Stalingrad

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

  A lot of people stayed in Stalingrad. Girls, young women, children under fourteen, men under fifty-five or sixty, and women up to fifty were packed off to Germany. Many young women and girls worked and even lived with them. Real patriots, those ones. At the start people who worked here in the city center were allowed to go home, but with a German escort. They stopped letting people do this recently. They got special insignia and documents so the places they were living in didn’t get destroyed. Some of them did laundry, some of them cleaned.

  When our boys came on January 28 our building was again hit by two shells.

  They’d knock on the door and ask to come in and get warm. You’d let them in, and they’d toss the place and take your stuff. Towards the end, if you’d made some flat bread with bad flour, they’d take that as well. You’d make something for the children—horse soup. Or you’d have extra pieces of horsemeat—which you cut up in pieces instead of bread—they’d even take this from you. We stopped letting them in. So then it would go like this: They’d come in a group of two or three. One would stand at the door with a revolver. The others said: give us what you’ve got. My husband isn’t here, I’d say. Look for yourself. They’d look and they’d look and they’d find nothing, and if there was anything to find they’d take it. Every night the same story. We stopped letting them in for a while, but then they started shooting.

  Then there was an announcement saying that we had to bring bread to the commandant’s office, two kilos’ worth. If you didn’t have bread, then you could bring meat. If you didn’t have meat you could bring horsemeat, salt, soap, or tobacco. I didn’t have anything at all. I went to the commandant’s office and said that I had nothing. So what? You’ve got to give us something. If you don’t, we’ll take your pass. I said that I didn’t have a pass. You can take me and my children and do what you like with us.

  This girl’s mother had some spoiled rye flour that mice had gotten into. I picked it over, sifted it, poured it into a bag, and said that was everything I had. That’ll do, they said, give it here.

  When we lived on Ninth of January Square,64 this boy, Gera, was going to school. Two Russian soldiers gave him a little wheat. We had nowhere to put it, so we stashed it. When we got kicked out of that apartment, we didn’t get a chance to get it. Then they posted a notice saying that the area beyond the railway was restricted. Going there was punishable by death.

  Four Germans were quartered in our place. They stayed with us for two whole weeks. Taichka’s sister was working on Communist [Street]. She worked for the Germans. She came with a patrolman. We arranged for him to accompany me to where the wheat was buried. It had gotten to the point where the children were dying from starvation. He said of course he would. He spoke good Russian. They were having a hard time of it because of the lack of bread. He said: “Lady, let’s split it fifty-fifty.” I agreed. He comes to get me the next day. We set off. We got to the bridge by the fire tower. The policemen there let him through, but not me. They told him to either get me a pass or get lost. There were skirmishes constantly going on in this district. He said: “Let’s go, lady, let’s get you a pass!” The two of us went to the prison. They had some sort of military headquarters there. He wasn’t allowed in. He said: “Let’s try the commandant’s office.” And so we went. When we got there he explained the situation. There were generals there, officers. They call for me: Do you have any grain? I say I used to have a bit, but that it might be gone by now. They assign another German to us, a gendarme, they called him. With the gendarme we were let through. The patrolman was sent home, and I went with the gendarme. We crossed the bridge, went down Communist Street, kept going farther. There’s more and more shooting. He says: “Lady, that’s the front line!” I say: “Go back, then.” He sticks to the walls while I walk right down the middle of the street with my sledge. Again he says: “You can’t walk in the street, this is the front.” I say: “Go back then, why don’t you? I’m not afraid.” I kept going, forgot all about him. When I glanced back I could see him sneaking his way forward. We make it to Shilovskaya Street. There used to be an enlistment office there. There was a rope stretched across the street with a patrolman standing nearby. That meant we couldn’t go this way. He says something to him in German. “Lady, you can’t go there, that’s the front line.”

