Stalingrad

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

  On September 9, 1942, the division was removed from reserve status and arrived at the Stalingrad Front on September 14. The first battalions of the 10,000-man division crossed the Volga late on the 14th and early on the 15th. They became embroiled in fighting with the Germans as soon as they reached the western banks.55 By the end of the next week Vasily Grossman had written an article on the 13th Guards Division in Stalingrad. The battle would decide “the fate of the world” and answer the “question of all questions.” Grossman portrayed Rodimtsev, since promoted to major general, as the battle’s linchpin: “Temperament, strong will, composure, quick reaction, the ability to advance when no one else would even dream of an attack, tactical experience and caution combined with tactical and personal fearlessness—these are the traits of a young general’s military character. And the general’s character became the character of his division.” Grossman asked Rodimtsev whether “he was exhausted by the round-the-clock tension of combat, the round-the-clock thunder of the hundreds of German attacks that had taken place last day, last night, and would continue tomorrow. ‘I am calm,’ he said, ‘this is the way it has to be. I have probably seen it all: how my command post was pounded by a German tank and then a German machine gunner threw in a grenade just to be sure. I threw it out. So here I am, fighting, and will go on fighting till the last hour of the war.’ He said it calmly, in a low voice. Then he began asking about Moscow. We actually talked about the current theater season.”56

  Just as Grossman described him, Rodimtsev shows restraint in his interview with the Moscow historians (unlike the hot-tempered Chuikov). He talks cautiously and primarily keeps to the events of the battle, spending most of his time on the September attempt to take Mamayev Kurgan and the storming of the German-fortified “L-shaped house” in early December. Rodimtsev emphasizes the importance of the careful planning and coordination between his regiments for their success and stresses his own military skill. He makes no secret of the heavy losses sustained by his division. By early October, over four thousand men were dead or injured. He mentions that when he ordered the storming of the L-shaped house some of his soldiers—all Uzbeks, he notes—remained on the ground and afterward were shot for their cowardice.

  Rodimtsev does not address the defense of the so-called Pavlov House. Only years later did Soviet politicians hype this episode as a grand story of the spirit of Soviet internationalism.57 Led by Sergeant Yakov Pavlov and Lieutenant Ivan Afanassyev, two dozen Red Army soldiers entrenched themselves in a four-story residential building set off from the street. The soldiers represented up to eleven different Soviet ethnic groups (the accounts vary)—Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Uzbeks, Kalmyks, and others. For almost two months they staved off the German onslaught before troops from the Soviet counteroffensive came to their aid on November 24.58 In his memoir, published in 1969, Rodimtsev devoted an entire chapter to the Pavlov House; the storming of the L-shaped house received only two pages. The memoir vaunts the soldiers’ heroism and the harmonious relations and omits the violence among the ranks and the losses they sustained in combat.59

  After Stalingrad the 13th Guards Division fought ceaselessly. As before, the division had the task of building bridgeheads, first crossing the Dnieper, then the Vistula, the Oder, and the Neisse. After traversing the Oder in January 1945, Rodimtsev (by then a lieutenant general) was honored as Hero of the Soviet Union for the second time. After the war he worked as a general inspector of Soviet forces and was elected deputy of the Supreme Soviet. Rodimtsev died in Moscow in 1977. Today his daughter Natalya directs a school museum in Moscow devoted to the Great Patriotic War.

  TRANSCRIPT

  of interview conducted with Major General Alexander Ilyich RODIMTSEV Commander of the 13th Guards Rifle Division

  January 7, 1943

  Stalingrad

  Interview conducted by scientific secretary A. A. Belkin

  Recorded by stenographer A. I. Shamshina60

  I was born on March 8, 1905, in the village of Sharlyk,61 in the Chkalov region—formerly the Orenburg region—to a family of poor peasants. Three of my sisters are there now. The youngest of them is forty, the middle one’s fifty, and the oldest is sixty. I’m the youngest. Our father died in 1919, our mother in 1929. I was raised mostly by my mother, and then I took care of myself.

