So unendurable was the battleground that the commander of the 62nd Army, General Aleksandr Lopatin, began to evacuate troops across to the eastern shore of the Volga. His commanders viewed this as an abdication of responsibility, and Lopatin was sacked. His replacement proved to be an inspired choice. General Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov was appointed commander of the 62nd Army on September 12. In July Chuikov had been brought back from assignment in China, where he had been a military adviser to Chiang Kai-Shek. He played a major part in stiffening the resistance on the steppe in front of Stalingrad. He was able to gather together scattered, leaderless soldiers and weld them into a more effective fighting force, learning all the time from German military habits, searching for their weaknesses. He was a tough, burly man, his ready smile revealing rows of gold-capped teeth. He endured what his men endured and faced death without flinching.36
He was thrown into the cauldron of Stalingrad at a decisive juncture. The day he arrived, September 13, Paulus had massed his army for the final push to the river. The sight that met Chuikov's eyes astonished him: ‘The streets of the city are dead. There is not a single green twig left on the trees; everything has perished in the flames.’37 He made his way to the rough dugout on the slopes of Mamayev Kurgan where the army headquarters was based. Almost at once he was engulfed by the battle. German forces stormed the hill and forced him to withdraw to the banks of the Tsaritsa river where it joined the Volga. Here in a hot, unventilated underground bunker he improvised a command centre for an army with whose outer units he could scarcely communicate. His lifeline was the Volga. A fleet of small ferryboats brought food, ammunition and occasional reinforcements, returning heavily laden with the wounded.
On the far bank of the Volga lay the main part of the Soviet front line. During September Stalin reorganized the line. The Stalingrad Front was renamed the Don Front, since its forces had been cut off north-east of the city by the German thrust to the Volga on August 23. Stalingrad itself and the area immediately to the east of the city was renamed the Stalingrad Front and was placed under a tough Ukrainian, General Andrei Yeremenko. A peasant by origin, like so many of the successful Second World War commanders, he became a cavalry NCO during the First World War and stayed in the service after the Revolution. He survived the purges as a divisional commander before going on to command the Soviet Red Banner Army in the east in 1940. He returned to take command of a front in the collapse in 1941 and was fortunate to survive serious injury. He was ambitious and temperamental; Zhukov became a particular target of his military jealousy. He was famously courageous and fought with a vengeful determination. At Stalingrad he was wounded seven times, four times seriously. He continued to exercise command from his hospital bed and eventually recovered to survive the war.38
In Yeremenko and Chuikov, Paulus found unyielding adversaries. The September battles pushed the Red Army to the very edge of human endurance and to the very edge of the Volga. In three days of fierce fighting, which began on September 13, German forces struggled forward through the rubble and ruins to the Central Railway Station and the slopes of Mamayev Kurgan. The station changed hands fifteen times. Small detachments of Soviet soldiers attacked at night to reverse the gains made by the Germans by day. The summit of Mamayev Kurgan was seized first by one side, then the other. The hill became a moonscape of craters and grey ash. Greatly outnumbered, Chuikov's tired troops, each group the remnants of what had once been whole divisions, retreated house by house, block by block. On the far side of the Volga there was little left to send. In desperation Stalin ordered the 13th Guards Division, led by Aleksandr Rodimtsev, a Hero of the Soviet Union, to race to the rescue. They disembarked at a bleak railhead set up on the bare steppe miles behind the front. They undertook a gruelling forced march and arrived by ferry tired, in some cases weaponless. Yet like the proverbial cavalry, they arrived just in time. With just fifteen tanks and a handful of men Chuikov held off the furious efforts of the 6th Army to reach the central jetties. Rodimtsev's Guards were brought across a boatload at a time and were thrown into the mouth of the battle with almost no preparation. They took casualties of almost 100 per cent, but they did what was needed. The 62nd Army kept its slender grip on the western bank of the Volga, and the city was saved.39
The battlefield that Rodimtsev's men were flung onto resembled no ordinary field of combat. The city looked as if it had been the epicentre of a giant earthquake. Over the whole area there settled a layer of thick, dark ash from the burned-out buildings, which gusted into clouds of grey dust with the thud of each new shell or each blast of wind from the steppe. There hung in the air the acrid fumes of scorched wood and brick and the occasional stench of burning flesh. Each fresh barrage or bombing contorted the ruins afresh. Soviet and German soldiers hid or lived in the cellars; they fought among the piles of masonry that gave them rough shelter from the constant fire of heavy machine-guns and tommy-guns. The front lines had no clear edges. The two sides were no more than a grenade's throw apart. Soviet soldiers who found themselves trapped behind German lines carried on fighting. Almost everyone was wounded, but light wounds no longer earned a reprieve from combat. The severely wounded were taken out when possible, but hundreds died where they lay, prey to the swarms of rats that flowed like a warm river over the living and the dead.40
The strategy pursued by Chuikov and Paulus was greatly simplified by the battle. The Soviet commander had to stay in Stalingrad, come what may; the German aim was to push the defenders back into the Volga. The conflict hinged not on strategy but on tactics. Chuikov became overnight a master of the urban battlefield. He instructed his men to keep their front line as close to the German one as they could, to prevent the enemy, for fear of hitting his own side, from deploying his superior air and fire power. By late September this was a fact of life, for only a matter of a few hundred yards separated the forward German units from the riverbank itself. From beyond the river on the eastern bank came a ceaseless barrage of artillery and rocket fire from Soviet positions, which had a much broader target to aim at. The German army found urban conflict dauntingly different from the fast air and tank operations across the steppe. In Stalingrad they had to fight against an enemy frustratingly elusive and deadly. Chuikov ordered his men to take every advantage of the terrain and of their own fighting skills. When they could Soviet forces fought at night. They infiltrated German units until on a given order they let out a barrage of fearsome yells and machine-gun fire against their nervous enemy. At night a blanket of fear descended on German troops. The tough Siberians and Tatars on the Soviet side used knives and bayonets to slaughter isolated German units inept at hand-to-hand fighting among the shadows. By day snipers sat in wait for anything on the German side that moved. From Berlin came crack shots to neutralize the sniper threat, but they too fell victim to the Red Army's hidden war. ‘Bitter fighting,’ wrote one German NCO. ‘The enemy is firing from all sides, from every hole. You must not let yourself be seen.’41
