800 Days on the Eastern Front

A Russian Soldier Remembers World War II

Nikolai Litvin, Stuart Britton

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780700624584
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

During his 800 days of war, Nikolai Litvin fought at the front lines in the ferocious tank battles at Kursk, was wounded three times, and witnessed unspeakable brutalities against prisoners and civilians. But he survived to pen this brief but powerful memoir of his wartime experiences.Barely out of his teens, Litvin served for three years in the Red Army on the killing fields of the Eastern Front. His memoir presents an unadorned, candid narrative of the common soldier's lot in Stalin's army. Unlike the memoirs of Russian officers—usually preoccupied with large military operations and political concerns—this narrative offers a true ground-level view of World War II's deadliest theater. It puts a begrimed human face on the enormous toll of casualties and provides a rare perspective on battles that were instrumental in the defeat of the German army.Litvin's varied roles, ranging from antitank gunner at Kursk to heavy machine gunner in a penal battalion to staff driver for the 352nd Rifle Division, offer unique perspectives on the Red Army in World War II as it fought from the Ukraine deep into the German heartland. Litvin documents such significant battles as Operation Kutuzov, Operation Bagration, and the German counterattack on the Narev, while also providing unique personal observations on fording the Dnepr River under enemy fire, the rape of German women by Russian troops, and literally seeing his life pass before his eyes as he watched a Stuka's bomb fall directly on his position. And, because part of his duties involved chauffeuring Red Army generals, he also presents revealing glimpses into their personalities and behaviors.Originally written in 1962, with events still fresh in his mind, Litvin's memoir lay unpublished and unseen until translator Stuart Britton and a Russian colleague approached him about publishing it in English. Britton interviewed Litvin to flesh out the details of his original recollection and annotated the resulting work to provide historical context for the campaigns and battles in which he participated. Remarkably free of Soviet-era propaganda, this gem of a memoir provides a view of the war never seen by western readers, including photographs from Litvin's personal collection.An invaluable historical document, as well as a remarkable testament of survival, Litvin's memoir offers unique and penetrating insights into the Soviet wartime experience unavailable in any other source.

Chapter 1

I Become an Airborne Soldier

I was born on 20 June 1923 in the village of Grigorevka, forty kilometers south of the city of Petropavlovsk in western Siberia. My parents were peasants, and I was one of four sons born to them. After the end of the Russian Civil War, my father worked as a tractor mechanic.

In 1927, my grandfather and my uncles formed an agricultural cooperative. They farmed an area of approximately five square kilometers. Through government loans, they acquired a tractor, a threshing machine, a grain harvesting machine, and other farm machinery and inventory. In its first year of operation, the co-op grew a very tall crop of wheat, which was sufficient to pay off the government loan.

At the end of 1929, our family moved to Nikolaev in the Ukraine, where my father worked at a shipbuilding factory. I began my studies at a school in Nikolaev in 1931. In 1933, the Ukraine began experiencing a terrible famine.¹ In order to save the family from starvation, we moved to Omsk Oblast, where my father worked in a garage as a mechanic for the “Fighting” state farm [sovkhoz]. It was here where I completed fourth grade and joined the Young Pioneers,² together with my brother. I recall that there was a shortage of ties and neckerchiefs then, and my brother and I once wrote a letter to Stalin: “Comrade Stalin, please send neckerchiefs to me and my brother.” Soon, neckerchiefs reappeared in the shops, but then we received a letter from the district committee: “Children, we hope you now have your neckerchiefs, but in the future, we ask you not to trouble Stalin with such matters.”

About this time, my parents sent me back to my birthplace, Grigorevka, to help my grandfather and grandmother on the co-op. I completed the seventh class of my education there. In training there, the local youth selected me to be the chairman of the civil defense organization. By this time, I had earned many badges through the Young Pioneers, including defense badges, the “Voroshilov Rifleman,”³ sanitation and chemical defense badges, and the “Readiness for Labor and Defense.” No one else in the village had so many such honors! I organized training for the youth in shooting and self-defense. Our school took first place in the district competitions. In October 1938, I was accepted into the Komsomol, the Communist Youth League, which was the preparatory stage to Party membership.

In August 1939 I entered the Petropavlovsk Technical School for Geotechnical Engineering. By the spring of 1941, we had finished the academic portion of our training and had begun field training in geodesics. I was eighteen years old.

The Outbreak of War

On the morning of Sunday, 22 June 1941, I woke up, leaned over, and turned on my radio. For some reason I didn’t hear the physical exercise program that normally played on the radio at that time of the morning. Instead, the radio was playing military march music continuously. Later that morning, my father dropped by to see me and suggested we go for a beer. It was a warm day. Around noon, the martial music on the radio was interrupted by an official communication. Foreign Minister Molotov was speaking: “Citizens and kolkhozniki⁴ . . . Fascist Germany has attacked us. . . . ” A thought immediately flashed through my mind: “Father will first be called to the front, then my brother Alexander (Shurka), then me. My father and I will return, but Shurka will not.” And that is precisely what happened. Shurka was two years younger than me.