  I looked: it had snowed. You couldn’t even see any footprints, let alone people. I told him we were nearly there, that he could stay here while I kept going. It was open all around, you could see everywhere. Someone started shooting, but I keep going with my sledge. Then they must’ve seen that I was a woman because the shooting stopped, and then our soldiers were shooting. I got to my place marker and dug up the wheat. Then I tidied up the grave where my husband and daughter were buried. I stayed for quite a while. I’d already put the sack on the sledge. He came up and said: “Show me where it was buried!” Maybe there’s some more left. I say: “Go ahead, take a look!” He looked. I left, and he crawled after me. We made it to Communist Street. When we got to the bridge, I turned onto another road. He says: “No, we’re going to the commandant’s office, the grain must be given to them.” I think to myself, does that mean I went through all that for the commandant? Turns out I had. There was a notice posted there in Russian: Anyone with knowledge of stores of grain or clothing must report it to the office of the commandant. They’d send a patrolman or two, who would then go dig up the stash and divide it between them. I never got my share. They didn’t give me so much as a single grain. They took all of it and then brought me home. I had lost two buckets’ worth of wheat.

  After returning to Stalingrad, refugees sit on the ruins where their home once stood, March 1943. Photographer: N. Sitnikov

  On the 26th, when our forces were about to enter the city, the Germans occupied our building, which became their headquarters. They kicked us out into the courtyard at four in the morning, with all the kids and our things. We stayed in the trenches for two days until our soldiers arrived.

  GURTYEV’S RIFLE DIVISION IN BATTLE

  In September and October 1942, the 308th Rifle Division, under the command of Leonty Gurtyev, saw almost uninterrupted combat. It fought at two key positions: first at the Kotluban heights,65 twenty-four miles northwest of Stalingrad, and later at the Barricades munitions plant in the city’s industrial district. The division, composed of ten thousand soldiers from Siberia, suffered heavy losses in the fighting. By the time the division was placed on reserve status in early November awaiting reinforcements, the roster had shrunk to 1,727 men, of whom in Chuikov’s estimation only a few hundred were fit for battle.66 These eight weeks of intense combat are described in the following conversational strand composed of interviews with commanders, political officers, foot soldiers, and nurses of the 308th Rifle Division.

  The German panzer advance north of Stalingrad to the Volga on August 23 took the Soviets completely by surprise. It drove a wedge in the line of defense formed by the Southeastern and Stalingrad Fronts, enabling the 6th Army to cross the Don and disperse units from the 62nd Army in short order. Meanwhile, the 4th Panzer Army approached the city from the southwest, forming a pocket with the 6th Army that pushed the leftovers of the Soviet 64th Army eastward. On September 3 the spearheads of each army joined forces near Pitomnik on the western outskirts of Stalingrad. With Soviet troops still regrouping, the city was vulnerable to the combined German armies. The battle that the Soviets had planned for the fortified line of defense along the Don River would now take place along the Volga, under far worse conditions.

  Stalin, who had been tracking these developments from Moscow, pressured his generals to take immediate action. On August 26, General Zhukov, the new deputy commander in chief of the Red Army, departed for Stalingrad, tasked with launching a diversionary attack by September 2. The 1st Guards Army, with support from the 24th and 66th Armies and from the 4th Tank Army, was to punch a hole in the Wehrmacht’s northern cordon stretching from the Don to the Volga, encircle the Germans, and link up with the b
eleaguered 62nd Army. Zhukov began preparations but objected to the time frame, which he regarded as too narrow, since several of the divisions planned for the offensive had yet to arrive. He believed that a coordinated attack could take place no sooner than September 6. On September 3 the front commander, Yeryomenko, reported to Stalin of heavy bombing in the city, signaling that the German armies were about to strike. In response Stalin cabled an urgent telegraph to Zhukov: “Stalingrad may be taken today or tomorrow if the Northern Army Group doesn’t offer immediate assistance. [ . . . ] Delay at this point is equal to a crime.”67 Zhukov had no choice but to launch the attack the following morning, with the additional units joining the next day.

  Though Soviet troops outnumbered their opponents, they were at a disadvantage in several respects. The flat and treeless steppes offered no shelter, and the Soviet rifle divisions, lacking sufficient air and armored support, were exposed to German artillery fire and air attack. The German soldiers of the 76th and 113th Infantry Divisions had entrenched themselves in the balkas, deep gullies common in the region, making them hard to hit. What also proved fatal was Yeryomenko’s stubborn insistence on daytime fighting.68 Nevertheless, the Soviets were able to push two and a half miles into the five-mile deep cordon. On September 8 the 308th Rifle Division was taken off reserve status and deployed to Kotluban, at the heart of the offensive, in a bid to seize a strategic hill.

