The World War II Chronicles

by William Craig

  Before leaving, both Vasilevsky and Zhukov signed a map showing the plan for the counteroffensive. Stalin added the word, “Approved.” Then he wrote his own signature.

  Chapter Eleven

  While Stalin was placing his personal endorsement on the plan to destroy the Sixth Army, Adolf Hitler left Vinnitsa to fly home. As the throbbing engines of his Ju-52 transport carried him across the Ukraine and then Poland, the Führer withdrew from his aides in sullen contemplation of the disastrous summer in southern Russia. His blitzkrieg on the steppe was foundering in the streets of Stalingrad. His thrust into the oil fields of the Caucasus was equally bogged down in the mountain foothills. But in Berlin he continued to deny these harsh realities and, on September 30, he launched into a plaintive defense of his accomplishments. Speaking at a Winter Relief Rally in the Sportspalast, he told his audience, “When Mr. Eden or some other nincompoop declares that they have a belief, we cannot talk with them, as their idea of belief seems to be different from ours.… They believe that Dunkirk was one of the greatest victories in the world’s history.…”

  Silhouetted by banks of spotlights, Hitler continued:

  What have we to offer? If we advance 1,000 kilometers, it is nothing. It is a veritable failure.… If we could cross the Don, thrust to the Volga, attack Stalingrad—and it will be taken, you may be sure of that—then it is nothing. It is nothing if we advance to the Caucasus, occupy the Ukraine and the Donetz basin.…

  We had three objectives: (1) To take away the last great Russian wheat territory. (2) To take away the last district of coking coal. (3) To approach the oil district, paralyze it, and at least cut it off. Our offensive then went on to the enemy’s great transport artery, the Volga and Stalingrad. You may rest assured that once there, no one will push us out of that spot.…

  In Stalingrad, “that spot” as Hitler referred to it in his speech, a few battered Russian units still managed to stymie German efforts to drive them into the Volga. In the central part of the city, Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards held a tiny sliver of land along the Volga from Pensenskaya Street north to the Krutoy Gully. At some points, their salient was only two hundred yards deep.

  Searching for elbow room; the 42nd Regiment’s commander, Colonel Yelin, had picked out two buildings on Lenin Square that might be used for strongpoints. One was a badly damaged apartment house facing Solechnaya Street. The other building was sound. A second lieutenant named Zabolotnov took a squad to the undamaged one on the right and occupied it. The new post was labeled “Zabolotnov’s House” immediately, but he died within twenty-four hours. His men maintained the position.

  As for the damaged building facing Solechnaya Street, Sgt. Jacob Pavlov and three other men crawled across a courtyard, threw grenades into first-floor windows, and helped each other inside, while the few Germans not killed by the blasts scrambled away across the square. In the basement, the squat, constantly smiling Pavlov discovered a small group of Russians, both military and civilians. Some were badly wounded, and Pavlov sent a runner to report that he had taken the house, but the messenger was forced back inside when the Germans counterattacked. He finally got through the next night, September 29, taking some wounded with him, and 13th Guards Division Headquarters sent more men to help Pavlov. The twenty men quickly organized their new home. They broke down a wall between two cellars, posted mortars and machine guns at key windows, and began to snipe at the enemy. Four more soldiers arrived, the final reinforcements from headquarters. During the breaks in the shooting, the small band of men—drawn by chance from all regions of the Soviet Union, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, the Ukraine—tried to make the best of a tense situation. They found an old phonograph and one record, whose melody no one recognized. But they played it continually and it soon began to wear out.

  Outside the apartment house, German tanks constantly probed for a weak spot. But “Pavlov’s House” was a natural roadblock, commanding a wide field of fire and denying the enemy access to the Volga bank, only 250 yards away. Instead of bringing in planes or artillery to smash the obstacle, the Germans unaccountably continued to attack it head on and suffered the consequences.

  North of Krutoy Gully, Col. Nikolai Batyuk’s 284th Siberian Division clung to the southern and eastern slopes of Mamaev Hill, although the Germans held the crest and poured shells down on the zigzag network of Russian trenches. Batyuk lost three hundred soldiers on September 28 alone, but his men held their thin line and refused to allow the enemy to sweep past them to the Lazur Chemical Plant and then on to the Volga.

