He paid tributes to several of the Stalingrad divisions—to Zholudev's which had
defended the Tractor Plant almost to the last man, to Ludnikov's, to Rodimtsev's, and many others, adding rather pointedly that although Rodimtsev's division had played an enormous part in "saving" Stalingrad in September, "there was no division which had not also "saved" Stalingrad at one time or another.
[Then, as later, Chuikov felt that Rodimstev had been given a disproportionately large share in the press accounts of the Battle of Stalingrad—at the expense of others whose military record was at least as remarkable. In his book he explains how this happened: at the height of the fighting in October and November, Soviet correspondents were not
allowed to enter the most dangerous areas in Stalingrad, and had to stay in the more quiet southern part of the city, then held by the remnants of the Rodimtsev Division. They had plenty of time to talk to Rodimtsev—and to write him up.]
Chuikov also said that after the great counter-offensive had started to the north and south, things inside Stalingrad became much easier; all the same, the 62nd Army had been
ordered to "activise" its front with constant attacks on the Germans now encircled in the Stalingrad "pocket". Chuikov spoke of his men with a note of fatherly affection. He was also popular with the soldiers; many Stalingrad soldiers later told me that they admired him immensely for his extraordinary personal bravery, and for his self-control— "There isn't another man in a thousand who wouldn't have lost his head on that 14th of October."
I was not to see Chuikov again until June 1945; by then he was one of the conquerors of Berlin. The prosperous abandoned Nazi villas with their rose and jasmine bushes and the motor boats on the Wannsee seemed a million miles away from the dead frozen winter
soil of that night at Stalingrad, from that icebound Volga, into which the wreckage of barges and steamers was frozen.
"It's been a long and a hard way," said Chuikov that day in Berlin. "But mind you," he added, flashing his gold teeth, "speaking of those barges and steamers, it wasn't as bad as you think. It was a devil of a job getting the stuff to Stalingrad, but we got ninety per cent across for all that! "
The morning after our evening with Chuikov I climbed up to the little war memorial they were putting up on top of the cliff. A Russian soldier and two German prisoners were working on it. One had a growth of black beard, the other of reddish beard. A little Bashkir soldier with a strong humorous Mongol face and deep laughing slanting eyes
came up to me and started telling me in broken Russian how he had fought at the Red
October Plant during the worst of the Stalingrad Battle. Then he said, pointing at the two Fritzes digging the frozen earth round the memorial: "Can you talk their language?"
"Yes." "Then come and talk to them." "Na, wie geht's?" Cheerfully, with a look of surprise, but emphatically the dark German said: "Ganz gut.'" "So you haven't been murdered by the Russians after all?" "No," he said, cheerfully again. I translated to the Bashkir. "To think what they've done. During the evacuation they sank a steamer on the Volga, with three thousand women and kids. Nearly all killed or drowned," he said, "and now they're wearing our valenki." True enough, both of them were wearing valenki. One was wearing a dirty German grey-green overcoat, but below it were all sorts of bits of clothing, and the other wore a padded Russian army jacket, and they both had fur caps of sorts. "Yes," said Black Stubble, "the Russians gave us these valenki. Die sind prima!"
They were both from Berlin; I asked if they still thought Hitler the greatest man in the world. They protested vigorously; Red Stubble said he had once been a Young
Communist, and Black Stubble said he had been a Social Democrat. "Ach, all the misery that Hitler has brought to the world and to Germany," Red Stubble said sen tenuously.
"Stalingrad—yes, but in Germany it's just as bad: Cologne and Düsseldorf and parts of Berlin, and it's going from bad to worse." They were both on the skinny side, but looked reasonably fit, and said they were getting plenty of food now, and were surprised at being so well treated. The Russian sergeant who was in charge of the two Germans had been
listening to our conversation with a touch of tolerant amusement. Now he called them back to get on with the job. "How are they?" I said to him. "They're all right, nichevo.
Ludi kak ludi. (Like any other people)".
