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Stalingrad

Page 14

by Stalingrad- The City that Defeated the Third Reich (epub)


  Nikolai Romanovich Petrukhin (Chief of the war department of the Stalingrad Regional Committee): The sustained bombardment of the city began on August 23 at 6:00 P.M. and continued intensively until August 27, 1942.

  Dmitri Matveyevich Pigalyov (Chairman of Stalingrad Soviet Committee): The first raid took place in October 1941 at Beketovka, in the Kirov district. Three Stukas came and dropped a dozen bombs. The bombs struck near the rail station. People had been feeling relatively safe—the enemy was far away. Many people were gathered at the station, so we suffered several dozen casualties. These were our first casualties of the war. Later in the winter, there were only occasional air raids. There was quite a heavy raid in April 1942. Around fifty aircraft took part. We had very few casualties. We’d set up rather strong anti–air installations, and the AA artillery had been brought in. The raid didn’t cause much damage, the buildings were unscathed. A few small houses were destroyed, and we lost a few men. Until July there were no mass air raids, though there were small isolated attacks on Krasnoarmeysk. For the most part, the air raid sirens were rarely followed by bombing. Most of the bombing occurred when the sirens were silent. Because of the frequency of the enemy raids, we decided not to raise the alarm for one airplane attacking on its own. Otherwise, the whole city would have panicked. The factories, the plants—it would’ve caused untold damage. We’d have had to close the factories! So people said you could rest easy whenever you couldn’t hear the sirens. It’s an odd thing, but life’s like that.

  That’s how it was until August 23, when the siege of the city began. It was a sunny day. Everything was in its place, the city was full of life, and the factories were producing at full speed. Actually, I should mention that we hadn’t evacuated the city, even though the front had come as close as the Don, even past Abganerovo from the south. Just two weeks before the siege of the city proper we sent tens of thousands of people out of the city—women with children, who weren’t working at the factories. None of the workers were released, with few exceptions. The city was ready. Every company and organization was working at full speed.

  Then came August 23. It was a Sunday. Everyone was at work—we didn’t have a weekend. It was a fine day. All day the enemy was bombing the stations northwest of the city, starting with Panshino, then Don, Ilovla, the Konny junction, Gorodishche, and then back again. They started bombing the stations in the morning. We didn’t think much of it, didn’t pay it much attention.

  At about noon I left with my deputy, Lebedev, to observe the construction of the ring roads. [ . . . ] We drove for three hours. During that time the air raid sirens started up. Enemy aircraft had come as far as the city, but hadn’t bombed it. They started bombing Orlovka on the other side of the Tractor factory. The general feeling was that so long as the alarm was sounded, there wouldn’t be any bombs.

  We had come to share this feeling. We decided not to get back to our command post immediately, but to see how the city was doing under the alert. You can’t see everything from your command post; you can only gauge the situation from the reports of others. We decided to take a look ourselves. We drove around the city for about an hour during the alert. Then we went to our post. As the head of the local anti–air defense, I took my seat, as did my deputy. These were proven men here. We took our seats and stayed put. Everything was more or less quiet in the city. The city was not being bombed. I established communication with our air defense stations. Communications weren’t very good, so I decided to go out to them. The sirens had been going for two hours. By then it was about 5:00 P.M. on August 23.

  Claudia Stepanovna Denisova (Secretary of the Yermansky District Committee): There had never been an air raid like that before. It actually looked like the sky was covered with airplanes. There didn’t seem to be anywhere that didn’t get hit. They started bombing at around five or six. Factory no. 687, a solid-tire factory, was the first place to catch fire. It had just been rebuilt but hadn’t started production yet. That same night a lot of places went up in flames: most of the apartment buildings and institutes, the construction trust, the railway depot, and buildings all the way down to the Volga. I stayed at the phone because I wasn’t permitted to leave. I couldn’t even go to the headquarters of the anti–air defense. I was told to inform the City Party Committee of what damages we had sustained.

