Red Sniper on the Eastern Front

The Memoirs of Joseph Pilyushin

Joseph Pilyushin

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781526743787
• eBook ISBN: 9781848846982
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

A gripping memoir of a Soviet sniper who fought against the Nazis during the siege of Leningrad and throughout World War II.
Joseph Pilyushin, a top Red Army sniper in the ruthless fight against the Germans on the Eastern Front, was an exceptional soldier. His first-hand account of his wartime service gives a graphic insight into his lethal skill with a rifle and into the desperate fight put up by Soviet forces to defend Leningrad.
Pilyushin, who lived in Leningrad with his family, was already 35 years-old when the war broke out and he was drafted. He started in the Red Army as a scout, but once he had demonstrated his marksmanship and steady nerve, he became a sniper. He served throughout the Leningrad siege, from the late 1941 when the Wehrmacht's advance was halted just short of the city to its liberation during the Soviet offensive of 1944.
His descriptions of grueling front-line life, of his fellow soldiers, and of his sniping missions are balanced by his vivid recollections of the protracted suffering of Leningrad's imprisoned population and of the grief that was visited upon him and his family.
His narrative will be fascinating reading for anyone eager to learn about the role and technique of the sniper during the Second World War. It is also a memorable eyewitness account of one man's experience on the Eastern Front.

Chapter One

My First Shot at the Enemy

Leningrad . . .

The streets and squares were filled with sunshine; golden spires gleamed brightly against the blue sky, and the gardens and parks were alive with fresh greenery and colour. I had seen all these things many times, but now the beauty of my native city seemed especially attractive.

At noon on 23 July 1941, together with other new recruits I was marching through the streets of Leningrad towards the front, in the direction of Narva. We gazed at the streets, buildings and parks and silently said goodbye to our homes and families. The Narva Gates receded into the distance, but still we kept glancing back at the city.

Immediately upon arriving at our destination, we became part of the 105th Separate Rifle Regiment, which was assembling in an attractive little village. That same night, our company was assigned to man combat outposts. We headed off towards the banks of the Narva River. The commanders and Red Army men strode silently, keeping their weapons at the ready.

Private Romanov and I picked our way through some low undergrowth along the banks of the river. Petr was moving in front of me so stealthily that not a single branch rustled and not a single dry twig snapped beneath his feet. Whenever my head or shoulder brushed up against some bushes or an incautious footstep broke a twig, Romanov would stop, turn around and whisper through his teeth, ‘Quiet!’, wrinkling his broad forehead in consternation.

Reaching the place that our commander had designated, we lay down beneath a low-growing willow. Below us, the water was flowing in a broad current.

The mysterious silence of the woods was unsettling, and our ears pricked up at any soft rustle. Everything around me seemed unusual; even the starry sky seemed to be suspended just above the tips of the pine trees. The birds had long ago fallen silent; only somewhere in the rye, something was repeating a monotonous call: ‘Peets-polots, peets-polots, peets-polots . . .’

A thin shroud of morning fog slowly rose above the river and meadows. On the edge of the woods, concealed among the overgrowth, a field dove began its mournful call: ‘Ooo-ooo.’ A magpie began to warble in a birch grove. A squirrel, its head tipped to one side, looked down on us with its bright little eyes and loudly chattered while hopping from branch to branch.

At dawn, our company commander Senior Lieutenant Kruglov showed up. He dropped down onto the grass next to Romanov without taking his eyes off an isolated cottage on the other riverbank. The home seemed to be empty and abandoned: the windows and door had been boarded up.

Suddenly I saw a gate in the fence that surrounded the yard slowly open. A tall woman emerged, stopped, and looked around. She was dressed in a long black skirt and a blouse with unusually wide stripes. A yoke lay across her shoulders, with a basket of laundry hanging from each end. The woman walked directly across a field to the river. Reaching the bank above the river, she placed one basket on the grass, and with the other slowly made her way down to the water’s edge.

