Hitler was determined that Stalingrad should be taken. The city was an important industrial centre and dominated the Volga, the river along which the Soviets moved vital supplies up from the Caucasus. If Moscow and the other northern cities could be cut off from this southern oil, the Soviets would be struck a devastating economic blow. (Hitler’s intense interest may also have been fuelled by the city’s very name – Stalingrad had been renamed in honour of the Soviet leader after his alleged exploits there during the civil war.)
The 4th Panzer Army, together with the 6th Army, converged on the city, which lay spread out in front of them like a ribbon for 50 kilometres or so along the Volga. A more difficult city to defend could scarcely be imagined. The river formed a natural barrier, and once the Germans surrounded the city on the remaining three sides, all reinforcements would have to make the dangerous journey across the water.
On Sunday, 23 August the Germans launched a 600-bomber raid on Stalingrad – the most intense aerial bombardment so far seen on the Eastern Front. That morning Valentina Krutova, an eleven-year-old schoolgirl, and her fourteen-year-old brother Yuri were picking berries on the city outskirts when they heard the sound of a massive armada of planes. As they looked up, the bombs began to fall. ‘Everything was ablaze,’ she says. ‘There was screaming . . . While an adult could have been able to understand that there was a war going on, what could we understand, being children? We were only scared that we would be killed.’
‘When the bombing began, it was really horrible,’ says Albert Burkovski, who was fourteen in 1942. ‘I can still remember the planes, the noise they were making, and it became real hell. I don’t know how people managed to bear it. It was all one big fire. We climbed to the roof and we could hear the moaning, groaning from down below.’ Once the bombing had stopped, Albert ran back home towards the house he lived in with his grandmother. When he turned on to their street, he saw that his house had become a pile of rubble. ‘Once we came back there was only moaning and more moaning coming from under the ruins. My grandmother had been hiding in the basement of the house, but it was all closed in by the ruins – everyone in there was crushed. I thought for some time that I had better be killed because such was my grief, my misery, because I was all alone.’
Stalin resolved to hold the city. The Red Army had retreated hundreds of kilometres from Kharkov in the Ukraine, and a stand had to be made on the Volga. Initially he refused to allow even the civilian population to escape across the river. There would be no more running away. Here the Red Army would stay and fight.
At his new headquarters at Vinnitsa in the Ukraine, Hitler sweated in the fierce summer heat. Despite the progress that had been made by both Army Groups, no Soviet armies had been encircled. Fanning Hitler’s annoyance, General Halder, the Chief of the Army General Staff, suggested that there might not be enough resources available to support both Army Groups and enable them to meet their objectives simultaneously. Hitler was furious. Halder recorded in his war diary on 30 August: ‘Today’s conference with the Führer was again an occasion for abusive reproaches against the military leadership abilities of the highest commanders. He charges them with intellectual conceit, mental inadaptability, and utter failure to grasp the essentials.’2
At the beginning of September there was another row as Field Marshal List’s Army Group A, fighting in the Caucasus, appeared to slow in its advance. Jodl, Chief of the Operations Staff of the High Command of the Armed Forces, supported List’s actions, saying that he was following previous instructions from the Führer. Hitler was beside himself with anger. List was removed and on 9 September Hitler personally took command of Army Group A, which was advancing across the steppes about 1600 kilometres away. This led to a bizarre command structure in which, as commander of an army group, Hitler was answerable to himself as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, then to himself again as Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht (all the German Armed forces), and finally to himself again as Head of State. Then, as if the atmosphere of change was not fetid enough, on 22 September Hitler replaced Halder as Chief of Staff with Kurt Zeitzler, a general famed for his obsequiousness. So, at the same time as Stalin was learning to listen to the advice of those around him, Hitler was creating an impractical military structure that crushed individual initiative and in which his military commanders knew what fate to expect if they dared criticize their all-knowing Führer.
