Stalingrad
Page 26
After nearly three weeks the Germans launched a decisive assault on the factory. Never had there been such preparations for an attack. For eighty hours their airplanes, heavy mortars, and artillery pounded the area. Three days and three nights were made into a chaos of smoke, fire, and thunder. It went quiet all around, and then the Germans attacked with heavy and medium tanks, regiments of infantry, hordes of drunken submachine gunners. The Germans managed to break through to the factory, their tanks stood beneath the walls of the workshops; they got past our defenses, cut off our divisional and regimental command posts from the forward lines. Without direction, it seemed that the division would lose its ability to resist, and that the command posts, now directly in the path of the enemy, would be destroyed.
But then an extraordinary thing happened: every trench, every bunker, every foxhole and fortified shell of a building transformed itself into a stronghold with its own command and communications. NCOs and regular soldiers took command and repelled the attack with skill and cunning. At that dark and difficult hour, commanders and staff officers fortified their command posts and repelled the enemy’s attack like ordinary soldiers. Chamov fended off ten assaults. After defending Chamov’s command post, one officer—an enormous, red-haired tank commander—having spent all his shells and cartridges, jumped to the ground and started pelting the approaching submachine gunners with stones. The regimental commander himself manned a mortar-tube. The division’s favorite, regimental commander Mikhalyov, died when his command post was hit by a bomb. “They killed our father,” said the men. Mikhalyov’s replacement, Major Kushnaryov, moved his command post to a concrete pipe that ran beneath the workshops. Kushnaryov, his chief of staff Dyatlenko, and six officers fought at the entrance to this pipe for several hours. They had a few boxes of grenades, and with these they repelled all the attacks of the German submachine gunners.
This unimaginably fierce battle went on for several days without a break. They no longer fought for a particular building or workshop, but for each individual step of a stairway, for a corner in a narrow corridor, for a single workstation, for the space between workstations, for a gas main. Not one man in the division took a single step back during this fight. If the Germans managed to occupy a location, that meant that every Red Army soldier there was dead. Everyone fought like that red giant, the tank commander whose name Chamov didn’t know, or like the sapper Kosichenko, who pulled pins from grenades with his teeth because his left hand was broken. When a soldier died it was as if he transferred his strength to the living. There were times when ten bayonets did the work of a battalion in holding the line. Time after time the Germans would take a workshop from the Siberians, and again the Siberians would take it back. It was during this battle that the pressure of the German offensive reached its peak. This was the moment of their greatest potential in the line of the main drive. But it was as if they had tried to lift some unbearable weight; they over-strained the spring that powered their battering ram. The pressure of the German attack began to subside. The Siberians had held out against this superhuman pressure.
Mass grave of soldiers at the Red October factory, 1943
One cannot help wondering how such great perseverance was forged. It was said to be a combination of their national character and recognition of of their great duty, of a rugged Siberian perseverance, of excellent military and political training, and harsh discipline. But I’d like to mention still another quality that played a significant role in the great and tragic epic: the surprisingly good morale, the intense love that connected all the men of the Siberian division. All of the commanders were imbued with a Spartan spirit of modesty. You could see this in the small things: in the way they refused the hundred-gram vodka ration throughout the battle at Stalingrad, in their reasonable and straightforward leadership. I could see the love that connected these men of the division in the grief they felt when speaking of their fallen comrades. I heard it in the words of a private from Mikhalyov’s regiment. Asked how he was doing, he said: “What difference does it make? Our father is gone.”
I could see it in the tender meeting of the gray Colonel Gurtyev and the medic Zoya Kalganova, who had just returned after being wounded for the second time. “Hello, my dear girl!” he said softly as he walked toward her with open arms. It was the way a father would greet his own daughter. This love and faith in one another worked wonders.
The Siberian division did not leave the line, nor did they even once look back; for they knew that behind them was the Volga and the fate of their country.
