War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 (49 page)

Oqueka’s battery commander, Oberleutnant Rossman, ordered them to concentrate automatic fire on the tracks of the advancing T-34s. Nobody was optimistic as to the likely outcome, but there remained little else they could do. Oqueka ‘clenched his teeth and decided they would sell their skins as dearly as possible’. They held their fire until the tanks had approached to within 200m. A burst of fire smashed the track of the leading T-34, which began to turn helplessly around on the same spot. Guns were then ordered to concentrate fire at the turret. Even before the first magazine emptied, the turret lid flipped open and a white flag appeared. The Russian crew clambered out and were taken prisoner. Meanwhile the cone of 20mm fire was switched to the left and another T-34 similarly disabled.

Instead of surrendering, the crew of this vehicle chose to fight with small arms as they emerged. They were cut to pieces by multiple impacts of 20mm cannon explosions which sparked and spluttered around the hull. Other tanks met the same fate. Crews were scythed down at any sign of resistance. The rest of the T-34s turned back. It was inconceivable to Oqueka and the other gun crews that their insignificant calibre cannon could have triumphed against tanks considered the heaviest and best of their type. ‘Our nervous tension was released in a triumphant yell,’ Oqueka exclaimed, ‘as if we were eight-year-old kids playing cowboys and indians!’

They moved forward curiously to examine the results of their handiwork and discovered that, apart from cut caterpillar treads and damage to drive and sprocket wheels, there was nothing to explain the abrupt abandonment of the tanks. ‘Not until the prisoners were questioned did the riddle become clear,’ explained Oqueka. The answer lay in the resonant din produced by multiple 20mm strikes on cast steel turrets, which had the effect of transforming them into ‘huge bells’.

‘Continuous explosions on the turret had produced a hellish noise which had grown louder from explosion to explosion. The sound had swollen beyond the realms of tolerance and had virtually driven the crews insane.’

Oqueka recalled the example of executions of indicted criminals in ancient China. Hapless individuals were incarcerated inside a huge bell which was hammered outside until the unfortunate victim expired. The 20mm gunners appreciated they were not totally defenceless when facing heavy tanks. Oqueka claimed his battery disabled 32 T-34 tanks before the end of the year, employing similar tactics.
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Other German sectors on the Kiev perimeter were not so fortunate. On the right wing of the 45th Infantry Division, Infantry Regiment 133 experienced ‘a lunatic and reckless cavalry attack which rode through our machine gun fire’. They were followed by ‘mass human-wave attacks, which we had not experienced until now’. Cossacks galloped through German outposts with drawn sabres, slashing down with such force that troops caught in the open had their helmets cleaved through to the skull. A segment of this epic Tolstoyian charge reached as far as the division headquarters at Yagolin before it was stopped. Behind the cavalry came a tightly compact triple-wave infantry assault, supported by heavy artillery fire. Four tank and three lorry-mounted infantry platoons were amongst them, suicidally driving directly against the division line. As they dismounted when blocked by a railway line atop an embankment facing the German positions, they were subjected to a withering storm of fire from co-ordinated artillery, anti-tank, machine gun and small arms fire. ‘The dead,’ according to the division report, ‘covered the length of the embankment in countless masses.’ Among them were women in uniform.

On 24 September the tidal wave of suicide assaults shifted against the 44th Division to the right and south of 45th Division. Russian troops exploiting inter-division boundary gaps penetrated into the rear positions, falling upon the logistic and artillery units that stood in the way. The 6th Battery of Artillery Regiment 98, occupying high ground at point 131, fired directly into waves of attacking Russian infantry, creating huge gashes in the advancing crowds. Undeterred, the remorseless mob swept into the German gun positions where furious hand-to-hand fighting developed. One German artillery piece was captured and hauled around to fire at its own division headquarters, wounding horses but missing personnel. At this moment in the struggle, one of those curious paradoxes of war occurred. While the chaotic and savage mêlée continued around the gun positions of 6th Battery, hardly 100m away columns of Russian infantry marched by moving eastwards, with rifles at the shoulder, as if on parade, oblivious to what was going on. They would have made all the difference and widened the breakthrough if they had been deployed to support the penetration struggling on their flank. The 45th Division padre, watching this in disbelief, remarked ‘they did not take the slightest notice of the clear route on offer over there, they were on another mission!’
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Fearful losses on both sides became increasingly apparent as the pocket was compressed. ‘I could not avoid seeing the truckfuls of young corpses,’ recalled Max Kuhnert following the advance. They were German.

