Disaster at Stalingrad

CHAPTER 10 New Commanders All Round

Disaster in the Western Desert had brought Rommel to the gates of Egypt just as the British were trying to come to grips with the impending Turkish entry into the war. That would threaten the vast oil resources at Baku but also those at Mosul in northern Iraq and at Abadan on the Persian Gulf, both sources vital to the British war effort. If successful, the Turks and Germans would not only have stripped the Soviets and Western Allies of crucial sources of oil but also have cut the Persian Corridor through which most aid now reached the Russians. The British scraped together six divisions for their 10th Army based in Baghdad; there would have been more, but two had already been rushed off to help stop Rommel. They also set up a largely paper 9th Army in Syria and used deception to inflate its very weak forces into divisions. The Americans had been persuaded to redirect several air squadrons to bolster 10th Army. The British had offered to deploy a corps of three divisions for the defence of Baku, but Stalin had categorically refused to allow even friendly foreign troops on Soviet soil. ¹

Stalin nonetheless was particularly worried about keeping the Persian Corridor open now that the Arctic route was temporarily stopped. The main route ran by rail and road from northern Iran to the rail centre at Dzhulfa in Soviet Azerbaijan, and then north through Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, and Tiflis (modern Tbilisi), capital of Georgia, where it picked up the Georgian Military Highway that took it over the high passes to Ordzhonikidze (former Vladikavkaz) in North Ossetia. Ordzhonikidze was the main sorting and transshipment station for all the supplies and equipment coming through Iran. From Ordzhonikidze it was sent by rail straight up to Astrakhan where much of it was then fed directly into the defence of Stalingrad as well as equipping the growing Stavka reserve accumulating east of the Volga and north of the Don.

The Dzhulfa rail centre was also the main junction with Baku and the shipments of aid coming by sea from the Persian port of Noushahr. From that port aid was also sent to the Caspian port of Makhachkala just north of the Caucasus range. From there it was transported to Ordzhonikidze. Two alternative routes ran from Tehran through Soviet Turkmenistan to Krasnovodsk on the Caspian and from there by sea to Baku. Dzhulfa, though, was the critical junction. If it failed, the only way British and American aid could get through was to reroute it across the Caspian from Noushahr directly to the ports of Makhachkala and Astrakhan at the mouth of the Volga. Given the lack of shipping, that would amount to only a trickle. If the terminus of Ordzhonikidze fell, only the unused sea route to Astrakhan would remain.

Stalin and the Stavka had also long been aware of Turkey’s imminent entry into the war, even the codename, Operation Dessau. A casual observer could have seen what was coming as the Turkish Army massed on the border to be joined by a German expeditionary corps. If that were not enough, their agent within the Wehrmacht’s general staff fed them the organization and date of the invasion. That had given Stavka time to alert the Transcaucasian Front’s five armies to dig in and prepare. Stalin also ordered two more armies from Stavka reserve to reinforce them. Their commitment soon proved prescient.

On 2 September the Turkish ambassador handed Foreign Minister Molotov a declaration, just as Turkish armies were crossing the border into the Soviet Socialist Republics of Georgia and Armenia. The twenty-one divisions of the Turkish 2nd and 3rd Armies led the invasion. Eight divisions of former Soviet Muslim POWs were attached in separate corps to each army. Another fifteen Turkish divisions were assembling along the country’s eastern and southern borders to threaten the British in Persia, Iraq and Syria. The Turkish chief of staff, however, was reluctant to engage the British fully. Turkey needed a way out of the war if something were to go wrong. He issued confidential instructions to those armies to restrain their aggressiveness.

The German Jäger troops were under no such restraint and flowed like water seeking its own level through the difficult terrain of the border area in 3rd Army’s sector. They had to admit that the Turks might not be the brightest warriors ever to tread the earth, but they were always up for a fight, especially against a traditional enemy like the Russians. Third Army’s objective was the Georgian capital of Tiflis, 130 miles from the border, with a secondary mission to threaten Batumi on the Black Sea Coast just beyond the border. After taking Tiflis 3rd Army would then cooperate with 1st Panzer Army’s drive through Chechnya to Baku and the oilfields.

