The World War II Chronicles

by William Craig

  “Yes, it’s me. We’re in Kalach.”

  “In Kalach? The Germans are there.” The voice was incredulous.

  Ilyin tried to explain how he was still holding out, even though Capt. Gerhard Meunch’s battalion had forded the Don and seized the old part of the town. The voice on the radio told him to wait a minute. Ilyin listened to the static, then the voice on the radio came back with another question: “Tell me, Comrade Ilyin, where is your command post?” Realizing the voice was trying to trap him, he immediately pinpointed his location, and was showered with congratulations for fighting so well. Then headquarters broke off the conversation.

  Three nights later, as Yeremenko began disengaging his troops from the steppe, the voice called Ilyin again and told him to give up the orchard and make a run for the Volga. Within hours, his brigade stole out of Kalach in a thirty-eight-truck convoy. When the Germans sensed movement in the dark, they blazed away at the sound and Ilyin stood in the road, exchanging shots with Meunch’s battalion. Then he leaped into a car and rode off safely to Stalingrad.

  On September 2, Paulus finally agreed to the southward drive toward Hoth, and within hours, the jaws of the pincers snapped shut. But Paulus had waited too long. Most of the Russian troops on the steppe had escaped into Stalingrad, and his seventy-two hours of indecision had given the enemy another chance to fight. Now the battle would be in the streets of Stalingrad, where blitzkrieg tactics were useless.

  * Khrushchev has claimed that he called Stalin’s dacha to ask permission to call off the Soviet offensive, and that Malenkov relayed Stalin’s order to continue the attack.

  Marshal Zhukov denies this in his memoirs, charging that, in reality, Khrushchev urged Stalin to ignore warnings of disaster and press the assault.

  Chapter Eight

  On September 3, Joseph Stalin sent a telegram to Marshal Zhukov at Malaya Ivanovka on the western bank of the Volga, fifty miles due north of Stalingrad:

  The situation at Stalingrad has deteriorated further. The enemy stands two miles from the city. Stalingrad may fall today or tomorrow if the northern group of forces does not give immediate assistance. See to it that the commanders of forces north and northwest of Stalingrad strike the enemy at once.… No delay can be tolerated. To delay now is tantamount to a crime.…

  In the five days he had been at the front, Zhukov had not yet performed a miracle, but he was attempting to coordinate Russian infantry attacks with meager air and tank strikes. Such an effort needed time. This Stalin would not allow him. When Zhukov called him, pleading for a delay until ammunition arrived in sufficient quantities, Stalin gave him until September 5. On that day, Zhukov launched “human wave” assaults, which crashed into the left flank of the German corridor from the Don to the Volga and immediately foundered. At nightfall, the German corridor was still intact.

  Zhukov phoned Stalin with the bad news. After describing the carnage, he mentioned that Paulus had been forced to transfer some reserves from the outskirts of Stalingrad to contain him.

  Stalin was elated. “That’s very good,” he said. “It is of great help to the city.”

  When Zhukov cautioned that the Russian success was illusory, the premier dismissed it, saying, “Just continue the attacks. Your job is to divert as many of the enemy forces as possible from Stalingrad.”

  With that Stalin hung up.

  Adolf Hitler, the other grand chessmaster in the fateful game, paced the fragrant pine woods of Vinnitsa in growing frustration. He could not understand why the goals of Operation Blue had not been met. General Paulus had hit the Volga on August 23, but Stalingrad had not yet fallen. And in the Caucasus, where Army Group A strove for the prized oil fields, something else was going wrong.

  Ever since the Germans had turned the corner at Rostov on July 23, and burst into the land mass between the Black Sea and the Caspian, the Russians had played a skillful game of will-o’-the-wisp, drawing the Nazis further and further from their supply bases. The German grenadiers of the First Panzer and Seventeenth Armies crossed parched desert, fields of six-foot-high sunflowers, and, on August 9, finally came to the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains where they captured the oil center of Maikop, only to find it burned to the ground by retreating Russians. Hitler then urged his commanders on toward Grozny, Batum, and Baku. Along the way, they acquired new allies: Moslems, Circassians, natives who rejected Communist rule. Still the Germans never trapped a large body of the Red Army. By September, with supply lines sluggish, their march toward the chief oil centers slowed. When Army Group A’s commander, Marshal List, recommended regrouping, Hitler went into a tirade and threatened to fire him.

