A Writer at War (26 page)

‘I’ve killed two officers. One on a hill, the other one by the State Bank. He was dressed in white. All the Germans sprang to their feet and saluted him. He was checking on them. He’d wanted to cross the street, and I hit him in the head. He fell down at once, raising his feet with shoes on them.

‘Sometimes I come out of the basement in the evening, I look around and my heart sings, I would love to spend half an hour in a city which is alive. I come out and think: the Volga is flowing so quietly, how come such terrible things are happening here? We had a man from Stalingrad here. I kept asking him where all clubs and theatres were, and about going for strolls by the Volga.’

The editorial staff at
Krasnaya Zvezda
could hardly believe it when they received the full text of this article in a signal more than four hundred pages long brought over from the
Stavka
, the general staff headquarters attached to the Kremlin. Grossman had persuaded the signals detachment of Stalingrad Front to transmit it to Moscow. That they agreed to such a request in the middle of the battle of Stalingrad is sufficient proof of the regard in which he was held. Ortenberg was the first to acknowledge that the effort and risk to which Grossman subjected himself was worth it. ‘
It was probably because Grossman
had got close to [Chekhov],’ he wrote, ‘and had shared the hardships and dangers of fighting, that he succeeded in creating such an expressive portrait of a warrior, going so deep into the world of his thoughts and sentiments.’

The exploits of snipers were talked about and admired almost like those of football players. Each division was proud of its star, and the Siberians of the 284th Rifle Division were convinced that they had the greatest star of all in the form of Vasily Zaitsev. But the compulsion of propaganda exaggeration made the scores achieved by these Stakhanovites of the urban battlefield somewhat suspect.

Zaitsev is a reserved man, about whom soldiers in the division say: ‘Our Zaitsev is cultivated and modest. He has already killed 225 Germans.’
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His other snipers are [known as] young hares.
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Batyuk says: ‘They obey him, just like little mice. He asks: “Am I saying the right things, comrades?” Everyone answers: ‘Yes, Vasily Ivanovich.”’

There is a striking entry in Grossman’s notebook, which is hard to verify.

Murashev and medical orderly Zaitsev had been sentenced to be executed. Murashev for shooting himself through the hand, the other, because he had killed a famous pilot, who was coming down by parachute from a shot-up aircraft. [The sentence of] execution was commuted for both of them. And now they are both the best snipers in Stalingrad. (Murashev is nineteen.)

Zaitsev was the only well-known sniper of that name in Stalingrad, and there is no other account that he was ever a medical orderly, or had shot a ‘famous pilot’ coming down by parachute. Perhaps Grossman was the only person to have recorded this story before the Soviet propaganda machine rewrote his life into a legend.

Like the other snipers, Zaitsev seemed to be proud of taking revenge on any Russian woman seen associating with a German.

Zaitsev has killed a woman and a German officer: ‘They fell across each other.’

Several of the leading snipers at Stalingrad, including Chekhov and Zaitsev, reported brief duels with German snipers. This was hardly surprising since counter-sniper actions were regarded as their highest priority.

A single combat between Zaitsev and a German sniper: ‘He had killed three of our men. He waited for fifteen minutes. Our little gully was empty, and he started to get up. And I saw that his rifle was on the ground. And I stood up upright. He saw me and understood. And I fired.’

This brief, but deadly encounter was probably the one seized upon later by Soviet propaganda. It was blown up into the epic saga of a protracted duel between Zaitsev and the untraceable ‘Major Koenig’, the chief of an equally unidentifiable ‘Berlin Sniper School’, who had been flown in to track down Zaitsev and kill him. There is, however, no mention of any of this in any German source. Zaitsev’s claim that they both stood up is also highly unconvincing. Snipers on both sides tended to work in pairs, and a victorious sniper who indulged in such a boastful gesture would have been shot down immediately.

To judge by the way General Chuikov played up the story in his memoirs, he may well have been the one who had the idea of promoting the myth, especially since Zaitsev belonged to Batyuk’s division and not to Rodimtsev’s. It is intriguing that Grossman, who reproduced in
Life and Fate
his wartime notes about the sniper meeting almost as he had written them at the time, makes one change. The duel, which Zaitsev had described so perfunctorily at the meeting recorded in Grossman’s notes, lasts ‘
for days
’ in the novel. Grossman, for once, appears to have preferred the propaganda version.

