* The German advance in the summer of 1942 finally came to a halt at Stalingrad, on the banks of the Volga river. There the Red Army made a stand, and the two opponents became bogged down in the nastiest sort of grinding street fighting.
* While the German Army Group B was flooding across the Don, reaching for Stalingrad only some 58 kilometers (36 miles) away, Army Group A was deep in the Caucasus region, having reached the foothills of the mountains on 9 August. Although BLUE had been mismanaged and was well behind schedule, things seemed to still be going well for the Germans, and many of the troops thought that victory was within reach.
However, as far as Stalin was concerned, if Hitler wanted Stalingrad, he was going to pay for it. The Red Army was not going to fight a delaying action at the city -- it was going to hold it, or die trying. If anyone in the ranks had any different ideas, he was likely to die anyway. In late July, Stalin had signed "Secret Order 227", nicknamed "Not One Step Backwards", making unauthorized retreats punishable by death.
This principle was applied on a broad scale. The NKVD of course operated in the Red Army to root out spies and traitors, with the definition of "traitor" being murderously broad, through what were then called the "Special Departments". The Special Departments created "blocking units" equipped with machine guns to mow down soldiers who thought to flee a battle without being ordered to do so. Blocking units were an ancient practice, not unique to the Soviets, and had been used with particular enthusiasm by Trotsky during the civil war. Stalin liked the idea as well. Many of the people in the blocking units were hardened criminals who would kill anyone without much hesitation. There are perfectly believable stories that on occasions there were stand-up battles between front-line troops and blocking units.
Order 227 also formally introduced "shtraftbaty (penal battalions)", which were made up of soldiers who broken the rules in some way. The penal battalions were suicide units, used as the leading edge of assaults. There were even penal squadrons in the air arm. The term of service in a penal battalion was three months, but the likelihood of surviving the term was small. Surprisingly, many penal battalions would fight with spirit and determination; possibly it was a point of pride to die well, or possibly it was the realization that the only slim chance for survival under such circumstances was to outfight the enemy. A serious enough wound was enough to obtain release from a penal battalion, but security officers were careful to check to see that the wound wasn't self-inflicted, or inflicted by blocking units. If they passed, the comment ATONED WITH OWN BLOOD was added to their official records. The same consolation, for whatever it was worth, was also added to the records of the slain. However, the combat distinctions of penal battalions were ignored in official Red Army records, which many veterans felt was an insult to the heroism often displayed.
Despite the brutality of Order 227, the blocking units, and the penal battalions, even some war veterans who served in the ranks defended these decisions as necessary. An army that has often been defeated acquires a tradition of defeat; breaking that mindset requires extraordinary measures. Stalin was the sort of person who took whatever measures he thought necessary, no matter how cruel.
* Stalingrad was a modern Soviet city with a peacetime population of a half million, an industrial center and a major manufacturing site for tanks and other military vehicles. It sat on the west bank of the Volga, which flowed to the southwest at that place. The city was built up along the river, with a number of important -- or soon to become important -- sites arranged as follows from north to south, linked by rail lines paralleling the river:
On 2 August 1942 Stalin assigned the defense of Stalingrad to Lieutenant General Andrey Ivanovich Yeremenko. Yeremenko, a big Russian bear of a man, had been brought from Siberia in late 1941 and had been wounded in the leg in the fighting with the Germans that followed. His wound was still bothering him, but he told Stalin that he felt fit to go into combat. When someone observed that Yeremenko was still limping, Stalin simply commented: "We will consider that Comrade Yeremenko has fully recovered."
Yeremenko arrived at Stalingrad on 4 August, where he met with his political commissar, Nikita Khrushchev. Although political commissars could be a nuisance, Khrushchev was bright and energetic, if sometimes noisy and erratic, and they made a good team. They set shop in a concealed bunker in Tsaritsa Gorge in the vicinity of Red Square, and worked hard to prepare the defense of the city.
BACK_TO_TOP* In the wake of Molotov's visit to the West, the Americans and the British conducted intensive discussions on the possibility of a landing in Europe under Operation SLEDGEHAMMER. The British were cool to the idea, to put it mildly; SLEDGEHAMMER was effectively seen as a sacrificial operation, conducted simply to draw German forces away from the East and with no other opportunity for success. Given the lack of resources, particularly landing craft, the reality soon became clear that the invasion could not be performed in 1942.
