Stalingrad
Page 38
“We need you in Stalingrad right away, right this second. The enemy had broken through and small groups have already entered the city.”
I said: “I can’t, my men need guns.”
“What do you need?”
“Submachine guns.”
He gave me 450 (?) submachine guns, twenty heavy machine guns, fifty light machine guns, and about forty antitank rifles. I got all of this on the 12th, got it to the men, and by the night of the 13th the rest of our weapons arrived. On the 13th we were all armed, but we still hadn’t been given cartridges or ammunition. We already had our artillery, but that was to stay on the east side of the river. It was impossible to bring it over. There were no tanks.
On the 14th we got the order to cross the Volga and join the 62nd Army, which was under the command of General Chuikov and Military Council member Gurov. We didn’t know what the situation was. They gave me a task: I had to send one regiment over at crossing no. 62, and the other two at the central crossing. The first regiment—the 39th—was to take Hill 102, and the other two—the 42nd and 34th—were to cross at the central crossing and clear out the area along the Tsaritsa. One battalion was turned over to the commander of the 62nd Army.
What was the point of giving him that battalion? I think it was to provide security for their headquarters, which was also inside the enemy encirclement.
Yeryomenko had everyone cross to the other side at night, including me and my staff. I had absolutely no idea of the real situation. I had no idea that the enemy had already reached the riverbank. But in the first two waves 1st and 2nd Battalions had to be left to establish a beachhead. We heard that the enemy was on the shore, that the battalion had already engaged them, fighting from the moment they reached dry land. I realized we had to move faster. We were literally giving out ammunition on the barges. The 42nd Regiment embarked right away, around 1,500 men. The engineer started turning some lever back and forth—nothing. The enemy was already shooting at us, with machine guns and artillery. The engineer lost his nerve. We had to shoot him and put someone else in his place. We got back under way. The commander of the 42nd Regiment, Colonel Yelin, made it across. He was the first to lead his regiment in battle.
In the morning I could see that we needed to get the entire division across. I called to get permission from Yeryomenko. That day our headquarters staff made the crossing aboard a cutter. That was about 10:00 A.M. We came under heavy enemy fire, and Colonel Uzky, the chief of our engineering team, was wounded by a mortar. But we got across. The Stalingrad regional NKVD had some men there. They had a tunnel. I put my command post there because they had a direct line with Yeryomenko. We had no contact of any kind with Chuikov. That day another barge tried to cross after mine but was hit by enemy fire and sank.
A boat full of Red Army soldiers sinks in the Volga, Stalingrad, 1942.
We had aircraft, but they weren’t doing very much. Then I crossed, got a sense of the situation, gave the regiments their orders, and went into the attack. Throughout the 14th and most of the 15th I had no contact with Chuikov. Toward the end of the day on the 15th I got to the railroad and took the train station with some losses. Chuikov summoned me. I reached him around 5:00 P.M. On my way there I got a lot of trouble from the planes. I got there, reported that our men had made it, explained our current position. He gave me my objective, and from that moment on we stayed in touch. From then on we remained in contact with high command. [ . . . ]
The enemy launched a counterattack on the morning of the 17th. After heavy preparation from the air, some forty tanks and about two thousand infantry attacked Hill 102. All those attacks were repelled, and Mamayev Kurgan remained ours through the 17th. The regiment withstood more than eight hundred German air attacks. Dolgov was the regimental commander. I wasn’t in contact with that regiment. They were in contact with Chuikov’s deputy at the command post at Crossing no. 62 and were getting their orders independently.
The 17th saw still fiercer fighting. There was no question of us organizing any serious attack, of allocating specific forces toward a specific objective. Throughout the 17th we simply swapped the same streets and buildings back and forth. This continued through the 18th, 19th, and 20th.
On the 20th I got a report saying that the enemy had set the train station on fire. The men we had there had given it up and moved to the Communist Grove by Station Square, where they dug in. I can’t remember the exact date, but at some point the 92nd Brigade arrived. They were sent to the left flank toward the grain elevator. They were tasked with clearing out the small groups of Germans who had infiltrated the area, and to reinforce their positions there. [ . . . ]
This building belongs to us, then it’s theirs, then it’s ours again—it’s impossible to say exactly where the front lines are. We lacked any experience with urban warfare. Our weak point, at the very beginning, was our failure to grasp that the enemy had already occupied Stalingrad. We should have prepared ourselves better for urban warfare. We should have assigned specific streets and buildings to specific groups, rather than task them with engaging some division along some line. The Germans were, at this time, in a stronger position. They had been quick to take the House of Specialists and the State bank, and they were still holding on to them. Our men were only thirty meters away, but no matter what I did, I just couldn’t retake these buildings. I could have done it at the very beginning, but I didn’t want to incur unnecessary losses. I thought I’d get to the railroad and cut them off, then I’d get my reinforcements as scheduled, and then I’d establish a base that would make it impossible for them to hold out. But it all went topsy-turvy. When things got difficult for them, the units to my left retreated to the east bank. That division’s commander and commissar were shot.74 So my left flank, my immediate neighbor, was the enemy.
