Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  Five roubles rent a month is all I pay; you wouldn't get a house so cheap in any other country." Here was, indeed, a strangely mixed family: the grandmother still thinking of the good old days under the Tsar, the mother with her Cossack background and her petit bourgeois instincts; the father a real Soviet proletarian; and the boy who could only see a happy future for himself under the Soviet system with its stress on education—to all these people the Germans were unspeakably odious.

  This was not quite general in a town like Kotelnikovo; I saw a large Cossack family on whom a number of Germans had also been billeted; they had been allowed to keep a cow and dozens of chickens, and a sort of modus vivendi had been established between themselves and the Germans, "who were very fond of eggs and milk".

  One of the members of this family worked on a near-by kolkhoz, and contributed what she could to the "good living" of both her family in Kotelnikovo and of their German guests. The kolkhozes in the area had not been disbanded, though the Germans kept promising that they would be under the New Order.

  The German capture of Kotelnikovo on August 2 had been so sudden that only about

  one-third of the population could be evacuated—and in terrible conditions at that. Many had been bombed on the railway or machine-gunned on the roads, and much of the cattle that was being evacuated to the Astrakhan steppes had also been killed in air-raids before it reached its destination. According to Comrade Terekhov, chairman of the local

  executive committee who had taken up his duties again the day after the town was

  liberated, four people were shot by the Germans for harbouring a Soviet officer; and some 300—mostly young people—had been taken away to Germany as slave labour;

  many more would have been taken, and the whole town would have been destroyed if the Germans had had time to do so. Some, he said, had collaborated voluntarily with the

  Germans, and had left with them; others, including several railwaymen, had been forcibly drafted into the polizei, and, though they had to go through "certain motions", they had remained loyal to the Soviets. Certain cases of "excessive matey-ness " with the Germans were going to be looked into...

  Outside Kotelnikovo the Russians had captured an enormous ammunition dump, two

  Fokke-Wulf 189's, completely intact, and a number of other German aircraft. The

  Russian air force sergeant to whom I talked said he didn't care for the idea of using German planes: "It's a tricky business. Our anti-aircraft gunners are too sharp for that. At Stalingrad we got five Me.l09's in perfect condition, and we thought we'd use them. All five were shot down by our own guns the very first day. Damned if I'd go up in a German plane. Signalling is all very well, but the chap on the ground thinks the Fritz is cheating, and he just won't miss a chance of having a crack at a Messerschmidt..." He said these planes here had got stuck for lack of water. It often happened on these improvised

  airfields in the steppe.

  There was still a good deal of air activity; from increasingly distant airfields—their closest base was now at Salsk, 125 miles from Kotel-nikovo and 220 miles from

  Stalingrad—the Germans were still trying to send their transport planes to Paulus's

  trapped army. They were being shot down by the dozen, and very few were now getting

  through. Goering's promise to Hitler to carry 500 tons of supplies a day to Stalingrad had proved a complete myth. The many captured German airmen we saw during those days

  were obviously disheartened by the "near-suicide" job they had to do, and doubted whether Stalingrad could hold out, though several argued that, in the spring, there would be a new German offensive, and that Stalingrad would be taken. Rostov would

  "certainly" not be abandoned. The captured infantry-men—many of whom had wandered about the steppe for a week trying to catch up with the rapidly retreating Germans and were very hungry—were even more demoralised. The fanatical Nazis, especially among

  the Goering boys, still thought a defeat of Germany quite impossible, but thought the war might end in a draw: Stalingrad was already having that effect on them.

