Zaitsev had no idea how his antagonist worked. He had killed many German sharpshooters, but only after watching their habits for days. In Konings’s case, his camouflage, firing patterns, ruses, all these pieces of the mosaic were missing.
On the other hand, German intelligence had studied Russian leaflets describing Soviet sniper techniques, and Zaitsev’s mannerisms had been bountifully illustrated by Russian propagandists. Major Konings must have absorbed this information; Zaitsev had no idea when he would strike.
For several days, Russian marksmen searched the ruins of Stalingrad through their field glasses. They came to Zaitsev with strategies, novel and fresh, but the grim Siberian rejected their advice. He had to wait until Konings made the first move.
During this period nothing unusual occurred. Then, in rapid succession, two Soviet snipers fell victim to single rifle shots. To Zaitsev it was obvious that Major Konings had announced the beginning of their personal duel. So the Russian went looking for his foe.
He crawled to the edge of no-man’s-land between Mamaev Hill and the Red October Plant and surveyed the chosen field of battle. Studying the enemy lines through binoculars, he saw no irregularity: The terrain was familiar, with trenches and bunkers in the same patterns he had memorized in past weeks.
Throughout the afternoon, Zaitsev and a friend, Nikolai Kulikov, lay behind cover, running the glasses back and forth, back and forth, searching for a clue. In the midst of the constant daily bombardment, they ignored the big war and looked for just one man.
As the sun began to set, a helmet bobbed unevenly along a German trench. Zaitsev thought of shooting, but his instincts warned him it might be a ruse, that Konings had a partner out to trap him. Exasperated, Kulikov asked: “Where can he be hiding?” But Konings had not offered a single clue as to his own position. When darkness came, the two Russians crept back to their own bunker, where they argued for a long time about the German’s strategy.
Before dawn, the snipers went back to their hole at the edge of no-man’s-land and studied the battlefield again; Konings remained silent. Marveling at the German’s patience, Zaitsev began to admire his adversary’s professional skill. Fascinated with the intensity of the drama, Kulikov talked animatedly while the sun rose to the meridian and then set behind Mamaev. As another night came suddenly, the combatants went back through their own lines to get some sleep.
The third morning, Zaitsev had a new visitor, a political agitator named Danilov, who came along to witness the contest. At first light, the heavy guns began their normal barrage and while shells whistled over their heads, the Russians eyed the landscape for a telltale presence.
Danilov suddenly raised himself up, shouting: “There he is. I’ll point him out to you.” Konings shot him in the shoulder. As stretcher bearers took Danilov to the hospital, Vassili Zaitsev stayed very low.
When he put his glasses back on the battlefield, he concentrated on the sector in front of him. On the left was a disabled tank, to the right a pillbox. He ignored the tank because he felt no experienced sniper would use such an exposed target. And the firing slit in the pillbox had been sealed up.
Zaitsev’s glasses continued to roam. They passed over a sheet of iron and a pile of bricks lying between the tank and the pillbox. The glasses moved on, and then came back to this odd combination. For minutes Zaitsev lingered over the metal. Trying to read Konings’s thoughts, he decided the innocuous rubble was a perfect hiding place.
To test his theory, Zaitsev hung a glove on the end of a piece of wood and slowly raised it above the parapet. A rifle cracked and he pulled the glove down hurriedly. The bullet had bored a hole straight through the cloth from the front. Zaitsev had been correct; Konings was under the sheet of iron.
His friend Nikolai Kulikov agreed. “There’s our viper,” he whispered.
The Russians backed out of their trench to find another position. Anxious to put the German sniper in a maximum amount of blinding sunlight, they followed the irregularly curving front line until they found a spot where the afternoon sun would be at their backs.
The next morning they were settled into their new nest. To their left, to the east, the Volga ferries again struggled through enemy mortar fire. To the southeast, under the piece of iron sheeting lurked their antagonist, and Kulikov fired a blind shot to arouse the German’s curiosity. Then the Russians sat back contentedly. Aware that the sun would reflect on their scopes, they waited patiently for it to go down behind them. By late afternoon, now wrapped in shade, they had Konings at a disadvantage. Zaitsev focused his telescopic sight on the German’s hiding place.
