officers he had been put forward as a candidate for the Frunze Military Academy. For junior officers the Military Academy meant escape from the stifling monotony of service in the lower ranks to more interesting and creative military work on the staff. Nekrassov had already passed the preliminary medical board and had been recommended by superior reporting officers, including his divisional commander. He had received a summons to sit the Academy entrance examinations and was required to be in Moscow on 10 August. But the training of reservists dragged on. Nekrassov feared that, if he missed these entrance examinations, perhaps next year some other officers in the regiment might have better luck and he would be left out, or next year something might go wrong in the company and once again he would have another year to wait. If this went on, he might never get into the Academy at all. It was important for him to know. Nekrassov, who was approaching his twenty-fourth birthday, wanted to get on with it. There were only two weeks left before the examinations but he had still not received confirmation of permission to attend, and there was no sign of an end to the exercises. The only consolation was that in the division there were many other officers who had applied for military academies, and they too remained in uncertainty.
One of these, it so happened, was none other than his old friend Dimitri Vassilievitch Makarov, who had just turned up in another motor rifle regiment of the same division.
On 26 July intensive training had begun on the loading and unloading of heavy equipment for movement by rail. Next day the divisional headquarters and the headquarters of the regiments were reported, as the two friends heard, to be working out the problems of concealed advances over long distances. Soon afterwards 197 Division did a night march of 200 kilometres and by morning had taken cover in a large area of thick forest. The officers knew that their division was already in Polish territory. The troops did not. Soldiers were not allowed to carry maps, nor were they shown how to read them. Herein lay, Nekrassov had been taught, an advantage of the system: Soviet forces had to be prepared to fight anywhere without argument and did not need to know where they were. In the clearings in the dense forest, camouflaged shelters for thousands of vehicles had already been prepared in advance. This, if surprising, was convenient.
The following night, in good summer weather, the division made another move westwards and by morning had again taken cover in the woods, in positions that had again clearly been occupied by some other division before them.
Nekrassov had already become aware that many other divisions in addition to his own were involved in what was clearly a very large troop movement. Exercises? Of course. But one thing was unusual. There was a completely unprecedented intensity of ideological work. Political commissars of every rank were conducting hundreds of individual and group discussions about the bestial face of capitalism and its blood-sucking nature, about unemployment, inflation and aggressive capitalist intentions. This went on, of course, during any training exercise, but not with such high intensity. There was something even more unusual. During training, the tanks, artillery, mortars, BMP, and other fighting equipment normally had only drill rounds and blanks. The division was now issued with live ammunition.
On the evening of 1 August, once the ammunition had been stowed and all vehicles had been replenished and checked, officers of the General Staff carried out an inspection. Shortcomings were pointed out which had to be put right within the next few days, but on the whole the inspecting officers were satisfied.
At 2300 hours on the night of 3/4 August the division was put on full alert. It was again a warm summer night. Battalions and companies stood-to in the forest clearings. Something important was clearly afoot. A message was then read out from the Government of the Soviet Union. NATO forces, it said, had treacherously attacked forces of socialist countries with no prior warning. All ranks, the message ended, soldiers, sergeants, warrant officers, officers and generals must now do their duty to the end, to crush this imperialist aggression by destroying the wild beast in its den. Only thus could the peoples of the world be kept free from capitalist enslavement. The soldiers enthusiastically shouted ‘Hurrah!’ as was expected of them. Nekrassov looked at the greyish-green crowds of men and wondered how long this rush of enthusiasm could last. There were deficiencies in the training of Soviet forces which would come to light in the very first battle. The poor co-operation between the various arms of the forces, for example, would become obvious. The majority of the infantry, in spite of all the training they had been doing, were still little more than a herd. The level of training of young officers was also clearly inadequate.
Nekrassov did find some comfort in reflecting on the wisdom, intuition and foresight of the Soviet High Command. Our enemies have only just begun the war, he thought, but already our troops have been mobilized and we are in position. We have received our reservists and drawn our ammunition and have moved forward to our forming-up points. How did our leaders manage to calculate and anticipate the enemy’s perfidious intentions so exactly as to be able to deploy our own forces on the very day before the enemy attack? There was food for thought here.
It was still dark when Nekrassov pushed his way out of the lean-to roughly fashioned from the branches of young fir trees in which he had spent the last few hours of the night. The summer weather had broken and turned cold. Wrapped in his greatcoat he had not felt it, and was grateful that there had been no rain, but he had slept little.
There was much to think about. The 197 Motor Rifle Division was now dispersed north-west of Kassel and would move forward this morning into the battle. That thought lay like a grey leaden weight in the back of his mind and he tried to keep it there. Though baptized already in battle under bombardment from the air, he had never been in action against an enemy on the ground before but he was confident that he would know how to handle his company. What concerned him now was to get it on the move in the best possible shape. There would be no other chance today to put things right before it would find itself engaged against enemy he had been told would be British. As he moved round with the Sergeant Major, a portly Ukrainian called Astap Beda, who had just come up to report, Nekrassov looked with more than usual care at what was being done.
The motor rifle company commanded by Nekrassov was, when complete, 105 men strong, mounted in the ten infantry combat vehicles (BMP) in which they would ride into action. He could just distinguish the outlines of the vehicles, now dispersed 30 metres apart round the edges of a woodland clearing, as the first light of an August day crept out of a clouded sky. There was activity all about him, for they would soon be moving off. Men tried not to hear the mutter of gunfire from the west as they checked the stowage of equipment on their vehicles, grateful that at least they had not yet been ordered into their grossly inconvenient chemical warfare clothing.
Each BMP carried four
Key personnel were usually Russian, or if not were at least proficient in the language. The driver of Nekrassov’s own BMP, a silent, watchful man by the name of Boris Ivanienko, came from Poltava. You could never know, of course, who was an informer and who was not and Nekrassov would hardly have confided in his driver in any case, but the Senior Lieutenant had come to have some confidence in this quiet and competent man, who so often seemed to know what was wanted of him even before he was told. It would be good to have someone like that close at hand in the battle.
Another member of the company whom Nekrassov had got to know quite well was a funny little rifleman, from Kazan on the Volga, called Yuri Youssupof, who was also carried in the company commander’s BMP. Nekrassov had said a kind word to this man soon after his arrival as a reservist, something which so startled a simple and lonely youth very far from home, completely baffled by what went on around him, that he attached himself to Nekrassov from then on in an almost dog-like devotion. Junior officers in the Red Army had no personal servants but it was customary for one of the rank and file to be made available for small services to an officer, to enable him to get on with his job without minor distraction. In No. 3 Company Yuri thus became the Senior Lieutenant’s personal orderly, trying to see that he got something to eat and somewhere to sleep, longing in his simple way to be able to do more for one of the very few people, since he was torn from his family and friends, who had treated him as a human being.
At this time Nekrassov’s company, to which six new men had come yesterday, was still eight under its