  In the daily staff meetings with his “conscience,” the stubborn Gen. Franz Halder, Hitler bridled under repeated warnings about weak flanks and poor communications both at Stalingrad and in the Caucasus. He began to think about replacing Halder, too.

  The situation deteriorated further on September 7, when Gen. Albert Jodl returned from a hurried trip to the Caucasus headquarters and heartily endorsed List’s idea of ending all attacks until Army Group A was resupplied with men and matériel. Hitler exploded at this defection by a trusted aide. He screamed at Jodl, who also lost his temper and shouted back stinging reminders of Hitler’s various directives that had brought the operation to its present sorry state.

  His face blotched and his eyes feverish, the Führer stormed out of the meeting. From that moment on, the breach between him and the Wehrmacht generals widened irreparably. Until the end of the war, whenever he stayed at the OKW, Hitler took almost all his meals alone, except for the companionship of his dog, Blondi.

  While the leader of the Third Reich sulked at Vinnitsa, his pawns in the Fourth Panzer Army were storming the southern outskirts of Stalingrad. After meeting Paulus’s Sixth Army on the steppe just outside the city, “Papa” Hoth wheeled his divisions eastward for a drive to the Volga that hopefully would split the Sixty-second and Sixty-fourth Soviet armies. But the moment his tanks rolled off the steppe into the congested, hilly suburban towns of Krasnoarmeysk and Kuperosnoye, Hoth faced a different kind of war.

  Gone were the lightning ten-mile advances. Now Hoth settled for only a mile or two each day. When the panzers bogged down in narrow streets, Russian soldiers doused them with Molotov cocktails. From windows, enemy snipers picked off whole squads of unwary foot soldiers. Artillery, once used to decimate unseen targets miles away, was now employed to rip out the guts of buildings just fifty yards in front of stalled German divisions.

  The cost was frightful. Werner Halle, a corporal in the 71st Regiment of the 29th Motorized Division later wrote in his diary, “During this period we were frequently without company commanders or even platoon leaders … each one of us, this may sound hard but this was the way it was, could easily guess that he might be the next to go.…”

  On the evening of September 9, Halle and his men received a warm meal, their first in many days. The next day, he stood on the slopes leading down to the Volga at Kuperosnoye and marveled that he had made it to this huge river. After sending word back of his triumph, he dug in quickly to await a violent Soviet reaction to his presence.

  Halle’s arrival at the Volga marked the final isolation of the Russian Sixty-second Army. Already cut off in the north by the German Sixth Army’s push to the Volga on August 23, it was now penned into a salient around the suburb of Beketovka and was about to absorb the full weight of Friedrich von Paulus’s main body, drawn up at the western rim of Stalingrad. The Sixty-second Army was now the only combat force left to deny Stalingrad to more than two hundred thousand invaders.

  In the Tsaritsa Gorge, traffic around the Russian Military Council bunker was unusually light. Civilians who commented on the hushed atmosphere were unaware that Gen. Andrei Yeremenko had moved out, across the river to Yamy. Yeremenko’s reasons for leaving were legitimate. He had trouble communicating with his armies over phone wires, which were constantly being cut by enemy fire, and German mortars were shelling the Tsaritsa
Gorge itself. Only a few days before, flames from a burning oil dump had poured down the gorge and almost incinerated the headquarters.

  When Nikita Khrushchev phoned Stalin to explain why they wanted to leave, the premier fumed, “No, that’s impossible. If your troops find out that their commander had moved his headquarters out of Stalingrad, the city will fall.”

  Khrushchev kept repeating the arguments until Stalin relented: “Well, all right. If you’re certain that the front will hold and our defenses won’t be broken, I’ll give you permission.…”

  The headquarters staff crossed the Volga on September 9, and before he left, Khrushchev called in bald-headed Gen. F. I. Golikov and told him to stay as liaison with Gen. Alexander Ivanovich Lopatin, commander of the sacrificial Sixty-second Army. Golikov turned “white as a sheet” and begged Khrushchev not to abandon him. “Stalingrad is doomed!” he begged. “Don’t leave me behind. Don’t destroy me. Let me go with you.”*

  Khrushchev brusquely ordered Golikov to pull himself together, then stalked out of the bunker to catch the ferry to the far shore.

