Stalingrad

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

  By spring I had started to get better and could help with the work. I can’t remember exactly when I was completely recovered. I got tired of living in my father’s home, so I left to see my brothers in Kronstadt. I made it there. I understood a thing or two about the political situation. The summer of 1917 was a time of political demonstrations. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries11 held a lot of sway in our village. When my brothers came home, they would tell me everything that was going on. Of course we, the young people, couldn’t stand the Socialist Revolutionaries, and people nicknamed us “Bolsheviks.” Considering that the Bolsheviks got the blame for anything and everything, that was the role we played. We couldn’t be reasoned with. When we were all together, we were a pack of kids you didn’t want to mess with. One of my brothers now manages the Sergo Ordzhonikidze machine tool factory in Moscow.

  When I got to Kronstadt, I entered a completely new environment. First of all, Kronstadt was a revolutionary city. They were getting ready for October.12 It wasn’t spoken of openly or loudly, but the work was under way. I didn’t want to leave, so I signed up in the same training unit as one of my brothers. I learned how to be a sailor—how to swear and eat gruel and wear wide-legged trousers. There were conversations and discussions, and from this I began to form some opinions. My brothers were not party members, but they all had Bolshevik sympathies. Three of them took part in the October Revolution. They wouldn’t take me. “Where do you think you’re going, kid?” they said. They were part of the group that stormed the Winter Palace, two of them13 actually fought the cadets who had set up in there. My other brother never left his ship.

  We all know how that revolutionary uprising ended. Soon after you got the sense that the old military organization was beginning to come apart. People were leaving the front, leaving the fleet, and we—I think this was in early 1918—all of us ended up in Serebryanye Prudy. We came to the home of our father, whose household now consisted of eighteen people because his older sons had gotten married. The family lived with my father, and then we show up, the scamps, and what’s there for us to do? Especially since it’s winter.

  When I got to my village all the young people came to me. We all did a lot of thinking, but not for long. Around that time they issued the decree on the formation of the Red Army.14 We all got together. What are we going to do now? Join the army! From our village it was me, Vasily Kuzmich Rykin, Alexei Gubarev, and Yegor Minkin. We went to Moscow. We didn’t know where to go. We went up to the first person we saw in an army overcoat and asked him where the nearest military unit was. He turned out to be a good guy.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  “We want to join the Red Army,” we said.

  “Do you have documents?”

  We went back to our village council15 to get the right documents showing that we were politically trustworthy. The man recommended that we go to Lefortovo.16

  He said: “They’re putting together some sort of courses there. They might take you.”

  The commissar in charge of the courses was Segal, if I’m not mistaken. We went there with all our belongings. If we couldn’t get work, we might as well study. He talked to us and signed us up right then. They immediately started getting us in line, took us out on walks every Sunday through Moscow to show off the armed forces of the proletariat. We looked pretty good.

  Then the Left Social Revolutionaries led an uprising,17 and we were put in to suppress it. The uprising was crushed. For me it was a baptism of fire. After a while, at the end of July, early August, we graduated. So we had about four months’ training. Those were the Red Army’s first military instructor courses at the former Alexeyevskaya Academy18 in Moscow. They sent us to the front. [ . . . ]

  [A long story about Chuikov fighting in the Civil War follows.]

  I was admitted to the party in 1919 on the shores of the Vyatka.19 It was very simple:

  “Why should we take you?”

  “Why wouldn’t you?” And that was that.

  Then I was sent on a long trip to China. After that I worked in the Special Far Eastern Army until 1933. Then I worked for a time in Moscow as the head of the Red Army’s Officer Training School, until 1935, and after that I studied for another seven months at the Stalin Academy of Motorization and Mechanization. In 1936 I joined the command staff of a mechanized brigade in Bobruysk. In 1938 I was made commander of a rifle corps, then the commander of the Bobruysk Army Group, which then became the 4th Army during the move into Poland. As soon as that campaign was over, they sent me to the Finnish Front. I was leading the 9th Army toward Ukhtinsky. Then that campaign was over. And right when we got back west to the 4th Army, they sent me again to China to be Chiang Kai-shek’s chief adviser. I know some English, enough to hold a conversation, and then I started learning a bit of Chinese.