Churchill was planning a visit to Cairo, and decided to go on to the USSR via Tehran to break the news personally to Stalin. Simply handing the message on through the British embassy was out of the question; that would be telling the Soviets that the British didn't take the matter seriously. Churchill had no illusions it was going to be a pleasant visit with Stalin, comparing it to carrying a lump of ice to the North Pole.
Stalin already had reason to be unhappy: after the Murmansk convoy codenamed "PQ 17" had been all but slaughtered in early July, with 24 ships out of the 33 in the convoy sunk, the Murmansk convoys were suspended until aircraft carrier escort could be provided, and would not resume until "PQ 18" in early September. The interruption was relatively brief, but it came at a time when the Soviet Union was under intense pressure, and the suspension reinforced Stalin's belief that the British and Americans were letting the Soviets twist in the wind. Averell Harriman thought it would be reassuring to have an American representative meet Stalin along with Churchill; Roosevelt wired his consent, leaving the agenda up to Harriman. Harriman caught up with Churchill in Cairo, and the two men arrived in Moscow on the afternoon of 12 August 1942. The meeting would be elevated as the "Second Moscow Conference".
Churchill insisted on promptly meeting with Stalin, with the prime minister explaining to Koba why SLEDGEHAMMER wasn't going to happen. Stalin was unhappy, with Harriman reporting that the Soviet leader replied "with a degree of bluntness almost amounting to insult", deriding his allies for their timidity.
However, Koba was pleased when Churchill told him about plans to intensify the bombing campaign against Germany, with the Americans planning to throw their weight into the air campaign, and was intrigued with the plans for TORCH, the invasion of North Africa. Stalin somewhat surprised his guests by exclaiming: "May God help this enterprise to succeed!" -- an odd comment from an atheistic Communist. Harriman learned that it was not an unusual remark from Stalin, apparently a habit left over from his seminary days.
The visitors met with Stalin again the next day, 13 August, with British senior staff officers, who had arrived later than Churchill and Harriman, in attendance. Koba went into his "hard cop" act, complaining at length and accusing his allies of cowardice: "You British are afraid of fighting. You should not think the Germans are supermen. You will have to fight sooner or later. You cannot win a war without fighting."
Churchill had of course been expecting something along such lines, and was prepared for it. His famous eloquence was by no means entirely spontaneous -- those in his close company could sometimes hear him addressing the House of Commons from his bathtub -- and no doubt he had written the script in his mind during the long trip east. Churchill started with a tactful but hardly meek reply: "I pardon that remark only on account of the bravery of the Russian troops." He then went on to smother Stalin with a long speech, which Harriman described as "brilliant".
The translator could barely keep up. Stalin, realizing that he was outmatched -- nobody had ever accused him of brilliant oratory -- decided to retreat, laughing and politely cutting Churchill off. "Your words are of no importance. What is important is your spirit." The rest of the discussions that day remained tense, but on the third day, 15 August, Koba was back to playing "soft cop", and all was cordial. The two leaders even had an extended late-night discussion over drinks.
Churchill's military chief of staff, Field Marshal Alan Brooke, had been in attendance for the last two days of meetings. Churchill felt he was making headway with Stalin, but Brooke, a skeptic by nature, was not so convinced, writing in his diary: "It was very interesting meeting [Stalin], and I was much impressed by his astuteness, and his crafty cleverness. He is a realist ... The two leaders are poles apart as human beings ... [Churchill] appealed to sentiments in Stalin which I do not think exist there."
At a formal dinner during the sessions, Brooke found Stalin "quite lively", judging him an "outstanding man" but "not an attractive one ... He has got an unpleasantly cold, crafty, dead face, and whenever I look at him, I can imagine his sending off people to their doom without ever turning a hair." Indeed, the entire conference had been neatly stage-managed by Stalin. Thanks to Beria and Red spies in the British government, little that Churchill told Koba was the least surprise, the spies having sent precise reports of high-level strategy conferences between the British and the Americans.
On Churchill's return to Britain, the prime minister wrote President Roosevelt that he was "definitely encouraged" by his visit to Moscow, judging that having grasped the nettle and gone through the trouble to hand Stalin bad news personally, he had minimized the damage: "Now they know the worst, and having made their protest are entirely friendly."
The idea that Stalin could be "entirely friendly" was an exaggeration approaching delusion. Stalin, as Brooke had concluded, was a realist, with few concerns beyond brutal practicalities, and Churchill's deference in traveling to Moscow to meet with Stalin counted for little, possibly nothing, in comparison with the test that the Soviet dictator faced in Stalingrad.
