Aleksandra Samusenko

I’m at Sundance in Utah right now trying to pitch a variety of things I’m pretty excited about working on, so in the meantime here is an article from my book Guts & Glory: World War II, available now through my store page. It’s basically a badass history of World War II, but I phased out the swearing so it can go into school libraries without triggering a drone strike from the PTA. I hope you like it.

—

Churning up the barren Russian steppe at thirty-four miles per hour, Lieutenant Samusenko of the First Guards Tank Army glared through the T-34’s gun sights at the rapidly-approaching formation of hulking enemy Panzers, unfazed as explosions ripped up the countryside, dive-bombers screamed overhead, and armor-piercing shells whizzed past the turret.  Just one among an 800-vehicle-wide sea of Soviet T-34 medium tanks hurled into action against the toughest, most well-equipped, most fanatical troops Adolf Hitler had to offer, and with little less than the survival of Mother Russia on the line, Lieutenant Samusenko calmly ordered the vehicle’s driver to accelerate to maximum speed and the loader to slam another 76.2mm anti-tank shell into the main cannon.   

Sometimes in war – and especially in a brutal, bloody, gruesome no-holds-barred war between two countries that hate each other with an ungodly death-rage – you need to throw the tactics and stuff out the window and just come out swinging.  For Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, that happened in July of 1943, outside the Russian steppe city of Kursk. It was here, on a wide-open field decorated only with the occasional anti-tank trench or artillery gun emplacement, that the two most powerful land armies on earth fought the single largest tank battle in human history.

Before it was all over Lieutenant Aleskandra Samusenko, the only female tank officer in the history of warfare, would be issued a medal for single-handedly taking on three Nazi super-tanks at close range and living to tell the tale.

It had been a long, hard, soul-suckingly terrible winter for the German Reich.  After having their previously-invincible army stopped at the gates of Moscow and then decisively kicked in the Panzers in the frozen rubble of Stalingrad, the Nazi armies were now in the unfamiliar position of having to locate “Reverse” on their tanks’ gear-shifters and roll backwards away from all the people trying to blow them up.  All across the Eastern Front, an almost-endless wave of Soviet men and machines surged ahead, battering the Germans relentlessly across a 500-mile-front with enough guys that every German soldier could kill six Russians and still somehow find himself outnumbered. I don’t know how good you are with math, but those really aren’t great odds if you ask me.

But as the cold, mud-covered frosty misery of the Russian Winter slowly melted away, the hardened veterans of the German army knew it was time to drop another good old-fashioned lightning blitzkrieg on the Russkies and turn this thing around once and for all. 

And this time, they had a secret weapon:  The brand-spanking new Tiger I heavy tank.

Of all the awesome tanks produced during World War II, none was more feared, more iconic, or more deadly than the dreaded PzKpfw VI Tiger heavy tank.  Designed and produced by Ferdinand Porsche (yeah, the sports car guy), the Tiger was a 54-ton behemoth of steel with four-inch thick armor plating and a gigantic 88mm main cannon.  Churning up the countryside at 23 miles per hour, this unstoppable death-dealing Nazi monstrosity could blast apart Russian tanks from a mile away and then laugh while puny enemy anti-tank rounds pinged harmlessly off the hull with all the deadliness of a BB gun.  Sure, they broke down a lot and the engine had a nasty habit of bursting into flames every so often, but when you can accurately launch a high-explosive bullet the size of a golden retriever two kilometers while driving over a stone wall at twenty miles an hour you tend to forgive that sort of thing.

So, in July 1943, equipped with a brand-new shipment of Tiger and equally-dangerous PzKpfw V Panther medium tanks, the Germans prepared to launch a massive counterattack that would sucker-punch the Russkies and flip the table like a cranky dude who just realized he’s about to lose a ten-hour game of Monopoly.  The plan, known as Operation Citadel, was your regular straight-up old-school German blitzkrieg pincer attack, right out of the playbook. This time it was aimed at trapping 500,000 Russian troops in a pocket outside the city of Kursk.

By this point in the war the Russians had seen enough German pincer attacks to know what’s up, and did their best to build defenses accordingly.  While the Germans waited for their trains to bring up enough Panther and Tiger tanks to mount an attack, the Russians dug gigantic minefields, built hundreds of hidden emplacements for anti-tank guns, laid down miles of barbed wire, and dug trenches that were too wide and too deep for German tanks to cross.  They knew the attack was coming, where it was coming from, and when it was coming.  

But knowing the enemy plan and being able to stop it are two very different things altogether.  