In and around the Red October Plant fighting had gone on for weeks. Trenches ran
through the factory yards and through the workshops themselves; and now at the bottom of the trenches there still lay frozen green Germans and frozen grey Russians and frozen fragments of human shapes; and there were helmets, Russian and German, lying among
the brick debris, and now half-filled with snow. There was barbed wire here, and half-uncovered mines, and shell cases, and tortuous tangles of twisted steel girders. How anyone could have survived here was hard to imagine; and somebody pointed to a wall, with some names written on it, where one of the units had died to the last man. But now everything was silent and dead in this fossilised hell, as though a raving lunatic had suddenly died of heart failure.
It was still 30° below zero. That afternoon we also went up the deadly slopes of Mamai Hill along a narrow path about 100 yards long. Already on the summit the Russians had erected a rough wooden obelisk painted bright-blue, with a red star on top. Among the fractured stumps of fruit-trees lay more helmets, and shell-cases, and shell splinters and other metal junk. There were patches of snow on the ploughed-up frozen ground, but no dead except for a solitary large head, completely blackened with time, and its white teeth grinning; had he been a Russian or a German? A major said that the Russians had been buried, but that 1,500 Germans were still stacked up on the other side of the hill. How many thousands of shells had pierced this ground where only six months before the
water-melons were ripening? A Russian tank was standing there, half-way up the hill, facing the summit, and burned-out.
I remember, we then drove into central Stalingrad, along a long, long avenue with
shattered trees on either side, running parallel to the Volga. We passed tramcars—many of them, all blasted, smashed and burned out; had they been standing here since the great bombing of August 23? ... One could see it now: Stalingrad was one of the modern cities of Russia; its entire centre, like its factories, had been built in the last ten or twelve years.
Here were large blocks of flats, all burned out, of course, and public buildings in the main square, with the wrecked railway station at one end. This, too, had changed hands several times in deadly fighting in September... In the centre of the square there was a frozen fountain with the half-shattered statues of children still dancing round it.
We got out here. There was an enormous heap of litter piled up in one corner of the
square—letters, and maps and books, and snapshots of German children, and of German
middle-aged women with smirking self-contented faces standing on what looked like a
bridge over the Rhine, and a green Catholic prayer book called Spiritual Armour for Soldiers, and a letter from a child called Rudi writing that "now that you have taken die grosse Festung Sewastopol the war will soon be ended against die verfluchten Bolschewiken, die Erzfeinde Deutschlands."
We walked down the main avenue running south, between enormous blocks of burned-
out houses, towards the other square. In the middle of the pavement lay a dead German.
He must have been running when a shell hit him. His legs still seemed to be running, though one was now cut off above the ankle by a shell, and, with the splintered white bone sticking out of the frozen red flesh, it looked like something harmlessly familiar from a butcher's window. His face was a bloody frozen mess, and beside it was a frozen pool of blood.
In the other big square some houses had been wrecked, but two were standing there,
squat and solid, though burned-out: the Red Army House and the Univermag Department
Store.
>
After visiting the scene of Paulus's surrender and talking to Lieutenant Yelchenko who had captured the Field-Marshal, we went out into the street again. Everything around was strangely silent. The dead German with his leg blown off was still lying some distance away. We crossed the square and went into the yard of the large burned-out building of the Red Army House; and here one realised particularly clearly what the last days of Stalingrad had been to so many of the Germans. In the porch lay the skeleton of a horse, with only a few scraps of meat still clinging to its ribs. Then we came into the yard. Here lay more horses' skeletons and, to the right, there was an enormous horrible cesspool—
fortunately frozen solid. And then, suddenly, at the far end of the yard I caught sight of a human figure. He had been crouching over another cesspool, and now, noticing us, he
was hastily pulling up his pants, and then he slunk away into the door of a basement. But as he passed, I caught a glimpse of the wretch's face—with its mixture of suffering and idiot-like incomprehension. For a moment, I wished the whole of Germany were there to see it. The man was perhaps already dying. In that basement into which he slunk there were still two hundred Germans—dying of hunger and frostbite. "We haven't had time to deal with them yet," one of the Russians said. "They'll be taken away tomorrow, I suppose." And, at the far end of the yard, beside the other cesspool, behind a low stone wall, the yellow corpses of skinny Germans were piled up—men who had died in that
basement—about a dozen wax-like dummies. We did not go into the basement itself—
what was the good? There was nothing we could do for them.
