Russia at war
Page 59
Government did not wish to take any chances with the Volga Germans. They were
deported, a whole half-million of them—to Kazakhstan in August 1941. There had
already been some cases of railway sabotage in the "Autonomous German Volga
Republic" (with "Engels" as its capital!) at the very beginning of the war, and also stories of German airmen brought down over the area, being given shelter by the local Germans.
On Wednesday morning, Moscow seemed very far away. All night the train had travelled at good speed, and we were now in the endless waterless steppes of the Trans-Volga
country. There was very little snow, and through it rose tufts of untidy brown grass. We had just passed several wrecked railway-carriages, and beside the siding lay another railway wagon, its wheels in the air. It had already gone rusty. At the small station I talked to a group of railwaymen. Among them was an elderly man from Tomsk, a dour
Siberian with a long greyish moustache and a wrinkled face. "Stalingrad," he said, "yes, it's over there—not very far away, about a hundred kilometres from here. Oh yes, in
October we were right in the thick of it. Can't tell you how many times we were bombed
—but it was a hell of a lot of times. See that?" he said, pointing at the overturned wagon.
"I drove that train. They were lucky that day. Three direct hits on my train. Just went up in the air. Only the engine and the front carriage rolled on, all the rest was torn away and wrecked." I looked down the line: there was the wreckage of many more wagons and also of several lorries and armoured cars which must have been part of the train's cargo.
"Were many killed?" "Thirty-five," said the Tomsk man. "Thirty-five railwaymen and three soldiers. Their graves are over there," he said pointing to the east, a little way off the line. And it was strange how, in saying it, this tough Siberian said not mogily, but the affectionate diminutive mogilki, little graves.
A young railwayman joined in. He was fair and blue-eyed, and spoke with a soft southern accent. "I've been working on this line right through the Stalingrad business," he said.
"We railwaymen are really the same as soldiers. All the supplies to Stalingrad came along this line, so you can imagine the attention the Fritzes paid it. All around here has been bombed to blazes, except one small hut." Not far away from the railway line were more craters and piles of twisted metal, but also large numbers of new rails, stacked up. "We've got these spare rails all down the line," he said. "And the railway was never put out of action, except occasionally for a couple of hours. When you think of the amount of traffic along this line these last five months, they didn't really hit many trains." "That's true,"
said the Tomsk man, "but they gave us a lot of trouble dropping the bombs just beside the railway, and wrecking all the telephone and telegraph wires." The young railwayman smiled. "Well, it's a great comfort to know it wasn't in vain. The Fritzes are running like rabbits now. Yes, there were some fearful moments, but down here we never thought
they'd get away with it. We used to see a lot of people straight from Stalingrad, and they never lost hope... " He was from Bessarabia. " I got away by the skin of my teeth when the Rumanians surrounded our village. Followed the Red Army across the Pruth. I know I'll soon be back in Bessarabia, drinking good Bessarabia wine. It's a better country than this, I can tell you," he said, looking at the desolate steppe.
Another railwayman joined in, and also thought he would soon be "back home at
Kupiansk, in the Ukraine, near Kharkov". He was our engine-driver; his face was grimy with coal-dust, but his white teeth and pink gums were bright and moist as he smiled, and he had laughing Ukrainian eyes. I knew the name of Kupiansk only too well; it was the important railway junction which was among the first places the Germans had seized at the beginning of their summer offensive...
He talked about the chaos of the evacuation from the Ukraine in June 1942. "I was lucky," he said. "We received the order to evacuate the rolling stock. There was no time to look for my family, who were in a village nearby. At all the stations there were mobs of people hoping—often against hope—to be evacuated to the east. And then, would you believe it, at the third railway stop, right there on the station platform, were my wife and my little daughter. I shoved them quickly into one of the goods trucks, and so we all got away. Incredible luck, don't you think? " His wife and child were at Saratov now.
At length the train moved. For a long time we travelled through the steppe, without any sign of human life, except occasional haystacks. Then we passed some low L-shaped
mud-huts, the same colour as the earth. These were Kirghiz huts. There was a pale-blue sky over this ocean of perfectly flat steppe—it was like the first shots of Pudovkin's Storm over Asia. In fact, this was Asia; according to the map, the railway twice crossed through stretches of country which belonged administratively to Kazakhstan. How clearly one realised now why the men fighting at Stalingrad felt that beyond Stalingrad "there was nothing". Thousands had travelled to Stalingrad along this line.
Another station with L-shaped mud-huts, with two large shaggy camels outside one of
them, the same colour as the huts and the earth, also some horses, and an old Kirghiz woman, a perfect Asiatic with a long padded coat and a white cloth round her head,
below the fur cap with earflaps. Her face was wrinkled, dark-brown, with narrow eyes.