The mission of the 2nd Army was to strike through Soviet Armenia and into Azerbaijan. Its primary immediate mission was to seize the rail centre at Dzhulfa. The 2nd Army’s attack also put the Armenians at the mercy of the Turks, who were determined to finish their genocide of 1915-22. It was almost as if they were responding to Hitler’s question of 1922, ‘Who remembers the Armenians?’ They were going to ensure that no one did. The Final Solution of the Armenians was at hand.²

Stalin was impatient for an attack from north of Stalingrad on the encircling German troops north of the city. Zhukov had flown to the front to see to it. He found the armies available unready for such an offensive operation and informed Stalin over the scrambler phone. Stalin then called Marshal Alexander Vasilevsky, the Chief of the General Staff, whom he had also sent to the area to observe what was going on. He admitted the Germans had reached the northern suburbs. Stalin exploded over the phone:

Vasilevsky replied as calmly as he could, ‘We are putting everything that can fight into the places under threat. I think there’s still a chance that we won’t lose the city.’ Stalin rang him back shortly and ordered an immediate attack, regardless of the condition of the troops. The attack on the 5th failed for exactly the reasons that Zhukov had anticipated — the inexperience of the divisions and their lack of ammunition. It did one thing of great value, however.³ When Zhukov explained that the attack had failed but that it had diverted 6th Army reserves outside Stalingrad to contain it. Stalin replied, ‘That’s very good. It is of great help to the city.’ Zhukov tried to tell him that the attack had served no purpose, but the Vozhd said, ‘Just continue the attack. Your job is to divert as many of the enemy forces as possible from Stalingrad.’⁴

The build-up for the attack had been clear to the Germans, and Paulus’s concentration of effort to stop it gave 62nd and 64th Armies a breathing space. At the same time, Chuikov alerted Yeremenko of the threat from 4th Panzer Army coming from the south, threatening to get behind the two Soviet armies. He drew the proper conclusions. On the night of 2–3 September the two armies withdrew into the inner Stalingrad defence ring. On the 3rd, Seydlitz’s LI Corps linked up with Hoth’s panzer spearheads to find only an empty pocket.

Seydlitz continued his two-division attack and tore through the repositioned elements of 62nd Army. Unit after unit was driven back with heavy losses or simply collapsed as the Germans approached the western outskirts of Stalingrad. Two rifle divisions completely disappeared from 62nd Army’s order of battle in this fighting. The German attack was concentric with LI Corps driving from the west, XIV Panzer Corps from the north, and XLVIII Panzer Corps (4th Panzer Army) from the southwest. Zhukov’s continued attacks from the north, however, drew most of the combat power out of XIV Panzer Corps’ attack against 62nd Army. More importantly, Paulus diverted his air support from the attack on Stalingrad to contain Zhukov’s attacks. Renewed Soviet attacks on 5 September caused Paulus to order Seydlitz to suspend his attack in order to commit all German air support in that direction. Hoth’s panzers also found stiffening resistance slowing their progress against 64th Army. Crushing Soviet artillery and rocket-launcher fire and infantry counterattacks eventually brought them to a halt.

Chief of the Army General Staff Halder was presenting a major appraisal of the deteriorating condition of the fighting forces on the Eastern Front when Hitler savagely interrupted him. ‘Who are you to say this, Herr Halder, you who in the First World War occupied the same revolving stool, and now lecture me on the fighting man, you who have never been awarded the black Wounds Badge?’⁵ There was a stunned silence among all the officers in the briefing room. Hitler had flung at the Army’s Chief of Staff the ultimate insult.

One too many times Halder had argued with Hitler’s wishful thinking. He may have been sitting on the same revolving staff stool, but that had not prevented him from gaining a clear understanding of the exhaustion of the German forces on the Eastern Front as well as the inadequacy of resources deployed along two divergent directions across vast distances.

Three days later the tension came to a head. Jodl had enraged Hitler with his reports of his visits to the front. He had reported that List had stated he did not have the resources to complete his mission. Jodl had not spent his career on the revolving staff stool and had seen as much combat as Hitler had in the First War and was twice wounded. Hitler screamed at him. ‘Your orders were to drive the commanders and troops forward, not to tell me that this is impossible.‘⁶ Jodl in turn lost his temper and screamed right back that List had followed Hitler’s orders. Again Hitler screamed. ‘You’re lying. I never issued such orders — never!’ He stormed out into the black of the Ukrainian night. ‘It was an hour before he came back — pale, shrunken, with feverish eyes.’⁷

That night he ordered stenographers from the Reichstag to report to headquarters in order to take verbatim notes of his deliberations. From then on, the rift between him and his Wehrmacht generals widened. Hitler sulked, even refused to shake hands with his generals and thereafter took all his meals alone. On the 9th, he relieved List and announced that he would now personally command Army Group A. The commanders of 17th and 1st Panzer Armies would report directly to him. In reality, because Hitler took no direct interest in the details of command, the army group’s chief of staff functioned as its commander.