Gazing at the woman, I thought of my native Belorussia. There were many times when my own mother had hoisted a yoke with baskets onto her shoulders, and headed for the Sor’ianka River to wash the laundry. ‘Where is she now?’ I asked myself. ‘Has she remained in German-occupied Belorussia, or did she manage to leave with the other refugees?’ With pain in my heart I thought of my family, which I had recently left behind in Leningrad: ‘What are my wife and children doing now? How are they?’

I recalled the early morning in June, when a messenger from the district recruitment centre [raivoenkomat] had knocked on my apartment door and handed me a summons to appear immediately at an assembly point. I quickly gathered my things and stopped in front of the bedroom’s closed door. I badly wanted to see my wife and children one more time, and have a quick talk with them before my departure. I took hold of the doorknob . . . but stifling my internal emotions, I released it and strode resolutely away from the room.

Kruglov’s soft voice interrupted my reflections: ‘Comrades, for some reason this woman isn’t hurrying to do the laundry. Take a look at her.’

Kruglov crawled on his belly to the edge of the woods. The woman was standing on the bank, and shading her eyes from the sun with her hand, she was looking towards our side of the river. Romanov and I took a close look at her face: Romanov through his binoculars, and I through the tele scopic sight on my rifle. The face was long and somewhat gaunt, with a sharp nose and chin; the closely-spaced eyes reminded me of a fox’s.

Apparently satisfied, she squatted down, pulled a thin cord with a weight on one end from the basket, and deftly tossed it into the water. Then with one hand she grabbed an article of clothing from the basket and slowly began to wash it. Meanwhile, she carefully wound the end of the cord around her other hand; as soon the weight appeared, she immediately tossed the soaked piece of clothing into the basket, stuck the cord down her blouse and left the riverbank. Glancing one more time in our direction, she easily lifted the yoke with the baskets and hastily returned to the cottage, walking with a man’s stride.

Kruglov crawled back to us. ‘Well, what do you think?’ he asked us.

‘It’s all very suspicious, Comrade Commander,’ Romanov replied.

‘I think so too . . . But we mustn’t show ourselves. We need to keep watching . . .’

‘But she might leave.’

‘Don’t worry; some of our guys are over there in that little village.’

Walking up to the fence, the woman grabbed the gate latch, took a furtive look around and, apparently noticing nothing out of the ordinary, stepped into the yard. Once through the gate, she tossed the laundry baskets against the fence and quickly strode over to the doors of a shed.

Romanov gave a soft whistle, and commented, ‘You must have come a long way, you devilishc frau, to wash laundry in a Russian river.’ Then he quickly added: ‘Look, look, Comrade Commander; that laundress is raising an antenna!’

Petr Romanov was a radio operator by military training, but in civilian life he had been a German language instructor. His powerful physique was like that of a village blacksmith. Cheerful and clever, he easily got along with people and made friends quickly. However, he had one flaw: he was too excitable. Even now, he tensed up all over, as if ready to hurl himself across the river.

‘Easy, Romanov,’ Kruglov said as he laid his hand on Romanov’s shoulder. ‘The German scout will only report what he saw: there are no Russians, the crossing over the river is clear, and the water is of a certain depth. That’s just what we need.’

We all liked our company commander Viktor Vladimirovich [Kruglov] from the first meeting with him. His swarthy, somewhat oblong face radiated an inner tranquillity. His large blue eyes, thick eyebrows, firm lips and absurdly white teeth gave him a youthful look and immediately made a lasting impression.

Military Orders decorated the commander’s chest. From word of mouth among the troops, we knew that he had participated in the Finland campaign [the so-called Winter War with Finland] and had already participated in more than one clash with the German occupiers. While listening to the commander, I scanned the opposite bank like an owl, fearing that I might miss the enemy, which had to be somewhere nearby.

Suddenly the sound of motors carried from the opposite bank, and soon we saw enemy motorcyclists speeding across a field. There were ten of them. ‘Greetings,’ I thought to myself. ‘Here’s our first meeting, and how many more such meetings lie in our future?’ My hands unconsciously gripped my rifle more tightly. I looked over at Kruglov. His face was impassive, but his eyes were burning with a malicious fire.

‘You see how the enemy is operating,’ he said. ‘First they sent out a scout with a radio, and after him, a reconnaissance squad on motorcycles.’