On 19 August 1942, the British did open up a "Second Front" of sorts by sending 6,000 troops, mostly Canadians, ashore at the French seacoast town of Dieppe. The Dieppe raid was badly conceived, poorly executed, and the Germans crushed the landing at modest cost to themselves. There were silver linings to the fiasco. The action effectively proved that SLEDGEHAMMER -- which, given the scarcity of resources, couldn't have been conducted on a scale any order of magnitude larger than the Dieppe raid -- would have suffered the same fate. More positively, it enhanced the Fuehrer's worries about landings in the West, making him more reluctant to transfer forces from there to the East; it also showed that the British were willing to shed their blood in the fight against the Germans. Churchill, in fact, was determined to take aggressive action, and the Canadians had paid the price.
Stalin took little or no notice of the raid. Why would he? It was such a piddling thing; the most it could do was reinforce his perception that the Western Allies were worthless. The reality was that the USSR was essentially on its own. Stalingrad would stand or fall on the skill and determination of the Red Army and the Soviet nation.
BACK_TO_TOP* Even before Paulus moved across the Don in force, Hoth and his 4th Panzer Army was advancing on Stalingrad from the south after their futile "vacation" to Army Group A. On 20 August 1942, Hoth was about 32 kilometers (20 miles) south of the city, where he found his line of advance obstructed by terrain crossed by ravines and a line of hills.
Hoth was a tough, aggressive commander, intimidating in appearance though basically paternalistic. His men called him "Papa"; anybody who has ever been in the military knows that a commander with a nickname like "Papa" or "Pops" commands the absolute loyalty of his troops. Bad terrain was troublesome, but it wasn't going to stop him. He moved forward.
What did stop Hoth was a number of divisions from the Soviet Sixty-Fourth Army, braced by tanks and under the command of Major General M.S. Shumilov. The Soviets were holding the line of hills in a good defensive position, and showed no inclination to budge -- though Hoth hit them again and again over the next few days, with nothing to show for it but mounting casualty lists.
While Hoth was engaged in this painful exercise, on 23 August, 6th Army forces began their advance east from their bridgehead over the Don. It became a hot, dry summer day as the sun rose in the sky. The 6th Army's 16th Panzer Division, under Lieutenant General Hans Hube, charged ahead, encountering only ineffective Red Army resistance that was quickly brushed aside.
From his bunker in Tsaritsa Gorge, Yeremenko tried to deal with panicked officers and coordinate a response to the German attack. While he was engaged in this exercise, two military engineers came to the bunker and proudly announced that after two days of work, they had completed a pontoon bridge spanning the Volga, which was 1.6 kilometers (a mile) wide at Stalingrad. Yeremenko immediately told them to destroy the bridge.
They were shocked, but he repeated the order: "I said to destroy it. And quickly." Yeremenko had no real confidence in holding Stalingrad for the moment. If the Germans seized an intact crossing over the Volga, there might be no stopping them. The bridge had to go.
By nightfall, Hube and his panzers had reached the Volga, on the outskirts of Stalingrad north of the Tractor Factory. Hube set up a defensive perimeter, planning to move on the Tractor Factory come sunrise. That night, following up air raids conducted during the day, the German 4th Air Fleet pounded Stalingrad with 600 aircraft, dropping high explosive and incendiaries. The area around Red Square was flattened, fires raged out of control since the municipal water system had been shattered, and tens of thousands of civilians died. Most of the surviving citizens fled across the Volga if they could, though many of the fugitives were killed by attacks of Luftwaffe aircraft.
When the dawn came on 24 August, Hube was confident. He was an aggressive and combative commander, as hinted by the artificial black hand he had obtained in the First World War. His troops greatly respected him for his toughness, clarity of thinking, and pragmatism, calling him "der Mensch (the Man)". He moved forward rapidly at first, to abruptly run into a wall of steel and fire that stopped his panzers cold. Yeremenko had thrown together a defensive line during the night using everybody and everything he could scrape up, including Red Navy Marines from the Soviet Far Eastern Fleet, plus T-34 tanks driven right off the end of the Tractor Factory assembly line into the fighting. Some of the tanks were handled by the workers who had built them, including women.
Hube tried again on 25 August and did no better. Yeremenko continued to scrape up weapons and reinforcements, and in fact was able to launch counterattacks that by 29 August had not only inflicted serious losses on Hube's force, but had bottled up 16th Panzer against the Volga. Hube wanted to break out and escape to the west -- but orders from the Fuehrer dictated that he hold his ground and wait to be relieved.
