The Constructed Mennonite - History, Memory, and the Second World War

by Hans Werner

  His first war stories began in the winter of 1940 during the Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland. On 30 November 1939, the giant Soviet Union attacked Finland after Stalin tried unsuccessfully to gain territory from the Finns by negotiation. The Finnish border was on the outskirts of Leningrad; the Finns had offered a smaller buffer than Stalin had asked for, and ultimately he had decided to attack the much smaller Finland. The war went badly for the Red Army. Although vastly superior in numbers, the Red Army faced determined Finnish soldiers fighting on home ground. My father always maintained that the Soviets initially sent their southern troops into battle in the snow, soldiers who really did not know what winter was. To some extent, this was true. The Soviets sent regional troops dressed in brown uniforms and boots in winter to fight against Finnish troops on skis and dressed in white.1

  Ivan became part of the Winter War later, when the Red Army launched a massive offensive in February 1940 to break through the Mannerheim Line, a goal that had eluded it in the months after the initial attack. My father’s story always began with a strange event that was difficult to picture from his description. Ivan’s unit was entrained in Chelyabinsk and then travelled to Moscow, where they were all taken to some kind of theatre. In the taped interview of these events, my father described it as “a big show—the whole train stopped, there were many train runs, about three or four every day. We all got into the Moscow city theatre, thousands of people could get into the theatre; there they showed us live tanks; they had a turntable stage, where they tried to show us the way the war actually was.”2

  My father’s memories were unclear about the dates for the unit’s transfer to the Karelian Isthmus. Accounts of the Winter War indicate that a Soviet troop build-up in the weeks before signalled a massive assault on the Mannerheim Line that began on 11 February 1940.3 To defend against the Soviet attack, Finnish troops had concentrated their limited resources where they would be most effective. The railway line from Leningrad to Finland represented the only effective way for Soviet troops to enter the theatre of war, and one of my father’s most vivid memories was of the train being shelled even before it could be unloaded.

  We went into the bush and were already being fired upon by the artillery. We went by rail past Leningrad, and the railway went right into Finland. We unloaded the tanks off of the rail cars, and most of the rail cars tipped. We just turned the tank on the flat car and drove it off into the snow; it was very rough. We didn’t fool around with unloading. Some of the tanks were broken right there; they tore off their tracks while unloading. There was just snow, brush, and stones; you couldn’t see where you were, you just drove off the train. You just turned around right on the train car and drove off, and the tank was so heavy the train car tipped. You just took off, the train cars didn’t roll very far, they just stayed there. The train could not travel any further; it just stayed there and had to be fixed before it could move.4

  I asked my father how he had felt during this first taste of coming under fire. He had little to say other than there were no words to describe how one felt in these circumstances. Other than the images of their arrival on the front, my father had no specific stories about the main battles of the Winter War. He generally indicated that the fighting had been fierce in the first days of the assault, that they had made progress, and that after a week or so they had begun to move forward with less resistance. My brothers recall him mentioning the danger posed by Molotov cocktails, bottles filled with gasoline that were lit before being dropped into a tank’s air intake, causing a fire and forcing the tank crew out of the machine, where they came under infantry fire and certain death. My father told stories of Finnish soldiers joining Red Army food kitchens for a meal, and of deadly accurate Finnish women snipers, but these stories did not seem to have been his experiences. They might well have circulated among the Soviet troops as front-line stories.

  Military histories of the Winter War provide some context for Ivan’s experiences. For this war, the Red Army’s tanks were organized into brigades under the command of infantry divisions. Based on my father’s stories, it is likely that he was in one of the five tank brigades attached to the 123rd Rifle Division, part of the 7th Army. The division broke through the Mannerheim Line on 11 February 1940 near the village of Summa.5 The massive assault began with an intense bombardment of the line by Soviet artillery. The military strategists having learned from earlier mistakes, now had the infantry accompany the tanks. The tanks moved forward in a leapfrog fashion with the infantry moving with them to consolidate the ground gained. Descriptions of the destruction of the bunkers of the Mannerheim Line note the key role of tank drivers in manoeuvring their machines to give protection to the infantry from the machine guns inside them.

  In contrast to the nebulous accounts of the assault on the Mannerheim Line, my father’s memories of being wounded were vivid and clear. Sometime around 8 March 1940, Ivan’s tank brigade was advancing along the road to the Finnish city of Vipurii when Ivan drove over a mine that blew the track off the tank’s sprockets. His tank had to stop while the infantry carried on. He and another crew member got out to fix the track using spare links he had with him. His helper crawled back into the tank ahead of him, and as Ivan was getting into the tank “someone fired out of a house nearby—with a machine gun—and he hit me in the leg. Actually he hit the tank, and the bullet ricocheted, so it hit the tank and then went into my leg at a slant and fairly deeply. I did not notice it—I jumped in, started up, and drove off, and after having driven for a while I noticed that the leg was always falling asleep. I felt my leg, and my pants were all bloody, and then I realized I was wounded.”6

