A Writer at War (27 page)

Sergeant Vlasov, forty-eight, an old man, from Yaroslavl. The barge was holed by a shell. While one man held his legs, Vlasov plugged the hole with his coat and nailed planks over it. There was four hundred tons of ammunition on the barge. [Vlasov] had been the chairman of a collective farm. His two sons are at the front, his wife is back home with three other children.

After the commissar’s speech, Vlasov shot a coward, the helmsman of a motor launch, the driver Kovalchuk. Kovalchuk had been
ordered to take soldiers across to the Red October factory. There was a heavy bombardment, he got frightened and took them to an island instead, saying: ‘Life is more important to me . . . You can transfer me, or shoot me, but I’m still not going to do it. I’m an old man.’ He was simply afraid, and he was swearing. He wouldn’t recognise anyone, and he said about the general’s order: ‘To hell with generals!’

The battalion was formed up for Kovalchuk’s execution in front of the ranks. ‘At a time when hundreds of thousands of soldiers are fighting for Stalingrad, he has betrayed the Motherland,’ [the commissar proclaimed]. ‘Who would like to shoot him?’ Vlasov stepped forward. ‘Allow me, Comrade Commissar.’

[Kovalchuk] cringed. He cried: ‘Have mercy on me, Comrade Commissar, I will reform.’ [The commissar] embraced Vlasov in front of his company.

The battalion commissar clearly had considerable respect for Vlasov.

‘The most terrible thing I’ve been through was when a barge [was hit]. There were about four hundred men on it. There was panic, and cries. “We are sinking, we are lost!” Vlasov came up to me: “It’s ready, Comrade Commissar.” [i.e. the barge was already patched up.] And just then a fire broke out. A soldier, the son of a bitch, had taken a bottle of KS
⁸
and started drinking, and a fire began. We put it out with a groundsheet. At any moment they could have started jumping in the water! Old man Muromtsev was there with us as well. He found two holes and plugged them. Everyone can get scared, can’t they? I got frightened myself, everyone is prone to it, but some can keep this fear under control. Now we are so used to it that when it becomes quieter, they say: “It’s a bit boring!”’

Grossman did a full interview with Vlasov.

Vlasov, Pavel Ivanovich, forty-eight years old, from the area of Yaroslavl. He has a family of five. One of his sons is a guards mortarman. Vlasov was drafted in August 1941. To begin with he guarded depots.

‘We have been here on the Volga since 25 August. The barge was
large, about four thousand tons of amunition. A bombardment began while we were loading it, but we paid no attention to it. We cast off. I was in the front of the boat, that was my place. They opened fire. I had to watch out. A hole appeared in the deck and in the side of the boat, one metre below the waterline. The wood was splintered. We heard the noise of water [pouring in]. People began to cry out.

‘I snatched a groundsheet from one of them and ran into the hold. It was light [enough to see] there because the deck was broken. We crammed the big hole with the groundsheet and a greatcoat. And the small holes, we filled them from the outside. They held me by the legs, and I leaned over.’

About the cowardly driver of the motor launch. ‘That was at the beginning of October. We had received an order to cross over to the other [western] side and mend the mooring. He took us to an island and said: “For me, life is more important.” We started cursing him in foul language.

‘A report was made to the commissar about it. We were formed up, the whole battalion. The commissar read out the order, and he, Kovalchuk, was not behaving well. He was crying and pleading to be sent back to his post. But he was a bad offender already: he’d said that he’d desert. I had the feeling that, if I could, I’d tear him to pieces, even without that [death] sentence. Then the commissar said: “Who would like to shoot him?” I stepped out of the line, and [Kovalchuk] collapsed. I took a rifle from my comrade and shot him.’

‘Did you feel any pity for him?’

‘How can one speak of pity?’

‘I received my call-up papers on the night of 28 August [1941]. I don’t drink much normally, I am not used to it. I don’t write much [in letters home]: “I am still alive,” and I ask them to describe how they are managing the household. The kids aren’t spoilt, I don’t know how they are behaving in my absence, but they did help when I was there. There’s a lot of work. One has to work night and day. Of all crops, flax is the most labour-intensive. You need to weed it, and weed again, to pull it by hand, to dry it in stooks, then beat it down, spread it and then lift it . . . In general, the work here is not so hard as back home, although we had to go three days without
sleep while we were making a bridge. If you get tired well and truly, you sleep. If you haven’t slept one night, you’ll sleep the following one.

