Words in Print: Vasily Semyonovich Grossman (Василий Семенович Гроссман) – Book Review of “Forever Flowing”, February 23, 1973

Another review of Forever Flowing, albeit I don’t know the publication in which this item actually appeared!  Brief like Thomas Lask’s 1 April 1972 review in the New York Times, this anonymous reviewer focused upon the book from a literary – and thus not too complimentary – vantage point.

________________________________________

Synthesis with Slaves

VASILY GROSSMAN
Forever Flowing
Translated by Thomas P. Whitney
217 pp  Andre Deutsch £  2.25

February 23, 1973

(Photograph accompanying “Stalingrad“, by Vasily Grossman, at Granta, November 15, 2018.)

Vasily Semenovich Grossman was an important Russian writer, little known in the West, who was born in 1905, established himself as a novelist before he was thirty, and became famous during the Second World War for some impressive works of reportage and for a novel, The People Is Immortal, which rose above the prevailing level of social patriotism.  Despite his considerable contributions to Soviet literature, however, he got into trouble towards the end of Stalin’s life, when his old play If One Believes the Pythagoreans and his new novel, For The Just Cause, were suppressed.  After Stalin’s death he spent several years writing a bitterly subversive book called Everything Flows, which couldn’t possibly be published in Russia and was smuggled abroad after his death in 1964.  It was published in Germany in 1970, and now appears here in a very stiff American translation.

The new title, Forever Flowing, is rather misleading.  Grossman was of course quoting one of the old Heraclitan tags, which is repeated in the book, together with a grim parody of another instead of “You cannot step into the same river twice.”  He says, “You cannot get into the same prison train twice.”  The whole book, in fact, is permeated with the metaphysical ideas attributed to Heraclitus more than 2,000 years ago; and, while this destroys its literary quality, it gives it a special historical and philosophical interest. 

Everything Flows is not really a novel – or rather, it begins as a novel, describing one of the “Returners” (возвращающиеся – vozvrashchayushchiesya) a man who has come back from the labour camps after thirty years and finds that everything has flowed, everyone has changed, and the revolutionary enthusiasm of the old days has turned into sour disillusion and narrow careerism; but it soon breaks down into a series of semi-fictional stories about various aspects of the Stalinist dictatorship which are never properly drawn together but are linked and eventually overshadowed by a long meditation on the meaning and purpose the phenomenon of Stalinism.

Grossman is remarkable among Soviet writers fur seeing this not as some kind of error in development or interruption of progress hut as an essential culmination of the whole course of Russian history.  He sees Stalin as the true successor of Lenin, and Lenin as the destroyer of the liberty which had become possible for the first time in 1917.  Lenin is indicted for creating a synthesis of “socialism and unfreedom”, which derives from the Tsarist tradition of progress plus serfdom, embodied above all by Peter the Great.  This is a familiar theme in the West, but in Russia it is rank heresy, and it would be interesting to know in what circumstances Grossman came to such a conclusion.

Some of the stories have considerable power, especially those about Masha, the wife of an arrested man who is arrested in turn and suffers and dies in the camps, and about Anna, the Party activist who witnesses the Ukrainian famine at the beginning of the 1930s during the compulsory collectivization of the land.  But the main story, about Ivan, the hero whose life has been ruined by the regime, is weak, and the whole hook leaves an impression of artistic confusion mixed with intellectual conviction of a disturbing kind.

Everything flows, and yet remains tile same: tyrannies rise and fall, but tyranny lasts forever.  Grossman hints that liberty will come in the end, but it is hard to see how this fits into his scheme, and the terrible vision of Russia enduring perpetual slavery is the most striking feature of the hook.  It is a pity that, in spite of the time he spent on it, Grossman didn’t manage to make it as good as it deserved to be.

Suggested Readings

Aciman, Alexander, Book Review: Vasily Grossman, the Great Forgotten Soviet Jewish Literary Genius of Exile and Betrayal, Lives Inside Us All, Tablet, October 23, 2017
 
Capshaw, Ron, The Scroll: The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee Was Created to Document the Crimes of Nazism Before They Were Murdered by Communists – For the crime of acknowledging Jewish identity, the committee’s members were killed in a Stalinist pogrom, Tablet, November 29, 2018
 
Epstein, Joseph, The Achievement of Vasily Grossman – Was he the greatest writer of the past century?, Commentary, May, 2019.
 
Eskin, Blake, Book Review: Eyewitness – A collection of Vasily Grossman’s shorter work offers a chance to reassess the Soviet master’s life and legacy. A conversation with Grossman translator Robert Chandler, Tablet, December 8, 2010
 
Kirsch, Adam, Book Review: No Exit: Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman’s indispensable account of the horrors of Stalinism and the Holocaust, puts Jewishness at the heart of the 20th century, Tablet, November 30, 2011
 
Vapnyar, Lara, Book Review: Dispatches – How World War II turned a Soviet loyalist into a dissident novelist.  Plus: An audio interview with the editor of A Writer at War, Tablet, January 30, 2006
 
Taubman, William, Book Review: Life and Fate: A biography of Vasiliy Grossman, the Soviet writer whose masterpiece compared Stalin’s regime to Hitler’s, The New York Times Book Review, p. 16, July 14, 2019

 

Words in Print: Vasily Semyonovich Grossman (Василий Семенович Гроссман) – Book Review of “Forever Flowing”, The New York Times, March 26, 1972 [Daniel Maffia]

Here’s Irving Howe’s 1972 New York Times review of Vasily Grossman’s Forever Flowing, with artist Daniel Maffia’s accompanying illustration.

Maffia’s art juxtaposes a portrait of Grossman with the image of a train, the latter symbolic of the book’s opening pages, which describe the journey of protagonist Ivan Grigoryevich (if he is actually a protagonist, for he seems far more having been acted upon than acting) back to Moscow after his release from decades of imprisonment in the Gulag.

While Grossman’s better known and far lengthier Life and Fate features characters fully “fleshed out” in terms of names and identities (personal history, life experiences, and relationships with family and friends) could the strikingly generic Russian name “Ivan Grigoryevich” – consisting solely of a given name and patronymic, thus lacking any connotation of nationality – have been an effort to  create within one character a literary template for universal themes of freedom and justice?

Having read both novels, I find a comparison between them to be strikingly difficult because of dissimilarities in their length, literary structure, scope of action, and the disparity between the depth of character development in Life and Fate, versus the near one-dimensionality of characters in Forever Flowing.  In addition, the books differ through Grossman’s focus within Life and Fate on the historical experience of the Jews of Russia (both civilian and military) within the context of the Second World War, against Forever Flowing’s universality, Jewish themes being apparent in only a single, searing, passage.

Yet, withall, I liked Forever Flowing more than Life and Fate, for despite the former’s lack of cohesion (Howe is entirely correct in his appraisal, “…he wrote out of so urgent a passion that he brushed aside the formal niceties of composition, these chapters have to be taken as set-pieces not well integrated with the plot.”) underlying themes are approached with a degree of directness and simplicity that is striking in effect and intensity.

