No veteran, of course, remembered any of this later. Thieving was another dark truth that time and collective memory would bury. The consequent shortages were also a source of grievance, an insult that could rankle, and as such they had no place in the bright memory of war. But the losers, naturally, were the men whose stores were being skimmed. On a daily basis, they put up with watery soup, sugarless tea and the lumps of gristle that could not be sold for cash. Even when the food turned up, they might find that there were no bowls or spoons to serve it with.38 Everyone understood that reserve troops should suffer, but even at the front there were whole days when soldiers went without hot meals or tea.39 Complaining could put a man on a charge of anti-Soviet agitation. ‘On verifying the food,’ NKVD officers primly noted, ‘it was found to be of the required standard, and the portions were all in line with current norms.’40 The men had to choke down their fury with the cabbage soup. Statistics for recorded crime concealed the facts:41 if the overall figures in monthly reports are to be believed, fewer than 10 per cent of troops were disciplined for any crime, including theft.42 There could be no truth, then, in soldiers’ complaints, or so their officers alleged, but that was partly because high figures for crime reflected most of all upon the politruks and their bosses. The temptation to hold the statistics down was as hard to resist as the promise of a crate of contraband sardines.
Meanwhile, ordinary men and women found numerous ways to keep the hunger and the cold at bay. Pilfering, which was a sort of compensation for indignity, was one recourse. Another was extorting sheep and pigs from local people. Self-help, which could take many forms, was commonplace. As Zhukov was preparing for the great assault, soldiers in Belorussia were putting in their usual hours on the farms, digging the fields and shifting truckloads of young pigs for fattening.43 As ever, despite the demands of the war, farm work was deemed to be a part of army service. By now, however, it was profitable. Farms kept grain stores and chickens, not to mention larger animals for butchering. Beyond the cow sheds, too, there was more free food in the open country. Hunting accidents became so common on the Belorussian Front in the summer of 1944 that soldiers in the 11th guards army were banned from shooting deer and other wild game.44
Those worn-out boots and greatcoats also had to be replaced. ‘My boots have fallen to bits,’ lamented Ermolenko in July 1944. He was a long way from a depot that supplied American lend-lease. But he was in Belorussia, and he was on campaign. Trade was one option; the hunt for a well-shod corpse or prisoner another. As he put it, ‘I’ll have to find some “trophy footwear” somewhere.’45 Boots were re-soled with leather from the seats of German tanks, coats mended with shreds of tarpaulin. If the Red Army looked bizarre by the spring of 1944, it could at least take comfort from the fact that the enemy, for the most part, looked worse.
This, then, was the titan that was preparing to strike west that summer. The orders to its staff and officers suggest precision and planning. Forward and rear supply bases were established with fuel and ammunition stocks and generous quantities of food. The heavy guns, at least, arrived intact, since they were usually too large to steal. The rest depended on the vigilance of loyal staff officers. Everyone was working at full stretch, however. The preparations for Bagration, whatever the problems and leaks, were formidable.46 Because so much depended on surprise, almost all aspects of supply had to be carried out in duplicate. The idea was to deceive the German army, to make it think that the attack – if it came at all – would come from anywhere but the so-called Minsk ‘balcony’, the bulge that pointed straight towards Berlin. A massive charade followed: the mustering of troops whose sole purpose was to appear to gather, the clearing of dummy airfields in the forest, the drawing up of precious heavy guns whose destiny was not to fire. The real army only moved at night, its tracks swept clear behind it so that the wide trails of tanks and guns had disappeared by dawn. All radio communications ceased. Even bathing at open points along the route was forbidden.47 The operation was about to prove a huge success, but for the soldiers on the ground, it was, as Belov wrote one weary night, just ‘the old song beginning once again’.48
Almost the last entry in Belov’s journal was written on 18 June. Apart from frantic planning, he had seen little movement for several months, but when Zhukov appeared with two of his most senior aides, Belov knew that the long wait was over. The night manoeuvres started, the tension increased. His men were tired, quarrelsome. ‘There are grounds for thinking that we’ll go into the attack on 21 or 22 June,’ Belov wrote, ‘which happens to be the third anniversary of the war. It’s interesting that 21 June is also four months since we crossed the Dnepr. For some reason I have been feeling physically poor lately, and my nerves are utterly shattered… There are no letters from home, the devil take them. In that regard, I can be very tolerant, because we’ll soon be in battle, and then I’ll forget everything. The whole thing is unpleasant, and pretty strange.’49 These were not the last words that Belov would write, but from that day he never had the time to keep a diary again.
Bagration involved five separate but co-ordinated strikes along the Soviet Western Front. Although the most important was to be the drive on Minsk and westwards through the whole of Belarus, the first attack came in the north, breaking the last resistance of the Finns. To the south, later, Lvov would also be encircled as a separate group of armies struck west over the Carpathian mountains. The progress on each of these fronts was breathtaking. Minsk, the strategic prize, was captured by 3 July. Within three weeks, the troops of Rokossovsky’s first Belorussian Front had crossed the border into Poland.
To get there, they had thrown roads made of logs across the swamps. They had forded, swum or sworn their way across the many rivers in their path. Each line of trenches that they took was mined, collapsing, fetid with the stink of rats and shit and death. But they would face and shatter the most redoubtable enemy formation still on Soviet soil. In just twelve days, the German Army Group Centre lost twenty-five divisions and more than 300,000 men.50 The cost to the Red Army also ran to tens of thousands of lives. ‘When we come to a minefield,’ Zhukov would tell Eisenhower later in the war, ‘our infantry attacks exactly as if it were not there. The losses we get from personnel mines we consider equal to those we would have gotten from machine guns and artillery if the Germans had chosen to defend that particular area with strong bodies of troops instead of with minefields.’51 Some divisions, including those that fought near Mogilev, were so broken that they were forced to withdraw and regroup in late July,52 but Belorussia had been almost cleared of German troops.
Most of the men in this great storm had little time to write. An exception was Ermolenko. His diary notes were typically brief, but they were true to the communist idiom that he now espoused. ‘At last we have started to attack on our part of the front,’ he wrote on 22 June. The Soviet air force – supported, now, by a fleet of American planes based in Ukraine – had been bombing the German lines for two weeks. In the skies above the Pripet marshes, the red star now enjoyed the absolute dominion that the swastika had exercised exactly three years earlier. On the ground, however, the men waited for orders of their own. The drive on Minsk, the central campaign of Bagration, began in a storm of artillery fire. ‘At 16.00 hundreds of weapons opened fire with hurricane force,’ Ermolenko went on. ‘Thousands of tons of murderous metal flew over the German positions.’ Within two hours ‘the German positions were hidden by a veritable wall of smoke and dust’. The enemy was so far away that this smoke was the only clue to the locations of the dugouts, trenches and the lines of guns. Those guns now began firing in their turn, and the entire front was swallowed up in a hot yellow fog. The casualties would be enormous. But the shaking earth and smell of flame felt like the Red Army’s reply – long overdue – to the insult of three years before. ‘Everyone’s mood,’ Ermolenko noted, ‘immediately lifted.’ German intelligence reports that month found just the same.53 In contrast to some of the defensive operations of the previous three years, this was a campaign that made Soviet soldiers glad.