Russian soldiers affected to despise the German counterpart, the six-barrelled mortar, known as the Nebelwerfer. They called it the ‘footler’, or the ‘donkey’ because it made a braying noise, or the ‘Vanyusha’ (meaning little Ivan, just as Katyusha was the diminutive of Katya). There was a joke in the 62nd Army about what would happen if ‘Vanyusha tried to marry Katyusha’.*
Chuikov soon recognized that the key infantry weapons in Stalingrad would be the sub-machine-gun, the grenade and the sniper’s rifle. After the Winter War, following the devastating attacks of Finnish ski troops, shooting on the move, the Red Army accepted the idea of sub-machine-gun squads of eight men, designed to be carried into battle if necessary on the back of a T-34. In Stalingrad street-fighting, this size of squad proved ideal for close-quarter fighting. During house-and bunker-clearing, the hand grenade proved essential. Red Army soldiers called it their ‘pocket artillery’. It was also effective in defence. On Chuikov’s orders, grenades were stocked ready to hand in recesses dug into the side of every trench. Not surprisingly, there were many accidents caused by untrained soldiers. The second-in-command of a company was killed and several men were badly wounded when a newly arrived recruit mishandled a grenade. Others were killed when soldiers, mainly from Central Asia, tried to fit captured German detonators in their own grenades. ‘Further weapon training is needed,’ the chief of the political department reported to the military council of Stalingrad Front.
Another weapon, often as dangerous to the user as to its intended victims, was the flame-thrower, which was effectively terrifying when clearing sewer tunnels, cellars and inaccessible hiding places. The operator knew that as soon as the enemy sighted him, he would be the first target for their bullets.
Red Army soldiers enjoyed inventing gadgets to kill Germans. New booby traps were dreamed up, each seemingly more ingenious and unpredictable in its results than the last. Angered at their inability to fight back against the Stuka attacks, Captain Ilgachkin, a battalion commander, decided with one of his soldiers, Private Repa, to construct their own form of anti-aircraft gun. They fastened an anti-tank rifle to the spokes of a cartwheel which in turn was mounted on a tall stake driven into the ground. Ilgachkin made complicated calculations on the basis of the gun’s muzzle velocity, and the estimated speed of a diving aircraft, but whether ‘the gaunt and melancholy’ Repa paid much attention to these figures is another matter. In any case their contraption achieved a certain success, with Repa managing to bring down three Stukas?
The real anti-aircraft batteries also amended their tactics. The Stukas came over at an altitude of between 4,000 and 5,000 feet, then half-rolled to drop into a dive at an angle of about seventy degrees, their siren screaming. They came out of the dive at just under 2,000 feet. Anti-aircraft gunners learned to put up a curtain of fire to hit them either at the point of going into the dive, or at the point of coming out. Shooting at them on the way down was a waste of ammunition.
Another device was dreamed up by Vasily Ivanovich Zaitsev, who soon became the most famous sniper in the Stalingrad army. Zaitsev attached the telescopic sight from his sniper’s rifle to an anti-tank gun to take on machine-gun nests, by slotting a shell right through their loophole. But he soon found that the charges in the mass-produced shells were not consistent enough for precision shooting. Fame could be achieved even with conventional weapons. Bezdiko, the ace mortarman in Batyuk’s division, was renowned for having achieved six bombs in the air at the same time. These stories were exploited in an attempt to spread a cult of the expert to every soldier. The 62nd Army’s slogan was: ‘Look after your weapon as carefully as your eyes.’
The ‘garrisons’ holding the fortified buildings so central to Chuikov’s strategy, who included young women medical orderlies or signallers, suffered great privations when cut off for days at a time. They had to endure dust, smoke, hunger and, worst of all, thirst. The city had been without fresh water since the pumping station was destroyed in the August raids. Knowing the consequences of drinking polluted water, desperate soldiers shot at drainpipes in the hope of extracting a few drops.
Supplying forward positions with food was a constant problem. An anti-tank detachment had a Kazan Tartar cook who filled a large army thermos with tea or soup, fastened it to his back and crawled up to the front-line positions under fire. If the thermos was hit by shrapnel or bullets, the hapless cook was soaked. Later, when the frosts became really hard, the soup or tea froze and he was ‘covered in icicles by the time he got back’.
