A Writer at War (24 page)

Chuikov’s army was not only exhausted and demoralised. Reduced to fewer than 20,000 men, it was heavily outnumbered and outgunned on the key sector of central Stalingrad, where four German infantry divisions, two panzer divisions and a motorised division attacked from the west towards the Volga. The two key objectives for them were the Mamaev Kurgan, a Tartar mound 102 metres high (and known as Point 102), and the Volga crossing point just beyond Red Square. Chuikov reached this landing stage on the night of 12 September immediately
after his appointment as commander of the 62nd Army had been confirmed by Yeremenko and Khrushchev.

By the light from blazing buildings, he made his way to the Mamaev Kurgan where 62nd Army headquarters was temporarily established. The situation was even more desperate than he had feared. ‘I see Mamaev Kurgan in my dreams,’ Chuikov told Grossman later.

The only unmauled formation under his command was Colonel Sarayev’s 10th NKVD Rifle Division, but its units were dispersed and Sarayev, who reported to the NKVD chain of command, was more than reluctant to put his men under Red Army control. Chuikov’s commissar, Gurov, was scathing about the NKVD division.

‘The Sarayev division was scattered all over the front, and therefore there was practically no control over it. The Sarayev division did not fulfil its function. It hadn’t held its defensive positions, and didn’t maintain order in the city.’

The previous year, no military commander had had the courage to face up to one of Beria’s officers. But Chuikov, facing disaster, had no qualms. Evidently, his threat to Sarayev about Stalin’s anger if the city fell had the required effect. Sarayev followed orders and placed one of his regiments in front of the vital landing stage, as instructed.

Grossman only discovered later that Chuikov was another commander who used to punch his subordinates when in a foul mood. Chuikov was indeed ruthless, as ready to execute a brigade commander who failed in his duty as a simple soldier who turned tail in battle, but his own physical bravery was beyond question.

‘A commander must feel that it is better for him to lose his head than to bow to a German shell. Soldiers notice these things.’

‘The first task was to instil in your [subordinate] commanders the idea that the Devil is not so terrible as he is painted.’

‘Once you are here, there is no way out. Either you will lose your head or your legs . . . Everyone knew that those who turn and run would be shot on the spot. This was more terrifying than the Germans . . . Well, there is also Russian zeal. We adopted a tactic of counter-attack. We attacked when they became tired of attacking.’

In his memoirs, Chuikov openly acknowledged that when defending Stalingrad, he had followed the precept that ‘Time is Blood’. He had to hold the Germans at all costs and that meant throwing fresh regiments and divisions into the hell of the city as soon as they reached the eastern bank and were ready to be ferried across.

The Sixth Army’s major offensive into the city was launched just before dawn on 13 September. Chuikov had not even had time to meet his formation commanders when the German 295th Infantry Division came straight for the Mamaev Kurgan. Two other infantry divisions headed for the main station and the landing stage. Chuikov could only watch events from a slit trench through periscopic binoculars.

That evening, Führer headquarters celebrated the success of the 71st Infantry Division reaching the centre of the city. Stalin heard the same news in the Kremlin when Yeremenko telephoned him and warned that another major attack could be expected the next day. Stalin turned to General Vasilevsky. ‘Issue orders immediately for Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards Division to cross the Volga and see what else you can send over.’ Zhukov, who was also with them, poring over a map of the area, was told to fly down again immediately. Nobody was in any doubt that the moment of crisis had arrived.

Chuikov’s army headquarters now found itself in the front line, following the attack on the Mamaev Kurgan the day before. In the early hours they moved south to the tunnels of the Tsaritsa gorge, which Yeremenko and Khrushchev had so recently abandoned. Gurov told Grossman: ‘When we were leaving Height 102, we felt that the worst thing of all was uncertainty. We didn’t know how all this was going to end.’

The battle on 14 September went badly for the defenders. The German 295th Infantry Division captured the Mamaev Kurgan as Chuikov had feared, but the biggest threat came in the centre of the city, where one of Sarayev’s NKVD regiments was thrown into a counter-attack on the main station. It changed hands several times during the day.

The key event, according to the Stalingrad legend, was the crossing of the Volga under fire by General Aleksandr Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards Rifle Division.
¹¹
This formation had been hurried down by forced marches. Grossman recreated the march and the arrival on the bank of the Volga from participants.

