The Second World War (69 page)

Many Soviet soldiers could not take the psychological strain of battle. Altogether a total of 13,000 were executed for cowardice or desertion during the Stalingrad campaign. Those arrested were forced to strip before being shot, so that their uniforms could be reused without having discouraging bullet holes in them. Soldiers referred to a prisoner receiving his ‘
nine grams
’ of lead, a final ration from the Soviet state. Those who turned a blind eye to comrades trying to desert were themselves arrested. On 8 October the Stalingrad Front reported back to Moscow that after the imposition of hard discipline ‘
the defeatist mood
is almost eliminated, and the number of treasonous incidents is getting lower’.

Commissars were particularly disturbed by rumours that the Germans allowed Soviet deserters who crossed over to go home. A lack of political training, a senior political officer reported to Moscow, ‘
is exploited by German agents
who carry out their work of corruption, trying to persuade unstable soldiers to desert, especially those whose families are left in the territories temporarily occupied by the Germans’. Homesick Ukrainians, often refugees from the German advance who had been put into uniform and sent straight to the front, appear to have been the
most vulnerable. They had had no news on the fate of their families and homes.

The political department could have pointed to the fact that only 52 per cent of the soldiers of the 62nd Army were of Russian nationality as evidence of the all-embracing nature of the Soviet Union. And even this figure does not take into account the strong Siberian contingent. Just over a third of Chuikov’s men were Ukrainian. The balance was made up with Kazakhs, Belorussians, Jews (legally defined as non-Russian), Tatars, Uzbeks and Azerbaijanis. Far too much was expected of the
levée en masse
from central Asia, who had never encountered modern military technology. ‘
It is hard for them
to understand things,’ reported a Russian lieutenant sent in to command a machine-gun platoon, ‘and it is very difficult to work with them.’ Most arrived untrained and had to be shown how to use a gun by their sergeants and officers.

‘
When we were moved
to the second line because of huge losses,’ a Crimean Tatar soldier recorded, ‘we received reinforcements: Uzbeks and Tajiks, they were all still wearing their skull-caps, even at the front line. The Germans shouted to us in Russian through a megaphone: “Where did you get such animals from?”’

The propaganda addressed to soldiers was crude but probably effective. A picture in the Stalingrad Front newspaper showed a frightened girl with her limbs bound. ‘
What if your beloved girl
is tied up like this by fascists?’ said the caption. ‘First they’ll rape her insolently, then throw her under a tank. Advance, warrior. Shoot the enemy. Your duty is to prevent the violator from raping your girl.’ Soviet soldiers believed passionately in the propaganda slogan: ‘
For the defenders of Stalingrad
, there is no earth on the other side of the Volga.’

In early September, German soldiers had been told by their officers that Stalingrad would soon fall and that would mean the end of the war on the eastern front, or at least the chance of home leave. The ring around Stalingrad had been closed when the troops of the Fourth Panzer Army had linked up with Paulus’s Sixth Army. Everyone knew that people at home in Germany were awaiting the triumphant news. The arrival of Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards Rifle Division and the Germans’ failure to take the landing stages in the centre of the city were seen as no more than temporary setbacks. ‘
Since yesterday
,’ a member of the 29th Motorized Infantry Division wrote home, ‘the flag of the Third Reich flies over the city centre. The centre and the area of the station are in German hands. You cannot imagine how we received the news.’ On their left flank, the Soviet attacks from the north were all driven off with heavy casualties. The 16th Panzer Division had positioned their tanks on a reverse slope and knocked out all the Soviet armoured vehicles which appeared over the top of the ridge.
Victory seemed inevitable, yet doubts started to arise in some minds with the first frosts.

On the evening of 16 September, Stalin’s secretary entered his office silently and laid on his desk the transcript of an intercepted German radio signal. It claimed that Stalingrad had been captured and Russia split in two. Stalin went to the window and stared out, then rang the Stavka. He ordered them to send a signal to Yeremenko and Khrushchev demanding the exact truth on the current situation. But in fact the immediate crisis had already passed. Chuikov had begun to bring further reinforcements across the river to make up for his terrible losses. Soviet artillery, massed on the east bank, was also becoming more adept at breaking up German attacks. And the 8th Air Army was starting to send up more aircraft to face the Luftwaffe, although its aircrew still lacked confidence. ‘
Our pilots feel that
they are corpses already when they take off,’ a fighter commander admitted. ‘This is where the losses come from.’