Regardless and even because of their stylistic differences, both books are worthy of reading and contemplation.

________________________________________

A bold underground novel of the split Russian soul

Forever Flowing
By Vasily Grossman.

Translated from the Russian by Thomas P. Whitney.
247 pp.  New York: Harper & Row.  $6.95.

By IRVING HOWE

The New York Times Book Review
March 26, 1972

For two centuries now, under czars and commissars, Russia has given us the most brutal autocracy and brilliant literature.  During the last 20 years its best writing has come from poets, novelists and essayists who cannot publish in their own country but whose work, in defiance of the bureaucratic fist, finds its way into the West

Some of these writings, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel, “The First Circle,” Andrei Sinyavsky’s essay, “On Socialist Realism,” and Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir, “Hope Against Hope,” are masterpieces.  Their strength comes not merely from a high order of individual talent, but from the unconditional attachment to freedom that is the animating idea of Russian underground literature (samizdat).  Indeed, at a time when some Western intellectuals have again yielded themselves to authoritarian dogmas and charismatic dictators, it is these brave writers of the East – not only Russians but also Poles like Leszek Kolakowski and Yugoslavs like Milovan Djilas – who best uphold the values of independence, freedom, dissent.

Vasily Grossman’s “Forever Flowing,” written shortly before his death in 1964, is another of these remarkable books, known only to a few friends (and no doubt the secret police).  It is a novel portraying the experiences and reflections of a man who returns to Moscow after 30 years in the Siberian labor camps; it contains pungent discussions of political ideas; and it trembles with the vision of freedom.  At least in this book, Grossman is not so good a novelist as Solzhenitsyn or smooth an essayist as Sinyavsky.  Yet in one major respect his book seems the boldest to emerge from the suppressed literature of Russia: It is the first, to my knowledge, that comes to grips with the myth of Lenin.

Grossman’s career holds remarkable interest, precisely because for so long a time it was quite ordinary.  He began to publish in the 30s, when a novella of his attracted the favor of Maxim Gorky.  Other writings established him as a gifted novelist who was especially admired by Russian literary people for his style.  Apparently a decent man, he tried to maintain his integrity and nurture his talent during the Stalin years without paying too great a price in shame.  Neither heroic nor slavish, he remained silent when he had to, but meanwhile kept his mind alive, storing up explosive ideas and impressions.

In 1946 he published a play, “If You Believe the Pythagoreans,” that was denounced by the party-line critics, and then, during the anti-Semitic campaign against “homeless cosmopolites.” he was attacked again Konstantin Paustovsky, the distinguished Russian writer, privately told a friend in the West that in these years Grossman wrote a novel which he, Paustovsky, considered a masterpiece but that the manuscript was confiscated by the secret police and no copies were allowed to remain.  Nevertheless, Grossman kept writing “for the drawer,” completing “Forever Flowing,” not a masterpiece but a notable book, in his final years.

What seems most striking about his career is that, in ways not entirely clear from a distance, a man like Grossman could experience a major intellectual and moral transformation over a period of time – by himself? together with friends? – in which the received ideology of the Communist state was discarded and the scorned, “obsolete” values of liberalism or social democracy became a cherished possession.  Reading the pages of “Forever Flowing” with their glow of humane reflectiveness, one wonders: How did people like Grossman hack their way out of the ideological jungle in which circumstances had trapped them?  How, in their enforced isolation, did they find a path, and by no means uncritically, to the best of Western thought?  Whatever the answers, one is almost tempted after reading this book to accept Grossman’s view – a view not exactly encouraged by recent history – that there is a natural, indestructible striving toward freedom inherent in human nature.”

“Forever Flowing” begins in a familiar manner: a worn old man is on a westward-moving train to Moscow.  Mocked by the louts and officials who share his compartment, he keeps his silence.  Ivan Grigoryevich is returning from the camps to which, half a life earlier, he had been sent because of an impulsive student speech deviating from Communist orthodoxy.  The figure of the returned prisoner is a central one in recent Russian writing: the victim, the survivor, the man who remembers.

Ivan visits his cousin and boyhood chum, Nikolai, a small-talented scientist who has toadied a little over the years and now lives in “a world of parquet floors, glass-enclosed bookcases, paintings and chandeliers.”  One man well-fed, smug, and uneasy; the other gaunt, tormented and irritable.  Ivan makes no accusations.  It is his very silence that provokes Nikolai into self-defense: “I went through trials and tribulations,” though “of course I did not ring out like Herzen’s bell.”  It is hopeless, a dialogue of the deaf.  What can a man from the camps say to a man with an apartment?

Beyond these acrid, sharply-contoured opening chapters, “Forever Flowing” has little plot.  Ivan visits Leningrad, meets Pinegin, a former colleague, now a dignified gentleman with a fine coat.  “Don’t worry,” bursts out Ivan in anticipation of a rebuff,”… like you, I, too, have a passport.”  Pinegin replies with dignity: “When I run into an old friend, I am not in the habit of making inquiries about his passport”  It sounds good, a word of solidarity at last.  Later, we learn it was Pinegin who had denounced Ivan.

Ivan moves to a town in southern Russia, works as a laborer, meets a woman also worn out by suffering.  She lived through Stalin’s campaign against the kulaks and the forced collectivization.  They have a few moments together, not exactly of happiness, but of the peace that comes when people can at last speak with honesty.  The woman dies.  Ivan is again alone, with his thoughts and questions, “gray, bent and changeless.”

Woven through this simple story are linked segments of incident and passages of reflection.  Two scenes are especially strong.  One is an imaginary trial, perhaps running through Ivan’s mind, in which the informers who had sent millions to the camps are now arraigned.  Each speaks freely, from his own motives, for his own skin.  Especially forceful is “the well-educated informer”:

“Why are you determined to expose particularly those like us who are weak?  Begin with the state.  Try it!  After all, our sin is its sin.  Pass judgment on it!  Fearlessly, out in the open. …  And then explain one other thing, if you please.  Why have you waited till now?  You knew us all in Stalin’s lifetime.  You used to greet us cordially then and waited to be received at the doors of our offices.”

The other scene, rich with Dostoevskian echoes, consists of Ivan’s recollections of a critical moment in prison.  Next to him lay “the most intelligent of all the men I ran into.  But his mind was frightening.  Not because it was evil [but because] he refused to accept my faith in freedom.”  This fellow-prisoner believed “in the law of the conservation of violence.”  The history of life, he insisted, “is the history of violence triumphant.  It is eternal and indestructible.”  To Ivan the pain of these words seemed greater than the pain of the interrogator’s blows a few hours earlier.  “They dragged me off again to interrogation …  I felt relieved.  I believed again in the inevitability of freedom.”

The chapters of intellectual reflection are meant no doubt to be taken as the thoughts of Ivan.  But perhaps because Vasily Grossman could not properly finish his book or perhaps because he wrote out of so urgent a passion that he brushed aside the formal niceties of composition, these chapters have to be taken as set-pieces not well integrated with the plot.  No matter; they are striking in their own right.