  I went to the parish school until 1917, then to the upper primary school for two years, until 1919. We had a small patch of land. Then I apprenticed as a shoemaker. One of my sisters went to school, the others got married. Me, my sister, and my mother lived with my sister’s husband. I made shoes from 1921 to 1922. 1921 was the year of the famine,62 and when there was nothing left to eat I started driving a cart.

  My mother always said I would come to a bad end. I got into a lot of mischief. She was always crying because I couldn’t keep from misbehaving at school. Our teacher kicked me out seven times. I was strong, and I beat up the other kids. We lived right next door to some kulaks,63 and I was always fighting with the boys. First they’d send out the little ones, then the ones with beards. But these were all clean fights—if they hadn’t been, we’d have been up before the community court.

  Me and my sister went to school together. She was a serious student. The second she got home she’d be doing her homework. I paid attention in class, but that was it. Never got around to buying slates. The school was around four kilometers away from our street, which was called Otorvanka. It’s strange to think, but I didn’t have any proper shoes. I never wore boots or anything like that, I just had my bast shoes. Those things wear out quickly. I can remember my teacher always giving me twenty or thirty kopeks so I could buy new ones.

  I did all right at school. When I got home, I usually played checkers. We were also very serious about horse riding. I rode horses from a young age, spent fourteen years in the cavalry, then served as a paratrooper, and then I was in the air force.

  This one time I was invited to a Komsomol meeting, but when I got there it was just middle peasants and kulaks. This girl ran me out of there and I never went back. I’m extremely sensitive—someone picks on me and I’m not showing up again. It was only after I was in the army that I became a Komsomol member.

  In 1921 I started to learn tailoring, shoemaking. In short, I was an apprentice. We had someone from the village, a wealthy man named Lapshin. He had five or six workers, and I also worked for him. I learned the trades, and I got only a scrap of bread, nothing more, no wages of any kind. That went on until 1927. In 1927 I was drafted into the army. Strangely enough, before 1927 I’d never seen a railroad, couldn’t even imagine what it was like. I’d heard people talk about it. My brother-in-law, an old soldier, talked about his time in the army, told me how big Moscow was, how there was a Kremlin, and the tsar-bell, the tsarcannon. It came as quite a shock when I ended up at the Kremlin myself for three years of training.

  In 1927 I was drafted into the army and sent to an escort unit in Saratov. I was a regular soldier at first, then a junior officer. This is where I joined the Komsomol. I was chosen by the leader of the company Komsomol organization. Then, as soon as I finished training as a junior officer, I went to the Federal Military Academy at the Kremlin.64 I was very disappointed at not getting into the cavalry because I loved horses. That was all I cared about. But for some reason the commission didn’t take me. Later, after I’d been serving for some time, I wanted to fulfil my dream, to do what I wanted to do.

  I was at the academy from early 1929 to late 1931—three years. They took us to Khodynka65 for the first time, where we were examined. I got an A in math but a D in Russian, because of our unusual dialect. When I went home in 1937 they said something like: “Our Sanka’s come home!” Because the dialect was so ingrained I ended up making mistakes when I wrote. I got B’s in all my other subjects. I liked gymnastics—the horizontal bar, parallel bars, the pommel horse. I was an amateur athlete, and since I was in good shape I did pretty well. Also did well with military subjects. For three years I stood watch at L
enin’s Tomb, the Borovitsky Gates, the Spassky Gates.66 Then I was admitted to the cavalry school. When we started doing horsemanship drills and jumping, I showed the class what I could do, but the commission decided that my Russian language scores weren’t good enough. I said that was nonsense, I was doing just fine. The squadron commander went to them and said: This guy knows how to ride a horse. I’d started pasturing horses at night by six or seven, and I’d been racing them since I was ten. There was this kulak who had good horses, and they’d put kids in the races, and whoever’s horse won would get a sheep.

