Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943 Read online

  These aerial softening-up attacks, known as ‘house-warmings’, lasted most of the day. Next morning, the Barrikady yards were carpet-bombed by Heinkel 111 squadrons, and shelled by artillery and mortars again. Suddenly the German guns ceased firing. Even before the shouted warning, ‘Get ready!’, the Siberians prepared themselves, knowing full well what the uneasy lull heralded. Moments later they heard the grinding and metallic screech of tank tracks on rubble.

  The German infantry discovered over the next few days that Gurtiev’s Siberian division did not sit waiting for them. ‘The Russians made attacks every day at first and last light,’ an NCO from the 100th Jäger Division reported. Chuikov’s appallingly wasteful policy of repeated counter-attacks astonished German generals, although they were forced to acknowledge that it wore down their troops. The most successful defensive measures, however, were the heavy guns on the east bank of the Volga, once their fire plans were coordinated.

  In the Red October plant, detachments from the 414th Anti-Tank Division had concealed their 45-mm and 96-mm guns in the rubble, using lumps of discarded metal as camouflage and protection. They were sited for firing from ranges as short as 150 yards or less. By dawn on 28 September, two regiments of the 193rd Rifle Division had also crossed the Volga, and rapidly prepared positions. Their ‘house-warming’ was carried out by massed Stuka attacks the following day. The German advance made further reinforcements an urgent need. The 39th Guards Rifle Division was sent across even though it was only a third of its proper strength.

  The German attacks grew heavier into October, especially when reinforced with the 94th Infantry and the 14th Panzer Division as well as five combat engineer battalions flown in specially. On the Soviet side, units were completely fragmented, and often all communications broke down, but individuals and groups fought on without orders. On the Barrikady sector, Sapper Kossichenko and an unnamed tank driver, each with one arm shattered, pulled the pins from grenades with their teeth. At night, sappers continually ran forward carrying more anti-tank mines, two at a time, ‘holding them under their armpits like loaves of bread’, to bury them in the rubble of the approaches. The German attacks, wrote Grossman, were eventually blunted by ‘dogged, rugged, Siberian obstinacy’. One German pioneer battalion in a single attack at this time sustained forty per cent casualties. The commander returned from visiting his men, stony-faced and silent.

  Chuikov’s divisions were badly mauled, exhausted and very short of ammunition. Yet on 5 October, General Golikov, Yeremenko’s deputy commander, crossed the river to pass on Stalin’s order that the city be held and the parts occupied by the Germans recaptured. Chuikov disregarded such an impossible instruction. He knew that his only chance of holding on depended on massive artillery bombardments from across the river. The Germans soon made Yeremenko’s urgings irrelevant. After a relatively quiet day on 6 October, they launched a heavy assault on the Stalingrad tractor plant with the 14th Panzer Division attacking from the south-west and the 60th Motorized from the west. One of the 6oth’s battalions was virtually destroyed by salvoes of Katyushas fired at maximum range. The extra elevation was achieved by backing the launcher trucks so that their rear wheels hung over the steep Volga bank. Meanwhile, part of the 16th Panzer Division attacked the northern industrial suburb of Spartakovka, pushing back the remains of the 112th Rifle Division and the 124th Special Brigade. Chuikov’s army, now down to a drastically reduced area along the west bank, felt that it was being relentlessly pushed back into the river.

  The Volga crossings became increasingly vulnerable with the 62nd Army’s perimeter so drastically reduced. German batteries and even machine-guns on direct fire ranged in on the landing points. A narrow pontoon bridge from Zaitsevsky island to the west bank had been built by a battalion of Volga watermen from Yaroslavl. This enabled a constant ant-like stream of bearers to cross during darkness, carrying rations and ammunition. Its small size reduced the target, but for those treading the constantly moving planks, the shells exploding in the river either side made each journey terrifying. Cargo boats were still needed for larger and heavier items, as well as evacuating the wounded. Replacement tanks were taken across by barge. ‘As soon as dusk falls’, wrote Grossman, ‘the men responsible for the river crossing come out of their dugouts, bunkers, trenches and hidden shelters.’

  Close to the landing points on the east bank there were field bakeries in bunkers, underground kitchens providing hot food in thermos containers, even bathhouses. Despite such comparative comforts, the regime on the east bank was virtually as harsh as in the city itself. The cargo boats and their crews, drafted into the 71st Special Service Company, came directly under the new NKVD commander, Major-General Rogatin, who also commanded the military office of the River District.