* To the south of the city, Hoth had finally grown tired of smashing his head against the "damned hills" that blocked his line of advance. He put infantry onto the fighting line to keep the Soviets busy, then shifted his panzers southwest 48 kilometers (30 miles) where they could get around the inconvenient terrain. After two days of preparations, 4th Panzer Army moved out, to be rewarded by rapid success. By 31 August, Hoth's panzers had penetrated the outer line of Stalingrad's defenses and were threatening to drive a wedge between the Soviet Sixty-Second Army in Stalingrad and the Sixty-Fourth Army to the south of the city. Once isolated, the Germans would be able to grind down the Sixty-Second Army and take Stalingrad.
Hoth's success meant nothing if it wasn't followed up, however, and Paulus proved to be in no hurry. 6th Army didn't link up with 4th Panzer for three more days. In the meantime, Yeremenko had stabilized his defense. It was a nasty fight, and not all the troops were sufficiently motivated. After one infantry division began to bleed away deserters, the divisional commander assembled his troops, lectured them on the need to show some guts, and then walked down the front rank, shooting each tenth man in the head with his revolver until he had emptied all six chambers. It was an ancient custom, what the Romans called "decimation", and it had the desired inspirational effect.
Stalin was of course paying close attention to the battle, and on 27 August he appointed Georgiy Zhukov, arguably his best general, to take overall control of military operations in the region. For the moment, all Zhukov could do was scrape up reinforcements, weapons, and supplies and get them to Yeremenko as fast as possible. As Zhukov wrote later: "With the fall of Stalingrad, the enemy command would be able to cut off the south of the country from the center. The Supreme Command was sending to Stalingrad all that it was possible to send." It was a purely reactive response to the situation, but ideas for proactive measures were circulating through Zhukov's head.
Hoth renewed his drive on 8 September. By 10 September, his panzers had reached the Volga below the city, to the south of the Grain Elevator. The defenses were tough and he went no further. By this time, all of 6th Army was in line and the city had been invested, with Hube and his 16th Panzer finally relieved. The Soviet Sixty-Second Army was now closed up inside Stalingrad. To the south of the city, the Sixty-Fourth Army held a line southwest of the Volga, but was unable to link back up with Stalingrad's defenders.
Yeremenko was finding that trying to direct the battle from so close to the fighting line was proving counterproductive, and Khrushchev suggested to Stalin over the phone that command be shifted to the rear, on the east bank of the Volga. Stalin rejected the idea, saying that it would demoralize the troops, but Khrushchev pressed his case, and Stalin finally gave in.
There still had to be someone to conduct the battle on the spot in Stalingrad. The commander of the Sixty-Second Army, Lieutenant General Aleksandr Lopatin, wasn't up to the job, having clearly lost his nerve. On 12 September he was sacked, to be replaced by General Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov, then the deputy commander of the Sixty-Fourth Army. Chuikov went to Yeremenko's headquarters that night in an American-built jeep, with the flames from the burning city across the Volga so bright that he didn't need to turn on his headlights. He was assigned the command and Khrushchev asked him pointedly: "Comrade Chuikov, how do you interpret your orders?"
He replied simply: "We will defend the city or die in the attempt."
Chuikov was a model Russian peasant -- coarse, tough, practical, absolutely stubborn, nasty-tempered and rough on his subordinates to the point of giving them hefty blows with his fists or his walking stick on occasion, for which even Stalin reprimanded him. He was the ideal man to command the defense of Stalingrad.
* While Army Group B invested Stalingrad, Army Group A enjoyed a rapid drive south towards the Caucasus, with the Soviets providing little opposition. The Germans had an easy time of it until they reached the Terek River, running along the foothills of the Caucasus, at the end of August.
Part of the problem was that Kleist's supply lines were overextended, and he could not get fuel for his panzers. The bigger part of the problem was that the Soviets had sensibly decided to give up undefendable land and focus all their efforts on building up their defenses along the mountain regions where their military resources would have the greatest advantage. The local population was put to work, digging hundreds of kilometers of trenches and antitank ditches, building tens of thousands of pillboxes and strong points.
Kleist had really won nothing. The Germans had occupied Maikop, an oil production center, but the Soviets had done a thorough job of destroying it; all the invaders got for their trouble were choking clouds of smoke. All through September, German mountain troops probed for a breakthrough. Nazi propaganda films played up videos of German soldiers raising their banner on top of high peaks, but prying the Red Army out of such fortifications was going to take more than small bands of mountain troops. In October, snow would begin falling, and that would be the end of serious offensive operations in the region until spring.
