But when we were given real bullets and set off in a convoy on rails, I understood that it was no game,' the now retired father of five told The Observer in an interview at his house in the country outside Moscow.
His targets included road bridges, rail yards, road transport convoys, submarine pens and V1 rocket launching sites.
That may be the benchmark inside Iraq, where people long ago started to rail against the enormous, slow-moving American convoys that used to snarl traffic, and the often interminable delays at checkpoints manned by US soldiers.
By road and rail north: The Northern Distribution Network carries convoys, trainloads of personnel carriers and heavy vehicles through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to Georgia or on through Russia to Latvia.
In April 1943, members of the resistance group, the successfully attacked the "Twentieth convoy" carrying 1,500 Belgian Jews by rail to Auschwitz in Poland.
Prisoners were transported there by rail from all over German-occupied Europe, arriving in daily convoys.
He was unable to determine what exactly became of all the rail barges (Mr. Grant thinks several went to the Mediterranean), but said such convoys were common before D-Day.