One general, who had just returned after a week away, ‘was so shocked by Hitler’s “long stare of burning hate” that he thought: “This man has lost face; he has realized that his fatal gamble is over, that Soviet Russia is not going to be beaten in this second attempt.”’⁸

Now confident that the threat to his northern flank had been stabilized, Paulus order Seydlitz back into the attack in what he hoped would be the final push that would take the city. Supported by assault guns and groups of 40-50 Stukas, the lethal German combined-arms machine ground steadily towards the bank of the Volga.

However, Stalin’s instinct that continuous attacks by Stalingrad Front from the north would give the defenders of the city vital breathing room was again proved correct. Seydlitz and his chief of staff visited Paulus at 6th Army headquarters that night and found him on the horns of a dilemma. He was still worried about his northern flank, and Zhukov’s attacks gave him every reason for it. Should he continue to attack due east into the city or north to contain Zhukov? In the end, he ordered Seydlitz to wheel the flank of his corps north to support XIV Panzer Corps on the 9th. At the same time, he ordered Hoth’s XLVIII Panzer Corps (resubordinated to 6th Army) to attack southeast to break through to the Volga and split the 62nd and 64th Armies.

With the fall of the main passes, the Vikings and Slovaks fell like an avalanche on the rear areas of the Soviet 46th Army. Most of its main units had been scattered in regiments and battalions fighting in the mountains and passes. As the Germans burst through from the Klukhor Pass, overwhelming the final reserves of the 394th Rifle Division, all these detachments in the mountains were suddenly isolated and out of the fight. The Soviets had not one tank to contest the advance.

The only force standing in the Germans’ way was the 7th NKVD Division which was just then experiencing a visit from Beria himself at its headquarters at Zakharovka a few miles north of Sukhumi. Despite Beria’s interference, they held out for two days, displaying a determination to fight to the death. On the third day, they collapsed under the weight of the enemy’s combined arms attack. Rudel’s Stukas first destroyed the division headquarters. Then, one by one, they took out each of the antitank guns into the depth of the enemy defences. The panzers and their grenadiers burst through the broken lines and shot anyone in blue trousers. They would take no NKVD prisoners.⁹

Beria himself waited too long to escape the chaos. His staff car was intercepted by a German tank lurching onto the road to cut off the NKVD. The collision did the car no good as the tank crunched right over it turning the second most feared man in the Soviet Union into bloody jam.¹⁰

Following the tanks, the mountain corps marched. To the east the Alpini were also heading to Sukhumi. They had only half the distance to go. Ahead of them were only elements of the shrunken 351st Rifle Division.

The 46th Army’s headquarters had just transferred to Sukhumi when the Vikings and Slovaks blew into the city. Besides its naval personnel, there was only one rifle regiment in the city. Since there were no prepared defences, the Soviets fell back into the ruins of the 14th-century Genoese fort and the 18th-century Ottoman fortress. The Soviet sailors either defended their own facilities or powered up what ships they had to escape. The German corps commander directed his men from the Kaman Cathedral where tradition said that the bones of St John Crysostom were buried. All this time Rudel’s Stukas played the vital role of heavy artillery, blasting away the enemy holed up in the ruins. The Alpini streamed into the city before their German counterparts late that day and were thrown into the final assault on the ruins.

By the next day, this beautiful Georgian city with its palm trees, spas and botanical garden was fully under German control and largely intact except for the port facilities which the Soviet naval personnel had destroyed. The last of the defenders were dead or prisoners. Of the latter, there were over 8,000. By this one victory, the entire coast north to the Taman Peninsula was cut off including 12th, 18th, 47th and 56th Armies and the surviving elements of the Black Sea Fleet. The North Caucasus Front simply ceased to exist. The German mountain corps commander commented that the victory had come none too soon for the first snow was falling in the high mountain passes.¹¹

One flinty sailor had no intention of surrendering. He commanded the Azov Sea Flotilla which had initially found refuge in Novorossiysk after the fall of its own bases earlier. Vice-Admiral Sergei Georgievich Gorshkov took the last of his ships to sea, crammed with refugees, to Batumi over a hundred miles down the coast on the Turkish border.¹²

Hitler received the news with a righteous tirade. ‘All along I knew,’ he told the staff, ‘that my will would triumph,’ he pointed to them, ‘when all of you doubted. When I convinced the Turks to come in on our side, you doubted still. Now we are crushing the Russians between us.’ He pounded the table in a triumphal rage that approached a wolfs howl.¹³

