The training these recruits received was brutal, quick and very focused. ‘Army life is cruel, especially right now,’ nineteen-year-old Anatoly Viktorov wrote to his father. ‘In a short time you have to develop courage, boldness, resourcefulness, and quite apart from that, the ability to hit the enemy accurately with a gun. You don’t get any of these qualities as a free gift.’62 ‘We work for nine hours a day – and if you add the preparation we do by ourselves it’s twelve,’ another young man told his father.63 Thousands of miles to the west, newly recruited German infantrymen were training at the same accelerated pace.64 The Eastern Front claimed more lives than all the other theatres of European war combined, and even Hitler’s army had to change its rules and turn out soldiers fast. However, for new recruits to the Red Army, it was no comfort to know that ‘Fritz’ was suffering a similar stress. For most young Soviets, the struggle to get through those first few weeks alive and fit was utterly preoccupying.
David Samoilov found himself in a camp for infantry officers. The man in charge of his training was a ‘bestial and innate scoundrel’ called Serdyuk. This old hand used drill to torment the new recruits, forcing them to don their gas masks and run out across the steppe at the first hint of dawn. Samoilov had to carry a machine gun on these sorties, and he remembered its weight to the ounce: ‘Base – 32 kg, body – 10 kg, armour – 14 kg.’ He also remembered the meaningless torture of reveille practice. He would be ordered to lie down, get up, dress, undress and repeat the process over and over again. The idea was to reduce the time that each recruit would need until the whole thing took mere seconds, but like all drill, the exercise was also intended to beat the wind out of a dilettante, to turn a man into a soldier. ‘Serdyuk,’ Samoilov recalled, ‘was the first personification of hatred in my life.’65 No one described their training camp with love. ‘We fall in for classes, we fall in for meals,’ another officer trainee wrote to his wife in April 1942. ‘You can’t call a moment your own.’66
Private Aleksandr Karp was assigned to the artillery, leaving to train as soon as he had finished school in the summer of 1942. ‘Reveille is at 5 o’clock,’ he wrote to his grandmother. ‘We wash and all that. Breakfast at last, which usually consists of some kind of kasha with a hunk of sausage, butter, sweet tea and bread, which is never quite enough. Immediately after breakfast, lessons, without going back to barracks. We work for eight hours until lunch.’ After a few weeks, he had graduated from basic square-bashing to the more sophisticated study of weapon assembly and disassembly, target practice, geometry and mathematics. Time was always reserved for political education, which at this stage included reports on the war. The classes ran without a break. By early afternoon, the men were ravenous. ‘Lunch is usually something like soup with grits,’ Karp continued, ‘admittedly with fat, and then for seconds either that kasha again with that same sausage or else dumplings with gravy.’ The men were then shepherded off to spend their afternoon preparing for the next day’s classes, at the end of which came supper. ‘Bread and butter (25 g) and sweet tea (half a litre).’ ‘All our lessons,’ Karp wrote, ‘are in the open air. We have to sit for eight hours in scorching sun, which sometimes means that nothing sticks in our heads… We’re getting used to it a bit now, but we’re all terribly tired.’67
Karp had just left home. He was not interested in vodka or tobacco. Instead, like many others of his age, the young man craved milk, sweets and bread. He was always hungry. He traded some of his rations for sugar and sneaked out of field exercises to buy milk and dried fish from the local peasants.68 That autumn, he begged his grandmother to send more money. Men who had cash could quell their hunger with the berries and nuts that nearby children brought to sell at the barracks. Theft was a problem; new recruits soon learned to hide money and even food. They also had to dodge the bullies who threatened to beat their possessions out of them.69 It was tempting to raid the supplies from local farms, and in Karp’s unit, men stole out at night to dig potatoes from outlying fields. They made small fires and boiled them on the spot, using their helmets as saucepans. More enterprising youths stole chickens or took shots at wild hares. Karp’s own diet was so poor that within weeks he had come out in septic boils.70
As in peacetime, not all the farmwork that the men performed was unofficial. ‘They’ve sent us to the collective farm,’ Karp reported in October. ‘We have in fact been told to dig potatoes. The work is very hard. It was all made far worse this time by the fact that it was very cold and there was even rain with hail in it from time to time. The earth was cold and wet and it was terribly hard to dig in it, looking for spuds… We were all black and filthy, knackered. We worked without a break. They gave us half an hour for lunch. We ate it with the same dirty hands that we had been digging with. The mud poured down our hands and faces and into our mugs… but there was nothing much to eat then anyway.’ When Karp was given time off to recover from another bout of boils, he noted that he would be let off ‘the building work, my lessons, and mucking the horses out’.