The Senior Lieutenant looked sternly at us: ‘I’m warning you: not a single shot without my command.’ With that, he crawled off towards the location of a signalman in the forest.

The German motorcyclists drove up to the riverbank, shut off their motors, and without dismounting, began to look attentively at our side of the river. Then one after the other they hopped off their motorcycles, and holding their sub machine-guns at the ready, moved towards the river.

Romanov elbowed me in the side and whispered: ‘No way! Have the swine decided to cross over to our bank?’

‘How should I know? We have to wait for orders . . .’

The Nazis cautiously walked down to the water’s edge, removed canteens from their belts, and filled them with water.

Romanov muttered through his teeth: ‘Eh, if only we could fill their bellies with something other than water!’

‘Everything in its own time . . .’

We examined the German motorcyclists with curiosity. Their faces and uniforms were dusty from the road. They had potato-masher grenades on their tightly-strapped belts, and steel helmets on their heads that settled down almost to the level of their eyes. My conscience compels me to say that for some reason, I wasn’t feeling any hatred towards the German soldiers at that time. The hatred came a little later, when I witnessed the death of my comrades and the brutal cruelty of the fascist executioners.

High above us in the sky, a dogfight was playing out. An enemy plane, enveloped in a black cloud of smoke, swiftly plummeted towards the ground. A black spot separated from the burning aircraft, tumbled through the air, and then seemingly came to a brief halt as a parachute canopy blossomed above it. Under the canopy, the pilot was swinging from side to side as he drifted downward.

With agitation Romanov and I watched what was happening in the sky. From time to time we nudged each other in the side and said something, passionately hoping for the victory of our pilots, who were duelling with the Messerschmitts. The German motorcyclists were also distracted by what was happening above, seemingly surprised by the sight of a handful of Russian ‘falcons’ courageously taking on a larger number of German aircraft. Quickly exchanging a few words about something, the motorcyclists returned to their mounts and quickly drove away.

Romanov again turned in my direction: ‘Don’t be surprised by what I’m about to tell you. There will be a battle soon . . . who knows when we’ll have a chance to speak calmly and leisurely again.’

I looked into his eyes. They were affectionate and trusting. Romanov pulled a photo out of the pocket of his combat blouse and extended it towards me. I saw in the photo a man about 35 years old, whose face looked very similar to Romanov’s: the same affectionate eyes, smooth high forehead, and sharp chin. Returning the photo to him, I asked: ‘Is this your father?’

‘Yes . . . But I’ve never seen him. He left for the war back in 1914; I was born about a month after his departure. Later my mother told me that he was killed on the banks of this very river in 1917. You can understand my feelings: I can’t take a step back in any direction from here.’

Romanov was perceptibly agitated, and he pronounced those final words rather loudly. Company commander Kruglov was lying nearby and heard everything. ‘And who told you that we would be retreating from these banks?’ the Senior Lieutenant asked. Romanov didn’t reply. ‘We will fight here for our fathers and brothers, who were victorious for us on these fields during the civil war, and we will fight here for Soviet power,’ Kruglov added.

A certain while passed, and then again the sound of motors carried to us from the opposite bank. I spotted a new group of motorcyclists hurrying towards the river. This time, an armoured car was leading them.

The German armoured car stopped by the cottage. Two officers leisurely stepped out of the vehicle. As they did so, a tall fellow also dressed in an officer’s uniform approached them. Observing the Germans through my telescopic sight, I immediately recognized in the tall officer’s face the ‘woman’ who had measured the river’s depth that morning. Motioning with his hand towards our bank, the scout was saying something confidently to the other officers, who frequently consulted outspread maps. ‘Soon, their forward units will come up,’ I thought.

How much time passed in the waiting, I don’t remember. Then suddenly not far from me a shot rang out, and immediately machine-gun fire and rifle fire shattered the calm over the Narva River.

I quickly selected my target – the tall officer. I hastily took aim and fired my first shot. The German rocked sharply and slowly dropped to his knees, then to his hands. Propping himself on the ground, he tried to push himself up, but simply couldn’t lift his now heavy head. With that final effort, he fell awkwardly onto his chest, his arms splayed in opposite directions.