Grossman is fascinated by the paradox that runs through the whole Russian revolutionary movement  How can it be that in the same people there exists a “meekness and readiness to endure suffering … unequaled since the epoch of the first Christians” together with “contempt for and disregard of human suffering, subservience to abstract theories, the determination to annihilate not merely enemies but those comrades who deviated even slightly front complete acceptance of the particular abstraction …”?  Grossman finds his answer in the tradition of Russian messianism, a “sectarian determinism, the readiness to suppress today’s living freedom for the sake of an imaginary freedom tomorrow.”

In a powerful sketch of Lenin, he connects the revolutionary leader with this two-sided tradition: the gentle selfless man who loved music and showed tenderness toward friends, and the harsh politician who, in rage against heresies, laid the basis for the party-state dictatorship.  This kind of revolutionary Grossman sees as a man who fancies himself a surgeon of history: “His soul is really in his knife.”  Grossman’s Stalin reduced Leninism to its political essentials.

But Grossman does not stop there.  Through a confrontation with those notions of a unique Russian destiny that course through the work of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as well as, less assertively, Solzhenitsyn, he performs a first-rate intellectual service.  The great Russian writers, both the reactionaries and some revolutionaries, professed to find unique qualities in the Russian soul which they regarded as the last unsullied vessel of Christian purity; they sneered, too often and with disastrous results, at the liberalism of the West.  All these prophets “failed to see that the particular qualities of the Russian soul did not derive from freedom, and that the Russian soul had been a slave for a thousand years.”  And then a crucial passage:

“In the Russian fascination with Byzantine, ascetic purity, with Christian meekness, lives the unwitting admission of the permanence of Russian slavery.  The sources of this Christian meekness, and gentleness, of this Byzantine, ascetic purity, are the same as those of Leninist passion, fanaticism, and intolerance.”

This is the voice of a “Westerner,” the kind of Russian intellectual who, alas, never has had enough influence in his own country.  But now, after the ordeal of the past half-century, what Grossman wrote in the privacy of his study, perhaps without expecting that it would ever be published, takes on the strength of a central truth.  It is, I think, the one supremely revolutionary idea: that without democratic freedoms no society, whether it calls itself capitalist or socialist, whether it has an industrialized or backward economy, can be tolerable

It is also the one permanently revolutionary idea, for no one can say with assurance that it will survive our century and every thoughtful man knows that it will always have a precarious life, its triumph never assured.

Suggested Readings

Aciman, Alexander, Book Review: Vasily Grossman, the Great Forgotten Soviet Jewish Literary Genius of Exile and Betrayal, Lives Inside Us All, Tablet, October 23, 2017
 
Capshaw, Ron, The Scroll: The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee Was Created to Document the Crimes of Nazism Before They Were Murdered by Communists – For the crime of acknowledging Jewish identity, the committee’s members were killed in a Stalinist pogrom, Tablet, November 29, 2018
 
Epstein, Joseph, The Achievement of Vasily Grossman – Was he the greatest writer of the past century?, Commentary, May, 2019.
 
Eskin, Blake, Book Review: Eyewitness – A collection of Vasily Grossman’s shorter work offers a chance to reassess the Soviet master’s life and legacy. A conversation with Grossman translator Robert Chandler, Tablet, December 8, 2010
 
Kirsch, Adam, Book Review: No Exit: Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman’s indispensable account of the horrors of Stalinism and the Holocaust, puts Jewishness at the heart of the 20th century, Tablet, November 30, 2011
 
Vapnyar, Lara, Book Review: Dispatches – How World War II turned a Soviet loyalist into a dissident novelist.  Plus: An audio interview with the editor of A Writer at War, Tablet, January 30, 2006
 
Taubman, William, Book Review: Life and Fate: A biography of Vasiliy Grossman, the Soviet writer whose masterpiece compared Stalin’s regime to Hitler’s, The New York Times Book Review, p. 16, July 14, 2019

 

Words in Print: Vasily Semyonovich Grossman (Василий Семенович Гроссман) – Book Review of “Forever Flowing”, The New York Times, April 1, 1972

Subsequent to Irving Howe’s review of Forever Flowing in The New York Times, came a shorter, penetrating, astute review by Thomas Lask in the same newspaper.  Different in approach from Howe, Lask’s analysis of Grossman’s book suggests that it was based upon a deep familiarity with the political history of the Soviet Union.

________________________________________

When Theories Are Made Flesh

By THOMAS LASK

FOREVER FLOWING.  By Vasily Grossman.
Translated from the Russian by Thomas P. Whitney.
247 pages.  Harper & Row.  $6.95.

The New York Times
April 1, 1972

(Photograph accompanying Simon Willis’ essay of January / February 2013 “Art, Freedom, and Cognac“, at 1843 Magazine.)

In one of the powerfully conceived images in Vasily Grossman’s novel, the Russian state is described in physical terms as an entity of such great mass as to warp everything that comes within its orbit.  How Russians were bent by that magnetic pull from their decency, their humanity is the substance of this novel.  It isn’t, strictly speaking, a novel at all, even within the latitude granted that term.  The characters, though distinctive, are types, examples in a dissertation on the post-revolutionary state. 

There is no story to speak of, and what story there is, one of betrayal, imprisonment and release, is neither new nor unknown.  But the form does not matter nor the old fashioned writing (if we judge the original by Thomas Whitney’s translation) nor such clumsy devices as the intrusion of the author to the forgetful exclusion of his main figure.  “Forever Flowing” is not intended as blithe entertainment; it is the thoughts of a man who has seen much, wondering amid the ruins and shards of his life how they came about.  As such it is as eloquent a memorial to the anonymous little man in the Stalinist state as “Dr. Zhivago” is to the artistic spirit in post-Czarist Russia and “The First Circle” to the scientific intelligentsia.

Enemy of the People

“Forever Flowing” is a look at the Soviet state from the very bottom, not from the bottom of society or the political spectrum, but from the place where all the lofty decisions from on high, all abstractly conceived theories, all high sounding resolves are translated into human endeavor and measured by human results.  It is the place where all theories are made flesh.  Grossman judges all theories by a simple rule: What happens to the people to whom they apply?

As he follows the results from the time of Lenin to that of the post-World War II leadership, he concludes that the state is a rapacious, relentless, soul-crushing adversary – an enemy of the people.  Yet so powerful is the embracing magnetism of the state that the citizenry contrive at their own downfall.  At the worst it allows the scum, the Yagodas and Berias to come to the top; at best it corrupts even the well-meaning and men of principle.  The real saints are few and far between.

