Barbarossa (39 page)

The time for conducting large-scale operations was gone for
ever; from the wide expanses of steppe-land, the war moved into the
jagged gullies of the Volga hills with their copses and ravines, into
the factory area of Stalingrad, spread out over uneven, pitted,
rugged country, covered with iron, concrete and stone buildings. The
mile, as a measure of distance, was replaced by the yard. G.H.Q.'s
map was the map of the city.

For every house, workshop, water-tower, railway embankment,
wall, cellar and every pile of ruins, a bitter battle was waged,
without equal even in the first world war with its vast expenditure
of munitions. The distance between the enemy's army and ours was as
small as it could possibly be. Despite the concentrated activity of
aircraft and artillery, it was impossible to break out of the area of
close fighting. The Russians surpassed the Germans in their use of
the terrain and in camouflage and were more experienced in barricade
warfare for individual buildings . . .

If the battle had a tactical pattern it was one which revolved
around the fate of the Volga ferries, the lifeline of the garrison.
For although the Russians kept their heavy and medium artillery on
the east bank, they were consuming small-arms ammunition and mortar
bombs at a prodigious rate, and depended on the traffic across the
Volga for many other services essential to the fighting spirit of the
garrison, ranging from the provision of vodka to the evacuation of
wounded. The slight curve in the course of the river and the numerous
islets which obstructed the stream between Rynok and Krasnaya Sloboda
made it very difficult to enfilade all the crossings even after guns
had been installed on the right bank, and well-nigh impossible to do
so at night, when the bulk of the traffic was on the move. The
Germans were slow to realise this, and instead of putting all their
energies into attacks at the extremities of the Russian position and
working their way up and down the bank—a tactic which if
successful would ultimately have left the garrison stranded on an
island of rubble in the centre—they switched their effort to
different points in the city, adopting the most extravagant method of
simply battering away at one block after another. Each of the three
major "offensives" launched during the siege was aimed at
cutting across the thin strip of ground the Russians held and
reaching the Volga at as many points as possible. The result was that
even where they were successful in their aim, the attackers would
find themselves stranded in a web of hostile emplacements, their
access corridors too narrow to make the troops at their tip anything
but a tactical liability.

If the Luftwaffe had been employed with single-minded persistence
in an "interdiction" role (in the sense, that is to say, in
which the term came to be understood in the West), the Volga ferries
might have been knocked out. Certainly Richthofen, had he been
properly directed, could have done more about the Russian 76-mm.
batteries on the east bank, whose fire deterred the 6th Army from
operating too close to the river. Yet the fact remains that while the
Russians showed great skill and versatility in adapting their tactics
as the battle wore on, Paulus mishandled it from the start. The
Germans were baffled by a situation hitherto outside their military
experience, and they reacted to it characteristically—by the
application of brute force in heavier and heavier doses.

This bafflement extended from the senior commanders to the
ordinary soldier. Hoffmann (the diarist whose exultation at the 23rd
August terror raid has already been quoted) reflects this attitude in
the epithets he attaches to the defenders, ranging progressively
through incredulity and contempt to fear, and then to self-pity.

September 1st: "Are the Russians really going to fight on the
very bank of the Volga? It's madness."

September 8th: ". . . insane stubbornness."

September 11th: "... Fanatics."

September 13th: ". . . wild beasts."

September 16th: "Barbarism . . . [they are] not men but
devils."

September 26th: ". . . Barbarians, they use gangster
methods."

There is no further comment for a month on the quality of the
enemy, and during this time the entries are filled with gloom at the
plight of the writer and his comrades in arms.

October 27th: ". . . The Russians are not men, but some kind
of cast-iron creatures; they never get tired and are not afraid of
fire."

October 28th: "Every soldier sees himself a condemned man."

