The Second World War Page 50

  On the evening of 7 September, even though the advance into Stalingrad appeared successful, Hitler went into an unprecedented rage. General Alfred Jodl had just come back to the Führer headquarters at Vinnitsa from a visit to Generalfeldmarschall List, the commander-in-chief of Army Group A in the Caucasus. When Hitler complained about List’s failure to achieve what he had ordered, Jodl replied that List had done what he had been told. Hitler screamed: ‘That is a lie!’ and stormed out of the room. He then gave orders that stenographers should take down every word said at the daily situation conference.

  General Warlimont of the OKW staff, who returned after a short absence, was struck by the dramatic change in atmosphere. Hitler greeted him with a ‘long stare of burning hate’. Warlimont later claimed to have thought: ‘This man has lost face; he has realized that his fatal gamble is over.’ Other members of Hitler’s staff also found that he had become completely withdrawn. He no longer ate with his staff or shook their hands. He seemed to distrust everyone. Just over two weeks later Hitler dismissed General Halder as chief of the general staff.

  The Third Reich had achieved its greatest occupation of territory. Its forces spread from the Volga to France’s Atlantic coast, and from the North Cape to the Sahara. But now Hitler became obsessed with the capture of Stalingrad, mainly because it bore Stalin’s name. Beria referred to the battle there as ‘a confrontation between two rams’ since it had become a matter of prestige for both leaders. Hitler above all grasped at the idea of a symbolic victory at Stalingrad, to replace the looming failure to seize the Caucasian oilfields. The Wehrmacht had indeed reached the ‘culminating point’, where its offensive had run out of steam and it was no longer able to defeat subsequent attacks.

  Yet in the anxious eyes of the outside world, nothing appeared capable of stopping a German advance into the Middle East from both the Caucasus and North Africa. The American embassy in Moscow expected a Soviet collapse at any moment. In that year of disasters for the Allies, most people failed to recognize that the Wehrmacht had become dangerously over-extended. Nor did they appreciate the resolve of the battered Red Army to fight back.

  As the 62nd Army pulled back to the edge of the city, General Yeremenko, the commander of the Stalingrad Front, and Khrushchev its chief political officer, summoned Major General Vasily Chuikov to their new headquarters on the east bank of the Volga. He was to take over command of the 62nd Army in Stalingrad.

  ‘Comrade Chuikov,’ said Khrushchev, ‘how do you interpret your task?’

  ‘We will defend the city or die in the attempt,’ Chuikov replied. Yeremenko and Khrushchev said that he had understood correctly.

  Chuikov, with a strong Russian face and a shock of crinkly hair, proved to be a ruthless leader, ready to hit or shoot any officer who failed in his duty. In the mood of panic and chaos, he was almost certainly the best man for the task. Strategic genius was not needed in Stalingrad: just peasant cunning and pitiless determination. The German 29th Motorized Division had reached the Volga on the southern edge of the city, cutting the 62nd Army off from its neighbour, the 64th Army commanded by Major General Mikhail Shumilov. Chuikov knew that he had to hang on, wearing the Germans down, whatever the casualties. ‘Time is blood,’ as he put it later, with brutal clarity.

  To block the increasing attempts by troops to escape back across the Volga, Chuikov ordered Colonel Sarayan, commander of the 10th NKVD Rifle Division, to place pickets on every crossing point to shoot deserters. He knew that morale was collapsing. Even an assistant political officer had unwisely written in his diary: ‘Nobody believes that Stalingrad is going to hold out. I don’t think that we will ever win.’ Sarayan, however, was outraged when Chuikov then told him to deploy the rest of his troops for combat duty, under his orders. The NKVD did not take kindly to any army officer assuming control over its men, but Chuikov knew that he could withstand any threats. He had nothing to lose. His army was down to 20,000 men, with fewer than sixty tanks, many of which were immobile, so they were towed to fire positions to be dug in.

  Chuikov had already sensed that German troops did not like close-quarter fighting, so he intended to keep his lines as near to the enemy as possible. This proximity would also hinder the Luftwaffe bombers, afraid of hitting their own men. But perhaps the greatest advantage was the damage they had already done to the city. The landscape of ruins which Richthofen’s bombers had created would provide the killing ground for their own men. Chuikov also made the right decision in keeping his heavy and medium artillery on the east bank of the Volga, to fire across at German troop concentrations as they formed up for attacks.