  Residents flee from the bombing, August 1942. Photographer: Emmanuil Yevzerikhin

  I remember that like it was only yesterday. It was a bit frightening. They would announce: “Still under alert. Still under alert.” The alert was not removed, so it kept going.

  Ezri Izrailevich Ioffe (Acting director of the Stalingrad Medical Institute): The evacuation [of the medical institute] had been set for August 23. It was a Sunday. It had taken us two days to prepare. That evening we were supposed to take a steamer. We were to evacuate the first-year students, the library, and the whole of the theory department. It was beautiful and sunny. All day we loaded the trucks and took everything to the riverbank. The heavy bombing started at around 2:00 P.M., and the air raid sirens kept going and going. Our steamer was meant to disembark at 7:00 P.M., but by around 6:00 P.M. we were being hit unrelentingly by a hundred bombers. Everyone was running for it. My family had already left, and I returned hungry to the institute at 6:00 P.M. It was empty: windows were open, doors and walls were missing, everywhere was covered with shrapnel. There was a dreadful whirlwind. It was terrifying. I stayed at the institute with four Komsomol orderlies. Professor Tsyganov’s orderly, who had come from Odessa as an evacuee, was very frightened, so I let him go. The bombs came in waves: they would drop bombs for twenty minutes, then fly away. I stayed there until ten o’clock, when I received a call from the regional committee telling me to send them these Komsomol members because some tanks had been parachuted down north of the Tractor factory. I heard this from the committee secretaries, who had seen planes dropping tanks.35 I had four students at my disposal whom I sent around the city to gather party and Komsomol members. We ended up with about fifteen people. We were looking until 2:00 A.M. Some we managed to get on the phone, and the others were reached at home.

  Claudia Stepanovna Denisova (Secretary of the Yermansky District Committee): They bombed us mercilessly, and there was fire all around. It was like this: one of them flies in, bombs a street, and then the next one’s right behind. This goes on and on like a conveyor belt, and all the while with the wailing sirens. The bombing went on through the night. The wounded were taken to the party offices, which were located downstairs. There didn’t seem to be much point in taking them there. [ . . . ] Then we got hold of a car. We loaded the wounded and drove them to the river crossing. All of this was done by our political staff. Afterward, once we’d gotten the wounded to the ferry, I went to the district committee offices. I’d just arrived when it was hit by a bomb. [ . . . ] It was terrifying. [ . . . ] The shock wave knocked me through the building and pinned me to a wall, and I was covered in white plaster. One wall of the building was missing. Thankfully, no one was hurt.

  When I got to the basement, the State Bank—the building next door—burst into flames. That was a direct hit. [ . . . ]

  The State Bank and the city committee building were on fire. I saw that all the party members had returned. “Where can we go? There’s fire everywhere, everything’s burning.” Our district was a sea of flame. It was hot. We couldn’t go outside, but we couldn’t stay in this building. There was a wall of smoke—the walls of the city committee building were already on fire.

  Ivan Fyodorovich Zimenkov (Chairman of the Stalingrad Regional Soviet of Workers Deputies): On [August] 24 there was heavy bombing in the morning, and the workers gathered at a park in the city center. We held a meeting with the workers to discuss how to defend the city. The park was a good place to distribute arms. It was the rallying point where we armed the worker battalions, which took place on August 24 and 25. The workers would come to get their weapons and assignments, then they’d be handed over to a junior lieutenant, and
they’d all go to the front line to defend the city. There were workers from the Tractor factory, from Factory no. 221. This wasn’t the only rallying point—it only held four to five hundred men. You couldn’t imagine what we were feeling then.

  This one steelworker who’d been at the works for thirty or forty years, he picks up a submachine gun, but he’d never picked up one before, so we showed him what to do. We taught men how to load the drum magazines, how to set them to single-fire, and so on. On August 23, 24, and 25, enemy aircraft conducted an especially brutal bombardment of the city. It was during this brutal bombardment that the people came together, took their weapons, and were immediately sent to the front line. We delivered these workers battalions to Front HQ.