A piece of glass suddenly glinted at the edge of the sheet. Zaitsev motioned to Kulikov, who slowly raised his helmet over the top of the parapet. Konings fired once and Kulikov rose, screaming convincingly. Sensing triumph, the German lifted his head slightly to see his victim. Vassili Zaitsev shot him between the eyes. Konings’s head snapped back and his rifle dropped from his hands. Until the sun went down, the telescopic sight glittered and gleamed. At dusk, it winked out.
Before assaulting the factory district, Paulus insisted on eliminating a Russian salient around the town of Orlovka, three miles west of the tractor works.
The order to attack that town was sent to the 60th Motorized Division, and some of its officers complained bitterly. One of them, Lt. Heinrich Klotz, thought it absurd. At forty-three, he commanded the oldest group of men on the battlefield. One-third of them had fought in World War I in which Klotz himself had been wounded.
At a briefing, when he had asked whether tanks would support the assault, his superior answered that there were none to spare. Incensed, the aging lieutenant predicted the failure of the mission. The commanding officer angrily rebuked Klotz and told him to keep his mouth shut. Sourly, he continued, “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but we have to take Orlovka.”
In the gray predawn mist, Lieutenant Klotz sat in a hole and thought: This is going to end in slaughter. But when the time came to advance, he wearily waved his arm and led the old men up a hill.
Russian planes suddenly roared over the crest and trapped Klotz’s company in the open. Sticks of bombs exploded and right in front of Klotz, two stretcher-bearers simply disappeared. Lying on the ground, he stared at the huge hole where they had been, but he could not see any trace of them. Meanwhile, his troops died under bombs and machine-gun strafings. When the planes left, he shouted at his men to retreat and ran back to his own lines.
That night he went out with medics to pick up the dead and wounded. For hours he called the names of friends he had led into a massacre. Of the 120 men who had gone with him that morning, only thirty returned.
At 60th Motorized Division casualty stations the surgeons worked feverishly to save lives. Almost totally recovered from his broken upper jaw, Dr. Ottmar Kohler had moved his hospital to within a half mile of the front. Stubbornly insisting that all German aid stations treat men within minutes of their being wounded, he had fought the traditions of the German Army. Operating on the victims of the Orlovka battle, Ottmar Kohler knew his radical approach was successful. He was saving men who otherwise would have died, and recently he had been inundated with postcards from convalescent patients back in Germany. All of them thanked him for keeping them alive.
The determined Kohler planned to continue his campaign with the hierarchy until every soldier wounded at Stalingrad got an equal chance to survive.
Despite local setbacks to units like Klotz’s company, the “correction” at Orlovka was successful and the Russian sector quickly collapsed. But General Paulus now faced new troubles, this time within his own ranks, when he became engaged in a feud with the Luftwaffe about how the campaign was being conducted.
Gen. Freiherr von Richthofen, the acerbic, flamboyant commander of the Fourth Air Fleet, had hinted strongly that the city would have fallen long ago were it not for the timidity of the leadership of the ground forces. Paulus resented Richthofen’s insinuations, and on October 3, he and General Seydlitz-K
urzbach met with the Luftwaffe general and Albert Jeschonnek, Goering’s deputy. The Luftwaffe officers lamented the loss of so many men in the streets of Stalingrad. When Paulus said prompt reinforcements would bring success, the air force men seemed sympathetic, and the generals parted on amicable terms.
But later, Richthofen gave Jeschonnek his own interpretation of the problem, “What we lack is some clear thinking and a well-defined primary objective. It’s quite useless to muck about around here, there, and everywhere as we are doing. And it’s doubly futile, with the inadequate forces at our disposal. One thing at a time, and then all will go well—that’s obvious. But we must finish off what we’ve started, especially at Stalingrad.…”
Richthofen was now questioning not only Paulus but the Führer himself, who had “mucked about” in several directions and brought on the present crisis in southern Russia.
