by Stalingrad- The City that Defeated the Third Reich (epub)
After that we were on the other side of the Don. Our brigade went on the offensive on July 15 and suffered heavy losses. They made me adjutant to the intelligence officer. We attacked the enemy in the area of the villages of Tinguta and Peskovatka.168 We didn’t have any vehicles, so we had to get there on foot. We’d just joined the fight and were taking losses when we were sent back. Orders came from high command, so we went to Tinguta and dug in. The defensive line ran from Tinguta to Peskovatka to Ivanovka. All our battalions were there. We were at the command post with the intelligence officer.
On August 23, 1942, we were hit by a heavy air raid. At first there were four planes: two would bomb while the others reloaded. Then the first pair would fly off while the other two attacked. The dust rose up. The German tanks advanced through this dust. The airplanes were constantly circling overhead. And you know how unbelievable the dust is Stalingrad. It’s incredible, and there’s no water, no nothing. [ . . . ] We were attacked by German tanks. On August 24 tanks came from the area of Blinkino and concentrated in the area of Sarepta. The intelligence officer was ordered to ascertain the enemy strength in the area of Sarepta. We went to carry out this order. This was when the intelligence officer got hit. As adjutant, I was ordered to deliver him back to the unit, regardless of whether he’d been hit or torn to pieces, and if that didn’t work I was to give my own life trying to save the valuable documents he had with him. I grabbed both him and the documents and took them to brigade headquarters. He was seriously wounded. I was very careful with him. We had just reached the brigade commander when he died. Nothing else to do: I had to go back to the company and continue our work. Lieutenant Khodnev was made the new intelligence officer. We got into a BOB-I armored vehicle and went to scout out the enemy forces in the area of Blinkino station. We found out what they had there and came back. The enemy’s strength had been established. They had three armored vehicles. These were scouts in the vehicles, maybe paratroopers. We drove to Blinkino station, parked, and set off on foot to secretly observe the tanks. Their tanks weren’t well camouflaged, they were just sitting on top of a hill.
An inexperienced lieutenant from another unit was also trying to find out how many tanks the enemy had. They wanted to torch those tanks. Someone said: “Get down!” Petrol bombs hit the tanks, which turned around and fired at them—and that was it, the whole platoon was neutralized. But the lieutenant, he jumped into a trench when the tanks started coming. A tank drove over there, went back and forth five times to run him over. This was reported to command when the tanks left. The intelligence officer was Lieutenant Kuzin, who also got killed.
In late August we got to Stalingrad and took up defensive positions on the Volga. The brigade was supposed to be in communication with the left flank. We took an armored car out on reconnaissance. This was on August 27. By that time the enemy was already at the Tractor factory, and they were firing on the Volga with machine guns. While were out, I became gripped by fear and lost it. I was a complete coward, but I didn’t know it at the time. Fifteen dive-bombers were attacking our vehicle. I figured that if one them dropped a bomb, it would be the end of me. So I ordered them to stop the vehicle so we could escape into a ravine. One of the planes went into a dive, and I got shot in my left hand and both legs. The driver was okay. I climbed into the turret and he drove us back to our unit. We made it, but I couldn’t get out. They sent me to Beketovka. There was a field hospital there. I stayed there until evening. Then they moved me to the island, and from there they sent me to Field Hospital no. 2209 in Shchuchy. I stayed there for five days. Then I was sent to Leninsk. From Leninsk I was supposed to be evacuated to the far rear. They started loading me into a railcar. But the moment I was on the train, enemy aircraft came flying in, bombing and burning nearly everything. They sent me to Kapustin Yar. I stayed in the hospital there. I was there from August 27 to October 26. On October 26 I was sent to the 178th Reserve Regiment in Solyanka. On the same day I was assigned to the 38th Brigade. They put me in intelligence again. I was deputy commander of intelligence. On November 3 we went to the front. My legs were weak, so I couldn’t keep up. In view of this, Major Belyayev made me chief of the supply depot. I ran the supply depot and ferried ammunition from the east bank to the west bank. We supplied ammunition throughout November. Our ammunition depot also took in captured weaponry. From there we went straight to Beketovka. In Beketovka I was sent beyond our advance units on reconnaissance.