Ivan Grigoryevich has been given his freedom after 30 years in the Russian slave labor camps, and he returns to Moscow, to Leningrad, to once familiar places an old, gaunt, bent man.  As he visits a cousin, encounters a comrade who had denounced him to the prosecutor, finds lodgings and a job for himself, Russia’s history, his own past and that of so many he knew boil and bubble in his mind.  His reappearance disconcerts those he meets; they find their dormant consciences flickering to life, unpleasant memories floating to the top of their minds.  Some had given in to base demands a little at a time only to find themselves so far in, it was as distasteful to turn back as to go on.  Some had believed that they were working for the good of the state.  Some were greedy, some were seduced by ambition or high office.  The motives and the reasoning were always complicated, intertwined, rationalized.  And as the author points out the thinking inside the camp was exactly the same as that of the world outside.  The ideologies of the prisoners were as varied and ingenious as the men who had put them there.  They were after all the same Russians.

Vasily Grossman, who died in 1964, was a novelist, playwright and war correspondent, whose work after World War II was so severely criticized that he never finished a novel about that war although part of it had already appealed in print.  The present work occupied him for the last eight years of his life.  It has not been published in Russia for reasons that will be clear to every reader.

Excesses of the State

One of them is that he goes beyond Stalin to Lenin when he comes to place the blame for the excesses of the Soviet state.  He dismisses the human side of Lenin, his personal modesty, his courtesy, his love of music, his patience with a citizen, not because they are not true, but because they did not really count in guiding the revolution and in establishing the new state.  These took intellectual arrogance, ruthlessness, insulting impatience with opposition and contempt for western notions of individual freedom.  Those who shared Lenin’s gentler side, Bukharin, Rykov, Kamenev and Zinoviev, were crushed as mercilessly by Stalin as these qualities were eliminated from the body politic.  Stalin, says the author, was Lenin’s true heir.  The force that fashioned the revolution later guided the purges.

But an idea of even greater abhorrence to the Russian hierarchy as well, perhaps, to the Russian people, is the one that sees the Soviet state as a natural result of Russian history.  The serf-like mentality of the Russian people has been a weight on the liberating spirit of the country for a thousand years.  In a passage that shoots a sharp light into the discussion, Grossman argues that Lenin was chosen by the Russian people.  He was their kind of leader.

In spite of all his pessimistic assessments, he contends that the spirit of freedom lives on in the Russian heart and that it will ultimately flower even in his native land.  How this will come about in the light of all he has said is never made clear.  Very likely it was Grossman’s last wan hope.  By the time he died, perhaps there was nothing left.

Suggested Readings

Aciman, Alexander, Book Review: Vasily Grossman, the Great Forgotten Soviet Jewish Literary Genius of Exile and Betrayal, Lives Inside Us All, Tablet, October 23, 2017
 
Capshaw, Ron, The Scroll: The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee Was Created to Document the Crimes of Nazism Before They Were Murdered by Communists – For the crime of acknowledging Jewish identity, the committee’s members were killed in a Stalinist pogrom, Tablet, November 29, 2018
 
Epstein, Joseph, The Achievement of Vasily Grossman – Was he the greatest writer of the past century?, Commentary, May, 2019.
 
Eskin, Blake, Book Review: Eyewitness – A collection of Vasily Grossman’s shorter work offers a chance to reassess the Soviet master’s life and legacy. A conversation with Grossman translator Robert Chandler, Tablet, December 8, 2010
 
Kirsch, Adam, Book Review: No Exit: Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman’s indispensable account of the horrors of Stalinism and the Holocaust, puts Jewishness at the heart of the 20th century, Tablet, November 30, 2011
 
Vapnyar, Lara, Book Review: Dispatches – How World War II turned a Soviet loyalist into a dissident novelist.  Plus: An audio interview with the editor of A Writer at War, Tablet, January 30, 2006
Taubman, William, Book Review: Life and Fate: A biography of Vasiliy Grossman, the Soviet writer whose masterpiece compared Stalin’s regime to Hitler’s, The New York Times Book Review, p. 16, July 14, 2019

 

Paco’s Story, by Larry Heinemann – 1986 [Paul Bacon] [Updated post…]

(First posted in November of 2017, “this” revision includes an excerpt from Larry Heinemann’s novel…)

God’s Marvellous Plan.
Our man Paco, not dead but sure as shit should be,
lies flat on his back and wide to the sky,
with slashing lacerations,
big watery burn blisters,
and broken, splintered, ruined legs.
He wallows in this greasy, silken muck that covers him
and everything else for a stone’s throw and dries to a stinking sandy crust.
He lies there that night and all the next day,
the next night and half the second day,
with his heels hooked on a gnarled, charred,
nearly fire-hardened vine root; immobile.
And he comes to consciousness in the dark of that first long night
with a heavy dew already soaked through the rags of his clothes,
and he doesn’t know what hit him.

Am I ever fucked up, he thinks to himself,
but he doesn’t so much say this or even think it as he imagines looking down at his own body,
seeing – vividly – every gaping shrapnel nick,
every pucker burn scar,
every splintery compound fracture.

And at first he encounters his whole considerable attention on listening –
for the cries, the hoarse, gulped breathing,
the whispering supplication of the other wounded,
for water,
for Jigs the medic,
for God’s simple mercy.
(Swear to God, James, you have not heard anything in this life
until you have heard small clear voices in the dark of night calling distinctly, “Help me, please” –
though they say the crying of wounded horses is worse.
Paco waits with closed eyes and stilled breath,
to shiver and be appalled at the dry raspy voices;
waits patiently to whisper back in answer.
But he hears, of course, nothing.
(pp. 18-19)

________________________________________

Paul Bacon’s cover art

________________________________________

Larry Heinemann

Words in Print: Vasily Semyonovich Grossman (Василий Семенович Гроссман) – Obituary, The New York Times, September 18, 1964

Vasily Grossman’s obituary, as it appeared in the New York Times in September of 1964.  The item’s brevity stands in ironic contrast to the future impact and continuing legacy of Grossman’s literary oeuvre…

________________________________________

VASILY GROSSMAN,
SOVIET NOVELIST

Writer of War Stories Dies
– Criticized by Stalinists

Special to The New York Times

September 18, 1964

(Photograph accompanying book review “Perfection Is Always Simple“, of July 5, 2013, at Financial Times.)

MOSCOW, Sept. 17 – Vasily S. Grossman, the Soviet novelist and former war correspondent, I died Monday after a long illness.  He was 58 years old.

Mr. Grossman was best known for his war novels based on his experiences as a front-line correspondent for the Defense Ministry newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda.  He was repeatedly criticized in the postwar Stalinist period for a lack of party-minded orientation.  He did little subsequent writing.

A graduate of the mathematics-physics faculty of the University of Moscow, Mr. Grossman worked for several years as an Industrial safety engineer before turning to professional writing in 1934.

His first novel, “Glueckauf,” published in that year, was based on his experiences in the Donets Basin coal mines.  In the late nineteen thirties he wrote a major novel in three volumes, “Stepan Kolchugin,” dealing with the Bolshevik underground before the revolution.

In his wartime novel, “The People Are Immortal,” which is considered to be one of his best, the author avoided romantic eloquence and sought to stress the human side of soldiers in battle.