‘Our anti-aircraft guns aren’t doing a good job. So far, I have only seen three aircraft knocked down by them. They don’t deserve any praise.

‘The youngsters obey me. Sometimes I am strict with them, but it’s necessary. If one shows a weak spot, it’s no good, either at home or at war . . . I handed everything over when I was leaving for the war. I have no debts. If I get killed, there’ll be no debts left unpaid . . . One carries all one’s belongings on oneself: a mug, a pot, a spoon. Money we send home, there’s nothing to buy.

‘In my section there’s Moshchav and Malkov. There’s no one else. Everyone else has been killed or wounded . . .

‘We catch fish. The Germans stun ’em for us. I caught a sterlet, then an ide, and we made soup.
⁹

‘There are dogs who know aircraft very well. They pay absolutely no attention when one of our aircraft is flying over, even if it roars across right above their heads. But they start to bark immediately at German planes. They start to howl and hide, even when one of their aircraft is flying very high.’

‘Shells and bombs send off no shrapnel or splinters when they explode in the water. Only a direct hit is dangerous. Yesterday a trawler was hit. It went to the bottom with seventy-five wounded men.’

In his article ‘The Stalingrad Crossing’, Grossman wrote:

The earth around the landing point
was ploughed up by their evil metal . . . And German fire never stopped even for a minute . . . Between the piers on the bank and Stalingrad lay 1,300 metres of the Volga’s water. Soldiers from the pontoon battalion had heard many times, in brief moments of silence, a distant sound of men’s voices. At that distance it sounded sad: ‘A-a-a . . .’ That was our infantry rising for a counter-attack.

The [Germans have a] timetable: [Artillery] fire until midnight. From midnight until two in the morning – quiet. From 2 a.m. until 5 a.m. – they fire again. From five till noon – quiet. The [Luftwaffe]
works from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon, as if it were a regular job. They aim at the bank. They don’t waste bombs in the river.

‘The crossing operates from six o’clock in the evening until four thirty in the morning . . . [one of the men said] We camouflage [the boats], bringing them under cover of the bank and trees. The steam pinnace
Donbass
is hidden inside a destroyed barge . . . It’s very hard when there’s a moon. It’s beautiful, but damn the beauty.’

A welder at the west bank crossing point soon found himself mending more than battered boats.

Welder Kosenko was so good people came to him from the front and asked him to mend their Katyushas. ‘You do it better than at the front.’ Two tanks rushed back from the front. ‘Quick, we’ve got to go back and fight.’ He fixed them and they went back into the battle.

Everyday life. The [transport troops] have their own bakery,
banya
and delousing facility. The
banya
is dug out of the earth. The soldiers like to go there with birch twigs. They would stay there all the time if they could. Its chimney has been knocked down by an explosion. The bakery is a Russian stove, dug into the earth. They bake a wonderful, light hearth bread. They are excellent bakers, but the whole bakery was smashed by the latest bombing! The 2nd Company’s kitchen [suffered] a direct hit too. ‘May I report? The kitchen has been blown up, together with the
shchi
!’

‘Well, go and cook more dinner, then.’

Grossman, although only a correspondent, evidently pitched in when the situation demanded.

[A supply of] Katyusha rockets caught fire. There was one truckload of them and dozens of vehicles around it. We dragged them away.

But above all, he was pleased that his articles meant so much to the men.

They all liked my piece very much about the soldiers from Yaroslavl. They were as proud as peacocks: ‘This is written about us!’

1
The 284th Rifle Division became the 79th Guards Rifle Division on 1 March 1943 in honour of its role at Stalingrad.

2
There were no German servicewomen in the front line, so one assumes that these were Russian civilians recruited or forced to act as auxiliaries. Under Stalin’s personal order, they were to be treated as traitors even if they had been compelled to work for the Germans at gunpoint.

3
In his
Krasnaya Zvezda
article, Grossman added extra detail. ‘
Sometimes it is very quiet
, and then one can hear small pieces of plaster fall in the house opposite where Germans are sitting. Sometimes one hears German speech and the creaking of German boots. And sometimes the bombing and shooting gets so strong that one has to lean to the comrade’s ear and shout as loudly as one can, but the comrade answers with gestures: “I can’t hear.”’

