The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

by Andrew Roberts

  The Germans on the right bank had the advantage of heavy weaponry, but when the Russians were able to get hold of long-barrelled anti-tank guns, and use them on the flanks of Panzers sent into Stalingrad, they could be highly effective. ‘When you’ve hit it,’ a thirty-eight-year-old rifleman called Gromov told Grossman, describing the destruction of a German tank,

  ‘you see a bright flash on the armour. The shot deafens one terribly, one has to open one’s mouth. I was lying there, I heard shouts: “They’re coming!” My second shot hit the tank. The Germans started screaming terribly. We could hear them clearly. I wasn’t scared even a little. My spirits soared. At first, there was some smoke, then crackling, then flames. Evtikhov had hit one vehicle. He hit the hull, and how the Fritzes screamed!’ (Gromov has light green eyes in a suffering, angry face.) 15

  Once Soviet reinforcements arrived at the railway station on the left bank during the battle, they were ferried across the Volga, on boats that took appalling punishment from the Luftwaffe. Grossman described how ‘Those launches that did get through to Chuikov were holed fifty to seventy times in only a few minutes. They arrived at the right bank with their decks covered in blood.’16 The journalist, who himself crossed the river under fire, fortified by ‘a huge amount’ of cider from a nearby collective farm, found the Volga ‘terrifying like a scaffold’.17 Most crossings took place after nightfall, when the Stukas could no longer operate, and sometimes the smaller launches were buried under the sand of the beaches during the day, ready to be dug up and used the following evening. The 10th NKVD Rifle Division policed the crossing points, shooting deserters and preventing civilians from escaping. Stalin believed that the presence of civilians would make the troops fight harder, but after the air raids of 23 August 300,000 were evacuated, nonetheless leaving 50,000. Of these, only around 10,000 survived the battle, including 904 children, a mere nine of whom could be reunited with their parents.18

  On 28 August, responsibility for the overall defence of the Stalingrad sector was given to General Georgi Zhukov, a commander who fully deserves the subtitle of his recent biography: The Man Who Beat Hitler.19 Born of peasant parents, Zhukov was conscripted into the Russian Army in 1914 and joined the Red Army in October 1918, serving first in the cavalry and then in armoured mobile units before joining the High Command. At the battle of Khalkin Gol in August 1939, Zhukov proved that even a decapitated Red Army could defeat the modern, efficient Japanese. Commanding in Mongolia also kept Zhukov away from the Winter War against Finland, in which few Russian generals shone. After June 1941 he assisted Voroshilov in the defence of Leningrad, being brought back to Moscow by Stalin to co-ordinate the great 1941 winter counter-offensive. He was therefore a natural choice for the overall command of the Stalingrad campaign. Although much of the war was spent at the Stavka, the Russian High Command in Moscow, Zhukov’s driver estimated that he covered more than 50,000 miles by road and wore out three aircraft visiting the various fronts. Decisive, tough, energetic, personally brave, occasionally cruel – he would strike officers and occasionally attended the executions of subordinates – Zhukov was a meticulous planner and always showed complete confidence in ultimate victory. High casualty rates never unnerved him in the slightest. It was always going to take such a commander – one who displayed the military equivalent of Stalin’s political ruthlessness – to win this existential struggle.

  Meanwhile, Franz Halder’s diary entry for 30 August illustrates Hitler’s highly strung nature as he committed the cardinal error of fighting according to the enemy’s strengths rather than his own: ‘Today’s conferences with [the] Führer were again the occasion of abusive reproaches against the military leadership of the highest commands. He charges them with intellectual conceit, mental non-adaptability, and utter failure to grasp essentials.’20 The next day Hitler declared that it was all a ‘Problem of toughness! The enemy will need his strength sooner than we do… So long as the enemy suffers losses in his approach, let him run; someone will collapse; not us. By [the time of the fall of St] Petersburg [that is, Leningrad] six to eight divisions are free.’ He later spoke of ‘World War I circumstances. Heavy barrages’ – that is, precisely the war of attrition he most needed to avoid, and probably the only type of warfare which the Soviets could win against the Wehrmacht.21 Hitler’s error in not fighting a war of manoeuvre in Russia, but instead contesting with maximum mutual attrition cities such as Stalingrad, is all the more reprehensible from one who had himself fought in the trenches of the Great War.