Zaitsev’s subsequent memoirs (almost certainly written with heavy assistance by Soviet propaganda experts) recount the same exciting, but ultimately unconvincing, story of a duel over several days. A German telescopic sight, with a label stating that it had been recovered from the corpse of the German major, is displayed to this day in the Armed Forces
Museum in Moscow. Yet, most telling of all, there is no mention whatsoever of the famed duel in any of the accounts of the Stalingrad Front political department sent back to Moscow during the battle, even though every detail on sniper activities which could be used for propaganda was reported.

Colonel Batyuk was equally proud of their other weapon stars.

‘In our division, we have the best sniper on the [Stalingrad] Front, Zaitsev; the best mortar man, Bezdidko; and the best artillerist, Shuklin, commander of the 2nd Battery (who destroyed fourteen tanks with one gun from a pillbox). Bezdidko remarked: “He hit them all with one gun because he’s only got one.”

‘Here one likes to make fun of the legendary heavy-mortar sniper Bezdidko. When German mortar bombs fall by the command post, the divisional commander says: “Oh, that son of a bitch, Bezdidko, why haven’t I taught him to shoot like this?” And Bezdidko, who never misses his aim, which is accurate to a centimetre, laughs and frowns. And Bezdidko himself, a man with a melodious soft little tenor voice and a sly Ukrainian smile, who has 1,305 German kills noted in his scorebook, affectionately teases Shuklin, the skinny commander of the 2nd Battery.’

Bezdidko also appears in the sniper meeting recounted in
Life and Fate
, and the conversation left virtually unchanged from the original notes.

‘Comrade Colonel, I’ve killed five Fritzes today, and used four bombs.’

‘Bezdidko, tell them how you destroyed that little brothel.’

‘I regard it as a bunker,’ Bezdidko answered modestly.

Some improvisations were less successful. Zaitsev tried attaching a sniper scope to an anti-tank rifle, thinking he could put a round through a gun-slit in an enemy bunker, but the quality of the ammunition was so unpredictable that no two rounds came close to the same target. Grossman noted another invention, which was in fact less perfect than is implied here.

The brains of the Red Army have finally turned to the anti-tank rifle . . . [using] a cart wheel, fastened to a picket and rotating [through] 360°. Seven aircraft have been hit.

Battalion Commander Captain Ilgachkin had a problem: he never could manage to hit an aircraft with a rifle. He made theoretical calculations of the speed of the bullet from an anti-tank rifle (one thousand metres per second), made a table, supplemented it with information on whether an aircraft is moving towards the firing point or away from it. Having made this table, he hit an aircraft immediately. After that, he fastened a stake in the ground, made an axle, put a wheel on it and they attached an anti-tank rifle to the spokes.

Batyuk also recounted how the Germans tried to taunt them on the radio or just make jokes.

‘“Rus, have you had dinner? . . . I’ve had butter, I’ve also had eggs, Rus. But not today. Today I’ve eaten nothing.”

‘“Rus, I am going to get some water. Please shoot at my legs, not at my head. I’ve got children, I’ve got a mother.”

‘“Rus, do you wanna swap an Uzbek for a Romanian?”’
⁶

Batyuk, known to his soldiers as ‘Bulletproof Batyuk’, appears to have been one of those commanders genuinely impervious to danger.

Batyuk: ‘In this very bunker, the door used to crash down inside and fall on to the table.’ While the Germans were shelling the bunker of the artillery commander, Batyuk stood outside the entrance of his bunker laughing, and [pretending to] correct them: ‘Further right, further left.’

Artillery, as Chuikov had realised right from the start of the battle, would be their only hope. As there was little room for deploying heavy artillery among the ruined buildings of the west bank, he had withdrawn all guns and howitzers over 76mm to the east bank. The key people were the gun batteries’ forward observation officers, often concealed in high buildings like snipers. They relayed target details back by radio or by landline. ‘Artillery on the battlefield must be like a kite,’ General
Yeremenko observed to Grossman. But he had no illusions about the frequent danger of ‘friendly fire’. ‘In Stalingrad, when our artillery fires at our soldiers, they joke bitterly: “Here we are, the second front has opened at last.”’

