Disaster at Stalingrad

by Peter G. Tsouras

  At noon the Germans struck back in great strength, overran the Kurgan, and despite heavy loss seemed on their way to break through to the river landing stage where the 13th Guards were scheduled to land. Already some of their heavy machine guns were raking the landing stage. The Germans thought they had won the battle and many were cheering and dancing for joy. News of the loss of the Kurgan spread through the Soviet defenders and came close to breaking their nerve. They had already seen all the artillery returned to the eastern bank and interpreted it as the first stage in the abandonment of the city. Rather it was a clever decision on Chuikov’s part to mass his artillery where it could be easily deployed and controlled. It was far easier to feed the guns their ammunition on that side rather than haul it across the river.

  Chuikov now threw in his last reserve — nine tanks, his own staff officers and political section, almost all of them communists, and the headquarters guard company. Major General A. I. Rodimtsev, commander of the 13th Guards, arrived to see Chuikov. He reported that he had a full division of 10,000 men, but a thousand lacked arms. Chuikov stripped all but his infantry of their small arms to make up the shortfall.

  Still it seemed the Germans would win the race to the landing stages. Chuikov then made a crucial decision. Rodimtsev’s regiments would have to begin crossing now, in broad daylight. The Germans would reach the Volga and overrun the landing stages if they waited for dusk. Already the Germans had reached the embankment north of the landing stages and occupied a number of buildings. At this desperate moment a member of Chuikov’s staff recalled the scene as Rodimtsev was about to take his leave, Chuikov embraced him and said, ‘I can’t see either of us surviving this. We’re going to die, so let’s die bravely, fighting for our country.’

  The Germans had already occupied buildings near the ferry, and their machine guns swept over the landing stages, killing the ferry commander and then his commissar who took his place:

  The harbour was in flames and the heat reached such intensity that the Katyusha rockets unloaded and stacked by the quayside, suddenly ignited. They were flying out of their boxes, exploding everywhere like ghastly fireworks. We were desperately running about, trying to separate the ammunition boxes, with German snipers picking us off.

  Groups of German infantry were approaching the landing stages. All seemed lost, the city fallen, when the defenders were suddenly seized with a great rage and everywhere flung themselves at the Germans. ‘We stood together, firing and firing — until our guns were almost melting from the heat.’

  Now, on the east bank, Rodimtsev addressed the men of the first regiment to cross. They were terrified of the swarming Stukas and knew it was a death sentence to attempt to cross in daylight. Even if a man fell into the water alive, the weight of his equipment would carry him to the bottom. He reminded them of who they were and what they had already gone through. He calmed the recruits by telling them that battle would make them veterans. Then he pointed to the dying city and told them that the fate of their Motherland now hung in the balance. It would be a determined body of men that marched down to the landing stages to fill the boats clustered there.

  Many died on the way across the river either from direct hits on their boats or sinking beneath the water. The others did not even wait for the boats to reach the landing stages but leapt into the water and raced ashore to close with the enemy as German machine guns winnowed their ranks. The ferocity of their attack stunned the Germans. One unarmed and bleeding soldier was seen to throw himself at a German soldier, snap his neck, and throw the corpse over his shoulder before moving on to the next one. They cleared the Germans from the embankment and pushed them back. Half the men who had crowded aboard those boats had died by the time the Germans had been thrown out of their lodgement. That night most of the rest of 13th Guards got across the river shepherded at the landing stages and into the city by Chuikov’s surviving staff.24

  With the day the Luftwaffe showed up in massive force to hammer the 13th Guards who were trying to orient themselves as they moved through the streets. Seydlitz’s LI Corps resumed the attack as XLVIII Panzer Corps fought its way along the Volga shore. The arrival of the 13th Guards threw a rock into the gears of the German attack. The railway station changed hands four times, but by nightfall was still held by Rodimtsev’s men. That night they retook the Kurgan. They had been the margin that kept the Germans at bay.

