In the second week of August I was able to travel by car from Moscow to Tula, and then to Orel. The following account, based on notes written at the time, describes what the edge of the Orel Salient looked like, and what I found inside the Salient, particularly at Orel itself.
The thistles were as tall as a man; the thistles and the weeds formed a thick jungle, making a belt some two miles wide, and stretching west and east, and then south, nearly all the way round the Orel Salient. In this jungle, through which the dusty road from Tula now ran, there was death at every footstep. "Minen" in German, "Miny" in Russian, old and new notice-boards were saying; and, in the distance, up on the hill, under the hard blue summer sky, were distorted shapes of ruined churches and fragments of houses, and chimney-stacks. These miles of weeds and thistles had been a no-man's-land for nearly two years. Those ruins on the hill were the ruins of Mtsensk; two old women and four cats were the only living creatures the Russians had found there when the Germans pulled out on July 20. Before departing they had blown up or set fire to everything—churches and houses and peasant cottages and all. In the middle of last century Leskov's—and
Shostakovich's—"Lady Macbeth" had lived in this town; it was strange to think that this drama of blood and passion should have taken place in a town now smelling of blood
shed for such different reasons.
We drove through the jungle up to Mtsensk. No, one small brick house had somehow survived. "Feeding Point", a notice outside said. "Here you can receive your dry ration, breakfast, lunch and dinner." And, beside it, was another notice: "The enemy has destroyed and looted this town, and driven away its inhabitants; they are crying for revenge."
Achtung, Minen. Achtung, Minen... "They're the devil," said the colonel who met us at Mtsensk. "Along only 100 yards just off this road we dug up 650. There was very tough fighting round here. German Jaeger—tough troops, very good troops, can't deny them that. But the mines are bad, very bad. Every damned day something happens. Yesterday a colonel came down this road on horseback; the horse kicked an anti-personnel mine—and there you are: horse and colonel both phut." He talked of new delayed-action mines found in German dugouts. Contraptions in which the acid eats through the metal; some take two months to blow up. And there were also booby-traps, plenty of them. These mines and
booby-traps had become one of the Germans' most important weapons in 1943. and were
the Russian soldiers' greatest worry and chief topic of conversation.
[Many mines—both Russian and German—made in 1943, were cased in wood and so
were particularly hard to detect.]
Mines had caused terrible casualties to the Russians in the Orel fighting, and were going to cause many more at Kharkov and elsewhere. As we talked to the colonel, a horse-cart drove past and in it were two moaning soldiers, with blood streaming from their heads; they had just been blown up on a mine...
In the last few days, only about 200 people had come back to Mtsensk, out of its original population of 20,000. These two hundred had been hiding somewhere in the countryside.
Along the road to Orel, with fields and beautiful woods on either side, there were no villages anywhere, and only notice-boards among the rubble giving the name the village had had. The German "desert zone" had now spread all the way from Rzhev and Viazma to Orel.
Orel, not so long ago a pleasant provincial backwater, still full of Turgeniev memories and associations, was badly shattered. More than half the town was destroyed, and some of the ruins were still smoking. The bridges over the Oka had been blown up, but a
temporary wooden bridge had already been built, and army lorries were driving west, and ambulances were coming in from Karachev— thirty miles further west—where there was
heavy fighting.
How had Orel lived through nearly two years of German occupation? Of 114,000 people
now only 30,000 were there. Many had been murdered; many had been hanged in the
public square—that very square where there were now new graves of the first Russian
tank crew that had broken into Orel, and also of General Gurtiev, of Stalingrad fame, who was killed here the morning the Russians fought their way into the city. Altogether, 12,000 people were said to have been murdered, and about twice as many deported to
Germany. But there were also many thousands who had joined the partisans in the forests round Orel and Briansk—for this (especially the Briansk area) was active partisan
country.
The Germans had appointed a Russian burgomaster, who had now fled with them; and
they had brought to the Orel countryside some former Russian landowners or landowners'
sons—White Guardists they called them. But whether they got their former estates back was not quite clear. In most places, the kolkhozes had not been dissolved. A little private enterprise was encouraged—but goods were so short that it never came to anything. True, I found in a pile of junk in a street a broken bottle, and on it a label saying first in Russian and then in German: "Fruchtwasser-Fabrik, NOS-DRUNOW UND Co., Orel, Moskauer
Str. 6." It would have been interesting to talk to Nosdrunow, the Mr Schweppes of German Orel; but he was not to be found.
The winter of 1941-2 had been the hardest of all. People had died by the hundred of
starvation. Later, they began to receive 7 ounces of bread a day if they worked for the Germans in one way or another. And then there was all the horror of the Russian war
prisoners' camp; and here I first learned at first hand of the German policy towards Russian war prisoners, as it changed after Stalingrad. Until then, they were allowed to die like flies; after that they were being blackmailed or flattered into joining the Vlasov Army.
Stiff, pop-eyed, blue-eyed General Sobennikov, now chief of the Garrison of Orel, had taken part in the great July offensive and now talked about it. By July 15, after three days'
heavy fighting, the Russians had broken through the main lines of the German defences round the Orel salient. There had never been, he said, such a heavy concentration of Russian guns as against these defences; in many places the fire-power was ten times
heavier than at Verdun. The German minefields were so thick and widespread that as
many mines as possible had to be blown up by the super-barrage, in order to reduce
Russian casualties in the subsequent break-through. By July 20, the Germans tried to stop the Russian advance by throwing in hundreds of planes; and it was a job for the Russian anti-aircraft guns and fighters to deal with them. In the countless air-battles there were very heavy casualties on both sides. Many French airmen were killed, too, during those days.
How important it was for the Germans to hold Orel, he said, could be seen from the order of General von Schmidt (since replaced by General Model) saying that Orel must be held to the bitter end.
"And it certainly was," said the General. "The German troops were tough; nearly all held out and only very few surrendered. None of the prisoners we took were older than thirty
—picked troops, healthy, good troops; when Comrade Ehrenburg now talks about the
German army being composed of gouty old men suffering from piles, he is talking
through his hat. Yes, good troops, though morally damaged, all the same. Kursk and the rest has had a demoralising effect on them. Prisoners also told us that the fall of
Mussolini had made a deep impression on the German soldiers—though some continued
to believe their officers' stories that Mussolini was a very sick man."