This is a long I found, so look out for parts 2, 3, etc

Dmitriy Loza, tank commander of Matilda, T-34 and Sherman


Author: Valeri Potapov
Created on Wednesday, 19 September 2001 00:10
Last Updated on Monday, 19 September 2011 16:18
Total hits: 3624
- Dmitriy Fedorovich, on which American tanks did you fight?
- On Shermans. We called them "Emchas", from M4 [in Russian, em chetyrye]. Initially they had the short main gun, and later they began to arrive with the long gun and muzzle brake. On the front slope armor there was a travel lock for securing the barrel during road marches. The main gun was quite long. Overall, this was a good vehicle but, as with any tank, it had its pluses and minuses. When someone says to me that this was a bad tank, I respond, "Excuse me!" One cannot say that this was a bad tank. Bad as compared to what?
- Did you have just American tanks in your unit?
- Our 6th Guards Tank Army (yes, we had six of them) fought in Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Austria. We ended the war for us in Czechoslovakia. Then they rushed us to the Far East and we fought against Japan. I briefly remind you that the army consisted of two corps: 5th Guards Tank Stalingrad Corps on our own T-34s and 5th Mechanized Corps, in which I fought. For the first time this corps had British Matildas, Valentines, and Churchills.
- They delivered the Churchill later.
- Yes, a bit later. After 1943 we largely declined British tanks because they had significant deficiencies. In particular, they had 12-14 h.p. per ton of weight at a time when good tanks had 18-20 h.p. per ton. Of these three British tanks, the best was the Valentine produced in Canada. Its armor was streamlined but more importantly, it featured a long-barreled 57mm main gun. My unit switched over to American Shermans at the end of 1943. After the Kishinev Operation our corps became the 9th Guards Mechanized Corps. I missed to tell you that every corps consisted of four brigades. Our mechanized corps had three mechanized brigades and one tank brigade, in which I fought. A tank corps had three tank brigades and one mechanized brigade. Yes, we had Shermans in our brigade at the end of 1943.
- But the British tanks were not withdrawn from service, so they fought until they were gone. Wasn't there a period when your corps had a mixture of tanks, both American and British? Were there any problems associated with the presence of such a broad variety of vehicles from different countries? For example, with supply and maintenance?
- Well, there were always problems. In general, the Matilda was an unbelievably worthless tank! I will tell you about one of the Matilda's deficiencies that caused us a great deal of trouble. Some fool in the General Staff planned an operation and sent our corps to the area of Yelnya, Smolensk, and Roslavl. The terrain there was forested swamp. The Matilda had skirts along the sides. The tank was developed primarily for operations in the desert. These skirts worked well in the desert-the sand passed through the rectangular slots in them. But in the forested swamps of Russia the mud packed into the space between the tracks and these side skirts. The Matilda transmission had a servomechanism for ease of shifting. In our conditions this component was weak, constantly overheated, and then failed. This was fine for the British. By 1943 they had developed a replacement unit that could be installed simply by unscrewing four mounting bolts, pulling out the old unit, and installing the new unit. It did not always work this way for us. In my battalion we had Senior Sergeant (Starshina) Nesterov, a former kolkhoz tractor driver (Kolkhoz is sort of farm - Valeri), in the position of battalion mechanic. In general each of our tank companies had a mechanic and Nesterov was it for the battalion. At our corps level we had a representative (whose name I have forgotten) of the British firm that produced these tanks. At one time I had it written down, but when my tank was hit everything I had in it burned up -photographs, documents, and notebook. We were forbidden to keep notes at the front, but I did it on the sly. Anyway, this British representative constantly interfered with our efforts to repair separate components of the tank. He said, "This has a factory seal. You should not tinker with it!" We were supposed to take out a component and install a new one. Nesterov made a simple repair to all these transmissions. One time the British representative came up to Nesterov and asked him, "At which university did you study?" And Nesterov replied, "At the kolkhoz!"
The Sherman was light years better in this regard. Did you know that one of the designers of the Sherman was a Russian engineer named Timoshenko? He was some shirt tail relative of Marshal S. K. Timoshenko.