This scene of filth and suffering in that yard of the Red Army House was my last glimpse of Stalingrad. I remembered the long anxious days of the summer of 1942, and the nights of the London blitz, and the photographs of Hitler, smirking as he stood on the steps of the Madeleine in Paris, and the weary days of '38 and '39 when a jittery Europe would tune in to Berlin and hear Hitler's yells accompanied by the cannibal roar of the German mob. And there seemed a rough but divine justice in those frozen cesspools with their diarrhoea, and those horses' bones, and those starved yellow corpses in the yard of the Red Army House at Stalingrad.
Chapter VII "CAUCASUS ROUND TRIP"
"Kaukasus— hin und zurück" —Caucasus round trip: that's what German soldiers used to say with a touch of irony and some bitterness when it was all over. The German invasion of the Caucasus had lasted six months; in August 1942 they overran vast territories there as quickly as they were to evacuate them again in January-February 1943.
Their hurried evacuation of the Caucasus was, of course, a direct result of the
encirclement of the Germans at Stalingrad and the subsequent recapture of the Don
country by the Russians. If the Russians had succeeded in January 1943 in closing the
"Rostov bottleneck" and, better still, in also occupying the Taman Peninsula, that Germany escape route to the Crimea across the Kerch Straits, all the German forces in the Caucasus would have been trapped.
In the last five months of 1942, with attention focused on Stalingrad, the Soviet press gave relatively little space to the fighting in the Caucasus, and, for many years
afterwards, very little was written about the Caucasus campaign. Coming on top of the loss of Rostov at the end of July 1942, its first phase was one of the Russians' bitterest and most humiliating memories. Despite Stalin's "Not a step back" order flashed to every unit of the Red Army at the end of July, the Russians were on the run, throughout August, in the Kuban and the Northern Caucasus as they had not been since some of the worst
days of 1941. The communiqués during August were unspeakably depressing: it was
clear that the Kuban country—the richest remaining agricultural area this side of the Urals—was being abandoned "under the pressure of superior enemy forces". By August 20 an enormous territory had been overrun by von Kleist's Heeresgruppe A; the whole of the Kuban country was now in German hands, and the Germans were penetrating into the Caucasus proper and driving on, in the west, to the Black Sea coast, after capturing Krasnodar, the capital of the Kuban, and Maikop, the third most important oil centre in the Caucasus. In the east, they were on their way to the two great oil centres, Grozny and Baku.
When the Russians had failed to stop the Germans on the Don at the beginning of
August, the German advance through the Kuban had assumed all the characteristics of the blitzkrieg. The Germans had overwhelming superiority in tanks and aircraft, and only here and there, particularly along the rivers, did the Russians fight a rearguard action of sorts, but without much effect. According to Russian accounts, the roads were crowded with thousands of refugees, trying to escape, with their cattle, to the mountains; others stormed trains at every railway station; but, in reality, the German advance was so rapid that probably not very many civilians actually got away.
[According to General Tyulenev, many thousands got away all the same, but in the worst possible conditions. "Even the smallest railway stations were cluttered with thousands of refugees. Despite intensive German bombing, and though having exhausted their meagre food supplies, all these people were trying to get away from the German avalanche."
There was, he further relates, such an influx of refugees—weeping women and children
—into the Caspian ports like Makhach-Kala and Baku, where they were desperately
hoping to be taken across the Caspian, that a serious danger of epidemics arose; the local Party organisations made a frantic effort to house a large number of these refugees in local kolkhozes and to ship the rest to Krasnvodsk, on the other side of the Caspian, and beyond. (I. V. Tyulenev, Cherez Tri Voiny (Through Three Wars) (Moscow, 1960), p.