  Semyon Yefimovich Kashintsev (Secretary of the Red October District Committee): The 1st Destruction Battalion returned from the front at the end of August with only twenty-two men. [ . . . ] Why so many losses? One survivor, Commissar Sazykov, explained it like this: In those early days it was only our unit and the guys from the Tractor factory bearing the brunt of the main strike, before the regular army units arrived, and the destruction battalion was poorly equipped. The only weapons they had were rifles.

  Vladimir Kharitonovich Demchenko (Major, commandant of Stalingrad): At that time there was a great shortage of weapons. We didn’t even have rifles. I went all over the place to get rifles for these men. [ . . . ] Wherever we came across captured enemy weapons, we used them to arm our detachments.

  Ezri Izrailevich Ioffe (Acting director of the Stalingrad Medical Institute): In those first two days there was great confusion among the regional organizations, it was the 26th before they put themselves back together. [ . . . ] On the 24th and 25th we had no newspapers, electricity, or water, and, because of the lack of water, the fire crews could do nothing about the burning buildings. On the night of the 25th I could see an enormous column of smoke on the wooded banks of the Volga—the oil tanks were on fire.

  Claudia Stepanovna Denisova (Secretary of the Yermansky District Committee): Putting out the fires was impossible because the Germans had taken out the water supply system. They’d cut off the main pump at Mechyotka—it was destroyed, there was no water. We fought the fires with whatever we had. The self-defense groups and others were not working at all badly and within half an hour they’d manage to extinguish a fire—but then it would flare up again. A lost cause [ . . . ] I sent all our command staff across the Volga. I did this on my own initiative because otherwise we might have had casualties. Not one person in the district committee died. The people were still alive, and they could be of use. The chairman and three secretaries from the district committee were still there. One secretary was a man, the others women. They called us the “women’s district committee.” [ . . . ]

  Within three or four days everything was turned into the ruins you’re looking at right now.

  Vladimir Kharitonovich Demchenko (Major, commandant of Stalingrad): About ten thousand people were dead after the first bombardment. That figure also includes military personnel sent here. Cellars were packed with hundreds of people. There were some I know that held two or three hundred. [ . . . ] On the first day, thirty-seven aircraft bombed us until evening.36 Can you imagine? Twenty to thirty dive-bombers trying to take out the AA batteries.

  Dmitri Matveyevich Pigalyov (Chairman of Stalingrad Soviet Committee): My opinion—as a nonmilitary man—is that the enemy hoped to demoralize the people. They knew that we hadn’t evacuated anyone. There were bombs everywhere, fires everywhere. People were stunned. There was a mass panic, no leadership. It was up to me to take control of the city until the military forces got here.

  Because we’d built defensive lines and the enemy hadn’t broken through from the north or south, we had a chance to get organized.

  Three days after the bombing started in this area, we dragged people out from their trenches and shelters and began making repairs. We decided to repair the water system and the bread factory, to reestablish electricity production, and even to get the trams running. An extraordinary city commission was formed.

  Vladimir Kharitonovich Demchenko (Major, commandant of Stalingrad): A commission was established during the bombardment to take decisive measures to reestablish the city’s economy. [ . . . ] Sure, there were bombs, but we still had to feed the people. We still had to organize the economy. Chuyanov chaired this commission, which also included Zimenkov, Voronin, and me, the commandant of the city.

  Mikhail Alexandrovich Vodolagin (Secretary of the Stalingrad Regional Committee): In the very first minutes of the raid, bombs severed our main artery, the power line that supplied the factories in the north and center of the city, and in many sectors the 110-kV line was cut off. The city was left without light, water, bread. We were ordered by the city defense committee to do everything we could to restore the city’s water supply. The fires that raged throughout the city were stifling. Sometimes it was difficult to get to the river for a quick drink of water. We understood our mission. It was technically difficult but of great importance. Under constant attack from the air—later from artillery and mortar fire—our people threw themselves into their work. At any time day or night—for days on end, actually—they worked to fix the power line. There were times when they’d just finish resupplying a sector only to have it destroyed, the blast sending people ten or twelve meters into the air. But after the initial shock they’d go right back to repairing the line.

