‘The company commander summoned me: “Can you recce the slag heap behind the [railway] line? There’s a wooden house there.” I said: “I must eat. And what about some sleep?” “To hell with sleep.” The lieutenant gave me some bread and sugar, but then the shells began to fly. So I didn’t manage to eat anything. I just went without eating. Well, I set off . . . I went to the slag heap. I spotted two machine guns and a mortar. I came back and reported. “Well,” said my lieutenant, “you’ve spotted them, and you will destroy them.”’
‘When Germans had pushed us right back to the Volga, their sub-machine-gunners were shouting: “Rus, glug-glug!” And we shouted back: “Hey, come here, you’re thirsty, aren’t you?”’13
Soldiers burned to death in the houses. Their charred corpses were found. Not one of them had fled. They burned holding out.
One of Grossman’s most celebrated articles in Krasnaya Zvezda was entitled ‘The Stalingrad Battle’, a collection of descriptions, some just vignettes.
In the light of rockets one sees the destroyed buildings, the land covered with trenches, the bunkers in the cliff and gullies, deep holes protected from bad weather by pieces of tin and planks of wood.
‘Hey, can you hear me? Have they brought dinner yet?’ asks a soldier, who is sitting by the entrance of the bunker.
‘They left a long time ago to fetch it, and look, they haven’t returned yet,’ a voice anwers from the darkness.
‘They either had to shelter somewhere, or they’re never coming back. [Enemy] fire around the field kitchen is too heavy.’
‘What louses! I badly want my dinner,’ says the sitting soldier in an unhappy voice, and yawns . . .
Germans sitting in one of the buildings were resisting so stubbornly that they had to be blown up together with the heavy walls of the building. Under a fierce fire from the German defenders who could sense their own death, six sappers carried up by hand ten poods14 of explosive and blew up the building. And when I imagine for a moment this picture – Sapper Lieutenant Chermakov, Sergeants Dubovy and Bugaev and Sappers Klimenko, Zhukhov and Messereshvili crawling under fire along the destroyed walls, each with 1.5 poods of death, when I picture to myself their sweaty, dirty faces, their shabby army shirts, when I remember how Sergeant Dubov shouted: ‘Hey, sappers, don’t be scared!’ And Zhukhov answered, twisting his mouth and spitting dust out: ‘There’s no time to be scared now. We should have been before!’ – I feel a great pride for them.
Here, where the meaning of measurement has shifted, where an advance of only several metres is as important as many kilometres under [normal] battle conditions, where the distance to the enemy sitting in a house next door is sometimes counted in dozens of steps, the location of divisional command posts has also changed accordingly. Divisional headquarters is 250 metres from the enemy; command posts of regiments and battalions are correspondingly closer. ‘If communications are broken, it is easy to communicate with regiments using one’s voice,’ a man from the headquarters says jokingly. ‘You shout, and they’ll hear you. And they’ll pass the order on to their battalions, also by voice.’ . . . And in this catacomb where everything is shaking all the time from explosions of bombs and shells, the staff and commanders are sitting bent over the maps, and a signaller, who is always present in all essays from the war, is shouting: ‘Luna, luna!’ And here, a runner is sitting shyly in the corner, holding a makhorka cigarette in his hand, averting his eyes and trying not to exhale in the direction of his chiefs.
After the battle, Grossman heard this story of Gurtyev, the commander of the 308th Rifle Division, and Zholudev, the commander of the 37th Guards Rifle Division. They had been neighbours in the terrible battle for the tractor works when Zholudev’s guardsmen were crushed.
Gurtyev telephoned Zholudev and said: ‘Courage, I can’t help. Stand firm!’ When Zholudev was ordered to move to the left bank, [i.e. withdrawn entirely from the battle] he said to Gurtyev: ‘Stand firm, old man! Courage!’ and they both laughed.