BACK_TO_TOP* General Chuikov had little time to become comfortable, if such a word could be used in such circumstances, to his new command in Stalingrad. The next morning, 13 September, the Germans began the day with a heavy artillery barrage, followed up with an assault with panzers and infantry. Chuikov had only about 55,000 men to deal with about 100,000 Germans.
Paulus focused his attack on the center of Stalingrad, around Mamayev Hill and Railroad Station #1, while Hoth kept up the pressure on the south end of the city. Paulus wanted to cut Stalingrad in half; once that was done, the Germans would control the main ferry landing and the defense of the rest of the city would be unhinged. Resistance was stiff and his troops made slow progress that day, though Chuikov was forced to move his headquarters from Mamayev Hill to the bunker in Tsaritsa Gorge.
The morning after that, 14 September, Chuikov counterattacked, pressing the Germans back until Stuka dive bombers -- "musicians" or "screechers" as Red troops called them -- showed up and pounded the Soviets, breaking the counterattack and apparently breaking the defense as well. German panzers and troops moved forward rapidly into the center of the city, and it seemed for a moment that they had all but won the battle.
The Germans quickly found out that the Soviets had not given up; they had simply shifted tactics. As had been proven in Rostov, the Red Army might not be so skillful at the battles of maneuver in which the German Army excelled, but had a much better understanding of house-to-house fighting. Chuikov, who had something of a droll sense of humor, referred to his command as the "Stalingrad Academy of Street Fighting", and had booklets prepared to give new arrivals a quick course of instruction on the details of the art.
The streets were full of rubble that blocked the panzers or funneled them into avenues that turned out to be kill traps, with the land carefully mapped out, ringed with anti-tank guns, and covered by pre-targeted heavy artillery positioned on the east shore of the Volga. Red Army sappers crawled out at night to plant mines everywhere, which badly hindered German armor, and Luftwaffe bombers could no longer reliably determine who to bomb -- though they continued to pulverize the rubble behind the front lines, for whatever little good that did them. Chuikov's men built "mini-fortresses" in the ruins, staying as close as possible to the enemy to prevent the Germans from using heavy artillery or aerial bombing to root them out. It wasn't hard to build strongpoints in the ruins of the city, and it was easy to conceal them in the rubble.
The little fortifications were linked by trenches, and arranged to provide interlocking fields of fire. Machine gunners would wait until the enemy was well into a "killbox" before opening fire. Mortars set up in the upper floors of buildings provided precision artillery support, and antitank guns were set up where there was a clear field of fire to deal with enemy armor and add firepower to infantry fights. In some cases, the guns were dismantled, the pieces carried through the ruins, and then re-assembled. When the Germans cleared one strongpoint, the Soviets would simply fall back a bit and set up another.
Heavy Soviet artillery was sited across the Volga, with spotters moving through the ruins of the city to pinpoint targets for the big guns. Duels were sometimes conducted between Soviet and German batteries, with the German guns sited well behind their own lines. To provide more immediate fire support, Soviet trucks fitted with Katyusha rocket launcher racks were hidden near the riverbank. They were driven out to dump a load of rockets on a target, then driven back again before German counterfire fell on their position.
Despite the endless bombardments, it was still an infantryman's fight, with Red Army assault teams led by troops armed only with grenades, knives, and entrenching tools. They would rush a strongpoint and create confusion, to be followed up by better-armed soldiers who would clean up after them. The Germans also formed up assault teams, similar to those devised late in World War I, consisting usually of ten armed infantry braced with a machine gun, light mortar, and flame-throwers.
The environment was so cluttered with wreckage that Soviet infiltration teams were often able to sneak around the Germans and ambush them. Soviet troops would move quietly through back alleys or sewers, or even build a "tunnel" through a row of buildings by simply knocking holes in the internal walls and then showing up in unexpected places. Sometimes the infiltration teams would go snatch Germans as "tongues" for intelligence; German troops would turn around and find out that one of them had simply disappeared, dragged off through a sewer to be worked over by Special Department interrogation teams. German propaganda describing what would happen to soldiers unlucky enough to be captured by the Bolsheviks actually proved counterproductive, since German prisoners were often already terrified before anybody laid a finger on them. If they didn't talk then, they quickly found out that the propaganda wasn't far wrong.