  Lt. Pyotr Deriabin had been stationed at the yellow brick Lazur plant for a short time and from his gun position on the grounds, frequently scanned the summit of Mamaev and the two green water tanks from which the Germans watched both him and river traffic to the east. Each time he did so, Deriabin felt the Germans were looking down his throat. And they were, for his mortar batteries came under such continuous attack that regimental headquarters ordered him to pull back to the tennis racquet-shaped railroad track circling the plant. There, in a series of caves in the embankment, the lieutenant paused to write to his only brother, fighting somewhere near Voronezh. He did not know that he had been killed during the summer.

  He also wrote to his girl friend back in Siberia. Desperate to tell her where he was, he enclosed clippings from the Red Army newspaper, Red Star, telling of the “glorious” struggle in Stalingrad. He always added: “Hello, I’m still alive.” She got every letter, but from each one censors had removed the clippings.

  Although Deriabin’s guns had to be moved from the premises, the Lazur Chemical Plant remained in Soviet hands. In one section of the block-long building, Russian instructors now conducted an intensive course in sharpshooting. Against the wall of a long room, they painted helmets, observation slits, and outlines of human torsos. At the other end, they stood over trainees and coached them on sniper techniques. All day long, the plant echoed to rifle fire from within as the recruits practiced shooting at the targets. Those who graduated from this impromptu school went immediately to the edge of no-man’s-land where they began to take a fearful toll of the enemy.

  Already Russian newspapers had made the name Vassili Zaitsev famous. In but ten days’ time he had killed nearly forty Germans, and correspondents gloatingly wrote of his amazing ability to destroy his enemies with a single bullet. It was a skill he had learned while shooting deer in the forests around Elininski, his home in the Ural Mountain foothills. A shepherd in the summers, Zaitsev, at the age of fifteen, went off to technical school in Magnitogorsk. Later, he served as a bookkeeper in the Soviet Far East Fleet. On September 20, 1942, the broad-faced Zaitsev came to Stalingrad with the 284th Division. Now he was a national hero, and as his fame spread across no-man’s-land, the Germans took an inordinate interest in him. They called a Major Konings out from Berlin to kill him.

  Unaware of the German plan, Zaitsev continued his one-man war and began to teach thirty other Russians his specialty. Blond Tania Chernova was one of his students. They also became lovers.

  Tania relished her new life. Undaunted by her ordeal on the Volga and in the sewer pipe, she had become a professional soldier, living in foxholes, drinking vodka, eating with a spoon she kept in her boot. She slept curled up beside strangers; she bathed in pails of water. She also learned how to take cover in the front lines, how to track the enemy through the telescopic sight and, most importantly, how to wait for hours before firing a single shot that killed.

  During her training as a sniper, she went out on a special mission ordered by 284th Division Headquarters after captured prisoners had pinpointed a German headquarters located in a building between the Stalingradski Flying School and the Red October Plant. Tania and five men were assigned to dynamite it.

  Late at night they passed through Russian outposts and crawled into enemy territory. When they heard an occasional voice, or flares burst overhead, they froze. An hour later, they found their target in a half-destroyed apartment house with one entire wall
missing.

  The patrol tiptoed up an intact stairwell while Tania brought up the rear. When the Russians reached the second-floor landing, the five men disappeared around the corner but a noise distracted her. She whirled to see a German soldier emerging from behind a post. “Hände hoch,” he grunted, waving a pistol in her face. Immediately lashing out with her boot, she caught the German in the groin. He doubled over, his pistol bouncing off the stairs and into the street. Tania grabbed his helmeted head and cracked his face into her knee. In desperation he savagely bit her left thumb.

  She knocked him down and twisted his right arm under his body. Pressing deep into his throat with both hands, she held on while he thrashed about violently. His helmet fell off and suddenly Tania noticed her victim had bright red hair. She leaned harder on his windpipe. When he gurgled horribly, one of her patrol came back downstairs and whispered, “Tania, are you all right? Where are you?”