  The war found me still in China, and in March 1942 I came home. I was appointed commander of the 1st Reserve Army in Tula. I came here with that army on July 17. [ . . . ]

  My first fight with the 64th Army was not a success. I’m not sure why. We got in on the 17th [of July], and on the 19th we got the order to move in and take up defensive positions, even though 10 percent of our forces hadn’t arrived, and by the start of the battle we had 60 percent of our forces at most. The divisions had come two hundred kilometers from the station where they’d disembarked, and then they were going almost straight into combat. The leadership had some strange ideas, and we suffered for it. That’s what happened with Gordov.20 The 64th Army avoided the catastrophe that happened to the 62nd Army on the other shore. I got us out. People called it a chaotic retreat, but I got the army out from under enemy fire. The ones who didn’t do this paid dearly, such as the 51st Army and many divisions. But I kept the 64th Army strong. We took casualties, but you can’t get anything done without some casualties. I didn’t want to leave the front. Whatever happens, happens. Then a group that was made up of the 64th Army and the remnants of the 51st Army was sent to Kotelnikovo.21 We fought there. They really hit us hard. Front command misjudged the direction of the attack, even though comrade Stalin had told Gordov and everyone else that Tsimlyanskaya22 was the enemy’s main objective.

  An enormous German motorized group came out of there and moved from Tsimlyanskaya toward Stalingrad. No one took the appropriate actions. Then they started getting something together to throw at them. They sent me in with my group. At first we were four divisions, then seven. We held the enemy back and made it possible for our troops to move laterally. We foiled the enemy’s plan to hit Stalingrad via Kotelnikovo. We slowed them down, took out a large number of tanks and tens of thousands of infantry, especially Romanians, thereby forcing their retreat. We accomplished this primarily with fast troop movements and tough defensive actions. We managed to create a front—otherwise there would have been nothing, just an open gate. [ . . . ]

  On September 11, I was summoned to see Yeryomenko and Khrushchev at front headquarters, where I was told that I was to take command of 62nd Army. My mission: defend Stalingrad. They told me to find out what units were there, since they themselves didn’t know exactly.

  The Germans were coming in from two directions. The first group was coming at the 62nd Army from the west via Kalach, just north of Spartakovka and Rynok; the second strike force was coming out of the southwest from Tsimlyanskaya and Kotelnikovo. These pincers were coming together on the 62nd Army in Stalingrad, because the 64th Army had withdrawn to Beketovka. The Germans didn’t go there. I personally think their strategy was to try and take Stalingrad as quickly as possible, which would demoralize our army so much that we wouldn’t know what to do. Stalingrad was important to them as a departure point for the north. Their pincers came together in the area of Karpovka-Nariman, and everything was focused on Stalingrad, where we had only the 62nd Army. The rest of our forces were outside the pincers. [ . . . ]

  After Nikita Sergeyevich23 told me to go to Stalingrad, he asked me: “What are your thoughts?” Yeryomenko also wanted to know. He’s known
me a long time. Well, what could I say? I said: “I understand my orders just fine, and I’ll carry them out. I’ll do what I can. I’ll either keep them out of Stalingrad or die trying.” There were no more questions after that. They offered me tea, but I declined, got in my car, and drove to Stalingrad.

  Our command post was located on Hill 102,24 and the enemy was three kilometers away. We had communications, telephone and radio. But they were breaking through all over the place, everywhere you looked. The divisions were so tired out and drained from the previous fighting that they couldn’t be relied on. I knew I’d be getting reinforcements in three or four days, but I spent those days on pins and needles trying to scrape together enough men to produce something like a regiment to plug the gaps. The front ran from Kuporosnoye and Orlovka to Rynok.25 The Germans’ main thrust was directed at Gumrak26 and the train station in the center of town, and the second strike was coming on the south side, against Olshanka27 and the grain elevator.

  A division. How many men? Two hundred, from various units. A brigade. How many men? They’re saying three hundred. Some divisions were down to only thirty-five men. We had some artillery, not divisional artillery but an antitank regiment.

  Those four days were torture, in the fullest sense of the word. The 6th Guards Brigade was completely eliminated on the 13th. Only one tank remained in working order, a T-34. The 113rd Brigade held on to about twenty tanks. They were in the south, and the 6th Guards Brigade had been on the right flank. Colonel Krichman28 was their commander. They were a fine brigade, but they were on that right flank. There were some other brigades, but they didn’t have any tanks, and the Germans were advancing.