His play, “We Believed the Pythagoreans,” was attacked in the Soviet press in 1946 during a party crackdown on arts and literature.

A second novel of the war, “For the Just Cause,” which deals with the defense of Stalingrad, was criticized in 1952 for underemphasizing the role of the party in winning the war.  A corrected edition appeared in 1956.

Suggested Reading

Aciman, Alexander, Book Review: Vasily Grossman, the Great Forgotten Soviet Jewish Literary Genius of Exile and Betrayal, Lives Inside Us All, Tablet, October 23, 2017

Capshaw, Ron, The Scroll: The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee Was Created to Document the Crimes of Nazism Before They Were Murdered by Communists – For the crime of acknowledging Jewish identity, the committee’s members were killed in a Stalinist pogrom, Tablet, November 29, 2018

Epstein, Joseph, The Achievement of Vasily Grossman – Was he the greatest writer of the past century?, Commentary, May, 2019

Eskin, Blake, Book Review: Eyewitness – A collection of Vasily Grossman’s shorter work offers a chance to reassess the Soviet master’s life and legacy. A conversation with Grossman translator Robert Chandler, Tablet, December 8, 2010

Kirsch, Adam, Book Review: No Exit: Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman’s indispensable account of the horrors of Stalinism and the Holocaust, puts Jewishness at the heart of the 20th century, Tablet, November 30, 2011

Vapnyar, Lara, Book Review: Dispatches – How World War II turned a Soviet loyalist into a dissident novelist.  Plus: An audio interview with the editor of A Writer at War, Tablet, January 30, 2006

Taubman, William, Book Review: Life and Fate: A biography of Vasiliy Grossman, the Soviet writer whose masterpiece compared Stalin’s regime to Hitler’s, The New York Times Book Review, p. 16, July 14, 2019

 

Starlight, by Scott Ely – 1987 [John Dispenza] [Updated post…]

(“This” post was created in November of 2017.  It’s now been updated, to include an excerpt from Scott Ely’s novel…)

Jackson walked across the compound toward the bunker line,
looking for a bunker that looked like the one he had just seen in the scope. 
Suddenly mortar rounds started dropping. 
Jackson dived into the nearest shelter, a recoilless rifle emplacement. 
The firebase’s mortars and 105s replied.

“Hey, it’s fucking Alabama,” a soldier said.

“Hale kick you out of the TOC?” another soldier asked.

“I –“ Jackson began.

Rounds began to drop close to the emplacement and men scrambled for cover. 
Jackson heard the shrapnel whistle overhead.

“Get the fuck out of here, Alabama!”, a soldier yelled. 
“You’re drawing fire just like fucking Light.”

The firing had stopped and someone shoved Jackson out of the emplacement.

“Go get somebody else fucked,” a voice yelled after him.

Jackson ran for the radar bunker.

Alfred could still be all right. 
Maybe it was the next incoming that was going to get him, Jackson thought.

But when Jackson reached the radar bunker,
he found the bunker had taken a direct hit which had collapsed the roof. 
A group of soldiers were already trying to dig out Alfred’s body.

I don’t want to know this fucking shit before it happens, Jackson thought,
gasping for breath.

Jackson returned to the TOC and sat up on the roof for a long time in the light rain. 
Although he kept turning the starlight on, it remained dark.

After Alfred’s death Jackson wanted to put the starlight away and never look at it again. 
He understood why Light wanted to get rid of it
and how Light had known nothing was going to happen to him
all those times Jackson had gone out in the bush to meet him. 
But other soldiers had died during the attack,
and who was to say one of them, not Alfred,
was the doomed soldier he had watched in the scope. 
The soldier might have died somewhere else, at Firebase Mary Lou or even in Laos.

Yet every night, Jackson looked at the scope because he wanted to know what the future held for him. 
But he never saw himself in the scope, although he saw other soldiers die,
always shadowy forms whose identities were uncertain. 
Jackson was sure he would recognize himself if he appeared in the scope. 
Jackson was never more afraid, choking and gasping for breath,
than when he watched a doomed man’s image take form in the scope.

But Jackson gave no more warnings. 
He had learned how useless that was by his experience with Alfred. 
He never knew for sure who was going to die. 
No one would believe him, and soon his reputation would be similar to Light’s. 
Hale might banish him to the jungle.

Every night Jackson called Light on the radio but received no reply.  
He thought about going out to find Light but Light had warned him to stay at the firebase. 
Perhaps Light had seen something in the scope.

So Jackson kept watching men die in the scope,
the starlight glowing the green light,
the men’s bodies torn by shrapnel or bullets,
and as the glow faded and the screen turned dark,
Jackson was left breathless and afraid.  (pp. 130-131)

Those Who Fall, by John G. Muirhead – 1986 [Cover by Eric Joyner, Interior Illustrations by Susan Coons]

This post has been updated to include Tom Ferrell’s laudatory review of Those Who Fall, from The New York Times Book Review.  The review follows…

‘I Drop Bombs.  That’s My Job’

THOSE WHO FALL
By John Muirhead.
Illustrated.  258 pp.  New York:
Random House.  $18.95.

By Tom Ferrell

The New York Times Book Review
February 15, 1987

PEOPLE who have been in battle have a claim on our attention, as the Vietnam veterans keep insisting.  This is not because we are grateful, or even because we should be.  There’s a terrible disproportion between risk and gain, increasing with time.  The Americans in a World War I cemetery lost all they had to lose, but it would be a bold and speculative accountant of history who might try to show just how we are better off in 1987 for men who died very young in 1917.

John Muirhead isn’t dead, though men were killed in his plane and more than enough airmen went down in flames before his eyes.  He too has trouble defining his claim on our attention.  This is how “Those Who Fall” begins:

“I suppose I am like most men who soldiered for a time.  I think that something unusual happened to me; some particular meaning was revealed to me so I should set it down.  Men have been boring their wives, their children, and other men with these kind of stories from Marathon through Chickamauga, and I’m no different from the lot.  Having survived it all, I can’t leave well enough alone, but must ponder on it and remember and talk at least about one part of it that was, I think, a kind of glory.”

Mr. Muirhead, whose first book this is, is now a retired engineer.  In early 1944 he was a B-17 pilot based near Foggia, Italy, flying missions up the Adriatic and over the Alps to targets like Regens-burg, Munich and Wiener Neustadt.  For combat soldiers, the men of his heavy bomber group enjoyed reasonable material conditions: hot meals, dry beds in which they could safely sleep, even hot water at times.  Then they would rise, before dawn, to start a long day’s ride over an armed and hostile industrial society, 10 men in a contraption 75 feet long and weighing not all that much more than a New York City bus.