With ill-defined front lines, and a defence in depth of no more than a few hundred yards in places, command posts were almost as vulnerable as forward positions. ‘Shells exploding on top of our command post were a common occurrence,’ wrote Colonel Timofey Naumovich Vishnevsky, the commander of the 62nd Army’s artillery division, to a friend from hospital. ‘When I left the bunker, I could hear sub-machine-gun fire on all sides. Sometimes it seemed as if the Germans were all around us.’ A German tank came right up to the entrance of his bunker and ‘its hull blocked the only way out’. Vishnevsky and his officers had to dig for their lives to escape into the gully on the far side. The colonel was badly wounded. ‘My face is completely disfigured,’ he wrote, ‘and consequently I will now be the lowest form of life in the eyes of women.’
German command bunkers ran little risk of being overrun during September and October, and the standard three feet of earth on top of the wooden beams served as sufficient protection only against Katyushas. The main danger was a direct hit from the heavy artillery across the Volga. Divisional and regimental commanders were concerned with personal comfort as well as efficiency. A wind-up gramophone often sat next to a crate of brandy or wine brought from France. Some officers took to wearing sports trousers, even tennis shorts, when down in the damp, heavy air of their bunkers, because their combat clothes were infested with lice.
It was much more of an upside-down world for their soldiers. Instead of saying ‘good-night’, they wished each other a ‘quiet night’ for the dangerous hours of darkness. In the frosty morning, they emerged stiff in every joint, seeking a patch of sunshine in the bottom of the trench like lizards to absorb the warm rays. Feeling braver in the daylight, the Germans shouted insults and threats from their front lines: ‘Russkies! Your time has come!’ or ‘Hei, Rus, bul-bul, sdavaisa!’, their pidgin Russian for: ‘Surrender or you’ll be blowing bubbles!’ The notion of pushing Soviet troops back into the Volga, where they would drown like a stampeding herd, became a constant refrain.
During lulls in the battle, Russian soldiers too sought patches of sun, out of enemy sniper fire. Trenches were sometimes like a ‘tinker’s factory’, as shell cases were made into oil lamps, with a piece of rag for a wick, and cartridge cases into cigarette lighters. The ration of rough makhorka tobacco, or lack of it, was a constant preoccupation. Connoisseurs insisted that no fancy paper should be used when rolling makhorka into fat, shaggy cigarettes, only newspaper. The printer’s ink was supposed to contribute to the taste. Russian soldiers smoked constantly in battle. ‘It’s permissible to smoke in action,’ an anti-tank rifleman told Simonov, ‘what’s not permissible is to miss your target. Miss it just once and you’ll never light up again.’
Even more important than tobacco was the vodka ration, theoretically 100 grams a day. Men fell silent when the vodka was produced, everyone eyeing the bottle. The strain of battle was so great that the ration was never considered enough, and soldiers were prepared to go to desperate lengths to meet their need. Surgical spirit was seldom used for its official purpose. Industrial alcohol and even anti-freeze were drunk after being passed through the activated carbon filter of a gas mask. Many soldiers had thrown their gas masks away during the retreats of the previous year, so those who had held on to them could bargain. The result could be much worse than just a bad headache. Most recovered because they were young and healthy and did not resort to it frequently, but those who tried too often went blind.
In the arm
ies out in the steppe, soldiers often drank up to a litre of spirit a day in winter. The balance above the official ration was made up by failing to report casualties and sharing out their allocation, or through bartering uniform or bits of equipment with villagers behind the lines. Home-brews obtained this way out on the Kalmyk steppe included ‘every imaginable sort of alcohol, even a spirit made from milk’. Such commerce proved more dangerous for civilians than soldiers. A ‘military tribunal of NKVD Forces’ sentenced two women to ten years each in the Gulag for trading alcohol and tobacco in exchange for parachute silk to make underclothes.
The medical services in the Red Army were seldom regarded as a high priority by commanders. A seriously wounded soldier was out of the battle, and senior officers were more concerned with replacing him. Yet this attitude did not deter the very bravest figures on the Stalingrad battlefield, who were the medical orderlies, mainly female students or high-school graduates with only the most basic first-aid training.