To get the reinforcements he needed, Paulus sent a flood of cables to Army Group Headquarters about Sixth Army’s forty thousand casualties in six weeks’ time. As a result, Hitler sent him the 29th Motorized Division and the 14th Panzers from Hoth’s Fourth Army south of Stalingrad, plus individual replacements from the Ukraine, and these troops came as green soldiers.
Their first hours in combat were especially dangerous. They had to trust their instincts, to waken their animal senses and be alert to the slightest sound or movement. If they were slow to learn, they were soon dead. In the sector held by the 9th Flak Division, six new men entered the front line one night, and one by one their curiosity led them to look at the Russian positions. By ten the next morning, four of the six had been shot through the head.
Vassili Chuikov had organized an efficient intelligence organization to keep abreast of Paulus’s plans. Reconnaissance teams regularly monitored no-man’s-land, checking changes in German strength. Sometimes, select groups passed through the enemy lines to spy on troop movements in the rear, and to capture prisoners.
On October 9, a four-man commando squad found refuge in an abandoned railroad coal car on a track between Mamaev Hill and the Red October workers’ settlement. The Russians stayed inside the shelter most of the day, reporting back by radio now and then on German activity. They had located dozens of artillery pieces firing on the city from behind the northern slope of Mamaev; they had seen columns of German field guns and mortars moving on rear roads toward a rendezvous on the western outskirts of Stalingrad. Behind the guns came hundreds of trucks, carrying ammunition. The squad sensed a mass movement, a buildup taking place inside Sixth Army’s lines. But they needed a prisoner to confirm their hunch.
After dark, the commandos snipped a telephone cable and waited for the Germans to come and repair it. A flashlight soon appeared and when the German approached the break, the Russians shot him. One of them dressed up in his uniform and stood on the railroad embankment waiting for another German to walk the wire.
Another flashlight soon moved along the track and Pvt. Willi Brandt fell into the ambush. The Russians knocked him out and he revived to find four men standing over him, asking questions, demanding prompt answers. Terrified, Brandt gave his name, rank, and unit. Further, he told his interrogators that the German 24th Panzer Division had just been shifted toward the factories, the 94th Division had arrived from southern Stalingrad, and that Adolf Hitler had ordered the city taken by October 15.
The Russians had their answer. Warning Brandt that he had betrayed military secrets, they led him back to the railroad track and pointed out the road leading to his friends. In the darkness, the trembling Brandt expected a bullet in his back. None came and he kept walking. When he was out of range, he turned and waved, calling: “Danke, Kamerad!”
Vassili Chuikov added the commando team’s information to his maps. Now that he knew the full weight of Sixth Army was bearing down on the factories, he ordered local attacks to push the Germans off balance, to delay the inevitable. But the Sixth Army threw the Russians back every time. They were too strong.
The Stukas came at first light on the morning of October 14, and hundreds of the black planes hovered over Stalingrad. Sirens screaming, they dove again and again. Although the day was sunny, a blanket of smoke from bomb bursts cut visibility to a hundred yards.
By 11:30 A.M., after two hundred German tanks had broken through Russian defenses around the tractor works, Gen. Erwin Jaenecke’s 389th Infantry Division burst into the mile-long labyrinth of shops. The works quickly became a charnel house. Millions of shards from the enormous glass skylights in the roofs littered the concrete floors, and blood smeared the walls. Cannon shells and tracer bullets ricocheted through cafeterias, and Germans and Russians lunged at each other across chairs and tables. The eight thousand commandos of the Soviet 37th Guards Division met the Germans head-on in the factory complex and in the next forty-eight hours, five thousand of them were either killed or wounded. General Zholudev himself was a casualty. Buried in rubble to his neck by a direct hit on his command post, he waited for hours until he was rescued. Later he collapsed in shock at Chuikov’s headquarters when he tried to describe the annihilation of his men.
Chuikov had little time to sympathize. His entire army was in mortal danger. All telephone lines were cut. Scattered units sent runners to the riverbank asking for directions, or whether the Sixty-second Army was still functioning. Chuikov set up an emergency radio to transmit orders across the river and then relay them to isolated forces trapped in the rubble of the factories. Chuikov told each division and regiment to hold fast.