  * Later, Golikov complained bitterly to Stalin about his treatment at Khrushchev’s and Yeremenko’s hands. The premier very nearly cashiered Yeremenko on the spot. Only when Khrushchev told Stalin about Golikov’s cowardly behavior was the situation clarified.

  Chapter Nine

  General Golikov’s hysteria reflected the increasing tendency among Soviet personnel to quit the city. While Golikov was forced to remain because of a direct order from Khrushchev, thousands of Russian officers and men sought safety on the eastern shore of the Volga. Some forged false papers; others hid on the ferries. All were desperate enough to chance a fatal encounter with NKVD police. But even the Green Hats were now leaving.

  At his nearly deserted bunker in the Tsaritsa Gorge, General Lopatin tried valiantly to rally his dispirited soldiers. But the Sixty-second Army he commanded existed in name only. Having been badly battered west of the Don, its survivors had straggled into Stalingrad to seek refuge, not combat. Its front extended from the tractor factory to the grain elevator and it was ill-prepared to withstand the full weight of the oncoming Germans. An armored brigade possessed just one tank. An infantry brigade counted exactly 666 soldiers, of whom only 200 were qualified riflemen. A regiment which should have mustered 3000 troops listed 100. The division next to it, normally 10,000 strong, had a total of 1500. On the southern fringe of the city, the once great 35th Guards Division carried 250 infantry on its rolls.

  With these statistics confronting him, General Lopatin lost confidence in his ability to save Stalingrad. When he confided his fears to Yeremenko, he lost his job.

  Across the Volga, in the woods at Yamy, Yeremenko and Khrushchev held a hurried conference to choose a successor. Sifting the names of candidates, they quickly agreed that one general, Vassili Ivanovich Chuikov, the deputy commander of the Sixty-fourth Army, was best qualified for the job. A peasant whose career included work as a bellhop and shop apprentice before the Bolshevik Revolution, Chuikov had joined the Communist party in 1919 and within months became leader of a regiment during the Civil War. Six years later, at the age of twenty-five, he graduated from the prestigious Frunze Military Academy and went on to command an army in the Russo-Finnish War of 1939–1940. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Chuikov was stationed in Chungking, China, reporting the palace intrigues around the “Fascist” Chiang Kai-shek. Not until the spring of 1942 did he return to Russia, where, for the past six weeks, he had worked in General Shumilov’s Sixty-fourth Army as it fought the German Fourth Panzer Army on the steppe southwest of Stalingrad. Despite the constant retreats before the massed enemy tanks, Chuikov never succumbed to defeatism. Strong-willed, imbued with a belief in himself, he heaped scorn on those who lost heart. Argumentative to a fault, he readily chastised anyone who disagreed with his ideas about military matters.

  His abrasive personality went hand in hand with his pugnacious appearance. Broad-shouldered, stocky, he had a jowly, seamed face. Tousled black hair fell into his eyes, and his smile revealed a row of gleaming gold teeth. Chuikov cared little about his dress, so ordinary and unkempt that he was frequently mistaken for the average foot soldier.

  Yeremenko and Khrushchev felt that Chuikov’s dynamic manner far outweighed any deficiencies in temperament. Precisely because he was decisive, tenacious, and a brilliant improvisor on the battlefield, they believed that he was the right man to send into Stalingrad. Yeremenko phoned Stalin on the BODO line to get approval for the appointment, then called the general to Yamy for a conference.

  On the evening of September 11, Chuikov appeared at the main ferry landing in Stalingrad. While waiting for a steamer, he wandered into a first aid station and immediately became furious at what he saw. Men with grievous wounds were lying on the floor, their blood-soaked bandages unchanged for hours. Unfed, they continually asked for water.

