Thor's Anvil (Kirov Series Book 26)

by John Schettler

  Then the real trouble started. That heavy German Assault Pioneer group west of Spartanovka was finally breaking through on the rightmost flank of the Samara Rifles. The Germans had put together a big kampfgruppe there, with units from the 72nd Infantry, three assault gun companies, and a lot of engineers. They had reached the edge of the cemetery just outside the western edge of the town, right where Chuikov had moved the artillery of the 13th Guards Division. Now those guns would have to move again, which meant there would be no supporting fires from them for at least the next few hours.

  The regiment of the 13th Guards he had sent to stop Volkov’s Guardsmen had stood like a stone wall north of Spartanovka for three days, but now their positions were slowly being flanked to the west. He reluctantly sent them an order to withdraw 500 meters, and said goodbye to Volkov’s men with a good barrage from the powerful Guards Mortar Battalion. The Volga Rifles still held all of Rynok, but now the gap between them and the rest of the defenders was another 500 meters wider, and over ground he never expected to see his men set foot on again. There were too many men coming over that bridge from Volkov’s 5th Army each night after dark. So by day he had his artillerymen register their fire with spotting rounds, so he could saturate the bridge with punishing fire that night.

  In spite of that, there were already 8 battalions of Volkov’s best troops lined up north of Spartanovka, and the ground they held was ground the German assault battalions did not have to cover. By dawn on the 18th of November, the Germans had fought their way through yet another graveyard, the cemetery west of the town. They were intent on pushing past the western side of the town, towards the balka that marked a natural northern boundary for Volgograd.

  Just beyond it was the Tractor Factory, and after holding for another day, Chuikov could see that Spartanovka was inevitably going to be flanked and cut off. The only way he could stop that persistent German drive was to yield ground, and so on the night of 19 NOV, he ordered the Samara Rifles to pull back out of the wooded country where they had been fighting and reestablish their lines along the balka. The new defensive front now ran west about five kilometers to reach the positions of the10th NKVD Brigade screening the Tractor Worker’s Settlement.

  As for the plight of the 193rd Rifle Division south of the NKVD troops, Smekhotvorov reported penetrations to either side of his division, which was now in considerable disarray. It was the primary force covering the ground approaching the Barrikady Factory, and the Worker’s Settlement for that plant had already been overrun about seven kilometers west of the factory site.

  One thing led to another.

  The collapse of the193rd compromised the flank of Gurtiev’s 308th Siberian on its southern flank, and now the Worker’s Settlement for the Red October Factory was also threatened. The outer defenses of the entire northern industrial sector of the city was slowly yielding to the hammer blows, one after another on Thor’s Anvil. Only at Mamayev Kurgan was there any good news, where the counterattack of the13th Guards had swept the Germans from the hilltop and stopped that serious penetration to the heart of the city. All the battle lines south of that had been forced to yield ground and consolidate, but they were holding.

  These first five days fighting finally concluded the preliminaries. The Germans had to ease up the pressure and rest the troops, assessing their own losses and meeting to plan the next phase of the battle. Before them lay the names of places that had become famous in Fedorov’s history of these events, the Factory District in the north; the Rail Plaza, Power Station, and Central Depots in the center, where key sites like Pavlov’s House, Univermag Department Store, the Central Bank, Red Square and the Gorki Theater would soon be tested again under the hammer of war.

  In the south, two of Shumilov’s divisions still held half of Yelshanka, and two more were battling in Novo Kirovka. In the heart of that segment of the city lay the new Steel Foundry Plant, just north of the dry Yelshanka River. Behind the division lines, closer to the Volga, the citizen militias were fortifying another string of would be famous places, the Saw Mills of the Lumber Trust, Balka Causeway, the Cannery, Lumber Yards, and a tall solid concrete structure with multiple chimneys that would come to be called the Grain Elevator.

  The misery and mayhem of war in Volgograd had many names, and many faces. Soon those faces would be drawn and gaunt, fringed by any rag of clothing to be found in a vain attempt to stave off the terrible cold.