  As hard had been the blows of Seydlitz’s corps, the greatest damage done to 62nd Army was by XLVIII Panzer Corps attacking from the southeast. The 24th Panzer Division’s two Kampfgruppen struck deep into the city and by midmorning had taken the rail junction barely a mile from the Volga. The Soviet infantry fought for every building and ‘had to be individually thrown out of every street in hard hand-to-hand and close combat’. The 29th Motorized Division fought its way north along the Volga bank with the massive grain elevator looming ahead of them to the north:

  By the day’s end, with their defences shattered and in shambles, all of the forces defending 62nd Army’s left wing conducted a disorganized fighting withdrawal eastward into the southern section of Stalingrad and the narrow strip of land on the Volga’s western bank south of the Tsaritsa and El’shanka Rivers.25

  Symptomatic of the day’s setbacks was a report by the NKVD that pointed to instances of outright collaboration with the Germans and a disintegration of morale. The 62nd Army’s NKVD blocking detachment had arrested 1,218 men drifting to the rear and the Volga bank. They shot twenty-one and detained another ten. The rest were sent back to their units. Worse yet was the arrest of the commander and commissar of a regiment who had deserted their unit:

  For displayed cowardice — fleeing from the field of battle and abandoning units to the mercy of their fate — the commander of the associated regiment of 399th Rifle Division, Major Zhukov, and the commissar, Senior Politruk Raspopov, have been shot in front of the ranks.26

  CHAPTER 11

  Der Rattenkrieg

  Grozny, 16 September 1942

  Again the Israilov brothers, Khasan and Hussein, watched German parachutes flittering down through the night sky. This time there were hundreds. They were the men of 4th Battalion, Luftlande-Sturmregiment 1 (Parachute Assault Regiment 1), Flieger Division 7 (7th Airborne Division). Many of the men, including their commander Major Walter Gericke, wore the cuff band ‘Kreta’ in honour of their desperate air assault on the island of Crete in May 1941.

  They were Hermann Goring’s pride and joy. Their losses on Crete had been so high that Hitler refused to conduct another large-scale airborne landing. It then took an appeal to Goring by Army Group A for just one battalion to be used in a night air drop. He had asked Hitler, who relented as long as it was only one battalion. The Luftwaffe was, in any case, hard put to divert enough Ju 52 transports for the drop of even one battalion.

  As he came down in his chute, Gericke could see the lines of bonfires that had guided the transports to their drop zone. The Chechens had done just what they said they would do. Let’s hope, he thought, they would have the promised number of men on the ground to assist in his mission. He was determined to go on no matter what,

  Within half an hour he was conferring with Khasan. To enormous relief, he could tell by moonlight that the woods were filled with well-armed men. He shuddered for a moment. They reminded him of the natives of Crete who had come out of their homes with scythes and pruning hooks, kitchen knives and old swords, to fall on his paratroopers with a fury they had never expected. Mountain peoples are tough and unforgiving. An even greater surprise were the twenty-two Studebaker trucks waiting to move the extra ammunition and equipment that had been dropped with them. Israilov laughed as he pointed to them, ‘Gift of the American people! We snatched them off the Georgian Military Highway for you. Just dressed as NKVD men and pulled them off the road.’

  Their move through the countryside was mercifully uneventful. By dawn their objective was in sight, the vast Grozny oilfields, a forest of derricks and the cracking and refin
ing plants that left a haze in the air. Now it all depended on the element of surprise. The German armies in the south needed not merely oil but refined petroleum products, and those were made by the cracking and refining plants. The oil by itself was of little immediate use. Gericke’s mission was to take those plants. His problem was that there was a garrison in Grozny to protect the fields and, on Stalin’s orders, the plants had been set for demolition if the Germans seemed about to overrun them. Gericke considered that even a surprise attack would not be quick enough to forestall the destruction of the plants.

  The Studebakers were a godsend. He gathered his company commanders and quickly revised their plans. He turned to Israilov, ‘You still have those NKVD uniforms?’1

  ‘Of course, my friend.’

