by Stalingrad- The City that Defeated the Third Reich (epub)
Between October 5, 1942, and January 10, 1943, I had 242 dead Germans on my account. I had trained a total of thirty snipers. I had established a new movement, a sniper school. In the March 15, 1943, issue of Red Fleet there was an article by Guards Captain Aksyonov in which he described my work.
I’d gotten a lot of harassment in the navy. The conditions were just unbearable, and even wise people told me: “Zaytsev, if I were you, I’d shoot myself.” But I survived and loved the navy despite all the morons—they weren’t all that bad, but the quartermaster service really was completely full of morons.
Here’s another example. The Germans were bringing in reinforcements. I don’t remember the date, but by then I was already in a different regiment. I was there with some students. There were four others working in another district. I was at an observation post with the commander. A messenger shows up looking for me. He says: Comrade Zaytsev, German activity has been reported in such-and-so observation sector. They’re sending in reinforcements. I went out with my snipers to take a look at these reinforcements. I called up the other four, so that made six of us, counting me and my student. We ran over there, went into a bombed-out building, and ambushed the Germans as they were moving in formation. We let them come to about three hundred meters before we started shooting. It worked out perfectly. There were about ninety to a hundred of them. They weren’t expecting this. They didn’t know what was going on, and they stopped: first one drops, then a second, then a third. You need two seconds to shoot. Our SVT rifle holds ten rounds.144 All you do is squeeze the trigger and it loads the next round. In about half an hour the six of us killed forty-six Germans. That was my most memorable ambush. After we were finished, our artillery and mortars cleaned up the rest.
I remember this one interesting moment. The guys often laugh about this when we meet up. It was the first time I suffered a concussion. I’d climbed into a collapsed furnace. The building had burnt down, all that was left was this one furnace and a chimney. I’d climbed in and was shooting from inside it, but the Germans saw me, and then they hit the chimney with their mortars. I was buried under a pile of bricks, and my rifle was broken. I’d killed a lot of Germans from that furnace. When I got buried I was wearing large boots—size 45—and I couldn’t get up. My tarp, which had been torn in half, was wrapped around my feet. I pulled my feet out, but the boots stayed put. By the way, I’d been lying there unconscious for two hours. When I came to, I dug myself out from under the bricks and pulled my legs out, but those boots, like I said, stayed there in the furnace. I threw out all the bricks, thinking: “To hell with them if they kill me.” I slung the broken rifle around my neck, wrapped my feet in rags, grabbed the boots with my hands, and ran with no shoes down the alley. The men laugh about this. It would have made a fine photograph. For some reason the Germans didn’t shoot me.
Here’s another one. It was in the Long Ravine. The Germans had a kitchen there. In a cellar. It was evening, getting late, the sun had set. We were in this building having a smoke. And we see this big German come out from somewhere. They had these enormous insulated pots. The German comes out all in white—a cook, apparently—and he starts washing out the pot. It was a distance of about four hundred meters. He was right out in the open. Someone says: “Zaytsev, shoot him!” I raised my rifle, and just as he grabbed the pot by the rim to look inside I shot him in the head. His head went right into the pot as he dropped. The soldiers said: “The enemy has resorted to the use of tinpot weaponry.” We got a kick out of that.
I first started shooting when I was about twelve. I’ve still got one brother. When we were kids we hunted partridges, grouse. I was a good shot even as a kid. Our father taught us to shoot squirrels. He had us shoot them while they were jumping from one tree to the next. We went hunting a lot: my father, my mother, my sister, and my brother and me. It was fun. If you shoot a squirrel with a shotgun, you tear everything up and ruin the pelt. We had a sister, and me and my brother decided to kill enough squirrels to make her a fur coat.
But we had to shoot them with a single pellet, so we had to practice this art. We made our own pellets. They were similar in size with what you get in a small-caliber TOZ rifle.145 I was about twelve then. Once I’d gotten good at shooting, my father gave me a hunting rifle. But we still shot squirrels for our sister’s coat, about two hundred of them. My sister is older than me. My brother was born in 1918. My mother and sister could shoot too. My mother isn’t someone you want to mess with. The forest there was mostly pine with the occasional birch. I can shoot with either eye. The vision in my left eye is still good. My right eye’s not that great.