  That was 1927. After that we started training. I finished near the top of my class. I was the deputy cadet commander. Each platoon was led by a cadet commander. I was his assistant for the combat unit, since I’d always been one of the top students. I did well in science: math, physics. History too, and political science. I could quote pages of Lenin word for word, and I still haven’t lost all that much. Fiction didn’t really interest me. I only developed an interest in that after finishing school. It was only then that I started to read. I was an avid reader of Tolstoy. I’ve read War and Peace three times. I’ve read Anna Karenina, Resurrection. In Anna Karenina, when Vronsky falls from his horse, I thought: I’ve raced at the hippodrome. And when there’s that obstacle, and his horse falls—I feel for him, and I’ve come to love the story so much more because I’m a cavalryman too. In War and Peace I enjoy reading about the people themselves. But if you look at the way things are now, of course, it’s all completely different. Any one of our men is a lot better than heroes from back then. Suvorov was a good man for his time. He had a personal heroism: he picked up his blade and his lance and went forward. Now there’s plenty of people like that, and even that’s not enough: we’ve got to organize the battle. Back then there wasn’t any kind of coordination. The job of their highest leader was the same as that of a commander of a platoon, a company, a battalion. And now you’ve even got to be yelling at battalion commanders. [ . . . ]

  [Left out is a longer description of Rodimtsev’s experiences in the Spanish Civil War. “That’s where I first got a chance to shoot fascists.”]

  But I was still homesick for Russia when I was in Spain. When I crossed the frontier, I stood on my native soil and said: Yes, now I am in Russia. I never thought I’d be leaving. It was extremely difficult there. We’re in a difficult situation now, of course, but the equipment is all the same. There were Messerschmitts. Madrid was destroyed. Not like Stalingrad, of course, but it was still bad. You could see shells landing in the streets. It’s true the population didn’t get evacuated. In the morning everyone would move out to the field, into dugouts and holes. The people there played a very active role. It was all very democratic. Our people think: Oh, maybe I’ll just stay here.

  I’m very much against changing into civilian clothing. There was a general who changed out of his uniform and left the encirclement. When he came back, they gave him his army. The instinct for self-preservation is so strong that it supersedes everything. There is nothing else. But there was none of that in my division. One time when I found myself surrounded, the secretary of the party commission changed clothes, and so did the head of operations. I kicked them out of my division right then, brought the brigade together, and announced that these people were no longer with us. There was some criticism over this. They said there might come a time when I would have to do that, but I said that so long as I have any self-respect I would not get down on my knees for anyone, nor would I change out of uniform. It’s disgraceful for a military man. I wrote an article about Russian honor—it’s going to be in Red Star—about the honor of war, about how a warrior should behave, regardless of the situation.67

  I got back from Spain in 1937 and took some time to relax. I’d been traveling for twenty-five days. I went to the Paris Exposition,68 saw the delights of Paris, saw how the people lived, what sorts of theaters they had, how the girls behaved. The Moscow Art Theater was there with its actors—the people were interested in this too, to see what it was like. Paris is a nice, very cheerful place. The exposition was there, all lit up. It was extraordinary. Night was like day. I only spent a day in Berlin. Paris is cleaner. Berlin has a sort of dark look to it, all factories and gloom, covered in soot, like Leningrad, especially in the industrial areas. [ . . . ]

  After my time off I was made the commander of the 61st Regiment, where I’d started out as a platoon commander. The previous commander was shot in 1937. Whether he was an enemy or not, I’m not entirely sure. By the time I got to the division nearly everyone had been removed. I started leading the regiment. I was in command for about eight months before leaving for the Frunze Academy.69 I graduated with perfect scores, a colonel. I’d been a colonel since 1937. I graduated in 1940, after which I was appointed deputy commander of the 36th Division, the same division as my regiment. For about eight months I was a deputy divisional commander on the Finnish Front. The divisional commander often went away—he got sick—so I was often the de facto commander of the division. There I found myself in combat. The cavalry corps had just got there, and on the 12th we were meant to attack Helsinki, cross the Gulf of Finland, and then all of a sudden there was peace.

  Before the war they started recruiting for the air forces. Officers and generals were taken from large divisions and sent to the operations faculty. They needed skilled personnel, officers that were not only good pilots but also good tacticians. [ . . . ] I started flying U-2s. Then we were brought into the airborne forces, and I was made commander of the 5th Airborne Brigade, then the 6th Airborne Brigade. Before the war we were in Pervomaysk,70 where we were renamed the 3rd Airborne Corps.