  Understanding the propaganda blow that would follow its fall, Stalin told the Stavka on 12 September that his name-city – later one of the ‘hero-cities’ of the Soviet Union – had to stay in Russian hands at all costs.22 Yet at dawn the next morning the Sixth Army launched its major offensive, with the 295th Infantry Division driving straight for the Mamayev Kurgan, which today contains the graves of 35,000 soldiers of both sides. By the evening of 13 September the German 71st Infantry Division had broken into the city centre. On the 14th the main railway station changed hands five times in one day, and was to change hands another thirteen times over the next three days.23

  The battle of Stalingrad is suffused with legends and, as with all great battles, some events are blown out of proportion – often by the veterans themselves – whereas other moments that might in truth have been equally important are minimized by posterity, sometimes because of the sheer lack of survivors. Fierce historiographical battles have also inevitably been fought over the fiercest battle ever contested. Generals became jealous of each other’s fame, and politicians of generals, thus further blurring the testimony. Finally, political ideology during the Cold War also badly skewed the history. One undeniably extraordinary moment in the battle, however, came at 17.00 hours on 14 September during the crossing of the Volga by the 13th Guards Rifle Division, under the Spanish Civil War hero General Alexandr Rodimtsev, which charged up the steep bank to engage the Germans, who had reached to within 200 yards of the river. Rodimtsev’s division of over 10,000 men was reduced to only 320 survivors by the end of the battle.

  Grossman vividly recorded the many perils of the river crossing:

  ‘He’s diving, the louse!’ someone shouted. Suddenly, a tall and thin bluish column of water sprang up about fifty metres from the barge. Immediately after another column grew and collapsed even closer, and then a third one. Bombs were exploding on the surface of the water, and the Volga was covered with lacerated foamy wounds; shells began to hit the side of the barge. Injured men would cry out softly, as if trying to conceal the fact of being wounded. By then, rifle bullets had already started whistling over the water.24

  The story of Stalingrad is also indelibly linked to the phenomenon of snipers, the more successful of whom, such as Anatoly Chekhov and Vasily Zaitsev, became heroes throughout the Soviet Union. With near-destroyed buildings littering the city, well-hidden sharp-shooters on both sides could keep up an accurate and debilitating fire against almost anyone moving anywhere. Counter-sniper actions became part of the Stalingrad myth, too, since flushing snipers out was costly and difficult. ‘I killed forty Fritzes in eight days,’ claimed Chekhov, who served in the 13th Guards Rifle Division. Even though Zaitsev began as a sniper only on 21 October, his supporters claimed that he shot 149 people; and another sniper, Zikan, allegedly killed 224.25 When the Germans persuaded starving Russian children to fill their water bottles from the Volga, in return for a crust of bread, Red Army snipers shot these ‘traitors to the Motherland’ as they returned from the river. The extent to which the (notoriously untruthful) Soviet propaganda machine exaggerated the snipers’ totals can never now be checked, but reports of exploits such as Zaitsev’s were good for morale, and today he is buried in pride of place on the Mamayev Kurgan. Women also made good snipers, and Tanya Chernova of the 284th Siberian Division claimed eighty kills in three months.

  During the battle of Stalingrad, the NKVD shot around 13,500 Russian soldiers – the size of an entire fully manned divis
ion – for treachery, cowardice, desertion, drunkenness and ‘anti-Soviet agitation’. The condemned men were ordered to undress before execution, so that their uniforms could be reissued ‘without too many discouraging bullet-holes’.26 Stalin’s ‘Not One Step Back’ Order No. 227 of July 1941 had made provision for each army command to detail up to one thousand men to ‘combat cowardice’. In circumstances as terrible as those at Stalingrad, any lesser punishment would probably have led to mutinies and mass desertion. ‘The only extenuating cause for withdrawing from a firing position’, Komsomol (Young Communist League) members were told, ‘is death.’27

  Burials during the battle took place at night, with volleys fired not into the air, but at the German lines. Chuikov ordered that the no man’s land between the front lines should be kept as small as possible, both to wear down the enemy’s nerves and to give the Luftwaffe as little opportunity as possible to strafe the Russian lines, for fear of killing their own troops. (Ever-present Russian black humour was at its sharpest during Soviet friendly-fire incidents, with jokes such as ‘Here we go, the Second Front has opened at last!’) 28 The close proximity of the lines meant that soldiers could call out to each other. ‘Rus,’ one German joked about the Russians’ supposedly unreliable Uzbecki troops, ‘do you want to swap an Uzbeck for a Romanian?’ There were incidents of grenades being tossed such short distances that they could be tossed back before they exploded.

