The World War II Chronicles

by William Craig

  As he dozed on into the afternoon, Nekrassov thought more and more about the Germans on the steppe and he wondered what would happen to Stalingrad when the enemy finally reached the Volga. He could see himself crouching in the scrub grass on the far shore while German shells blasted up huge fountains of water.

  Fifteen miles north of Nekrassov’s lumber pile, the nightmare he envisioned had already begun.

  Machinist Lev Dylo had just met his first Germans. He tried to run, but was thrown to the ground and manhandled. One soldier snatched his watch. Others prodded him to his feet and marched him across a field. Dylo waited until he saw a deep ravine, then plunged into it and escaped. The Germans did not shoot.

  Dylo ran two miles to the tractor works and burst in on his superiors.

  “They’re here. Hurry!” he shouted, but the factory supervisors had already been alerted. The first battalions of workers’ militia, some wearing uniforms but most in civilian clothes, were marching out to man barricades along the Mokraya Mechetka River.

  In factory courtyards up and down the main north-south highway in Stalingrad, political commissars and foremen processed thousands of workers for duty. They told each group, “Whoever can bear arms and whoever can shoot, write your names down.” Those who signed got a white armband, a rifle, and a bandolier of ammunition before they moved off in platoons to the riverbank. Workers not selected went to the settlement houses to alert relatives of those who had gone into the lines.

  Pyotr Nerozia hurried home from one of these meetings at the Red October Plant to say good-bye to his family which was being evacuated that afternoon across the Volga. He arrived too late and found only a note saying that his wife and children had already left for Uralsk. Though relieved that they had gotten off safely, Pyotr felt a sudden loneliness. The stillness of the house bothered him and he left for a walk. Near the aviation school, he stopped in a field, picked up a watermelon, then turned and went back home. In the kitchen he started to fry two eggs.

  When another air raid alert sounded, Nerozia turned off the stove, left the two eggs in the pan, and went to the battalion headquarters of his workers’ fighting detachment.

  The air raid siren that Nerozia reacted to was just another in the series of false alarms that Stalingrad residents had endured during the day. By late afternoon, the center of the city had lapsed into apathy. Incredibly enough, despite the presence of Yeremenko’s nerve center in the Tsaritsa Gorge and the unusual military traffic on roads leading north to the factory area, most people in the downtown part of the city remained completely ignorant of the crisis.

  Lt. Viktor Nekrassov had finally gotten up from his comfortable log heap and, with his friend, wandered over to the main library at the river’s edge. In the quiet and cozy reading room, he sprawled into a wicker chair and begn to thumb through a magazine containing short articles on Peru. At a long table, two young boys laughed out loud at a book of drawings about Baron Munchhausen. On the wall, a big clock struck each quarter hour. After a while, Nekrassov and his frend got up and left.

  Loudspeakers were spewing yet another warning across squares, intersections, and side streets. The voice minced no words: “Attention. Attention. Citizens, we have an air raid! We have an air raid!”

  As if to underscore that it was not just another drill, antiaircraft guns around Red Square banged loudly in frenzied cadence. Small black puffs marched across the clear blue sky; automobiles quickly screeched to a halt. Tramcars let off passengers who stood mute for a moment, shaded their eyes and looked into the sun to gauge the danger point.

  Then they saw them, the lead groups of more than six hundred German planes, coming from beyond the Don. Like strings of gulls, flying in perfect V’s, the Stukas and Ju-88s droned over the sun-drenched city and tipped over into their dives. Their bombs fell into the crowded downtown residential area and, because of the long drought, flames spread like wildfire. In seconds, Stalingrad was ablaze.

  Concussions blew down most of the houses on Gogol and Pushkin streets. Outside a cinema, a woman was decapitated as she ran along the sidewalk. The city waterworks building collapsed from a direct hit. The telephone exchange fell in on itself; all regular phone communications blinked out. The screams of trapped operators came up through a jumble of broken switchboards and control panels.

  At Stalingrad Pravda, on the northern side of Red Square, bombs smashed the outer walls and brought survivors streaming out to seek safety in a nearby cellar. In the meantime, the loudspeakers on Red Square tonelessly asked people to shoulder arms and fight the invader.