Chuikov’s tactics were to ignore the orders from Stalingrad Front to launch major counter-attacks. He knew he could not afford the casualties. Instead he relied on ‘breakwaters’, using reinforced houses as strongpoints, and anti-tank guns concealed in the ruins to fragment the German attacks. He coined the term ‘the Stalingrad academy of street-fighting’, to describe the night raids by fighting patrols of men armed with sub-machine guns, grenades, knives and even sharpened spades. They attacked through cellars and sewers.

Fighting day and night would take place from floor to floor in ruined building blocks, with enemy groups on different floors, firing and throwing grenades through shellholes. ‘
A sub-machine gun is
useful in house-to-house fighting,’ a soldier recorded. ‘Germans would often throw grenades at us, and we would then throw grenades at them. Several times I actually caught a German grenade and threw it back, and they exploded even before they hit the ground. My section was ordered to defend one house, and in fact we were all on its roof. The Germans would get to the ground and first floor, and we fired at them.’

The resupply of ammunition became a desperate problem. ‘
The ammunition brought over during the night
is not collected in time by representatives of the 62nd Army command,’ the NKVD Special Detachment reported. ‘It is unloaded on the bank and then often blown up by enemy fire during the day. The wounded are not taken out until the evening. Heavily wounded men don’t get any aid. They die and their corpses are not removed. Vehicles drive over them. There are no doctors. The wounded men are helped by the local women.’ Even if they survived the crossing of the Volga and reached a field hospital, their prospects were far from encouraging. Amputations were carried out hurriedly. Many were
evacuated in hospital trains to Tashkent. One soldier recorded how, in his ward of fourteen soldiers from Stalingrad, just five men had ‘
a full set of limbs
’.

The Germans, dismayed to have lost their advantages of manoeuvre, dubbed this new form of combat ‘Rattenkrieg’, the war of rats. Their commanders, appalled by the intimate savagery of the fighting in which their casualties mounted at a terrifying rate, felt that they were being forced back to the tactics of the First World War. They tried to respond with storm-groups, but their soldiers did not like fighting at night. And their sentries, frightened by the idea of Siberians creeping up to seize them as ‘tongues’ for interrogation, panicked at the slightest sound and began firing. The Sixth Army’s expenditure of ammunition in September alone exceeded twenty-five million rounds. ‘
Germans are fighting without counting ammunition
,’ the Special Detachment reported back to Beria in Moscow. ‘Field guns can fire at just one man while we begrudge a machine gun a belt of rounds.’ Yet German soldiers were also writing home to complain of short rations and hunger pains. ‘
You can’t imagine
what I am experiencing here,’ wrote one. ‘Some dogs ran by the other day and I shot one, but the one that I shot turned out to be very thin.’

Other means were used to wear down the Germans and prevent them getting any rest. The 588th Night Bomber Regiment specialized in flying their obsolete Po-2 biplanes low over the German lines at night and switching off their engines as they made their bombing run. The ghostly swish made a sinister noise. These outstandingly brave pilots were all young women. They were soon dubbed the ‘Night Witches’, first by the Germans and then by their own side.

During the day psychological pressure was exerted by sniper teams. At first, sniper activity was random and ill planned. But soon Soviet divisional commanders recognized its worth in striking fear into the enemy and bolstering the morale of their own men. ‘Sniperism’ was raised to a cult by political officers, and as a result one has to be fairly cautious about many of the Stakhanovite claims made about their achievements, especially when propaganda turned ace snipers almost into the equivalent of football stars. The most famous sniper in Stalingrad, Vasily Zaitsev, who was not the highest performer, was probably promoted because he belonged to Colonel Nikolai Batyuk’s 284th Rifle Division of Siberians, a formation favoured by Chuikov. The army commander was jealous of the publicity given to Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards Rifle Division, so its star sniper Anatoly Chekhov received less attention.

