Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

The network of roads and railways (he said), was very weak; and yet there was

  never a shortage of food, munitions or petrol. Every soldier, every driver, every railwayman understood the tremendous aim before us. The railwaymen ran more

  trains than seems humanly conceivable. The lorry-drivers who, normally, should

  not work more than ten hours a day in winter, often went on working on our

  transport columns for twenty-four hours on end.

  He was certain that the Germans could have broken out of Stalingrad at the early stages of the encirclement, if Hitler had allowed it.

  Asked about allied equipment and supplies, Malinin said that there were "a certain amount of American food", a few Dodge lorries, and a few Churchill tanks—they were good, but there were only very few of them.

  As we now know from German sources, one of the immediate consequences of the

  encirclement of the German forces at Stalingrad in November was an extreme shortage of winter clothing there. In November, seventy-six railway wagons of winter clothing had got stuck at Yasinovataya railway station, seventeen at Kharkov, forty-one at Kiev, and nineteen at Lwow. The German High Command, not wanting to give the Stalingrad

  troops the idea that they would not win the battle before winter, had been in no hurry to send them winter clothing. The combination of cold and very low rations— towards the end, these were reduced to two ounces of bread a day and scraps of horse-flesh (with the generals receiving, in theory, five ounces of bread)—enormously increased the death-rate among the Germans especially in January. Not that the cold was uniformly intense. It was very cold (minus 20° to minus 25° centigrade) in the second half of December; it was much milder during the first half of January (usually between 5° and 10° below), but became extremely cold after that, the temperature falling at times to minus 25 °, 30° and 40°. And even 45°.

  On the night of February 4 I learned what 44° of frost means in practice, and what it must have meant to the Germans at Stalingrad—and to the Russians for that matter; for it

  would be a great mistake to imagine that a Russian—no matter how well clad— likes 44°

  of frost...

  We set out at 3 p.m. on our fifty mile trek from General Malinin's headquarters to

  Stalingrad. Our Army driver said we would make it in four to five hours; it took us nearer thirteen.

  There were half-a-dozen of us in a wretched van, without any seats or benches, sitting or half-lying on bags or pieces of luggage. Every hour it became colder and colder. To add to our misery the back door of the van had no glass in it; it was almost as cold as driving in an open car.

  It was a pity not to travel through this battle area during the day, but it couldn't be helped.

  Even so, I remember that night as one of my strangest experiences during the whole war.

  For one thing, I had never known such cold in all my life.

  In the morning it had been only minus 20°, and then it was minus 30°, then minus 35°, then minus 40° and finally minus 44°. One has to experience 44° of frost to know what it means. Your breath catches. If you breathe on your glove, a thin film of ice immediately forms on it. We couldn't eat anything, because all our food—bread, sausage and eggs—

  had turned into stone. Even wearing valenki and two pairs of woollen socks, you had to move your toes all the time to keep the circulation going. Without valenki frostbite would have been certain, and the Germans had no valenki. To keep your hands in good condition, you had to clap them half the time or play imaginary scales. Once I took out a pencil to write down a few words: the first word was all right, the second was written by a drunk, the last two were the scrawl of a paralytic; quickly I blew on my purple fingers and put them back in the fur-lined glove.

  And as you sit there in the van all huddled up and feeling fairly comfortable, you cannot bear to move, except your fingers and toes, and give your nose an occasional rub; a kind of mental and physical inertia comes over you; you feel almost doped. And yet you have to be on the alert all the time. For instance, I suddenly found the frost nibbling at my knees: it had got the right idea of attacking the tiny area between the end of my additional underwear and the beginning of the valenki!... Your only real ally, apart from clothes, on such occasions is the vodka bottle. And, bless it, it didn't freeze, and even a frequent small sip made a big difference. One could see what it must be like to fight in such conditions. For the last stage of the Battle of Stalingrad had been fought in weather only a little milder than it was on that February night.