Sappers from the 193 Dnepr rifle division building a shelter, 10 December 1943
It was not what they had signed up to do, but at least the digging was good practice for their real work. In November, Karp experienced ‘the toughest day of my training’. He and his mates were dumped on the cold steppe and left to make an earth dugout in which they had to spend the night. These shelters, zemlyanki, were a core part of the Red Army’s survival plan. They could be quite elaborate, with curtained-off rooms, an iron stove and even a window. But all were dug into the earth, concealed with turf or branches, stuffy, cramped and thick with the makhorka that almost everybody smoked. The description that an infantryman sent back to his wife that spring was typical. ‘We live like moles, in the earth,’ he wrote. ‘The walls are made of planks, and so is the roof, although there is no floor or ceiling. We sleep on planks as well, two-storey bunks… It’s just a bit uncomfortable when there is a lot of noise, because up to four hundred people have to live in here.’71
The digging, then, was not a trivial task, and Karp’s team had yet to learn the real knack. ‘We were saved by the fact that they gave us warm things,’ he wrote. ‘Padded clothes and valenki. But all the same we froze to our bones.’ It was particularly bad for each man as he did his sentry duty. Coming back inside ‘it became clear what a great thing a campfire is. That night, we all took it in turns to freeze.’72 The trainees grumbled, but so, unfortunately, did the inspectors who reviewed their work. That autumn, a report written with new standards of training in mind found infantry and gunner recruits wanting in almost every area. It also noted that their discipline was weak, that they were too fond of slipping away without permission and of sleeping at their posts, and that their manner to superior officers was rude.73 ‘We studied for ten years in school,’ wrote Karp sulkily. ‘And now we have to start all over again, working without a break. I’m sick of it. On the other hand, we can’t expect that what’s ahead will be any better.’74
The irony was that most, in fact, expected nothing less. Recruits climbed patiently into the trains that took them to the Volga or the north because they could see no future except through war. The humiliation of the training camp would end, the waiting finish, and they would begin to do a real job. They could also get their revenge, and not just on the invader. The prospect of combat and death loosened the hold of duty, party and the whole communist state. Samoilov remembered his own journey to the front. He and his comrades travelled with the hated senior, Serdyuk. As they put miles of track between their company and the old camp, their tormentor seemed to withdraw into his thoughts. ‘The tragedy of the tyrant,’ Samoilov noted, ‘lies in the fact that his power is never limitless.’ On that train, the balance would shift. It was a story that would be repeated elsewhere as insulted men began to weigh their own value. The hope – or fear, depending on your rank – was that the battlefield would level former differences out. A group of Uzbeks gathered round Serdyuk one evening. Their teeth flashed in the semi-d
ark, their bodies, muscled from years on the steppe, crowded their victim like the walls of a cell. ‘We’re going to the front, aren’t we?’ asked one of them. Serdyuk looked up into a fixed, confident smile, the ‘slant-eyed glance of Tamurlane’. As soon as he arrived at the unit’s reserve base, he asked to be transferred to another group.75
‘Without exception, we are all worried about Stalingrad,’ a junior officer called Ageev wrote to his wife in October 1942. ‘If the enemy succeeds in taking it, we will all suffer, including the people in our unit.’76 The city that bore Stalin’s name acquired a mythic significance that autumn. ‘I am writing to you from this historic place at an historic time,’ Viktor Barsov wrote to his parents in August.77 His mother guessed correctly where he was. The Moscow press was full of tales from the embattled town; the whole country waited for news. As Barsov put it in another letter that October, ‘I am defending the histor[ic]. t[own]. form[erly]. Ts[aritsyn]. now St[alingrad].’ His boots were soaked through and his fingers stiffened through his thin gloves as he wrote. He was no more a superman than young Karp, and just as preoccupied with hunger, cold and lack of sleep. Instead of steppe, the city that surrounded him for miles was no more than a wilderness of rubble, twisted steel and mud. But his letter suggests a certain pride in his position. Already everybody knew that fighting here was likely to decide the war.
Stalingrad stands on the west bank of the Volga river, the mightiest in Europe. The city, originally named for the Tsaritsa, a tributary of the Volga that cuts it in half, came to bear Stalin’s name in honour of a civil-war campaign in which the future leader had played a conspicuous part. Partly because of this, Stalingrad had been developed as a model city for the region, with open spaces, parks, and pristine-looking white apartment blocks that reflected the river and the summer glare. But even if it had not borne a famous name, the city was important. It was a major centre for engineering and manufacturing industry, it supported a university and several technical schools, and it hosted an extensive network of supply and storage facilities for the armies fighting nearby on the river Don. In 1942, Hitler regarded it as an important bridgehead on the Volga river and as a vital staging post for armies heading south towards the oilfields of the Caspian. He also savoured the prospect of capturing the city bearing Stalin’s name.
The battle to take it began in the heat of the southern Russian summer as Red Army units stationed on the river Don fought to hold off an enemy advance from both the south and west. On 4 August, the German 6th Army reached the southern bank of the Don, which bends east at this point in a great arc towards the Volga. By mid-month, they held almost the entire stretch of territory within this Don bend to the west and north-west of Stalingrad. The Soviet defence was more determined than of late, but conditions did not help to raise morale. On more than one occasion, whole armies gave way to panic, rushing headlong for the barren gullies on the far side of the Don. ‘I am taking part in a very large operation,’ Volkov wrote to his wife in August 1942. ‘For the past few days and still right now I am in the front line. I don’t have time to describe what’s going on, but I can tell you that what’s around me is a very hell. There’s wailing and roaring all around, the sky is splitting with the din, but my eardrums are already used to it. One shell burst just three metres from me, and I was spattered with mud, but I’m still in one piece. But as to what will happen, I can give you no guarantees.’78
In fact, the fighting in the Don country helped to delay the German advance, which mattered later in the campaign when the ice and darkness finally set in. At the time, however, the breathing space seemed made for working on the great city’s defence. As in Moscow a year earlier, citizens were pressed into militia gangs and given shovels, carts and lumps of wood. Tank traps and trenches were prepared, defensive drills rehearsed. None of these preparations would prevent the cataclysm when it came, and local people seemed to sense that fact. While some exhausted Stalingraders dug, their neighbours, no less frightened, were streaming eastwards to the Volga, pulling carts, carrying bundles, driving stock.79 They were rushing to escape from a trap. Many of the bridges across the river had been mined, while the roads were already exposed to sporadic aerial machine-gun fire. Thousands of refugees would never make it to the sallow hills of Asia.
The attack came on Sunday 23 August. That day, 600 German planes circled over Stalingrad. They flew in low, carpet-bombing in relays. By nightfall there was little left above the ground but rubble, searing flame and smoke. ‘The streets of the city are dead,’ Chuikov would write as he toured his new battleground a few days after the catastrophe. ‘There is not a single green twig on the trees: everything has perished in the flames. All that is left of the wooden houses is a pile of ashes and stove chimneys sticking up out of them. The many stone houses are burnt out, their windows and doors missing and their roofs caved in. Now and then a building collapses. People are rummaging about in the ruins, pulling out bundles, samovars and crockery, and carrying everything to the landing stage.’80 Tens of thousands of civilians would never manage to escape. In that first day and night, an estimated 40,000 people died.81
The bitterest and most appalling phase of Stalingrad’s defence also began that August. For a few weeks, the Soviet 62nd and 64th armies retreated from the city’s western suburbs to a few strongholds in the centre and the north. By mid-September, the 62nd Army was holding the city on its own. Its orders were to destroy the enemy – the 6th Army of General Paulus – in the city itself. Soldiers holding the narrow strip of ruined earth along the Volga’s western bank were told to fight as if there were no land across the water on the eastern shore. What that would mean soon became clear. Chuikov’s men, reinforced by any troops who could be shipped across alive, clung to their bridgehead by contesting every house. Inside the ruins, sometimes in the dark, men fought with bayonets and their bare hands to hold each stairwell and each bullet-pitted room.
From October, Chuikov’s soldiers in the city would be supported by well-organized artillery, this time sensibly sited on the Volga’s eastern bank. But the enemy maintained complete superiority in the air. All troops in the city, German and Soviet – and the few civilians who had not succeeded in escaping after the first fatal days – were subject to unrelenting bombardment. So were the boats that brought supplies and men across the river from the Soviet side. The food ran out, bullets ran out, the cooling water in machine guns boiled. The men lived and died amid a litter of corpses and rubble, the bodies blending with the dust. As Chuikov himself recalled, ‘The heavy casualties, the constant retreat, the shortage of food and munitions, the difficulty of receiving reinforcements… all this had a very bad effect on morale. Many longed to get across the Volga, to escape the hell of Stalingrad.’82 His men were close to absolute despair. ‘It is all so hard that I do not see a way out,’ a soldier wrote home that October. ‘We can consider Stalingrad as good as surrendered.’83
For tens of thousands, there could never be escape. True, some of the top brass, as well as some police, shipped out to safer ground, leaving the men to face the wreckage and the flames alone.84 Chuikov himself is said to have requested several times to remove his headquarters to the safety of the other bank,85 but the general had no choice. His orders were to lead the soldiers by example. He had a relatively free hand over tactics, and the promise of daily replacements of men, but there would be no going back. The troops who disembarked at Stalingrad had no option except to fight. One sanction, which Chuikov was never ashamed to use, was the threat of a bullet in the back. The discipline the general maintained was savage even by the standards of Zhukov’s Red Army. But the Volga river, steaming from the heat of German shells, was a barrier more deadly than any secret police line. Just over half a million troops were massed for Stalingrad’s defence in July 1942. Well over 300,000 of these would die.86
The physical toll defies imagination. The day-today conditions on their own wore the men down; it was not just the bombing, the unrelenting noise, the dust, flame, cold and darkness
. The city’s defenders relied entirely on the river boats to deliver supplies. As these began to fail, soldiers turned into scavengers, taking the boots, the guns and even writing paper from corpses. The reek of decayed flesh mingled with the hot metal and sweat. There was little enough clean water in the shelters where soldiers huddled at night, so washing was out of the question. Lice, always a problem at the front, infested clothing, gloves, bedding and the men’s own matted hair. Unlike the rats and birds that also moved among the ruins, these vermin were not even good to eat. The men had their own way of describing siege rations. ‘You’ll live,’ they would mutter, ‘but you won’t be able to fuck.’87 The bitter words ignored the fact that they still had to fight. Only the injured, proven in combat, stood a chance of a place on the boats that slipped back to the east bank every night. The hospitals filled up. Their staff worked to exhaustion.
The men’s own view was that ten days were as much as anyone could take. Even the toughest used to say that after the eighth or ninth day they were certain to be wounded, if they did not die.88 Most had grown used to the sounds and smells of war, and old hands felt that they could judge, even predict, their universe. It was the closest they might ever come to controlling the chaos at the front. ‘We knew by the flight of a shell if it would hit you or not,’ a survivor remembered. ‘We could also tell where a mine would land by the noise it produced.’89 But the endless struggle to remain alert destroyed a person’s concentration in the end. The archives do not talk about stress much – the Soviet army operated with less sensitive measures of the soldiers’ health and fitness – but, as one survivor put it, the men became ‘a little less than human’ as they strained to hear the shadows in the dark.90 ‘At least I can say that I saw a lot of heroic things,’ an officer wrote later to his wife, ‘but I also saw a lot of things that the Red Army ought to be ashamed of. I never thought that I’d be capable of the kind of ruthlessness that really borders on cruelty. I thought I was a good-hearted person, but it seems that a human being can hide within himself for a long time the qualities that surface only at a time like this.’91
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