The chief hazards were fighters – Germany still had at that time enough planes, pilots and fuel to mount a vigorous defense – and flak.  “We edged past Pola,” Mr. Muirhead writes, “and were saluted with a barrage of flak that for all but a few bursts fell short of the low-left squadron.  Three stray shells exploded in the center of the formation.  I could see the orange flame in the middle of the black puffs.  Two successive bursts erupted off the tip of our right wing and magically an array of star-shaped holes appeared in our windshield.  …  It never seemed to us that the flak came from anything on the ground.  Not from guns that men fired.  Flak came from the sky itself; it blossomed there.”  Things got rapidly worse and stayed worse for hours; on this trip to Regensburg, a particularly horrible one, Mr. Muirhead’s left waist gunner was killed, one engine was shot out and his group lost 11 of 21 planes.

• • •

Fear and self-induced amnesia became the poles of Mr. Muirhead’s service life.  He avoided knowing the other members of his crews.  He tells us, repeatedly, that he forgot why the war was being fought and didn’t want to know.  “I work in this little parish,” he tells a nonflying officer friend.  “I’m employed to fly a bomber from here to there.  I drop some bombs there, and then I come back here – if I’m lucky.  That’s my job; I’m used to it.”

On June 28, 1944, he was shot down over Bulgaria, surviving with most of his crew.  Defeat brought a kind of relief, but apparently not only because capture enhanced his chances of living out the war.  “Peace and comradeship,” he writes, could now replace professional relations among his crew and his new acquaintances in captivity.  Though he nowhere says so, I suspect he was glad to see his responsibility diminished.  Another pilot’s error in formation that had destroyed two B-17s and 20 men returns oppressively to his memory several times in his narrative.

His P.O.W. camp was atop a hill, with splendid views; but life in it was very lousy, literally.  Also hungry and unmedicated, though it isn’t clear that his Bulgarian captors were in much better case; the Germans had stripped their unfortunate ally to support their own military machine as their situation deteriorated on both fronts.  In September, with the Russians massed on the Bulgarian border, the camp commandant opened the gate and released the prisoners.  What happened after that Mr. Muirhead doesn’t say.

WE haven’t been bored; the battle stuff has been keenly drawn, the terror and desperation, some of it quiet, are as real as can be.  There’s a lot of soldierly helling around and a lot of funny obscene conversation, funny in the way reflex obscenity can be when it supplants or augments official military jargon (there’s also a lot of effortful, quasi-poetic writing, much of which deserves good marks for trying).  And there’s enough nuts-and-bolts matter about caring for planes and running the squadron to fix the whole tale solidly in the slot of 1944 material technology.  All excellent of its kind, and it is a kind, the kind that feeds little bookstores and catalogue houses specializing in “militaria” and “aeronautica.”

But what about the glory?  Promised at the start, it begins to glimmer in the P.O.W. camp when the men win a tiny victory over toilet regulations.  “To endure we sought to win such trifles to measure the day.  We had become aliens of the poorest kind, and we had to find more than bits of bread to live on.  …  The last hour, the last minute, the last second of the last day, would come to pass, opening the way for us.  That would be the moment of our glory, our long-remembered glory.”  And so it proved, when Mr. Muirhead and two comrades, with four legs among them, walked out the prison gate and across their hilltop – a victory parade without a band.  Military memoirs don’t dare to dress themselves in glory much any more, and maybe you had to be there, but Mr. Muirhead has the courage to trust his memories.  I’m convinced he was there.

Tom Ferrell is an editor of The Book Review.

I suppose I am like most men who soldiered for a time.
I think that something unusual happened to me;
some particular meaning was revealed to me so I should set it down.
Men have been boring their wives,
their children,
and other men with these kind of stories from Marathon through Chickamauga,
and I’m no different from the lot.
Having survived it all, I can’t leave well enough alone,
but must ponder on it and remember and talk at least about one part of it that was, I think,
a kind of glory.

On the twenty-third of June, 1944,
I ended my time as a bomber pilot flying out of Italy with the 301st Bomb Group,
and became a prisoner of war in Bulgaria.
My last mission was to Ploesti.
Although that name had its own dreadful sound,
the other places and other names all took their toll
whether you feared them or not.
It mattered very little when you finally bought it.
The odds were, one always knew, that something was going to happen.
It was not felt in any desperate way,
but rather it came as a difference in consciousness
without one’s being aware of the change.
In the squadron we learned to live as perhaps once we were long ago,
as simple as animals without hope for ourselves or pity for one another.
Completing fifty missions was too implausible to even consider.
An alternative, in whatever form it might come, was the only chance.
Death was the most severe alternative.
It was as near as the next mission,
although we would not yield to the thought of it.
We would get through somehow: maybe a good wound,
or a bail-out over Yugoslavia or northern Italy; the second front might open up,
and the Germans might shift all their fighters to the French coast.
We might even make it through fifty missions – a few did.
But such fantasies didn’t really persuade us,
not with our sure knowledge that we were caught in a bad twist of time
with little chance we would go beyond it.
Our lives were defined by a line from the present
to a violent moment that must come for each of us.
The missions we flew were the years we measured to that end,
passing by no different from any man’s except we became old and died soon.

I don’t know whether any of this is true or not.
Everything happened that I have said happened,
but it’s memory now, the shadow of things.
The truth lives in its own time, recall is not the reality of the past.
When friends depart, one remembers them but they are changed;
we hold only the fragment of them that touched us and our idea of them,
which is now a part of us.
Their reality is gone, intact but irretrievable,
in another place through which we passed and can never enter again.
I cannot go back nor can I bring them to me;
so I must pursue the shadows to some middle ground,
for I am strangely bound to all that happened then.
We broke hard bread together and I can’t forget:
Breslau, Steyr, Regensburg, Ploesti, Vienna, Munich, Graz,
and all the others; not cities,
but battlegrounds five miles above them where we made our brotherhood.
It’s gone and long ago; swept clean by the wind, only some stayed.
Part of me lives there still, tracing a course through all the names.
I don’t know why.
What is it that memory wants that it goes through it all again? 
Was there something I should have recognized? 
Some terrible wisdom? 
The kind of awful knowledge that stares out of the eyes of a dying man? 
I was at the edge then and almost grasped the meaning,
but I lived and failed the final lesson and came safe home.
I linger now, looking back for them, the best ones who stayed and learned it all.
“It was as if in greeting that three of the tiny creatures came out from the boards around the stove and scurried toward me.  I was sitting on Mac’s bunk.  He used to feed them crumbs every time he came in the tent.  A fourth mouse joined his friends and, while they nibbled happily, I began the sad chore of going through Mac’s belongings.”  (pp. 66-67)

“I don’t have any damn matches.”

“I handed him mine.  He took them without a word; he struck five of them before he got the pipe going.  He had forgotten his cigarette, which was still smoldering on the bomb cart where he had placed it.”  (p. 114)

“The ground was rushing up at me!  I was moving toward a high ridge!  I swept over it, and then I plunged through the upper branches of a giant pine; mu chute caught and was held fast while my inertia drove me over a deep, rocky gorge.  My forward motion was violently snubbed, and I was sent rushing back toward a massive trunk.  I missed it by three feet, but continued to swing wildly beside it.  After a time, the motion ceased.  I hung there over the steep incline of the gorge.  The base of the tree reached deep into the slope; it was much too far to drop.”  (p. 194)

__________

In this strange life, we lived in the narrow dimension of the present.
We didn’t seek the future, for it was not there;
and if we could not move into it or beyond it,
we could not return to our past.
We were dull and listless,
but we did not have the true languor of young men
whose dreams were of worlds ahead of them,
and who saw the present only as prelude to it.