  The nearer we got to Stalingrad, the more bewildering was the traffic on the snow-bound road. This area, in which the battle had raged only so very recently, was now hundreds of miles from the front, and all the forces in Stalingrad were now being moved— towards Rostov and the Donets. About midnight we got stuck in a traffic jam. And what a

  spectacle that road presented—if one could still call it a road! For what was the original road and what was part of the adjoining steppe that had been taken in by this traffic—

  most of it moving west, but also some moving east—was not easy to determine. Between the two streams of traffic, there was now an irregular wall of snow that had been thrown up there by wheels and hoofs. Weird-looking figures were regulating the traffic—soldiers in long white camouflage cloaks and pointed white hoods; horses, horses and still more horses, blowing steam and with ice round their nostrils, were wading through the deep snow, pulling guns and gun-carriages and large covered wagons; and hundreds of lorries with their headlights full on. To the side of the road an enormous bonfire was burning, filling the air with clouds of black smoke that ate into your eyes; and shadow-like figures danced round the bonfire warming themselves; then others would light a plank at the

  bonfire, and start a little bonfire of their own, till the whole edge of the road was a series of small bonfires. Fire! How happy it made people on a night like this! Soldiers jumped off their lorries to get a few seconds of warmth, and have the dirty black smoke blow in their faces; then they would run after their lorry and jump on again.

  Such was the endless procession coming out of Stalingrad: lorries, and horse sleighs and guns, and covered wagons, and even camels pulling sleighs—several of them stepping

  sedately through the deep snow as though it were sand. Every conceivable means of

  transport was being used. Thousands of soldiers were marching, or rather walking in

  large irregular crowds, to the west, through this cold deadly night. But they were cheerful and strangely happy, and they kept shouting about Stalingrad and the job they had done.

  Westward, westward! How many, one wondered, would reach the end of the road? But

  they knew that the direction was the right one; perhaps few were yet thinking of Berlin, but many must have been thinking of their homes in the Ukraine. In their valenki, and padded jackets, and fur caps with the earflaps hanging down, carrying tommy-guns, with watering eyes, and hoarfrost on their lips, they were going west. How much better it felt than going east! Yet from the west others were coming—these were merely a trickle. But they also had their story to tell—these peasants in horse-sleighs and horse-carts, and these citizens of Stalingrad walking or driving home through the night—driving home into the ruins. And around all this bustle of trucks, and horse-sleighs, and covered wagons, and camels, and soldiers shouting, and soldiers swearing, and soldiers laughing and dancing joyfully round the bonfires filling the air with acrid smoke, lay the silent snow-covered steppe; and, as the headlights shone on the steppe, and you looked, you saw dead horses in the snow, and dead men, and the shattered engines of war. We were now in the

  "pocket". And, ahead of us, the searchlights were spanning the sky —the sky of Stalingrad.

  It was not till 4 a.m. that we reached Stalingrad. It was terribly cold, and the night was pitch-black, except for a few dim lights here and there. Dazed with cold, we stepped out of our van. Somebody shouted a few yards away; somebody else waved a
lantern. "Two here," the man with the lantern said, "two more farther along." He lit up a hole in the ground. "Go down there, and get warm." The hole was little wider than a man's body.

  Sliding on the slippery boards, and clutching at the ice-covered sides of the tunnel, we slithered down into the dugout, a drop of twenty or twenty-five feet. Warmth! How cosy the miserable hole looked, and how sweet the fumes of the makhorka smelled! There were four men down there— two of them sleeping on bunks, the other two crouching by

  the small iron stove. Both of these were young fellows—one almost a boy, with a little fair down on his chin. The other one, Nikolai, was a tougher soldier, though scarcely more than twenty-three. The other two yawned and fell asleep again. We were offered

  two of the bunks, covered with thick brown army blankets; but the dugout, lit by a

  kerosene lamp made of a shellcase, with its top flattened to catch the wick, was crowded, and we sat up most of the time. Nikolai treated us to hot tea out of old cans and, once we had thawed, we vaguely began to take things in. These men belonged to one of the guards regiments that had just completed the liquidation of the German 6th Army, and were now having a few quiet days before being sent on to the front. "When it gets light," said Nikolai, "you'll be able to see the Barricades and the Tractor Plant over there; it looks as if they were standing, but they're gone. There's nothing left of Stalingrad; not a thing. If I had any say in the matter, I'd rebuild Stalingrad somewhere else; it would save a lot of trouble. And I'd leave this place as a museum."

