every house, workshop, water-tower, raised railway track, wall or cellar, and even for every heap of rubble. There was nothing, even in World War I, to equal the
enormous expenditure of ammunition. The no-man's land between us and the
Russians was reduced to an absolute minimum, and, despite the intensive activity of our bombers and our artillery, there was no means of widening this "close combat"
gap. The Russians were better than the Germans at camouflage, and more
experienced in barricade fighting for separate houses; their defence lines were very strong... The catastrophe that later followed has eclipsed these weeks of "siege". But it is the story of heroic deeds by small units, storm groups and many nameless
German soldiers..."
If the Germans had reason to congratulate themselves on the heroism of their soldiers, the Russians had even more reason to do so, especially as German superiority in tanks and aircraft continued to be very great. By and large, the Germans, supported by aircraft and tanks, attacked during the day. For the Russians, as Chuikov says, "the night was their element". The effectiveness of the German tanks and aircraft was, however, limited by two factors: observing that the Germans were not good at precision bombing, Chuikov
had devised a tactic of "close combat", whereby the no-man's land never exceeded "the distance of a hand-grenade throw": this kept the Russian front lines more or less immune from air attack; as for the tanks, these found it more and more difficult to operate as the mountains of rubble accumulated in the streets of Stalingrad. Highly favourable to the Russians, too, was the powerful fire of the guns and katyusha mortars from the other side of the river; these caused havoc among any German troop concentrations, and in the
German positions, which were usually more exposed, and less well camouflaged than the Russians'.
On September 27, the Germans began their first big offensive against the industrial area of Stalingrad. "Hundreds of dive-bombers" attacked the Russians, and the Germans, though suffering heavy losses, crossed the Russian minefields and advanced between
2,000 and 3,000 yards. Gorishnyi's troops lost the top of Mamai Hill and what was left of them entrenched themselves on its north-east slope. "One more such day," Chuikov commented, "and we would have been thrown into the Volga."
Chuikov sent an SOS to the War Council asking for reinforcements, especially in the air.
[To Mr. Khrushchev personally, according to his 1959 book.]
Two infantry regiments, under General Smekhotvorov crossed the Volga that night and
were promptly sent to reinforce the troops in the Red October Garden City. The remnants of Gorishnyi's and Batyuk's troops counter-attacked on Mamai Hill. On the morning of September 28 the Germans resumed the attack, their planes concentrating not only on the Russian troops, but also on the Volga shipping. Of the six cargo ships on the Volga, five were put out of action that day. Some oil tanks in the neighbourhood of Chuikov's
command-post were set on fire by German bombing.
The staff at my command post were choking with the heat and smoke. The fire of
the flaming oil tanks was crawling down to our dugouts. Every dive-bomber attack
was killing people and putting our wireless sets out of action. Even Glinka, our cook, who had set up his field kitchen in a bomb crater, was wounded.
And yet, the German attacks lacked the coherence and self-assurance of the previous day.
Supported by tanks, entire battalions would hurl themselves into the attacks, and this enabled us to concentrate our artillery fire on them...I then appealed for help to General Khrukin, commander of our air force, and he threw in all he had. It was
during this big Russian air-raid that Batyuk's and Gorishnyi's troops again
attacked Mamai Hill; they made an appreciable advance, though they failed to seize the summit, which remained a no-man's land, and continued to be shelled by both
sides. That day, the Germans lost 1,500 men in dead alone, and some fifty tanks. On Mamai Hill alone, there were 500 German corpses.
Chuikov admits, of course, that the Russian losses were very heavy too.
Our tank units had 626 casualties (dead and wounded), Batyuk lost 300 men and the Gorishnyi Division, though continuing to fight, was bled white. Many hundreds of
Russian wounded were now on the river bank, waiting to be evacuated; with the
shipping losses that day this was no easy task. The delivery of ammunitions had also become extremely difficult. And, meantime, reconnaissance reported that the
Germans were preparing to launch another major attack against the Red October
plant. The real battle for industrial Stalingrad was only beginning.