Ortenberg also recounted a bizarre event, which took place during one of Grossman’s trips to Stalingrad from Akhtuba, the base on the east bank of the Volga. ‘Once, in mid-October, he told officers from the Political Department of the front that he was going to visit [General] Rodimtsev the next day. They had two well-packed parcels with presents sent by an American women’s organisation. Grossman was asked to deliver these presents to the two “most courageous women defending Stalingrad”. The Political Department had decided that the two most courageous women could be found in Rodimtsev’s division, and that Grossman was a suitable person to deliver these presents to them. Although he did not like official ceremonies, Vasily Semyonovich reluctantly agreed. He crossed the Volga in a motor boat, and joined Rodimtsev. The two girls stood in front of him. They were very excited about the famous writer and the heroic general presenting them with gifts. They said a formal thank you and started unwrapping the packages at once. Inside were ladies’ swimming costumes and slippers to go with them. Everyone was extremely embarrassed. The luxurious swimming costumes looked so strange in this environment, under a thundering cannonade of the Stalingrad battle.’
1 The 37th Guards Rifle Division was formed from I Airborne Corps in August 1942, and later became part of the 65th Army once it had been re-formed after its heavy losses in Stalingrad.
2 Major-General L.M. Dovator, the commander of the II Guards Cavalry Corps in the battle for Moscow, was killed on 20 December 1941.
3 The international press was more likely to have had an effect than the Soviet press.
4 Grossman notes this as the night of 13 October, but most accounts put Yeremenko’s visit to the embattled west bank as taking place in the early hours of 16 October.
5 Grossman is probably referring to 17 October, when all the west bank bridgeheads faced the most intense onslaught. The battalion was from Lyudnikov’s 138th Division, a fresh batch of reinforcements which Chuikov brought across the Volga at the critical moment.
6 The 308th Rifle Division became the 120th Guards Rifle Division with the 3rd Army. Like almost all the divisions at Stalingrad, it fought all the way to Berlin.
7 A Vanyusha was their nickname for the German Nebelwerfer multi-barrelled mortar. This less effective counterpart to the Katyusha was originally called a Vanya, and then the joke arose about what would happen to little Vanya if he married the rather more powerful Katyusha. It was sometimes known also as the ‘braying donkey’ because of the noise the mortar bombs made in the air.
8 In the final article, the daily walk appears to have grown from Grossman’s original ten to fifteen kilometres a day all the way to twenty kilometres a day.
9 ‘The Little Blue Shawl’ had such a powerful influence that some soldiers even added the song’s title to the official battle cry so that it became: ‘Za Rodinu, za Stalina, za Siny Platochek!’ – ‘For the Motherland, for Stalin, for the Blue Shawl!’
10 A good soldier when wounded feared, with justification, that he would never be allowed to return to his comrades. The authorities in the rear would just make up a batch of those deemed to be battleworthy again and send them off to any regiment. This was why they were writing to their political officers.
11 Almost every account by a Red Army soldier at Stalingrad talks of fighting SS soldiers, but in fact there were no SS formations serving there at all. It had tended to become a figure of speech for well-armed and disciplined German soldiers.
12 The standard grenade of Soviet manufacture was known as a ‘sausage’. The American hand grenade, supplied through Lend-Lease, was known as a ‘pineapple’.
13 As mentioned in the previous chapter, Soviet snipers had been killing all their water carriers. Germans, desperate for water, had even resorted to tempting Stalingrad children with crusts of bread to go and fill their water bottles in the Volga, but snipers had orders to shoot down any civilians, including children, who assisted the enemy for whatever reason.
14 A pood was the equivalent of 16kg, so ten p
oods of explosive was 160kg, a huge charge.
SEVENTEEN
The Tide Turned
The October battles petered out at the end of the month, mainly due to exhaustion and a shortage of ammunition. The reorganised Soviet artillery across the river was now able to hammer German concentrations even more effectively as they prepared to attack. Paulus, under pressure from Hitler, still mounted assaults, but they were much smaller in scale to avoid the Soviet artillery and Katyusha batteries and because the German divisions were so short of men. Most dangerously of all, Paulus accepted Hitler’s order to use panzer troops as infantry. It meant that he had no armour in reserve in case of surprise attack.
Hitler’s obsession with taking Stalingrad – an ersatz victory to compensate for his failure to seize the oilfields of the Caucasus – had not slackened. He talked about it on 8 November in a broadcast speech from Munich. ‘I wanted to reach the Volga,’ he declared with unsubtle irony, ‘to be precise at a particular spot, at a particular city. By chance it bore the name of Stalin himself.’ He then boasted that ‘time is of no importance’.