The road turned south-west
, and soon we began to see maples and willows. Orchards with low apple trees in them stretched around us. And as the division was approaching the Volga, we saw a tall, dark cloud. One couldn’t possible mistake it for dust. It was sinister, quick, light, and black as death: that was the smoke from burning oil-storage tanks rising over the northern part of the city. Big arrows nailed to the trunks of trees said ‘Crossing’. They pointed towards the Volga . . . The division couldn’t wait until night to cross the river. Men were hastily unloading crates of weapons and ammunition, and sugar and sausage.

Barges were rocking on the waves, and men from the rifle division felt frightened because the enemy was everywhere, in the sky, on the opposite bank, but they had to encounter him without the comfort of solid earth under their feet. The air was unbearably transparent, the blue sky was unbearably clear, the sun seemed relentlessly bright and the flowing flat water seemed so tricky and unreliable. And no one felt happy about the clarity of the air, about the coolness of the river in the nostrils, about the tender and moist breath of the Volga touching their inflamed eyes. Men on the barges, ferries and motor boats were silent. Oh, why isn’t there that suffocating and thick dust over the river? Why is the bluish smoke of the smokescreen canisters so transparent and fine? Every head was turning from side to side in anxiety. Everyone was glancing at the sky.

‘He’s diving, the louse!’ someone shouted.

Suddenly, a tall and thin bluish-white column of water sprang up about fifty metres from the barge. Immediately after it another column grew and collapsed even closer, and then a third one. Bombs were exploding on the surface of the water, and the Volga was covered with lacerated foamy wounds; shells began to hit the sides of the barge. Injured men would cry out softly, as if trying to conceal the fact of being wounded. By then, rifle bullets had already started whistling over the water.

There was one terrible moment when a large calibre shell hit the side of a small ferry. There was a flash of flame, dark smoke enveloped the ferry, an explosion was heard, and immediately afterwards, a drawling scream as if born from this thunder. Thousands of people saw immediately the green helmets of the men swimming among the wreckage of wood rocking on the surface of water.

Chuikov told Rodimtsev, who crossed to the west bank during the afternoon
of 14 September to receive his orders, that the situation was so desperate that his men should leave behind all their heavy equipment, bringing just grenades and personal weapons. Rodimtsev described it to Grossman at a later stage in the battle.

‘We began the crossing at 1700 hours on 14 September, preparing weapons as we went along. One barge was destroyed [by bombing] during the crossing; forty-one men were killed and twenty survived.’

Much has been written of the 13th Guards Rifle Division charging up the steep bank of the Volga and straight at the Germans, who had advanced to within two hundred metres of the river’s edge. But Grossman heard about a special mission assigned to a small group of six men from the division.

Sapper Lieutenant Chermakov, Sergeants Dubovy and Bugaev, and Red Army soldiers Klimenko, Zhukov and Messereshvili carried out the task of blowing up a sealed building of the State Bank. Each carried 25kg of explosives. They made it to the bank and blew it up.

Inevitably, there was a less heroic aspect to the crossing of the river, which Soviet official accounts always suppressed.

Seven Uzbeks were guilty of self-inflicted wounds. They were all shot.

The exploits of the 13th Guards Rifle Division attracted a great deal of attention in the Soviet and international press. Rodimtsev, to Chuikov’s furious jealousy, became a world-famous hero. Grossman, however, was more interested in the bravery of the soldiers and junior officers than in the squabbles of the commanders. He persuaded Rodimtsev’s headquarters to let him have the report below, and he carried it with him in his field bag all through the war. He mentioned it in his essay ‘Tsaritsyn-Stalingrad’ and included it in the novel
For a Just Cause
.