  The first major German assault began on 13 September, the day after Hitler had forced Paulus to name a date for the capture of the city. Paulus, suffering from a nervous tic as well as from chronic dysentery, estimated that his forces would take it in twenty-four days. German officers had encouraged their men with the idea that they could sweep through to the bank of the Volga in a great charge. Richthofen’s Luftwaffe squadrons had already begun their bombardment, mainly with Stukas screaming down. ‘A mass of Stukas came over us,’ a Gefreiter in the 389th Infantry Division wrote, ‘and after their attack, one could not believe that even a mouse was left alive.’ Clouds of pale dust from smashed masonry mingled with the smoke from buildings and the burning oil tanks.

  Exposed in his headquarters on the Mamaev Kurgan, Chuikov was out of contact with his divisional commanders because of telephone lines cut by the bombing. He was forced to take his staff in a crouching run to a bunker cut deep into the bank of the Tsaritsa River. Although most German attacks had been slowed by fierce resistance, the 71st Infantry Division broke through into the centre of the city. Yeremenko had the unenviable task of informing Stalin by telephone, when he was in the middle of a conference with Zhukov and Vasilevsky. Stalin immediately gave orders that the 13th Guards Division commanded by Major General Aleksandr Rodimtsev, a hero of the Spanish Civil War, should cross the Volga to join the fighting in the city.

  Two of Sarayev’s NKVD rifle regiments managed to hold the 71st Infantry Division during 14 September, and even retook the central railway station. This gave just enough time for Rodimtsev’s guardsmen to start their crossing that night, in a mixture of rowing boats, pinnaces, gun-boats and lighters. It was a long and terrifying journey under fire, for the Volga at Stalingrad was 1,300 metres wide. As men in the first boats neared the western side, they could see German infantrymen silhouetted against the flames of blazing buildings on the high bank above them. The first Soviet soldiers ashore charged straight up the steep slope into the attack, lacking even the time to fix bayonets. Joining up with the NKVD riflemen on their left, they pushed the Germans back. As more battalions landed, they fought forward to the railway line at the base of the Mamaev Kurgan, where a bitter battle continued for its 102-metre summit. If the Germans took it, they could control the river crossings with their artillery. The hill was to be churned by shellfire for three months, with corpses buried and disinterred again and again.

  Clearly a number of the NKVD riflemen thrown into the front line cracked under the strain. The Special Detachment reported that ‘the blocking unit of the 62nd Army arrested 1,218 soldiers and officers between 13 and 15 September, of whom 21 were executed, ten imprisoned and others sent back to their units. Most of the troops arrested are from the 10th NKVD Division.’

  ‘Stalingrad looks like a cemetery or a heap of garbage,’ a Red Army soldier wrote in his diary. ‘The entire city and the area around it are black as if painted with soot.’ Uniforms on both sides were hard to distinguish as they became impregnated with dirt and masonry dust. And on most days the smoke and dust was so thick that the sun could not be seen. The stench of bodies rotting in the ruins mixed with that of excrement and burned iron. At least 50,000 civilians (one NKVD report says 200,000) had failed to cross the Volga or been stopped, now that priority was given to the evacuation of the wounded. They huddled, starved and thirsty, in cellars of the ruined buildings
as the battle went on above them, the ground shuddering from explosions.

  Life was far worse for those trapped behind German lines. ‘From the very first days of the occupation,’ the Special Detachment of the NKVD reported later, ‘the Germans started eliminating the Jews left behind in the town as well as Communists, Komsomol members and people suspected of being partisans. It was mostly German Feldgendarmerie and Ukrainian auxiliary police who were searching for Jews. Traitors from among the local population also played a significant role. To find and kill the Jews they checked apartments, basements, shelters and dug-outs. Communists and Komsomol members were searched for by the Geheime Feldpolizei, which was actively helped by traitors of the Motherland… There were also acts of savage rape of Soviet women by Germans.’

  Many Soviet soldiers could not take the psychological strain of battle. Altogether a total of 13,000 were executed for cowardice or desertion during the Stalingrad campaign. Those arrested were forced to strip before being shot, so that their uniforms could be reused without having discouraging bullet holes in them. Soldiers referred to a prisoner receiving his ‘nine grams’ of lead, a final ration from the Soviet state. Those who turned a blind eye to comrades trying to desert were themselves arrested. On 8 October the Stalingrad Front reported back to Moscow that after the imposition of hard discipline ‘the defeatist mood is almost eliminated, and the number of treasonous incidents is getting lower’.