  Chapter 30

  3rd Battalion, 513th Grenadier Regiment in the 294th Division was advancing with newfound exuberance. They had been a part of the southern pincer movement that had so bedeviled the Soviet 193rd Rifle Division, moving into the suburbs just north of the Red October Worker’s Settlement. At one point, they became mixed in with units from the 24th Division to the south, but soon they found resistance slackening, the streets quiet and relatively empty. Sensing a trap, they probed cautiously for over an hour, then realized the enemy was simply not there.

  “Come on men!” said Stumpfeld. “Let’s get through to the rail line.” The going was easy, the platoons and squads moving in quick dashes along the streets, and meeting only occasional resistance from a local with a hunting rifle or an old pistol. They pushed through a bombed out block, the victim of Stuka strikes the previous day, and were elated to find they had reached the main rail line that ran north towards the factory district from the Tennis Racquet.

  They were now no more than two kilometers west of the Red October Factory, where Chuikov sat with his headquarters staff, and virtually no garrison of any kind. But there was a reason for that. Stumpfeld’s Battalion had been noticed two hours earlier, and the garrison, the entire 39th Guards Regiment of the 13th Division, had fanned out and started moving west towards that rail line. They would soon be joined by two battalions of the 56th Tank Brigade, rushing north at Chuikov’s behest.

  The rumble of approaching armor finally dampened the spirits of the Grenadiers, metal demons grinding their way forward, impervious to rifle and MG fire. The tanks halted in the relatively open ground around the rail tracks, then the turrets turned, and they began blasting away that the buildings where Stumpfeld’s men crouched low on defense. They remained stubbornly beyond the range of the few Panzerfausts the men had, and so the order was passed to begin withdrawing, house by house, so the battalion could get back into the urban area out of that merciless tank fire.

  “Get on the radio,” said Stumpfeld to at Lieutenant. “Tell them we’ve reached the rail line, but the enemy has brought up tanks. We need support.”

  They fell back through the bombed out block, where they made contact with German troops on their left, a battalion of the 24th Infantry that had become totally lost in the maze of narrow streets and was now separated from its division. It was already in a hot firefight with those Russian Guardsmen, and beyond their position the sound of artillery, machineguns and mortars rumbled to the north.

  “Our boys are giving them hell up there,” said Stumpfeld. That was the Russian 193rd Rifle Division sector that they had been trying to encircle and destroy. “We ran them right out of bed in that worker’s settlement last night, and now they get no breakfast.”

  His talk was covering over the stress of the battle; his fingers unsteady as he fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette. Somehow those few minutes, leaning against a broken stone wall and smoking, restored his calm. He passed the butt off to the Lieutenant, who took it gratefully.

  “Come on then, I want to see what the ground looks like on our right.” Stumpfeld peered over the wall, grateful the tanks had not followed them into the broken neighborhood, though he could hear the thrum of their engines in the distance. He stood up, and as he did so, he seemed to quiver, his legs twitching. Lieutenant Meyers looked up, and saw a hole in his forehead; then Stumpfeld simply keeled over and fell with a heavy thud.

  “Hauptmann!” He instinctively reached for the other man, but he knew he was dead, and that he would soon be as cold as that heartless ground. So now Meyers was in charge of
III Battalion, and after passing a moment to compose himself, he mirrored the sad work of ‘Graveyard Heintz,’ as the men of his division had come to call him. He had to search the pockets of his fallen officer and find maps, letters, anything that should not be left behind. Then he would call for two men to come up and get the man’s body. There was obviously a sniper out there somewhere, and he made a mental note about that cigarette. The smoke and aroma could have given their position away, and of course, like most really good officers, Stumpfeld always led from the front.

  Angry, Meyers crawled back a safe distance, looking for the Battalion mortar teams. They had a good number of the small 5cm version, and several 8cm Granatwerfers. He wanted to put fire on the enemy to discourage any further attack, and those mortars were his only ranged firepower. When the men started dropping the shells into those tubes, his eyes narrowed. Payback, he thought.