[Report]

Time: 11.30 hours, 20.9.42

To: Guards Senior Lieutenant Fedoseev (Commander of the 1st Battalion)

May I report to you, the situation is as follows: the enemy is trying to encircle my company, to send sub-machine-gunners round to
our rear. But all their efforts have so far failed in spite of their superior strength. Our soldiers and officers are displaying courage and heroism in the face of the fascist jackals. The Fritzes won’t succeed until they’ve stepped over my corpse. Guards soldiers do not retreat. Soldiers and officers may die like heroes, but the enemy mustn’t be allowed to break our defence. Let the whole country learn about the 3rd Rifle Company of the 13th Guards Division. While the company commander is alive, not a single whore will break through. They might break though if the company commander is killed or heavily wounded. The commander of the 3rd Company is under stress and unwell physically himself, deafened and weak. He gets vertigo, is falling off his feet, his nose bleeds. In spite of all the hardships, the Guards, namely the 3rd and 2nd Companies, will not retreat. We will die like heroes for Stalin’s city. Let the Soviet land be the [enemy’s] grave. Commander of the 3rd Company Kolaganov has himself killed two Fritz machine-gunners and took from them a machine gun and documents which he has presented to the HQ of the battalion. [Signed] Kolaganov

The 62nd Army, continually outnumbered, held on as best it could within an ever diminishing perimeter along the west bank. Rodimtsev told Grossman: ‘We operated with no reserves. A thin defence line, that was all we had.’

Yeremenko told him: ‘I was sweating, [The Germans] were pressing hard, and we had positioned our troops stupidly. I felt hot all the time, [even though] I am a very healthy man. We were just feeding soldiers [into the battle]. That was it.’

Gurov, the chief commissar of the 62nd Army, pointed out: ‘There were days when we evacuated 2,000–3,000 injured men.’

Krylov, the chief of staff of the 62nd Army, remarked on the German conduct of the battle.

‘They rely on the massive use of fire-power, to stunning effect. Their powerful materiel is in inverse proportion to the potential of German infantry. German middle-rank commanders completely lack initiative.

‘The first days of September were particularly hard, the beginning of chaos. In the evenings I could pull myself together in order to give instructions to the troops. During the day, we just counted down minutes till the evening.’

The Germans knew only too well that they needed to break the 62nd Army’s life lines across the Volga, using artillery as well as the Luftwaffe. That was why there were so many struggles back and forth to secure the Mamaev Kurgan, the one hill from which direct fire could be concentrated on the landing stages. The river-transport troops, many of them Volga boatmen and fishermen, faced dangers as great as those of the
frontoviki
on the west bank.

The officer in charge of the crossing, Lieutenant Colonel Puzyrevsky, has been here about two weeks. His predecessor, Captain Eziev, a Chechen, was killed by a bomb on a barge. Perminov, the military commander, has been here for fifty-seven days. Deputy Battalion Commander Ilin has been taken away by air, heavily wounded. Smerechinsky – killed – was the chief of the crossing before Eziev. The battalion commander, who set up the Volga crossing, was killed by a bomb splinter. Sholom Akselrod, commander of the technical platoon, was killed on a barge by a mine.
Politruk
Samotorkin was wounded by a mine.
Politruk
Ishkin’s leg was torn off by a shell.

For the reinforcements assembling on the west bank opposite, the 1,300 metres of open water was enough to break anyone’s nerve. But Chuikov, with his characteristically brutal humour, observed that the crossing was just the start.

‘Approaching this place, soldiers used to say: “We are entering hell.” And after spending one or two days here, they said: “No, this isn’t hell, this is ten times worse than hell.” [It produced] a wild anger, an inhuman anger, towards Germans. [Some Red Army soldiers] were escorting a prisoner, but he never reached his destination. The poor chap died from fear. “Would you like to drink some water from the Volga?” [they asked], and they rammed his face into the water ten or twelve times.’

Suffering seemed to have become a universal fate. Towards the end of the month, Grossman received a letter from his wife, Olga Mikhailovna, in which she recounted the death of her son, Misha, who had been killed by a bomb. He wrote back in a clumsy attempt to mitigate her despair.

My own one, my good one
. Today I received your letter which someone had brought from Moscow. It grieved me deeply. Don’t let your spirits sink, Lyusenka. Don’t give way to despair. There is so much sorrow around us. I see so much of it. I’ve seen mothers who have lost three sons and a husband in this war, I’ve seen wives who’ve lost husbands and children, I’ve seen women whose little children have been killed in a bombing raid, and all these people don’t give way to despair. They work, they look forward to victory, they don’t lose their spirits. And in what hard conditions they have to survive! Be strong, too, my darling, hold on . . . You’ve got me and Fedya, you have love and your life has a meaning.