8
Exulting, Grieving and Sweating Blood
April and May are often warm in the Crimea, but in Belarus, more than 500 land-locked miles off to the north, the wind across the marshes is still cold and sour. In 1944, the state that was called Belorussia was a desert; bleak, snow-covered, wasted by two armies and three years of war. Nikolai Belov had been trapped for nearly six months in its landscape of ice and mud. As an officer, he could not complain about his lodgings. He had a cabin lined with local logs, not an oozing dugout; unlike his men, too, Belov was well supplied with food and heating fuel. But the monotony of the Belorussian winter depressed him, the endless pine and fetid swamp suggesting shipwreck. He was bored, apathetic and restive. To pass the time, he tried to read biography, starting with a life of Napoleon. In April 1944, he finished the second book of his war. Its hero was a Georgian general who had fought and died at Borodino. The general’s name was Bagration. If Belov had known what Moscow was planning next for him, he might have smiled at the irony.
Operation Bagration, which he was just about to join, was one of the largest military campaigns of the entire war. Far to the west, the Allied forces under Eisenhower were preparing to launch their own great attack, Overlord, the forcing of the English Channel and the start of a long push through France. But the Soviet campaign to drive the German army out of Belorussia was no less ambitious than the D-Day landings. It was also more costly, and ultimately, more momentous. Planned for the early summer, it would be delayed by endless wrangles over supply and logistics. In the end, with a symmetry that was unintended, it was launched on 22 June, the third anniversary of Hitler’s Barbarossa.1 Like Barbarossa, too, it would tear through the country like a storm. If it had not been for Stalingrad, and then for Kursk, Bagration – which Stalin named for his Georgian fellow countryman – might well have looked like the war’s greatest turning point.
In fact, the operation on the Soviet Union’s western marches virtually escaped the kind of epic treatment that historians would later accord to Stalingrad and Kursk. For one thing, it was overshadowed, in western Europe and the English-speaking world, by the drama that was taking place at the same time in northern France. Bagration was also swallowed by the triumphs that came after it, as if, in some way, it was no more than a grand prelude. But above all, the army that would fight it, though still the Red Army, could no longer pretend to be the gallant underdog. Before Bagration, Soviet troops were still working to liberate their own country. When it was over, they were poised for conquest, facing westwards across Europe in a manner that – in central European minds at least – raised spectres of an alien horde. The story of the Soviet Union’s patriotic war would be much easier to tell if it could have a happy ending. But what came after Bagration, in keeping with the brutal nature of the times, was not the shapely stuff of fairy tales.
Zhukov and his colleagues had learned a great deal since 1941. The planning of Bagration showed just how much they could achieve on a grand scale and also how far they had moved ahead on issues like co-ordination, secrecy, deception and detailed tactical preparation. The Red Army was also by this stage the best-armed ground-based force in Europe. Among the tons of weaponry that it deployed that spring, there was an average of 320 artillery pieces for every mile of the front line.2 But the background to Operation Bagration was no less tense, no less demanding on a human scale, than the months leading up to Kursk. The miracle was that soldiers who had been in action for months, if not for years, were able to galvanize their minds and bodies to fight on at all.
That winter, most of the men were bewildered, tired and shocked. ‘The patriotic wave of the summer and autumn is receding,’ the hopeful German spies wrote to their masters in Berlin in January 1944. Within the ranks, consensus favoured rapid peace. The soldiers seemed to want no more than just to drive the fascists off their soil. Taking the war abroad, fighting for other lands, was not worth months of hardship or another winter in a trench.3 The older men now longed for home, while new recruits, many of whom were not Russians, tended to lack the sense of purpose of the patriots of 1941. Almost all had reason to complain. Many now marched with injuries that would bedevil them for ever, shortening their lives. The war had changed more than their bodies, too. By this stage it had swamped their thoughts, altered their language, distorted their tastes. It left each of them so exhausted that they could sleep at their guns, in clammy trenches, on the backs of tanks. They could sleep anywhere, in fact, but few were given chance enough. Most front-line troops had scarcely rested since the whirlwind of the previous autumn.
For those who survived it, Kursk had been intoxicating, and the onward march to Orel and Kharkov the progress of heroes. There was a pause in September, and sometimes even a few days when front-line divisions were in the same place for long enough to write letters or mend their boots. ‘I’m giving my lice a chance to sleep,’ Belov wrote on 9 September. For the first time in weeks, he sat for an entire afternoon. The fighting had not stopped, but now, as a staff officer, it was Belov’s job to organize it all. He hated the work, longed for an active role and pined for the men’s company and for the next jolt of adrenalin.4 He was already addicted to war, just as he was also repelled and wrecked by it. But he would find plenty of action in the next few months. By early October, Belov’s division had reached the river Sozh, which flows south into the Dnepr through the city of Gomel. ‘We are making war on Belorussian territory,’ he noted. By late November, they were almost on the Dnepr itself. It was progress, it was another step towards triumph, and yet it was still wretched, grinding, hard. ‘We’ll have to spend the winter in the woods and marshes,’ he wrote on 28 November. ‘We began our attack at ten o’clock. In twenty-four hours we’ve made about six kilometres. We’ve got no ammunition or shells. There isn’t enough food. The rear units have fallen behind. A lot of people have absolutely no footwear at all.’5
Belov’s staccato notes sketch the bare outlines of collective misery. The Red Army was preparing to deliver the last blow that it would need to strike on its own soil, but many troops were in a poor state for campaigning. The host of men that seemed so alien when it reached Europe, whose vanguard excited such terror, was indeed filthy, stinking and unkempt, but few soldiers would choose to be that way. They did not dwell on their wretchedness, perhaps, because it was by now so much a part of life. By the end of 1943, daily realities like lice, rheumatic aches and unhealed sores were too familiar to note. Few soldiers saw a dentist at the front, though many city-bred young men regretted – for a week or two – that toothpaste was so hard to find. Eventually, like everyone else, they got used to a different kind of mouth. Toothache joined haemorrhoids and conjunctivitis on the list of irritations that soldiers just lived with, as they lived with rats. In March and April, unhealed wounds and bleeding gums announced the first scurvy. No orders from Moscow could produce cabbage when the stores were down to tea and dry buckwheat. The early spring was the worst time, after the long winter and well before the first green crops had grown. And early spring – late March in the Crimea, May in Belarus – was also the season of the mud.