I was seriously wounded once. I’ve got a piece of shrapnel under my right eye, and another one near the corner of my eye, also on the right. The splinter under my right eye can’t be removed because it’s under the mucous membrane. It doesn’t bother me, but I see red circles when I look down and then back up again. There’s another splinter in my left eye. I couldn’t see much of anything for five days. My whole face got burned.
I did some hunting in the Far East. I hunted wild boars, bears, bison, lynx, wolves, foxes, pheasants. I was also a good shot in the military. I was a good shot as a kid, and so were my parents. I probably got it from them. My mother’s an old woman now, wears glasses, but she’ll still go out and shoot. A grouse will perch somewhere in a birch tree, and she comes out, takes a shot, and it’s dead. Then she goes home and plucks it.
I found out I was going to be made a Hero of the Soviet Union on February 23, 1943. I’d been called to see comrade Shcherbakov, the head of the Main Political Administration. When I got to his assistant, Captain Vedyukov, I still didn’t know about the award. When I got there they congratulated me. The decree granting me the award was made on February 22, 1943. On February 26 I received the Order of Lenin. Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin handed it to me. Now I’m going to study in Solnechnogorsk.
Snipers usually hide out in buildings. When our forces were outside the city, we had to operate in the field. You’ve got to study the terrain in advance. You find out where the enemy will be and how he’ll get there, you locate the best place for an ambush, study the enemy’s defenses.
When you’re hunting for enemy officers or soldiers, you disrupt their activities, make it impossible for them to stand up or bring in ammunition, say, or food. You find out when they do these things. You get there and stay put, deciding which weapon would be a better choice: your submachine gun or your rifle. If there’s a lot of them, you won’t get everyone with the rifle, but with the submachine gun you can mow them all down. Sometimes you shoot from one position and then move to another. They start shooting back at your position, but you’re already gone, you’re somewhere else. You’ve always got to prepare several firing positions in advance. And make a lot of decoys to thoroughly confuse the enemy. He shoots but doesn’t hit the target. I would shoot, for example, from underneath a dead body. You can also shoot from behind rocks.
How was I wounded? I was lying in wait. The Germans spotted me. None of them could get me. I wasn’t letting any of their snipers get up. I was under a railcar. They decided to shoot at the car, hoping I’d be hit by some of the flying bits of metal, splinters, fragments, and so on. So that’s what they did. They fired directly at the car. Fragments from the car flew right at me. A shell exploded up above. My face was burned up, I had shrapnel wounds, all my clothing was torn, my knee was dislocated, and my right eardrum was ruptured. Basically, I was very seriously wounded.
Zaytsev is accepted as a candidate in the Communist party, Stalingrad, October 1942.
I joined the party in October 1942.146 There was one occasion when me and my men were surrounded. There’s the Volga, but you can’t get anything across. We were in an encirclement. No hope we’d make it. That’s what I was thinking, but I was in command and I couldn’t say that to the men. It was an extremely difficult situation. I was a chief petty officer at the time. After that first battle I received a government award, the Medal for Va
lor.
We were in a terribly difficult situation. We had a representative from the Red Army’s Main Political Administration.147 I told our commanders that there was “no land for the 62th Army on the other side of the Volga. This is our land, and we will defend and hold it.”
From six or seven in the morning until seven in the evening the Germans bombed and they bombed. There were [ . . . ] air raids every day. There was shelling and mortar fire. The six-barreled mortars rumbled all day without a break. Night bombers came after dark to drop more and more bombs. Is there any hope in such a situation? People are getting wounded, killed. But it’s a great time for storing up hatred. When you capture a German, you feel there’s nothing you couldn’t do to him—but he has value as an informant. You grudgingly lead him away.