Churchill read Stalin’s message to the cabinet. ‘I received your message on 7 September. I realise the importance of the safe arrival in the Soviet Union of convoy PQ-18 and the need for measures to protect it. Difficult though we find it at present to assign extra long-range bombers for the purpose, we have decided to do so.’¹⁴

Convoy PQ-18 had been in the planning stage before the destruction of PQ-17. The Soviets had provided a long list of desperately needed supplies and equipment. The Anglo-American losses with PQ-17 and from the Home Fleet had not deterred Stalin at all from acting as if PQ-18 was inevitable. By finally agreeing to an earlier Allied planning proposal to provide long-range bomber support, he hoped to encourage them to push forward with the convoy. Churchill announced:

He did not say that Roosevelt had told him that there was growing opposition, especially from the US Navy, to resuming the convoys. He had enough reasons of his own to avoid sending another convoy. Politically it would be impossible. The country had been stunned by the tragedy of the convoy and then the drubbing given to the Home Fleet. He would meet intense resistance across the political spectrum if they were resumed so soon.

In any case, Stalin would have to be satisfied with the excuse of the danger of continuous daylight of the Arctic summer. That would give them perhaps three months more before they had again to grasp that painful nettle.

Corporal Werner Halle, 71st Motorized Regiment (29th Motorized Division), and the rest of his battalion got their first hot meal in a long time. They had seen hard fighting and even harder losses. Halle recorded in his diary that ‘we were frequently without company or even platoon leaders… each one of us, this may sound hard but this was the way it was, could easily guess that he might be the next to go…’

They had been fighting in the southern suburban towns of Krasnoarmeisk and Kuperosnoye, attacking along the seam between 62nd and 64th Armies. The 14th and 24th Panzer and 29th Motorized Divisions of XLVIII Panzer Corps attacked straight towards the southern suburbs of Stalingrad in order to split the two Soviet armies and cut the city off from the south in accordance with Paulus’s decision of the 7th. The attack had slowed to a crawl in the narrow streets, where:

Nevertheless, the Germans fought on. They had not far to go. The next morning Halle and his comrades broke through the rest of the way to the Volga at Kuperosnoye. Stalingrad was now cut off from the south, and all river traffic stopped below the German foothold on the bank. Now 62nd Army would be defending the city alone.¹⁵

By now 62nd Army’s commander, Anton Lopatin, had given up all hope of holding the city and decided to abandon it. He gave the order but was defied by his chief of staff, General N. I. Krylov, who then notified Khrushchev and Yeremenko. They immediately relieved Lopatin and put Krylov in temporary command. Now they had to find a new commander.

The attack of the Turkish 8th Division along Georgia’s Black Sea coast towards the port of Batumi was more a victory parade than a battle. The native Georgians in the province of Adjara had converted to Islam when conquered by the Ottoman Empire in 1613 and joyously welcomed the Turks. The Soviet 47th Mountain Division guarding the port murdered their Russian officers and commissars and went over en masse to the Turks. The division had recently been re-raised after being destroyed in 1941. It had been filled mostly with ethnic Turks from Azerbaijan. As a result the Turkish 8th Division’s entry into the outskirts of Batumi triggered joyous celebrations in Istanbul and Ankara and not a few very discreet ones in Baku.

Things suddenly got deadly serious for the 8th Division as it found the Soviet Black Sea Fleet naval personnel in the port of much sterner stuff. They got even sterner when Gorskhov’s flotilla escaping from Sukhumi arrived to add more troops to the battle as well as a determined new commander in the vice admiral. He could only hold on and resist to the end, hoping against hope that the sudden collapse of the North Caucasus Front could be repaired in time to relieve the garrison. Against the Russian sailors, the Turks threw some of the finest battalions in their army in tactics reminiscent of the First War. Gradually, the once beautiful city of Batumi was reduced to a stinking, corpse-filled rubble.¹⁶

Turkish 3rd Army’s main attack towards the Tiflis valley ground forward ‘despite the frustrations of the difficult terrain, bad weather, and inadequate air support’. General de Angelis was in his element though. This Austrian officer was a brilliant tactician and under his command XLIV Corps, Turkish III Corps, and the legions of former Red Army POWs outmanoeuvred the exhausted Soviet 45th Army and trapped large numbers of its men who promptly surrendered. Many of them were Muslim natives of the Transcaucasus, not overly fond of Russians. Only the Georgians fought on tenaciously, though they had no love for the Russians. The Turks were the enemy of their blood, who had tormented them for 500 years. They tolerated the Russians because they had saved Georgia from extinction by the Ottomans and Persians at the beginning of the 19th century and been its protective big brother ever since. In that part of the world what happened hundreds of years before was like yesterday.