By day the initiative lay with the attacker. The 6th Army was able to deploy more tanks and heavy weapons than its enemy, and the Soviet front line was ground down yard by yard. In late September much of the central area of the city had fallen. The giant Univermag department store in Heroes of the Soviet Union Square was defended to the death by Soviet soldiers holed up in the shop basement. Paulus then made it his headquarters. To the south a giant grain elevator became the scene of a fifty-eight-day siege, the Soviet garrison holding out floor by floor as German tanks and guns reduced it to a twisted shell. On September 25 Paulus turned his attention to the northern factory district, where most of the remnants of 62nd Army was besieged. Here the same tactics of armoured thrust and Soviet counter-thrust were employed for every factory building and every warehouse. Three under-strength German infantry divisions and two Panzer divisions attacked along a narrow, three-mile front until they had driven the defenders out of all but one factory complex. The surviving Soviet forces huddled in the Barricades Factory on the very banks of the rive
r. Chuikov's other troops clung to small pockets of territory along the edge of the Volga. They were so reduced in number that they were organized in small detachments or ‘storm groups’, capable of launching nothing more than local forays.
How the Red Army survived in Stalingrad defies military explanation. Chuikov inspired his men. Despite a bomb attack on his headquarters in September and a flood of burning oil through his bunker in October, Chuikov stayed where he was, at the front line among his own. His determination infected others. A different commander might have asked less of his men, and he was savagely intolerant of those who failed to rise to the terrible challenge of Stalingrad. During the battle it has been claimed that 13,500 men were executed for cowardice, though they may not all have been regular soldiers, and almost certainly not all were cowards. Chuikov displayed a grim fatalism that was reflected in the morale of those he led.42 Soviet soldiers, like soldiers everywhere, fought better when they knew what they were fighting for and were confident of their leaders. After that, what Simonov called the ‘dour determination’ of the ordinary Russian took over. Simonov's hero, Saburov, contemplates the distant, burning city as he arrives at the front: ‘He felt that his own fate would be decided on the other side, together with that of the city. If the Germans took the city he would die. If he prevented them from taking it he might live.’43 Alexander Werth also detected a changed mood among the veterans he talked to at the time of Stalingrad. Men arrived, shocked and fearful, on the riverbank, under continuous German shelling. Some were men in their fifties who had fought in the First World War, some boys of eighteen. Yeremenko was forced to send cooks and mechanics from the rear, with almost no battle experience. A quarter of them might be dead before they reached the front line, a few hundred yards beyond the bank. But the rest developed a tough survival instinct. Viktor Nekrasov, the novelist, who fought as a lieutenant through the Stalingrad battle, recalled that the ill-assorted reinforcements soon became ‘wonderfully hardened soldiers. Real frontoviks.’44
During the struggle Chuikov was not alone. To the south, separated from him by German troops, stood the remnants of the 64th Army, which kept up an active defence against the German flank. From beyond the river came artillery fire and the deadly assault of the multiple rocket-launcher, the Katyusha. Set in the back of a truck, each launcher could send a salvo of four tons of explosives over an area of ten acres. German forces feared them more than artillery. There was no familiar rush of sound, and once released the rockets distributed their fatal loads quite randomly. Chuikov had them on the west bank. Trucks were driven perilously close to the river's edge to get the maximum trajectory. By October the ground barrage was joined by a growing weight of Soviet air power. As Luftwaffe activity was reduced by the loss of crews in combat or from accident, the Soviet 8th Air Force, drawing on extensive new production, could field 1,500 planes instead of the 300 the defenders had started with. Soviet pilots were given intensive training in night flying, which they had lacked. A more effective system of radio communication produced radical improvement in Soviet air fighting.45
All of this was watched from Moscow, as Zhukov and Vasilevsky put the finishing touches to Operation Uranus. Zhukov was determined that everything should be in place before launching the attack. Previous Soviet counter-offensives had foundered because they had been started prematurely, at the bidding of an impatient leader. The temptation to relieve Chuikov by pushing Soviet reserves into the city was resisted at the cost of a terrible harvest of death within the cauldron. During October and November reserves of men, equipment and horses were brought up to strengthen the fronts to the north and south of the long German salient. The moves were made with the maximum of security. Using the advantages of the weather and the lessons of camouflage and deception painfully learned in the first year of war, the Red Army built up a force of over one million men, 14,000 heavy guns, 979 tanks and 1,350 aircraft. The deployment went undetected by German intelligence, which expected that Soviet forces, bled white in the city battle, had few reserves left for more than local spoiling actions.46 During early November the General Staff debated the precise details of the operation. Their conclusions were passed on to the front and divisional commanders so that everyone would be clear about what was expected of him. This in itself represented a great advance on the frantic operational planning before Leningrad and Moscow and helped to secure the success of Uranus.