The next day, when we went to school, the school administration announced that it was terminating our geodesic training. The male students were immediately to undergo training as tractor operators, the female students as dispatchers for the machine tractor stations that served farms in the area. Why tractor operators? Because when the war began, existing tractor operators were mobilized for the front, while someone still needed to harvest the fields. So they prepared us for the job.

The director of the local machine tractor station was an Order of Lenin recipient. For a month, we trained hard to learn how to operate and repair the tractors and machinery. Then he sent us to a kolkhoz to prepare for the upcoming harvest. When we arrived, we found no tractors waiting for us. We had to repair some brokendown tractors for our own eventual use. Eventually, I was assigned to operate a ChTZ—a tractor from the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory. We drove around on our tractors for a while, to get the feel of handling our machines, and in the evening the director came and organized us into a tractor brigade.

The harvest began. For some reason, my tractor ran slowly and kept falling behind the other tractors. I was embarrassed, so embarrassed that later that night, I had a dream. In my dream, Engineer Zubkov, who had trained us on the tractors, visited our tractor brigade. I asked him, “Why is my tractor moving so slowly?” And in my dream, he answered, “Hey, you dunderhead, tighten up the governor, and your machine will run faster.” I woke up with a start at 2:00 a.m., jumped out of bed, ran to the tractor, tightened the governor—and the next day, my tractor indeed ran faster.

I worked there until the harvest finished on 25 September 1941. When the harvest work ended, we returned to the technical school to begin our third year of study in land surveying and topography. Then suddenly the government passed a decree to shorten our course of study from four years to three.

During our third and now final year of study, we also engaged in civil defense and paramilitary training. I trained in airborne assault techniques, such as parachute jumping and glider landings. Other students studied chemical defense [flame-throwing] measures. In our Komsomol (Communist Youth League) organization we even had a motto: “Each member should earn four badges: the ‘Voroshilov Rifleman’ (for shooting accuracy), the ‘Readiness for Anti-Air Defense,’ the ‘Readiness for Labor and Defense,’ and the ‘Readiness for Sanitary Defense.’”

In the fall of 1941, the 52nd Aviation Squadron arrived in our city. They trained civilian pilots, including volunteers from our technical school. Incidentally, when the war started, training at the technical school became no longer free, but I didn’t have to pay: education was free for the children of frontoviki [frontline soldiers].

I Volunteer for the Airborne

Shortly after my final year of study, they wrote out a certificate for me to leave for graduate practice in Pavlodar. But by that time, I badly wanted to go to the front, even though I had an education waiver until the completion of my technical training. Sometimes I could hear people around me saying, “He’s paid them all off ! Look at him walking around like such a smart aleck!” Their words shamed me.

So I went to the military enlistment office and began to pester them to take me into the Red Army. The military commissar refused: “When it is necessary, we’ll come for you.” But at that time, a lieutenant arrived to recruit troops for the airborne forces. I appealed to him. He asked, “Are you a Komsomol member?”

“Yes,” I said, “I have made thirty-seven parachute jumps, and I’m a third category fencer. I have glider and ski experience.”

The lieutenant warned me that airborne troops were already 90 percent dead men walking but told me that if I persisted, he would accept me—only on the condition that the oblast Komsomol committee would give me a recommendation.

I ran to the oblast Komsomol committee and found an acquaintance of mine, Genka Uporov, sitting there. He also was a former student of the technical school but had left to fight in the “Winter War” against Finland and had returned crippled, with the Order of the Red Banner. He tried to persuade me not to enter the airborne forces but gave me a recommendation nonetheless.

On 20 September 1942, I was brought to Liubertsy, near Moscow, to the 1st Airborne Corps. Ten such corps were forming up there, by order of Stalin. [Here Litvin could not resist a little joke.] He wanted to use them to subjugate all of Europe, and fling them upon all the capitals of Europe. Hitler simply outpaced him, and was already in France, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. The Americans conquered half the world with the help of the 82nd Airborne!

I found approximately forty volunteers from my city in Liubertsy. The command supplemented us with men who had been imprisoned for minor violations: Twenty minutes late—straight to jail. They gathered an entire echelon in this fashion.

In Liubertsy, they took us first to a bathhouse and then distributed the uniforms. The commissar of the echelon, Tumarbekov, was ordered to select 100 men for a special unit—a separate mortar battalion [divizion] attached to corps’ headquarters. My assignment was with this mortar battalion.

At that point we had no artillery, and we carried everything ourselves, even our mortars. We each carried a PPSh submachine gun, a Finnish knife, two grenades (one antitank, one antipersonnel), 500 rounds of ammunition, a sapper’s shovel, a water bottle, and a meal kit. Some of us carried the barrels of the mortars; others carried the bases or the mortar shells.

The Northwestern Front: Demiansk and Staraia Rusa

In the winter of 1942, German Army Group North’s 16th Army held a narrow salient deep into the Soviet lines at Demiansk. The Soviet Stavka had marked this salient for elimination but held even more ambitious goals for the offensive in this sector. The Stavka hoped that the simultaneous blows of Northwestern Front’s 1st Shock Army and 27th Army on opposite sides of the Demiansk corridor would crush the corridor leading into the Demiansk pocket and simultaneously tear open a gap in the German defenses. This would allow the 1st Tank Army to crash through into the German rear toward Stoltsy and Luga, thereby unhinging Army Group North’s Sixteenth Army from its northern neighbor, the Eighteenth Army encircling Leningrad.

