The Northern Group’s four armies with eighteen rifle and two cavalry divisions, two rifle corps, and seven brigades had been slowing Kleist to a snail’s pace. Its persistent counterattacks had driven the Germans back to their foothold on the eastern side of the Terek at Mozdok. A good part of its tank force was made up of British Valentines and American M3 Stuart light tanks. The Valentines tended to burst into flames, a matter that Stalin brought up with Churchill, suggesting that the Soviet use of diesel in their T-34s was superior.
Kleist resumed his attacks on the 11th and met the same determined resistance, but by the next day the Soviets seemed to be in much weaker strength. In the night two of their armies had begun withdrawing. One was being sent to staunch the open wound left by the encirclement of the Northern Group due to the fall of Sukhumi and the other to retake Dzhulfa.
Breaking contact with half your force and reshuffling the rest of it to cover the same front is one of the most difficult manoeuvres any army can make. It can succeed, though, if the enemy does not interfere. That was a break that Kleist was not about to give. Luftwaffe reconnaissance reported the roads leading south filled with Soviet troops. General Traugott Herr’s 3rd Panzer Division was Kleist’s spearhead. He divided his command into combined arms battlegroups (Kampfgruppen) and drove his panzers right into the confusion of the Soviet passage of lines and transformed it into a bloody rout.
At this point Kleist was presented with an operational dilemma. He had multiple missions: to seize the oilfields at Grozny and to take Ordzhonikidze and the high mountain passes of the eastern Caucasus to open the road to Baku. He had reached that point where all three of these locations were within his grasp. His 3rd Panzer was within 36 miles of Ordzhonikidze and 13th Panzer about the half that distance from Grozny. It was time he asked army group headquarters to put on alert the parachute battalion that had been prepared for just this moment. Upon the approach of German forces, the Soviet garrison of Grozny was under Stalin’s orders to destroy the oilfields. Only a surprise descent gave a chance of saving them for the fuel-thirsty German armies fighting from Voronezh to Mozdok.
For Stalin the loss of Sukhumi entailed another and perhaps even more serious loss - Beria. He needed a replacement. For that he reached into the second tier of the NKVD chiefs and plucked out Victor Abakumov. He had survived the purge of the NKVD in 1937-8 because he had been single-mindedly ruthless in carrying it out. Single-minded and ruthless were just the qualities Stalin was looking for.
With Stalin’s approval, Abakumov liquidated Beria’s senior lieutenants and replaced them with his own. When he personally cleaned out Beria’s safe, he found a document that really caught his attention. It was a file, and not just any file but Stalin’s, prepared by the tsar’s secret police, the Okrana. It was not the file of a suspect or revolutionary. It was that of an informer. From Beria’s notes, it became clear that this file in the hands of the NKVD and the senior staff of the Red Army had prompted preparations for a coup that Stalin preempted with the purges that had decapitated both organizations.18 For Abakumov, whether Stalin had been a traitor to the communist party was a matter of indifference. He would have served the tsar as diligently had he provided a ladder to power. Still, this poisonous document could prove useful. Who knew what course the war would take, and betting men were putting their money on the Germans.
Krasnofimsk, 11 September 1942
‘Everybody off!’ men were shouting at the Pacific Fleet sailors in the railcars that had just pulled into a siding at the town’s rail yard. The men were all volunteers for the front and were to join the 2nd Battalion, 1047th Regiment of the 284th Rifle Division stationed there, 139 miles west of Sverdlovsk in the Urals.19 They got a hearty welcome from the Red Army soldiers who were amused by the sailor’s blue and white striped collarless shirt, the Navy’s emblematic telnyashka, under their pea jackets.
It was something that 27-year old Warrant Officer Vassili Grigorievich Zaitsev had come to take great pride in ever since he had been conscripted into the Red Navy in 1937. He had worked as a payroll clerk for the last four years, earning a promotion for his diligence and reliability. Like so many of his comrades he had volunteered for the front as soon as the war had started, but only recently had his request and that of so many others in the Pacific Fleet been approved to join the fighting at Stalingrad.
Zaitsev had grown up in the foothills of the Ural Mountains where his grandfather had taught him to shoot and hunt. The old man came from a long line of hunters and was devoted to Vassili, his favourite grandson, to whom he passed his vast experience of stalking and marksmanship. Bullets were expensive and had to be used with care. One shot, one kill, was the old man’s method. Young Vassili became an expert shot, never wasting a bullet and became so good at building hides that even his grandfather could not find them. To him tracking an animal was like reading a book. Like all bureaucracies the Red Navy failed to exploit this talent. Instead, because Vassili had taken accounting courses, they thought him a perfect payroll clerk. Some things never change.
However, anyone who got to know the payroll clerk would be struck by several things: ‘his modesty, the slow grace of his movements, his exceptionally calm character, and his attentive gaze. His handshake was firm, and he pressed your palm with a pincer-like grip.’20
Southeastern Front Headquarters, 12 September 1942
Chuikov had been ordered by the Front military council to report immediately to its headquarters on the east bank of the Volga. It took him hours to find one of the irregular transports coming from the other side. He had time to walk through the field hospitals huddled along the bank in dugouts and tents, crowded with wounded and overworked and overwhelmed staff. It was a depressing sight.
