Leningrad

The other day exactly this sort of incident was uncovered; it was spotted through binoculars. A colossal column of tanks was seen approaching. The tanks stopped, an officer got out and leant against one with his elbow, and his elbow made a dent. Well, as you know, elbows don’t make dents on real tanks. This slight detail revealed the truth — the tanks turned out to be fake.24

Whether this absurd attempt at persuading men to fight panzers virtually with their bare hands had any success we do not know; it seems highly unlikely.

Brought to battle, the volunteers’ lives were thrown away in the most primitive fashion. ‘Russian attack method’, German chief of staff General Halder wrote in his diary: ‘Three-minute artillery barrage, then pause, then infantry attacking as much as twelve ranks deep, without heavy weapons support. The men start hurrah-ing from far off. Incredibly high Russian losses.’25 One of those infantrymen was Frenklakh. ‘You’re so terrified that your legs root themselves to the ground’, he remembered. ‘It’s extraordinarily difficult to make yourself get up, pick up your rifle and run. Once you’re up it’s fine — you just run forwards. But it wasn’t just fear of being shot in the back of the head if you didn’t that made you do it — you were high on a sense of duty.’

Officers who emerged from battle alive were subjected to the usual suspicious bullying. Verkhoglaz interrogated a politruk, Mikhail Serogodsky, after a disastrous engagement near Kingisepp at the end of July:

Serogodsky: ‘Nine hundred of us arrived at the railway station, and six hundred came out of the fighting there.’

Verkhoglaz: ‘Were the rest killed, or did they make off?’

Serogodsky: ‘Some went off towards Gdov, some were killed.’

Verkhoglaz: ‘I know exactly why some of them ran away — it was because you lost your head. You didn’t understand that you have to lead. Thanks to your failure of leadership they ran away in animal terror.’

The remainder of the unit, Serogodsky continued, were ordered to ‘consider themselves partisans’, broke up into groups and headed into the woods:

Verkhoglaz: ‘The reason for your return from the rear?’

Serogodsky: ‘We had difficulties with food. For the last three days until we met up with our units again, we fed off wild plants. We were walking through deep pine forest and living off wood sorrel. Extreme hunger forced us to rejoin our lines.’

Verkhoglaz: ‘And your losses are how big?’

Serogodsky: ‘Hard to say. In our detachment there are sixty-five men left. That wasn’t just deaths; twice I sent men out on reconnaissance and they didn’t come back.’26

Anger and despair come through the battalion-level reports as well, their language burned clean of the usual political jargon. A Commissar Moseyenko of the First Division explained, on 21 July, why his unit had been forced to retreat:

The battalion was defending itself against mortar fire, and could not open fire in return because it had no mortars of its own. The battalion had no communications with the regiment, the artillery or its own companies, as a result of which our artillery was firing at our own soldiers in their own trenches. The 1st Company of the battalion subjected the 3rd Company of the same battalion to fire.27

Another officer of the First Division complained of the lack of medical services:

It isn’t just that the situation with drugs is bad; we have no surgical equipment at all. If the wounded need surgery we can’t help them. There are no surgeons, no instruments, no nurses. There are the Red Cross girls — they are heroines, true, but that isn’t much help to them. We haven’t got enough first aid kits. There are no back-up stocks, only what the soldiers already have in their bags, that’s all. One small bottle of iodine per bag. . What can I say about medical transport? We should have 380 trucks; we have 170. There are no qualified doctors. .

It was small wonder, he hinted, that officers often found their position unbearable:

There was one unpleasant incident. The commander of the 1st Kirovsky Regiment shot himself. The reason, apparently, was cowardice, fear that [the regiment] was not properly armed. They say that fifteen minutes earlier he had given an excellent speech [to the troops], then walked out and shot himself. His actions have not been explained to the soldiers; they have been told that he was killed by diversionists.28

A senior lieutenant questioned why he had ordered a retreat on his own initiative, replied, ‘I don’t know how to be an officer and I didn’t want lots of people to be killed through my fault’, before bursting into tears.29 A machine-gunner left a brisk note: ‘I’ve decided to take my own life. It’s too difficult in the company. Signed, company sergeant major Smirnov.’