  "It's funny," said the younger boy, "to think how quiet it is now. Only three days ago there was still fighting going on. This is a lousy dugout; it's one our people built. The German dugouts are much better. In these last weeks, they hated coming into the open; they can't stand the cold... Filthy, dirty; you wouldn't believe in what filth they lived there. Scared of the cold, and scared of our snipers, and of katyusha, of course." The lad shook his head and gave a boyish giggle. "Funny blokes, really. Coming to conquer Stalingrad, wearing patent-leather shoes. Thought it would be a joy-ride. Just go and have a look at them at Pitomnik. Parasites!" he concluded with that favourite Red Army man's word, a word coined back in '41.

  "Katyusha", said Nikolai, "has done a wonderful job. We got an enormous crowd of them encircled at Gumrak, and they wouldn't surrender. So we got fifty or sixty katyushas round them, and let fly... My God, you should have seen the result! Or else we gunners would go up to their pillboxes and smash them up at thirty yards. It was really the guns that did the main job in this liquidation; we had complete superiority in artillery. But they can be tough, for all that. No, they don't like surrendering, not they! On the last day we got to a house where there were fifty officers; they kept firing and firing. It was only when four of our tanks came right up to the house that they put up their arms. Ah, well,"

  he said, sipping hot tea out of the can, "just one more Stalingrad, and they'll be finished!"

  "They were in a bad way all right," said the third man, who now woke up—a dark Armenian with a hooked nose, dark beady eyes and a funny accent. "Down at Karpovka, the Germans were eating cats. They were hungry and very cold, and many died of the

  cold. The local people somehow managed to survive: they had hidden chunks of frozen

  horse-flesh; and had to manage on that. It was better than cats, anyway. An old woman who lived in a dugout there said the Germans took her dog away and ate it. Yet the

  German Commandant kept a cow, and he wouldn't allow it to be slaughtered; it made the Fritzes very angry. In the end he had to give way, though. There was also an old priest there, and back in August the Germans opened a church for him. He used to pray for the victory of the Christ-beloved Hosts—which might have meant anything. Some of the

  people thought it was a great joke."

  The soldiers laughed. "Never mind," said Nikolai. "It may now soon be over. I am a factory worker and when we recapture Kharkov, I hope I get my old job back. All very well sitting in trenches and dugouts. But I've been at it since 1940. It's been a long road to Stalingrad, seeing I started this war at Lwow. I was stationed there before the war. Queer lot, the Poles. Before the war, we had to deport the more unreliable elements—all sorts of people. They kept saying: 'We don't want to be either German or Soviet'. That's

  understandable. But then why, I ask you, when the Germans were coming in at one end

  of the city, and we were leaving from the other end, did the Poles—youngsters mostly, boys and even girls of fifteen—keep firing at us from every window? Of course, there are different kinds of Poles; some were very friendly and hospitable; it's a question of class, I suppose... "

  It was odd to hear again about this old, old Russo-Polish enmity, even here, in a dugout in the ruins of Stalingrad...

  In the end, we snatched a couple of hours' sleep, and about 8 a.m. crawled up the slippery tunnel. Here was Stalingrad.

  *

  It wasn't quite what I had expected. For a moment, I was dazzled by the sun shining on the snow. We were in one of those Garden Cities which the Russians had lost in

  September. Most of the cottages and trees had been completely smashed. To the right, in the distance, there were large imposing-looking blocks of five or six-storey buildings; they were, in reality, the shells of the buildings of central Stalingrad. On the left, a couple of miles away, there rose a large number of enormously high factory chimneys; one had the impression that there was, over there, a live industrial town; but under the chimneys there was nothing but the ruins of the Tractor Plant. Chimneys are hard to hit, and these were standing, seemingly untouched. It was still very cold, though a little less so than during the night.