[ . . . ] We left there on January 28 to go on the offensive near Stalingrad. I went with Sharin, Kiselyov, and Klimov to scout out the entire left flank. The 2nd Battalion of 57th Army was active in this area. We struck the enemy head-on. After that we were on the defensive. What did we do while we were on the defensive? There were German planes in the air, and we started shooting flares at them. They started dropping things on our positions: thermoses with chocolate, bread, ammunition. They dropped all kinds of food to us, they dropped rations on Beketovka many times. We were always getting things from their side.
Soldiers of the 13th Guards Rifle Division after the battle, February 1943. Photographer: G. B. Kapustyansky
On January 31 I was at the command post. We were at the hospital for water transport workers. By then our forces had General Paulus surrounded. I got up early and went to see. I went with a politruk to find a car. We found one with gas, with everything. Then we went back to the company commander. Then we changed our quarters and began to live in the basement of this department store.
CAPTAIN PYOTR ZAYONCHKOVSKY
One of the top experts on the Wehrmacht at the Stalingrad Front was Captain Pyotr Andreyevich Zayonchkovsky, the head instructor for enemy propaganda in the 7th Section of the political department of the 66th Army.169 The 66th Army was stationed north of Stalingrad and took part with other Soviet armies in the failed bid to break through the German cordon north of Stalingrad in September 1942. It took the army until January before it was able to advance to Stalingrad. Though their units had been decimated, on February 2 they took the Tractor factory from the Germans. After the north Kessel surrendered, Zayonchkovsky led the interrogations of captured German officers and soldiers. The interrogation reports are presented in the next chapter.
The thirty-nine-year-old captain earned his post in the enemy propaganda unit due to his good German language skills, which he acquired at home and in the Cadet Corps prior to the revolution. Enemy propaganda required thorough knowledge of the enemy—the names of the commanders (which Zayonchkovsky shouted through a bullhorn to urge German surrender) but also of the ways the Germans thought and acted. The objective was to “break down” the morale of the enemy soldiers.170 In his interview Zayonchkovsky analyzed the soldiers of 6th Army, their social background, and their “political and moral state.” He describes in detail how the confidence they expressed in letters and diaries in the summer of 1942 gave way increasingly to exhaustion and resignation in the face of heavy Soviet resistance. He believed that the Soviet antiwar propaganda had a great effect, especially after the Germans were encircled. He criticizes the Germans’ “robber morality” and lists the baby carriages and infant clothing he found in the abandoned shelters of the Germans. Zayonchkovsky took these thefts as evidence of the enemy’s degeneracy: only a morally unhinged soldier could commit such militarily useless crimes against the civilian population.
Zayonchkovsky’s comments on Soviet military leadership are similarly astute: the poor coordination between units, the pitiful performance of the air force during the first phase of battle, and the widespread lack of discipline among the troops. At the same time, he notes approvingly the high levels of discipline and order among the Germans.
Before Zayonchkovsky volunteered for the front in 1941, he had studied history at the university and subsequently earned his doctoral degree. His testimony is that of not only an eyewitness but a historian. He consulted letters and diaries of captured or killed German soldiers and checked the sources thoroughly. At one point he remarks that a German le
tter he cites was not sent by mail but personally handed to the addressee—the implication being that the author could speak openly without fear of military censors. For Zayonchkovsky, the historian, this gave the letter a high value as a historical source.
For historians today, the beginning of Zayonchkovsky’s testimony is especially interesting. He proudly announces that he is a descendant of Russian admiral Pavel Nakhimov, who in 1853 destroyed the Osman fleet in the battle of Sinop and later defended the besieged city of Sevastopol in the Crimean War. By World War II the name Nakhimov had come back into favor; in 1944 Stalin created the Nakhimov Medal for members of the Soviet fleet. This was in keeping with the Soviet regime’s decision in the late 1930s to cultivate the Russian tradition. (The name “Great Patriotic War” was chosen as part of this strategy.)171 Before the late 1930s Zayonchkovsky would not have been able to make these remarks about his family without fearing incarceration or worse. As a descendant of an aristocratic family he had been one of the “former people” in the founding years of the Soviet Union, someone who could neither vote nor study and was suspected of helping the counterrevolution. Concealed behind Zayonchkovsky’s brief remark in the interview that he had “worked for seven years as a carpenter in a factory, joined the party in 1931” was a young man’s attempt to gain acceptance in the Soviet system. Zayonchkovsky attended the Cadet Corps in Moscow. When it closed in 1918, he transferred to the cadet school in Kiev. In the following years he worked for the fire company and the railroad and at the above-mentioned engineering works.172 Other young people deemed “class enemies” at this time tried to cleanse their “contaminated” past through “resocialization.” It may be the case that Zayonchkovsky worked in a factory in order to develop a proletarian mentality.173 He likely lied about his family background when joining the party.