On November 13 Zhukov and Vasilevsky visited Stalin to lay before him the final plans for the operation. He was in unaccustomed good humour and agreed to everything. The launch date he left to Zhukov's discretion. After one final inspection, November 19 was fixed as the date for the blow on the northern flank, November 20 for the attack from the south-east. Though Chuikov did not know it, he had to endure unaided for only a few days more. They were critical days. On November 9, after clearing most of the factory district and pressed on by his frustrated Führer, Paulus made one last attempt to take the city. When the German Army chief of staff, General Zeitzler, asked Hitler to consider abandoning the city and shortening the German line, Hitler shouted, ‘I won't leave the Volga!’47 Paulus was ordered to assemble seven divisions for the task. In the early hours of the morning they crashed forward and succeeded in splitting the 62nd Army once again. German troops punched a corridor 500 yards wide through to the Volga. They were subjected to heavy fire from the opposite bank, while Chuikov sent storm detachments to try to force the Germans from the new salient. The attacks failed, and the small bridgeheads in the north of the city were surrounded by German troops. Supplying Chuikov's troops was made difficult by the ice floes that began to choke the river. They were saved only by the exhaustion of the enemy. By November 12 the German offensive ground to a halt, and both sides dug in. Slowly the Red Army began to win back here and there a section of factory or a blockhouse. After two months of the most gruelling combat since Verdun the two sides had fought to a standstill. Neither possessed the means to defeat the other; neither could retreat.
On November 18 Chuikov received a call from front headquarters to expect a special order. He and his men knew nothing of Operation Uranus. It was kept from them to ensure that they would continue to fight with suicidal energy. At midnight the special order arrived, telling Chuikov that the Germans he was fighting were about to be cut off by a massive counter-offensive launched from neighbouring fronts. If it heightened the morale of the beleaguered defenders of Stalingrad, it gave them little immediate respite. Ice prevented the shipment of further supplies until the river froze solid on December 16, and the first small sled was pulled across. Nor did encirclement stop Paulus from fighting. For another six weeks Chuikov and Paulus fought a punch-drunk duel around Mamayev Kurgan and the Barricades Factory, while the noose tightened around 6th Army.
The counter-offensive was successful beyond all expectations. On November 19 Vatutin's South-western Front and Rokossovsky's Don Front swept forward against the 3rd Romanian Army and elements of the German reserve forces. The Romanian front collapsed in hours. Fast-moving Soviet armoured columns, moving over the now frozen steppe, caused the kind of panic German Panzer divisions had provoked the year before. By November 21 Romanian forces had surrendered, and 27,000 of them became prisoners. From the south a powerful armoured thrust hit the 4th Romanian Army, which disintegrated with the same dramatic speed. Resistance stiffened as German units began to be encountered, but so unprepared were Axis forces for an attack of this speed and weight that within four days the two Soviet pincers met up on the Don some sixty miles west of Stalingrad. The bridges over the river were vital to the success of the operation, and as Soviet forces approached they detached small mobile units to race ahead and seize them. At the town of Kalach Colonel Filippov, with a small detachment of tanks, drove into the centre at night with lights blazing. German guards thought it must be their own forces; before they had time to realize their mistake Filippov had seized the bridge and key areas of the town.48 He held off German counter-attacks until the rest of his divisio
n arrived. The encirclement was sealed when advance guards from south and north met at the village of Sovetsky, some miles south of Kalach.
The German southern front was in disarray. Men, horses and guns lay in grotesque, frozen heaps where they fell. The Red Army cleared the steppe around them, until a corridor over a hundred miles wide separated the German front from Paulus, the 6th Army and remnants of the 4th Panzer Army, a total of more than 330,000 men. The first reaction was to try to break out. Paulus later complained that he ‘could easily have done so’. 49 But Hitler, who flew back to his headquarters on November 20 to deal with the emergency, told him to stand fast at all costs. Hermann Goering, who accompanied Hitler, promised to supply Paulus from the air with 500 tons a day. Field Marshal von Manstein was given responsibility for cutting a corridor through to Stalingrad to re-establish overland contact with the encircled army. The Soviet staff had anticipated this. They filled the circle around
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