Hitler could not have been more wrong. Time was of great importance. Winter was approaching rapidly, and so, therefore, was the season of Soviet offensives. German soldiers called the worst climatic conditions ‘weather for Russians’ for that very reason. Grossman, unaware of any plans, wrote to his father on 13 November, just under a week before the great attack.
I work a lot, the work is stressful, and I am pretty tired. I have never been to such a hot spot as this one. Letters don’t reach me here, only once they brought me a whole bundle of letters, among them was a letter and a postcard from you . . . It is quite frosty here now, and windy.
Neither Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia nor the German Sixth Army had fully realised that the Stavka in Moscow was using the 62nd Army as the bait in an enormous trap. The Germans knew that there was a threat to their flanks – the left rear along the River Don was manned by the Third Romanian Army and the front to the south of Stalingrad was held by the Fourth Romanian Army. A Soviet build-up was spotted, but the scale and the ambition of the operation was grossly underestimated. Any suggestion that the Red Army could carry out a huge encirclement of the Sixth Army in the way that German panzer groups had surrounded Soviet armies the year before was considered unthinkable.
General Chuikov, still holding on in Stalingrad itself, had his own problems. The Volga was freezing over but had not yet frozen solid. The large ice floes coming down the river meant that taking supplies across was now extremely hazardous. But on 19 November, Operation Uranus began 150 kilometres north-west of Stalingrad, with a massive assault on the Romanian Third Army. The next morning, another attack fifty kilometres south of Stalingrad smashed open the Fourth Romanian Army. It took the Germans until midday on 21 November to appreciate that the 300,000 men of the Sixth Army were about to be cut off and that there was nothing that they could do about it.
Grossman had managed to have himself attached to IV Cavalry Corps which protected the left and outer flank of the two attacking mechanised corps. According to Ortenberg, Grossman ‘watched the beginning of the advance from the observation post of the division, and then, walking with the advancing troops, he described expressively all that he had seen on the way’.
Soviet troops prepare for Operation Uranus round Stalingrad, November 1942.
A soldier who had been a prisoner of war during the last war looks at a diving plane: ‘Must be my lad bombing,’ he says.
They run into the attack protecting their faces with sapper spades. In the attack, a rifle is better than a sub-machine gun.
The Romanian troops, dressed in brown uniforms and Balkan sheepskin caps, lacked modern equipment, leadership and anti-tank guns. They soon threw down their rifles and shouted ‘Antonescu kaputt!’,1 but surrender did not save them. Thousands of prisoners were shot out of hand, and the frozen roads were littered with the detritus of a defeated army.
Troops are marching. Their spirits are higher now. ‘Ah, it would be great to get to Kiev.’ Another man: ‘Ah, I’d like to get to Berlin!’
An image: a strongpoint destroyed by a tank. There is a flattened Romanian. A tank has driven over him. His face has become a bas-relief. Next to him, there are two crushed Germans. There is one of our soldiers, too, lying in the trench half buried.
Empty cans, grenades, hand grenades, a blanket stained with blood, pages from German magazines. Our soldiers are sitting among the corpses, cooking in a cauldron slices cut from a dead horse, and stretching their frozen hands towards the fire.
A killed Romanian and a killed Russian were lying next to each other on the battlefield. The Romanian had a sheet of paper and a child’s drawing of a hare and a boat. Our soldier had a letter: ‘Good afternoon, or maybe good evening. Hello, Daddy . . .’ And the end of the letter: ‘Come and visit us, because when you aren’t here, I come back home as if to a rented flat. I miss you very much. Come and visit, I wish I could see you, if only for an hour. I am writing this and tears are pouring. That was your daughter Nina writing.’
During the rapid advance, when there was no clear front line, Grossman found himself in unexpected danger. He was accompanied by Aleksei Kapler, the film director who became the first love of Svetlana Stalin. For daring to fondle the tyrant’s young daughter, Kapler was beaten up by Beria’s men and sent to the Gulag for ten years in 1943. After Stalin’s death, Kapler recounted his adventure with Grossman during this advance. ‘We wandered into an empty house and decided to stay there for the night. Then some soldiers appeared. We saw their shadows on the ceiling and realised that they were not our soldiers, because their helmets were different from ours. They turned out to be Romanians. Fortunately they did not spot us and went away.’