  Seeing her plight, the other Russian pushed her away and smashed the red-haired man in the head with his rifle butt.

  Tania got up from the corpse and ran to the floor above, where the dynamite was already in place. The sergeant ordered, “You do it,” and she lit the fuse. Forgetting all caution, the Russians pounded down the stairs. The noise they made alerted the Germans, who fired at the shadowy figures emerging from the building.

  Racing back toward their own lines, the demolition team heard a shattering explosion and the German headquarters behind them blew apart in an orange ball of fire.

  On the right flank of Tania’s position, the 95th Division, under the leadership of bald-headed Col. V. A. Gorishny, occupied another part of the bomb-pitted eastern slope of Mamaev Hill. But the 95th was so badly mauled that in a matter of days it would be transferred to reserve behind new divisions now digging in at the northern factories.

  There, the fresh 39th Guards had thrown up a second line of defense behind the 194th and 308th divisions, responsible for holding the western approaches to the Red October and Barrikady plants. A few miles to the north, around the tractor works, the 112th Division had just been joined by aggressive Gen. Victor Zholudev’s elite 37th Guards, young marines dressed in black striped shirts and berets.

  The arrival of the 37th Guards had coincided with the departure of the last civilians still working inside the plant. When the dreaded order from the Military Council finally reached them—“Get out! Go across the river!”—the employees packed their blueprints, records, and tools into trucks. German artillery shells whined into the mile-long industrial complex as the workers walked one last time through the machine shops and assembly lines. Overwhelmed by remorse at having to leave such an integral part of their lives, they cried unashamedly.

  Their convoy drove south past the statue of Felix Dzerhezinsky, Stalin’s first secret police chief and, just before the tractor plant passed from view, one foreman pointed out a building near the river and said, “We can start up again there when we come back.” He sounded genuinely optimistic.

  Riding down the main road, the workers passed the oil-tank farm on a hillside above the primitive trench headquarters in which Vassili Chuikov sweltered and prepared for the next phase of the German offensive.

  The general had just received a letter from his wife, Valentina, living in Kuibyshev almost four hundred miles northeast of Stalingrad. She told her husband she had seen him in a newsreel; she said the children were fine. Her tone was cheerful and relaxed.

  But the general knew differently: His aide had learned that Chuikov’s youngest daughter was suffering from acute dysentery and the family was having great difficulty getting food, clothing, and other household necessities. Lacking even soap, they used a mustard preparation to wash themselves. This distressing news only added to Chuikov’s mental burden as he struggled with the daily threat of extinction. The strain was beginning to take its toll. His body was covered with eczema, which left scaly, itchy sores on his skin and forced him to bandage his hands to absorb oozing lesions on his fingers. When doctors suggested that he get some rest on the far shore, Chuikov angrily rejected their advice. With the enemy massing on the outskirts of the factories, he was afraid to leave Stalingrad even for a moment.

  Fortunately, new troops were arriving via the new river crossings Chuikov had improvised after losing the downtown ferry landing. Now the Skudri Crossing serviced the area from Rynok down to the tractor works and, to this exposed mooring, boats came at night to avoid the incessant German bombardment that made daylight trips suicidal. The most vital link, however, was Crossing 62, a cluster of moorings behind the Red October and Barrikady plants where the majority of soldiers and matériel debarked under overhanging palisades. This landing site was reasonably safe as long as the Germans failed to seize the nearby factories.

  The nightly voyages to Crossings 62 and Skudri were a ghastly shock to soldiers joining the battle. The sight of a city on fire, the deep rumble of thousands of guns, instinctively made them recoil. But Communist party agitators, politrook, were always with them, working with ferocious zeal to calm them down. The politrook led the way to the ferries, to tugs like the twenty-six-year-old Abkhazets, and there they handed out pamphlets entitled “What a Soldier Needs to Know and How to Act in City Fighting.” Usually, the agitators were the first ones on board. Like sheep, the soldiers followed. Then, as the boats slowly moved out into the river, the politrook unobtrusively took up stations along the rails. To prevent desertions over the side they kept their hands on their pistol holsters.