  On Medevditskaya Street, every house burned briskly. When firemen arrived, they saw a hysterical woman running down the middle of the road, while clutching a baby tightly to her breast. One of the men jumped out, grabbed her and pushed her down into a trench. A bomb went off, killing the man as he tried to get down beside her.

  On Permskaya Street, Mrs. Konstantin Karmanova returned home after seeing her two older sons march off with their factory unit. As she and her sixteen-year-old son Genn turned into the street, they saw the whole block burned out except for their own home, a one-storey brick dwelling. Mrs. Karmanova ran inside to save what she could. She grabbed a bundle of papers left by her husband when he went off to war: some of them dated back to 1918 when he fought as a Bolshevik for Tsaritsyn. Rushing into the backyard, she dug a hole and buried the documents and some silver heirlooms. Around her, houses continued to burn.

  In Dar Gova, railroad man Constantin Viskov woke from his drugged sleep to hear bombs crumping down near the train station. As he jumped out of bed, his wife handed him a package of food and kissed him good-bye. Viskov raced away through smoke and fire toward the terminal.

  The first bombs fell as Pyotr Nerozia unlocked the safe at battalion headquarters. His superior, a woman named Denisova, rushed in and told him to send guns to the tractor factory. After issuing orders for their transfer, Nerozia reminded himself to go home and pick up some food.

  Outside the headquarters, the city shook in agony. Smoke pouring through the windows choked him, and suddenly he was thirsty. Comrade Denisova grabbed at his arm and pointed to the main hospital, which collapsed while they watched. Running over to help the patients, they shepherded a group on to the nearby children’s clinic. But it caught fire immediately and the invalids inside were roasted to death.

  Nerozia then went off to assemble a workers’ detachment at the Factory Krasny Zastava. It was a mass of flames. He moved on to the City Soviet at Red Square, but it, too, had flared and broken under a string of bombs. He ran ahead to the Metro, a cavernous underground air-raid shelter, now crammed with screaming and suffocating people. Nerozia balked at going into this hellhole and, remembering the food at home, circled back to his own street where his house was still standing.

  Going to the bedroom he found his parrot squawking for attention as it hopped frantically about its cage. Taking the trembling bird in his hands, he held it at the window and released it into gray clouds of smoke. The parrot flew off and flitted nervously from tree to tree.

  Nerozia watched his pet for a moment, then ran back to the kitchen and filled a bedsheet with farina, wheat grain, dried bread, and a bottle of vodka. When he finished he gazed wistfully at the stove where his two fried eggs lay under a coverlet of fallen plaster. With a final shrug, he hoisted the sack of rations onto his shoulder and left his house for the last time.

  At 7:00 P.M., during the height of the bombing, the City Soviet leaders managed to function from an improvised network of cellars. They sent out orders to continue publication of Pravda and Mikhail Vodolagin, a thick-lipped, bespectacled member of the Central Committee, hurried over to Pravda headquarters on Red Square and found the entire building a shambles. A few hundred yards away, he stumbled on the newspaper staff, cowering in a basement and too stunned to work.

  Vodolagin commandeered a car and went north toward the tractor factory, which he knew had a printing press. The trip normally took twenty minutes, but with Ge
rman planes overhead and bodies and debris clogging the main road, the passage was torturous. To Vodolagin’s right, liquid fire from ruptured oil tanks passed down the slope and spilled into the Volga. To his left, the lower slopes of Mamaev Hill were covered with the bodies of picnickers.

  After two harrowing hours, Vodolagin arrived at the nearly deserted tractor works. He found his printing press, collared a militiaman who said he knew how to set type and, as plaster fell from the ceiling, he started to bring out a special issue of Pravda.

  Close to 9:00 P.M., with the Stukas and Ju-88s still overhead, Mrs. Vlasa Kliagina hurried back from digging ditches in Yelshanka. She was anxious to find her daughter, Nadia, who had gone home early to be with little Vovo. At a roadblock, Mrs. Kliagina fretted impatiently until a soldier finally waved her through into her own neighborhood, crackling from a hundred fires.