THE LANDING AT LATOSHINKA
On January 1, 1943, Vasily Grossman was recalled to Moscow after reporting for Red Star in Stalingrad since September 1942. In his diary he describes the sadness that suddenly befell him on New Year’s Eve. While everyone around him was celebrating, Grossman thought of a devastated battalion that he believed had been forgotten: “On this holiday, I recalled the battalion that had crossed over to Gorokhov to divert the blow to itself. It was destroyed to the last man. Who will remember the battalion on this holiday? No one is remembering those who had crossed the river that foul October night.”109 Grossman spoke with sailors from the Volga flotilla during his work as a war correspondent in Stalingrad; from them he is likely to have heard about the battalion’s fate. In June and July 1943 the Moscow historians interviewed forty-six members of the flotilla.110 Many mentioned the doomed battalion, which met its end while attempting to storm a village held by the Germans north of Stalingrad on the western bank of the Volga. Some of the sailors had ferried the soldiers to the other side of the river; others had watched helplessly from the eastern bank as each wave of the assault faltered in a barrage of enemy fire. The sailors seemed deeply stirred by what they witnessed, and most struck a sober tone.
Much of the testimony from soldiers interviewed after February 2, 1943, had passed through the prism of Soviet victory. In the case of the sailors from the Volga flotilla, the focus lay on a failed operation, though quite a few sought to wrest meaning from the event—including Grossman, who attributed to it an objective that had never been intended. The battalion was part of the 300th Rifle Division. Supplied with reinforcements from Bashkiria, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, the division had been awaiting deployment since mid-October.111 On October 27 General Yeryomenko ordered the division to send a fortified battalion across the Volga to retake the village of Latoshinka from the 16th Panzer Division.112 From there it was to push south toward Rynok and assist Colonel Sergei Gorokhov’s 124th Rifle Brigade.113 The 1,200-man contingent had been backed against the Volga in hedgehog formation since being cut off from the rest of the 62nd Army when the Germans took the Tractor factory.114 The second part of the mission was to take advantage of the first lull in the Wehrmacht’s drive to eliminate the remaining Soviet positions since October 14. Yeryomenko’s daring operation embodied the aggressive spirit that came to dominate Soviet military thinking under Stalin’s sway.115 The November 1 report of the Soviet military staff described the maneuver succinctly: “The reinforced battalion of the 300th Rifle Division entered combat at 4:00 A.M. to occupy the Latoshinka district.” On the same day the Wehrmacht reported that “The attempt of several Soviet battalions to cross the Volga to the north of Stalingrad failed completely. A large number of Russian swift boats were drowned, the bulk of the Russian forces was destroyed or taken prisoner.”116 On November 1 the military council of the Stalingrad Front sent a telegraph to Moscow informing the Soviet high command that the enemy had positioned powerful infantry and armored vehicles in Latoshinka, threatening the undermanned and underequipped Soviet battalion. Unable to contact the unit’s commander, the military council decided to withdraw the battalion to the eastern bank under the cloak of night. After incurring considerable losses, it had fulfilled its purpose of “drawing enemy forces.”117 On November 4 Latoshinka appeared again in a Soviet military staff report—“The battalion of the 300th Rifle Division, fighting, had fallen back behind the railroad and continued combat in the Ni
skovodnaya embarkation area”—before being expunged from the annals of the Red Army.118
Latoshinka had been in German hands since August 23. A column of the 16th Panzer Division commanded by General Hans Hube crossed the Don on August 23 and by the following afternoon had reached the Volga, forty miles farther east. This enabled the creation of the northern cordon that Gurtyev’s 308th Rifle Division tried to breach in September. A history of the German division describes the moment the panzers arrived at the river’s “preeminent western bank”:
“Quiet and majestic, the broad, black current carried the barges upriver; beyond it, the Asian steppe stretched infinitely in every direction; the faces of the men showed pride, elation, and astonishment. [ . . . ] The men entrenched themselves in the outlying villages of Dachi and Latoshinka tucked among the vineyards. After weeks of fighting in the treeless steppe, they hoped for a few days of rest in this luscious magical garden full of walnut trees, oaks, sweet chestnuts, potatoes, tomatoes, and wine.”
But this idyll did not last long.