4
It is impossible to judge the claimed kill scores of snipers in Stalingrad, especially Zaitsev’s, since according to his own account, he did not become a sniper until 21 October, when he shot three men, one after another. Colonel Batyuk is said to have seen this feat and ordered that he be made a sniper. So how Zaitsev achieved such a stupendous score when the most intense phase of the battle was over is hard to tell.

5
‘Zaitsev’ in Russian means hare, so Zaitsev’s apprentice snipers were known as
zaichata
, or leverets.

6
Uzbeks had the reputation of being the least reliable members of the Red Army while the Germans were openly contemptuous of their Romanian allies of the Romanian First and Third Armies which were supposed to secure the north-western and the southern flanks of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad.

7
‘Khren’ in Russian means horseradish, but it is also a euphemism for an insult similar to ‘motherfucker’. So when the pilot shouted: ‘Hey, motherfucker!’ Khrennikov was astonished at hearing what he thought was his own name.

8
KS was an industrial mixture containing unpurified spirit.

9
Acipenser ruthenus
, or freshwater sturgeon, and
Leuciscus idus
, sometimes known as the orfe.

General Chuikov’s headquarters had been less than a week in the Tsaritsa tunnel when another German offensive crushed the centre of Stalingrad. Chuikov and his staff moved some four kilometres north to the Red October works. The factory district of northern Stalingrad soon proved to be the focus of German attacks, with the first major offensive starting on 27 September. These attacks were heralded by squadrons of Stukas, which Red Army soldiers dubbed ‘screechers’ or ‘musicians’ because of their screaming sirens as they dropped towards their target.

The fighting was equally desperate on the northern flank where the 16th Panzer Division had captured Rynok and Spartakovka and advanced towards the tractor works from the north.

Bolvinov’s 149th Brigade – probably, one of the best units . . . was sent to fight under Gorokhov [commanding the 124th Brigade], and Gorokhov pushed Bolvinov into the backgound. But Bolvinov was doing what he had to. He crawled, armed to the teeth with grenades, from one fire point to another, and Red Army soldiers loved him.

For all headquarters on the west bank, the major problem was communications. Signal cables were forever being broken by shellfire and runners were cut down. Chuikov described to Grossman the feeling of frustration and fear.

‘[It was] the most oppressive sensation. There’s firing and thunder all around. You send off a liaison officer to find out what’s happening, and he gets killed. That’s when you shake all over with tension . . . The most terrible times were when you sat there like an idiot, and the battle was boiling around you, but there was nothing you could do.’

The most direct threat to Chuikov’s headquarters came on 2 October. The headquarters of 62nd Army had been sited on the steep bank of the Volga just below some fuel storage tanks which everyone had assumed to be empty. This was a dangerous mistake. The Germans targeted the tanks successfully and suddenly the headquarters was engulfed in burning oil, as Chuikov later described to Grossman.

‘Oil was flowing in streams to the Volga through the command post. The Volga was in flames. We were only some fifteen metres from the river’s edge . . . The only way out was to move towards the enemy . . . The fuel tanks were on fire. A fountain of smoke eight hundred metres high. And the Volga. All this stuff was flowing with roaring flames down to the river. They dragged me out of the river of fire and we stood on the water’s edge until morning. Some men who had been asleep burned to death . . . Up to forty men were killed at the headquarters.’

Chuikov’s chief of staff gave his own version.

Then [headquarters] moved into a tunnel by the Barrikady plant and was there from 7 to 15 October. There we were being forced away from the main forces, [so] from there, we moved to the Banny gully, into the tunnel headquarters of the 284th Rifle Division which had left there and moved towards the bank. Here one often hears of the Banny gully.

‘“The Army Command Post has disappeared!”’

‘“Where to?”’

‘“It’s not gone to the left bank, it’s moved closer to the front line.”’

On 6 October, General Paulus sent two divisions against the huge Stalingrad tractor plant on the northern edge of the city. Paulus was under heavy pressure from Hitler to finish off the pocket of Soviet resistance on the west bank. Meanwhile, Yeremenko was being urged by Stalin to counter-attack and throw the Germans back. Chuikov ignored this unrealistic order. He could barely hold on as it was, and then only thanks to the Soviet heavy artillery positioned on the east bank, firing over their heads into German forming-up areas to disrupt their preparations for an attack.