  Within an hour the truck convoy entered the main road to the fields with Chechen drivers dressed in NKVD uniforms, a surefire unquestioned pass to anywhere they wanted to go. The Chechens spoke fluent Russian and had that cold self-confidence that could bluff through anything. Israilov slipped his men between Grozny and the fields waiting to ambush the garrison when it sallied out.

  The few guards at the main cracking plant were overpowered almost without a shot, but it was too good to be true that everything would fall to Gericke’s coup de main. The chief engineer at the plant was shot just as he set off the demolitions that sent the facility up in a ball of fire.

  Stalingrad, 16–17 September 1942

  Already that morning Chuikov had reported to the front military council that he was completely without reserves while the enemy continued to commit fresh forces. ‘[A]nother few days of such bloody fighting and the Army would disintegrate, would be bled to death. I asked for the Army to be immediately reinforced by three fresh divisions.’

  That night a near full-strength 92nd Naval Infantry Brigade from the North Sea Fleet crossed the Volga as did a tank brigade. The sailors had not been incorporated into the Red Army but fought in their own uniforms, bell-bottom trousers, sailor caps with the ribbon hanging from the back, and their telnyashka shirts. They were as tough as the frozen sea they had sailed. With them was the 137th Tank Brigade with light tanks to help stop the Germans from getting to the Volga east of Mamayev Kurgan.2

  That day’s fighting raged along almost the entire perimeter of 62nd Army’s front from the Red October complex in the north past the Kurgan and through downtown Stalingrad to the El’shanka River. Seydlitz’s 295th Infantry Division stormed the hill only to be thrown off by battalions of the 13th Guards and 112th Rifle Divisions. That afternoon the Germans counterattacked and took the summit. They now had the perfect observation post to see everything within Chuikov’s lines, the ferries and the opposite shore of the Volga, and to call down accurate artillery fire. They did not have, however, undisputed control of the hill. Chuikov’s men were still in possession of significant parts of it which prevented the Germans fully exploiting its potential.

  On Chuikov’s southern perimeter, XLVIII Panzer Corps drove the fragments of Soviet units back and crossed the El’shanka River near its confluence with the Volga. Chuikov then consolidated these fragments under the 35th Guards Division which finally brought the Germans up short.

  The high tempo of fighting continued on the 17th. Now the grain elevator on the bank of the Volga became the focus of both armies. This huge structure still filled with grain dominated the skyline of the city. So important was it that Paulus chose its likeness to adorn the Stalingrad victory medal he designed. Chuikov had to defend it because it anchored his line on the Volga. Guardsmen and naval infantry were infiltrated to garrison it through a network of tunnels. They held out until the 20th when the Germans finally stormed it. One German soldier wrote:

  Fighting is going on inside the elevator. It is occupied not by men but devils, whom no flames or bullets can destroy. If all the buildings of Stalingrad are defended like this, then none of our soldiers will get back to Germany.3

  Already the Germans were referring to this brutal city fighting as Der Rattenkrieg, the rats’ war.

  Those ‘devils’ were suffering their own hell. One naval infantryman wrote:

  In the elevator the grain was on fire, the water in the machine guns evaporated, the wounded were thirsty, but there was no water nearby. This was how we defended ourselves twenty-four hours a day for three days. Heat, smoke, thirst — all our lips were cracked. During the day many of us climbed up to the highest points in the elevator and from there fired on the Germans; at night we came down and made a defensive ring around the building. Our radio equipment had been put out of action on the very first day. We had no contact with our units.4

  East of the Volga, 17 September 1942

  Warrant Officer Zaitsev was marching with his regiment at night to avoid air attack. Ahead of them on the horizon was a ghastly sight.

  The reference point visible to all, the hellish fires at the edge of the steppe, gave us the sensation of walking towards the end of the world. But those were the fires of Stalingrad!