Up to the 22nd this back-and-forth fighting went on day and night: this building or street is theirs, then it’s ours. So assault groups were set up and sent out methodically, so we knew who was supposed to go where. We managed the battle by giving each unit its own street.
[ . . . ] On the morning of the 20th, at around ten o’clock, the enemy went on the offensive, crushed our forward line, knocked out six guns, and captured the Ninth of January Square. There they took out a few antitank rifles and moved onto Artillery Street. Our soldiers, while losing many men, took out forty-two enemy tanks during this fight and killed around 1,500 Germans, thereby stopping their attack. They were unable to advance farther. Panikhin was there, his command post in a sewer pipe. It was a difficult situation. Several enemy tanks had broken through to the Volga, they were moving toward Panikihin, but with heavy artillery fire and antitank weaponry we send them back, disabling some, destroying others. The enemy’s attack lost momentum, and they had to fall back.
Soldiers from Rodimtsev’s Guards division preparing an attack. Stalingrad, September 1942. Photographer: S. Loskutov
General Rodimtsev pictured with soldiers from his division. Stalingrad, September 26, 1942.
On the 23rd the Germans tried to improve their position, attacking with a number of small groups. I received modest reinforcements, around five hundred men, and I launched a counterattack, but this achieved no successes in terms of territory because the enemy forces were three to four times the size of our own. I then decided to switch to an active defense while more reserves were brought over. After that, and in coordination with other divisions, I would launch a decisive attack. I was always in contact with Chuikov. He ordered me at that time to move to some sector and defend it. Lieutenant Fedoseyev’s 1st Battalion was cut off when our left flank was exposed and an enemy group broke through from the right and surrounded them. By the 2nd that battalion was wiped out. We couldn’t reestablish communication with them. Everything we know of their actions comes from reports, from their commander, who was wounded and got out, and a medical orderly. The report said: “Unless the enemy is walking over my dead body, none of us is going to leave.” So this battalion stayed to the last man, dying
heroically on that spot.
The fighting was already taking on a different, more local character. There was fighting in every building. The enemy was regrouping his forces. When they saw that they were meeting considerable resistance—and they’d deployed about seventy tanks and a thousand infantry—and that that they weren’t going to win here, the enemy moved to the north, to Orlovka, the factory district, by moving around to my right.
Until the 1st things were relatively quiet for us. Then I asked the commander to give me the 39th Regiment, since a new division, Batyuk’s 284th, had arrived. On the night of October 1st this regiment was relieved, and I put them on the left flank with the task of protecting the central crossing, Penzenskaya Street, and Smolensk Street, and to prevent the enemy from breaking through to the Volga.
When the regiment was relieved they came here, and the very next day these brave troops withdrew from Mamayev Kurgan, which was then taken by the Germans. From there they could fire on nearly the entire Volga, and they remain in possession of Hill 102 to this day.
I had nothing left. One battalion was wiped out, and the 34th was in a bad way. I lost some four thousand men here. That’s not an easy thing to accept. One of our guns took out three tanks. Then the guy manning it was badly wounded, but he didn’t take one step back right until a fourth German tank ran over and crushed him. No one retreated or surrendered. Men died, but they did not retreat.
On the 2nd the enemy took the whole of Mamayev Kurgan, putting the entire crossing under enemy fire. [ . . . ]
Then came our counterattacks to the north. I was ordered to dig in where we were, to hold the line and the streets we’d taken, and switch to a tough, unwavering defense. This was because we were running low on manpower. Any more active operations were out of the question—the units to my left had already retreated to the east bank. I had to make sure the north was secure and prevent the enemy from breaking through our right flank, from reaching the crossing and taking the Volga. There were no more offensive operations. In my sector the enemy was doing the same thing: building a solid defense. Through October, November, and December we improved our positions to keep the enemy from firing on the Volga. We took the L-shaped building and the railway workers building, and there the fighting took on a local character.75
Soldiers of the 13th Guards Rifle Division storming the L-shaped building. November 1942. Photographer: Georgy Zelma
While they still held the L-shaped building and the railway workers building the Germans had been able to keep us from crossing the Volga and walking freely there. We were only able to get around in trenches. So the commander set us the task of taking those strongholds: the L-shaped building, the railway workers building, the air force building, and School no. 38. For this task I chose one battalion that was backed up by Panikhin’s 34th Regiment. His orders were to take the L-shaped building and School no. 38. The 42nd Regiment, reinforced with two additional battalions, was to take the railway workers building and School no. 38, and then take up position on the Ninth of January Square, where they would dig in. I went to see Yelin at the 42nd Regiment’s command post, which was in a mill. You could see a lot from there. The operation was exceptionally well planned. Every soldier knew where he was going and what he had to do. They knew all the angles, which firing points they had to take out, when they had to stop and start firing. I had the artillery put in a heavy ten-minute barrage, during which time our assault was to begin. There was about forty to fifty meters to get to the enemy in the L-shaped building and the railway workers building, and about one hundred meters to School no. 38. We had to run across the Ninth of January Square, which was well covered.76