176.)]
For the same reason it was practically impossible to evacuate any of the industries and the most the Russians could do in Maikop was to blow up the derricks and other
installations and destroy what oil reserves were still there; the German oil engineers who arrived soon afterwards found that it would take a very long time before Maikop could produce any oil again.
To the Russians, the abandonment of the Kuban and the northern fringes of the Caucasus proper were, sentimentally, a particularly painful and shameful memory; and yet, almost all German writers on the Caucasus campaign are agreed that the Russians did the only sensible thing they could do in the circumstances, which was not to allow themselves to be trapped by the highly mobile advancing German forces, and to escape to the relative safety of the mountains.
As it turned out, the German plan for the conquest of the Caucasus was over-ambitious. It was one of Hitler's less happy brainwaves. His original plan, as we have seen, had been to capture Stalingrad first, with far larger forces than were ultimately sent there, and then to overrun the Caucasus, chiefly from the Caspian side, to begin with, with Grozny and
Baku as No. 1 target. After the easy capture of Rostov, Hitler imagined that the Russians were so weak that he could divide his forces in two, one to capture Stalingrad and the other to conquer the Caucasus. He had long had his eye on the Caucasian oil and thought that, by cutting the Volga supply route and also capturing the three Caucasian oil cities, he could knock out Russia economically in a very short time. The capture of Baku was scheduled for the middle or end of August.
There is no doubt that the Germans again underrated the Russian capacity of resistance; in the Caucasus, as elsewhere, they tried to do too many things all at once: a) in the east, break through to Grozny and then, along the Caspian, to Baku; b) in the middle, break through to Vladikavkaz (Orjonikidze) and cross the great Caucasus mountain range along the Georgian Military Highway into Transcaucasia and, perhaps simultaneously, along
the parallel Ossetin Military Highway, as well as further west across the mountain passes of Klukhor, Marukh and Sancharo—a straight cut to the Black Sea coast between Sochi
and Sukhumi, whence the Germans could then overrun Transcaucasia from the west and
reach the Turkish border; c) in the west, to break through to the Black Sea at Novorossisk and, farther south—which was much more important—at Tuapse, whence they could
follow the Black Sea coast all the way to Batumi.
General Tyulenev, the Commander of the Transcaucasian Front, has since then written
that if, instead of trying to do too many things all at once, the Germans had concentrated the bulk of their forces in the east, they might have broken through to Grozny and even to Baku. Instead, Tyulenev argues, they were determined to grab the Black Sea coast as
well, partly in order to eliminate the Russian Black Sea Navy, which would have had to scuttle itself, and partly in order to get Turkey into the war on the German side. Tyulenev actually refers to certain units in the German armies invading the Caucasus which were held in reserve for "operations in the Middle East and for joining up with Rommel's forces in Egypt!" It is scarcely surprising that Churchill was extremely worried about the German advance into the Caucasus and offered Stalin a large Anglo-American air force which would "defend the Caucasus". And, as we have seen, Stalin did not reject the proposal off-hand.
The Russian command obviously felt that the danger of a German breakthrough to
Grozny and Baku was very real. Throughout August and September 90,000 civilians
were mobilised for day-and-night work on fortifications, gun emplacements, anti-tank ditches, et cetera, at Grozny, Makhach-Kala and the "Debrent Gate" on the Caspian, as well as at Baku itself, round which ten defence lines were built. In fact, however, the Germans were stopped at Mozdok, about sixty-five miles west of Grozny, and were
prevented, during weeks and months of intense fighting, from enlarging the bridgehead they had seized on the south side of the Terek river, and so driving on to Grozny. It came as a complete surprise to the Germans that the Russians had, in addition to the armies that had escaped them, sufficient reserves in the Caucasus to stop them at Mozdok—a place-name which, like Stalingrad, first appeared in the communiqué on August 25, and
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