Red Army Tank Commander: At War in a T-34 on the Eastern Front by Vasiliy Bryukhov

I was somewhat surprised by the candor and openness that the author divulged of his experiences on the front during the Great Patriotic War. The majority of the text takes place from the Battle of Kursk until the war's end. The author was almost always on the frontlines and the amount of engagements he describes can be counted in the dozens. The writing style can be bland and tedious at times, and more than once I found myself having to reread passages numerous times to understand what was happening. This book will not always keep your attention, but nonetheless there are various stories, anecdotes, and events that are worth reading about every so often throughout the entirety of the text.

The author mainly served in T-34 tanks and in a command capacity, first a platoon and then a company, throughout the war. Unlike many accounts from 1941 and 1942, the author's tank brigade regularly inflicted major damage to the enemy, be they German, Romanian, or Hungarian units, as Red Army forces found themselves outside Soviet territory and liberating parts of Eastern Europe from the Wehrmacht. While some of the events recounted would look suspicious if superimposed on the initial period of the war, by 1943 the Red Army was no longer mainly launching head-on attacks but regularly looking to the flanks and rear to dislodge the enemy, encircle, and annihilate him. Although there are instances of officers issuing ignorant orders that cost many men their lives, they are nowhere comparable to the scale of destruction and devastation that 1941 and 1942 witnessed.

I was somewhat surprised by the candor and openness that the author divulged of his experiences on the front during the Great Patriotic War. The majority of the text takes place from the Battle of Kursk until the war's end. The author was almost always on the frontlines and the amount of engagements he describes can be counted in the dozens. The writing style can be bland and tedious at times, and more than once I found myself having to reread passages numerous times to understand what was happening. This book will not always keep your attention, but nonetheless there are various stories, anecdotes, and events that are worth reading about every so often throughout the entirety of the text.

The author mainly served in T-34 tanks and in a command capacity, first a platoon and then a company, throughout the war. Unlike many accounts from 1941 and 1942, the author's tank brigade regularly inflicted major damage to the enemy, be they German, Romanian, or Hungarian units, as Red Army forces found themselves outside Soviet territory and liberating parts of Eastern Europe from the Wehrmacht. While some of the events recounted would look suspicious if superimposed on the initial period of the war, by 1943 the Red Army was no longer mainly launching head-on attacks but regularly looking to the flanks and rear to dislodge the enemy, encircle, and annihilate him. Although there are instances of officers issuing ignorant orders that cost many men their lives, they are nowhere comparable to the scale of destruction and devastation that 1941 and 1942 witnessed.

Some of the more interesting events discussed are an attempted rape and the repercussions for the Red Army men involved (a penal battalion for one and an execution for the other), the creation of blocking detachments in 1944 from soldiers of the author's brigade and how they were able to stop unauthorized retreats, how enemy firing positions were flushed out, atrocities committed against Red Army nurses, and the consistent demands made of tank units in the latter part of the war (constant days of advances and combat with units taking casualties that reduce them from hundreds to mere dozens). While the writing style does detract from the readability of these recollections, as with every memoir, there are stories recounted that make the book a worthwhile investment.