The next morning he reported and was briefed by Khrushchev while Yeremenko listened. ‘The conversation was brief,’ he wrote. ‘I had been appointed Commander of the 62nd Army.’ They told him Lopatin had been removed for defeatism. Khrushchev pointedly stated that his selection was based on Chuikov’s beating the enemy on the Aksay while in command of the Southern Group. Then Khrushchev asked him, ‘Comrade Chuikov, how do you interpret your task?’
Chuikov had not been prepared for such a question, but the answer quickly came from deep within.
We cannot surrender the city to the enemy because it is extremely valuable to us, to the whole Soviet people. The loss of it would undermine the nation’s morale. All possible measures will be taken to prevent the city from falling. I don’t ask for anything now, but I would ask the Military Council not to refuse me help when I ask for it, and I swear I shall stand firm. We will defend the city or die in the attempt.21
They replied that he understood his mission completely.
Chuikov set out immediately to find his headquarters. As his ferry approached the right bank, he could see,
the landing stages filled with people. They are bringing the wounded out of the trenches, craters and dugouts, and people are crowding round with bundles and cases . . . all these people have stern faces, black with dust and streaked with tears. Children, racked with thirst and hunger, no longer cry, but merely whimper, trailing their little hands in the water ... One’s heart contracts and a lump comes to one’s throat.22
He found his headquarters on Mamayev Hill (or Kurgan), a vast artificial mound built ages ago by steppe nomads as a burial site and located in the centre of the city. He found the dugout and Krylov, yelling over the phone as shells hitting outside drizzled dirt from the rafters overhead on everyone. Here was a man that he might work with, just as tough and decisive as himself. That night he discovered what a hollow shell 62nd Army was. In his three armoured brigades there was only one tank left. One division had been reduced to a composite ‘regiment’ of 100 infantry, less than a company. The next division had only enough infantry left to amount to a battalion. His motorized brigade had barely 200 infantry. A division on the left bank had only 250 infantry. Only Colonel Sarayev’s NKVD division and two other brigades were more o
r less up to strength.
Worse yet was the sense of hopelessness that was spreading like the pox among the men, accelerated by Lopatin’s despair. Men were drifting back to the Volga to find a way across. Even senior staff officers were trying to get across, feigning illness. Nevertheless, he determined to attack on the 14th.
Stalingrad, 13–15 September 1942
Chuikov’s first full day of command was welcomed by a German attack on the Kurgan itself. His command post bunker was struck so often that the telephone wires were cut again and again. He asked Yeremenko for several divisions to reinforce his disintegrating lines. Then he moved from the Kurgan, when the Germans had fought their way to within 800 yards of his command post, to a command bunker dug in the side of the Tsaritsyn gorge.
In the short time since he had arrived, he had observed that the German tactics were consistent with what he had experienced at Kalach and on the Aksay.
Watching the Luftwaffe in action, we noticed that accurate bombing was not a distinguishing feature of the German airmen: they bombed our forward positions only when there was a broad expanse of no-man’s land between our forward positions and those of the enemy.
The solution seemed to be to reduce that expanse to no more than a grenade’s throw, to grasp the enemy by the buckle. ‘We must gain time. Time to bring in reserves, time to wear out the Germans; Chuikov told his assembled commanders. He pointed to the map of Stalingrad on the wall. ‘The scale was no longer the kilometre, rather it was the metre. The battle was for street corners, blocks of houses, individual houses.’ Krylov drew the enemy positions with a blue pencil (Soviet units in red, of course).23
Chuikov knew he did not have a large force to throw at the enemy, and the enemy knew it, too. He recalled that the great Suvorov had said that ‘to surprise is to conquer’. Although his infantry were weak, he was able to call on strong artillery support. The guns thundered at 03.30 in the morning of the 14th. He spoke to Yeremenko who promised him that at sunrise the Red Air Force would be in the sky over the city to disrupt the inevitable Luftwaffe appearance. He also said that the 13th Guards Rifle Division had been released from Stavka reserve and would begin crossing the river that evening.
The attack achieved some success in the centre, but at dawn the Luftwaffe arrived in strength and defeated Chuikov’s air support. Units of 50-60 aircraft then bombed and strafed his attacking units, ‘pinning them to the ground. The counter-attack petered out.’
The Soviet troops in the centre of 62nd Army’s line had been all but wiped out. Chuikov looked about for any reserve. He faced down NKVD Colonel Sarayev who finally accepted that he was a soldier of the 62nd Army. His own lines were stretched thin, but he had 1,500 worker militia, and these Chuikov used to garrison a number of large buildings in the path of the Germans, each under the command of a reliable communist. It was not enough.
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 l
and 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.
Disaster at Stalingrad: An Alternate History Page 21