Snipers picked off the incautious and dueled with each other at times. The best snipers scored hundreds of kills. Propaganda on both sides played up their snipers to the point where the profession became something of a cult, and in the Red Army snipers were in the front of the line for rations and supplies. Soviet snipers would make a dummy out of rags and whatever to provoke Germans into taking shots at it and giving away their positions. One Red Army sniper cleverly rigged white flags to pop up from the rubble when he pulled on a string, and then nailed Germans who stuck their head up to tell the Russian to come on over.
The Germans called the struggle "Rattenkrieg": war of the rats. The fighting line could be the wall inside a building, or different floors in the building. There was no telling when a soldier might encounter that one deadly bullet, or where it might come from. The Germans shot at any noise in the night, and there were a lot of friendly-fire casualties on both sides, both from jumpy infantry and from misdirected mortar or artillery shells. The environment was a waking nightmare, with the cries of the wounded proving particularly disturbing. One German wrote in his diary: "It's not a human sound, just the dull cry of suffering of a wounded animal."
Astoundingly, there were still thousands of civilians hiding in the ruins, trying to survive. Small children were sometimes adopted by units on either sides, mostly as mascots, though sometimes they were used to run errands. Soviet troops were ordered to fire on children if they were clearly aiding the Germans, though it is difficult -- if not impossible -- to believe that any but the most callous Red Army soldiers did more than fire a few shots in their direction to teach the kids some caution.
For the civilians, for the soldiers on both sides, food and water could be hard to come by, sickness was common, and everyone was infested with lice, which the Germans called "little partisans". Soldiers did what they could to make themselves as comfortable as the situation allowed. During lulls in the fighting the troops on the two sides would sometimes chat and make little deals, trading a pot of water for some cigarettes or such, and then go right back to killing each other. In some cases, after both sides watched the bodies of their comrades pile up in a fight for some insignificant bit of ruin, they would decide that neither side was going to win, resulting in a temporary local cease-fire.
* Mamayev Hill and Railroad Station #1 changed hands repeatedly that day; that night; and the next day, 15 September. Chuikov had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to hold the ferry landing. He had to hold the landing since there were 10,000 reinforcements waiting to cross the Volga and join the battle, in the form of the Thirteenth Guards Division under Major General Alexander Ilyich Rodimtsev. Rodimtsev was a Spanish Civil War veteran and had won distinctions in the fighting since Hitler's invasion; he was a person of intellect, humor, and by all evidence total fearlessness. His troops were well-trained, highly motivated, and adored him -- fearing wounds to a considerable extent because that might mean a transfer to another command.
The Thirteenth Guards managed to get across the river that night. Chuikov even ordered NKVD units into the fight. Normally it was the NKVD that ordered the regular army around, and Beria had promised to crush any Red Army officer who presumed to tell NKVD units what to do, but Stalin's insistence on holding Stalingrad meant that the usual rules were suspended. That didn't mean that there weren't still plenty of NKVD troops in the rear, quick to shoot anyone who even resembled a deserter -- a practice which met with Chuikov's full approval.
The Soviets retook Mamayev Hill on the morning of 16 September and dug in to make sure they kept it. However, the fighting didn't die out, and what was left of Railroad Station #1 kept changing hands again and again. On 17 September, Chuikov was forced to pull his headquarters back again, to a dugout on the river banks in the factory district. Over the next few days, the Germans push in the center of the city finally ground down to a complete halt from sheer exhaustion.
* The fight in the south of the city remained in full burn. The Germans managed to make progress until they came up to the Grain Elevator on 16 September and immediately found themselves in the ugliest sort of grinding close-quarters fight. The defenders consisted of about 50 men under Lieutenant Andrey Khozyanov, with their only heavy armament being two Maxim-type machine guns and two Degtyarev PTRD anti-tank rifles. The PTRD was a big, single-shot bolt-action weapon that looked like a piece of plumbing -- not much more than a nuisance against any serious armor, but firing a big 14.5-millimeter bullet with a lot of range and hitting power that could punch through almost anything else.
The troops in the Grain Elevator had been ordered to fight to the death, and almost all of them did. When a German officer came forward under a white flag with an interpreter and arrogantly demanded that them to surrender or else, they told him to go straight to hell.
On 20 September, the Germans brought up about a dozen tanks and pounded the Grain Elevator into a ruin. The Soviets fought on in the rubble. Resistance didn't begin to crumble until 22 September, when the Germans were finally able to move forward, with the survivors of the defense running off when they could stand no more. The Germans found the corpses of most of the defenders, many of them Red Marine "sea devils", and took only a handful of wounded prisoner. The southern part of the city was now mostly in German hands, though the Soviets still clung to parts of the riverbank.