On September 29, the Germans proceeded to "liquidate" the eleven-mile-deep and three-mile-wide "Orlovka" salient to the northwest of the industrial area of Stalingrad. Here again we find in Chuikov's book some angry polemics against the command of the
Stalingrad Front (now called the Don Front) beyond the German "Rynok" salient to the north of Stalingrad.
[ The changes in name, and in command, of the "fronts" to the north and south of Stalingrad have led to a lot of confusion. In early August Yeremenko was in command of the army groups both north (the "Stalingrad Front") and south of the city, with Golikov as his deputy in the south (the "South East Front")—and also of the troops inside the city.
Then on September 28 (i.e. before the Orlovka battle), according to both Yeremenko and the official history 'IVOVSS, vol. 2, p. 444) the army group to the north, previously the Stalingrad Front, was renamed the "Don Front", and placed under General Rokossovsky, and that to the south was now called the "Stalingrad Front" and was under Yeremenko
"as before". Chuikov's troops in the city came under command of the "new" Stalingrad front and were therefore still under Yeremenko. So when Chuikov criticises the
"Stalingrad Front" for not helping in the Orlovka battle from the north, he must really mean what had then become the Don Front. He is therefore in fact criticising
Rokossovsky and not, as would appear, Yeremenko.]
Twice before Yeremenko (and his deputy, Gordov, Chuikov's bête noire) had failed to break through the German salient and come to the rescue of the 62nd Army.
Chuikov argues that the existence of the Orlovka bulge gave the troops in the north a wonderful opportunity to cut through the German "Rynok" salient, which was only five miles wide; but once again, when the German attack on the Orlovka salient was serious, the opportunity to help the 62nd Army was missed.
The small number of troops under Andrusenko, Smekhotvorov and Sologub defending
the Orlovka bulge, had already suffered very heavy losses in the first two days of the German attack. Some, under Andrusenko, were then encircled, and fought on for nearly another week. Then, having run out of ammunition, 120 men broke out of the
encirclement on the night of October 8; the remaining 380 were left behind, dead or
severely wounded.
A few days before, the command of the Stalingrad [Don] Front asked me what
measures I was taking to hold the Orlovka bulge... What could I reply? The best
answer would have been that the Stalingrad [Don] Front should strike out from the north at the rear of the German divisions attacking Orlovka. But no one was
planning such a blow. For my own part, I had no reserves. With the Germans
threatening to strike a powerful blow at the Stalingrad Tractor Plant and the
Barricades Plant, I could not afford to help those in the Orlovka bulge.
Marshal Yeremenko, in his book, Stalingrad, published in 1961, i.e. two years after Chuikov's book, treats the liquidation of the Orlovka bulge as an inevitable war casualty, and makes no attempt to answer Chuikov's very serious charges of apathy and inactivity on the part of the commanders of the army-group to the north. It may well be that, with an eye on the coming Russian counter-offensive, the commanders of the "Stalingrad" or
"Don" Front preferred to remain inactive, trusting that Chuikov would somehow succeed in holding his Stalingrad bridgeheads. If so, it was a dangerous gamble, since on October 14, as we shall see, and again in November, the 62nd Army was very nearly wiped out.
*
For the Russians, October was the cruellest month in Stalingrad. On October I, Major-General Guriev's 39th Guards Division arrived in Stalingrad, where it was to defend the Red October Plant for many critical days. (Some of its survivors were later to fight all the way to Berlin). On the same day, another famous division crossed the Volga —that of
Colonel Gurtiev. These men, many of them Siberians, were to bear the brunt of some of the heaviest fighting in the northern part of Stalingrad during October.
[Gurtiev himself was to be killed at Orel in the summer of 1943.]