  Commissars were particularly disturbed by rumours that the Germans allowed Soviet deserters who crossed over to go home. A lack of political training, a senior political officer reported to Moscow, ‘is exploited by German agents who carry out their work of corruption, trying to persuade unstable soldiers to desert, especially those whose families are left in the territories temporarily occupied by the Germans’. Homesick Ukrainians, often refugees from the German advance who had been put into uniform and sent straight to the front, appear to have been the most vulnerable. They had had no news on the fate of their families and homes.

  The political department could have pointed to the fact that only 52 per cent of the soldiers of the 62nd Army were of Russian nationality as evidence of the all-embracing nature of the Soviet Union. And even this figure does not take into account the strong Siberian contingent. Just over a third of Chuikov’s men were Ukrainian. The balance was made up with Kazakhs, Belorussians, Jews (legally defined as non-Russian), Tatars, Uzbeks and Azerbaijanis. Far too much was expected of the levée en masse from central Asia, who had never encountered modern military technology. ‘It is hard for them to understand things,’ reported a Russian lieutenant sent in to command a machine-gun platoon, ‘and it is very difficult to work with them.’ Most arrived untrained and had to be shown how to use a gun by their sergeants and officers.

  ‘When we were moved to the second line because of huge losses,’ a Crimean Tatar soldier recorded, ‘we received reinforcements: Uzbeks and Tajiks, they were all still wearing their skull-caps, even at the front line. The Germans shouted to us in Russian through a megaphone: “Where did you get such animals from?”’

  The propaganda addressed to soldiers was crude but probably effective. A picture in the Stalingrad Front newspaper showed a frightened girl with her limbs bound. ‘What if your beloved girl is tied up like this by fascists?’ said the caption. ‘First they’ll rape her insolently, then throw her under a tank. Advance, warrior. Shoot the enemy. Your duty is to prevent the violator from raping your girl.’ Soviet soldiers believed passionately in the propaganda slogan: ‘For the defenders of Stalingrad, there is no earth on the other side of the Volga.’

  In early September, German soldiers had been told by their officers that Stalingrad would soon fall and that would mean the end of the war on the eastern front, or at least the chance of home leave. The ring around Stalingrad had been closed when the troops of the Fourth Panzer Army had linked up with Paulus’s Sixth Army. Everyone knew that people at home in Germany were awaiting the triumphant news. The arrival of Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards Rifle Division and the Germans’ failure to take the landing stages in the centre of the city were seen as no more than temporary setbacks. ‘Since yesterday,’ a member of the 29th Motorized Infantry Division wrote home, ‘the flag of the Third Reich flies over the city centre. The centre and the area of the station are in German hands. You cannot imagine how we received the news.’ On their left flank, the Soviet attacks from the north were all driven off with heavy casualties. The 16th Panzer Division had positioned their tanks on a reverse slope and knocked out all the Soviet armoured vehicles which appeared over the top of the ridge. Victory seemed inevitable, yet doubts started to arise in some minds with the first frosts.

  On the evening of 16 September, Stalin’s secretary entered his office silently and laid on his desk the transcript of an intercepted German radio signal. It claimed that Stalingrad had been captured and Russia split in two. Stalin went to the window and stared out, then rang the Stavka. He ordered them to send a signal to Yeremenko and Khrushchev demanding the exact truth on the current situation. But in fact the immediate crisis had already passed. Chuikov had begun to bring further reinforcements across the river to make up for his terrible losses. Soviet artillery, massed on the east bank, was also becoming more adept at breaking up German attacks. And the 8th Air Army was starting to send up more aircraft to face the Luftwaffe, although its aircrew still lacked confidence. ‘Our pilots feel that they are corpses already when they take off,’ a fighter commander admitted. ‘This is where the losses come from.’

  Chuikov’s tactics were to ignore the orders from Stalingrad Front to launch major counter-attacks. He knew he could not afford the casualties. Instead he relied on ‘breakwaters’, using reinforced houses as strongpoints, and anti-tank guns concealed in the ruins to fragment the German attacks. He coined the term ‘the Stalingrad academy of street-fighting’, to describe the night raids by fighting patrols of men armed with sub-machine guns, grenades, knives and even sharpened spades. They attacked through cellars and sewers.