Here also were several soldiers, most of them Mongols. A young Russian soldier, with weather-beaten face and red eyes, came up, asked for newspaper to roll some cigarettes and said he had heard that Tsymlianskaya on the Don and Nalchik in the Caucasus had
been liberated from the Germans. He had just come from Stalingrad, along the railway from Leninsk. He had been in Stalingrad for two months. "Now the Fritzes are trapped like rats," he said. "But the svolochi are still cocky, shouting 'Russ, sdavais!' (Russian, surrender!). But things are going fine. They still have those transport planes to drop them food during the night; but when they try to get there during the day, we shoot every damned one of them down." Except for the redness of his eyes, due to chronic lack of sleep, he seemed none the worse for his two months at Stalingrad— though these last two months had, of course, been nothing like the terrible months of September and October...
A train coming the other way passed us; it had anti-aircraft guns on board, many wrecked Russian planes, and also a long string of oil tanks, coming from where—Baku perhaps?
For this was the only remaining line linking northern Russia with the Caucasus.
Leninsk, near the end of the branch line running from Baskunchak, was as far as we
could go by rail. It was some thirty miles from Stalingrad on the other side of the Volga, was the principal supply base for Stalingrad itself, and also for the Stalingrad Front...
Practically all the troops and equipment for the "southern pincer" had come through here.
It was also to Leninsk that the wounded from Stalingrad were normally evacuated. It had very strong antiaircraft defences, and was relatively undamaged. It still had the
appearance of an old-time district town. The wide main street was composed of shabby little brick houses, while in the side-streets there was nothing but wooden cottages, many with very beautiful wood carvings around the windows. The old-time atmosphere of this provincial backwater contrasted strangely with the modern slogans painted on every wall:
"Men of the Red Army, remember at Stalingrad your responsibility to your country!"
"Drive the German rats from the walls of Stalingrad!" "Glory to the men of Stalingrad!"
and so on. In the small public park was a statue of Lenin, and on the airfield just outside the town were numerous "aero-sleighs", with Red Cross markings, for the transport of the wounded.
We had a meal at the officers' mess, and met two surgeons from Leninsk Hospital. One of them, a small and dapper man, had gone through the whole of the Stalingrad battle at this transit hospital. "One of the worst features of this war,"
he said, "is that the proportion of the severely wounded is much higher than it was in any other war. It used to be eighty per cent light cases, and twenty per cent severe cases; now the severe cases are around forty per cent. Head injuries are much more frequent than in the last war, owing to mortar shells and bombs. It's the same on the German side; we know it from German army
doctors we have taken prisoner." He said that most of the German and Rumanian
prisoners suffered from frostbite. They were simply unprepared for this winter weather, and really seemed to imagine they were going to take Stalingrad in September and end the war! The Rumanians have those high fur hats, which look very decorative but don't protect the lower half of the face, or even the lower half of the ears. And instead of felt valenki the Germans now have some ridiculous ersatz valenki made of straw, and with wooden soles; the things are so clumsy that they can't even walk in them."
The atmosphere in the officers' mess was jovial, and there was little talk of all that this corner of Russia had gone through in the last months. A few toasts were drunk to "our gallant Allies"—not without a little touch of irony.
One of the girls who was serving us had a bandage tied round her cheek. I asked if she had been wounded. Next to me sat a pompous stout major. "Ah, yes," he said, "she was wounded. Our people are wonderful; when they are lightly wounded, they just go on with their work, wouldn't dream of stopping." "Nonsense," said the older surgeon, "she's just got a gumboil."
My heart warmed to the major; here was Gogol's immortal blow-hard Nozdrev back
again, and in the Red Army at that, and thirty miles from Stalingrad!
We had to wait for our bus in a room beside an empty hospital ward, with two young
nurses as our hostesses. The hospital was empty now, though the beds were all made,
ready to receive any sudden arrivals. But for several days now there had been no
wounded from Stalingrad; the Germans in the "bag" were perhaps running out of ammunition one of the girls suggested.
The girls were called Valya and Nadya. Valya was lively, red-cheeked and flirtatious in a coy way. She was twenty-one and married, with her husband in the Army. She was in
uniform, and when the war broke out had been studying biochemistry at the university.
The other girl had one of those full but pale Russian faces with large grey eyes, with perfect large white teeth and lips that were full without being sensuous.
From time to time they would put on a well-worn record on their portable gramophone—
bits from Werther or Manon of all things. When the gramophone played, they were silent.
Nadya wore a red woollen jumper which stressed the paleness of her beautiful face. "I am not a nurse," she said, "I am a medical statistician, attached to this hospital base." "Some statistics you must have had to do here through the autumn," I remarked. "Yes," she said,
"some statistics." Her home was in Stalingrad, and her address was 24 Frunze Street. It seemed odd that anyone should have an address at Stalingrad! "You should go to Stalingrad after the war," she said, with a faint smile. "Not that you will find my house there any more. It was destroyed like the rest of the city. And what a pity! We had those lovely boulevards, and so many fine new buildings, and public parks, and the new Volga Embankment; and, on Sundays, there were lots of young people everywhere, and lots of trees and flowers, and all those steamer and sailing-boats and motor-boats on the Volga.
It was a gay town. I was in my last year at school when the war started, and I joined up as a medical worker, after a short training."
A copy of Simonov's poems was lying on the table. I asked Valya if she liked Simonov.