On the early morning hours of July 6, 1943, the Germans launched an all-out attack spearheaded in the south by the elite Second SS Panzer Corps and their ferocious Tiger and Panther tanks.  With shocking speed and ruthless efficiency a crushing wave of tanks, armored trucks, and other hulking war machines from the First, Second, and Third SS Panzer Divisions smashed through the front lines of the Russian armies.  Bunkers exploded into towering fireballs all down the line as German tanks smashed their way across the plains, and anything left standing was a target for the fleet of Luftwaffe bombers that blackened the skies above. The men of the Waffen-SS, hand-picked for their fanatical devotion to Hitler and the Nazi party and rocking the best training and weaponry in the Third Reich, and these guys were as tough as they come.  So in addition to having impenetrable armor, better range, and a stronger gun than the Russian T-34s, these dudes were also veteran super-soldiers who could routinely get off two or three accurate shots from their main cannon in the time it took the Russian crews to fire once. In just seventeen hours, the Second SS Panzer Corps had advanced through the front lines of the Soviet defenses and were threatening to complete the encirclement and destruction of the Russian troops at Kursk.

The Russian commander, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, responded by deploying the entire First Guards Tank Army to meet the SS head-on.

23 year-old Guard Lieutenant Aleksandra Samusenko was already a three-year veteran of the Red Army.  Much of her background is clouded in mystery, but this tough woman had initially served in an infantry regiment during the Winter War with Finland in 1940, but because she had plenty of technical training as a mechanic she was sent to Tank School in 1941 and trained on the T-34 medium battle tank.  She’d fought Germans plenty of times, destroyed dozens of enemy anti-tank guns on the outskirts of Stalingrad, and had been wounded twice in battle, including one time when her tank was hit and caught fire and she barely escaped with her life. She’d earned the respect of her men so commandingly that she was the only woman in the Red Army (and as of 2014, in any army in history) to command a tank on a battlefield.  Leading a crew of three other tankers – a driver, a radioman, and a loader – it was her job to direct the tank, lead the troops, and, oh yeah, fire the main cannon. Which is sweet.

With no air conditioning, the crew of Samusenko’s T-34 were baking in the July heat, but they just wiped the sweat from their foreheads and kept going.  Slamming the control sticks forwards (tanks use two control sticks, one for each tread, instead of a steering wheel) , the driver gunned the 38.8-Liter V12 engine, rocking the 28-ton, 21-foot-long armored vehicle into action.  An incredible 840 Soviet tanks hurtled through the wheat fields and steppes, bearing down on 294 German tanks, including almost fifty of the dreaded Tigers. The Russians fired on the move, knowing that their guns weren’t effective against these new uber-tanks at that range and that their only hope was to get in close as fast as possible.  The Tigers took a fearsome toll, smashing T-34s and rolling backwards to keep their distance. All along the miles-long battlefield, he scene turned into a swirling melee of individual tank battles and general chaos. Tigers took out multiple T-34s only to be destroyed by a Russian soldier running up and throwing a bomb in the window. T-34s “wolf pack” attacked others, swarming them in the hopes that one of the tanks could get a clear shot at the less-well-armored back end of the Tiger.  Panzer IV tanks and T-34s went shot-for-shot with one another, and anti-tank guns and dive bombers cratered the earth with humongous explosions.

In the middle of the battle, Aleksandra Samusenko suddenly found herself up against three Tigers from the 3rd SS Panzer Division.  Telling her men, “there is no turning back for us,” she steeled her nerves and led her tank into battle, knowing that escape was not an option.  Peering through the gun sights, she fired accurately and quickly, shot after shot, firing on the move to try and give the Tigers a more difficult target to hit.  Somehow, with shells whirling around her, this lone T-34 was able to knock two of the enemy out of action with a couple super-accurate point-blank shots into the turrets of the enemy super-tanks, and then damaged the third with a shell that forced it to withdraw from the battle.  For her accomplishments, she’d receive the Order of the Red Star, a Soviet medal offered for exceptional leadership in combat. Later in the battle, her commanding officer would be killed in action, and Samusenko would seize the initiative, take charge of the battalion, and lead them out of a firefight at point-blank range with Nazi Panzers.  She’d be promoted to Captain and be given command of the unit, making her the only woman in history to ever command a tank battalion.

Her immense bravery would help save her unit and take out a couple of enemy tanks in the process, but the First Guards Army would be badly smashed up by the hardened SS Panzers and ultimately be forced back in tatters.  However, they had done their job – they’d bought time for the Russians to redeploy troops to prevent a breakthrough, and as Soviet Il-2 Sturmovik attack planes soared overhead dropping bombs on the Germans and more and more swarms of tanks and men came surging into the battlefront from every direction, the Nazis realized they’d lost their opportunity for quick, decisive blitzkrieg victory.  The Germans would lose 50,000 men and 700 tanks in the month-long battle at Kursk, and by the time the dust settled, they were back in full retreat all across the Eastern Front.

It would be the last German attempt to counter-attack the Russians in the war.