Equally tough new troops were the guardsmen under General Zholudev. These were
really guardsmen. All of them were young and tall, and healthy, many of them in
paratroop uniform, with knives and daggers tucked into their belts. They went in
for bayonet charges, and would throw a dead Nazi over their shoulder like a sack of straw. For house-to-house fighting, there was no one quite like them. They would
attack in small groups, and, breaking into houses and cellars, they would use their knives and daggers. Even when encircled, they went on fighting, and would die
crying: "For country and Stalin! But we shall never surrender."
[ In the second (1961) edition of Chuikov's book the mention of Stalin is deleted—both here and practically everywhere else.]
For Chuikov himself, October started particularly badly. His H.Q. near the Barricades Plant again happened to be close to some oil tanks; these were set aflame by German
bombers, and the burning oil poured across the H.Q.'s dugouts towards the Volga, and enveloped them in a sea of flame.
At first we almost lost our heads. What were we to do? Then my chief of staff,
General Krylov, gave the order: "Sit tight. Stay in the undamaged dugouts and keep up radio communications with the troops!" Then he said to me in a whisper: "Do you think we can hold out?" "Yes," I said. "At a pinch, we've got our revolvers."
"All right," he said. We understood each other perfectly.
I must admit that when I first looked out of the dugout, I was dazzled by the flames and overwhelmed. But Krylov's order brought me to my senses... Though encircled
by flames, we continued to work, and to direct the troops.
The fire went on for several days, and we had no other H.Q. in reserve. All our
troops, including our engineers, were fighting the Germans. So we had to carry on as best we could—in the surviving dugouts, in holes and trenches, often under
enemy fire. We did not sleep for several days and nights.
In these conditions, Chuikov was exasperated by the frequent phone calls from General Zakharov, Yeremenko's chief of staff, ostensibly asking for all kinds of details (which, in the circumstances, Chuikov was unable to supply) but, in fact, anxious to make sure that Chuikov's H.Q. still existed.
It was neither funny nor easy to spell out code words over the wireless with bombs and shells landing all round us. These unnecessary talks often resulted in the radio operators being killed, with the microphones in their hands.
Here, as elsewhere in the book, the frontovik's contempt for the staff officer living in relatively normal surroundings on the "safe" side of the Volga comes out strongly.
Worse still, after the flames had abated three days later, the Germans began to shell and bomb the Army H.Q. Numbers of men at the H.Q. were killed or wounded. With great
difficulty, the H.Q. was moved at night some 500 yards farther north, to the H.Q. of General Sarayev's division, which had been practically wiped out, and was now being
reconstituted on the other side of the Volga.
During all that first week of October, there had been heavy fighting in the industrial area of Stalingrad. By October 7, the Germans captured part of the Tractor Plant Garden City.
Often the Russians had some good luck, though. A katyusha hit at 6 p.m. that day wiped out a whole battalion of advancing German troops. Smekhotvorov's troops were,
meantime, fighting a stiff battle in the Red October Garden City. One building there changed hands five times during the day.
By October 8 it was clear that the Germans were preparing for an all-out offensive.
Hitler had promised his vassals to capture Stalingrad within the next few days. The German soldiers would shout from their trenches: "Russ, skoro bul-bul u Volga."
("You'll soon be blowing bubbles in the Volga. ") The German planes were showering leaflets on the city... These showed us surrounded on all sides by tanks and guns, and also mockingly reminded us of the "Stalingrad Front's" failure to break through to us from the north.
For four days—between the 9th and the 13th of October—there was a relative lull, and then, on October 14, all hell broke loose. Before this "final" German offensive, the depth of the main bridgehead held by the 62nd Army—i.e. the distance between the Volga and the front line was about two miles. If, Chuikov argues, the Germans had organised their attack properly, they could have broken through in one and a half or two hours. But the precautions taken by the Russians and the incredible stubbornness of their troops
prevented catastrophe. Nevertheless, it was touch-and-go.