  By September 10 Zhukov realized that the intended breakthrough would not succeed. He called Stalin to demand more troops and time for a “more concentrated blow.” Stalin summoned him to Moscow so they could deliberate the next move.69 On September 12 Zhukov, Chief of Staff Vasilevsky, and Stalin discussed how the Red Army could avoid imminent catastrophe. Zhukov wanted at minimum another army, more tanks, and an air force. He also presented ideas for a large-scale counteroffensive. It was here that the plan to encircle the Germans was hammered out.70

  Meanwhile, the Kotluban offensive continued to exact a high toll. By September 15, as many as a third of the 250,000 soldiers were wounded or dead. On September 18, a second offensive began, this time with more troops and a new formation. The 308th Rifle Division had been absorbed by the 24th Army but continued to fight near Kotluban. During the heavy fighting on September 18–19, the Soviets suffered thirty-two thousand wounded and dead. Nevertheless, the operation succeeded in pinning down several German divisions and elements of the Luftwaffe, reducing the force of the German attack on Stalingrad.71

  At the end of September, the worn-down 308th Rifle Division was posted to Stalingrad. After marching a hundred-mile detour around the front, they arrived at the eastern bank of the Volga on the night of October 1. They crossed in waves and entered the burning city with a mission to recapture the worker settlements in front of the Barricades munitions plant. On October 3 Paulus started a large offensive to capture the entire industrial district in the north. The advancing soldiers of the 24th Panzers had arrived at the Barricades plant on October 4 and decimated an entire regiment of the 308th Rifle Division. That evening Chuikov removed the remaining soldiers in the division from the line of fire.72 Stalin was not pleased. On October 5 he issued a strong rebuke to Yeryomenko: Stalingrad would fall if the sections of the city lost to the Germans were not retaken. “For that, it is necessary to turn each house and each street in Stalingrad into a fortress. Unfortunately, you haven’t been able to do that and continue surrendering block after block to the enemy. That shows you are acting poorly.”73

  In mid-October fighting in the industrial district reached its zenith. On October 14 the Germans began a large-scale assault on the Stalingrad Tractor factory, with the aim of pushing southward along the Volga to the city center. On October 17 German soldiers infiltrated the Barricades munitions plant defended by the 308th Rifle Division. The following day a Stuka pilot summarized the fighting in his diary: “We were plowing over the burning ruin of Stalingrad all day. I don’t understand how people are still able to live in this hell, but the Russians are firmly lodged in the ruins, the cracks, the basements and the chaos of the distorted factory frames.”74

  After ten days of fighting—participants on both sides described it as the most hellish of the battle—the 62nd Army had been pushed back to three shallow bridgeheads: a pocket held by Colonel Sergei Gorokhov’s group; the parts of the Barricades plant along the Volga (held by the soldiers of the 138th, 308th, 193rd, and 45th Rifle Divisions and of the 39th Guards Rifle Division); and a strip of land that stretched from the eastern edge of Mamayev Kurgan to the city center (held by the 284th Rifle Division and the 13th Guards Rifle Division).75 Altogether, these Soviet positions comprised around fifteen thousand able-bodied soldiers. By mid-November their number had shrunk by half.76 The wounded in the 308th Rifle Division had been carried off the battlefield and those remaining joined the 138th Rifle Division, who had assumed a hedgehog formation—their guns facing outward in all directions—on the banks of Volga under the command of Colonel Ivan Lyudnikov.77 On November 17, two days before Operation Uranus commenced, Hitler gave up hope of taking Stalingrad before winter. Instead, he urged his commanders “to take at least the areas from the munitions plant and the steelworks to the Volga.”78