The commander of 62nd Army’s hundred-strong sanitary company, Zinaida Georgevna Gavrielova, was an eighteen-year-old medical student, who had received the job on the basis of a strong recommendation from the cavalry regiment in which she had just served. Her medical orderlies, few of them much older than herself, had to conquer their terror and crawl forward, often under heavy fire, to reach the wounded. They then dragged them out of the way, until it was safe to carry them on their backs. They had to be both ‘physically and spiritually strong’, as their commander put it.
There was no question of medical personnel being non-combatant. The beautiful Gulya Koroleva, a twenty-year-old from a well-known Moscow literary family, had left her baby son in the capital and volunteered as a nurse. Serving with the 214th Rifle Division in the 24th Army on the northern flank, she was credited with having ‘brought over a hundred wounded soldiers back from the front line and killed fifteen fascists herself. She was posthumously awarded the Order of the Red Banner. Natalya Kachnevskaya, a nurse with a Guards Rifle Regiment, formerly a theatrical student in Moscow, brought back twenty wounded soldiers in a single day and ‘threw grenades at the Germans’. Stalingrad Front headquarters also singled out (posthumously) the bravery of another female orderly, Kochnevskaya, who had volunteered for the front, and carried more than twenty soldiers out of the firing line. Although wounded twice, she carried on bandaging and carrying officers and soldiers.*
The sacrifices of these medical orderlies were often wasted through the subsequent treatment of their charges. The casualties they carried or dragged down to the edge of the Volga were left uncared for until, long after nightfall, they were loaded like sacks of potatoes on to the supply boats, empty for the return crossing. When the wounded were offloaded on the east bank, the conditions could be even worse, as an aircraft woman discovered.
The survivors of a disbanded aviation regiment who spent the night asleep in woods east of the Volga awoke at dawn to strange sounds. Mystified, they crept through the trees towards the river bank to investigate. There, they saw ‘thousands of wounded, as far as the eye could see’, left on the sandy banks, having been ferried back across the Volga during the night. The casualties were calling for water, or ‘screaming and crying, having lost arms or legs’. The ground-crew staff went to help as best they could. The former maternity nurse, Klavdia Sterman, vowed that as soon as they reached Moscow, she would apply to transfer to a front-line medical unit.
Survival was far from guaranteed even on reaching one of the score of field hospitals on the east bank of the Volga. Conditions in Red Army hospitals, despite the presence of some of the finest Russian doctors, made them seem more like a meat-processing factory. The field hospital at Balashchov, which specialized in arms and legs, some six miles from the city, was very meagrely equipped. Instead of normal hospital beds, it had three-tiered bunks. One young woman surgeon, newly arrived, was worried not only about the physical state of the wounded. ‘They often closed in on themselves and wanted no contact with anybody else.’ She at first presumed that the wounded soldiers brought back across the Volga out of the ‘hell’ of Stalingrad would never want to return. ‘On the contrary: it became apparent that soldiers and officers wanted to go back to the front.’ Amputees certainly showed no sense of relief at missing the fighting. In fact, most of those incapacitated or permanently scarred, like the artillery colonel whose face had been sliced up by shrapnel, felt that they were no longer proper men.
Bad rations did not help either recovery or morale. Grossman, in an emotional state, clearly assumed that this was Russia’s fate at that time. ‘In hospital,’ he jotted in his notebook, ‘the wounded are given a very small piece of salted herring by nurses who cut them up with great care. This is poverty.’ In those days, before his eyes were opened, he seemed unable to recognize the truth. Soviet logic mercilessly dictated that the best rations went to the fighting troops. The wounded, if they were lucky, received three helpings of kasha, or buckwheat porridge, a day, nothing more. The salted herring seen by Grossman was an unusual treat.
A more revealing hint of the state of mind controlling the Stalingrad Front medical services came from the results of ‘socialist competition’ in hospitals, reported to Shcherbakov in Moscow. The caterers came first, the surgeons came second, and the drivers came third. Any criteria on which this exercise was based utterly demeaned the genuine sacrifice of medical workers, who gave so much of their own blood for transfusion – sometimes twice in an evening – that they frequently collapsed. ‘If they don’t give blood’, a report explained, ‘soldiers will die’.