‘It was just ghastly, and those were only a few from our immediate area. Blood was literally running down the side from the floorboards of the trucks, and the driver was, despite the heat, white as a sheet.’

Strewn along the roadsides were dismembered corpses. German soldiers were visibly affected at the sight of uniformed female Russian casualties. Kuhnert, inspecting a knocked out ‘60-tonner’ tank, saw that the flames had burned away the clothes of the driver and another crew member, a woman, hanging half out of a side door. She was probably a tank crew member but Kuhnert, uncomfortable with the concept of women fighting in uniform, surmised, ‘the Russians had apparently been so confident of their breakthrough that one had taken his wife or sweetheart into the large tank.’ Kuhnert was eating iron rations, which often contained a small tin of pork. As he prised it open with the tip of his bayonet and took his first mouthful, it coincided with the awful stench emanating from the tank.

‘Maybe I was simply too tired and the last few days for me as for many others, had been just too much. We had been in battle for 12 days; it was enough for anybody. Even so, for years to come whenever I tried to eat or wanted to eat tinned pork, I just couldn’t.’
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He was violently sick.

The reduction of the Kiev pocket was a battle of annihilation. As the Soviet divisions were cut to pieces, German casualties rose also. ‘Whose turn would it be today?’ was the unasked question vexing tired infantry as they roused themselves from a few hours’ sleep, often in woodland, before resuming the advance. ‘Pain, hunger and thirst took second place now,’ said one soldier, ‘with the ice-cold breath of death brushing our cheeks and sending shivers down our spines.’ It took five days to reduce the pocket. On the fourth day, 45th Infantry Division was attacking a heavily wooded feature in the Beresany area, pushing westwards toward Kiev. Heavy hand-to-hand fighting developed near Ssemjonowka against Soviet soldiers unusually armed with sub-machine guns and automatic weapons. There was no surrender.

Bundles of grenades bound together were hurled at the German attackers for maximum effect. One concentrated charge wiped out an entire machine gun crew. All night long the Russians repeatedly attempted to break out. By first light about 100 corpses could be counted, sprawled around the perimeter of one of the lead companies. A body inspection revealed 25 were officers and commissars and another 25 were NCOs. The wood where the enemy had been concentrated was raked by heavy artillery time and again until all resistance ceased: 700 PoWs including a Soviet army corps general emerged.

Even areas already overrun had to be systematically combed. It was a slow, methodical and remorselessly bloody process. ‘Survival became the only thing that mattered,’ declared Kuhnert. ‘One could actually become jealous of others who got wounded, not badly mind you, but just enough to get them home or away from this place of slaughter, stench and utter destruction.’ All the countless haystacks and straw huts that dotted the landscape had to be laboriously checked. Hiding inside were cut-off enemy groups who continued to pick off single German soldiers or vehicles. A ‘reconnaissance by fire’ was instituted to overcome the problem. The shelters were shot into flames. The 45th Division chaplain described the surreal scene:

‘If it were not necessary to contribute further to the fury of war one might have admired the countless dazzling columns of fire that made up this grandiose spectacle of illumination. In between, the infantry fanned out in wide skirmish lines and finally cleared the area of the last remnants of its defenders. Here and there the last magazine was fired off or a grenade thrown from haystacks already on fire.’
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Unteroffizier Wilhelm Prüller with Infantry Regiment 11 was pursuing fleeing Russian columns in vehicles mixed with tanks. German Panzer and motorised companies had become intermingled with the enemy ‘in the intoxication of this fabulous chase’.

‘There ought to be some newsreel men here; there would be incomparable picture material! Tanks and armoured cars, the men sitting on them, encrusted with a thick coating of dirt, heady with the excitement of the attack – haystacks set on fire by our tank cannons, running Russians, hiding, surrendering! It’s a marvellous sight!’

