Volga ferries.
Chuikov, returning from a visit to the east side of the Volga a few days later, describes the scene at one of the ferries:
From time to time a German shell would burst in the river, but this indiscriminate shelling was not dangerous... From a distance we could see that the pier was
crowded with people. As we drew closer many wounded were being carried out of
trenches, bomb-craters and shelters. There were also many people with bundles and suitcases who had been hiding from German bombs and shells. When they saw the
ferry arriving they rushed to the pier, with the one desire of getting away to the other side of the river, away from their wrecked houses, away from a city that had become a hell. Their eyes were grim and there were trickles of tears running
through the dust and soot on their grimy faces. The children, suffering from thirst and hunger, were not crying, but simply whining, and stretching out their little
arms to the water of the Volga.
During the last week of August and the first ten days of September, the Germans were advancing on Stalingrad from all directions, despite stiff Russian resistance; they had great superiority in weapons, above all in aircraft. By September 10 they broke through to the Volga south of Stalingrad, near Kuporosnoye, cutting the 62nd Army from the 64th.
As a result the 62nd Army was isolated within an irregular German "horse-shoe" of which the northern tip reached the Volga at Rynok and the southern tip at Kuporosnoye, about twenty miles downstream. At the time, the German air force did as many as 3,000
sorties a day; the Russians barely did more than 300. Nor did the Russians have any tanks to speak of.
The enemy had complete air superiority. This had a particularly depressing effect on our troops; and we were feverishly trying to think up some solution... A part of our anti-aircraft defences had been completely smashed, and most of the rest were moved to the left bank of the Volga. Here the guns could fire at German planes
hovering over the river and over a narrow stretch of the right bank; this, however, did not prevent German planes from being suspended over the city and the river
from dawn to dusk...
By September 10, morale among the troops was still very low.
The heavy casualties, the constant retreat, the shortage of food and munitions, the difficulty of receiving reinforcements ... —all this had a very bad effect on morale.
Many longed to get across the Volga, to escape the hell of Stalingrad... On
September 14 I met the former commander of the 62nd Army [Lopatin]; I was
struck by his mood of despair, by his feeling that it was impossible and pointless to fight for Stalingrad... As politely as possible, I suggested he report to the War Council [on the other side of the Volga]—in other words leave Stalingrad altogether.
This depressed mood of the former commander of the army was contagious... Three
of my aides, the men in charge of tanks, artillery and the engineering troops, all claiming to be ill, hastened to go beyond the Volga... All this was beginning to affect the ordinary troops...
Chuikov, aided by Divisional Commissar Gurov, General Krylov, and others proceeded
to give a number of pep-talks to the troops; about the same time, the War Council of the Stalingrad Front issued its famous order: "The enemy must be smashed at Stalingrad."
This had an electrifying effect on all the officers, soldiers and political personnel of the 62nd Army.
The German "horse-shoe" varied in depth; apart from a Russian salient at Orlovka in the north, the western extremity of which was about eleven miles from the Volga, the rest of the 62nd Army's bridgehead was, on an average, about five miles deep on September 13, before the first of the great German offensives against Stalingrad proper. The principal landmarks, from north to south, were Rynok (to the north of which the Germans had
crashed through to the Volga on August 23), Spartakovka Garden City, then the
Stalingrad Tractor Plant Garden City, with the Tractor plant itself nearer the Volga; then, the Barricades Garden City, and the Barricades Plant, to the east of it, also on the river bank; south of that, also on the river, was the Red October Plant, and slightly to the south-west, the Red October Garden City, south of which was the famous Mamai Hill,
the highest point in Stalingrad, for which ferocious fighting was to go on for months.
Mamai Hill marked, as it were, the border between the industrial north of Stalingrad and the business, administrative and residential south of the city, with its two railway stations, its Red Army House, its Univermag (department store), and other buildings that were to become famous during the later stages of the battle.
It was on September 12, two days after the 62nd Army had been isolated from the rest of the Soviet troops that Chuikov was appointed commander of the 62nd Army. The gloomy
Lopatin had been relieved of his command, and his chief of staff, General Krylov, who had had a fine record at Odessa and Sebastopol, had been temporarily in charge. Having been appointed commander of the 62nd Army by the War Council of the Stalingrad
Front, "with Comrade Stalin's approval", Chuikov declared to Khrushchev and Yeremenko: "We shall either hold the city or die there." Khrushchev assured him that all possible help would be given to Stalingrad's defenders. Chuikov kept on Krylov as his chief of staff.
The big German offensive started on September 13. Its main aim was to capture Mamai
Hill, the central part of Stalingrad, and so break through to the Volga. Chuikov's
command post was at first right on top of Mamai Hill, but:
The constant bombing and shelling of the hill continuously smashed our
communications, which made it impossible to direct the troops... So we moved to the Tsaritsa ravine, leaving only an observation post on top of the hill... During that whole day of the 13th, none of us, either officer or soldier, had had anything to eat.