Meanwhile, after the bombing of Stalingrad, in the last week of August the Germans finally reached the Volga. By 3 September the city was surrounded. ‘We came to a rise which offered a very good view of Stalingrad,’ says Joachim Stempel. ‘The city was in flames and suddenly, like a silver ribbon, I saw the Volga. It came as quite a surprise. We all knew we had to get there – that’s our goal, maybe the goal of the whole war . . . It was a very impressive thing to be standing on the border with Asia and being able to say – we’re at the Volga! In spite of all the casualties, all the hardships, we had managed to attain this goal, this victory. The Volga! It was within our grasp! The Volga was a very impressive sight in the autumn sun. A river of a width which we don’t know in Germany. And this incredible view into the depths of Asia – nothing but forests, more forests, plains and the endless horizon. It was an inspirational feeling for anyone who had been involved in breaking through the Russian defences, the taking of ground, the loss of good comrades who couldn’t experience this with us. And now before us, this picture, the Volga, close enough to touch. We thought, it can’t take much longer now – we’re here.’
As the Germans moved forward into the city, thousands of civilians became trapped behind their lines. Valentina Krutova, together with her brother Yuri and five-year-old sister, were amongst those cut off from the narrowing Soviet-held section of the city. They lived with their grandmother, who was badly wounded as the result of an explosion. ‘Germans often came into our house,’ says Valentina. ‘They would open the door and look in. But as our granny was really rotting alive and the Germans were very much afraid of various diseases, they didn’t come very close. The Germans saw there were blisters on her body and little worms had appeared in her wounds. It smelt terrible.’
There was no medical care available, and shortly after the Germans arrived her grandmother died. ‘When she died we carried her, we actually pulled her body on some piece of cloth into a trench and put the piece of cloth on her to protect her face from the earth, and then we buried her. We couldn’t find the place afterwards. It was very hard for us because we used to feel some support from her when she was alive. Although she was bedridden, she was with us, she was a living human being. We could talk to her. She would hug us and express her sympathy and this warmed our hearts. We didn’t feel too burdened by fear, although we were living on the territory occupied by the Germans. But when we lost her, it began to be emotionally very difficult for us. We had no one else to support us.’
Three children on their own amongst the thousands trapped in Stalingrad had little chance of survival, but fourteen-year-old Yuri did what he could to scavenge food. ‘My brother used to go to a grain elevator where a small amount of grain remained, and he gave us a little bit every day and it helped us. He kept the bag between the window panes. One day a German officer and two soldiers – they were either Germans or Romanians – came in and began demanding food. They wanted eggs and chicken and bread. And we had nothing. They began to search for food, and were clever enough to look between the window panes and they found that little bag with wheat. They wanted to shoot us down. My brother and I went down on our knees and pleaded with them not to kill us. The German officer was young. He began to say something to his soldiers. They took away the grain but they left us alone.’
Albert Burkovski was another child left on his own in the city, but he was lucky – he was on the Soviet side of the divide. In the first days of the bombardment he and a school friend helped transport wounded Red Army soldiers down to the landing stage on the Volga by pushing them in a cart. ‘We brought the wounde
d to the river crossing and could see cutters and boats and rafts approaching. The Germans were firing, and the firing was heavy.’ Many of the Soviet boats were destroyed before they reached the bank. ‘The crossing was terrible. There was so much shelling and bombing that, even if you could swim – well, you could get killed.’
Hitler had ordered that Stalingrad be taken, but Stalin had commanded that it be held. This city, which at the start of Operation Blue had been seen as merely one target amongst many, had unexpectedly become the operation’s main objective – almost the focal point of the whole war. Stalin ordered the Red Army to retain the Stalingrad bank of the Volga, using whatever means were necessary.
In such brutal circumstances the character of the two commanders in the battle was to prove crucial. Leading the German 6th Army was the sophisticated Friedrich Paulus, an experienced staff officer who had previously served as deputy Chief of Staff under General Halder. ‘Paulus was very tall and he was very calm and poised,’ says Günther von Below, who served under him in the 6th Army. ‘He was a very wise man with a very humane attitude. He was always somewhat hesitant in his decisions – one had to help him decide . . . On one occasion I said to him, “General, if you don’t sign here and now, I will sign on your behalf this very instant.” And then he signed the paper. And he laughed and said: “So much for that.”’
