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Evgeni Bessonov

It was a cloudy day, sleet was falling, it was quite chilly on the tanks and everyone tried to get closer to the tank's radiator - a bad weather for infantry. During February 9 and 10 the enemy put up stubborn resistance, throwing tanks, infantry and Volksschturm into action, raining mines and shells on us. We had a hard time, but the enemy's resistance was broken and after taking losses Germans had to withdraw, leaving heavy equipment and weapons behind - tanks without fuel, artillery and mortars. It was woodland; sometimes one could not see where Fritzes' fire came from. Now tanks advanced carefully, following tankodesantniki infantry, while our task was to destroy German Panzerfaust teams with small arms or indicate Fritz targets to the tanks, so that they could destroy them with main guns. Enemy tried to stop our advance by all means, laying ambushes - sometimes with very small groups, which was almost suicide mission with the only goal to stop us and inflict casualties on us. One evening, just when it started to get dark, the three vanguard tanks approached the edge of a forest. My platoon and me were in the middle of the advancing tank column, while a group of soldiers from another company was in forward security. All of a sudden several artillery shots shook the air and the column stopped. I jumped off the tank and ran forward to find out the situation. It got completely dark, but I saw a group of commanding officers, among them were commander of tank regiment Stolyarov, battalion commander Kozienko and others. Soldiers from the three first tanks ran back from the forest edge and brought on raincoat a heavily wounded soldier, who died soon afterwards. According to the soldiers, at the forest edge they got under fire from German assault guns. One of our tanks was knocked out, almost entire escorting tankodesantniki infantry died, only few wounded survived. Two other tanks tried to evade the fire. In one tank the crew abandoned their vehicle, but the driver made it to turn on reverse speed, and the tank rolled backwards without the crew. The regiment commander ordered to stop the tank and bring it back to the column, which was executed.

The commanders did not dare to mount a night attack, and the attack was shifted to the next morning. At dawn the battalion - all that was left of its three companies, started to advance through the forest to the left of the road. We did not know anything about the enemy. First everything was nice and quiet, no shots were fired at us, the enemy did not see us, and we did not see the enemy. However, this did not last for long, enemy spotted us and opened rifle and machine gun fire at us. We returned fire and advanced forward in short rushes.

Outnumbered German infantry retreated, or better said fled after our attack, however, we got under fire from three German assault guns, which turned out to be in some fifty meters from us. We had to take cover behind trees, as the assault guns fired at almost every single soldier. My orderly and me were lying under a tree, which was hit by a shell, in a meter from the ground. We were shell-shocked, the tree was cut down, but we remained unharmed and sneaked to another tree. We were lucky again, not for the first time. We did bit know what to do, as the tanks did not support us, staying far behind, but the 3rd Company commander Kostenko quickly came up with a solution. He brought heavy JS-2 tank almost to our line and indicated targets - the assault guns - to the crew. The tank fired two shots from its heavy gun (122 mm), and one assault gun literally fell apart, while the second round penetrated two assault guns at once. I had never seen such a "miracle" before. Our way was free. Battalion advanced a bit further through the forest, enemy was nowhere to be seen. Our tanks caught up with us, we were ordered to get on the tanks, and we went on with our mission.

 

Translated by: Bair Irincheev This page belongs to the I remember