"Yes, very much; we all do." "What, Wait for me?" "Yes, that, and much else." "Dear Simonov," said Valya sentimentally. Nadya said: "We'll have a glorious life after the war.
Stalingrad will be very beautiful again. We shall again go for holidays to the Caucasus, as we did before the war."
It was confirmed that day that the Germans had begun to pull out of the Caucasus;
Nadya's daydreaming wasn't so fantastic, after all.
We set out that afternoon from Leninsk to Raigorod across the delta-land of the Volga, between the narrow Akhtuba river and the Volga proper; flat wooded country with
several roads running to the Volga crossings opposite Stalingrad or south of it. There was a lot of traffic that afternoon, mostly army lorries, and an occasional peasant sleigh; and once we passed a sleigh drawn by a camel. Most of the life here seemed concentrated in the fishing villages on the Volga itself. Most striking along these roads through the delta-land were not only the numerous boards with Stalingrad slogans on them, but also notices like "Trench" and "Warming Station". These were part of the organisation of the
"lifeline"; the warming stations were dugouts, with a heated stove, off the road, where soldiers could stop to get warm; while the trenches were refuges during German air
attacks. Many dead horses were lying about, most of them half-decayed, but now frozen.
Our driver was a youngish man, who had been in Odessa during the siege, and had been evacuated by sea at the last moment; it was a fearful business, he said, as the ships were attacked by dive-bombers all the time, and many were sunk.
"I know these roads only too well," he said. "They used to be constantly attacked from the air. It was along these roads that we carried men and supplies to Stalingrad. Machine-gunning was the Fritzes' favourite sport; they killed lots of people and horses; but, especially after August, we had fighters in the air, and hundreds of lorries got through daily. My worst experience was on August 23, during the big raid on Stalingrad. You
can't imagine what it was like. The whole city was burning like a giant bonfire. There was the awful crash of masonry. I'd drive along a street between burning houses, and dozens of planes were in the air; and suddenly a large house would collapse just in front of you, and with all the dust you could hardly see where you were going; and there were a lot of dead people lying around. But I got away, and my lorry didn't have as much as a scratch. Right over the pontoon bridge, with stuff dropping into the water all round. The bridge didn't last long, I can tell you... " And, after that, day after day, he went on taking munitions to Stalingrad—"this side of the river, of course"—and evacuating the wounded. "It was a difficult time," he summed up in a typical understatement. "But it's going to be all right now."
We were not allowed to go to Stalingrad as yet, but by now we were only a few miles
away and at nightfall that evening we could see in the west a glow in the sky, and hear a gun firing every minute or so. It was relatively quiet at Stalingrad that night; but it was the eve of Rokossovsky's ultimatum to Paulus, and two days later the final liquidation of the German 6th Army was going to begin.
At last we reached the Volga crossing some fifteen miles south of Stalingrad. A few faint lights were flickering in the dark. The thud of sporadic gunfire had grown much fainter.
We drove smoothly over a wide pontoon bridge, lying flat on the ice. In the sky, on the right, was still that dim glow, that faint halo over Stalingrad. "It used to look different,"
the driver remarked, "when the whole town was burning for weeks. At Leninsk the whole sky used to be lit up at night." The bridge must have been nearly a mile long, though, in the dark, it was hard to say exactly. The bank on the other side was much steeper, and then we drove through a darkened village and then, through ten or fifteen miles of steppe, on to Raigorod.
We were billetted in a large hut requisitioned by the Army, and were given a meal—
borshch and some wonderfully cooked mutton —by a plump Ukrainian girl from
Kharkov and an elderly man with a hooked purple nose and a little toothbrush moustache; he was a Jew who had been a miner in the Donbas. He was talkative, but very gloomy,
since his family had been left behind. As he plaintively pleaded for the Second Front, one felt he was pleading for his wife and children.
would crawl on their bellies across the thin layer of ice, dragging behind them little sleighs with a couple of ammunition boxes—as much as the ice was likely to hold. The Germans continued to shell the river. All the same, most of them got across. Now the ice on the Volga is thick enough to be used for lorries and horse vehicles, though not strong enough for tanks; but we've got plenty of bridges now."
General Popov said it took three to five days to lay a pontoon bridge. In spite of all their bombing raids and reconnaissance flights the Germans had no idea until it was too late what a large number of troops had been brought over. Most of the work was done at
night, and during the day the troops were scattered in small groups over large areas. The Russians, he said, now had some American Dodges and jeeps, but not many; they also
used many "trophy" trucks made in practically every country in Europe; the French Renault trucks were particularly numerous. He hoped the production of these had been greatly reduced since the great RAF raids on the Paris works...
Close-Up II: The Scene of the Manstein Rout. — A Cossack Town Under the Germans. —
Meeting General Malinovsky.
The next day—January 7, 1943, we travelled in a blizzard across the completely flat and uninhabited Kalmuk steppes. Though it snowed heavily, it was not very cold—between
minus 5° and minus 10° centigrade. We were no longer in cars, but in a dilapidated old bus, used until recently as an ambulance for taking the wounded to Leninsk. In the