  The tank crew put out a white flag with a red cross on it, and an armoured vehicle came to pick Ivan up. It was driven a few kilometres away from the front, and Ivan and other wounded soldiers were transferred to a heated truck, which drove them to Leningrad. While he was in the hospital, the war in Finland ended, and Ivan recalled watching the victory parade on the streets of Leningrad from his hospital window. An officer of his unit also came to visit him, and he received a medal or citation of some kind.7 It was never clear what he received it for, but there were many medals and awards granted during the Winter War to boost morale. For instance, 237 men from the 35th Light Tank Brigade, which fought with the 123rd Rifle Division in the breakthrough of the Mannerheim Line, received medals of various kinds.8 Ivan might have been one of them. Although my father could not remember specifically, he thought he had spent about two months in the hospital, in part because the wound had become infected and in part because he had required considerable physiotherapy even after the wound had healed.

  The wounding in Finland and his recovery seem to have marked a turning point in how Ivan felt about his past life in Siberia, including the relationship with his wife. Since my father never told stories about his first marriage, this turning point is less clear and can only be inferred. With his hospital stay coming to an end in late spring of 1940, Ivan was given leave. Finally, one would think, there was an opportunity to see his family and wife Anna again after having been away for almost two years. But he did not go home. When asked why, my father explained that the leave was only two weeks, and it would have taken all of the two weeks—in fact two weeks would not have been enough time—to get to Siberia and back. Sharing a hospital room with him in Leningrad was an infantry soldier named Buki, who came from Georgia near the city of Tbilisi. Buki invited—begged—Ivan to join him at his home in Georgia when they obtained their leaves at the same time. The trip to and from Georgia, according to my father, took only a total of six days, leaving them a week in the warmer Caucasian climate. Buki thought Ivan would get along well with his family and explained that Georgians liked Germans. His sister was a schoolteacher who spoke fluent German, and Buki assured Ivan that he could converse with her in German while the two of them would speak Russian to each other, quietly, because Georgians hated Russians. Ivan agreed, and the two of them took the train to Tbilisi, whe
re he spent a week with Buki’s family. It was a beautiful area where they grew grapes, and my father’s accounts of staying there were told with fondness. My father recounted how Buki coached him to speak only German when a Cherkessian wearing his ancient warrior dress, complete with a sword, entered the restaurant where Ivan was dining with Buki, his sister, and some friends. The Cherkessian went by and patted him on the back and assured him that Georgians liked Germans.9

  When Ivan returned to active duty, he was assigned to a unit whose summer camp was near Velikiye Luki, about 450 kilometres west of Moscow. The spring months seem to have been a relatively quiet time for the unit. My father described in some detail the summer lodgings they made out of shingles cut from the trunks of trees in the dense evergreen forest near a river where they were encamped, but otherwise time passed by uneventfully until mid-June.

  The two giants of totalitarianism were not idle, however. As part of the Ribbentrop–Molotov Non-Aggression Pact signed by Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939, the smaller states of Eastern Europe were divided between Stalin and Hitler to be incorporated into their growing empires. In mid-June 1940, Stalin delivered an ultimatum to the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia effectively forcing them to surrender their sovereignty. With the rest of the world preoccupied with Hitler’s attack on France, the Baltic states had no option but to capitulate. The relatively relaxing spring in the forest was interrupted by these events, which my father remembered clearly.

  Beginning on 16 June, the Red Army suddenly occupied the three Baltic countries of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. A few days before the invasion, without any explanation, Ivan’s unit received instructions in manners and decorum. They were issued a supply of cigarettes and matches with specific instructions to use their own matches to light cigarettes rather than borrow a light from the glowing cigarette of a fellow soldier. The cigarettes were an unaccustomed luxury compared with the tobacco and paper they usually used to “roll your own.” Ivan, now a junior officer, was issued a new white collar, which he and the other officers who received such collars had to sew into their uniforms. One morning at four the alarm sounded for the unit to assemble on the nearby road, the tanks lined up one behind the other. Even junior officers still did not know what was going on. Upon receiving the signal, the convoy of tanks rolled forward toward the Latvian border. My father remembered the trip being about half an hour to the frontier and another few hours to Riga, the capital of Latvia. His account must have telescoped the time somewhat, unless their summer camp was some distance west of Velikiye Luki. The town is some 150 kilometres from the Latvian border and about 400 kilometres from Riga. In Riga, they assisted in disarming the Latvian troops, who received two days of rations and train tickets to go home. The rifles of the Latvian Army were collected in a pile, and kiosks were set up where Soviet officers issued the train tickets. A reporter for the Chicago Tribune who was in Riga at the time reported that on 17 June “there was a mob at the railway station, waving red rags and screaming in hysterical joy about the arrival of the Russians. The Latvian language could not be heard. The speeches, the shouts, the screams were all in Russian or Yiddish.” Some tanks were even showered with flowers.10

