TANK RIDER: Into the Reich with the Red Army [Paperback]

Evgeni Bessnov (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2005

Now in paperback!

The dramatic memoirs of a Russian officer on the Eastern Front.

The defeat of Germany from the perspective of the Red Army.

Honest and irrepressibly frank, Bessonov's dramatic memoirs reveal just what it was like to fight on the Eastern Front. There he played a part in this clash of titans and he witnessed the shuddering collapse of the Third Reich.

The cataclysmic battle of Kursk in 1943 put an end to Hitler's hopes of victory on the Eastern Front and it was Bessonov's first battle. From then on the Germans were forced into a long, bitter retreat that ended in the ruins of Berlin in 1945. At the forefront of the drive to expel the Germans from the Soviet Union, and push on to the gates of the Reich's capital, were men like Evgeni Bessonov. A tank rider, and officer in an elite guards unit of the Red Army, Bessonov rode tanks from Kursk, through a western Russia and Poland devastated by the Germans, and right into the heart of Nazi Germany.

Tank Rider is the atmospheric memoir of Evgeni Bessonov telling of his years of service in the vanguard of the Red Army and daily encounters with the German foe. He brings large-scale battles alive, recounts the sniping and skirmishing which tried and tested soldiers on both sides and narrates the overwhelming tragedy and horror of apocalyptic warfare on the Eastern Front.

Product Details

• Paperback: 254 pages
• Publisher: Casemate (October 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932033483
• ISBN-13: 978-1932033489
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #617,109 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating Account, May 2, 2006

By 

Thomas Reiter (Washington DC, DC United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tank Rider: Into the Reich with the Red Army (Hardcover)

I just finished this book and found it to be one of the most interesting WWII memoirs that I've read. Here's what I liked about it:

1) This is the most honest Russian account of WWII that I've ever read. The author tells it like he sees it, even when it is not necessarily flattering for the Red Army: the absence of Russian fighter cover, tankers refusing to advance against panzerfausts or Tigers, fraticide, bungling, commanders mysteriously always absent from the fighting, etc. That said, the author's pride in his men and his unit's achievements is obvious.

2) Unlike some other military memoirs, where the author might start the war as a colonel and end as an army commander, this author remains a platoon leader for almost two years of constant fighting. While he seems to have been constantly passed over for promotion, he was constantly assigned to the most dangerous missions in the leading elements of his brigade (overall, this book really reminded of IN DEADLY COMBAT by Bidermann).

3) While the book focuses on the fighting, there is also plenty about rest periods, what they ate, how they interacted with civilians, etc. From this perspective, this book is vastly more informative about the Russian soldiers' experience during the war than the more highly acclaimed IVAN'S WAR and more interesting than books like FIGHTING FOR THE SOVIET MOTHERLAND by Loza.

What didn't I like? Nothing really...not many maps, but they are not really missed given the small scale of the engagements described in the book and the good descriptions by the author.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Honest memoirs from the other side of the hill, February 16, 2005

By 

Dimitrios (Greece) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tank Rider: Into the Reich with the Red Army (Hardcover)

Evgeni Bessonov took part in the Great patriotic War while he served in the 49h Mechanized Brigade of the 6th Mechanized Corps of the 4th Tank Army of the 1st Ukrainian Front (commanded by the dynamic Marshal Ivan Konev). In this book he recounts many of his wartime adventures, at least as far as his memory perimtted, because the writing was made many years after the war. Bessonov was a junior officer who commanded a platoon of 12 - 20 tank riders, the men who rode in battle on top of the Soviet tanks, mainly T-34s and later IS-2s. Although he saw much action and was wounded some times he was not lucky when it came to promotion and didn't manage to command his own company. Albeit he made the Army his carreer after the end of the war. The book is important because it presents the war from the view of a simple Soviet warrior and is particularly revealing regarding the strength of the Luftwaffe even late in 1944 (when according to history books German aircraft had been disappeared from the sky of the Eastern Front, but quite the contrary was true!) and of the qualities of the German soldiers, whom he regarded as tough, well trained, cunning and strong opponents, from whom one could expect anything, anytime. Bessonov started his wartime carreer in August 1943 and finished it just a week before the fall of Berlin, when he was seriously wounded fron an artillery shell. The book contains some good maps but many of the places mentioned are not to be found on them. I didn't also understand why the translator kept calling the artillery and mortar rounds as "mines" throughout the text.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A lucky man's story, January 5, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Tank Rider: Into the Reich with the Red Army (Hardcover)

Evgeni Bessonov served as a platoon and a company commander in the Red Army during WWII. He was posted in the 49th Mechanized Brigade of the 4th Tank Army. He served continuously in the brigade from the Orel offensive (August 1943) to the encirclement of Berlin in April 1945 when he was wounded. He was almost unbelievably lucky to survive since he served among a tank rider batallion, commanding men who rode to the battle on tanks of the vanguard of breakthrough advances. He took a part in five stragegic offensives and in each one his batallion lost at least 80% of its men.

This book contains Bessonov's memoirs about the war, covering the time between his graduation from high school five days before the war started up to his transferral out of the brigade in Fall 1945. The text gives a very vivid picture of life (and death) in the spearhead of the Soviet offensive.

As most of the books on the East Front of WWII have been written from the German perspective, this book is a valuable for giving the front-line perspective of the opposing side.

Since this book was written almost 60 years after the events, it is possible that it contains factual mistakes due to faulty memory, as do most of such memoirs that are written without a support of a diary. In particular, I suspect that most of the ever-present German "Tiger" heavy tanks were actually misidentified Panzer IV medium tanks. However, such small shortcomings don't seriously devalue the book.

In short: this book is a one-of-a-kind account of war among the Soviet 'tankodesantniki'.