Now the fighting shifted back to the center of the city. On 27 September, the Germans began another push against Mamayev Hill, and after a brutal fight managed to shove the defenders down on the northeast slope of the hill. In the meantime, Paulus also began a drive into the factory district, losing many soldiers but pressing the Soviets very hard.
The fighting raged for two more days. The Germans had managed to take most of the central district of the city, giving them positions near the river from which they could fire parachute flares to spot boats trying to cross during the night, and then shoot them up. However, as in the south, the defenders managed to cling on in pockets along the riverbank, as well as in isolated strongpoints in the rubble of the city. Some of these strongpoints would hold out to the end of the battle. Sergeant Jakob Pavlov and his men performed a stubborn defense of a building that would become known as "Pavlov's House". Pavlov, who would live out the war to become the famous master of a Russian Orthodox monastery, would be nicknamed the "Homeowner".
Some men cracked. There were many desertions to the Germans, though any Red Army soldier who seemed inclined to even consider the idea was liable to be shot without hesitation, as was anyone who failed to shoot down a comrade trying to get to enemy lines. Indeed, discipline was so harsh that it contributed to the exhaustion. Some soldiers returning from the hospital to the front lines found themselves tagged as deserters and facing execution, and one soldier who ran away from an entire company that deserted was arrested because he had not done more to stop the rest, even though his fellows shot at him when he left them. Even picking up a German propaganda leaflet to roll a cigarette could be a capital offense.
Soviet propaganda of course plastered over such unpleasantries, playing up the troops in the rubble as heroic fighters motivated by the glory of Great Leader Stalin. That was pure silliness, one of the men writing later: "In the trenches, the last thing we thought about was Stalin."
* In the meantime, the air battle raged over the city. The Luftwaffe still held the upper hand over the Red Air Force in the skies, but the Soviets were now contesting them bitterly for the right. Red squadrons were thrown into combat with little training or preparation. When they were annihilated, sometimes within a week, new ones took their place.
Some Red aviators learned their skills under fire. There were even squadrons of women fighter pilots, some of them very skilled. One, Lidia Litvyak, had ten kills to her credit before her death in the skies over the battleground. With such sacrifices, the Red Air Force began to obtain the upper hand in the air over Stalingrad. As they did so, they began to hinder the movements of German reconnaissance aircraft, preventing them from observing Red Army activities behind the front lines.
Red Army forces had attempted to drive on the Germans from the north of the city on 18 and 19 September, but the attacks were halted in their tracks by Luftwaffe airpower. For a moment, both sides were spent and made no attempts to break the stalemate, though the fighting continued at a thunderous rumble.
BACK_TO_TOP* The exhausted lull in the fighting couldn't last. In hindsight, Hitler should have simply bottled up Stalingrad and left the place alone. His real business was to the south, and the battle for the city was no more than an increasingly expensive distraction. However, the struggle for Stalingrad had become a test of wills between the two dictators. Hitler was a person of obsessions, and Stalingrad had become one of them. Stalin gave it equal importance; it was not only a strategic location, the city bore his name, and its loss would be a personal humiliation. The thought of the Germans taking it away from him brought out all his deep reserves of stubbornness and ruthlessness. Stalin was also beginning to see that the game favored him. If the two dictators were alike in many ways, they were different in others: Hitler was the more impulsive and reckless, Stalin the more patient and calculating.
The Soviet nation was committed to the battle as well. Behind the lines, the defense of Stalingrad became a national cause, with citizens donating what valuables they had. Factories that had been relocated from the path of the German advance the winter before to raw industrial cities beyond the Urals were now beginning to churn out weapons in vast quantities. Women and adolescents tended the machines, backing up their male relations at the front.
The Red Army was making the Germans pay. Paulus found the price frightful. He had taken almost 40,000 casualties in the fight for the city to that time. He was also aware that his position was far from secure. He was deep inside a salient in Soviet lines, with his flanks protected by Rumanian, Hungarian, and Italian troops of doubtful reliability. German generals had proposed that these foreign divisions be braced up by German officers and troops, but the Rumanian and Italian governments had refused it as an insult to their national sovereignty. Hitler, reluctant to offend his allies, did not press the matter, though he remained uneasy over the issue.