  Snipers had a way of getting to a man like that. They sat out there somewhere in the broken buildings, as quiet and unseen as the death they brought to their enemies. But it was not the way Meyers wanted to die in battle. It seemed so inglorious. It was death by stealth and ambush, from an enemy that would not show his face. Yet that was just one private little slice of war. It wasn’t the slashing maneuver of Balck’s Panzer Regiment flanking his enemy when the Ghost Division appeared out of the morning mist like phantoms. There was no dash, or valor, or honor in that kind of a fight. It was war at its gritty heart, just men with rifles, in a haunted and broken city, creeping about from one blasted building to another trying to kill one another.

  Stumpfeld’s radio call had not gone unheeded. As sunset neared, he had friendly battalions to either side, and the enemy attack had been halted. The breakthrough his battalion had led, and the gap they had found, had just become a new wrinkle in the front, sealed off by the 39th Regiment of the Guards and those T-34s. One of the first things Lieutenant Meyers did was to take stock of what he had left. There were still 17 of the 27 squads the battalion had started with.

  Penetrations like the one Stumpfeld had led his men into had the effect of forcing the enemy to adjust their lines. Most of the open country west of the city had been yielded to the enemy, and now the defenders were being compressed into the long flat stretch of the city itself. As they did so, the strength of that defense hardened. The first offensive blows of Thor’s Hammer had beaten down the irregularities in the lines, but as it compressed, the metal on that anvil was beginning to show its strength.

  Meyers had his satisfaction for the death of his commanding officer when he ordered that mortar barrage. But the Russians answered it with the heavy howitzers of their shore battery firing from the Metalworks in Petroleum Syndicate 1. Both sides could throw stones, but the rounds the Russians sent in literally shook the ground when they fell. Meyers and his men endured a five-minute pounding from four BR-18 305mm Howitzers. One squad position in a house a twenty yards to his left took a direct hit, and the structure just blew apart. When the dust and smoke settled, Meyers’ squad count was down to 16.

  * * *

  “So now the real fighting begins,” said Shumilov. “The belly war. Our men will be crawling around in the rubble and snow from this point forward. And the front lines, if they can be called that, will be the floors between levels in any given house or building.”

  “True,” said Chuikov. “City fighting is a special kind of fighting. Things are settled here not by strength, but by skill, resourcefulness and swiftness. The buildings in a city are like breakwaters. So we must hold firmly to strong buildings, and establish small garrisons in them capable of all around fire in case they become encircled. The fighting will go on in those buildings—for a cellar, for a room, for every corner is a corridor.” Those were words he would recall and write again in his memoirs after the war, at least in Fedorov’s history. Whether he would remember them in this recounting of events, or ever live to write them down, remained unsettled.

  “Everything here is a matter of feet and yards now, not miles. We must wage a bitter fight for every house, workshop, water tower, railway embankment, wall, cellar and every pile of ruins. We have given them all the ground we can afford to yield.”

  “What about Yelshanka?” said Shumilov. “I’ve got the better part of two divisions holding that, and 90 percent of that front is now being manned by Volkov’s dogs. Then the Germans bunched up, and they’ve been trying to cut through to the causeway near the Cannery for the last two days.”

  “That is what they will continue to do,” said Chuikov. “They want to reach the Volga wherever they can, and cut our defense into smaller isolated pockets. But as long as we control the ferry sites, I can still move troops at night from one place to another. So it really doesn’t matter where we make a stand. One broken building is as good as another.”

  Shumilov nodded. “What will become of it?” he asked. “Can Rokossovsky get through to us any longer?”

  Chuikov smiled. “Have you looked at a map of the front lines to the north lately? The Germans pushed east of Voronezh before we finally stopped them. Then the line runs down along the Don towards the Chir now after Zhukov’s counteroffensive has ended. On the other side, the Volga reaches north, and Volkov controls the east bank there as far as Samara. The whole front line looks like a deep well, leading right here to Volgograd. And here we sit, like a pair of frogs at the bottom of that well, croaking at one another in the night. No, Mikhail Stepanovich, Zhukov moved 13th Tank Corps behind 65th Army, but let us not fool ourselves. There will be no further counterattacks here to try and save us.”