While working at the factory, Zayonchkovsky completed a night school course in history at the prestigious Moscow Institute for History, Philosophy, and Literature (IFLI). In 1937 he completed his studies and three years later defended his dissertation (kandidatskaya) on the Cyril and Methodius society, a secret association of Slavophiles in the nineteenth century.
After the battle Zayonchkovsky continued to work in the enemy propaganda unit of the 66th Army (renamed the 5th Guards Army on May 5, 1943). After sustaining a head injury in December 1943 he was discharged from the army with the rank of Guards major and returned to his profession as a historian. From 1944 to 1953 he headed the manuscript division of the Lenin State Library in Moscow. From 1948 on, he taught history at Moscow State University. (He was made professor in 1950 after completing his doctoral work.) He wrote eight monographs and edited a multitude of source editions, primarily on political and military aspects of the closing years of the tsarist period. In his field of research there was no one better. The multivolume bibliography of prerevolutionary Russian memoirs and diaries he edited remains an indispensable aid for historians.174 During his tenure as professor he supervised numerous doctoral candidates from the Soviet Union as well as from American and Japan. In 1968 he received Harvard University’s MacVane Prize for European History and in 1973 became an honorary member of the British Academy. However, he was never permitted to travel abroad to accept his awards. During his life Zayonchkovsky’s source-based methodology made him ideologically objectionable because it operated outside the prevailing framework. This “positivist” perspective shaped the testimony he provided in Stalingrad.
On September 30, 1983, Zayonchkovsky died of heart failure in the Lenin State Library while working on a history of the Russian officer corps.
TRANSCRIPT
of interview with Major Pyotr Andreyevich ZAYONCHKOVSKY
May 28, 1943
Interview conducted by comrade G. N. Anpilogov175
Stenography by A. I. Shamshina176
I was born in 1904. My father was an army doctor177 who came from a noble family.178 My grandmother was a cousin of Admiral P. S. Nakhimov.179 I’m from a long line of officers. My great-grandfather received the Cross of St. George180 for Borodino,181 and I spent three years in the cadet corps.
From a very young age I was brought up on the heroism of the Patriotic War of 1812. I can remember, for instance, being six or seven and knowing all the heroes of that war. The traditions of the Nakhimov family played an important role, of course. We kept a number of letters. One in particular was from Nakhimov to my grandfather, written after Sinope. I gave it to the Military Historical Archive.182
Red Army soldier Pyotr Zayonchkovsky, 1942
I was expected to become a naval officer, of course. In the beginning I went to the 1st Moscow Cadet Corps. The traditions and honor of the Russian army, the honor of the Russian officers—that made a strong impression on me. I remember 1917, the October Revolution. What did my father think of it all? He must have been more or less in line with the Kadets and the Octobrists.183 I was thirteen years old. I figured I could get along with the Bolsheviks so long as they kept the epaulets. I can remember a time in November [1917] when my father was swearing, saying that they were getting rid of them. He started crying, I was crying, and my younger brother, who was eleven, was also crying. I was glad when they came back again.184 These traditions played an important role in our family.
My father never was in the army. He was a doctor, and he died in 1926. My mother is a pensioner. Did my father buy in to the Soviet platform? Of course not.
