Tank Rider: Into the Reich with the Red Army

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.

Born in Moscow in 1923, Evgeni Bessonov spent almost a year in training before he was sent to the Bryansk Front in July 1943 to serve as a Platoon Commander in an infantry unit within the Soviet 4th Tank Army. His journey to the front was a challenge in itself as transport shortages forced him and his comrades to hitchhike and walk much of the distance between Moscow and the battle lines. He would survive the months of bitter fighting that lay ahead, including being wounded in the Battle for Berlin, to retell his experiences in Tank Rider.