  Casualty rates among the riverboat crews ranked with those of front-line battalions. For example, the steamer Lastochka(‘the Swallow’), while evacuating wounded, received ten direct hits on a single crossing. The surviving members of the crew repaired the holes during the day, and were ready to sail again the following night. Losses could also be heavy from accidents under pressure. On 6 October, an overloaded boat capsized and sixteen men out of twenty-one were drowned. Shortly afterwards, another craft landed in the dark at the wrong place and thirty-four people were killed in a minefield. Although slightly late in the day, the incident prompted the authorities to ‘encircle minefields with barbed wire’.

  The strain of the work often led to an alcoholic binge if the opportunity arose. On 12 October, when NKVD troops searching for deserters carried out a spot check on houses in the riverside village of Tumak, they found a ‘disgraceful scene’. A captain, a commissar, a stores sergeant, a corporal from the Volga flotilla and the local secretary of the Communist Party had ‘drunk themselves out of consciousness’, as the report put it, and were lying on the floor ‘in a sleeping state with women’. Still in their hopelessly inebriated condition, they were dragged in front of ‘the chief of NKVD troops in Stalingrad, Major-General Rogatin’.

  There were the odd scandals on land as well. On 11 October, in the thick of the fighting for the Stalingrad tractor plant, T-34S from the 84th Tank Brigade, with soldiers from the 37th Guards Rifle Division clinging on to turrets and engine decks, counter-attacked the 14th Panzer Division on the south-west side of the works. Both of these Soviet formations were newcomers to the west bank. One tank driver, failing to spot a shell hole through his hatch visor, drove into it. According to the report ‘the infantry company commander, who was drunk’, flew into a rage at the jolt they received and jumped down. ‘He ran round to the front of the tank, opened the hatch and fired two shots, killing the driver.’

  In that second week of October, a lull occurred in the fighting. Chuikov rightly suspected that the Germans were preparing an even bigger attack, probably with reinforcements.

  Paulus was under as much pressure from Hitler as Chuikov was from Stalin. On 8 October, Army Group B, on orders from Führer headquarters, had instructed the Sixth Army to prepare another major offensive against northern Stalingrad to start at the latest by 14 October. Paulus and his headquarters staff were dismayed by their losses. One of his officers noted in the war diary that 94th Infantry Division was reduced to 535 front-line troops, ‘which signifies an average fighting strength per infantry battalion of three officers, eleven NCOs and sixty-two men!’ He also described 76th Infantry Division as ‘fought out’. Only the 305th Infantry Division, recruited from the northern shores of Lake Constance, could be spared within the Sixth Army to strengthen the formations already committed.

  The Germans, with shouted taunts and leaflets, made no secret of their preparations. The only question was the precise objective. Reconnaissance companies from Soviet divisions were out every night to seize as many ‘tongues’ as possible. Hapless sentries or ration-carriers were dragged back for intensive interrogation, and the prisoner, usually out of sheer terror after all the Nazi propaganda about Bolshevik methods, was only too eager to talk. T
he intelligence section at 62nd Army headquarters soon concluded from a combination of sources that the main thrust would again be directed against the tractor plant. The remaining workers there and at the Barrikady, who had been repairing tanks and anti-tank guns right through the fighting, were either drafted into front-line battalions or, in the case of specialists, evacuated across the Volga.

  Fortunately for the 62nd Army, their intelligence analysis proved correct. The German objectives were to clear the tractor factory and the brickworks on its southern side, then push on to the Volga bank. Chuikov’s risky decision to bring regiments from the Mamaev Kurgan to the northern sectors paid off. He was, however, horrified to hear that the Stavka had reduced the Stalingrad Front’s allocation of artillery ammunition. This was the first hint that a major counterattack was in preparation. Stalingrad, he suddenly realized with mixed emotions, now represented the bait in an enormous trap.

  On Monday, 14 October, at 6 a.m. German time, the Sixth Army’s offensive began on a narrow front, using every available Stuka in General von Richthofen’s Fourth Air Fleet. ‘The whole sky was full of aircraft,’ wrote a soldier in 389th Infantry Division, waiting to go into the attack, ‘every flak gun firing, bombs roaring down, aircraft crashing, an enormous piece of theatre which we followed with very mixed feelings from our trenches.’ German artillery and mortar fire smashed in dugouts, and phosphorus shells ignited any remaining combustible material.