“Within a few days the region north of Stalingrad lay in ruin and the fighting had become relentless.”119
The chronicle goes on to portray the Soviet landing at the end of October. In contrast to Russian historical sources, it emphasizes the superior numbers of the Soviet force:
On the night of October 30, the Russians tried again to get a foothold in Latoshinka. Already in the early evening, the men of Stehlke’s combat group were roused by a commotion on the other side of the Volga. At midnight the gunboats and tugs began to near the shore. Gerke’s armored group opened fire on the Volga train station. Three boats, carrying fifty Russians each, sank; others were damaged and turned around. Three boats managed to land at Latoshinka, on the northeastern edge and in the south. The troops clung to the shore despite machine gun and artillery fire, pushed through to Latoshinka and attacked. Lieutenant Wippermann (16th Antiaircraft Tank Unit) and his troop held out despite superior enemy attacks and managed to inflict casualties on the opponent. Sixty Russians shifted their line of attack southward toward Rynok. Under fire from the 2nd Combat Engineers 16, the group was destroyed except for some small pockets, and the command collapsed.
The northern enemy group fought its way to the company command post of the 3rd Combat Engineers 16. But Senior Lieutenant Knoerzer and his company held fast. During a heavy exchange of fire, the division prepared a systematic counterattack to destroy the enemy troops who had landed. When the initiative started, the Russians came out with all guns blazing. But it was no use. At the company command post, fifty-six Russians put up their hands; by 1:00 P.M. thirty-six more prisoners had been captured.
In the meantime, the Russians in the north landed with reinforcements and more powerful ordnance. Crying out “Hurrah!,” they attacked to the south, but over the day nine tanks pushed them back to Latoshinka’s northern edge.
In the next days, the remaining invaders were killed or captured, the attacks being fended off from Rynok. On the evenings of November 2 and 3, several landing attempts with larger ships were thwarted. A new purge rooted out the last nests of resistance. The brave combat group under the skillful leadership of Major Strehlke, far inferior in number to the enemy, had taken command of the situation: four hundred men of the 1049th Rifle Regiment of the 300th Division from Bashkiria were bagged. Lieutenant Gerke received the Knight’s Cross for bravely defending his men.120
Looking at the German and Soviet accounts side by side, we can see why the landing failed. Contrary to Yeryomenko’s expectations, the Soviet assault did not come as a surprise: several attempts to land in the preceding weeks ensured that the soldiers of the 16th Panzer Division were on guard. Another factor was the lack of coordination among the Soviet troops. In particular, the battalion received no artillery support as it tried to build a bridgehead. Ordered on October 31 by the high command of the Stalingrad Front to help the soldiers of the 300th Rifle Division who had landed on the western bank, the chief of staff of the 66th Army asked why his staff had not heard about the landing. Two days earlier, he explained, the 66th Army and the Volga flotilla had also tried to advance to Colonel Gorokhov from the north.121 The sailors’ stories also detail the disastrous decision by the commander of the 300th Rifle Division, Colonel Ivan Afonin, to send wave after wave of ships loaded with soldiers into German fire; anyone who resisted was threatened with summary execution. Afonin likely feared that he would be reprimanded for cowardice if he acted otherwise. Yet the commanders involved in the operation displayed a tenacity which suggested that they had internalized Stalin’s “not one step back” command. Interestingly, the issue of valor in combat had an ethnic component: the mostly Russian sailors of the Volga flotilla criticized the non-Russian soldiers of the 300th Rifle Division for their poor fighting.
On November 9 General Yeryomenko drafted a report for Stalin in which he accounted for the failure of the commanding officers and divisional commander responsible for the operation. (He attributed it to their lack of experience.) In the report Yeryomenko noted that only 169 of the battalion’s original 910 soldiers and commanders remained, and he enumerated the loss of equipment in detail. But he also stressed the benefits of the landing operation: “The unit fulfilled the task of drawing away the forces from the Rynok area. The enemy was forced to counteract our landed troops by pulling tanks, artillery, and infantry from the area of Rynok and Spartakovka.”122 In his memoir Yeryomenko devoted just a short paragraph to the events at Latoshinka, repeating the explanation he provided to Stalin.123 General Chuikov never mentioned the episode; nor did the leading Soviet historian of the battle, Alexander Samsonov.