 If we were without dreams, without a past or a future,
and were caught in the stillness of the present,
our vision then became wise.
There was peace in the absence of clamor;
there was serenity in the days without battles.
If this tattered place where we lived
were to be the full measure of our lives,
we would find some sweetness in it.
A small mouse nibbling a piece of biscuit in my tent
was as wondrous as a unicorn.
The soiled streets of Foggia were full of light,
and one time when I was walking there,
I heard the pure voice of a woman singing.
I learned each day of the goodness of life.
I cherished what was given to me,
holding it just for the moment it was given,
for I knew it was fragile and could not be held for long.

__________

The Muirhead crew prior to departure for Italy.  Author John Muirhead is in front row, far left, holding headphones. Notice that the aircraft in the background is a B-24 Liberator, which the author initially flew before assignment to the 301st Bomb Group.  (USAAF photo, from dust jacket of Those Who Fall.)

The Missing Air Crew Report (MACR) – #16203 – covering the author’s final mission:  Target Ploesti, Roumania – Date June 23, 1944.  John Muirhead, as pilot, is listed first in the crew roster. 

The second page of the MACR, listing the crew’s enlisted personnel (flight engineer, radio operator, and aerial gunners). 

Eyewitnesses to the loss of Muirhead’s B-17, S/Sgt. William E. Caldwell and S/Sgt. Anthony J. Petrowski. 

John Muirhead, mid-1980s.

 

Russian Submarines in Arctic Waters, by Ivan Aleksandrovich Kolyshkin (Иван Александрович Колышкин) (Translated by David Skvirsky) – April, 1985 [Christopher Blossom]

Bantam Books’ 1985 edition of Russian Submarines in Arctic Waters is an English-language translation of Hero of the Soviet Union Rear Admiral Ivan Aleksandrovich Kolyshkin’s (Иван Александрович Колышкин) book Submarines in Arctic Waters, the latter originally published by Progress Publishers in Moscow, in 1966. 

Nautical artist Christopher Blossom’s cover depicts the submarine S-103 (“С-103“), which served in the Soviet Navy from mid-1939 to January of 1956.  The image of S-103 below, from Evgeniy Chirva’s website “The Great Patriotic War Undersea – About Submarines and Submariners 1941-1945” (Великая Отечественная под водой – О подлодках и подводниках 1941 – 1945 гг.), was perhaps the inspiration for Blossom’s art.  Certainly Blossom’s evocative composition parallels the perspective, angle of view, and rocky coastline in the wartime photo of the submarine.   

The cover of the original (English-language) publication of Admiral Kolyshkin’s book (from Ainsworth Books) is rather rudimentary, showing the Naval Ensign of the Soviet Navy adjacent to the Kola Peninsula, the location of the headquarters and bases of the former Soviet Union’s – and now the Russian Federation’s – Northern Fleet.  (At Severomorsk and around Murmansk, respectively.)   

Here’s a map view of the Kola Peninsula.  Note that the geography of the area as depicted on the cover of the 1966 edition doesn’t – hmmm – match the actual geography of the Kola Peninsula and its adjacent coastline.  Artistic simplicity?  Cold War era misinformation?  Or, both?

References

Biography of Hero of the Soviet Union Rear Admiral Ivan Aleksandrovich Kolyshkin  – at WarHeroes.ru

Submarines in Arctic Waters – at Ainsworth Books

Russian Navy – at Wikipedia

Soviet Navy – at Wikipedia

“The Great Patriotic War Undersea – About Submarines and Submariners 1941-1945” – Великая Отечественная под водой – О подлодках и подводниках 1941 – 1945 гг.

 

Damned to Glory, by Colonel Robert L Scott, Jr. – 1944 (Chapter: “Wool of the Russian Ram”) [Lloyd Howe]

This is the third post presenting an excerpt from Colonel Robert L. Scott’s 1944 Damned to Glory, which covers the service and use of the Curtiss P-40 fighter plane in the air forces of the United States and Allied nations during the Second World War. 

While my two prior posts about Damned to Glory pertained to the use of the P-40 in the United States Army Air Force (51st Fighter Group, in Assam Dragon) and South African Air Force (during the “Cape Bon Massacre” of April 22, 1943, in Desert Rats), “this” post moves to Europe: It presents Colonel Scott’s chapter about the use of the P-40 in the Soviet Air Force (“Военно-воздушные силы”, or Voyenno-Vozdushnye Sily (a.k.a. VVS)) in a chapter entitled “Wool of the Russian Ram”.  Scott relates accounts of the experiences of Soviet pilots (Aleksey Stepanovich Khlobistov, Petr Andreevich Pilootov, and Stepan Grigorevich Ridniy), and also mentions Pyotr Afanasyevich Pokryshev, all of whom piloted the Curtis P-40 in battle against the Luftwaffe. 

The chapter’s very title is a double entendre, for it’s illustrated by Lloyd Howe’s depiction of a Soviet pilot committing a “taran” – a controlled aerial ramming – against a German Me-109 fighter.  The illustration is based on an account Aleksey Khlobistov’s destruction of an Me-109 on May 14, 1942, while defending the city of Murmansk.

“Wool of the Russian Ram” follows below…

I have flown beside the Russian
At the siege of Stalingrad,
It was there I met the Prussian,
Heard the Hun cry “Kamerad!”
Impotence and rage might rankle
When my guns would freeze and stall,
Till I learned to ram the Heinkel,
Slashed his tail—and watched him fall.

WOOL OF THE RUSSIAN RAM

THERE’S a story that’s just about as wild as the winds of the frozen steppes of Siberia, a story vouched for by Johnny Alison and Herbert Zempke [Hubert Zemke].  Incidentally, these two and the same Phil Cochran of the Red Scarf Guerrillas once lived together as bachelors at Langley Field, around 1936.  How in heaven’s name this came about no one will ever know; the only good that could have come from this consolidation of talent was that one telephone-number could reach the three most eligible bachelors on the post.  Even then they branched out as the individuals and leaders they really were, and the house must have been as distinctly Alison, Zempke and Cochranish as were their respective techniques in flying.

From the 8th Pursuit Squadron at Langley, which was the first real P-40 squadron in the Army Air Forces, Alison went with Harry Hopkins to Russia.  Zempke joined him at Archangel in September, 1941, while poor Phil sweated the war out as he trained fighter pilots in the States.

P-40’s arrived at Archangel aboard transports, and Alison and Zempke helped put them together under a hard-fighting Russian officer, Col. Boris Schmirnoff.  Boris had fought the Japs in Mongolia, the Germans and Italians in the Spanish Civil War, and had operated against the Finns.  In his black Russian boots, which were always shined like a mirror, he was an inspiration of aggressive nature even to such stalwarts as these two Americans.

