Arsenij Nikolaevich Zonov was born in 1925 in a peasant family living in the village of Balezinschina in the Bakhtinskij (now Kirovskij) District of the Kirovskaja County. Upon his graduation from the Factory Worker School No. 42 in the city of Kirov, from winter of 1942 until the summer of 1943 he worked as a machinist in a repair shop at a factory. In the summer of 1943, he was drafted into the Red Army; after graduating from the 32nd Tank School in Kirov, he served as a SU-76 gunlayer in the 1201st Self-Propelled Artillery Regiment, a T-34 loader in the same regiment, and a motorcycle section commander in the 94th Separate “Hingan” Motorcycle Battalion of the 7th Mechanized Corps. In total, he fought in the Ukraine, Rumania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and China. He was decorated with the Order of Lenin, Order of Glory III Class, two Medals of Valor (“Za Otvagu” – Transl.), the Combat Achievements Medal (“Za Boevye Zaslugi” – Transl.) and the Order of Honor. In 1950 he became employed at the “Krin” factory, where he works through the present day and where he earned the honorific of “Expert Machine-builder of the Russian Federal Socialist Republic”.

A.B.: At the tank school did they immediately begin to train you as a loader?

No, I was being trained as a gunlayer, and successfully completed that course. Then we started to drive out to practice shoots at a firing range near the Bahta village – and the problem was that I was too short. I was a good student in the classroom, but in the vehicle itself I had to stand on my tiptoes just to try and reach the gunsight. The shoots were early in the morning, too, I didn’t really see the target at all – sent all my three practice shells into the empty sky (laughs – A.B.). The assault gun commander was a veteran tanker, fought in T-70s, came to us straight from the hospital. When I finished, he nearly cried, and told me: “son, what am I going to do with you once we get to the front? The assault gun exists to fire at tanks over open sights – if we can’t shoot, we’ll just be a practice target for them.” I was very disappointed too – it was a bad practice shoot. But then, during my first battle, near Odessa, we ran straight into German forces and I was right on the leading edge. In my first combat I destroyed an armoured transporter, one gun and a lot of enemy infantry. The Germans and the Rumanians were retreating, and we formed up right in their path – that’s the kind of battle that was. For that fight I was awarded the Medal of Valor – the first in my regiment!
How did I manage to fire the gun? Before that first fight we did have some run-ins with the Germans, some long-range firing but nothing more substantial. During that time I rigged up an empty ammo crate to serve as a platform on which I could stand while firing the gun. The regiment’s commander later nicknamed me “gunner with a lectern”.

I got my second Medal of Valor – for destroying a German tank – in another battle later on. We were behind the Dniester River, when that bridgehead was already somewhat enlarged. The assault guns were standing in prepared positions, then the infantry told us that there are German tanks in such and such a place. We moved out, I let off a few shots and hit him in the side, I think. Then I heard shouts “he’s burning up!” It’s like this – you move out, then you start maneuvering. The assault gun commander moved us forward, I fired my shots and he immediately moved us back and to the side as he knew that the Germans would aim at the spot from which we had opened fire. In any case, I was credited with a kill – meanwhile, I’m still not really sure whether it was my target that was burning back there.

A.B.: How many shells did you fire?

I can’t say exactly. It’s like this – typically, you start by firing a few aiming shots with high explosive shells – once you’ve zeroed in on the target, then you hit it with an armor piercing round. You have to fire aiming shots first though. On the other hand, if you’re firing over open sights and can actually see the target in front of you, then you can use an armor piercing shell straight away. We were also issued specially made sub-caliber shells, 5 per combat load. I only ever got to fire one of those, for some reason they all had to be accounted for. Now regular high explosive or armor piercing rounds – they gave us lots of those.

A.B.: Were you trained in indirect fire from the start?

Well, you see – on the firing range we took practice shots after gunnery classes mainly to get used to the sound of the gun firing. I mean, that’s how I understood it at the time – everything was different at the front. At the front, you’re firing on a live target. Artillery is an interesting and fairly simple discipline. They did train us in both direct and indirect fire, how to use the various instruments. Indirect fire training was fairly simple: you have your observer, but you yourself can’t see the target. So you aim the gun and fire, then the observer gives you a correction: “too short”. But then at the front, I never had a chance to fire at something indirectly, from fixed positions. When you’re right on the leading edge, you’re always firing over open sights – that’s the only kind of targets you get. That’s precisely what small caliber artillery is intended for. The 45mm guns are anti-tank weapons, while assault guns are used to engage the enemy forces directly. War is war, and different equipment serves different purposes.

A.B.: How were your assault guns used tactically?

An assault gun isn’t meant to go in with the main attack like the T-34 tank – the tanks have armor, while our guns are completely open from the rear. This one time, at the village of Grigor’evka near Odessa, HQ ordered us to go in with the tanks. Fortunately, my battery didn’t participate in that attack – a lot of the assault guns from my regiment burned up. Just imagine – a SU-76 has two engines working on high-grade aviation gasoline. That thing could blow up from the tiniest spark, which is what happened near Dniester when I almost burned up. That was the one instance of when we went into the attack like that, and several people burned up. Seems that’s how HQ wanted the attack to be conducted.

The Dniester was forced in May, and we wound up on a small bridgehead about one kilometer deep and half a kilometer wide. If you can picture the steep shore of the Vjatka River – that’s how it was at the bridgehead, with a serpentine road leading up from the river. So 6 of the 21 assault guns in my regiment went up the serpentine and deployed to defend the bridgehead. Of course, the Germans tried to push us back into the river, but the will of our soldiers was stronger than the Germans.

A.B.: What other shortcomings did the SU-76 have, in your opinion?

It was open-topped, for one. When you’re in a T-34, you feel protected. Not in the SU-76. Of course, the fact that it lacked an enclosed crew compartment could be a good thing – one time, an explosion threw me clear of the vehicle. If it hadn’t, I might have died then and there – as it were, my greatcoat was cinged and my face burned all over, but I got clear. The assault gun just continued to burn and eventually the shells inside detonated and blew it apart. And after all that I had to come back to the vehicle…Actually, it was an interesting event. I did a very dumb thing – well, maybe I did the right thing, who knows. The SU-76 gunner serves as the machine’s second-in-command and has the right to issue orders to the driver independently of the crew commander, because sometimes the commander might not notice something important. You issued orders through a visual intercom system. The system had three lights – white, green and red. Certain combinations of lights, for example if you pressed red and green, translated into different commands for the driver: “start the engines”, “forward”, “back”. An assault gun is more limited than a tank, which can rotate its turret 360 degrees. A tank can point its body in one direction while firing entirely elsewhere, while an assault gun’s main weapon can move 15 degrees right or left, no more than 30 degrees up, if I remember correctly, and 5 degrees down. Very limited.