and ammunition. At best, the crew – or those, at least, who had not been decapitated or dismembered by the shell itself – would have no more than ninety seconds to climb out of their cabin. Much of that time would be swallowed up as they struggled to open the heavy, sometimes red-hot, hatch, which might have jammed after the impact anyway. The battlefield was no haven, but it was safer than the armoured coffin that would now begin to blaze, its metal components to melt. This was not simply ‘boiling up’; the tank would also torch the atmosphere around it. By then, there could be no hope for the men inside. Not unusually, their bodies were so badly burned that the remains were inseparable.81 ‘Have you burned yet?’ was a common question for tank men to ask each other when they met for the first time. A dark joke from this stage in the war has a politruk informing a young man that almost every tank man in his group has died that day. ‘I’m sorry,’ the young man replies. ‘I’ll make sure that I burn tomorrow.’

  The troops that waited on the steppe near Kursk were rightly anxious as the weeks went by. On 8 May, commanders on the four main fronts were ordered to prepare for an attack within four days.82 Less than two weeks later, on 20 May, they were put on to alert again.83 No one doubted that the enemy was planning to attack, but nervous men and officers struggled to
predict the exact time. By day, the Soviet encampments hummed with diligent activity, but at night the steppe was treacherously still. ‘Every day there’s something new,’ Belov told his diary on 13 June. ‘Today another two have gone over to the enemy side. That’s eleven people already. Most of them are pricks. On 11 June, our neighbours did some battle reconnaissance. They didn’t find a thing. We’re all sitting in this ravine, it will be a month soon, and there’s just silence at the front.’ The next day brought news of the job they were to do. Within a month, his men would be helping to mount an offensive towards Orel. ‘A big operation is being prepared,’ he wrote. ‘Our division is going to attack in three echelons, and our regiment will be in the second. There will be thirty-five artillery batteries working in the division, not including two Katyusha regiments. It’s going to be pretty interesting.’84 But though he had his orders, Belov would see no action for several weeks. ‘I’ve been in this place longer,’ he wrote, ‘than I’ve been in any one spot in the entire war.’85

  The attack came in the first week of July. On the night of 4–5 July, a German prisoner told his Soviet captors that it would begin early that morning. At about two o’clock on the same morning, another prisoner told Soviet interrogators that the onslaught was timed to begin within an hour.86 Even along the vast horizon of the steppe, the sky had yet to fade into predawn. Zhukov ordered an immediate artillery and air attack, a spoiling action that ripped through the night, as he admitted, like ‘a symphony from hell’.87 But it was no more than an overture. Undeterred by the Soviet barrage, the Germans launched their own attack, the onslaught that was meant to win the war, from both faces of the salient. To the north of Kursk, not far from Belov’s base at Maloarkhangelsk, the ninth panzer army, commanded by Walter Model, struck at the Soviet lines, concentrating its main thrust in a narrow ten-mile stretch with the aim of breaking through and flooding south into the salient. More than 100 miles to the south, nine panzer divisions, commanded by General Hoth, pushed northwards towards the small town of Oboyan. The troops were the best available in Germany and included the hand-picked SS ‘Death’s Head’ and ‘Adolf Hitler Guards’ units. Their first objective was the highway that connected Oboyan, Kursk and Belgorod to the Crimea and all of south-eastern Ukraine.88 By 7 July, they had almost reached it.