  She ran along Sovietskaya Street and turned into Karl Marx Gardens where thousands of people huddled around benches. Homeless, crying, many had already lost relatives. Mrs. Kliagina searched for her children, but did not find them in the crowd.

  When she came to her own home, her heart sank. It was a smoldering ruin. She called out several times but no one answered and she fled down Komsomolskaya Street. A friend saw her there, sobbing incoherently, and shouted that Nadia was safe in a nearby cellar. At that moment, her daughter ran out and told her mother that Vovo had vanished. Mrs. Kliagina refused to believe her and broke away, screaming, “Vovo! Vovo! Where are you?” She never saw him again.

  In his diary that evening, the aggressive, flamboyant Luftwaffe general, Freiherr von Richthofen, summed up the results of his pilots’ operations over the stricken city, “A sudden alert sent out by VIII Air Corps put the whole of Air Fleet Four into the air, with the result that we simply paralyzed the Russians.…”

  It was true. The city’s pulse slowed, numbed by the blows that had killed nearly forty thousand people.

  Close to midnight, with the Tsaritsa Gorge completely ringed by fire, a bone-tired General Yeremenko picked up the BODO conference phone to speak with Stalin. Within minutes, the premier was on the line, listening as Yeremenko confessed that the situation was very bad, so bad that city officials wanted to blow up some of the factories and transfer the contents of others across the Volga. The general stressed, however, that both he and Commissar Khrushchev opposed such a move.

  Stalin was furious.

  “I do not want to debate this question,” he shouted. “The evacuation and mining of the plants will be interpreted as a decision to surrender Stalingrad. Therefore the State Defense Committee forbids it.”

  With this order, Stalin left Yeremenko to cope with the Germans knocking at the city gates.

  Chapter Seven

  According to the tactics devised by General Paulus, the three German divisions crossing the steppe on Sunday, August 23, were supposed to forge a forty-mile-long corridor from the Don to the Volga. This barrier of steel would seal off Stalingrad from the north and prevent reinforcements from filtering down to the aid of the city. In theory, the plan was sound. In practice, it required perfect coordination among the participating units.

  By midnight of August 23, the 16th Panzer Division on the outskirts of Stalingrad had outrun its support. Twelve miles to its rear, the 3rd Motorized Division halted for the night. Another ten miles back, the 60th Motorized Division had bogged down in a giant traffic snarl. Completely separated from each other, the three divisions became a chain of “islands” dropped in the middle of a hostile sea. Until these islands joined into a solid land bridge extending outward from the main body of the Sixth Army, each would be extremely vulnerable to Soviet counterattacks.

  While the Russian Military Council in Stalingrad dispatched the workers’ militia to trenches north of the tractor works, Gen. Hans Hube ordered his 16th Panzers into a circular defense perimeter, a hedgehog, with the division’s heavy artillery covering a 360-degree front. At the same time, Hube issued instructions for an immediate attack if there was any opportunity to take advantage of tactical surprise.

  At 4:40 the next morning, his gun batteries opened a furious barrage on Russian positions around Spartakovka and the Mokraya Mechetka River. Shortly afterward, panzers of Combat Group Krumpen roared out from the hedgehog onto the softened targets only to run into withering fire from hastily fortified Soviet trenches.

  In a miracle of overnight organization, Russian militia had dug interlocking strongpoints and assimilated the rudiments of modern warfare. Now, dressed in work clothes or Sunday finery, they crouched behind mortars and machine guns and challenged the finest tank army in the world. When Combat Group Krumpen staggered under their hail of shells, the Russians even opened a counterattack, sending unpainted T-34 tanks straight from the factory assembly lines at the Germans. The situation suddenly reversed, General Hube radioed Sixth Army Headquarters for information about his tardy supporting divisions.

  They, too, were under heavy pressure. The 3rd Motorized at the town of Kuzmichi, had just captured a Soviet freight train bulging with American Ford trucks and Willys jeeps, but it had to turn into its own hedgehog formation to face a reckless onslaught by the Russian 35th Guards Division, which was pouring down from the north to widen the gap between the 3rd and 60th Motorized to the west. Led by packs of tanks, Red Army soldiers spilled across the steppe and descended on the flanks of both divisions.