  ‘The fighting assumed monstrous proportions beyond all possibility of measurement,’ wrote one of Chuikov’s officers. ‘The men in the communication trenches stumbled and fell as if on a ship’s deck during a storm.’ Commissars clearly felt an urge to become poetic. ‘Those of us who have seen the dark sky of Stalingrad in these days’, Dobronin wrote to Shcherbakov in Moscow, ‘will never forget it. It is threatening and severe, with purple flames licking the sky.’

  The battle began with the main attack on the tractor plant from the south-west. At midday, part of XIV Panzer Corps recommenced its push from the north. Chuikov did not hesitate. He committed his main armoured force, the 84th Tank Brigade, against the major assault of three infantry divisions spearheaded by the 14th Panzer Division. ‘Our support from heavy weapons was unusually strong’, wrote an NCO in the 305th Infantry Division. ‘Several batteries of Nebel-werfer, Stukas shuttle-bombing and self-propelled assault guns in quantities never seen before bombarded the Russians, who in their fanaticism put up a tremendous resistance.’

  ‘It was a terrible, exhausting battle’, wrote an officer in 14th Panzer Division, ‘on and below the ground, in ruins, cellars, and factory sewers. Tanks climbed mounds of rubble and scrap, and crept screeching through chaotically destroyed workshops and fired at point-blank range in narrow yards. Many of the tanks shook or exploded from the force of an exploding enemy mine.’ Shells striking solid iron installations in the factory workshops produced showers of sparks visible through the dust and smoke.

  The stamina of Soviet soldiers was indeed incredible, but they simply could not withstand the force at the central point of the attack. During the first morning, the German panzers broke through, cutting off Zholudev’s 37th Guards and the 112th Rifle Division. General Zholudev was buried alive in his bunker by an explosion, a common fate during that terrible day. Soldiers dug him out and carried him to army headquarters. Others seized the weapons of the dead and fought on. The dust-covered German panzers smashed right into the huge sheds of the tractor plant, like prehistoric monsters, spraying machine-gun fire all around, and crunching the shards of glass from the shattered skylights under their tracks. During the close-quarter fighting which followed, there were no clear front lines. Bypassed groups of Zholudev’s guardsmen would suddenly attack as if from nowhere. In such conditions, a wise German medical officer set up his forward dressing station inside a smelting furnace.

  By the second day of the offensive, 15 October, Sixth Army headquarters felt able to record: ‘The major part of the tractor works is in our hands. There are only some pockets of resistance left behind our front.’ The 305th Infantry Division also forced the Russians back across the railway lines at the brickworks. That night, after 14th Panzer Division’s breakthrough into the tractor works, its 103rd Panzer Grenadier Regiment boldly cut through to the Volga bank by the oil tanks, harried by Soviet infantry attacking out of gullies. Fortunately for 62nd Army, Chuikov had been persuaded to move his headquarters, because communications were so bad. The fighting had hardly slackened. The 84th Tank Brigade claimed to have destroyed ‘more than thirty medium and heavy fascist tanks’ for the loss of eighteen of their own. The brigade’s human losses were ‘still being calculated’ when the report went in two days later. Although the figure for German tanks was almost certainly optimistic, the brigade’s junior commanders demonstrated inspiring courage that day.

  The commissar of a light-artillery regiment, Babachenko, was made a Hero of the Soviet Union for his bravery when a battery was cut off. The defenders’ farewell radio message received at headquarters read: ‘Guns destroyed. Battery surrounded. We fight on and will not surrender. Best regards to everyone.’ Yet, using grenades, rifles and sub-machine-guns, the gunners broke the enemy encirclement and made a fresh stand, helping to restore the sector’s line of defence.

  There were countless cases of unsung bravery by ordinary soldiers – ‘real mass heroism’, as the commissars put it. There were also trumpeted incidents of individual bravery, such as a company commander of 37th Guards Rifle Division, Lieutenant Gonychar, who with a captured machine-gun and just four men, managed to disperse an attacking German force at a critical moment. Nobody knew how many Red Army soldiers died that day, but 3,500 wounded were taken back across the Volga that night. The overworked medical orderlies suffered so many casualties that many of the wounded crawled to the river bank alone.