While we were in the area of the Metiz factory the Germans dragged out this woman (to rape her, no doubt). A boy yelled out: “Mama, where are they taking you?” She shouted—not far from us—“Brothers, save me! Help me!” How does that affect you when there’s nothing you can do to save her? You’re on the front line. You don’t have enough men. If you rush out to help her you’ll be slaughtered, it’ll be a disaster. Or another time you see young girls, children hanging from trees in the park. Does that get to you? That has a tremendous impact.
We didn’t know fatigue. Now I get tired just walking around town, but then we had breakfast around 4:00 to 5:00 A.M. and dinner around 9:00 to 10:00 P.M., going without food all day without getting tired. We’d go three or four days without sleeping, without even feeling sleepy. How can I explain this? You’re in a constant state of agitation, the whole situation is having a terrible effect on you. Every soldier, including myself, is thinking only of how he can make them pay more dearly for his life, how he could slaughter even more Germans. You think only of how to harm them even more, to spite them as much as you can. I was wounded three times in Stalingrad. Now I have a nervous system disorder and I’m shaking all the time. I find myself thinking about it a lot, and these memories have a strong effect.
I was a political group leader at the Voroshilov Battery and a bureau member in the Komsomol organization. I got good marks in the history of the party and in the history of the peoples of the USSR. I studied party history in 1939–1940. I enjoyed party history, but most of all I liked the history of the Civil War. I did a lot of reading. I read Furmanov’s Chapayev,148 read about Parkhomenko,149 Kotovsky,150 Suvorov,151 Kutuzov, the Brusilov Offensive.152 That was all while I was in the navy. I read Zazubrin’s Two Worlds,153 Bagration,154 Denis Davydov (the first partisan),155 Sergei Lazo—that was a big book.156 I really liked Stanyukovich’s sea stories157 and Stendal’s The Red and the Black. I’ve read Novikov-Priboy,158 War and Peace, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.159
Bookkeeping is good, calm, quiet work. It takes you into the depths of life. You feel like you’re in charge, that something depends on you. I like that. It’s independent work, and whatever you do, you must apply to your life.
General Chuikov and Commissar Gurov inspect Zaytsev’s sniper rifle. Photographer: Georgy Zelma
[ . . . ] Colonel Vedyukov arrived from the Main Political Administration. On the 23rd I was summoned to General [ . . . ]. There was to be a presentation.160 I was still in the field, lying in wait. I got word that I was being called in to receive a government award. Snipers and sailors were there with me. Everyone knew me. Word spread: Zaytsev was getting a government award. I asked my sailors: “Well, guys, anything for me to pass along?” We knew that Colonel Vedyukov was with us on the front line. I said: “What should I tell comrade Stalin from us Komsomol sailors? Colonel Vedyukov is here, he’ll be going to Moscow and will pass along the message.” They told me what to say.
I said: “All right, I’ll say—” And I told them.
“That’s right, off you go.”
Off I went—and soon enough it was all in the papers.
I joined the party during the most difficult period. In October the Germans wouldn’t let up. I already had some students then. I was always agitating for the party. I thought it was about time to get ready to join the party. They advised me to. I thought: How can I join the party when I don’t know the program? I read the program and wrote my application right there in a trench. Two days later I was summoned to a party commission. By then I’d killed sixty Germans. I’d been decorated. That was after the 23rd [of February].
Captain Zaytsev is congratulated by fellow soldiers on receiving his epaulets, February 1943.161
[ . . . ] Headquarters work is the worst thing in the army. I just got out of working as a quartermaster, and now I’m having to do the same sort of thing again. I thought: people are fighting. I wanted to do something so history would know that I existed; otherwise you live, trample the earth, and then everything goes dark.
You don’t have to use a sniper rifle. A sniper rifle has a telescopic sight with 4x magnification. But with an ordinary rifle, a distance of two hundred meters is still just two hundred meters. Your accuracy isn’t as good, but if you know how to shoot that doesn’t matter. I had thirty snipers but only eight sniper rifles. The rest used ordinary rifles. Say you’re in a city, inside a building, next to a small embrasure. With a scoped rifle you need a larger embrasure, and if the embrasure is large, then the enemy can see you. So there are times when it’s better just to use an ordinary rifle.