Seeing the first German that I had killed, I didn’t feel any sense of satisfaction, just some sort of dull pity for this man. After all, I was no longer firing at targets, as I had done in the Osoaviakhim, but at a living being. All of this flashed through my mind like lightning, but I immediately and automatically began to search for a new target, in order to repeat what I had already started.

When the battle sputtered to a close, Kruglov gathered us all together and with an irritated tone that we didn’t understand, shouted: ‘Who fired the first shot?’

We were celebrating our success, but our commander was furiously swearing at us: ‘Do you understand what you’ve done?! We might have dropped many more of them here, if you had carried out my order.’

Private Gerasimov, who was standing next to me, deeply sighed, took a step forward, and without looking at the commander, acknowledged in a deep baritone voice: ‘My nerves couldn’t take it any longer, Comrade Commander.’

Chapter Two

A Successful Ambush

When our company returned to the battalion’s location that evening, a deep trench had already been dug and carefully camouflaged. The other soldiers were eating dinner, talking over the day’s events in muffled voices, washing their mess tins, filling their canteens with fresh water, or checking their weapons.

Our sleep that night in the front lines was very restless: each of us woke several times during the night, and listened with concern to the distant rumble of artillery fire, coming from the direction of Kingisepp. Not a single sound was audible from our unit’s positions. Everything was done silently and without conversation. Our sentries paced cautiously, their eyes constantly looking towards the opposite bank of the river, where we were expecting the enemy’s appearance.

Many of the soldiers slept on the bare ground, tightly squeezing their rifle to their chest. Their sleep was light; they were ready at any minute to get up and go into battle. Those who could not sleep sat in groups and led whispered discussions. They were remembering their factories, their collective farms, their families. Each of us was hiding our concerns deep inside our hearts, although we tried not to think about the dangers that loomed over us.

The faint sound of engines hummed in the sky. Airplanes were heading to the east; obviously, towards Leningrad.

‘They’ve slithered up, the snakes,’ Romanov said. ‘Who knows, perhaps they’ll even drop a bomb on my home.’

I felt a stab of pain in my heart. Feeling my own sense of helplessness, I couldn’t stay still. I quickly smoked one cigarette after the other, pacing back and forth along the trench. The beauty of the ‘white night’ shimmered.¹ The rumbling noise of aircraft passing overhead filled the air.

Several days passed. We spent our time working with shovels and axes to deepen and reinforce our trench. There were light skirmishes with enemy reconnaissance groups on the opposite bank of the Narva River. It seemed the adversary was giving us the opportunity to grow accustomed to life on the front lines, before hurling his full strength at us.

I closely examined the comrades around me. Everyone was behaving differently before the battle. Some were endlessly checking their weapons over and over again. Some were carefully adjusting their equipment. Some smoked cigarette after cigarette without interruption. A few slept soundly.

On the opposite bank of the Narva it was quiet, like on the first day of our arrival here. Now and then glancing at my watch, I waited for when Viktorov, the company commander’s messenger, would return with fresh mail. Off in the distance, beyond the forest in the direction of the city of Narva, there were sounds like a rumble of thunder. The sharp report of gun volleys followed. Then everything merged into a constant roar of battle.

In the trench, two soldiers unfamiliar to me were standing around a heavy machine gun. One was older, and moved without haste; the other was a young guy, rapid in his motions. The young soldier was plainly nervous.

The old soldier gave a laugh: ‘What, Grisha, are you a bit scared?’

‘Of course, Uncle Vasya, I’ve never heard these sounds before.’

‘You’ll soon hear enough of it; you’ll get your fill of it . . .’

With that, Uncle Vasya stretched out on his...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Content
• List of Illustrations
• Translator’s Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• Photo Section
• Chapter 17
• Chapter 18
• Chapter 19
• Chapter 20
• Chapter 21
• Chapter 22
• Chapter 23
• Chapter 24
• Chapter 25
• Chapter 26
• Chapter 27
• Chapter 28
• Chapter 29
• Chapter 30
• Chapter 31
• Chapter 32
• Index