  At length we drove off, down towards the Volga, through the wreckage of the Garden

  City and past some smashed warehouses and railway buildings. The wind from across the Volga had swept much of the country bare, and the earth was deadly-frozen with patches of snow here and there, and a pale-blue sky above. A few frozen dead Germans were still lying by the roadside. We crossed the railway-line. Here were railway carriages and

  engines piled on top of each other, in an inextricable tangle of metal. High cylindrical oil tanks standing alongside the battered railway-line were crumpled up like discarded old cartons and riddled with shell-holes, and some had fallen down completely. On the other side of the road was a honeycomb of trenches and dugouts and shell-holes and bomb-craters; and then, beyond the railway, the road made a sharp hairpin bend, and before us was the white icebound Volga, with the misty bare trees of the delta-land on the other side, and, beyond it, the white steppes stretching far into Asia.

  The Volga! Here was the scene of one of the grimmest episodes of the war: the Stalingrad lifeline. The remnants of it were still there: those barges and steamers, most of them smashed, frozen into the ice. Now a thin trickle of traffic was calmly driving across the ice: cars and horse-sleighs, and some soldiers on foot. The Volga was frozen over, but not entirely—not even after the fierce frost of the past fortnight. There were still a few shining blue patches of water, from which women were carrying pails. We drove down

  from the cliffs to the Volga beach, crowded with hundreds of German "trophy" cars and lorries, and were now on Russian soil that the enemy had never taken.

  That night we saw General Chuikov, a tough, thick-set type of Red Army officer, but

  with a good deal of bonhomie, a sense of humour and a loud laugh. He had a golden smile: all his teeth were crowned in gold, and they glittered in the light of the electric lamps. For there was electric light in this large dugout built into the cliff facing the Volga, which had been his headquarters during the latter stages of the battle. With him was General Krylov, his chief of staff, who had also survived the siege of Sebastopol.

  Chuikov gave us his whole evening and talked solidly for at least an hour and a half describing the whole progress of the Battle of Stalingrad. Since then he has published a full account of the battle, from which I have quoted in
an earlier chapter; so I shall mention here only a few specially characteristic points of his story, as told immediately after the German capitulation. The story he told us then was, in essence, the same as that in the book, though then he did not allow himself various indiscretions, particularly about his fellow-generals and about the very uneven morale in the Red Army during the earlier stages of the 1942 campaign, which do appear in the book. There was, however, one

  small but significant detail. When asked whether Stalin had visited the city during the siege, as rumour had it, Chuikov then replied: "No. But Khrushchev and Malenkov were both here, practically all the time between September 12 and December 20. Stalin,

  meantime, was working on the gigantic offensive operation of which you can now see the first results.

  [ Malenkov's presence is not mentioned either in the official history or any other recently published accounts. Though not yet a Politburo member, he was, as member of the GKO, even more important.]

  He spoke of the important role played by the 62nd Army in slowing down the German

  advance through the Don country in July and August, then of the great German onslaught on Stalingrad on September 14, and of various stages of the battle.

  Then he came to the story of the 14th of October:

  It was the bloodiest and most ferocious day in the whole battle. Along a front of four to five kilometres, they threw in five brand-new infantry divisions and two tank divisions, supported by masses of infantry and planes... That morning you could not hear the

  separate shots or explosions; the whole thing merged into one continuous deafening

  roar... In a dugout the vibration was such that a tumbler would fly into a thousand pieces.

  That day sixty-one men in my headquarters were killed. After four or five hours of this stunning barrage, the Germans advanced one and a half kilometres, and finally broke

  through at the Tractor Plant. Our men did not retreat a step here, and if the Germans still advanced, it was over the dead bodies of our men. But the German losses were so great that they could not keep up the power of their blow, and were not able to widen their salient along the Volga.