  From their vantage point on Mamaev Hill, the Germans always spotted these boats and called for artillery fire on them. As the shells whistled down, the political officers diverted the soldiers’ attention by reading newspapers loudly, or passing out mail from home. In this way the troops were somewhat distracted. When men were hit, screamed, and died, the politrook worked harder to keep the rest of the group from succumbing to mob fear. Sometimes they failed, and soldiers leaped into the Volga. The politrook emptied their guns into these swimmers.

  In this manner, nearly one hundred thousand new troops had been ferried into Stalingrad by October; an influx equalling seven full divisions and two brigades. But they were killed so quickly that Chuikov still had only fifty-three thousand troops left who were capable of bearing arms. In less than a month, the Sixty-second Army had lost more than eighty thousand men, killed, wounded, or missing.

  To bring ammunition and food into the city, Chuikov had thrown together auxiliary “roads” to supplement the ferry pipeline. These footbridges, each several hundred yards long, joined Stalingrad to Zaitsevski Island in the middle of the Volga. Two of them were blown apart several times and had to be rebuilt. The southernmost link, formed by joining wooden rafts and barrels with iron bars and steel hawsers, was relatively sturdy, but even so, the footbridge was dangerous. It swayed badly from the force of bombs exploding nearby, frequently toppling soldiers into the river. But across this unusual highway came a steady trickle of men carrying on their backs the bullets, grenades, and shells needed for daily fighting.

  Now the Germans switched the focus of their attack from the downtown area of the city to the factories in the north, trying to soften the Russian defenses with nonstop artillery fire. On October 2, German shells blanketed the industrial zone and behind the Red October Plant, the supposedly empty oil tanks blew up with a shattering roar. Flaming fuel rolled swiftly down the hill to the Volga, where it became a ghastly wave. Across the river, onlookers screamed a warning to a large rowboat making for the eastern shore. But it was too far out to turn back and, when the wall of flame reached it, the oars reared up like firewings as the doomed passengers tried to beat out the fire. Through the smoke, spectators saw the sides of the boat blaze from the flaming oil. The boat’s occupants stood up and jumped. Their heads bobbed briefly in the middle of the inferno, and then the flames passed relentlessly over the tragic scene.

  The same fires nearly incinerated Chuikov and the entire headquarters staff. Every telephone line burned awa
y and, when Chuikov jumped out of his dugout, he was blinded by the dense smoke.

  Chief of Staff Krylov shouted, “Everyone stay where they are. Let’s get to work in the dugouts that are still intact.… Establish contact with the troops by radio.” But when he saw Chuikov, he whispered: “What do you think? Will we be able to stand it?”

  “Yes, of course,” Chuikov replied. “But just in case, let’s clean our pistols!”

  From across the river, Front Headquarters was afraid the fire had killed everyone in the dugouts. By radio, it kept asking: “Where are you, where are you?”

  The answer finally crackled through, “We’re where the most flames and smoke are.”

  The Germans were monitoring the conversation and concentrated their fire on the holocaust. Mortar shells killed men in the doorway to Chuikov’s dugout, and he moved quickly, this time up the shore line, closer to the tractor factory, the complex that the Germans were preparing to attack from three sides.

  In the midst of preparations by both armies for the final struggle, a sinister personal combat reached its climax in no-man’s-land. The two adversaries knew each other only by reputation. Major Konings had arrived from Germany to duel Vassili Zaitsev.

  The Russians first heard of Konings’s presence when a prisoner revealed the major was wandering the front lines, familiarizing himself with the terrain. Upon hearing the news, Col. Nikolai Batyuk, the commander of the 284th Division, called a meeting of his sniper group to brief them on the danger.

  “I think that the German supersniper from Berlin will be easy meat for us. Is that right, Zaitsev?”

  “That’s right, Comrade colonel,” Zaitsev agreed. But first, he had “to find him, study his habits and methods and … wait the right moment for one, and only one well-aimed shot.”