When Paulus returned to his headquarters after the conference with
Hitler on 12th September, H-Hour for his third offensive was
imminent. This time the 6th Army was deploying eleven divisions, of
which three were Panzer. The Russians had only three infantry
divisions, parts of four others, and two tank brigades. This drastic
reduction in the defenders' strength was the result of Hoth's success
in at last battering his way through to the Volga at Kuporosnoye, a
suburb of Stalingrad proper, and thereby dividing the 62nd and 64th
armies. Five days earlier, on 4th September, Hoth's tanks had split
the 64th Army for the first time by reaching the Volga at
Krasnoarmeisk, and the bulk of the Russian force, which had spent
itself in six weeks of continuous fighting against the elite
Panzergruppe
of the whole German Army, was pinned down along a
twelve-mile strip of the Stalingrad-Rostov railway embankment. The
day after the 14th Panzer took Kuporosnoye, Chuikov was appointed to
the command of the isolated 62nd Army. That night he crossed by boat
from Beketovka, and after a nightmare jeep journey up the left bank
of the river to report to Khrushchev and Yeremenko at "front"
headquarters at Yamy, took the ferry at dawn from Krasnaya Sloboda
across into the burning city.

Stalingrad had now been under continuous bombardment for
twenty-four hours, as the whole of the 6th Army's artillery paved the
way for Paulus' concentric assault. As their boat approached the
landing stage, spent shrapnel and shell fragments were dropping in
the inky water "like trout," and they could feel the air
temperature several degrees hotter from the flames. Chuikov
reflected:

Anyone without experience of war would think that in the
blazing city there is no longer anywhere left to live, that
everything has been destroyed and burnt out. . . . But I know that on
the other side of the river a battle is being fought, a titanic
struggle is taking place.

Paulus had concentrated two "shock forces" with the
intention of converging against the southern half of the town and
joining at the so-called "central landing stage," opposite
Krasnaya Sloboda. Three infantry divisions, the 71st, 76th, and
295th, were to move down from the Gumrak railway station, capturing
the main hospital, to Matveyev Kurgan. An even stronger force, the
94th Infantry Division and the 29th Motorised, was to strike
northeast from the Yelshanka mining suburb, backed by 14th and 24th
Panzer.

Chuikov had only forty tanks left in action, and many of these
were no longer mobile, but had been dug in as armoured fire points.
He also had a small tank reserve of nineteen KV's, as yet
uncommitted, but no infantry reserves whatever, for every man capable
of carrying a gun had been sucked into the battle. Chuikov's
predecessor, General Lopatin, had (allegedly) been convinced of the
"impossibility and pointlessness of defending the city,"
and this feeling of depression

had undoubtedly communicated itself to his subordinates ... on
the pretext of illness three of my deputies [for artillery, tanks,
and army engineering] had left for the opposite bank of the Volga.

The defence problem was fourfold: first, it was essential to hold
the flanks firmly anchored to the riverbank. Every yard of the steep
Volga escarpment was precious to the Russians, who had tunnelled into
it for depots, hospitals, ammunition dumps, fuel stores—even
for garages for the
Katyusha
trucks, which would reverse out
of their caves, fire a salvo, and get back under cover in less than
five minutes. The northern flank below Rynok was the stronger of the
two, for here the vast concrete edifices of the Tractor Factory and
the Barrikady and Krasny Oktyabr were virtually indestructible. But
at the southern end the buildings were less substantial and the
ground was relatively open, undulating mounds of rubble and
occasional patches of scorched heath dominated by a few towering
grain elevators. Here, too, lay the shortest route to the central
landing stage, along the course of the Tsaritsa rivulet; and to the
nerve centre of the Stalingrad defence system, Chuikov's own command
post, which was in a dugout known as the "Tsaritsyn bunker,"
sunk into the side of the riverbed at the Pushkin Street bridge.

The danger of concentrating his strength at the extremities was
that Chuikov's very long west-facing front (it was over ten miles
from Rynok to Kuporosnoye as the crow flies, and double that length
along the "line") would be vulnerable to a concentrated
assault on a narrow front, and in particular, that Matveyev-Kurgan, a
grassy hillock of parkland that dominated the centre of the town,
might be lost to the enemy before reinforcements could reach it.