In his memoir, Isaak Kobylyansky, a former artilleryman in the 300th Rifle Division, described the first attack on Latoshinka. From his position on the east bank, he heard sounds of fighting erupt from the village, and then radio contact was lost. In the evening a soldier who had swum back across the river told of the battalion’s sad demise. Kobylyansky was supposed to participate in the second landing attempt, but his boat was incapacitated by German mortar, probably saving his life. “The Latoshinka battalion met a tragic fate,” he concludes. “Nearly all of the nine hundred men were taken prisoner, killed, or wounded.”124
On November 23 the Soviets retook Latoshinka as part of a large offensive. Two days later Captain Pyotr Zayonchkovsky arrived in the destroyed village. His mission was to record the war crimes committed by the Germans. In the enemy positions he found bodies of Red Army soldiers that had been “brutally tortured,” presumably under interrogation. (His detailed impressions can be found on page 391.) Several months later representatives of the Extraordinary State Commission for Ascertaining and Investigating Crimes Perpetrated by the German-Fascist Invaders questioned the surviving residents of Latoshinka. They learned that the soldiers of the 16th Panzer Division, after taking the idyllic village, had “set up a love nest in a hole, kidnapped all the pretty girls, and held them there at gunpoint.” All the young women in the village were raped.125
THE SPEAKERS (in the order they appear)
Yuri Valerievich Lyubimov—Senior lieutenant, navigation officer for a detachment of armored cutters, communications officer for the Northern Group of the Volga Military Flotilla
Yakov Vasilievich Nebolsin—Senior lieutenant, flagship artilleryman, brigade of river ships, Volga Military Flotilla
Sergei Ignatievich Barbotko—Senior lieutenant, commander of armored cutter no. 41
Vasily Mikhailovich Zaginaylo—Deputy commander of the gunboat Chapayev
Pyotr Nikolayevich Oleynik—Petty officer 1st class, deputy commander of armored cutter no. 13
Semyon Alexeyevich Solodchenko—Petty officer 1st class, chief helmsman of armored cutter no. 11
Armored boat of the Volga Military Flotilla loaded with troops before a landing, October 1942. Photographer: A. Sofyin
Ivan Kuzmich Reshetnyak—Petty officer 1st class, signals officer of armored cutter no. 34
Ivan Alexandrovic
h Kuznetsov—Lieutenant captain, commander of the gunboat Usyskin126
Yuri Valerievich Lyubimov (Senior lieutenant, navigation officer for a detachment of armored cutters, communications officer for Northern Group, Volga Military Flotilla): The Latoshinka operation was organized and led by Captain Fyodorov, chief of staff of the Volga Military Flotilla, and Colonel Afonin, commander of the 300th Rifle Division. The landing force was made up of soldiers from the 300th Rifle Division, who were brought in by armored cutter with intensive artillery support from warships of the [flotilla’s] Northern Group. The purpose of the operation was to take Latoshinka and link up with Gorokhov’s127 attacking forces, thus improving the situation for soviet forces at this section of the front. The plan was to have two armored cutters go from Akhtuba to the area south of Latoshinka and land a group of men from the 300th Rifle Division. Meanwhile another two cutters were to leave Shadrinsky Bay to land forces on the northern edge of Latoshinka.128 Both of the first landing groups were meant to have reinforcements brought in on tugboats while the operation was under way. But things went somewhat differently than planned.
One of the armored cutters from the Akhtuba group was having engine trouble, so the other one took two landing parties (about ninety men). The enemy spotted this boat the moment it left Akhtuba. Heavy mortar and machine-gun fire left one man dead and about twenty wounded. They were forced to go back to Akhtuba. But despite that setback, it was important because it drew enemy fire away from the other landing group (from Shadrinsky Bay), which was able to proceed and land unnoticed. They landed without incident and occupied the area from the riverbank to the rail line this side of Latoshinka. Reinforcements were brought in to support the first wave. After the wounded were taken off the boat, the Akhtuba group went back in and made a landing in the area to the north of Latoshinka. In total we landed about a battalion’s worth of men from the 300th Rifle Division. The boat from Akhtuba released a barrage of Katyusha (M-13) rockets before landing its troops. But because of poor leadership in the landing party (the battalion lost its commander), the troops broke up into several small groups and lost contact with one another. When the Germans discovered the landing force, they sent tanks in to confront this broken-up, leaderless group and crush it. The landing force didn’t offer any kind of organized resistance, to say nothing of offensive operations.