  Coming at right angles from the Volga is a succession of deep, narrow balkas (gullies), which can still be seen today and which were fought over with particular fierceness as they provided good cover for both defenders and attackers, who could turn each other’s flanks if they won possession. ‘Command posts or mortar units use it,’ Grossman wrote of the series of balkas. ‘It is always under fire. Many people have been killed here. Wires go through it, ammunition is carried through it.’ Describing the German onslaught of 27 September 1942 in the first volume of his memoirs, The Beginning of the Road, Chuikov recalled that telephone communication broke down, constant smoke hampered visual reconnaissance, Staff and signals officers were killed and his command post was under attack the entire time, and he remembered concluding: ‘One more attack like that and we’ll be in the Volga.’29 There were in fact plenty more attacks just like that, with Chuikov’s headquarters having to move once more, but the Red Army somehow managed to hold on to at least parts of the right bank throughout the battle.

  The failure to dislodge the Soviets was one of the reasons that Hitler dismissed Halder as chief of the General Staff on 24 September. ‘After [the] situation conference,’ wrote Halder, ‘farewell by the Führer. My nerves are worn out; also his nerves are no longer fresh. We must part. Hitler talked of the necessity for educating the General Staff in fanatical faith in The Idea. He is determined to enforce his will also onto the army.’30 Hitler appointed in Halder’s place the recently promoted Brigadier-General Kurt Zeitzler, who had ‘a reputation for brutality towards subordinates and subservience to superiors’, and certainly showed lickspittle servility towards Hitler.31

  ‘There were daily quarrels all summer,’ Halder later told his Nuremberg interviewer about his relations with Hitler.

  The point upon which we had our final disagreement was the decision of an offensive on the Caucasus and Stalingrad – a mistake, and Hitler didn’t want to see it. I told him the Russians would put in another million men in 1942 and get another in 1943. Hitler told me I was an idiot – that the Russians were practically dead already. When I told Hitler about Russian armament potentials, especially for tank materials, Hitler flew into a rage and threatened me with his fists. Hitler issued several orders to the Eastern Front, contrary to military advice. This caused the setback. Then he blamed the army group for the defeat and claimed that they were purposely at fault. At that point I became furious, struck my fists on the table, made scenes, et cetera… those arguments were provoked by me because in twenty years of general staff work I have served with many superior officers and have not had arguments and I have always got along.32

  A fundamental cause of the defeat on the Eastern Front was the continual tension between the OKH and the OKW. Hitler resented the supposed snobbery, suspected the loyalty and despised the caution of his generals. Instead of a permanent consultative body of experts preparing situation reports and future possible operations, such as the Stavka in Moscow, the Chiefs of Staff in London and the Joint Chiefs in Washington, Nazi Germany just had the noontime Lagevortrag (situation conference), at which Jodl submitted Warlimont’s daily assessments. Hitler worked through Jodl and Keitel, whom he trusted but whom the OKH generals came to despise for their cowardice before the Führer. Orders were not debated with the Commander-in-Chief, Brauchitsch, who was simply expected to carry them out. It was a system that almost deliberately failed to use the best brains in the Wehrmacht hierarchy.

  On 30 September, Hitler made a radio broadcast promising the German Volk that Stalingrad would fall. Yet from nightfall that evening the 39th Guards Infantry Division under Major-General Stiepan Guniev was ferried across the Volga to defend the Red October Factory, an operation which Guniev continued ‘even when the grenades of German tommy-gunners were bursting at the entrance’ to his command post. The next day, 1 October, the situation in Chuikov’s headquarters was such that with the ‘Fumes, smoke – we could not breathe. Shells and bombs bursting all around us. So much noise that however loud you shouted no one could hear you… Many times the radio operator would be killed with the microphone in his hands.’ When the Front HQ asked their whereabouts, Chuikov’s command post answered: ‘We’re where the most flames and smoke are.’33 Yet all this came before Paulus’ most powerful offensive.