  Fighting day and night would take place from floor to floor in ruined building blocks, with enemy groups on different floors, firing and throwing grenades through shellholes. ‘A sub-machine gun is useful in house-to-house fighting,’ a soldier recorded. ‘Germans would often throw grenades at us, and we would then throw grenades at them. Several times I actually caught a German grenade and threw it back, and they exploded even before they hit the ground. My section was ordered to defend one house, and in fact we were all on its roof. The Germans would get to the ground and first floor, and we fired at them.’

  The resupply of ammunition became a desperate problem. ‘The ammunition brought over during the night is not collected in time by representatives of the 62nd Army command,’ the NKVD Special Detachment reported. ‘It is unloaded on the bank and then often blown up by enemy fire during the day. The wounded are not taken out until the evening. Heavily wounded men don’t get any aid. They die and their corpses are not removed. Vehicles drive over them. There are no doctors. The wounded men are helped by the local women.’ Even if they survived the crossing of the Volga and reached a field hospital, their prospects were far from encouraging. Amputations were carried out hurriedly. Many were evacuated in hospital trains to Tashkent. One soldier recorded how, in his ward of fourteen soldiers from Stalingrad, just five men had ‘a full set of limbs’.

  The Germans, dismayed to have lost their advantages of manoeuvre, dubbed this new form of combat ‘Rattenkrieg’, the war of rats. Their commanders, appalled by the intimate savagery of the fighting in which their casualties mounted at a terrifying rate, felt that they were being forced back to the tactics of the First World War. They tried to respond with storm-groups, but their soldiers did not like fighting at night. And their sentries, frightened by the idea of Siberians creeping up to seize them as ‘tongues’ for interrogation, panicked at the slightest sound and began firing. The Sixth Army’s expenditure of ammunition in September alone exceeded twenty-five million
rounds. ‘Germans are fighting without counting ammunition,’ the Special Detachment reported back to Beria in Moscow. ‘Field guns can fire at just one man while we begrudge a machine gun a belt of rounds.’ Yet German soldiers were also writing home to complain of short rations and hunger pains. ‘You can’t imagine what I am experiencing here,’ wrote one. ‘Some dogs ran by the other day and I shot one, but the one that I shot turned out to be very thin.’

  Other means were used to wear down the Germans and prevent them getting any rest. The 588th Night Bomber Regiment specialized in flying their obsolete Po-2 biplanes low over the German lines at night and switching off their engines as they made their bombing run. The ghostly swish made a sinister noise. These outstandingly brave pilots were all young women. They were soon dubbed the ‘Night Witches’, first by the Germans and then by their own side.

  During the day psychological pressure was exerted by sniper teams. At first, sniper activity was random and ill planned. But soon Soviet divisional commanders recognized its worth in striking fear into the enemy and bolstering the morale of their own men. ‘Sniperism’ was raised to a cult by political officers, and as a result one has to be fairly cautious about many of the Stakhanovite claims made about their achievements, especially when propaganda turned ace snipers almost into the equivalent of football stars. The most famous sniper in Stalingrad, Vasily Zaitsev, who was not the highest performer, was probably promoted because he belonged to Colonel Nikolai Batyuk’s 284th Rifle Division of Siberians, a formation favoured by Chuikov. The army commander was jealous of the publicity given to Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards Rifle Division, so its star sniper Anatoly Chekhov received less attention.

  The broken terrain of the smashed city and the closeness of the front lines were ideal. Snipers could hide themselves almost anywhere. A high building offered a far greater field of fire, but escape afterwards became much more dangerous. Vasily Grossman, the correspondent soldiers trusted the most, was even allowed to accompany the nineteen-year-old Chekhov on one of his expeditions. Chekhov, a quiet introverted boy, recounted his experiences to Grossman during long interviews. He described how he selected his victims from their uniforms. Officers were a priority target, especially artillery spotters. So were soldiers fetching water when German soldiers were tortured by thirst. There are even reports that snipers were ordered to shoot down starving Russian children, bribed by German soldiers with crusts of bread to fill their water bottles from the Volga. And Soviet snipers had no qualms about shooting any Russian women seen with the Germans.