The Sherman had its weaknesses, the greatest of which was its high center of gravity. The tank frequently tipped over on its side, like a Matryoshka doll (a wooden stacking doll). But I am alive today thanks to this deficiency. We were fighting in Hungary in December 1944. I was leading the battalion and on a turn my driver-mechanic clipped a curb. My tank went over on its side. We were thrown around, of course, but we survived the experience. Meanwhile the other four of my tanks went ahead and drove into an ambush. They were all destroyed.
- The Sherman had a rubber-coated metal track. Some contemporary authors point to this as a deficiency, since in combat the rubber might be set on fire. With the track thus stripped bare, the tank is disabled. What can you say in this regard?
- On the one hand this rubber-coated track was a big plus. In the first place, this track had a service life approximately twice that of steel track. I might be mistaken, but I believe that the service life of the T-34 track was 2500 kilometers. The service life of the Sherman track was in excess of 5000 kilometers. Secondly, The Sherman drove like a car on hard surfaces, and our T-34 made so much noise that only the devil knows how many kilometers away it could be heard. What was the bad side of the Sherman track? In my book, Commanding the Red Army's Sherman Tanks, there is a chapter entitled "Barefooted". There I wrote about an incident that occurred in August 1944 in Romania, during the Jassy-Kishinev Operation. The heat was fearsome, somewhere around 30° C. We had driven approximately 100 km along a highway in a single day. The rubber linings on our support rollers got so hot that the rubber separated and peeled off in long pieces. Our corps paused not far from Bucharest. The rubber was flying around, the rollers had begun to jam up, the noise was terrible, and in the end we had been stopped. This was immediately reported to Moscow. Was this some kind of joke, an entire corps had halted? To our surprise, they brought new support rollers to us quickly and we spent three days installing them. I still don't know where they found so many support rollers in such a short time. There was yet another minus of rubber track. Even on a slightly icy surface the tank slid around like a fat cow. When this happened we had to tie barbed wire around the track or make grousers out of chains or bolts, anything to give us traction. But this was with the first shipment of tanks. Having seen this, the American representative reported to his company and the next shipment of tanks was accompanied by additional track blocks with grousers and spikes. If I recall, there were up to seven blocks for each track, for a total of fourteen per tank. We carried them in our parts bin. In general the American representative worked efficiently. Any deficiency that he observed and reported was quickly and effectively corrected.
One more shortcoming of the Sherman was the construction of the driver's hatch. The hatch on the first shipment of Shermans was located in the roof of the hull and simply opened upward. Frequently the driver-mechanic opened it and raised his head in order to see better. There were several occasions when during the rotation of the turret the main gun struck this hatch and knocked it into the driver's head. We had this happen once or twice in my own unit. Later the Americans corrected this deficiency. Now the hatch rose up and simply moved to the side, like on modern tanks.
Still one great plus of the Sherman was in the charging of its batteries. On our T-34 it was necessary to run the engine, all 500 horsepower of it, in order to charge batteries. In the crew compartment of the Sherman was an auxiliary gasoline engine, small like a motorcycle's one. Start it up and it charged the batteries. This was a big deal to us!
For a long time after the war I sought an answer to one question. If a T-34 started burning, we tried to get as far away from it as possible, even though this was forbidden. The on-board ammunition exploded. For a brief period of time, perhaps six weeks, I fought on a T-34 around Smolensk. The commander of one of our companies was hit in his tank. The crew jumped out of the tank but were unable to run away from it because the Germans were pinning them down with machine gun fire. They lay there in the wheat field as the tank burned and blew up. By evening, when the battle had waned, we went to them. I found the company commander lying on the ground with a large piece of armor sticking out of his head. When a Sherman burned, the main gun ammunition did not explode. Why was this?