  In Pervomaysk—when we were still an airborne brigade—we were deployed to Kiev. The enemy had broken through and was threatening Kiev. We got there by train, disembarked, and spent fifteen to twenty days in the area of Darnitsa and Brovary. Then my brigade was moved to Ivankovo. The 5th Army and 26th Corps were there. The enemy broke through. It hadn’t yet been decided to use us as infantry. We were all outfitted with automatic weapons—small arms suited to fighting behind enemy lines.

  When the enemy got to Stalinka71 and broke through the front line, Stalin gave us an order: Do not lose Kiev. Our brigades were sent in unit by unit. When I got to Kiev, the 6th and 12th Brigades were already fighting. We joined the battle on August 8, 1941. In fifteen days we pushed them back fifteen kilometers. We fought there for another ten days or so. We were thanked by the government and by the Ukrainian Council of People’s Commissars. The Ukrainians had reason to be grateful to me. [ . . . ]

  I was marching on Kharkov. We stopped four kilometers out. The whole division came out, but we took a beating at Peremoga. Then I fought with the 62nd [Army] at the Don. I went in September, on the 14th. I went with this division, though they were already at full strength. All the commanders were still there. That was the 87th Rifle Division. Later they were named the 13th Guards. Their anniversary’s on January 19. Things went well for me there too. I had exceptionally good people, all of them from the academies. They all came out as mid-ranking officers. I had ten thousand men under my command. A decent division, with exceptional people, all of them trained. Golikov,72 the deputy commander of the Western Front, watched as I led my division.

  I got my artillery before the 13th [of September]. On September 13 we got our other weapons right on this spot.73 Front commander Yeryomenko really helped me out there. There were only about two thousand submachine guns. The division was fitted out for the most part. The enemy was already here on the night of the 14th. If I’d been a day later, there wouldn’t be a Stalingrad. [ . . . ]

  I’ve been in worse conditions than in Stalingrad. Here I stayed in a bunker inside a tunnel. There was so little oxygen that matches wouldn’t stay lit, but I stayed in that bunker. They threw grenades at our command post, but I figured they wouldn’t get to me in my bunker. But back at Konotop, out in the field, when that tank started coming right for my bunker—that’s a whole different thing. A
fter that I was at the command post in a forest. This plane attacked us twenty-seven times, always attacking my command post. All the trees were gone, and there were only two of us left from the bunker. Most of the commanders didn’t make it. They were literally jumping out from under tanks, firing as they tried to run away. When I returned to the battalion still alive, I got back to organizing my troops.

  It was the same in Kazatskaya, when a secretary of the divisional party committee changed his clothes. I was walking in some bushes, and there was an enemy tank nearby, but it couldn’t get me with either its main gun or machine gun. I lay down on the ground when they started throwing grenades. I was with my adjutant and the Special Department representative. They ran off and then came back to me. The men were fighting in an organized manner. The enemy had us surrounded and wanted to take us alive. But an airborne soldier is like this: you give him the order, and he fights. Tanks without people don’t do anything, and our infantry was cut off. We were a hair’s breadth from being killed. I got myself and my men out of there. That was the one time I was in the encirclement.

  And then—Stalingrad.

  The enemy was headed straight for the city. Then, when they were taking heavy losses and realized they couldn’t get past us, they turned from Orlovka and moved on the factories. It was difficult there as well. My situation improved when we began to bring in fresh divisions.

  On September 10 I was already in Kamyshkin when I got an order saying we were going to be trucked over to Srednyaya Akhtuba. Our division still hadn’t been equipped, but we were supposed to get weapons soon. I objected, said I wouldn’t go without weapons. There were times when my men had been unarmed, and we had had to take weapons off deserters. I was called to the direct line. I had a talk with Vasilievsky. He ordered me go there first and then get my weapons. Stalingrad, he said, was in a difficult situation. We arrived in Srednyaya Akhtuba on the 12th. The weapons still hadn’t arrived. We’d been issued some of them, but more than half of my men were still unarmed. On the 12th I reported my situation to front commander Yeryomenko. When I told him all we had was six hundred rifles, he was outraged.