Red Army soldiers were furious to find what their Romanian prisoners had looted from the homes of the local population. ‘Old women’s kerchiefs and earrings, linen and skirts, babies’ napkins and brightly coloured girls’ blouses. One soldier had twenty-two pairs of woollen stockings in his possession.’
The greatest joy was that of liberated civilians.
‘How did we find out that our troops had arrived? We were listening by the window: “Yegor, crank the engine!” [we heard] “Ours!” we cried.’
They soon expressed their loathing of the Romanians who, following the German example, had whipped or beaten civilians until they revealed where they had hidden their food.
Romanians. An old man called them ‘turkeys’. Real Gypsies. They kept saying all the time: ‘War is bad, we should go home.’ [Yet] they whipped the old man four times. They forced him to go and harvest cereals, and took the grain. They had fruit drops and canned food to eat.
Some civilians had also suffered from Soviet military action.
A babushka told us how one of our own pilots wounded her: ‘He dropped a bomb, the son of a bitch, fuck him,’ she says angrily, then looks at the commander who is changing his boots and corrects herself: ‘Son of a bitch, sonny. There are no cows, no cows to drive to the pasture, no cows to let back in. There is no life [left] for us.’
Grossman’s notes contributed to his article ‘On the Roads of the Advance’ about the offensive south of Stalingrad.
Ice is moving down the Volga. Ice floes are rustling, crumbling, crushing against one another. The river is almost wholly covered with ice. Only from time to time can one see patches of water in this wide, white ribbon floating between the dark snowless banks. The white ice of the Volga is carrying tree trunks, wood. A big raven is sitting sulkily on an ice floe. A dead Red Fleet soldier in a striped shirt floats past. Men from a freight steamer take him from the ice. It is difficult to tear the dead man out of the ice. He is rooted in it. It is as if he doesn’t want to leave the Volga where he has fought and died.
Barges full of captured Romanians pass us. They are standing in their skimpy greatcoats, in tall white hats, stamping their feet, rubbing their frozen hands. ‘They’ve seen the Volga now,�
�� say the sailors.
A group of two hundred prisoners usually marches under the guard of two or three soldiers. The Romanians march in an organised manner, some groups are even lined up and keeping in step, and this makes those who see them laugh . . . Prisoners move on and on in crowds, their mess tins and flasks rattling, belted with pieces of rope, or wire, blankets of different colours upon their shoulders. And women say, laughing: ‘Oh, these Romanians are travelling just like Gypsies.’
Romanian corpses are lying along the roads; abandoned cannons camouflaged with dry steppe grass point eastwards. Horses wander about in balkas dragging behind them broken traces, vehicles hit by shellfire are giving off a blue-grey smoke. On the roads lie helmets decorated with the Romanian royal coat of arms, thousands of cartridges, grenades, rifles. A Romanian strongpoint. A mountain of empty, sooty cartridges by the machine-gun nest. White sheets of writing paper are lying in the communication trench. The brown winter steppe has turned brick red from blood. There are rifles with butts splintered by Russian bullets. And crowds of prisoners are moving towards us all the time.
They are searched before being sent off to the rear. Heaps of peasant women’s belongings that were found in rucksacks and pockets of Romanians look comic and pitiful. There are old women’s shawls, women’s earrings, underwear, skirts, swaddling clothes. The further on we move, the more abandoned vehicles and cannons we see. There are trucks, armoured vehicles and staff cars.
We enter Abganerovo. An old peasant woman told us about the three months of the occupation. ‘It became empty here. Not a single hen to cackle, not a single cock to sing. There isn’t a single cow left to let out in the morning and let in in the evening. Romanians have pinched everything. They whipped almost all our old men: one didn’t report for work, another one failed to hand in his grain. The starosta in Plodovitaya was whipped four times. They took away my son, a cripple, and with him a girl and a nine-year-old boy. We’ve been crying for four days, waiting for them to return.’
A Writer at War Page 22