  Dmitri Matveyevich Pigalyov (Chairman of Stalingrad Soviet Committee): Once we’d restored the water system, the bread factory, and the mills, we started to provide supplies for the population. We opened trade stalls, two or three canteens in the center and outlying areas. We started feeding children at the canteens. Life went on, in a way. Trade resumed, stalls were set up in basements to sell groceries and bread. We set a new goal of rebuilding the bathhouses so people could wash themselves. From August 23 to 28 they’d been staying in shelters, basements, trenches—they needed to wash. We worked for two and a half days to repair a few bathhouses and get them up and running. On the first day about two thousand people used one of the bathhouses. A day after that we launched a radio station and played music from tapes. But amid all the fires and the bombs the music sounded like a funeral march. After a day of this we decided to quit broadcasting the music—we just played the latest news bulletins. Whenever it started playing, the radio lifted people’s spirits. If the radio is saying that the bread factory is operating and so on, then the city is alive. People felt better, and that meant that all was not lost. That’s the reason for the radio, so the people could listen. [ . . . ]

  In the Yermansky district, in the basement of block 7, two women were trapped for four or five days. Nobody knew they were there. Someone heard moaning and crying as they were passing by. They dug them out, got them out alive. I was there too. Turns out they recognized me, the chairman of the Executive Committee, and showered me with kisses of joy. [ . . . ]

  Children in Stalingrad during an air raid. Photographer: L. I. Konov

  A mother and daughter had been buried in this one basement. The mother had managed to dig herself out, but the daughter was buried in such a way that she had no hope of escaping. She was alive, but her legs were stuck in the rubble and she couldn’t get up. Several engineers arrived, and they all agreed that they wouldn’t be able to dig her out. I found out about this a few days later. I thought, there’s got to be some way to save her. So I go there with an engineer. He said he would give it a try. And, sure enough, he did it. When they started digging, she began to sing. Meanwhile, the mother, in complete calm, said to the daughter: “When they’ve got you dug out, don’t forget your things.”

  Ivan Alexeyevich Piksin (Secretary of the Stalingrad City Committee): There were some terribly gruesome scenes. City committee secretary Khlynin tells of one example. He goes into a cellar just in case, because there were times when there’d be a collapse, but the beams and walls would hold, and the people inside were still aliv
e. He enters the dark cellar and yells, “Is anyone there?” And then there’s this humanlike scream of wild profanity. He says it made his hair stand on end. He lights a match and he sees this man, burned all over, no eyes even, nothing at all. Can you imagine a man in such a state? They called for a medic right away. [ . . . ]

  Some people cracked up. It didn’t matter how much they tried to restrain themselves or keep it under wraps—they lost it all the same. There is, in the end, only so much one can get used to.

  Showing up at the factory never used to be a big deal because you were there all the time. But now when you arrive it’s a great event. People greet you warmly, as if it’s been ages. When I went to Red October, I went straight into the courtyard, and what a reception! A sturdy-looking man is brought to me, along with some armed workers.

  “What’s going on here, comrades?”

  “What’s going on, comrade Piksin, is that the enemy is bombing the city. We’re losing the city to them, we’re losing the factory, and this bastard here is taking advantage of the situation by looting.”

  “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “He worked in the auto shop. There were work clothes there, overalls. See for yourself how many he’s put on.”

  He was in fact wearing six sets of overalls. He had hidden underneath his shirt 115 packs of tea and wrapped around himself some eight meters of good drive belt, the kind that can be used as shoe soles. One worker asked: “Why’d you do it? This is government property.”

  “That’s my business.”

  “Who’d you get it from?”

  “Some guy.”

  “Were you selling them?

  “No.”

  “He’s a thief, a looter.”

 

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