  The nearest we got to the front was at Zimovniki some sixty miles down the Stalingrad-Caucasus line. The Germans had cleared out of the town only two days before, and were now fighting a stiff rearguard action some five miles south of it. There was intense air activity. As we approached Zimovniki across miles and miles of completely flat snow-covered steppe (we passed another enormous ammunition dump the Germans had

  abandoned in a hurry) Russian fighters zoomed overhead every minute; dogfights were

  going on not far away, and the fighters were also pursuing the retreating Germans. But they were now retreating more slowly: the remnants of their two tank divisions which had tried to break through to Stalingrad had been reinforced by the SS Viking Division,

  brought up from the Caucasus. Gunfire could be heard very clearly, and once a shell

  landed a short distance away, a cloud of yellow smoke rising from it. Now and then there came from the south a loud booming noise; that was the famous Russian katyusha mortar in action. The pleasant little town had been badly damaged by shelling, and a grain

  elevator was still burning; the local inhabitants told much the same story as in other liberated towns; during the four days' fighting at Zimovniki they had hidden in cellars, with very little food, and only snow to suck, instead of water.

  The street signs were still in Rumanian or German, and on the pedestal of the Lenin

  statue there was only half a leg still standing. The big clubhouse had been used as a barracks by the Germans. The whole floor was covered with bundles of straw on which

  they had slept. The rostrum was still decorated with fir-branches and the tables and the heaps of straw were littered with what looked like the remains of a Christmas party—

  dozens of empty wine and brandy bottles, mostly French, empty tins and German

  cigarette and biscuit cartons. Here also lay a pile of magazines, one of them showing German soldiers basking in deck-chairs on a verandah overlooking the Black Sea—was

  this Anapa?—and carrying a touristy article on "Der herrliche Kaukasus und die Schwarzseeküste". So they had already been making themselves at home in the Caucasus.

  The magazine was only three weeks old; now they were beating it from the Caucasus as fast as their legs would carry them...

  Much grimmer was the sight in the little park behind the clubhouse. Russian soldiers were digging a common grave for the Russians who had been killed at Zimovniki only

  two or three days before. There, in the park, seventy or eighty Russian corpses were placed in rows, in horrible frozen attitudes, some sitting up, some with their arms wide apart, some with their heads blown off; also, some elderly bearded men, and young boys of eighteen or nineteen with open eyes... How many common graves like this were being dug every day along the 2,000 mile front? ...

  Marshal Malinovsky, Mr Khrushchev's Minister of Defence, now very heavy, stout and

  seemingly humourless, and well over sixty, was a very different man in 1943. He was

  then a dapper young Lieutenant-General of forty-four, a very fine specimen of military manhood, admirably groomed in his smart uniform, tall, handsome with long dark hair

  brushed back, and with a round sunburned face, which did not show the slightest sign of fatigue after several weeks of continuous campaigning. He looked much less than forty-four. He was then still in command of that 2nd Guards Army which had played a leading part in smashing Manstein's Kotelnikovo offensive. Before long he was going to succeed Yeremenko as commander of the Stalingrad Front (to be renamed the "Southern Front") and was going to recapture Rostov in February 1943.

  He received us on January 11 at his H.Q. in the large school-house in a big village on the Don. After telling us of his experiences as a soldier of the Russian Expeditionary Force in France in World War I,

  [At that time he told the story as mildly and as "tactfully" as possible. As a me
mber of the Expeditionary Corps of 20,000 men he had, together with the others, sailed from

  Vladivostok to Marseilles via Singapore and the Suez Canal; he had fought at Laon and Arras; he had seen British and Anzac troops in action, as well as French poilus, Malgaches and Senegalese. At Amiens the Russians had fought side-by-side with the

  British. With a significant little smile Malinovsky said: "I liked those English and Scottish troops; they are slow, but they are reliable. I liked the way they shaved every morning and went into action smoking their pipes." Later, the Revolution broke out in Russia and "there was some trouble with the Russian troops in France." They did not feel any longer like "fighting for France"; they were put in a camp at Courtine; here there was more trouble, and the French shot three or four hundred of them. However, the bulk of the Russians were sent home in the end, except for some who had stayed in France,

  usually because of some French woman. When he returned to Russia, he joined the Reds in the Civil War. Later, the story of the massacre of the Russians at Courtine was to be told in Russian books (and, indeed, by Malinovsky himself) in much stronger terms.]