In command of the Soviet 62nd Army at Stalingrad, from September 1942 onwards, was a very different man – Vasily Chuikov. If Paulus was a strategist, aware of the grand sweep of war, then Chuikov was a tactician, focused on the struggle to take an individual street or building. If Paulus was courteous, almost deferential, then Chuikov was a bully whose brutal treatment of those he believed had failed him was legendary.
‘Chuikov could sense the nature of a battle,’ says Anatoly Mereshko, who served with him at Stalingrad. ‘And he could take timely decisions in spite of all obstacles to carry out that decision. He had persistence and perseverance . . . Chuikov combined the Russian features, which are, as one song puts it, “If you shoot, you shoot; if you make merry, you make merry,” and for Chuikov shooting came first. He had colossal energy that was very catching, and it passed on to more junior commanders and then on to soldiers. If Chuikov’s character had been different, then we wouldn’t have held Stalingrad.’
A crucial part of Chuikov’s character was his brutality. If a commander acted in a way he disliked, Chuikov would physically assault him: ‘He went as far as beating people with his fists or with a stick,’ says Mereshko, ‘for which Stalin told him off. He used to lean on a stick, and if he didn’t like the behaviour of a particular commander, he could hit this commander with his stick on his back.’ Later in the war Mereshko had personal experience of this side of Chuikov: ‘I went into the house where the operational department was, and I could see my boss leaning against the wall with the table overturned. He was holding a handkerchief to his nose and there was blood on it. He said to me that Chuikov had hit him.’ Mereshko’s superior officer explained the simple reason he had been assaulted by Chuikov: ‘The General Colonel had hit the Lieutenant Colonel because he was dissatisfied with the report he had received.’ Then his boss added, ‘Well, it’s good that you’ve just come, not one minute before, because otherwise he would have hit you too.’
Chuikov was one of a new breed of Soviet commander, not one of Stalin’s creatures picked primarily for his subservience but a ruthless and competent leader. He knew that he was required to hold Stalingrad or die in the attempt. He also knew that he had to impose the harshest discipline imaginable on the troops he commanded in order to achieve his aim; more than 13,000 of them were arrested – and many of that number executed – during the Battle of Stalingrad. Yet again, the Soviet system sought to fight ‘fear with fear’, as the Red Army was told retreat was impossible and that ‘there is no land beyond the Volga’.
The shrewd tactician in Chuikov also realized that the ruined city allowed the Red Army, for the first time in the conflict, to fight a different kind of war – one in which individual bravery and resilience would count as much as high-flown strategy. The Soviet troops would inhabit the city like ‘living concrete’ and take on the Germans in hand-to-hand fighting. Chuikov decreed that the Soviet troops must station themselves as close as possible to the German front line. That way the German bombers and artillery risked hitting their own men in any attack. The motto of the Soviet defenders became, ‘Don’t get far from the enemy.’ ‘Our principle was, we’ll put claws in the throat of the enemy and hold them very close,’ says Anatoly Mereshko. ‘That way you can stay alive. These were Chuikov’s tactics. The gap between you and the enemy should not be bigger than 50 or 100 metres, or not more than a grenade’s throw. If we threw a grenade, we had only four seconds before the explosion happened. When the Germans threw their grenades, they fell into our trenches and our soldiers could lift the grenade up and throw it back because the German grenades exploded after nine or ten seconds. So we took advantage of the weakness of the German grenades. That was also due to Chuikov.’
Chuikov also perfected the use of assault groups to clear German-held houses. ‘Such a group could vary between five and 50 people, without their rucksacks, only with grenades, and their job was to rush into the house,’ says Mereshko. ‘And then this assault group would be followed by a consolidation group. The assault group had to send the Germans into panic, but the consolidation group that followed had to repel the Germans’ counter-attack.’
These house clearances were the stuff of nightmares. Suren Mirzoyan is one of the few survivors of these operations from the Soviet side, and described a typical assault group encounter with the Germans: ‘Only the outer wall of the house survived, but inside there was rubble and the Germans had hidden amongst it. Suddenly one German jumped on my friend and he reacted and hit the German with his knee. And then a second German jumped on him and I lashed out against him – we had knives. Do you know when you press a ripe tomato, juice comes out? I stabbed him with a knife and everything around was in blood. I felt only one thing – kill, kill. A beast. And another German jumped on me and he was shouting and then he fell. If you were not strong enough physically, the German would have swallowed you. Each metre of Stalingrad meant possible death. Death was in our pockets. Death was always on our steps.’