Our lunch was being cooked in a small house on the side of the hill, but an enemy bomb destroyed both the kitchen and our lunch. Our cook tried to cook our dinner
in a field kitchen, but this was also smashed by a direct hit. Our cook wasn't going to waste any more food on us, so we stayed hungry all day. Glinka, our cook, and
Tasya, our waitress, were delighted when we transferred them to the new command
post.
This was a large, roomy and well-protected dugout, near the Volga, and between the two railway stations, which had earlier been the H.Q. of the Stalingrad Front.
Chuikov describes how, after their initial successes on the 13th, the Germans, now full of confidence, proceeded to occupy the central part of Stalingrad.
Our counter-attacks before daybreak were not unsuccessful at first; but once the
sun had risen German planes, in groups of fifty or sixty, proceeded to bomb our
counter-attacking forces non-stop... Our counter-attack failed. By noon, the enemy brought into action numerous tanks and motorised infantry... The main blow was
aimed at the Central Station. This was an attack of exceptional strength. Despite enormous losses, the Germans were now crashing ahead. Whole columns of tanks
and motorised infantry were breaking into the centre of the city. The Nazis were
now apparently convinced that the fate of Stalingrad was sealed, and they hurried towards the Volga... Our soldiers—snipers, anti-tank gunners, artillery-men, lying in wait in houses, cellars and firing-points, could watch the drunken Nazis jumping off the trucks, playing mouth organs, bellowing and dancing on the pavements.
Hundreds of them were killed, but more and more German troops were flooding the
centre of Stalingrad. The fighting was now within 800 yards of the 62nd Army's
command post. That night, Chuikov threw in his small reserve of nineteen tanks, to stop the Germans from breaking through to the Volga and to the Army H.Q.
It was during the critical night of September 14-15 that the famou
s Rodimtsev Division, 10,000 strong, began to arrive across the Volga.
Except for anti-tanks guns, the bulk of the division's artillery was to stay on the left bank.
Two infantry regiments of the Rodimtsev division were ordered to "clear the centre of Stalingrad " of the Germans, and another was ordered to occupy Mamai Hill and dig in there. Throughout the 15th, the fighting was extremely heavy; the Central Railway
Station changed hands several times, and, by the end of the day "it was hard to decide who was in possession of Mamai Hill". However, on the morning of the 16th, Mamai Hill was recaptured by the Russians, and the fighting for the Hill was to continue almost uninterruptedly until the end of January.
It was at the height of this fighting that the troops of the Stalingrad Front attempted to break through the German "Rynok" salient from the north. Chuikov tells with some irony how this offensive, conducted by Yeremenko and his deputy, the same old Gordov, came to nothing. For a few hours on September 18 the Stalingrad sky was clear of German
aircraft; they had gone to deal with the attempted Yeremenko breakthrough; soon
afterwards they were back over Stalingrad.
During that day the fighting was chiefly on Mamai Hill and around the Central Station.
The top of Mamai Hill was again recaptured "by the remnants of Sologub's division" and Colonel Yelin's regiment, which had advanced between 100 and 150 yards that day. On
the other hand, the Central Station was lost to the Germans that night, after five days'
bloody, often hand-to-hand fighting.
By this time [Chuikov relates] we had nothing left with which to counter-attack.
General Rodimtsev's 13th Division had been bled white. It had entered the fray
from the moment it crossed the Volga, and had borne the brunt of the heaviest
German blows... They had had to abandon several blocks of houses inside central
Stalingrad, but this could not be described as a withdrawal or a retreat. There was nobody left to retreat. Rodimtsev's guardsmen stood firm to the last extremity, and only the heavily-wounded crawled away... From what these wounded told us, it
transpired that the Nazis, having captured the station, continued to suffer heavy losses. Our soldiers, having been cut off from the main forces of the division, had entrenched themselves in various buildings around the station, or under railway
carriages— usually in groups of two or three men—and from there they continued
to harass the Germans night and day...
There is no doubt, as Chuikov himself admits, that it was the men of the Rodimtsev
Division who saved Stalingrad during the second half of September. But he pays this
tribute a little reluctantly: the reason being that, for months afterwards, the Rodimtsev Division continued to receive incomparably more publicity in the Soviet press (and,
consequently, throughout the world) than any other. In reality, it had suffered such appalling losses that, after the end of September, it played only a minor part in the Stalingrad fighting and occupied a relatively quiet sector.
Supplies for the 62nd Army inside Stalingrad had all to come from across the Volga; and the river, which is over a mile wide at Stalingrad, was under constant bombing during the day, and artillery and mortar fire during the night.
Units which had succeeded in crossing the Volga during the night, had to be put in position at. once, before dawn, and all supplies had to be immediately distributed among the troops, since they would otherwise have been destroyed by bombing...
We had neither horses nor cars ... everything that was brought across the Volga had to be carried to the firing line by the soldiers themselves—those very soldiers who, during the day, had to repel fierce enemy attacks and who at night, without sleep or respite, had to carry ammunitions, food and engineering equipment to the front
lines. This was terribly exhausting, and inevitably lowered their fighting capacity; and yet, that is how it went on in Stalingrad, day after day, and week after week, as long as the Battle of Stalingrad continued.