  “13th Tank Corps? What about the Shock Armies?”

  “They are being pulled out. 65th and 66th Armies are extending their lines, and consolidating near the Don. Don’t you see? We’re too deep in that well. Anything Zhukov sends is just throwing good money after bad. What more will they do here? They threw four Shock Armies at the Germans—pushed all the way to Nizhne Chirskaya, but they could not hold that ground for more than two weeks. So here we will sit. We’ll both be named Heroes of the Soviet Union, and that will be that. Don’t expect any relief from the rest of the Army. The most we will get from here on out will be the grateful thanks of the nation.”

  “Damn….” Shumilov swore quietly. “Now I regret yielding all that ground south of the Don. If we could have held Volkov back on the old fortification lines, then Zhukov’s attack would have had the SS in a bag for sure!”

  “Which would have meant nothing,” said Chuikov. “You saw how quickly they broke through. They probably sent every reserve unit they had in the south to do so, but they stopped that last operation Zhukov mounted. What was it called? Saturn. Well, he’s running out of planets, isn’t he? So here we sit.”

  “Then there will be no winter offensive?”

  “Oh, I never said that. No, those Shock Armies must be going somewhere if they are pulling them north of the Don. And Steiner’s SS went somewhere too. They are in the Donbass now, and the Donets Basin. They want to clear that area, and take Rostov. We’re just a boil on their backside. That’s why they pulled out all but one of their really good divisions. But the fact that they left the Brandenburgers here is a very clear message.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean they intend to take this city, stupid as that might seem. They wouldn’t leave a good division like that here unless they meant to finish the job. Hitler must have insisted on it. No General worth the name would put ten divisions into this mess, at least not willingly.”

  “We put ten here,” said Shumilov.

  “Which is why they put ten in—tit for tat.” Chuikov leaned back, running his broad hand over that lion’s mane of curly dark hair. The rumble of distant artillery fire intervened, and both men sat listening to it for some time.

  “So then,” said Shumilov at last. “We fight like the men in the Kirov Pocket fought, and like the 2nd Guards fought in Voronezh.”

  “Yes,” said Chuikov, “and like the men in the Donets Basin and Rostov
will fight, and after that the Army of the Kuban. All we are doing here is being stubborn. As long as we are here, then they need to leave those ten divisions here with us. So like I said, we fight now for every building—every room.”

  Shumilov nodded, but there was a vacant, empty look in his eyes. “How long can we hold, Vasily—not just here in the city, but out there?”

  “Who knows? Zhukov is moving those Shock Armies, so he has something left up his sleeve. I think they will attack near Voronezh. That penetration all the way to Anna was quite alarming. If the Germans drive due east in the spring, they could go all the way to Saratov. Then everything in the well on that map will be yet another big pocket, three times the size of the Kirov Pocket. I don’t think Zhukov can let that happen. So he must attack somewhere this winter to take the pressure off… Somewhere….”

  He was going to attack somewhere, and right where Chuikov, not Manstein, had called it. In fact, the warning the German General put in during his last visit to OKH had been enough to prompt Hitler to strongly reinforce the Smolensk sector as part of the general redistribution of forces he had ordered. But every place strengthened was another place that had to be weakened. Army Group Don had been strongly reinforced to stop the orbits of Zhukov’s planetary offensives. They had struck like successive blows, Mars was the spoiling attack, Uranus the daring drive to the Chir and into the Don Bend; then Saturn had even greater aspirations of breaking through between Tatsinskaya and Morozovsk to relieve the men trapped in the Donets Basin, but that hope was never realized.

  Chuikov was correct, and now the offensive hopes would have to be directed elsewhere. His stoic nihilism had seen the whole of it, and he knew his fate was now to sit there and endure those hammer blows, to be the stubborn anvil, while the army fought elsewhere… Somewhere….