The broken terrain of the smashed city and the closeness of the front lines were ideal. Snipers could hide themselves almost anywhere. A high building offered a far greater field of fire, but escape afterwards became much
more dangerous. Vasily Grossman, the correspondent soldiers trusted the most, was even allowed to accompany the nineteen-year-old Chekhov on one of his expeditions. Chekhov, a quiet introverted boy, recounted his experiences to Grossman during long interviews. He described how he selected his victims from their uniforms. Officers were a priority target, especially artillery spotters. So were soldiers fetching water when German soldiers were tortured by thirst. There are even reports that snipers were ordered to shoot down starving Russian children, bribed by German soldiers with crusts of bread to fill their water bottles from the Volga. And Soviet snipers had no qualms about shooting any Russian women seen with the Germans.

As on a fishing expedition, Chekhov would take up a carefully selected position before dawn so as to be ready for
‘the morning rise’
. Ever since his first kill, he went for head shots and the satisfying spurt of blood which it produced. ‘I saw something black spring out from his head, he fell down… When I shoot, the head immediately jerks backwards, or to one side, and he drops what he was carrying and falls down… Never did they drink from the Volga!’

The captured diary of a German Unteroffizier with the 297th Infantry Division just to the south of Stalingrad revealed how even outside the city ruins snipers had a demoralizing effect. On 5 September, he wrote: ‘
The soldier who was carrying
up our breakfast was shot by a sniper just as he was about to drop into our trench.’ Five days later he noted: ‘I have just been to the rear and I cannot express how nice it was there. One can walk upright without fear of being shot by a sniper. I washed my face for the first time in thirteen days.’ On returning to the front, he wrote: ‘The snipers don’t give us any rest. They shoot bloody well.’

The Stakhanovite mentality was deeply ingrained in the Red Army, and officers felt compelled to inflate or even invent accounts, as a junior lieutenant explained. ‘
A report had to be sent in
every morning and evening on the losses inflicted on the enemy and on the heroism of the men in the regiment. I had to carry these reports because I had been appointed liaison officer since our battery had no guns left… One morning just out of curiosity I read a paper marked “SECRET” sent by the regimental commander. It said that troops of the regiment had repulsed the enemy’s attack and damaged two tanks, suppressed the fire of four batteries and killed a dozen of Hitler’s soldiers and officers with artillery, rifle and machine-gun fire. And yet I knew perfectly well that the Germans had been sitting peacefully all day in their trenches and that our 75mm guns did not fire a single shell. I cannot really say that this report surprised me. By that time we were already used to following the example of the Sovinform Bureau [an official news agency].’

Red Army soldiers did not just endure fear and hunger and lice, which they referred to as ‘snipers’, they also suffered from a craving to smoke. Some risked severe punishment by using their identity documents to roll a cigarette if they still had some
makhorka
tobacco left. And when truly desperate, they smoked cotton wool from their padded jackets. All longed for their
vodka ration
of a hundred grams a day, but supply corporals stole part of it and topped up the remnants with water. Whenever soldiers had the chance, they would barter equipment or clothing with civilians for
samogonka
, or moonshine.

The bravest of the brave in Stalingrad were the young women medical orderlies, who constantly went out under heavy fire to retrieve the wounded and drag them back. Sometimes they returned fire at the Germans. Stretchers were out of the question, so the orderly either wriggled herself under the wounded soldier and crawled with him on her back, or else she dragged him on a groundsheet or cape. The wounded were then taken down to one of the landing stages for evacuation across the huge river, where they ran the gauntlet of artillery, machine guns and air attack. Often there were so many that they were left untended for many hours, sometimes even days. The medical services were overwhelmed. And in the field hospitals, which lacked blood banks, nurses and doctors offered their own in arm-to-arm transfusions. ‘
If they don’t
, soldiers will die,’ Stalingrad Front reported to Moscow. Many collapsed from giving too much blood.

The critical battle for Stalingrad also saw a major shift in power within the Red Army. On 9 October, Decree No. 307 announced ‘
the introduction of a unified command
structure in the Red Army and the elimination of the post of commissar’. Commanders who had suffered from the interference of political officers felt triumphant. It was an essential part in the renaissance of a professional officer corps. Commissars, on the other hand, were appalled to find that commanders now ignored them. The political department of Stalingrad Front deplored the ‘
absolutely incorrect attitude
’ which had emerged. Numerous examples were sent back to Moscow. One commissar reported that the ‘
political department is
considered to be an unnecessary appendix’.