  When Chuikov asked “Why?” of doctors and nurses, they shrugged their inability to cope with the staggering input of casualties. The reply seemed logical so Chuikov watched an operation, then went out to his jeep and sat brooding about the wounded until the ferry came in and transferred him to the far shore.

  At 10:00 A.M. on September 12, he saluted Andrei Yeremenko and said: “Tovarishch commander, General Chuikov has arrived according to your order.”

  Yeremenko greeted him warmly and offered to share breakfast. When Chuikov refused, the two men talked about general conditions in the Stalingrad area. Outside, an occasional German shell exploded in the nearby trees.

  “Vassili Ivanovich,” Yeremenko got to the point. “I asked for you in order to offer you a new position.…” Though he had anticipated the new post, Chuikov looked genuinely startled as Yeremenko stared intently at him for a reaction, “… the position of commander of the Sixty-second Army. What do you think of that?”

  Chuikov responded immediately, “V etom otnoshenii …” (“In this respect”), and Yeremenko remembered that Chuikov was fond of using this phrase in conversation, “… the appointment, of course, is extremely responsible.”

  Yeremenko broke in, “The situation of the Army is very tense, and I am happy you realize the heavy load you bear.”

  Chuikov nodded. “I think that, in this respect, I will not let you down.”

  Satisfied with Chuikov’s responses, Yeremenko took him to see Khrushchev, who was quickly convinced that Chuikov meant to stand fast in Stalingrad. The meeting broke up on the implicit understanding that Front Headquarters would not deny Chuikov help when he asked for it. Then the new commander of the Sixty-second Army left to collect his belongings before the return trip to the west bank of the Volga.

  On the same day, Gen. Friedrich von Paulus flew more than five hundred miles west to Vinnitsa in the Ukraine. There he spent hours with Adolf Hitler and discussed his chief concern, the left flank along the Don. Paulus asked the Führer to give him some “corset” units, a reserve for the puppet armies still moving into position. Hitler was most cordial and promised to look into the problem immediately. When he pressed Paulus about Stalingrad, the general told him the city should fall in a matter of days.

  That evening Paulus dined with his old friend Franz Halder. Over good wine, they talked of the successful summer steppe campaign, and Paulus repeated his fears about the weakness of the puppet armies on his left flank. Halder told him he intended to keep after Hitler on the subject and the two men parted on an optimistic note.

  Meanwhile, the three top men in Soviet military affairs were also in conference. Joseph Stalin, Georgi Zhukov, and Alexander Vasilevsky pored over the critical news coming from the battlefields. They noted that in the Caucasus, German Army Group A was beginning to slow down in its drive for the oil fields. But Stalin, still unsure that he had the strength to contain the enemy there, summed up the problem by saying, “They want to get at the oil of Grozny at any price.” Without pause he added, “Well now let’s see what Zhukov has to say about Stalingrad.”


  Zhukov did not have good news. His northern forces could not break the German corridor from the Don to the Volga. Stalin went to a map and studied his list of reserves in other sectors while Zhukov and Vasilevsky stood to one side and discussed in hushed tones the possibility of an alternative solution, another way out.

  Suddenly Stalin snapped, “What other way out?”

  Both generals were shocked by his keen hearing. Stalin continued, “Look, you had better get back to the general staff and give some thought to what can be done at Stalingrad and how many reserves we will need to reinforce the Stalingrad group. And don’t forget the Caucasus front. We will meet again tomorrow evening at nine.”

  While Stalin and his brain trust maneuvered in Moscow, Vassili Chuikov came ashore in Stalingrad to assume command of the Sixty-second Army. A rabble ran to meet him. Old men and women, little children crowded around; faces black with grime, they were a pathetic sight. The whimpering children begged for water, and that bothered Chuikov most of all, for he had none to give them.

  He drove off to the Tsaritsa Gorge to meet his staff, but the headquarters was empty and he had to ask soldiers in the streets for directions to the new command post. Someone told him it was on Mamaev Hill and, driving there through the wreckage from the bombings and shellings of previous days, he was appalled at the flimsy antitank defenses. From his own experience, Chuikov knew the Germans would roll over them in seconds. He noticed something else: Though it was still summer, every leaf had fallen from the trees.