My father was sick for a long time. So the burden of responsibility for the family fell on me. I was still finishing school. My father died after I graduated. I was always doing correspondence courses, and that’s how I graduated from the institute and completed my graduate studies. I spent four years working as a plane operator in a factory. I joined the party in 1931. In 1940 I defended my dissertation, and it was 1937 that I graduated from the institute. In December 1941 I volunteered for the army. I joined the home guard on July 3. After a few days our regiment was given leave until further notice. Then I was sent to work for the aerial reconnaissance and warning services. It seemed I wasn’t fit for anything better than sitting in a tree looking for airplanes. I was unlucky and ended up in the Political Administration of the Siberian Military District. A doctorate? You can be a lecturer. I spent three months as a lecturer. I asked the head of the political administration to either let me go or send me to the front. I didn’t join the army so that I could hang around in Novosibirsk. And because a unit was being formed at that time, I was made an enemy propagandist in the 315th Rifle Division. We left for Kamyshin, a town in the Stalingrad region, as part of the 8th Reserve Army.
The 8th Reserve Army’s headquarters was in Saratov. Soon I was transferred to the army political department as an officer in 7th Section, which dealt with work among enemy troops. On August 26—which was after the German’s 14th Panzer Corps broke through at Vertyachy, crossed the Don and reached the Volga—the 8th Army was called to the front and renamed the 66th Army. [ . . . ]
Our army got to the front on September 4, and that night we took up position on a twelve-kilometer line running from the west bank of the Volga to the area of the village of Yerzovka, sixteen kilometers north of the Tractor factory. The army joined the battle on September 5. Our task was to break the German defenses along this twelve-kilometer stretch. The army was made up of six rifle divisions: the 64th, 299th, 231st, 420th, 99th, and 84th. We also had two tank brigades and two rocket regiments. Our assault, which lasted eight days and cost us heavy casualties, did not result in any real successes. We were unable to move forward or break through the German defensive line. Our losses were staggeringly high. We lost nearly all of our tanks and a great number of men. On top of that, looking at it from an army-level perspective, there was a whole series of bad mistakes. For example, we started fighting without any intel on the terrain or the battle. We ought to have taken a day or two to bring our troops in line. After all, they’d just come a long way. Some of them had marched from Saratov. But taking a broader view, it must be said that a
one- or two-day delay might have cost us Stalingrad.
The Germans were taking extremely heavy losses. I can quote from a letter we found on a dead soldier. The letter was written on September 23. The letter belonged to Private 1st Class Hubert Hüsken, Field Post 06388. It was addressed to Franz Dahlin, a friend in Germany. He didn’t intend to mail it but rather to have someone deliver it in person.
Dear Franz,
Greetings from your friend Hubert! I’m finally getting around to writing you a few lines. You know how it is with letters, especially here, where there are things we can’t write about. Many of the men in our company are gone. Of 180 there are only 60 left. Our first taste of battle was especially brutal. Sprenger will tell you all about it. The war is very different from what I thought it would be. It doesn’t seem so important to me anymore. Everyone has to experience it for himself. The fighting on the Don wasn’t as bad, but there was often a lot of hand-to-hand combat.
A great battle began on August 22 around Stalingrad, right down to the Volga. We moved from the Don to the Volga in a single day, we were already there by 7:00 P.M. On the first day the Russians completely lost it. Ten of us took 150 of them prisoner, and sixty of them were girls aged eighteen to twenty—there’s no way you’re going to win a war like that. But by the next day they’d pulled themselves together, and then something started coming at us from all directions, something unimaginable, and it’s been like that up to this day.
Second Battalion was supposed to head north to keep the Russians from getting into Stalingrad. It was about ten kilometers from our positions to the outskirts of the city. But I’ve got to tell you, it wasn’t that easy. Their tanks broke into our sector every day, and that put all our units in a panic. So you can imagine why we had such losses. In one division’s sector the Russians had dug in around a hundred tanks. It gradually got to the point where your nerves couldn’t take it. I’ve never been in a situation like this. We’re not getting anything, everything is late, even the food. The Russians captured all of the canteen equipment and other things that were brought in by 5th Company, which was on our left. That company was disbanded yesterday. They only had twenty-seven men left. Twenty-six men from the 7th Company were sentenced to hard labor for cowardice and retreating in a panic. The same thing happened with 1st Battalion, which was left with even fewer men. We have four men left in our unit, and I’m in charge. Now you have an idea of how things are. Every day we wait to be relieved, which we hope will happen soon. We haven’t washed in four weeks.