Chuikov’s main tactic for blunting heavy German assaults was to create ‘breakwaters’ with defended houses. Fighting patrols would slip forward at night towards a chosen target, then be reinforced.

Seizure of a house. The assault group of ten men, [followed later by] a consolidation group, [with] ammunition and food for six days. [They would dig] trenches ready in case they were surrounded.

Resupplying forward and isolated units was a major problem. The 62nd Army often resorted to U-2 biplanes, mostly flown by the young women pilots, who could switch off their engines and glide silently either over German trenches to drop bombs, or over Soviet positions to drop supplies.

During the night, U-2s drop food for our troops. We mark the front line with oil lamps (flat dishes), which the soldiers light on the bottom of trenches. Company Commander Khrennikov once forgot to do this, and suddenly he heard a hoarse voice coming from the dark sky above: ‘Hey, Khren!
⁷
Are you going to light those lamps or not?’ That was the pilot. The engine had been switched off. Khrennikov says this made a terrifying impression on him: a voice from the sky calling his name.

General Rodimtsev said to Grossman:

‘My division and the Germans are stationed in houses next to each other, like pieces on a chessboard . . . They are living in basements, apartments and trenches . . . Four [soldiers] held a house for fourteen days. Two would go to get some food, the other two stayed to guard the house . . . Reconnaissance became very complicated . . . All anti-tank defence crews have been killed or wounded, to the last man . . . Moods – [the men were] tired, but spirits were high . . .

Lice – we got hold of Primus stoves and irons, and squashed them. [That] got rid of them.

And once again, jokes and insults would be hurled between trenches or even floors of the same house, often with heavy German humour: ‘Rus, give me your hat, and I’ll give you my tommy gun!’

Grossman was slightly perplexed by the ‘strange anxiety’ of the soldiers and officers he talked to. They seemed to be unusually concerned about the outside world.

‘And what do they say about us there? What do they think about us?’ There is a terrible lack of confidence.

Generals, especially Yeremenko, liked to pontificate on war and soldiering, but they often brought the subject back to themselves.

‘Young people have little experience of life, they’re like children. They die where they are sent . . . The cleverest soldiers are those aged between twenty-five and thirty. Older soldiers are “not exactly healthy men, tormented with worries about their families”. And I am tormented by my leg. I was under a terrible strain in Smolensk, and then at the Bryansk Front. Once, at the North-Western Front, I never went to bed for five days.’

‘Yes, when two generals fight each other, one of them will definitely turn out a clever man, and the other a fool. Although they are both fools,’ he added, laughing.

Gurov, the chief commissar of the 62nd Army, made similar sweeping statements.

‘The men, the soldiers, are all alike. Only commanders are different.’

If there was one area where Soviet commanders had little influence over events, it was on the vital Volga crossings. Everything depended on the men of the river-transports battalions – many of them Volga boatmen from Yaroslavl.

General Rodimtsev gave Grossman the official – and therefore optimistic – view.

‘We’ve been collecting boats from all over the river. Now we’ve got quite a fleet: twenty-seven fishing boats and motor boats. We raised a launch from the bottom of the Volga, but it was destroyed by a direct hit. The division is fully supplied: there is hot food, a spare set of underwear, chocolate and condensed milk. The evacuation of the wounded is exemplary. We have enough supplies for three days.’

Grossman, however, spent enough time with the boatmen, who had been conscripted into the army, to form a more accurate picture.

The Volga is 1,300 metres wide here . . . The boat has been hit. It was loaded with flour. Soldier Voronin didn’t lose his head. He emptied the flour from one sack, plugged the hole with the sack and blocked other holes with glue made from flour. There were seventy-seven holes in the boat. The soldier plugged them all in one day.

Corporal Spiridonov’s rear end has got smashed up. He is asking for some alcohol. Two heavily wounded men, Volkov and Lukyanov, barge in. They had walked thirty kilometres from the hospital. They’d escaped from the hospital. When put on a vehicle and driven back, they were both crying: ‘We won’t leave the battalion.’

When Eziev and Ilin were wounded, Red Army soldier Minokhodov dragged both of them from the barge and bandaged them. He himself was wounded in the back. He ran a kilometre back to the second echelon and told them that the battalion commander had been wounded, and he fell down unconscious. They were all taken to hospital together.