  General Vasily Chuikov (second from left) at his command post. To his left is his chief of staff, Nikolai Krylov; to his right is General Alexander Rodimtsev. Next to him sits divisional commissar Kuzma Gurov. Photographer: Viktor Temin Chuikov’s bandaged finger was, according to his son Alexander, not the result of a combat wound but of a nerve-related skin disorder that plagued him chronically in Stalingrad.29

  When I got to army headquarters I was in a vile mood. I only saw three people: comrade Gurov,30 chief of staff Krylov,31 and chief of artillery Pozharsky.32 Three of my deputies had fled to the east bank. But the main thing was that we had no dependable combat units, and we needed to hold out for three or four days. The divisions had their respective headquarters on the Volga, and we were still forward on this hill. We were in this tunnel alongside the Tsaritsa River, while all the command posts were farther back. This turned out to be the right decision. And then there’s one thing that went well, if we can use such a word. We immediately began to take the harshest possible actions against cowardice. On the 14th I shot the commander and commissar of one regiment, and a short while later I shot two brigade commanders and their commissars.33 This caught everyone off guard. We made sure news of this got to the men, especially the officers. If you go down to the Volga, they said, then you’ll find army HQ right ahead of you. And so they went back to their places. If I’d gone across the Volga myself, they’d have shot me when I got ashore, and they’d have been right. The needs of the day determine what needs to be done.

  We knew that we could hold out because we knew the enemy had weaknesses of his own. We had detached divisions of thirty-five men, or a group of two hundred, while the Germans rolled right into the city with tanks and other vehicles. On the 14th, when they came into the city, they were getting ready to celebrate. But these detached divisions put them in their place and pushed them back from the riverbank. They’d broken through to the crossing. What could we do? We were completely cut off, there was nowhere to run. We gathered our staff officers, and I got four tanks, and we threw everything we had at them. Rodimtsev’s division arrived.34 We had to at least clear out the landing area. We threw everything at them. The enemy got pushed back to the train station. Everyone stayed in line to the last man. We made it so two of Rodimtsev’s regiments could make the crossing safely. They entered the battle from the moment they disembarked at the landing. They didn’t know where they were or what was happening; they didn’t know whether it was night or day. But we had a sense that the enemy was being reckless, that they were coming at us without taking any precautions whatsoever. Our divisions were small, but we kept at it, we kept cutting them down. We still had plenty of ammunition. All the ammo dumps were here.

  During those three days we took out a huge number of enemy tanks. We lost a lot. They got all our guns and crews, but there was nothing we could have done. Everyone knew we had no right to pull back. And the fear of tanks goes away once you’ve learned how to treat them, and after a while you no longer give a damn about them. Of course there were cowards, men who ran away. But our communications were functioning, we had our liaison officers making sure that every divisional and regimental commander knew that anyone who went back to the riverbank, anyone who came close, was to be shot. The men knew that they had to fight to the last for Stalingrad, and they knew reinforcements were on their way.

  The political work was conducted haphazardly, but it was appropriate to the circumstances. During such dangerous times a soldier doesn’t need lectures or clever slogans. He needs to know that high command is with him, that his commander is with him. He needs to say that we must kill the Germans and that we will not cross the Volga. Among our commanders and commissars there were both brave men and cowards.

  We’d been fighting for three days when Rodimtsev’s division arrived, and they’d been fighting for six days in extremely difficult conditions. Sure, they didn’t make any gains, but they held that line on the riverbank. The enemy got nowhere in this fighting and started to bypass us, moving toward Mamayev Kurgan. Then we were able to catch our breath. [ . . . ] At that time the men and officers started realizing that the Germans weren’t managing to capture a damn thing, that we could fight and kill them. The men started running with the idea. Soldiers came up with their own slogans. They were starting to feel joy again.