  As morning approached the sun obscured the red of the flames on the horizon, but the dark crimson clouds became thicker. It was as if a huge volcano was erupting, spitting forth smoke and lava. And when the sun’s rays lit up between the clouds, we could see things circling, like a swarm of flies… it looked like the entire German air force — were flying over the city in formations, stacked three or four layers thick. They were unleashing their explosive payloads on the city below. The dive-bombers dipped down into the heart of this conflagration, and from the ground below them columns of red brick dust would shoot up hundreds of metres into the air.

  Zaitsev’s company commander announced, ‘That’s where we’re headed, but right now, sailors, we have to prepare you for action.’5 For the next three days the regiment received intensive training in street fighting, grenades, and close combat with bayonets, knives, and shovels. At the end, they traded in their Navy uniforms for ill-fighting Red Army brown, but they kept their striped Navy telnyashki underneath.

  Grozny, 18 September 1942

  It was a sight that few men of the 23rd Panzer would ever forget as they closed on Grozny and its oilfields. South of the city stretched a forest of derricks, here and there some of them were spouting fire like giant flamethrowers. Nearer the city a huge fire burned in the centre of the complex of cracking plants and refineries. The panzers were like the cavalry coming to the rescue, a theme so many of them had picked up from American movies before the war and in reading the Western adventures written by Carl May and so beloved of German schoolboys. Only this time, the cavalry rode in on steel steeds, and the settlers were the besieged battalion of Flieger Division 7.

  They bypassed the city to ensure the capture of that part of the fields and their facilities that had not been destroyed. Smoke rose from the city, courtesy of the Israilov brothers and their bands of Chechen rebels who had attacked as the garrison had rushed out to secure the oilfields. The Germans would later blanch at the atrocities the Chechens had committed on the Russian population of the city. If any ethnic group was atrocity-prone, it was the Chechens. They were already hated in the rest of the Soviet Union as the cruellest of the underworld mafias. Now they were sating their revenge on the Russian civilian population. The communists went first, then they worked their way down.6

  Fifty miles away to the west, 3rd Panzer was chasing the retreating Russians down the Georgian Military Highway. They bounced into Beslan and secured the road east to Grozny and then pressed on south. Outside Ordzhonikidze, the Soviet 9th Army gathered the fragments of units coming south and made its last stand. Strong tank attacks suddenly drove north out of the town. The British Valentines and American M3s, however, were very badly handled as if by amateurs who had never been in a tank before. Over a hundred tanks were left burning or abandoned when the survivors fled back into the city. Only later did the Germans learn that the Soviets had been using the stocks of Allied tanks from the parks outside the city, crewing them with infantry, truck drivers and whoever
else could be scraped up. It would take the arrival of two of Kleist’s infantry divisions to break the defence on 20 September and capture the vast sorting fields of British and American supplies and equipment.

  Kleist’s men had been at the end of a fraying logistics pipeline. Now they had everything. Food of all descriptions, boots, medical equipment and supplies, fuel, and above all fields full of American Studebaker and Ford trucks and jeeps. So many, in fact, that the Germans were able to refit XL Panzer Corps completely with more than its establishment of transport. There was enough left over to re-form two infantry divisions as motorized units. The Germans had got used to incorporating captured enemy equipment into their units, but they had never seen war support war in such a lavish style.7

  Werewolf, Vinnitsa, 18 September 1942

  Late than night Major Engel was writing in his diary of the day’s events at the Führer Headquarters:

  F. seems determined to get rid of Keitel [Chief of OKW] and Jodl… asked what successor he was thinking of. He mentioned Kesselring or Paulus… the chief of staff [Halder] would have to go beforehand, there was simply nothing more there. At the moment he trusted nobody among his generals, and he would promote a major to general and appoint him Chief of the General Staff if only he knew a good one… Basically he hates everything in field grey, irrespective of where it comes from, for today I heard again the oft-repeated expression that he longed ‘for the day when he could cast off this jacket and ride roughshod’.

  Hitler had made it clear that the General Staff officers were out of touch. “‘Same old song: too old, too little experience at the front.” Chief said he had a better impression from younger General Staff officers,’ such as Major von Stauffenberg, who often made statements before Hitler that affected operational decisions.8