Chuikov had sent urgent requests for infantry reinforcements to
Yeremenko on 13th September, when Paulus had started his attack and
he had learned during the night that the 13th Guards Infantry
Division, a very strong unit under General Rodimtsev (who had started
his experiences of street fighting in the Madrid University City, in
1936) would be sent over the river starting at dusk the following
day. However, during the afternoon of 14th September, Paulus' central
attack broke through the Russian front behind the hospital and the
Germans of the 76th Infantry Division began to pour into the rear
areas of the town, obstructed only by a few snipers.

Lorry-loads of infantry and tanks tore through into the city.
The Germans obviously thought that the fate of the town had been
settled, and they all rushed to the centre and the Volga as soon as
possible and grabbed souvenirs for themselves ... we saw drunken
Germans jumping down from their lorries, playing mouth organs,
shouting like madmen and dancing on the pavements.

To deal with this breakthrough Chuikov used his last reserve of
tanks, which meant bringing them up from the southern sector, itself
under very heavy pressure, in daylight. His own staff officers and
the bunker guard company were involved in the fighting, which raged
all night. Infiltrating German soldiers got within two hundred yards
of the Tsaritsyn bunker, and some managed to get heavy machine guns
into position where they could fire on the central landing stage.
Chuikov was now faced with the prospect of having his front once
again broken into two pieces, yet to move any more troops from the
southern end of the perimeter might lead to the collapse of the whole
position there.

At this stage German tactics, though wasteful and unsophisticated,
were highly abrasive against a defence stretched as thin as was that
of the 62nd Army in the first days of Chuikov's command. They
consisted of using tanks in packets of three or four at a time in
support of each company of infantry. The Russians would never fire at
tanks alone, but let them pass through into the field of fire of
antitank guns and dug-in T 34's which were held farther back; so it
was always necessary for the Germans to send infantry in first to
draw the defender's fire. Once his position had been identified, the
tanks would cover one another while they battered away at pointblank
range until the buildings fell down. Where the houses were tall and
substantial, this was a long and untidy business. Armour-piercing
shot was useless—it would pass right through the walls, doing
no more damage than a jagged hole about two feet across, yet to risk
sending the tanks out with only high-explosive ammunition meant that
they were at the mercy of any roaming T 34 that might come on the
scene. Furthermore, although tank fire would gut the first two
floors, the limited elevation of the turret often meant that unless
the top story was set alight the rest of the building went undamaged.

We would spend the whole day clearing a street, from one end to
the other, establish blocks and fire-points at the western end, and
prepare for another slice of the salami the next day. But at dawn the
Russians would start up firing from their old positions at the far
end! It took us some time to discover their trick; they had knocked
communicating holes through between the garrets and attics and during
the night they would run back like rats in the rafters, and set their
machine-guns up behind some top-most window or broken chimney . ..

The tank crews were understandably reluctant to take their
machines into narrow streets, where their lightly armoured rear deck
could be penetrated by antitank rifles or grenades thrown from
above. It was necessary to accompany each attacking force with
teams of flame throwers so that the buildings could be burned down,
but this was an extremely hazardous occupation as a single bullet
could turn the operator into a flaming torch. Special rates of pay
were introduced, but it was still impossible to get sufficient
volunteers without recourse to the punishment battalions.

[Owing to Russian practice of putting captured
Flammenwerfer
operatives to death in a certain fashion, they were described in
their paybooks as "Engineers, 1st Class," although drawing
rates of pay even higher.]

However, during the first days of their September offensive the
Germans enjoyed a superiority of three to one in men and over six to
one in tanks, and the Luftwaffe held complete dominion of the
daylight air. From 14th to 22nd September, while the 6th Army was
relatively fresh and the Russians were defending with the remains of
units which had been badly battered in earlier fighting, was the
period of Stalingrad's greatest peril.