Stalingrad

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

  People were different ages, but the bulk of them were thirty to thirty-five. There were young people, especially the sailors who came from the Far East, but there were also a lot of old ones. We screened them, but you can’t do anything much on the move. For some reason every soldier understood that he couldn’t leave Stalingrad. They knew that the whole country was talking about it, that Stalingrad could not surrender, that Stalingrad was defending the honor of the Soviet Union.

  There were a lot of girls: communications workers, paramedics, medical assistants, doctors. They did exceptionally good work, even if you compare a woman with our soldiers. They can’t do what a man can do physically, but they outdo men in terms of courage. And in their fortitude, heroism, honesty, and loyalty, not only do they not fall behind, but in many cases they outdo the men. It’s true that during heated and difficult combat situations I sent all my female staff workers to the east bank and had them replaced with men, but this was only because of their physical weakness, it had nothing to do with their moral qualities. Whenever you’d go along the riverbank you’d see the work of our medical units. All of our crossings were centralized. The divisions themselves didn’t transport anything. There was a mobile unit, a field hospital with surgical facilities. During the fighting we had a working surgical laboratory. One doctor has done two hundred complex operations. And take a look at these so-called nurses. Incredible! They’re buried in dust, but they just keep plugging away. I could tell you so many examples of how well these women worked. Looking at percentages, women receive more orders and medals when compared with the men, especially the medical workers. I can’t think of a single woman who’s been to Stalingrad and hasn’t been decorated, and if there is one, she won’t stay that way for long.

  The peculiarities of the fighting in Stalingrad, in terms of city defense and attacking whole cities, can all be applied to all combat situations. Any populated area can be turned into a fortress and can grind down the enemy ten times better than a garrison.

  Ambition is still there, but it’s not talked about much.

  We don’t have heroes who aren’t afraid of anything. No one sees or knows what Chuikov does when he’s by himself, when there’s no witnesses, nobody to see him, to see what’s going on in his head. The idea that a commander would go to his subordinates and bare his poor little soul—you could find them, but they’re the rejects and failures. We’re in a bunker, and shell fragments are flying at us. But what, you just sit there, and that doesn’t get to you? I don’t believe it. The survival instinct is still there, but a man’s pride—an officer’s especially—is of vital importance in combat. Lev Tolstoy was right about that.

  Here’s an example. Shells are flying, whistling, buzzing around—and then there’s a hit. Not everyone has the courage not to duck down when a shell’s coming. But ducking’s not going to protect my head or chest from a shell, so I’m no better off if I duck. Nevertheless, people do it. But my pride doesn’t permit this. I never do it. It would be completely different if I were on my own, but I’m never on my own. I don’t duck for shells, and I stake my life on that.

  Take, for instance, the title of Guards unit, or the honorary titles given to our heroes, the insignia: Don’t you think Stalin takes that into account? Grossman puts it this way. You’ve got some hard-hearted people: a battalion commander who’s been fighting all the time. He gets sent on a course, and then someone comes to say good-bye: “Comrade commander, permit me to say farewell. I’ve given my all.” “Oh, so you have. All right then.” I told Grossman: That is a valuable commander. In other circumstances they might be all tears and kisses, but here you shouldn’t display any weakness. A commander sees thousands of men die, but this can’t faze him. He can cry about it when he’s alone. Your best friend can get killed here, but you’ve got to stand there like a rock.52

  Here’s another example. On the 14th [of October] the bunker of the artillery section was destroyed. Nine men were buried, one jumped out, but his legs were stuck. It took two days to dig him out. He was alive. They’d dig, but then the dirt would fall in on him again. It just kills you to see that. But you can’t let on that it does.

  Or take this. Four men are in a pipe. They’re surrounded by eight Fritzes. One of them, wounded, crawls his way through the pipe with a message: open fire on us. We open fire, and the soldiers die along with the Germans. Think that’s easy?