Such a case occurred once in Ukraine. Our tank was hit. We jumped out of it but the Germans were dropping mortar rounds around us. We lay under the tank as it burned. We laid there a long time with nowhere to go. The Germans were covering the empty field around the tank with machine gun and mortar fires. We lay there. The uniform on my back was beginning heating up from the burning tank. We thought we were finished! We would hear a big bang and it would all be over! A brother's grave! We heard many loud thumps coming from the turret. This was the armor-piercing rounds being blown out of their cases. Next the fire would reach the high explosive rounds and all hell would break loose! But nothing happened. Why not? Because our high explosive rounds detonated and the American rounds did not? In the end it was because the American ammunition had more refined explosives. Ours was some kind of component that increased the force of the explosion one and one-half times, at the same time increasing the risk of detonation of the ammunition.
- It is considered noteworthy that the Sherman was very well appointed on the inside. Was this true?
- It was true. These are not just words! They were beautiful! For us then this was something. As they say now, "Euro-repair"! This was some kind of European picture! In the first place, it was painted beautifully. Secondly, the seats were comfortable, covered with some kind of remarkable special artificial leather. If a tank was knocked out or damaged, then if it was left unguarded literally for just several minutes the infantry would strip out all this upholstery. It made excellent boots! Simply beautiful!
- How did you regard the Germans? As fascists and occupiers or not?
- When one is standing in front of you with a weapon in his hands, and it is a question of who will kill whom, there was only one response. He was the enemy. As soon as the German threw down his weapon or we captured him, then it was quite another matter. I was not in Germany. I have already told you where I fought. Here is an incident from Hungary. We had a trophy German "letuchka" (light maintenance truck). We had penetrated into the German rear in column. We were going along a road and our light truck had fallen back. Then another light German truck, just like our own, attached itself to the back of our column. A while later our column halted. I was walking down the column, checking vehicles. "Is everything in order?" Everything was fine. I approached the last vehicle in the column and asked, "Sasha, is everything OK?" In response I heard "Vas?" What was this? Germans! I immediately jumped to the side and cried out "Germans!" We surrounded them, a driver and two others. We disarmed them and only then did our own light truck come up the road. I said, "Sasha, where were you?" He responded, "We got lost." "Well, look," I said to him, "Here is another light truck for you!"
- So, you didn't have hatred for these enemy soldiers, did you?
- No, of course not. We understood that they were also human beings.
- What about your relationships with the civilian population?
- When the 2nd Ukrainian Front reached the Romanian border in March 1944 we stopped, and remained in place until August. In accordance with wartime laws, the entire civilian population had to be removed from the front-line zone to a depth of 100 kilometers. These people had already planted their field gardens. The authorities announced the evacuation to the population over the radio and sent out transportation to pick them up the next morning. With tears in their eyes these Moldavians shook their heads. How could this be? They had to abandon their fields! What would be left upon their return? So the evacuation went ahead as required, and we had practically no contact with the civilian population. At the time I was chief of staff for ammunition supply for the battalion. The brigade commander summoned me and said, "Loza, are you from peasant stock?" I replied in the affirmative. "Well, I thought so. I'm appointing you as team chief! You will be responsible for weeding these gardens and ensuring that everything grows and so on. And God forbid that even one cucumber is spoiled! Don't touch anything! If necessary, plant your own crops." Teams were organized; in my brigade we had 25 men. All spring and summer long we fussed over these field gardens. In the fall, when the troops departed, we were told to invite a kolkhoz chairman as a representative, and we formally signed over to him all these field and kitchen gardens. When the housewife returned to the home where I myself was living, she immediately ran out to her garden and was dumbfounded. There she saw enormous pumpkins, tomatoes, and melons. She returned to the house on the run, fell at my feet, and began to kiss my boots. "Dear son! We thought that everything would be dried up and beat down. But it turns out that we have everything, and all we have to do is gather it in!" This is an example of how we related to our populace.
In the war medicine worked well, but there were cases for which the medics could do nothing except hang their head! Fellows, Romania at that time was simply the venereal cesspool of all of Europe! We had a saying: "If you have 100 Lei (Romanian currency) you may sleep with a queen!" When some German POWs fell into our hands, their pockets were full of prophylactics, as many as 5-10. Our political officers made a big deal out of this "Look at this! They have these so they can rape our women!" But the Germans were smarter than we were and understood what venereal disease could do to an army. If only our own medics had warned us about these diseases! Even though we passed through Romania quickly, we had a terrible outbreak of venereal disease in our units. Our army had two hospitals: one for surgical cases and the other for light wounds. They were forced to open a venereal section, even though it was not provided for in the table of organization and equipment.