  Malinovsky outlined the first stage of the Stalingrad battle, which ended with the

  encirclement of the German forces and the Russian westward drive into the Don country.

  The second stage was to have begun on December 16, but the Russians were forestalled by von Manstein's thrust towards Stalingrad on the 12th.

  He said that this striking force was composed of three infantry and three tank divisions, one brought from the Caucasus and another from France. They had about 600 tanks and

  were well supported from the air.

  [According to the Germans about 250 (tanks).]

  After describing the Russian rearguard action between December 12 and 16, the

  "defensive battles" fought for the next week on the Axai and the Myshkova rivers, the Russian counter-offensive which had hurled the Germans beyond Zimovniki, and the

  other offensive which had smashed the German "Tormasin Group" in the Middle Don, Malinovsky made a number of significant points:

  For the first time the Germans are showing signs of great bewilderment. Trying to fill in gaps, they are throwing their troops about from one place to another—which shows that they are short of reserves. Many of their troops are retreating west in a disorderly way, and abandoning enormous masses of equipment. Such troops are an

  easy target for our aircraft. Most of the satellite troops have been knocked out

  altogether.

  The German officers we have captured are extremely disappointed in their high

  command and in the Führer himself. They have none of the self-assurance they had

  last summer.

  We have considerable difficulties arising from our long lines of communication, but we are overcoming them fairly successfully. And the Red Army has certainly

  changed and evolved. There were some truly revolutionary changes in the Red

  Army organisation in the summer of 1942.

  [This was a clear allusion to those "post-Rostov" reforms described in an earlier chapter.]

  Secondly, there is far more drive and punch in our troops than there used to be; our winter offensive of 1942-3 is on a much larger scale than that of the winter of 1941-2. Our men have far greater experience, and an intense hatred of the Germans. And they can now face situations which they could not face a year ago—for example an

  onslaught by 150 enemy tanks. Well-armed with anti-tank weapons, our troops

  successfully faced such attacks in this last Manstein offensive.

  On the Stalingrad encirclement he said:

  Stalingrad is an Armed Prisoners' Camp, and its position is hopeless. The

  liquidation of the "cauldron" has begun, and the enormous losses the Germans will have suffered in Stalingrad will have a decisive effect on the war. Their attempts to supply Stalingrad from the air now that it is outside the reach of their fighters have been a complete failure.

  He thought the Germans were still strong in the air, for all that, and also still had a very great number of tanks. The Waffen-SS were ferocious fighters; but the quality of the other German troops varied greatly.

  He was cautious in his forecast for 1943: he was pretty sure that Rostov would be

  liberated, but would not commit himself to more "for the present". He thought limited German counter-offensives still possible, but none of any decisive importance. But he stressed that the Russians were still going to have a very hard time, that their sacrifices were "unprecedented in history", and he appealed for a much greater effort in the west.

  North Africa, he suggested, was only a small beginning, with little direct effect on German pressure in the east. He said that no allied equipment had yet been used on this front, except some American lorries.

  Malinovsky treated us to a generous lunch (with "trophy" French brandy and German cigars to conclude), and talked wittily and informally, again recalling some of his

  experiences in France in World War I. His toast was uttered with great warmth and

  friendliness:

  Victory (he said) is the sweetest moment in the life of every soldier, and I am sparing no effort to achieve it. We Soviet people realise the technical difficulties of a Second Front in Europe; we are, for the present, fighting without it, but we firmly believe it will come very soon. Show your people how pure and clear our aims and motives

  are. We want freedom—and let us not quibble over certain differences in our

  conception of freedom; these are a secondary matter—and we want victory so that

  there may be no war again.

  That evening, after seeing some more German airmen who had just been brought down—

  we travelled through a blizzard back to our Kotelnikovo "base".