  Ivan’s unit remained in Riga for a month, and my father had pleasant memories of his stay there. He “looked at the ocean, went visiting, got to know some of the people.” They had strict orders not to venture out alone, only in twos or threes. They were also to be polite when dealing with the local populace and were not supposed to discuss politics with anyone or provide any information regarding their unit or any other military details. His recollections of Riga in the summer of 1940 were also one of the few occasions when my father mentioned a friend. Petrov Krushinski was a Ukrainian with whom Ivan spent a great deal of time. Krushinski sang Ukrainian songs, which Ivan had difficulty understanding and made him laugh. His friend taught him some of them, such as “Rozpryahayte Khloptsi Koney,” a popular Ukrainian folk song. On one occasion, Ivan and Petrov were walking along the ocean when they heard two young women walking behind them speaking German. In late 1939, Hitler had offered most Germans in Latvia the option of being resettled in the Warthegau—the area of occupied Poland that Hitler wanted to make a permanent German state. Most Germans had left, but some had decided to stay in their homes in the Baltics, a decision most would regret after the Soviet occupation. After making Petrov promise he would keep it secret, Ivan struck up a conversation with the women, who were shocked to meet a German-speaking Red Army soldier. They invited the two soldiers to join them for lemonade in a restaurant, and as my father recalled “we visited with them for a while; they were very nice, happy.”11

  The brief accounts of his convalescent leave in Tbilisi and the interaction with the young women on the shores of the Baltic Sea at Riga suggest that Ivan’s connection to his wife and former life in Siberia was becoming less and less real. When I asked my father whether he ever got letters from home, he indicated he had received letters in the first years. He recalled the last letter he had received was about the time he had left the Leningrad hospital, though he qualified this memory by saying the letter had followed him, and he had read it only in the spring of 1941 when he was stationed at Grodno. The letters from home had seemingly not been very meaningful since there was so much the censors would not allow. Apparently the letters had only indicated that the family had enough to live on and that conditions were tolerable.

  The 1940–41 winter camp for Ivan’s unit was near Minsk and was the scene of one of my father’s favourite stories. It was to some extent a story my father told to boast about his prowess as a young man. When he told the story, it was unconnected to time or place, and only systematic placement of his stories in a time sequence suggests that it must have taken place in the winter of 1940–41. Ivan took part in a biathlon-like competition among various units of the Red Army stationed in the area. The contest pitted the tank division against an infantry division in a fifty-kilometre race. The race involved carrying a machine gun with a supply of ammunition to a point, firing at a target, and then skiing back to the starting line. With considerable pride, my father recalled how he had come in “second by half a ski length. If I had seen him sooner, I could have passed him, I had enough energy. I thought I was alone; all of a sudden I saw someone struggling ahead of me. I caught up to him, but I was still a little behind him going through the gate.”12

  A significant turn in Ivan’s perception of his role in the Soviet system also seems to have occurred sometime during the interlude between his participation in the Winter War in 1940 and the attack by Nazi Germany in June 1941. It came in connection with his desire to be a Red Army fighter pilot. Ever since his school days and the experience of glider flying, airplanes had fascinated Ivan. As my father described it, in the Red Army there was always an opportunity to advance—to try something else. Ivan seems to have taken the initiative to be transferred from a tank unit to a fighter aircraft unit. He discussed the prospects for this ambition with his senior officers, who suggested he apply. It meant appearing before a “commission,” as my father called it, to be examined. Here his certificate that he had participated in a glider club as a youth stood him in good stead. He had to pass the health exam, and his educational record was reviewed. Ivan was deemed to be qualified and was transferred to the Minsk military airfield, where he began his training with the mechanical aspects of an airplane, subject matter he found easy. He spent a few weeks in the engine shop and a few more in the airframe section. Then followed a week of parachute training, and finally training in an actual airplane began. The first task was to find out if the new pilot candidate had the “stomach” for fighter aircraft manoeuvres. Ivan was put through all the loops, rolls, and turns the instructor and airplane were capable of to determine whether nausea or fear would get the better of him. When they returned to the tarmac, a doctor was there to check his health again. My father told this part of the story in a heroic fashion—none of it had bothered him—he had passed
all of these tests with flying colours.

  But then came the political test, which in his words “was the most important area for a pilot; then all of a sudden they called me into the office and said I could not train as a pilot because I had relatives in Canada.” The Soviet regime believed that there was a heightened risk of pilots using their airplanes to defect by flying over the border and since he had family outside of the Soviet Union, he would be a security risk. He was done. After a month of further training as a mechanic, Ivan returned to his tank unit. His rejection as a prospective fighter pilot for political reasons, even though in his eyes he had excelled in all the other areas, was bitterly disappointing and changed his attitude. As my father put it in an interview forty-five years later, “up to that time I had always felt like a full-fledged Russian citizen, but then I started to doubt.” With the benefit of later memories of the Soviet–German war, he also suggested that it had brought to mind “what my mother always said to me, that if I was in a war and had the opportunity I should rather allow myself to be captured than to be shot.”13