  If the Germans had taken into account the psychological element, the political factor, the importance that Stalingrad has to every man and officer who comes here, who’s gone beyond the point of no return, if they’d taken into account that it wasn’t all haphazard and rushed, then they wouldn’t have gotten themselves into such a mess.

  It was impossible, in Stalingrad, to conduct any strategic or tactical maneuver. All we could do was just sit there. There was no opportunity for any kind of Napoleonic brilliance.

  [Second interview]

  [ . . . ] At one point I was livid with our journalists and writers, who seemed to be baiting Hitler on purpose: Stalingrad won’t be taken, Stalingrad won’t be taken. But the enemy was hitting us harder and harder, and we were sick of it. It’s terrible having to take all that. The foreign press, too: Stalingrad won’t be taken. A better prize for Hitler! Even without that he was tearing his way in, and now he was being encouraged, he kept hitting us, throwing in fresh troops, and I couldn’t get reinforcements. [ . . . ]

  October was the worst time for us in terms of enemy offensive operations. That was when Hitler promised everyone and anyone that Stalingrad would be taken. He really did throw everything at us that they had us on the front. Two, two and a half thousand airplanes were circling not just Stalingrad, but the entire army. They bombed us day in and day out. Mortar and artillery fire never stopped.

  What does a thousand airplanes mean? There wasn’t a single five-minute stretch when you didn’t have twelve, eighteen, thirty airplanes overhead. And they kept dropping more and more bombs. It happened so much that when someone brought you your soup you’d have to scoop the shell fragments out with your spoon. You’d see bits of bombs or stone, they’d landed in the soup on its way to you from the canteen.

  In early November the absolute worst thing was the Volga. It was starting to ice up, but the river was still flowing. There was no regular river transport. The armored cutters couldn’t get through. In other words, we weren’t getting supplies. The planes could only drop supplies at night because they couldn’t come out during the day. They were making drops for three days. This was tough for the pilots because our strip of land was so narrow. Sometimes what they dropped would hit the bank, sometimes it would go to the enemy, sometimes to us. They’d fly right up to us and yell: “Hey, where do you want it?” The U-2s were just excellent. We were worn down, nearly out of ammunition. We had limited supplies, limited amounts of food. Got to our last cartridge, despaired, but kept fighting. At that time there we had some stubborn hand-to-hand combat. I think the photographers captured some images. I should say that some of the photographers (this one in particular) didn’t hesitate to come with me up to the front lines to take pictures of the fighting twenty-five meters away. We’ve got an image of our soldiers sticking bayonets into the Germans—that’s as real as it gets. No touch-ups there. The battle’s raging, and they’re capturing it. It’s happening right here, and they’re getting it on film.

  Those were the most difficult days of all. We had a few tons of chocolate in store, and I thought, if we get a bar and some water to every soldier, we’ll live through this. We were much more concerned about ammunition. They started bringing things in from Moscow, uniforms and food. To hell with that. I said: “Get me some ammunition, I’m not about to start fighting with socks!” But we eventually got through all that. Not many in the army have gotten frostbitten. We haven’t been starving. Not too much in the way of lice. Just now the 64th has had some typhus, but in the 62nd we’ve only had six suspected cases. Three times a month my men have been going to the baths, the ste
am baths. They go, hit one another with twigs, feel healthier. All of this is at the riverbank. The bombs are coming, but you’re there getting cleaned up, feeling healthy. It’s true we went more than a month without the baths, but then we set up several dozen, maybe a hundred. The men are taking baths ten times a month.

  We haven’t lost control the entire time. We’ve known pretty well what the enemy is planning to do. Since we know his plans, we can make countermeasures in time. What countermeasures?