  There were many heavy snowfalls throughout the first half of January, but the weather was relatively mild—usually between minus 5° and minus 10° centigrade. It was not till towards the end of the Stalingrad mopping-up, i.e. the second half of January and the early days of February that the frost became truly ferocious: minus 30° and minus 40°

  centigrade. I was, indeed, going to find this out for myself; for a fortnight later I was to return to the Stalingrad area. And this time to Stalingrad itself.

  Chapter V STALINGRAD: THE AGONY

  On January 1, Sovinformbureau published a very long special communiqué on the results of the first six weeks of the Russian offensive in the Stalingrad and Don areas. Not only, it said, had twenty-two enemy divisions been surrounded, but thirty-six had been

  smashed in the six weeks' fighting. We need not quote here the figures of the enemy

  tanks, planes, guns, et cetera, captured or destroyed; they were obviously exaggerated—

  for instance 3,250 tanks and 1,800 aircraft.

  [ In an interview on the twentieth anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad, published in Pravda on February 10,1963, Marshal Malinovsky gave the following figures for German losses including all that was finally captured or destroyed in the Stalingrad "bag"

  during that battle, i.e. up to February 2: 2,000 tanks, 2,000 planes, over 10,000 guns and mortars and 70,000 motor vehicles. Except for the last, these figures are less than the Sovinformbureau statement claimed on January 1, 1943—a statement which did not

  cover what was to be captured later in the "cauldron".]

  What was interesting, in the light of subsequent attempts to minimise Zhukov's role in the planning and execution of the Battle of Stalingrad, was the concluding statement:

  These operations took place under the command of Colonel-General Vatutin,

  Commander of the South-West Front; Colonel-General Yere-menko, Commander

  of the Stalingrad Front; Lieut.-General Rokossovsky, Commander of the Don

  Front; Lieut.-General Golikov, Commander of the Voronezh Front, and under the

  general leadership of Army General Zhukov, Colonel-General Vassilevs
ky and

  Colonel-General of Artillery Voronov.

  There now remained the job of liquidating the German Stalingrad Cauldron. The trapped Germans had nothing more to hope for. Not that the troops in the Stalingrad trap were yet fully aware of the whole ghastly truth. The officers kept telling them not to be unduly disturbed by the rapidly diminishing food rations; the Führer would see to it that

  everything turned out all right, despite von Manstein's failure to break through. And in any case, they were told, their presence in Stalingrad was a great embarrassment to the Russians and, in the general scheme of things, a great service to the Führer and the Fatherland.

  Paulus's forces had been encircled since November 23 and their supplies were running down. Goering's promises to fly 500 tons of food, fuel and ammunition a day to

  Stalingrad had proved a mirage. Before long the Luftwaffe was only bringing in 100 tons a day and, towards the end of December, even less. The number of planes lost was

  growing daily. By the middle of December the troops began to eat what was left of the Rumanian cavalry division's horses.

  The Germans' growing shortage of ammunition made an enormous difference to the

  troops of the Russian 62nd Army still holding the Stalingrad bridgeheads. It was now almost safe to carry large dishes of hot food to the front-line troops in broad daylight, barely forty yards away from the German lines. It was equally safe— according to

  Stalingrad standards of safety—for whole convoys of horse-sleighs to cross the Volga during the day.

  At the end of December Grossman wrote in Red Star.

  Those Germans who, in September, broke into houses and danced to the loud music

  of mouth-organs, and who drove about at night with their headlights full on and

  who, in broad daylight, would bring up their shells in lorries—these Germans are

  now hiding among the stone ruins... Now there is no sun for them. They are rationed to twenty-five or thirty rounds a day, and they are to fire only when attacked. Their food ration is four ounces of bread and a little horse-flesh.

  There, like savages grown over with wool, they sit in their stone caves, gnawing at a horse's bone... Fearful days and nights have come to them. Here, in the dark cold ruins of the city they have destroyed they will meet with vengeance; they will meet it under the cruel stars of the Russian winter night.