  In April and May 1943, the Moscow historians interviewed twenty-four members of the 308th Rifle Division who fought at Stalingrad—from Commander Leonty Gurtyev and Divisional Commissar Afanasy Svirin to military engineers, switchboard operators, and nurses. The interviews provide vivid depictions of combat and death, both inside and outside the city. Above all, they show how the division persevered despite constant attrition. This was partly due to the division’s self-confidence and the troops’ loyalty to their commander. But it was also helped by the political officers, whose entreaties and encouragement provided a moral compass amid the tumult of battle. Again and again, they called on soldiers to show their mettle and uncover the hero within. If someone died while performing a heroic act—such as the nurse Lyolya Novikova, of whom Captain Ivan Maksin spoke—the example spurred on others to hate the enemy and sacrifice themselves for their country. Many of the interviews attest to how deeply the political conditioning the soldiers received informed their speech and behavior. Medic Nina Kokorina emulated the war heroes celebrated in her Komsomol group. The infantrymen Vasily Boltenko and Vasily Kalinin seem to have internalized the message that the inner strength of the Soviet soldier could prevail in the duel between man and machine that characterized the contest between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht. Soviet military training told soldiers that they could shoot down German aircraft or incapacitate a panzer through willpower alone. The confidence in the collective force of the soldiers finds symbolic expression in Fyodor Skvortsov’s description of how a human chain reestablished a broken telephone line.

  The first interviews, with Mikhail Ingor and Nina Kokorina, took place in Moscow on April 30, 1943; the remaining ones occurred between May 11 and 14 in the village of Laptyevo.

  THE SPEAKERS (in the order they appear)

  Gurtyev, Leonty Nikolayevich—Major general, commander of the 308th Rifle Division

  Kokorina, Nina Mikhailovna—Senior sergeant, medical company nurse, assistant deputy for political affairs for the medical company of the 347th Rifle Regiment

  Belugin, Vasily Georgievich—Major, commissar in the 347th Rifle Regiment

  Smirnov, Alexei Stepanovich—Lieutenant colonel, chief of the divisional political section

  Ryvkin, Semyon Solomonovich—Captain, commander of an independent field engineering battalion

  Svirin, Afanasy Matveyevich—Lieutenant colonel, deputy divisional commander for political affairs

  Petrakov, Dmitri Andrianovich—Commissar in the 339th Rifle Regiment

  Maksin, Ivan Vasilievich—Captain, chief of the divisional political section in charge of the Komsomol

  Boltenko, Vasily Yakovlevich—Junior lieutenant, platoon commander, and deputy battalion commander for combat units of the 347th Rifle Regiment

  Seleznev, Gavriil Gri
gorievich—Private, field engineering battalion

  Stoylik, Anna Kipriyanovna—Nurse, medical company platoon commander

  Vlasov, Mikhail Petrovich—Senior lieutenant, commissar in the artillery battalion of the 351st Rifle Regiment (no date given)

  Koshkarev, Alexander Fyodorovich—Party bureau secretary, 339th Rifle Regiment

  Kushnaryov, Ivan Antonovich—Lieutenant colonel, commander of the 339th Rifle Regiment

  Chamov, Andrei Sergeyevich—Lieutenant colonel, commander of the 347th Rifle Regiment

  Kalinin, Vasily Petrovich—Senior lieutenant, deputy chief of staff for intelligence, 347th Rifle Regiment

  Skvortsov, Fyodor Maksimovich—Private, telephone operator

  Sovchinsky, Vladimir Makarovich—Major, deputy commander for political affairs, 339th Rifle Regiment

  Brysin, Ilya Mironovich—Junior lieutenant, sapper platoon commander, independent field engineering battalion

  Dudnikov, Yefim Yefimovich—Private, sapper platoon, independent field engineering battalion

  Ingor, Mikhail Lazarevich—Captain, politruk, 347th Rifle Regiment

  Trifonov, Alexander Pavlovich—politruk, 1011th Artillery Regiment

  Stepanov, Alexander Dmitriyevich—Battalion commissar, 1011th Artillery Regiment

  Fugenfirov, Genrikh Aronovich—Commander of the 1011th Artillery Regiment79

  Major General Leonty Nikolayevich Gurtyev (Commander of the 308th Rifle Division):80 The division was made up of Siberians for the most part. [ . . . ] Our unit was recruited in March, April, May. In May we set off for the training camp. We left there in early June and went to the Saratov region. For a while we stayed at Karamyshevka, near the Tatishchevo rail station, where we completed our combat training.