  They dropped probably around a million bombs on us, not counting artillery and mortar shells. Our communications were established and worked without interruption. Colonel Yurin was our chief of communications. Even during that brutal bombardment, when everything was exploding, flying, burning, I spoke with every commander on the telephone twice a day, or a dozen times with some of them if they were taking part in an important attack. Our command post had moved to the Barricades factory to the fuel tanks. At that time we were two kilometers from the front lines. We’d sit down to eat, and the enemy would pour down bombs, try to bomb us out. Our soup came to the table with shell fragments in it. Lebedev, a member of the Military Council, told me about a time a shell landed when he was in the latrine. Yes, you’d go into the latrine—and find corpses there.

  Supplies reached us only over the Volga and only at night. Our men would go two or three days without eating. There was no way to get anything to them, no time to even think how you might do it. Here’s how the wounded got out: if you get wounded, you stay put until night. You’re bleeding, but you can’t do anything about it because you won’t make it if you crawl out of your trench, so you stay there, and tonight someone will find a way to get you out. You couldn’t go five minutes without fifteen or twenty airplanes flying overhead. They never stopped bombing, never stopped shelling. Everything kept close to the ground. Their tanks crept forward, with submachine gunners right behind. Their dive-bombers came within forty or fifty meters of the ground. The enemy had a map of Stalingrad and good air-to-ground communication. Their liaisons were excellent. But our soldiers knew that the closer they were to the enemy, the better. They stopped being afraid of tanks. The infantrymen would get in a trench, ravine, or building, and start shooting the enemy infantry who were advancing behind the tanks. The tanks would move through, and we’d leave them to our artillery, which was two to three hundred meters back from the front lines and would fire when they came within twenty to fifty meters. And we didn’t let their infantry through. The Germans
would think that this area was already cleared, that it was dead ground. But that dead ground came back to life. And we had our Katyushas and our artillery.

  The enemy threw one tank division and three rifle divisions against a single two-kilometer section of the front, and there was enough artillery preparation to make your hair stand on end. Their tanks advanced, and more than half stayed with us, disabled. There was no attack like that the next day. They were beaten, and they had some ten to fifteen thousand wounded. We sent back around 3,500 wounded, but who knows how many more stayed behind—not only on the front as a whole but just on that on that two-kilometer meat grinder.

  The crossing was under constant fire. The riverbank was ironed flat. It was being shelled the whole time. Comrade Stalin sent Yeryomenko to me to find out how we were holding up. It took him two and a half days to cross over to our bank. His adjutant was wounded in the shoulder, and two cutters were sunk. They crossed at night because of all the planes. Only the cutters were going. The steamers worked at night and hid themselves before dawn, so there wasn’t so much as a rowboat on the Volga. They went to Tumak35 and Verkhnyaya Akhtuba,36 but they still got hit there. As for our barges—who knows how many of them got sunk?

  We didn’t have any marine brigades, but we had sailors from the Far East who had come in as reinforcements.37 They were good men but poorly trained. Their morale was good. You’d give one of them a submachine gun and he’d say: “First time I’ve seen one of these.” After a day he’d know how to use it. There was no shortage of cartridges, they just had to learn what to do with them.

  As for the nationalities—there were Russians, many of them from Siberia. Seventy percent were Russian, 10 percent Ukrainian, and the rest were other nationalities. The Russians are the best fighters.

  The worst time during the defense of Stalingrad was after Hitler’s speech, when Ribbentrop and others announced that Stalingrad was going to be taken on October 14. They took five days to prepare for this. We could feel this. We knew they were bringing in fresh tank divisions, massing new divisions on this two-kilometer section, and in advance of this they were shelling and bombing us more than ever, we could hardly breathe. We stayed in our ravine. They bombed and shelled away, started fires. They knew our army’s command post was there. And so were eight fuel tanks. Every one of them was leaking. Fuel flowed down into the dugout of our chief of artillery. Everything caught fire, and it was burning for a whole kilometer along the bank of the Volga. The fire lasted three days on end. We were afraid of being suffocated or being so poisoned by fumes that the enemy would be able to take us alive. We moved to another command post closer to where the enemy would be attacking. And we stayed there. We knew that every extra meter of telephone wires increased the risk of our communications being broken. The most criminal, most dangerous thing for a commander, especially a senior commander, is when you lose control and communications. Most of all, we were afraid of losing control of our troops. I may not be able to send one of my commanders any reinforcements, but it’s enough for me to grab the phone and say the right thing, that’s all he needs.