  We make observations or find out from prisoners that the enemy is going to hit us hard at some location. They’re moving in their forces, dragging out their artillery, infantry, tanks, ammunition. We had a group of German forces in an area of about three to four square kilometers. With such a tight concentration of forces, you’ve just got to attack. You wait until the enemy is nearly ready, and then a few hours before their attack you open fire with your artillery, Katyushas, mortars. For an hour, or two or three, we give them hell. And we watch them, as if it were a movie, we watch their ammunition explode, their vehicles, we see their arms and legs go flying. Nothing remains of that elegant order they wanted to create. We’ve shattered it. Then they try to put things back in order. We nearly didn’t bother counting up their losses. We would just report that the enemy took a loss directly in front of our front line. We really got the better of them with that countermeasure. In some ten to fifteen minutes we shot thousands of shells on that concentrated force. We learned of the results from the prisoners we took. When they start to describe our artillery raid, our operations, you feel a rush of pride. The prisoners say that their hair stood on end, that they sensed they wouldn’t be able to take Stalingrad. They were devastated, and taking heavy losses. There was nothing they could do in Stalingrad, because the people defending it weren’t people, but some kind of wild animal. “Well,” I thought, “good luck to you all!”

  Hitler didn’t count on the fact that we would resist. When our men entered the city, when scores and hundreds of Germans started to surrender, this boosted our morale. Our men saw that we could hit the Germans and hit them hard. That’s the first factor.

  The second factor was the orders, and then our propaganda: you can die, but you can’t retreat. There’s nowhere to fall back to: Stalingrad will decide the fate of the motherland. The men understood this. The men were in such a mood that if they’d been wounded, even with a broken spine, they had tears in their eyes as they were being taken to the east bank. They’d say to their comrades who had brought them out: I don’t want to go. Better to be buried here. They considered it shameful to go wounded to the other bank. This echoed comrade Stalin’s order.

  The third factor was the merciless treatment of cowards and panickers. On September 14 the commissar and commander of the 40th Regiment left their regiment and ran. They were shot right then and there in front of the whole army. Two brigades ran off to the east bank and evaded me for several days. I found them and had their officers and commissars shot. The order was passed through all the units: There will be absolutely no mercy for cowards and traitors.

  The fourth factor was that you could look at the Volga and see it was damn difficult to get back across. That’s a purely geographical factor.

  There were foreign correspondents who were always digging for information: Which units are here? Where are they from? They asked: Are these the Siberian units? I said they were nothing of the sort: they’re Russians, Ukrainians, Uzbeks, Tatars, Kazakhs, and so on. That was the truth. There were people representing all nationalities. There weren’t any special or elite units that were created just for Stalingrad. Obviously Russians were in the majority because there’s a larger Russian population. The best fighters we have are the Russians, then the Ukrainians, and even the Uzbeks, who’d never fought before.

  They did cry a bit on the first and second day, but the situation forced them to follow the example of the Russian and Ukrainians and to fight and die with them. The soldiers had an exceptionally high level of political consciousness.

  We’d lie down dead there, but we wouldn’t retreat. If it came to it you’d put a bullet in your head. We decided that unless there was an order from above, we wouldn’t leave for any reason. In this regard I can attest that the Military Council did not leave, and, if they had, no others would have followed them.

  Did we feel we had the assistance and support of Moscow?

  What does it mean when N. S. Khrushchev calls on the phone? And he called very often. We know who N. S. Khrushchev is. A member of the Politburo and the Central Committee, someone who can speak directly with comrade Stalin. He didn’t pronounce Stalin’s name, but the fact that he often called to ask how things are going, how we’re feeling—that has meant a lot to us.

  “We’re fine, not too bad.”

  “Good, I’ve got a lot riding on you.”

  Yeryomenko came here. It took him over two days just to get across the Volga to speak with me. The Volga was boiling and burning, but nevertheless he came over on some sort of cutter. We’re old friends.

  “Comrade Stalin told me to check in on you, see how you’re doing, see what you need.” 53

  Things were bad in terms of ammunition and other supplies. There was no supply operation, and we were low on shells. He sent a telegram to Moscow, and the reply came back in a flash, and we could immediately feel the material support. The supply of ammunition and shells meant everything to us. There was aid not only on a material level. If there was something or someone you needed, you always went through Moscow. I only rarely resorted to this, but resort I did.