As for himself, the commander of the Sixty-second Army wondered how long he could survive. When he asked permission to send part of his staff to the safe side of the Volga, Yeremenko refused. In the meantime, thirty men around Chuikov’s bunker died from shells and bullets, and his bodyguards spent hours digging victims out of wreckage and bomb holes.
Around Mamaev Hill, Soviet troops had a bird’s-eye view of the intense fighting going on north of them. From his dugout Pyotr Deriabin saw German planes repeatedly diving into the billowing clouds of smoke and flame. When their bombs exploded, whole sections of the plants pirouetted into the sky before descending with dizzying velocity onto the ground and men below.
At the northwest corner of the Barrikady Gun Factory, the Russian 308th Division was pushed inside the machine shops and its commander, tall, slender Col. L. N. Gurtiev, was cut off from his troops. Chuikov sent a small party north to reestablish contact, and General Smekhotvorov led the group up the shoreline, crawling beneath the awesome fireworks display as guns on both sides of the river fired overhead. After nearly an hour, the relief squad tumbled into Gurtiev’s dugout. Old friends, the general and the colonel fell into each other’s arms and wept.
Across the river, General Yeremenko worried whether or not Chuikov could hold on. Sensing an increasing discouragement in the general’s radio reports, Yeremenko decided to return to the west bank for a personal assessment of the situation. Chuikov warned him not to come, but Yeremenko had been through battles before and bore scars from old wounds. On the night of October 16, he and his aides went by boat across the Volga. With shells bursting all around, they touched shore near the Red October Plant. The sky was almost as bright as day from German flares as the party walked north toward Chuikov’s command post. They climbed over mountains of wreckage and watched the wounded crawling past. Yeremenko stepped over them carefully and marveled at their strength in trying to make the final yards to the landing.
He missed Chuikov, who had gone with Kuzma Gurov, a member of the Military Council, to meet him at the landing. While they paced the bank and wondered what had happened to their guest, Yeremenko had traveled nearly five miles along the riverside to Sixty-second Army Headquarters. On the way, several of his aides died from bomb and shell splinters but he arrived unhurt and sat down to wait for his host to appear.
Hours later, Chuikov returned and the two men discussed imperatives. Chuikov wanted more ammunition and men, not whole divisions but replacements for decimated units. Yer
emenko promised prompt action and then spoke to individual commanders about their problems. By phone he counseled Rodimtsev and Guriev, then sat beside Gen. Victor Zholudev while that normally stolid officer tried to explain how the 37th Guards had perished at the tractor plant. In the emotion of the moment, Zholudev broke down and cried as he described the annihilation of more than five thousand of his soldiers.
After Yeremenko consoled him as best he could, the front commander said good-bye to Chuikov and reaffirmed his pledge to supply him. He also ordered him to seek a less-exposed home for Sixty-second Army Headquarters.
Just before dawn on October 17, Yeremenko returned to the far shore in a better frame of mind. Chuikov had not lost his nerve even though in three days, he had lost thirteen thousand troops, nearly one quarter of his fifty-three-thousand-man army. On the night of October 14 alone, thirty-five hundred wounded had come to the Volga moorings. As these victims of the slaughter at the factories waited for rescue tugs, the river actually frothed from shells and bullets. And when some boats finally bumped ashore, not a crewman was left alive to pull the wounded on board.
Overhead, Soviet airplanes were appearing in strength for the first time. Shuttled in from other parts of Russia in the past ten days, they began to dominate the night skies over Stalingrad.
Unused to such interference, nervous German soldiers recoiled from the new menace and complained bitterly to their superiors. At Golubinka, forty miles west of the city, a Sixth Army Headquarters duty officer noted the new peril in his daily report:
The untouchable nightly air dominance of the Russians … [has] increased beyond tolerance. The troops cannot rest, their strength is used to the hilt. [Our] personnel and material losses are too much in the long run. The Army asks Heeresgruppe [Army Group B] to order additional attacks against enemy airports daily and nightly to assist the troops fighting in the front lines.
The World War II Chronicles Page 51