In the great battle of attrition, the shipments of wounded to the east bank had to be matched by fresh ‘meat for the cannon’ taken across the Volga into the city. The Stavka drip-fed the 62nd Army with reinforcement divisions as their predecessors were shot to pieces. The new battalions were marched forward at nightfall for embarkation under the eyes of the NKVD troops. They could only stare across at the city on the skyline opposite, lit by fires, and try to ignore the smell of burning. Patches of the river were still aflame with oil. There were also NKVD detachments on many of the ships, ready to shoot anyone who dived overboard in a final attempt to avoid their fate on the west bank. German shellbursts in the river ahead were enough to make many lose their head. If anybody panicked, a sergeant or officer would shoot the offender on the spot and roll his body over the side.
The boats on which they had embarked bore every sign of the crossing’s dangers. One of the fire-fighting launches, refitted as a naval craft for the Volga flotilla, was said after one outward and return trip to have received 436 bullet and shell holes; only a single square yard of hull was untouched.
The easiest targets for German guns were the rafts used by engineer regiments to ferry heavy supplies, such as timber for bunkers, across to the city. When one of these rafts drifted on to the west bank, and soldiers there ran forward to help unload, they found a sapper lieutenant and three of his men so riddled by machine-gun fire that ‘it seemed as though iron teeth had savagely torn the sodden logs of the raft and these human bodies’.
Sixth Army headquarters knew that, with winter approaching, there was no time to lose. Even before Red Square and the grain silos south of the Tsaritsa were seized, it started to prepare for a knock-out blow in the industrial, northern half of the city.
Chuikov had moved to his new headquarters on the Volga river bank half a mile north of the Red October metalworks early on the morning of 18 September. His staff officers, however, had chosen an unprotected site just below a huge oil-storage tank, which they assumed to be empty.
Great efforts were made to bring across more ammunition and supplies at night, as well as reinforcements, which landed on the bank behind the Red October and Barrikady plants. Unessential personnel who could be better used elsewhere were evacuated. Most of the anti-aircraft defences round Stalingrad power station had been knocked out and their ammunition dump destroyed, so the young women from the surviving gun crews were withdrawn across the
Volga on 25 September, and reassigned to other batteries on the east bank.
At 6.00 (German time) on the morning of Sunday, 27 September, the offensive opened with concentrated Stuka bombing. As the Stukas peeled off, one by one, dropping into the attack with sirens screaming, their gull-winged shapes were black silhouettes against an autumnal dawn. On the ground, a total of two panzer divisions and five infantry divisions advanced to crush the main triangular salient which stuck out westwards from the Volga bank.
The 62nd Army pre-empted the main thrust of the German operation, north of the Mamaev Kurgan, with several spoiling attacks on its southern side. These seemed to confirm the hyperactive suspicions of some German staff officers that Russian signallers had sneaked into their territory and tapped into German landlines. They could not accept that the preparations for their attack had been so obvious.
The main Soviet effort had been to prepare anti-tank obstacles and thick minefields in front of the main factories which extended northwards from the Mamaev Kurgan for five miles – the Lazur (‘Azure’) chemical plant, the Red October metalworks, the Barrikady weapons factory and the Stalingrad Tractor Factory.
The heavily laden Landsers started to move forwards to their start lines during the bombardment, down and up the sides of balkas turned into scree slopes with rubble. They were breathless from exertion as well as dry-mouthed from fearful anticipation of the battle ahead. On the left, part of the 389th Infantry Division prepared to advance towards the Barrikady workers’ housing. One observer described them as ‘white symmetrical blocks of buildings and little houses with their corrugated tin roofs sparkling’. The air bombardment soon set them ablaze. In the middle, the 24th Panzer Division pushed forward from the small airfield. The Austrian 100th Jäger Division attacked the Red October workers’ settlements. Meanwhile, at the base of this flank, the top of the Mamaev Kurgan was retaken from Gorishny’s 95th Rifle Division, which had been crushed by the air and artillery bombardment.