storehouses 884.sto.003 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

The battles were huge here: there were hundreds of tanks, and on both fronts thousands of tanks on both sides, fighting each other. The artillery force was enormous. So our weapon storehouses were emptying very quickly, not so much of tanks, but artillery ammunition was running low. And what was worse was that we had tanks and soldiers hit. Tanks we managed to fix, but wounded people returning from hospitals to the battlefront - some of them did, but most didn't. And then we had a need for soldiers; we had to mobilize everyone. And it was only later, when people came from abroad, students came from abroad, that they were sent directly to the front, and we managed to man more tanks and to put them into battle. There were tanks we had to repair. Our repair system, our ammunition system, worked on the battlefield and in workshops inside the country, and each tank was repaired quickly and sent back into battle; and it was lucky that we could concentrate people quickly and to form teams quickly and to man the tanks. So our main problem was that we had suffered great losses in men and tanks. The tanks we managed to fix, but the problem was how to man the tanks and send them back into battle. To give an example: on the second day of the war, my division consisted of about 100 tanks, and 10 days later I had almost 250 tanks. I got reinforcements: I got a whole battalion of students mobilized from abroad; I got soldiers thareturned from hospitals. During the war we managed to strengthen [increase our strength].