—— From the Soviet Information Bureau... ——175swarmed across the railway embankment, filled the gully, and
begun to approach within twenty or thirty metres of our trenches,
our machine gunners were the first to open fire.
Anatoly Shcherbinsky mowed down a good few dozen Nazi
bandits with his Maxim gun and machine gunner Nikolai Guly
was not far behind. Behind them the riflemen of the company
fired in a coordinated and calculated fashion. With my sniper’s
rifle I shot at officers and those soldiers who were almost right up
to our trenches. The barrel of my rifle grew redhot...
Not expecting to encounter such fierce resistance, the Nazis
began a hurried retreat. Some of the German survivors took cover
in shell holes and started hastily digging in. The others, left without
their officers, faltered, and ran back, leaving dozens of bodies in
the gully. But at this point artillery and mortars came into play
from the depths of our defences. What the riflemen had started
was finished off by their friends, the gunners. The first attempt of
the Nazi cutthroats to break through our defences choked.
We got a lot of help from an antiaircraft battery attached
to the regiment and stationed somewhere in the depths of its
defences. These gunners used their fire to cut the enemy off from
the railway embankment, prevented them from getting away, and
finished them off on the spot, in the gully. Few of them succeeded
in escaping righteous vengeance on this occasion.
Commanding the antiaircraft battery was Senior Lieutenant
Yushin, another Tambovian, whom I had recently met by chance
- the same Semyon Yushin who had attended school with me back
home. Reckless even in his schooldays, he now took the decision,
in spite of the danger, to move his battery forward to deliver direct
fire and coolly swept the Nazis with antiaircraft machinegun fire
and bombarded them with high explosive shells, annihilating the
enemy’s mortar crews. And Yushin’s intrepid AA gunners fired
just as accurately at ground as at aerial targets. Now, in addition
to bringing down several aeroplanes, the battery knocked out the
enemy mortars. The role of ‘spotter’ on this occasion was fulfilled
by the battery’s deputy commander for political instruction, Senior