Another absolutely vital factor of the Stalingrad fighting (but one to which Chuikov refers as little as possible) was that practically all the artillery, katyusha mortars, etc.—
were on the other side of the Volga, and these represented a formidable force. Victor Nekrasov, the future novelist, who spent virtually the whole of the Stalingrad battle as a lieutenant of the Batyuk Division, in the Mamai Hill sector, told me:
Especially towards the end of October, when we had nothing but a few small
bridgeheads left on the right bank of the river, the number of troops there was
extremely small. Perhaps 20,000 in all.
[A leading Soviet military expert, General Talensky, in speaking to me about Stalingrad in 1945, put the figure rather higher: about 40,000. There was, he said, physically no possibility of having more people on the bridgeheads,]
But, on the other hand, the other side of the Volga was a real ant-heap. It was there that all the supply services, the artillery, air-force, etc. were concentrated. And it was they who made it hell for the Germans.
Exactly the same point is made by Konstantin Simonov in his new novel, Men Are Not Born Soldiers, an important corrective to the Chuikov story:
We could certainly not have held Stalingrad had we not been supported by artillery and
katyushas on the other bank all the time. I can hardly describe the soldiers' love for them... And as time went on, there were more and more and more of them, and we
could feel it. It was hard to imagine at the time that there was such a concentration of guns firing their shells at the Germans, morning, noon and night, over our
heads !
[Znamia, No. 11, 1963, p. 7.]
Even so, to the Russians on the bridgeheads, Stalingrad continued to be a peculiar kind of hell. Thus, of the reinforcements that came from across the river Nekrasov told me:
There were times when these reinforcements were really pathetic. They'd bring
across the river—with great difficulty—say, twenty new soldiers: either old chaps of fifty or fifty-five, or youngsters of eighteen or nineteen. They would stand there on the shore, shivering with cold and fear. They'd be given warm clothing and then
taken to the front line. By the time these newcomers reached this line, five or ten out of twenty had already been killed by German shells; for with those German flares
over the Volga and our front lines, there was never complete darkness. But the
peculiar thing about these chaps was that those among them who reached the front
line very quickly became wonderfully hardened soldiers. Real frontoviks.
In his account Chuikov refers to several "critical" days at Stalingrad, between September 12, when he took over the command of the 62nd Army and the middle of November,
when the last German offensive failed. In fact, every day was "critical", except that some days were even more so than others. Thus, September 21 and 22— i.e. a week after the Rodimtsev Division had joined in the fighting— were specially "critical". It was then that the Germans occupied a large part of the "business quarter" of Stalingrad and split the 62nd Army in two by breaking through to the Central Pier on the Volga.
One of the grimmest stories of Russian endurance that Chuikov tells is that of the 1st battalion of Colonel Yelin's regiment; this battalion had, for days, been fighting for the railway station; when the Germans captured this, the Russian survivors entrenched
themselves in a stone building in the neighbourhood, and finally only six survivors, all more or less seriously wounded, made their way to the Volga, and even so not until they had completely run out of ammunition. Here they improvised a raft of sorts, and drifted downstream, and were finally picked up by a Russian anti-aircraft crew and sent to
hospital. They had eaten nothing for three days. The dead and the heavily wounded had been left behind in their last stronghold inside central St
alingrad, now in the hands of the Germans.
The loss of the Central Pier required a reorganisation of the communication lines across the Volga. The Volga river flotilla continued to function, despite heavy losses, both north and south of the Central Pier; moreover, a foot-bridge, resting on empty iron barrels, was built across the river, farther to the north.
[The official map (in WOVSS, vol. 2, p. 440) shows that south of the Central Pier the Russians still held a small bridgehead in central Stalingrad, barely half a mile wide and a few hundred yards deep, on September 26; it was later abandoned, but it is not clear exactly when.]
To strengthen the rapidly dwindling Rodimtsev division, a number of other famous
divisions were transported to Stalingrad at the end of September—Batyuk's (largely
composed of Siberians) and Gorishnyi's. Rodimtsev was reinforced by 2,000 new men.
[The term "division" is in the case of Stalingrad misleading, since many of these
"divisions" were only 2,000 or 3,000 strong and often even smaller.]
Both sides had suffered staggering losses in the fighting in central Stalingrad. But, according to Chuikov, the Germans' breakthrough to the Volga at the Central Pier was only a "partial success", since their attempt to outflank the Russians to the north of them along the river failed completely. Here the Germans came up against the stubborn
resistance of the Rodimtsev, Batyuk and Gorishnyi divisions, the Batra-kov Brigade, and other troops. In this attempt, the Germans lost "dozens of tanks and thousands of men".
By September 24 the Germans had occupied most of central Stalingrad, and now aimed
their main blows at the industrial area in the north. Chuikov quotes with much
satisfaction a German observer, General Hans Dörr, who described the war in north
Stalingrad as follows:
These battles were in the nature of a positional or "fortress" war. The time for big operations was over... We now had to fight on the Volga heights cut by ravines; this industrial area of Stalingrad, built on extremely uneven ground, and composed of
buildings built of stone, iron and concrete, presented new difficulties. As a measure of length, a metre now replaced a kilometre. Fierce actions had to be fought for
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