After getting these orders, the men of the 34th and 42nd Regiments started extending their trenches forward, working day and night, until they ended up some twenty to thirty meters away from the enemy. They did most of the digging at night and kept themselves well out of sight during the day. They camouflaged their work by morning, and they got nearly all the way there. They did this over eight days, dug their way some sixty meters. It didn’t take that many men; they worked in shifts—two men at a time. They didn’t toss the dirt out of the trench but carried it down to the Volga. That was how we prepared for the attack. The attack itself was set for ten o’clock on the morning on December 3. I went to the observation post at 7th Company, 42nd Regiment. The regimental commander was there, while Commissar Vavilov stayed here. He went to the observation post in the pipe. I was able to observe the L-shaped building, the military supply store, and the Ninth of January Square. As for Panikhin, he had been ordered to launch a surprise attack without artillery preparation. He was to get into the L-shaped building at 6:00 A.M., secure it, and start attacking School no. 38 at 10:00 A.M. There was regular shelling that night until 4:00 A.M., when all of our artillery stopped. At 6:00 A.M. the 34th Regiment was to take the L-shaped building by storm. And the 42nd Regiment was to attack at 10:00 A.M. There was meant to be artillery preparation starting at 6:15, with regular shelling until 9:40, to destroy specific enemy firing points. We brought in guns to fire directly at the dispensary. We got a company of flamethrowers, twenty-eight men, and put ten of them with Pankhin at the L-shaped building and eighteen with the 42nd Regiment. Their job was to burn the Germans out of the basements as we were taking these strongholds.
There were many times previously when we’d tried to take these buildings but were unable to hold on to them because we weren’t determined enough. The Germans would launch a counterattack, and our men would either retreat to their trenches or die. We had to put together a group that would stay and secure the place after we took it.
The plan itself was well thought out. At 6:00 A.M. a group entered the L-shaped building without firing a single shot. We took control of the top floors at once. There were six of them. Our men went right in and started fighting in the rooms, on all floors. We had control of the top floor and they were down below, and also on the seventh [sic] floor. It was hand-to-hand fighting—literally stabbing and smashing. After the fighting was over, we had to take out the bodies, both ours and theirs. Now, though, it was a matter of getting the rest of the Germans out of the basement. Unless we did this, there’d be trouble later. But there were sixty men down there. In the end we captured seventeen machine guns, eighteen rifles, some submachine guns, flamethrowers, two antitank cannons, some mortars.
At ten o’clock, while I was there, we started the assault on the railroad building. We took it. The men took one prisoner, and the rest of the fascists were corpses. Some of our men were killed, and others went to School no. 38, where the enemy was launching a counterattack on the L-shaped building. I had told Zhukov, the acting commander of the battalion, to put together a proper fire plan. He did a good job organizing things before the attack. He set up the firing points and assault groups, gave the soldiers clear assignments so they knew who was going where and how. But he forgot about a “little detail” of central importance. The assault teams were not going to include heavy machine guns, which were to stay back in a supporting role. He didn’t bury them in the ground but hid them on the corners, one on the left and one on the right. When the infantry attacked, these guns were going to suppress the enemy firing points. But Zhukov didn’t put them in bunkers, which would have protected them from mortars. When the infantry attacked, the Germans went straight for our machine guns with their mortars. The first was taken out, then the second, but the infantry had already started. They were being cut down by German fire. Then Zhukov went out with his revolver, shouting, “For Stalin, for the motherland—forward!” But we couldn’t give him any supporting fire. I was there myself, just sixty meters away, and I immediately had them stop this mess. Eight men were killed there, twenty wounded. We suffered losses because we hadn’t weakened the enemy firing points enough, and ours got knocked out.
The second group was led by battalion commander Andrianov. He’d dug in his machine guns. When the Germans began firing back, they could keep on shooting without trouble. The
assault group went up, broke through, and began fighting inside the building. And so we managed to take the railroad building. One group went on to School no. 38 but didn’t have enough people to finish the job. We thought that they had twenty to thirty men, but it was a whole company there, seventy men.
When I found out that they were fighting at the L-shaped building, I told Panikhin that the building must be cleared out by any means, no matter the cost. Panikhin mobilized his men, organized them. Kutsarenko was his operations deputy. He was told to eliminate the enemy in the basement. There were a lot of them down there. In one basement we broke through the ceiling with crowbars and had at them with three flamethrowers. There were twenty of them there, all of them got burned up. In another cellar they put 250 kilograms of TNT on the floor above and detonated it, and that was the end of them. Then our guys could jump down and take care of the rest. A few of the Germans ran away.
The battle went on for twenty-six hours. By morning we’d completely cleared and secured the building. Now there were only thirty meters between us and the Germans. None of us were able to take School no. 38. This building was very important. You could see all of Stalingrad from there.
We found new ways of doing things. With a bit of thought you can find the right way. The basements were tough to get into, and they were safe from artillery. So we picked our way in with crowbars, broke through, and then had at them—we burned them out of their strongholds and then blew them up.