Paulus was showing signs of nervous strain. Chuikov, as tough as he was, was thoroughly stressed as well, having broken out in ghastly sores. He had lost at least twice as many men as the Germans, and despite the deadly risk thousands of Red Army troops had deserted, soldiers preferring to take the chance of being caught and shot to the certainty of being killed in the meat grinder. Many deserters were not worried about threats of reprisals against relatives, since their families were trapped behind German lines and beyond Stalin's reach, at least for the moment. Deserters often dressed as women to try to slip through the net.
Chuikov was also worried because harsh winter weather was approaching. In itself, despite its discomforts winter was an ally of the Red Army, but the Volga was wide and it could take some time to freeze over. Ice floes on the river would crush boats trying to make the nighttime runs that kept the defenders resupplied and reinforced. Once the ice was solid and thick, supplies could be carried across, but until that time Chuikov and his men would be on their own.
* On 2 October Paulus began another push, this time from the north into the factory district, roughly from the line where Hube and the 16th Panzer Division had been halted in August. The assault began with an artillery barrage, supported by Luftwaffe bombing, that lasted into 4 October. The bombardment quickly hit oil tanks near the Red October factory that Chuikov had thought were empty. They weren't, exploding in a huge blast, with burning fuel pouring across the ruins and into the river.
German troops moved against the Red October factory on 4 October. The fighting there was as or more nasty than any experienced in the struggle for the city to that time. Soldiers on both sides went berserk, throwing themselves at the enemy with total disregard for their own safety and sometimes, much to their own astonishment, regaining their senses to find themselves alive and surrounded by the dead and dying.
Paulus began a heavy drive on the Tractor Factory on 14 October, and managed to get a grasp on it after two days of brutal fighting. That wasn't the same thing as saying he had completely captured it: isolated pockets of Red Army troops fought on in the ruins of the factory, proving very hard and expensive to dislodge. He started another push against the Barricades and Red October factories on 19 October, and got a similarly painful hold on them with four days of equally brutal fighting. Soviet troops even set up strongpoints inside factory ovens and made the Germans pay.
The city was covered with smoke during the day, lit up by flames at night. One German officer reported seeing dogs fleeing the city in the darkness, desperately trying to swim across the Volga to escape the hell and thunder. By the end of October Paulus had bogged down once more, though Chuikov remained deeply concerned. The Germans were slowly pushing the Soviets back and the Volga was beginning its gradual freeze. Soon he would be cut off from supplies.
BACK_TO_TOP* The fighting for Stalingrad was going nowhere in any hurry, and so the Germans decided to modify their tactics. Hitler announced the change in plans at a public rally in Munich on 8 November 1942, saying that Stalingrad was all but conquered: "There are only a very few small places left there. Now the others say: 'Why don't you make faster progress?' Because I don't want to create a second Verdun, but prefer to do the job with small shock troop units."
The "small shock troop units" were four battalions of "engineers", or what might be better called "pioneers", each with 600 men, specially trained for reducing fortifications. They arrived on 9 November and went into the hell at the Barricades plant in the dark hours of the morning of 10 November in one more push to clear the Red Army out of Stalingrad.
The madness of the fighting had now gone beyond battles over a factory, to vicious struggles over sections of a factory. The Soviets had set up strongpoints in the "Chemist's Shop" and what they called the "Red House". The Chemist's Shop fell quickly, but the battle for the Red House went on into the next day, 11 November. The defenders finally holed up in the cellar, where the German pioneers wiped them out with gasoline and satchel charges.
The Germans had won little for so much painful effort. Soviet troops were still fighting hard in the rest of the factory and the pioneer battalions, now badly depleted, ended up going nowhere, doing no more than trying to survive an endless series of random, vicious clashes. Still, the Germans had pushed the Soviets back into pockets, and Paulus had cause to think that with a little more effort, he might be able to exterminate the defenders completely and win the nightmare battle.
Chuikov was correspondingly desperate, since supplies, ammunition, and reinforcements were drying up. All he could give his men for rations was a supply of chocolate bars. Chuikov screamed up the chain of command for help and got useless answers. However, he was experienced enough with the Soviet system to suspect from the vague replies that there was something going on and people were trying to keep it a secret.
Chuikov had some pretty good ideas of what was up, and he finally got a real answer from superiors on the evening of 18 November 1942. Before dawn on 19 November, he had the satisfaction of hearing the distant thunder of a massive artillery barrage to the northwest of the city and knowing what was happening. The Red Army was taking the offensive.
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