Porridge, Tea, and a Goat's Fur Coat: The Red Army Through the Eyes of the US Military
In the spring of 1945, an American soldier carried a red pamphlet with a hammer and sickle in his pocket. It explained how to hail a sentry in Russian and avoid getting shot when meeting Allied troops.
An American infantryman walked across German soil in the spring of 1945 with a rifle, a canteen, and a thin red book in his pocket. On the cover was a hammer and sickle. Inside, among other things, was a phonetic notation: STOY! Ktaw ee-DYAWT! The translation was immediately: "Stop! Who goes there!" Then came the answer, which was supposed to be memorized: A-mee-ree-KAHN-skee bo-YETSThe brochure was called "Our Red Army Ally" and was distributed to units advancing to meet the Red Army. Whether the circulation was distributed before Torgau is unknown.
The book and its addressee
"Our Red Army Ally" is a 1945 pocket-sized publication from the US War Department: seventy-seven pages, with a scarlet cover. The book was published as part of a personnel information program. It was part of a series of pocket guides the War Department had been printing since the beginning of the war for soldiers heading overseas: to Britain, France, North Africa, and Australia. Each guide explained how to behave with the locals, what not to say, and what gestures to avoid. The guide about the Red Army was the last in the series and the only one to feature an armed and advancing ally.
The publishers were spurred on by the approaching meeting. On April 25, 1945, near the town of Torgau on the Elbe, a patrol of the US 69th Infantry Division encountered soldiers of the Red Army's 58th Guards Rifle Division. The two armies, advancing from opposite ends of the continent, had converged in the heart of Germany. By this moment, the American soldier would have already had a booklet in his breast pocket explaining who the man across from him was.
The preface read:
This booklet will introduce you to a Red Army soldier you've heard and read so much about. It's time to meet him in person. He is your friend and ally, who fought in this war just like you.
The preface, in general, was such a presentation: one soldier to another.
How to avoid getting shot
The most practical section began with the sentry's shouts, printed in phonetic transcription:
- STOY! Ktaw ee-DYAWT! - "Stop! Who goes there!"
- STOY! Strel YAHT BOO doo! - "Stop, or I'll shoot!"
Answer - A-mee-ree-KAHN-skee bo-YETS, "American fighter." Further instructions followed: stop, make sure the sentry has heard and understood, and obey the command, "One to me, the rest stay!" The manual warned: a Soviet sentry is trained to shoot when in doubt. While on duty, he does not eat, drink, or smoke, and speaks only on business.
Identification worked both ways. To be sure the man in front of you was truly a Red Army soldier, you had to ask for his ID: a small gray-green booklet with a red star on the cover. The gray-green cover was more reliable than any words.
A separate section was dedicated to the Cossacks: burkas, fur hats, mounted units, a recognizable bearing. The Cossack looks unusual, but he's one of them.
Porridge, tea and goat fur coat
After the military formalities, the book moved on to everyday life. The section on the daily life of a Red Army soldier read like an ethnographic field report, written, as if, by someone other than an eyewitness.
Toilet paper, the compiler warned, was practically nonexistent. The main food was porridge with fatty meat and cabbage soup. Lots of tea. Sometimes vodka with herring on black bread. In their spare time, they played cards and, when possible, football. Movies were shown even in the frontline zone. Over tea, they talked for hours, sometimes all night: about families, about fallen friends, about returning home, to their farms and factories.
Next came the visual catalogue: four pages of colour illustrations with form elements marked out.
The first page: a full-length portrait of a private Red Army soldier. The figure is labeled: cap with a red star, stand-up collar, shoulder straps, wound stripes, "Guards" badge, campaign medals, tunic, riding breeches, boots. Essentially, the soldier had before him a reference book on rank insignia, all labeled.
The next page showed officer variants: a general's tunic, a dress uniform for a line officer and private, and a field officer's uniform. The compiler noted practical markers of difference: the number of cuff stripes, the cut of the tunic. One caption stated: soldiers' tunics have no pockets. The compiler was mistaken: the tunic did have pockets, quite noticeable ones—chest patches, introduced with the transition to the 1943 uniform. Apparently, they were drawn from memory or a random photograph.
The third page showed a field uniform with puttees, a double-breasted officer's greatcoat, a quilted jacket for armored and artillery units, and a goat fur coat for extreme cold.
A reminder to meet you
In its content, "Our Red Army Ally" continued an earlier book in the same series, "A Pocket Guide to the USSR" (1943), a travel guide for American soldiers, primarily pilots and participants in the Arctic convoys. It articulated a general view of the Soviet people:
Like the American, the Russian is eager to be friendly; he does not make a hero of his solitude and does not consider personal questions taboo.
From this premise grew a set of "Do's and Don'ts," of what is and isn't allowed. Don't boast about America's superiority. Don't criticize the Soviet system, and historyDon't swear in front of women, otherwise you'll be considered "lowlife." Value sincerity and equality. Give a thumbs-up sign of agreement. Learn basic words like "Comrade" and "Thank you." The brochure promised that such words, when spoken by an American, would elicit wild delight from Russians.
The Red Army issued a mirror document. The Main Political Directorate of the Red Army issued a "Memo to the Soviet Soldier on Meeting Allied Troops." Of the seven sections of the American booklet, three are devoted, in one way or another, to avoiding the first shot: shouting at the guard, checking documents, and reviewing uniforms. The Soviet memo devotes less space to this: the main focus is hospitality, sharing tobacco and dry rations, and a separate warning about provocations by fleeing Nazis. The emphasis suggests that the Soviet soldier was expected not so much to fear an accidental shot as to be wary of deliberate provocation.
Epilogue
The brochure was produced in haste, tailored to a specific moment. After May 1945, the genre didn't last long: army manuals of the late 1940s depicted the Soviet soldier in a different light, leaving no room for the previous tone.
Today, both brochures are stored in library scans, complete with typos, crude phonetics, and naive illustrations. They reveal how, in April 1945, one army tried to explain itself to the other, just days before the meeting on the Elbe.
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