  German commanders out in the steppe demanded constant news of progress in the city. ‘Factory walls, assembly lines, the whole superstructure collapses under the storm of bombs,’ wrote General Strecker to a friend, ‘but the enemy simply reappears and utilizes these newly created ruins to fortify his defensive positions.’ Some German battalions were down to fifty men. They sent back the corpses of their comrades at night for burial. Inevitably, a certain cynicism arose in German ranks about their leadership. ‘Our General,’ a soldier of 389th Infantry Division wrote home, ‘Jeneke [Jaenecke] he’s called, received the Knight’s Cross the day before yesterday. Now he’s achieved his objective.’

  During the six days of fighting from 14 October, the Luftwaffe maintained relays of aircraft attacking river crossings and troops. There was hardly a moment when German aircraft were not overhead. ‘The help of our fighter force is needed,’ noted the political department of Stalingrad Front in a coded criticism of Red Army aviation passed on to Moscow. In fact, the 8th Air Army was down to fewer than 200 machines of all types, of which only two dozen were fighters. Yet even Luftwaffe pilots shared the growing suspicion of ground troops that the Russian defenders of Stalingrad might prove invincible. ‘I cannot understand’, one wrote home, ‘how men can survive such a hell, yet the Russians sit tight in the ruins, and holes and cellars, and a chaos of steel skeletons which used to be factories.’ These pilots also knew that their effectiveness would soon decrease rapidly as daylight hours shortened and the weather deteriorated.

  The successful German thrust to the Volga just below the Stalingrad tractor plant entirely cut off the remains of the 112th Rifle Division and the militia brigades which had been facing XIV Panzer Corps to the north and west. While encircled fragments of Zholudev’s 37th Guards Rifle Division continued to fight on in the tractor plant, the remnants of the other formations were squeezed southwards. The great threat to the 62nd Army’s survival was a German thrust down the river bank, cutting off Gorishny’s division from the rear.

  Chuikov’s new headquarters were in constant danger. Its close-defence group was frequently thrown into the fighting. Since the 62nd Army lost communicati
ons so often, Chuikov asked permission for a rear headquarters group to cross to the left bank, while a forward group, including the whole military council, remained on the east bank. Yeremenko and Khrushchev, only too aware of Stalin’s reaction, refused point-blank.

  Also on 16 October, the Germans pushed down from the tractor works towards the Barrikady plant, but the combination of Russian tanks buried in the rubble and screaming salvoes of Katyusha rockets from the river bank broke up their attacks. That night, the rest of Lyudnikov’s 138th Rifle Division was brought across the Volga. As they marched forward from disembarkation, they had to step over ‘hundreds of wounded crawling towards the landing stage’. The fresh troops were thrown into an oblique line of defence just north of the Barrikady works.

  General Yeremenko also crossed the river that night to assess the situation for himself. Leaning heavily on a walking stick after his wounds the previous year, he limped up the bank to the overcrowded bunkers of 62nd Army headquarters. The craters and smashed timbers of dugouts which had received direct hits left little to the imagination. Objects and individuals alike were covered in dust and ash. General Zholudev broke down in tears, recounting the destruction of his division in the tractor works. Yet next day, after Yeremenko’s return, Front headquarters had to warn Chuikov that even less ammunition would be available.

  After the Germans had cut off the Soviet forces north of the Stalingrad tractor plant on the night of 15 October, Chuikov received little encouraging news from them, only ‘many requests’ from the headquarters of 112th Rifle Division and 115th Special Brigade for permission to withdraw across the Volga. Both headquarters apparently provided ‘false information’, claiming that their regiments had been virtually wiped out. This request to withdraw, tantamount to treason after Stalin’s order, was rejected. During a lull in the fighting several days later, Chuikov sent Colonel Kamynin to the enclave to check the state of their regiments. He found that 112th Rifle Division still had 598 men left, while 115th Special Brigade had 890. The senior commissar, according to the report, ‘instead of organizing an active defence… did not emerge from his bunker and tried in a panic-stricken way to persuade his commander to withdraw across the Volga’. For ‘their betrayal of Stalingrad’s defence’ and ‘exceptional cowardice’, the accused senior officers and commissars were later court-martialled by the Military Council of 62nd Army. Their fate is not recorded, but they can have expected little mercy from Chuikov.