Here is Chuikov's description of this "unforgettable" day:
The 14th of October marked the beginning of a battle unequalled in its cruelty and ferocity throughout the whole of the Stalingrad fighting. Three infantry and two
panzer divisions were hurled against us along a five-km. front... There were three thousand German air sorties that day. They bombed and stormed our troops
without a moment's respite. The German guns and mortars showered on us shells
and bombs from morning till night. It was a sunny day, but owing to the smoke and soot, visibility was reduced to 100 yards. Our dugouts were shaking and crumbling up like a house of cards... The main blow was delivered against Gorishnyi's,
Zholudev's and Gurtiev's troops, and the 84th tank brigade—all in the general
direction of the Stalingrad Tractor Plant and the Barricades Plant. By 11.30 a.m.
180 German tanks broke through Zholudev's positions to the stadium of the Tractor Plant... By 4 p.m. Sologub's, Zholudev's and Gurtiev's troops... were encircled but still fighting.
The reports from the various units were becoming more and more confusing... The
command and observation posts of regiments and divisions were being smashed by
shells and bombs. At my Army's command post thirty people were killed. The
guards scarcely had time to dig the officers out of the smashed dugouts of the Army H.Q. The troops had to be directed by radio; transmitters had been set up on the
other side of the Volga, and we communicated with them, and they then passed on
our orders to the fighting units on this side of the river.
... By midnight it was clear that the invaders had surrounded the Stalingrad Tractor Plant, and that fighting was going on in the workshops. We reckoned that the
Germans had lost forty tanks during the day, and around the Tractor Plant there
were 3,000 German dead. We also suffered very heavy losses that day. During the
night 3,500 wounded soldiers and officers were taken across the Volga; this was a record figure.
The Germans had managed to advance two kilometres (over a mile and a quarter) during the day; they had captured the Tractor Plant and had, indeed, cut the Russian forces in two. To the north of the Tractor Plant there was now only a small area in Russian hands: the small number of troops there were under the command of Colonel Gorokhov.
On the 15th the Germans continued to attack strongly; again thousands of bombs were
showered on the Russians, and the German tommy-gunner
s were trying to break through
to Chuikov's Army H.Q.
But von Paulus [says Chuikov] was short of that one battalion which might have
captured the Army headquarters, only 300 yards away. And yet we decided not to
move, and to fight on.
Nevertheless, Chuikov does not hesitate to describe the situation as "desperate"; owing to constant German air attacks, radio was working intermittently, not only on the right bank of the river, but also on the left bank, where an emergency command post had been set up. This was particularly serious since most of the Russian artillery was on the left bank, and communications were, for a time, as good as paralysed.
The Russian losses were mounting up at a disastrous rate. In two days' fighting
Zholudev's and Gorishnyi's troops had lost seventy-five per cent of their effective. On the night of October 15-16 a regiment under Colonel Ludnikov crossed the Volga and
entered the fray to the north of the Barricades Plant. But, as Chuikov says, this regiment, and the miserable remnants of the Gorishnyi and Zholudev divisions would have been
helpless against overwhelming German strength but for the Russian artillery on the other side of the river, the guns of the Volga flotilla and the stormovik planes which, with heavy losses, were breaking through the clouds of German planes and attacking the
advancing German troops. On the night of October 17-18 two more regiments of the
Ludnikov division crossed the Volga. That was also the night on which Chuikov was to receive a visit from General Yeremenko.
I went to meet him at the pier. Shells were exploding all over the place, and the Germans were shelling the Volga with their six-barrel mortars. Hundreds of
wounded soldiers were crawling to the pier. Often we had to step over dead bodies.
The meeting with Yeremenko was not a very happy one. Chuikov clamoured, above all,
for ammunition, and when, on the following day, he heard what was to be sent, he was furious. Instead of a month's supply, he was now promised a day's supply. He protested strongly, and the figure was "slightly revised".
Russia at war Page 53