Prisoners were flushed out from beneath haystacks or lying between furrows in the fields. ‘Shy, unbelieving, filled with terror, they came,’ gloated Prüller. Resistance by ‘many a Bolshevik’ was regarded as ‘stupid pig-headedness’. They were shot on the spot.
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By the fifth day Russian resistance was visibly collapsing. Col-Gen Michael P. Kirponos, commanding the Kiev troops, perished alongside his staff when his column failed to break through the German ring. Very few Soviet units escaped. Marshals Budenny, Timoshenko and their senior political commissar, Khrushchev, were flown out of the pocket by air. M. A. Burmistrenko, a member of the war council and Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, and the Chief of Staff of the Soviet Army Group, General Pupikov, were killed, as were most members of the General Staff. One single cavalry unit led by Maj-Gen Borisov managed to exfiltrate with 4,000 men.
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Although masses of Soviet PoWs were rounded up, they did not readily surrender. Gabriel Temkin, serving in a Soviet labour battalion, admitted ‘although officially a taboo in the Soviet press, the PoW issue was a public secret’. The Russian public was aware huge numbers of prisoners had been taken. ‘We were told both how the Nazis were mistreating them, which was indeed a fact, and what the Soviet punishment for letting oneself become a PoW was, which was also true.’

Commanders who surrendered were considered deserters, the consequence was their families could be arrested as forfeit. Likewise, families of Red Army soldiers taken prisoner would be denied government benefits and aid. ‘Falling into the enemy’s hands was considered almost tantamount to treason,’ Temkin explained. Exoneration was achievable only if one was incapacitated by wounds, killed, or later escaped. The capture of Stalin’s own son, Yakov, produced a poignant irony. ‘The Germans,’ Temkin said,’ were dropping leaflets with his photo over cities as well as over railway stations and Red Army groupings.’ Many soldiers had already witnessed the random and apparently officially sponsored shootings and ill-treatment of prisoners. Stalin’s son later died in a concentration camp. Temkin had no illusions. ‘I could not get out of my mind the fear of falling into their hands,’ he confessed. ‘I dreaded it more than being killed.’
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Major Jurij Krymov had already resigned himself to the inevitable. He received notification at 02.00 hours that the enemy were 4km from his left flank. There was no room inside the crowded shed with his sleeping soldiers, so he went outside. ‘The whole horizon was illuminated in red with everywhere the damn clatter of machine gun fire.’ It was apparent that ‘even with the best will in the world we are not going to get out of this’. A further depressing report revealed contact had been lost with the neighbouring unit to his left. Beleaguered from all sides, ‘they were being overwhelmed by events’. His commissar, who had supported him throughout, interrupted his melancholic train of thought, passing him two biscuits. ‘I had absolutely no idea where he had got them from,’ he said, ‘but he had not eaten them, he had brought them to me.’ Krymov’s letter to his wife stopped at this point. He was killed three days later.
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Leutnant Kurt Meissner was watching yet another despairing Soviet attack on the hard-pressed German ring. ‘This great mass of singing humanity had only been told to break out in our direction,’ he said. He and his men were new to combat and afraid. They had never seen anything like this before.

‘They came on in a shambling, shuffling gait and all the way they were calling out in this low, moaning way, and every so often they would break out into this great mass cry of “Hurraaa! Hurraaa! Hurraaa!”.’

Meissner and his men, covering a vast and flat sector, fired and fired until a wall of corpses built up, behind which still, advancing Russians began to shoot back. Thousands more came on, pushing beyond the bloody barrier and trying to rush the German positions. Meissner’s men quickly fell back and took up new positions to avoid being overrun. Now blocked, the Soviet tide sought to break through in another direction. As they did so, the Germans poured a murderous fire into their flanks. Meissner admitted:

‘I was in a sweat, very hot and frightened. Then a strange thing happened, and this was even more extraordinary: the whole mass of surviving Russians – and there were still thousands of them – simply stopped dead about a kilometre from us as if on order. We wondered what was happening and then saw through our glasses that they were discarding all their equipment. Then they turned about to face us. All the enormous sacrifice they had made had been in vain. They simply sat down on the spot and we received orders to go in and round them up.’
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