  The three huge factories and their adjacent Settlements were turned into a hecatomb during the fighting of early October 1942. Chuikov estimated that the 308th Infantry Division under Colonel L. N. Gurtiev fought off ‘not less than a hundred ferocious attacks’ in the course of the battle.34 At the Tractor Factory, north of the Barrikady complex, one regiment, commanded by a Colonel Markelov, had just eleven men left standing after only twenty-four hours of fighting.35 Yet right up until Paulus’ great offensive of 14 October, artillerymen and engineers at the Tractor Factory were still repairing tanks and guns with the help of workers from the Barrikady. Within the factory itself individual areas such as the sorting shop, calibration shop, warehouse and foundry became mini-battlefields in themselves, changing hands several times during the struggle. On 5 October alone, 2,000 enemy sorties were counted by the Russians, with the communal bath-house of the Red October Settlement changing hands five times. Chuikov could not find time to wash for an entire month. He took the terrible losses philosophically, saying that the experience gained in fighting the Germans ‘compensated for our physical losses. Of course, the loss of men is a bitter thing – but war is war.’36

  Dawn on Monday, 14 October 1942 saw the massive Sixth Army offensive by which Paulus tried finally to force the Sixty-second Army off the right bank of the Volga. Three whole infantry divisions and more than 300 tanks were thrown against the factory district. Chuikov sent all the women and wounded back across the Volga, and on the night of 15 October many of the 3,500 wounded had to crawl towards the medical centres because there were no longer enough medical orderlies and stretchers to carry them.37 A building has been preserved at one of the ferry crossings near the factory district, called Crossing 62, and there is hardly a brick of it that does not contain a bullet or artillery scar of some kind. The heroism of the forty-day defence of the Barrikady Settlements by Colonel L. Lyudnikov’s 138th Red Banner Rifle Division, as it was pushed back to a 700-yard perimeter on the Volga and surrounded on three sides by the Germans at this crossing, was one of the epics of a battle that was full of them.

  ‘Women soldiers proved themselves to be just as heroic in the days of fighting as men,’ recorded Chuikov. For all the ferocity of the battle, at Stalingrad women served on or near the front line, in their capacity as docto
rs carrying out operations, medical orderlies as young as fifteen carrying wounded men (and especially their weapons) off the battlefields, telephonists (one of whom was buried twice under the rubble in one day but kept on working once freed), radio operators, sailors in the Volga Fleet, anti-aircraft gunners, and especially pilots, known by the Germans as the Flying Witches. Most doubled as blood-donors. Stalingrad might have been an abattoir, but it was an equal-opportunities one. Around 490,000 women fought in front-line roles in the Soviet armed forces during the Great Patriotic War, and a further 300,000 in other roles.38 This was something Nazi ideology would never have permitted the Wehrmacht to copy, yet it significantly contributed to the Soviet war effort. Some 40 per cent of all Red Army front-line doctors were women; graduates of the Central Women’s School for Snipers were credited with killing 12,000 Germans; three regiments of the 221st Aviation Corps were women, as were thirty-three Heroes of the Soviet Union.39

  One act of particularly extraordinary heroism seen in the factory district was that of Marine Mikhail Panikako, who was about to throw a Molotov cocktail at a tank when a bullet hit it, drenching him with the burning liquid. ‘The soldier burst into a living sheet of flame,’ wrote Chuikov. ‘Despite the terrible pain he did not lose consciousness. He grabbed the second bottle. The tank had come up close. Everyone saw a man in flames leap out of the trench, run right up to the German tank and smash the bottle against the grille of the engine-hatch. A second later an enormous sheet of flame and smoke engulfed both the tank and the hero who had destroyed it.’40 Today, Panikako’s self-sacrifice can be seen as part of the superb 160-foot-long panorama in the Stalingrad Military Museum in Volgograd. Even when strained through the sieve of wartime and Cold War propaganda, such acts of courage were clearly outstanding, on both sides.