  Unaware of the situation, Dr. Ottmar Kohler tended to his patients at a makeshift hospital along a railroad siding, twenty-five miles west of the Volga. He was still in great pain from the broken jaw he had sustained the day before in the motorcycle accident. Unable to eat properly, he was living on chocolate and cognac. To keep his loose upper jaw in place, Kohler worked with a piece of cork clenched in his mouth.

  As the surgeon concentrated on an operation, a soldier yelled into the operating room, “The Russians have broken through!” Kohler kept working and, when he finished, went to the door to see several Soviet tanks squashing German vehicles only a hundred yards away. The sight brought a roar from his throat. Spitting out the cork, he screamed, “Load the wounded!”

  At that instant, concealed German antiaircraft guns fired ear-splitting salvos directly at the enemy tanks, which blew up, and scattered flaming fuel and bodies across the ground. The shooting increased as other Russian tanks came to duel with the German artillery.

  Rooted to the doorway, Kohler noticed a German sergeant and his six-man squad walking unconcernedly around the corner of the hospital. Trailing their guns in the dirt, the soldiers came up to him and the sergeant asked, “What the hell’s going on around here?”

  In reply, the astonished Kohler asked his own question, “What the hell are you going to do about it?”

  The sergeant shrugged in indifference, and begged to be allowed to rest. When Kohler looked into the man’s eyes, he held his temper, for it was clear to him the soldier had just undergone a harrowing experience. In the midst of the earthshaking shelling, he ordered food and rum for his guests.

  They stretched out against a wall and watched the battle escalate. Hundreds of Russian troops were marching toward them across a grassy field. Their arms linked together, they were singing songs in loud harmony. When the sergeant stopped eating he wiped his hands on his uniform and told Kohler he was ready for orders. The doctor suggested that the squad do a little fighting and asked the name of the sergeant’s commanding officer. “Captain Holland,” he said, adding in a hollow voice that Holland’s head had just been shot off by a Russian tank.

  Kohler knew now what haunted the sergeant so he left him alone, jumped on a pile of manure and trained his binoculars on the incredible parade coming at him from the meadow. Behind him a German staff car careened into the yard and an officer standing in the back seat hollered, “Just what in hell is going on around here?”

  Used to that question by now, Kohler merely waved a greeting. “Come up on my manure pile and see for yourself.”

  Giving the officer hi
s glasses, he pointed to the enemy infantry. The man swore in delight, handed back the binoculars, raced to his car and sped off toward an artillery command post.

  Kohler fixed his attention on the marching soldiers, whose songs drifted toward him on the balmy summer breeze. As the doctor stared in horrified fascination, geysers of earth suddenly blossomed among them and jagged holes appeared where men had been moments before. Kohler watched as the steppe grass turned red and the singing was replaced by the shrieks of the dying.

  Sickened by the slaughter, the doctor lowered the glasses, climbed down off the dung heap and went to care for his own wounded. Bending over the operating table, he carefully put another cork in his mouth to keep his throbbing jaw in place.

  Twenty miles southwest of Ottmar Kohler’s dispensary, Sixth Army commander, Friedrich von Paulus, read the radio messages from his three divisions on the steppe and lost his initial exuberance over the “lightning” victory of the previous day. He now faced the chilling prospect of losing one or more of these units unless he could send enough reinforcements and supplies to help them forge that barrier of steel to the Volga. As a precautionary measure, Paulus alerted the Luftwaffe to begin dropping ammunition and food into the most distant of the islands, General Hube’s 16th Panzer hedgehog at the outskirts of Stalingrad. Meanwhile, the general wondered how he was going to take that city in the next twenty-four hours, as Hitler expected him to do.

  At dawn, the city of Stalingrad looked as though a giant hurricane had lifted it into the air and smashed it down again in a million pieces. The downtown section was almost flat, with nearly a hundred blocks still engulfed by raging fires. With the waterworks broken, firemen could only try to care for the victims of the holocaust.