During these primitive encounters Mirzoyan preferred not to use modern weaponry: ‘I tried not to use [these] weapons against people. I had a knife or a spade – a very sharp spade. It’s better than a machine gun sometimes. I also used the spade in the front lines. You dig with your spade and then you can use it in man-to-man fighting. A machine gun takes a long time – you have to load it. But with a spade you simply lift it and you strike. It makes sense. These spades were very crucial in fighting.’
In the middle of September the Germans mounted a determined attack and managed to reach Stalingrad’s central railway station. Supported by the 13th Guards Division, Chuikov and his men fought back. Chuikov’s own determination to cling to the river bank or die in the attempt became an inspiration to his men. Every factory, every street, every house became a battlefield.
The savagery of the fighting amongst the rubble of Stalingrad was the antithesis of Blitzkrieg. This was not sophisticated combat but primitive struggle, as Helmut Walz, a private in the German 305th Infantry Division, discovered to his cost on the morning of 17 October when he and his unit were in the ruins of a factory: ‘We had the order to advance, in the open space, to the factory buildings. It was a desert of rubble. Everything was mixed up together.’ About 15 metres in front of him he saw Soviet soldiers in a dugout: ‘I advanced about 10 metres, so that I was roughly 5 or 6 metres away from them, and hid behind a heap of concrete. I called out to them in Russian to surrender, but they didn’t. Everywhere it was burning – bullets were flying through the air – so I threw a hand grenade right into the middle of them. And then one of them came out with blood running from his nose, his ears and his mouth. I don’t know anything abo
ut medicine but when I saw him I knew that he wouldn’t be able to survive – something inside his body was torn. And he aimed his machine gun at me – the Russian machine gun with the little drum at the front – and I said to myself, “Boy, you ain’t going to get me!” And I aimed my gun at him. And then I saw little stars shooting out of the air. For a moment I was numb. What’s going on? I ran my left hand over my face and a jet of blood came out and my teeth flew out of my mouth.’
One of Walz’s comrades, seeing what had happened, leapt up on to a mass of concrete and then crashed down hard on top of the Soviet soldier. ‘He jumped straight into the face of that Russian with his boots,’ says Walz. ‘I can still hear the face cracking – he kicked him to death, probably.’ Walz’s lieutenant gestured to him to move into the protection of a bomb crater where the officer bandaged Walz as best he could, but then another Red Army soldier appeared above them. ‘The Russian aimed his machine gun at him [the lieutenant] and then his steel helmet flew off – it was a bull’s-eye shot, right into his head,’ says Walz. ‘His head was open and I could see his brain, on the right, left and in the middle – there was water but no blood. He looked at me and then he fell into the rim of the crater.’ Another German killed the Red Army soldier who had shot the lieutenant, and Walz crawled away to search for a medic.
By the end of that one day in October, out of a total of 77 soldiers in his company ‘nobody was left – they were all either dead or wounded. The whole company had gone.’
The very proximity of the enemy in Stalingrad also led to bizarre, almost friendly, encounters. ‘Imagine us in house-to-house fighting,’ says Anatoly Mereshko. ‘We took the third floor and the Germans took the first and second floors. By midday both sides get tired and the Germans shout, “Hi, Russians!” “What do you want, Germans?” we’d say. “Can you send us some water?” they’d answer. And we’d shout, “Let’s swap pots filled with water for a pot filled with cigarettes.” And then one hour later we’d carry on, we’d open fire again. Or the Germans cry, “Well, we have no cigarettes. We can send you a couple of clocks or watches.” Well, then we swapped water for cigarettes or water for vodka or for schnapps, and we honestly stopped fighting during that hour of swapping. Eventually either they kicked us out of the house or we kicked them out – it was proper fighting, the strongest side winning.’
The Nazis- a Warning From History Page 25