Litvin’s 4th Guards Airborne Division, along with other airborne divisions formed in the “second wave” of Stalin’s attempt to create an airborne force, was sent to Northwestern Front’s 1st Shock Army to support its offensive against the southern side of the Demiansk corridor. Although all but one regiment of his division remained in reserve, Litvin’s narrative is noteworthy for the difficulties he details under which the Soviet infantry labored at this point in the war on this sector of the front. Hunger was a real problem, even for such an elite infantry formation, while they labored under difficult late winter conditions in boggy terrain with insufficient transportation.

In December 1942, our airborne corps was reorganized into the 4th Guards Airborne Division.⁵ They took the mortars from us and gave us instead 45-mm antitank guns and parachutes for them. On 3 February 1943 came the order for our departure to the front, to join the Northwestern Front’s 1st Shock Army south of Lake Il’men. We turned in our parachutes and received our combat loads. We spent the first night in Khimki and then moved by rail to Klina. Our battery reached the home of Tchaikovsky, the famous composer, and discovered that the Germans had been using it as a stable for their horses. We built campfires and spent the night there. The next day we passed through Torzhok and reached Ostashkov, south of Lake Il’men. When we arrived, we received a hot meal and skis. We waited here from 13 February until 15 February while the entire division was concentrating. On 15 February, the division moved out on skis toward our staging point for the coming offensive—a point about twenty kilometers southwest of Staraia Rusa, and east of Kholm.

There were thousands of vehicles in the area! Once, one truck created a traffic jam along the way. Traffic jams were dangerous—we had no air cover, and we were moving in a dangerously dense formation: eight divisions, 120,000 people. The order came immediately: “Shoot the driver!” Near Astratovo we stopped in a forest. The terrain in the area was very swampy. There was a light frost, and it was around twenty degrees Fahrenheit.

Here our division joined the 18th Guards Rifle Corps, which was part of the 1st Shock Army of the Northwestern Front. Ever since the first winter offensive of 1941–1942, the 1st Shock Army had been locked in savage fighting with the Germans, trying to liquidate the “Ramushevo corridor” into the Demiansk pocket. It had suffered enormous casualties in repeated attempts to cut the Ramushevo corridor but had not accomplished that objective. In the waning weeks of the 1942 winter offensive, Stalin and the Stavka wanted to make one more effort to cut the corridor and eliminate the Demiansk salient.

Before the offensive, we had to defend the single road that served as the supply route to this sector of the front. There were no food supplies. We found a dead horse and lived off it for two weeks, until food supplies finally arrived. We had a PTR antitank rifle company with us, many of its men fresh out of prison. The company’s sergeant major, Tumarbekov, one day suggested, “Let’s raid the Fritzes!”

The situation was that on the left bank of the Parusia River, the Germans and Finns had been sitting for one and a half years, sheltered in bunkers and pillboxes.⁶ The small river at that time was frozen and covered with snow and frozen corpses. We hatched a plan, then crawled up to the German lines and waited for the moment when the Germans changed garrisons. The order came, “Let’s go!” A desultory crossfire erupted and continued for nearly two hours. We held fire from our 45-mm guns, however, as at that time our ammunition supply was quite low—only two rounds per barrel. Somehow our raiding party reached their food stores and managed to return to our lines without losses. In the morning, the commander of the regiment summoned Tumarbekov and gave him a formal reprimand. To all the others, he gave medals!

The Northwestern Front’s offensive began on 26 February 1943, in the area of the Ramushevo salient. Our attack had been due to begin 15 February, but it had been badly delayed by difficulties in assembling the attack force due to the lack of roads in the boggy, forested region. For example, the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Guards Airborne Divisions arrived on time, but without their artillery, combat supplies, and provisions. Other units, including the ski brigades, arrived at the point of concentration only in the days after 20 February.

The larger objective of the 1st Shock Army was to attack the “neck” of the German Demiansk salient from the south, acting jointly with the 27th Army attacking from the opposite side of the “neck” in order to close it and trap the German divisions within a pocket. The task of the 18th Guards Rifle Corps was to break through the German forward lines of fortifications and cut the Staraia Rusa–Kholm road in the vicinity of the villages of Lekhny, Karkachii, Pesok, and Krivovitsa. This road was a key lateral line of communications behind the German front line. Once we had opened this gap in the German lines, Lieutenant General M. S. Khozin’s mobile group of the 1st Tank Army and 68th Army was to develop the offensive in the direction of Stoltsy and Luga, into the deep flank and rear of the German Eighteenth Army encircling Leningrad.

Unfortunately, the...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Editor’s Note
• Chapter 1: I Become an Airborne Soldier
• Chapter 2: Kursk
• Chapter 3: Pursuit
• Chapter 4: I Become a Chauffeur
• Chapter 5: Operation Bagration
• Chapter 6: Into Poland with the 354th Rifle Division
• Chapter 7: The Final Offensive
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover