Stalin regained his equilibrium and learned from past mistakes. When the spies who had warned him about Hitler’s plans for invasion continued to send a torrent of vital information to Moscow, he paid closer attention. Operating out of Paris was Leonard Trepper, called the “Big Chief,” who ran a spy network known to German secret police as the “Red Orchestra,” because of its nightly radio chorus across Europe. Trepper, a Polish Jew, had been planted in France before the war. There he cultivated an influential circle of German businessmen and military leaders from whom he extracted masses of information. Hounded by German radio sleuths, who tracked his transmitters with special directional equipment, Trepper still survived. But his time was growing short.
Other spies were relatively invulnerable. In Switzerland, a Hungarian Communist named Alexander Rado ran both a publishing business and a spy ring. One of his agents, Rudolf Rossler, was probably the most valuable weapon the Soviet Union possessed. The shy, bespectacled Rossler, code-named “Lucy,” had contacts inside the High Command of the German Army. His sources, never identified to this day, provided him with almost every decision made by the Führer. Rossler had passed both strategic and tactical battle plans on to Moscow, usually within twenty-four hours of their having been approved. His communiqués were worth many divisions to Stalin.
Thus, Moscow knew explicit details about Operation Blue: the names of the divisions involved in the attack, the number of tanks to be committed to battle, plus the operation’s ultimate goal of severing the Volga River lifeline and capturing the oil fields of the Caucasus. As the offensive progressed, Lucy also had forwarded each major shift in tactics, from Hitler’s indecision about taking Voronezh to his startling insistence on splitting his armies on the steppe.
Yet Stalin was hesitant when Lucy told of Hitler’s confusion at Voronezh. The premier had always believed that the Germans intended to take Moscow from the south, and therefore might be using the drive toward the Caucasus as a feint to draw Russian reserves from the capital. But when Lucy’s torrent of “inner strategy” continued to accurately forecast the German Army’s course across southern Russia, Stalin began to base Russian defense plans on Lucy’s confidences.
While Hitler chased two hares at the same time, Stalin, on July 13, had agreed to a plan set forth by his general staff (STAVKA) to withdraw Soviet units as far as the Volga, thereby forcing the Germans to spend the coming winter in open country. Almost a week later, when STAVKA received the astonishing news that the German Army groups had begun to split their forces on the steppe, Russian strategy changed again. Until this time, little consideration had been given to making a determined stand on the west bank of the Volga. Now Stalin made a decision of momentous significance. He sent an order to members of the City Soviet (city council) in Stalingrad to prepare for a seige. As of July 21 they were to organize the entire population in a frantic effort to build a fortified ring around the outskirts of the city while STAVKA tried to beef-up the small military garrison.
No one realized it at the time, but this decision to “stand fast” would change the course of history.
A few days later, on the night of August 1, Stalin had made another attempt to strengthen Stalingrad. Near midnight a Red Army staff car pulled up to the entrance of the Kremlin’s private quarters, and a squat, gray-haired officer eased slowly out of the back seat to limp painfully into the building. At the door to the premier’s office, forty-nine-year-old Gen. Andrei Ivanovich Yeremenko put down his cane, braced himself, and walked briskly into the room.
Stalin greeted him warmly. Shaking Yeremenko’s hand, he asked, “Do you consider yourself recovered?”
Yeremenko said he felt fine.
Another general interrupted, “It looks like his wound is still bothering him, he’s limping.”
Yeremenko shrugged off the remark, so Stalin let the matter drop. “We shall consider that Comrade Yeremenko has fully recovered. We need him now very badly. Let’s get down to business.”
Stalin spoke to the point. “Due to the circumstances around Stalingrad, prompt action must be taken to fortify this most important sector of the front … and to improve control of the troops.” Stalin went on to offer Yeremenko command of one of the fronts in the south. The general accepted, and Stalin sent him to STAVKA Headquarters a few blocks away to be briefed about the situation on the steppe.
Yeremenko spent the better part of August 2 studying the maps of Stalingrad and the surrounding area. As he stared at the topographical details of the forty-mile strip of land between the Don and Volga rivers, he concluded that in order to attack Stalingrad the Germans would have to concentrate most of their strength in that narrow “bridge” where the Don and Volga come closest to each other. And he wondered whether that type of deployment might offer the Russians a chance for a successful counterattack from the flanks.
After selecting the nucleus of a staff, he went back to Stalin for another conference. This time, the premier seemed more nervous and preoccupied. Puffing absently on his pipe, Stalin listened while his army chief of staff, Marshal Alexander Mikhailovich Vasilevsky, briefed him on the day’s activities. When the marshal concluded, Stalin turned to Yeremenko and asked: “Is everything clear to you, comrade?”
Yeremenko spoke up against the idea of two Russian fronts in the same region, especially since their boundaries met in the exact center of Stalingrad. To him, trying to coordinate the defense of a city with another commander equal in responsibility would be “utterly confusing, if not tragically impossible.”
Stalin left at that point to take some phone calls from the south. When he returned, he was subdued and obviously worried. Picking up Yeremenko’s protests about dual fronts, he said firmly: “Leave everything as it was outlined.…” Stalin told Yeremenko to take over the Southeastern Front and hold back the German Fourth Panzer Army coming toward the Volga from Kotelnikovo. Unhappy with this assignment, the general asked if he could lead the Stalingrad Front, comprising the northern part of the city and beyond to the Don, because he wanted to attack the German flank in that region.
Stalin broke in brusquely, “Your proposition deserves attention, but in the future … now the German offensive must be stopped.” Stalin had sounded annoyed and when he paused to fill his pipe with tobacco, Yeremenko mended his fences by agreeing with his commander in chief. As Stalin saw him to the door, he warned Yeremenko to take drastic measures to enforce discipline at the front. Now, on the night of August 5, Joseph Stalin paced his office waiting for further news from the steppe. Yeremenko had phoned from Stalingrad. He had sounded optimistic, but Stalin knew that sixty miles to the southwest, German tanks were brushing aside scattered Russian resistance and charging toward the city.
Unless Yeremenko stopped them, Stalingrad would fall in a few days.
Chapter Four
The city that Hitler had never planned to capture, and that Stalin had never intended to defend, lay sweltering under the summer sun. No rain had fallen for two months and, day after day, the temperature soared well above one hundred degrees. Worse, the humidity that typifies a river town was totally enervating. When the wind blew, it always came from the west—hot, dusty, bringing no relief. The citizens of Stalingrad were accustomed to being uncomfortable and they joked about how the heat made the concrete sidewalks bulge and buckle upward, splitting the slabs into giant fragments. As for the shiny asphalt roads, all one could do was watch the mirages rising from the wide boulevards in the center of town.
Few people in this cauldron knew their city was about to become a battlefield, but the tragedy of war had always menaced the region. In the year 1237, the Golden Horde of the Great Khan had crossed the Volga at this perfect fording point, ravaged the territory, galloped on to the Don, and then swept westward into European Russia, stopping their invasion just short of Vienna and the Polish border. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Moscow began her own expansion into Asia; the region became a border post from which Russian soldiers sallied forth to fight the Mo
ngols. When the czar decreed the area safe for settlement in 1589, he established a trading center called Tsaritsyn. In Tartar language the name was pronounced “sarry-soo” and meant “yellow water.”
Though the location was safe enough to settle, it never knew peace. Russian brigands wreaked havoc on the citizenry as they plundered their way north and south along the length of the Volga. The geographical key to bringing the wealth of the Caucasus to Moscow and Leningrad, the heartland of Russia, as well as being the east-west gateway to Asia, Tsaritsyn was a place for which men would always do battle.
The legendary cossack leader, Stenka Razin, took the city in 1670 and held it during a bloody siege. Just over one hundred years later, another cossack named Yemelyan Pugachev, decided to challenge the power of Catherine the Great and stormed Tsaritsyn in an effort to free the serfs. The rebellion ended as could be expected. The czarina’s executioner cut off Pugachev’s head.
Still the city prospered, finally taking its place in the industrial revolution when, in 1875, a French company built the region’s first steel mill. Within a few years, the city’s population had grown to more than one hundred thousand and, during World War I, nearly one-quarter of the inhabitants were working in its factories. Despite the boom, the city reminded visitors of America’s wild west. Clusters of tents and ramshackle houses sprawled aimlessly along the riverbank; more than four hundred saloons and brothels catered to a boisterous clientele. Oxen and camels shared the unpaved streets with sleek horse-drawn carriages. Cholera epidemics scourged the population regularly as the result of mountains of garbage and sewage that collected in convenient gullies.
It was almost predictable then that the Bolshevik Revolution would bring Tsaritsyn to its knees. The fighting for control of the region was unusually bitter and Joseph Stalin, leading only a tiny force, managed to hold off three generals of the White Army. Finally driven from the city, Stalin regrouped his forces in the safety of the steppe country, fell on the flanks of the White Army in 1920, and won a pivotal victory in the revolution. To honor their liberator, a jubilant citizenry renamed the city Stalingrad, but words alone could not repair the damage wrought by war. The factories had been rendered useless, famine struck down tens of thousands, and Moscow decided the only way to save the area was to return it to its industrial state. It was a wise decision. The new industrial plants soon were exporting tractors, guns, textiles, lumber, and chemicals to all parts of the Soviet Union. During the next twenty years, the city grew by leaps and bounds along the high cliffs of the western bank of the Volga. Now half a million people called it home.
When General Yeremenko first looked down on Stalingrad through the window of the plane bringing him to battle, he thrilled at the sight. Hugging the serpentine bends of the Volga, the city looked like a giant caterpillar, sixteen miles long and filled with smokestacks belching forth clouds of soot that told of its value to the Soviet war effort. White buildings sparkled in dazzling sunlight. There were orchards, broad boulevards, spacious public parks. During the drive from the airport through the city, Yeremenko felt himself overwhelmed by the power and charm of the rawboned metropolis.
The general’s underground command post was located in the city’s heart, only five hundred yards away from the western shore of the Volga in the north wall of a two hundred-foot deep, dried-up riverbed called Tsaritsa Gorge. A superb location for a headquarters (some said that it had been built years before on explicit orders from Premier Stalin himself), the bunker had two entrances: one at the bottom of the gorge and the other at the very top, leading into Pushkinskaya Street. Each entrance was protected from bomb blasts by heavy doors, plus a series of staggered reinforced partitions, or baffles. The interior was lavish by Russian military standards. The walls were paneled with an oaken-plywood surface; there was even a flush toilet.
In his comfortable office, Yeremenko immediately began to familiarize himself with his domain. On the desk lay a huge contour map, marked in pencil to show the demarcation line between his Southeast Front and the Stalingrad Front to the north, commanded by Gen. A. V. Gordov. The boundary ran straight as an arrow from the town of Kalach, forty miles west at the Don River, to the same Tsaritsa Gorge where Yeremenko sat. The longer he examined the artificial border, the more he fumed at STAVKA’s inability to realize that the dual-front concept was absurd. Worse, he had already spoken with General Gordov and discovered him to be as insufferable as he was reported to be. In the best of times a difficult man, under pressure Gordov became a tyrant, humiliating his staff, inciting open revolt among subordinates. Now faced with Yeremenko, a rival for power, he was evasive, uncooperative, and unpleasant. But since there was no point waiting for STAVKA to admit its mistake and reassign command responsibilities, Yeremenko tried to come to grips with his own immediate assignment.
He lingered over the map, searching its symbols for clues to a defensive strategy. Between Kalach and Stalingrad there was only steppe country—flat, grassy terrain that was perfect for German panzers. He next eliminated the assorted farms in the region, the kholkozi, where he knew thousands of Stalingrad’s citizens were finishing the job of snatching a bumper wheat harvest from the invaders. The farm crews out there had been straining under the brutal sun while Stuka dive-bombers machine-gunned them and set fire to trains filled with grain. Nevertheless, nearly twenty-seven thousand fully loaded freight cars had already rolled away to safety in the east. Behind them came nine thousand tractors, threshers, and combines along with two million head of cattle, bawling plaintively as they pounded toward the Volga and a swim to the safety of the far shore.
The “harvest victory” was the only one that Yeremenko could savor. Four rings of antitank ditches being dug twenty to thirty miles west of Stalingrad offered little hope. Neither did the “green belt,” a twenty-nine-mile arc of trees planted years before to ward off the effects of dust clouds and snowstorms. Only a mile wide at its thickest point, it could not withstand the concentrated fire of heavy artillery.
Yeremenko’s attention wandered southward, down the map to the rail center of Kotelnikovo, seventy-three miles away. Captured by the Germans on August 2, the city controlled the main road to Stalingrad. The German line of march was obvious: through Chileko, where the Siberian 208th Division had just been decimated by the Luftwaffe, and on to the towns of Krugliakov and Abganerovo. At the latter location, Yeremenko paid closer attention to swirling lines on the contour map indicating hills rising to elevations of from two to three hundred feet. The hills followed the main road the rest of the way to the congested suburbs of Stalingrad. With mounting excitement, he noted deep ravines cutting across the region from east to west and concluded that it would have to be in this twenty-mile strip of hill country that he would try to halt the German advance.
Deep in his heart, however, Yeremenko knew that eventually he would have to fight for Stalingrad block by block and street by street. So, as he pored over the map, he embarked on a peculiar mental exercise: replacing the map’s impersonal symbols with his own images of rock formations, houses, and streets, he strove to understand the battleground he had inherited. The southern part of Stalingrad became a jumble of white wooden homes, surrounded by picket fences and flower gardens. This was Dar Gova, a residential zone just below some light industrial development that crowded close to the Volga—a sugar plant and a massive concrete grain elevator that looked like a gray dreadnought on a prairie sea.
A short distance north of the elevator, the Tsaritsa Gorge cut its two hundred-foot deep scar in the earth before it ran due west for several miles into the steppe. Just above this dividing line was Gordov’s territory, over which Yeremenko had no jurisdiction. But he kept on with his studies, because he intended to be ready when STAVKA came to its senses.
Here was the heart of the city. It encompassed more than one hundred blocks of offices, stores, apartment buildings, and was bounded on the east by the central ferry landing—the only major crossing point on the Volga—plus a promenade along the Volga shore.
To the north, it was cut off from the next section of the city by another deep ravine, the Krutoy Gully, and on its western flank was another drab community of single-storey frame houses. Yeremenko sensed immediately that this whole central section of the city could become a fearsome line of defense. Reduced to rubble by gunfire, the fallen bricks and mortar would provide perfect cover for Russian infantry.
The center of town also contained Railroad Station Number One. For months trains had passed through it carrying refugees from other battlegrounds: Leningrad, Odessa, Kharkov. Crammed into cattle cars, when the trains stopped in Stalingrad they jumped off to find water and barter for food with merchants lining the platforms. While they haggled for fruit and bread, the penniless among them stole whatever they could behind the vendors’ backs. But in early August, the motley traffic from other fronts had to share train space with thousands of Stalingrad natives who suddenly had been ordered eastward into Asia by official decree. Now the terminal was swollen to the bursting point with tearful relatives embracing children, old men, and women, amid choked promises to write and keep well. The shrill whistles of the locomotives finally separated the groups. With a last wave and forced smile, a new flood of refugees joined the trek into the vast interior of Russia.
A half block east of the station, the men responsible for the city’s evacuation occupied a five-storey office building on the west side of the shrub-lined Red Square. Across the square, beside the cavernous post office, the newspaper Stalingrad Pravda (“Truth”) still printed a daily edition and distributed it to an anxious readership. Under the guidance of the chairman of the City Soviet, Dmitri M. Pigalev, and other members of the council, it published information about air raid drills, rationing, as well as battle reports from the front. To ward off panic, it reported only that the Red Army was scoring impressive victories west of the Don.
The World War II Chronicles Page 41