  The wounded were evacuated to the other side. “We’re bleeding to death,” I wrote to Moscow. “We don’t mind dying, and we’re fighting bravely. Stalingrad is holding out, so send us more men!”

  And they did. They wrote to me directly at my command post. “Why hasn’t Chuikov been given this and that, send him this and that.”

  We got the papers regularly. A soldier, naturally, is flattered when he reads the pages of central newspapers like Pravda and Izvestiya, where from the lead article to the very last page they’re always writing: “Stalingrad, Stalingrad.”

  My chief deputy of the medical administration once told me he’d seen a badly wounded soldier. He asked him where he was from and where he was going. The wounded man thumped himself on the chest and said:

  “62nd Army. I’ve been wounded three times, but I’ll get better and get back for sure.”

  We were getting so many parcels from all corners of the Soviet Union. We somehow managed to present these gifts to the men: a few apples, a piece of sausage. But the best soldiers, the ones who really distinguished themselves, they were always getting things. [ . . . ]

  Here’s what my wife wrote me: “I know that you’re in Stalingrad. It’s dangerous there, but I take pride in this struggle for Stalingrad. It looks like it’s a duel with the Führer. Hit him hard so his tongue sticks out like it does in the picture (see page 291).” And what do you think people wrote to the soldiers? What did people write to the officers?

  With regard to the country as a whole, to Moscow, to the high command, or comrade Stalin himself, I don’t have a bad word to say. We felt that we were doomed because we were physically cut off from everything. We felt the full weight of the situation. We felt that we were ready to die if it came to that. But we never felt forgotten or unappreciated. Of course we knew that no one could write openly about the defenders of Stalingrad, that no one could name names. These were military secrets. But when the People’s Commissariat of Defense issued a resolution in which the 62nd Army was singled out, every one of our men held his head high and walked with a spring in his step.

  In 1943, with comrade Stalin’s permission, I took a plane to see my family in Kuybyshev. It coincided exactly with the celebration of the anniversary of the Red Army on February 23. I was invited to the theater. They persuaded me to give a short speech. Marshal of the Soviet Union B. M. Shaposhnikov54 was there. Many people spoke, and they were greeted cordia
lly, but when the last of them gave me the floor, I stood there like an idiot for five minutes. Every time I opened my mouth, they’d interrupt with applause. I could sense how well they understood our situation and our struggle. . . .

  N. A. Dolgorukov, “As it was . . . so it will be!” Soviet propaganda poster from 1941.

  GUARDS DIVISION GENERAL ALEXANDER RODIMTSEV

  When the battle of Stalingrad began, Vasily Chuikov had yet to make a name for himself. This was in contrast to the lower-ranking and five-year-younger Alexander Rodimtsev, who was already a highly decorated war hero. Like Chuikov, Rodimtsev stemmed from a peasant family and a childhood shaped by poverty before entering the Red Army at the age of twenty-two and joining the party two years later. Rodimtsev followed an officer’s career path and rose quickly through the ranks. In 1936 he was sent to train the International Brigades in Spain. Under his command, the troops scored multiple victories over fascist forces, though he was unable to prevent the collapse of the Spanish Republic and the rise of Franco. On returning from Spain, Rodimtsev received the title Hero of the Soviet Union, the highest distinction in the Soviet Union.

  In 1939 Rodimtsev delivered the welcoming address at the Eighteenth National Congress of the Communist party. (That a thirty-four-year-old colonel was selected to give this talk testifies to the large swath that Stalin’s purges had cleared among the generals in the previous two years.) In September 1939 Rodimtsev took part in the Soviet invasion of Poland and then in the Winter War in Finland. In the war against Germany he commanded an airborne brigade that broke free from a Wehrmacht encirclement near Kiev. In November 1941 the brigade was expanded into the 87th Rifle Division and received Guards status in January 1942, becoming the 13th Guards Rifle Division.