Here at Archangel, Alison and Zempke checked out 120 Russian pilots in ten days.  They were amazed, back there in 1941, at the ability of the Russian pilots to absorb instruction, and at their keen interest to get to combat and kill the Hun.  As a pilot’s joke, though, Johnny said the Red pilots knew only two positions for a throttle – “closed” and “full open.”

These Russian flyers were destined for great things.  From the check-out school, the Russian P-40 pilots were sent to Rostov-on-Don, where they lived in railroad cars when they were not in the air against the Germans.  One of these pilots was Senior Lieutenant Stepan Grigorievich Ridny, aged twenty-three.  Ridny’s squadron was equipped entirely with P-40’s, and it fought on the Moscow front.  There, in the first week, his squadron shot down nineteen Huns and lost three men and three ships.

In that early period of the war Ridny was one of the best-known pilots in Russia; he had been in the Soviet Air Force since becoming seventeen years of age, and he had been decorated with the Order of Lenin and had been created “A Hero of the Soviet Union.”  Short and strongly built, as he sat in the cockpit of the Kittyhawk, with his light brown hair blowing over his face, he looked the part of a great Russian pilot.  Born near Kharkov, he had met a few Americans and liked them.

From Rostov, Ridny was transferred with his squadron to Moscow, for the defense of that city.  There in P-40’s they shot down 29 German planes in two weeks.

On the Leningrad front, Major Peter Adrievich Piliutov took a lone P-40 aloft for a check flight and was attacked by six Heinkels.  He shot down two of them and damaged a third.  At the start of the new year of 1942, Piliutov’s squadron of Tomahawks supported the Russian ground troops and helped them to recapture three hundred square miles of territory from the invaders.  During the five-day drive over the frozen wastes of this northern section near Finland, the Tomahawks functioned perfectly.  Four of them shot down eight Messerschmitts and routed others at low altitude under the clouds.  On missions of a certain type the P-40 was successfully used there on skis.

But the prize air exploit took place on the Murmansk front, above the jagged ice of the frozen sea, where the P-40 squadrons were used to keep the Nazi dive bombers from attacking munition and food convoys.  It was near there that one of the Soviet pilots, Alexei Khobistoff, showed himself a man of stern determination, and proved too that his ship could “take it.”

The first time he “rammed” an enemy ship, Khobistoff declared it was an accident.  He had been trailing a Heinkel bomber for about fifty miles as it darted in and out of the low clouds of the north country.  When finally he pressed his trigger for the kill, nothing happened – the guns were either frozen or jammed.  He drew away and made another attempt, with the same negative result.  In the meantime, the German gunners fired at him, and his ship was hit repeatedly.

Undaunted, Khobistoff approached the Heinkel through one of its few blind areas and tried once more to make his guns fire.  As he took his eyes from the larger ship to turn the hydraulic charging instruments again, he struck the Nazi plane with the wing and prop of his P-40.  There was a noise like the end of the world, sparks flew from the friction of the steel propeller cutting into the Heinkel’s wing – and then the Tomahawk skipped on over, and into the low clouds.  By the time Khobistoff had regained control of the fighter, the Heinkel had crashed.  The Russian flew home to his base, where the American fighter was patched up and again flown into combat.

Later this same Russian in a P-40 again found himself in a desperate position directly astern of a German bomber.  He drew closer and closer to the tail of the enemy ship, and by expert flying passed his prop into the fabric rudder of the Hun.  Once again the German crashed, and again Khobistoff returned to his base, where mechanics repaired the plane.

About a week later, as he flew top-cover out over the harbor to protect a convoy arriving from America, his squadron engaged many Messerschmitts.  In the hotly contested battle, Khobistoff shot down two Huns, but was in turn wounded, and his Tomahawk was set on fire.  I imagine that right about there any other man would have opened the hatch and jumped.  But not this Russian.  He turned the burning fighter and dove straight down on the tail of an Me-109.  As the whirling propeller of the P-40 made contact, the tail of the Hun flew into pieces – Khobistoff had rammed to destruction his third enemy aircraft.  Then he jumped clear of the burning Tomahawk.  As his ‘chute opened, he saw the Messerschmitt strike the muddy beach of the harbor, and his flaming P-40 streaking like an avenging devil right after it.

Alexei Khobistoff was in the hospital a few weeks, but here’s hoping somebody sent him another P-40 when he was released.

To substantiate these three collisions, two of which were intentional, there are official Soviet records.  Moreover, the Russian Air Force has published for its pilots a directive on “Ramming Procedure.”  In several instances during the siege of Stalingrad, there were other pilots who rammed German planes and not only escaped with their lives, but in some cases flew their damaged planes back to the home base.  One of these was Russia’s outstanding Ace, Major Alexandrevich Pokryshev (Pyotr Afanasyevich Pokryshev), who has fifty-nine German planes to his credit.

______________________________

Comments…

Herbert Zempke is almost certainly – well is certainly! – “Hubert Zemke”.  (Veritably: “Oops.”)

Stepan Grigorievich Ridny is Hero of the Soviet Union Stepan Grigorevich Ridniy (Степан Григорьевич Ридный).  Born in 1917, he was killed in action on February 17, 1942, while serving in the 126th Fighter Aviation Regiment.    

Peter Adrievich Piliutov is Hero of the Soviet Union Petr Andreevich Pilootov (Петр Андреевич Пилютов).  Born in 1906, he died in 1960.  

Alexei Khobistoff is – as alluded to above – Hero of the Soviet Union Aleksey Stepanovich Khlobistov (Алексей Степанович Хлобыстов).  Born in 1918, he was killed in action as a Guards Captain on December 13, 1943, while serving in the 20th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment (1st Composite Aviation Division, 7th Air Army).

Major Alexandrevich Pokryshev is twice Hero of the Soviet Union Pyotr Afanasyevich Pokryshev (Пётр Афана́сьевич Покры́шев).  Born in 1914, he attained 30 or 31 aerial victories, eventually commanding the 159th Fighter Aviation Regiment (275th Fighter Division, 13th Air Army).  He died in 1967.  

The painting below is a depiction of Major Pokryshev flying his P-40E (“white 50”, bearing stars indicating 15 aerial victories) during an attack against a pair of Heinkel He-111 bombers, during his service in the 154th Fighter Aviation Regiment.  The painting, entitled “Curtiss P-40 – One of many Lend-Lease P-40 used by the Soviets in WWII, claims a He 111 over the Eastern front“, is by aviation artist Darryl Legg.

An abundance of information exists about the tactic of aerial ramming as practiced by the Soviet Air Force in the Second World War.  Notable sites include Aeroram.Narod.RU, AirAces.Narod.RU, and TopWar.RU.  Valeriy Romanenko covers Soviet use of the P-40 in “The P-40 Fighter in Soviet Aviation” (“Истребители Р-40 в советской авиации”) in a very detailed 5-part series, commencing at AirPages.RU/US/P-40