Here is how we interacted with the Hungarian population. When we entered Hungary in October 1944, we saw practically deserted villages. When we entered homes we found warm stoves, with food warming on them, but not a person in the house. I recall that in one town a gigantic banner hung on the wall of a house. It depicted a Russian soldier eating a baby. These people were so terrified that when they were able to flee, they fled! They abandoned all their possessions. Later, with the passage of time, as they began to understand that all this was nonsense and propaganda, they began to return to their homes.
I recall when we halted in northern Hungary, on the border with Czechoslovakia. At that time I was already chief of staff of the battalion. One morning they reported to me that an old Hungarian woman had entered a barn the previous night. We had counterintelligence personnel in our army who worked for SMERSH (Russian for "Smert Shpionam" or "death to spies", the NKVD structure within the Red Army). There was a SMERSH officer in each tank battalion, and in infantry units only beginning at regiment and above. I told my SMERSH officer to go check it out. They poked around in the shed and found a young girl, 18 or 19 years old. When they dragged her out she was all covered with scabs and coughing. This old woman was in tears, thinking that now we would rape her daughter. Nonsense! No one laid a finger on her! On the contrary, we gave her medical treatment. Later she came to us often, spending more time with us than at home. When I visited Hungary twenty years after the war, I met her. What a beautiful woman! She was married and had children.
- Therefore, you didn't observe any excesses with the civilian population, did you?
- No we didn't. One time I had to go somewhere in Hungary. We took one Hungarian as a guide so that we would not get lost -after all this was a foreign country. He did his work and we gave him money and canned meat and let him go.
- In your book "Commanding the Red Army's Sherman Tanks" you wrote that the 233rd Tank Brigade's M4A2 Shermans were armed not with the short-barreled 75mm but the long-barreled 76mm main gun in January 1944. Wasn't this a bit early? Didn't these tanks appear later? Explain one more time which main guns were mounted on the Shermans of the 233rd Tank Brigade.
- Hmm, I don't know. We had very few Shermans with the short-barreled main gun. On the whole, ours had long-barrels. Not just our brigade fought on Shermans. Perhaps these were in other brigades. Somewhere in the corps I saw such tanks, but we had the tanks with the long barrels.
- There were personal weapons in each Sherman that arrived in the USSR, Thompson submachine guns (also known as the Tommy gun). I read that rear area personnel stole these weapons and that few tanks arrived in units still equipped with them. What kind of weapons did you have, American or Soviet?
- Each Sherman came with two Thompson submachine guns, in caliber 11.43mm (.45 cal), a healthy cartridge indeed! But the submachine gun was worthless. We had several bad experiences with it. A few of our men who got into an argument were wearing padded jackets. It turned out that they fired at each other and the bullet buried itself in the padded jacket. So much for the worthless submachine gun. Take a German submachine gun with folding stock (MP-40 SMG by Erma -Valeri). We loved it for its compactness. The Thompson was big. You couldn't turn around in the tank holding it.
- The Sherman had an antiaircraft machine gun Browning M2 .50 caliber. Did you use it often?
- I don't know why, but one shipment of tanks arrived with machine guns, and another without them. We used this machine gun against both aircraft and ground targets. We used it less frequently against air targets because the Germans were not fools. They bombed either from altitude or from a steep dive. The machine gun was good to 400-600 meters in the vertical. The Germans would drop their bombs from say, 800 meters or higher. He dropped his bomb and departed quickly. Try to shoot the bastard down! So yes, we used it, but it was not very effective. We even used our main gun against aircraft. We placed the tank on the upslope of a hill and fired. But our general impression of the machine gun was good. These machine guns were of great use to us in the war with Japan, against kamikazes. We fired them so much that they got red hot and began to cook off. To this day I have a piece of shrapnel in my head from an antiaircraft machine gun.