A SIMPLE SOLDIER: ALEXANDER PARKHOMENKO
On February 28, 1943, Esfir Genkina, assisted by stenographer Olga Roslyakova, interviewed several commanders and soldiers of the 38th Motorized Rifle Brigade who had captured Field Marshal Paulus and his staff on January 31. They brought the interviewees to the Stalingrad department store so that they could relay on site how the capture had taken place (pages 222–261). While in the department store, Genkina encountered Alexander Parkhomenko, a private who had been quartered there together with his company since the beginning of February. Parkhomenko had played no role in the capture of Paulus. The interview with him appears to have been unplanned and differs from many of the others, which involve decorated soldiers and high-ranking officials. As such, it gives a good impression of how a simple soldier in the Red Army talked and thought.
Parkhomenko’s remarks are straight to the point. He measures the events of the battle within his own radius, in contrast to the sweeping panoramas provided by the generals and staff officers. And unlike Vasily Zaytsev, Parkhomenko does not tell a hero’s story. On the contrary, he confesses that whereas others were brave he was not. His descriptions of the fear he weathered in battle are revealing. He speaks about his weaknesses (“I was a complete coward, but I didn’t know it at the time”) in the past, signaling that he, as a good Soviet citizen, had learned to conquer his baser instincts. Also noteworthy is his description of the “inexperienced” lieutenant, who, equipped only with petrol bombs, attacked several German panzers and died. Parkhomenko thought little of suicide missions, which he considered a means to display one’s readiness to die. (In early 1943 communist agitators did not praise suicidal bravery as much as they had in the first phase of the war, though it continued to be one of several competing models of behavior in battle.) Parkhomenko was in line with army commander Shumilov, who valued military skills and sought to conquer his opponent with cunning instead of confronting him in a head-on manner.162
64TH ARMY
(38th Motor Rifle Brigade)
Alexander Ivanovich PARKHOMENKO163
I was born in 1921 in the Far East, in the area of the Far Eastern railway. I finished engineering school in Vladivostok. Since 1942 I’ve been a member of the Komsomol. I joined the navy in September 1939. In 1941 I went back home because I was ill, and I noticed that there wasn’t anyone my age there. I started asking relatives and friends: Where is everyone? They said they’d all left for the front. Seeing that all the others had left, I started wishing I could go too. I started writing to my commanders. But they wouldn’t let me go: Stay here, we’ll do our fighting here.164 A marine brigade was be
ing formed, and they took me. That was on February 22, 1942. They sent me to the regimental troop school at the Rozengartovka station.165 I was a student there for about five months. I left with the rank of senior sergeant.
We left for the front on June 12, 1942. We got there, to Stalingrad, on June 28. They filled out our marine brigade with extra personnel from the infantry. From Stalingrad we headed straight toward the Don. We weren’t acquainted with the military situation. To us it seemed dreadful. At night when the planes flew in, the flares went up, and the bombing began—I couldn’t take it. I’ll tell you the truth: other men are brave, but I’m not.
We got to Vertyachy166 and took up positions. Then we went out with the intelligence officer. Basically, we were on patrol. He ordered me to scout out the enemy forces. We’d been assigned to the third echelon, which was right in Vertyachy. We crossed to the other side of the Don. Now we weren’t really familiar with some of the infantry uniforms, and it was night—you couldn’t see a thing. There was a patrol walking up ahead, he was not Russian and he was wearing this strange kind of jacket. We shouted at him: “Password!” He didn’t know it. Since he didn’t know, we started shooting. So did he. The enemy brigade advanced, and we moved to meet them. They opened fire on us. We were under machine-gun fire from two directions, and then it stopped all of a sudden. We radioed our brigade. Everyone in the brigade was ready, they wanted to attack. We’d read in the papers that the enemy launched psychic attacks, marching in columns.167 When I looked, I could see a column moving either toward or away from the front line. We immediately sent up signal flares and got on the radio. They told us on the radio that these were our own men.