De Angelis had forcibly to protect his Russian and Georgian prisoners from the troops of his Chechen-Ingush Legion. They could have taught the Einsatzgruppen a lot, and it was only the armed intervention of the Jägers that saved the POWs from torture and mass murder.¹⁷

To the east, the Soviet 71st Army defending the approaches to Yerevan had stopped the Turkish 2nd Army cold just within the border in bitter and costly fighting. Further to the southeast, however, native Azeri Turks provided vital intelligence and outright assistance to the invading Turks, and Soviet 72nd Army crumbled as its Azeri conscripts threw up their hands and surrendered by the thousands to their countrymen in the Azeri Legion. The stouter units were swamped with massed infantry attacks. By the 10th, the Turks were crossing the Arak River above and below Dzhulfa. The town fell almost without a fight.

You could almost hear in the General Staff building the loud crack all the way from the Caucasus. It was the deep, grinding snap of collapse. With the fall of Sukhumi and Dzhulfa, the Soviet control of the vast region of mountains, exotic peoples, and oil suddenly had been fatally wounded. With Dzhulfa, the main route to the Persian Corridor and the last major source of Allied aid was severed. There were over a half million Soviet troops in the region and no way to sustain them if the Germans and Turks eventually linked up at Baku.

Less than two weeks before, the situation seemed to have passed beyond the danger stage as the Germans were clearly exhausting themselves. The land was too vast, their forces too few, and the Soviet defenders too stubborn. It helped the defenders too that a major reorganization on the 1st had rationalized their forces. All forces had been put under the single command of General I. V. Tiulenev’s Transcaucasian Front. The North Caucasus Front had been downgraded to a group while the strong Northern Group had been created to block Kleist’s 1st Panzer Army from crossing the Terek River and overrunning the Grozny oilfields and taking Ordzhonikidze and its vast stocks of Allied supplies and equipment.

The Northern Group’s four armies with eighteen rifle and two cavalry divisions, two rifle corps, and seven brigades had been slowing Kleist to a snail’s pace. Its persistent counterattacks had driven the Germans back to their foothold on the eastern side of the Terek at Mozdok. A good part of its tank force was made up of British Valentines and American M3 Stuart light tanks. The Valentines tended to burst into flames, a matter that Stalin brought up with Churchill, suggesting that the Soviet use of diesel in their T-34s was superior.

Kleist resumed his attacks on the 11th and met the same determined resistance, but by the next day the Soviets seemed to be in much weaker strength. In the night two of their armies had begun withdrawing. One was being sent to staunch the open wound left by the encirclement of the Northern Group due to the fall of Sukhumi and the other to retake Dzhulfa.

Breaking contact with half your force and reshuffling the rest of it to cover the same front is one of the most difficult manoeuvres any army can make. It can succeed, though, if the enemy does not interfere. That was a break that Kleist was not about to give. Luftwaffe reconnaissance reported the roads leading south filled with Soviet troops. General Traugott Herr’s 3rd Panzer Division was Kleist’s spearhead. He divided his command into combined arms battlegroups (Kampfgruppen) and drove his panzers right into the confusion of the Soviet passage of lines and transformed it into a bloody rout.

At this point Kleist was presented with an operational dilemma. He had multiple missions: to seize the oilfields at Grozny and to take Ordzhonikidze and the high mountain passes of the eastern Caucasus to open the road to Baku. He had reached that point where all three of these locations were within his grasp. His 3rd Panzer was within 36 miles of Ordzhonikidze and 13th Panzer about the half that distance from Grozny. It was time he asked army group headquarters to put on alert the parachute battalion that had been prepared for just this moment. Upon the approach of German forces, the Soviet garrison of Grozny was under Stalin’s orders to destroy the oilfields. Only a surprise descent gave a chance of saving them for the fuel-thirsty German armies fighting from Voronezh to Mozdok.

For Stalin the loss of Sukhumi entailed another and perhaps even more serious loss — Beria. He needed a replacement. For that he reached into the second tier of the NKVD chiefs and plucked out Victor Abakumov. He had survived the purge of the NKVD in 1937-8 because he had been single-mindedly ruthless in carrying it out. Single-minded and ruthless were just the qualities Stalin was looking for.

With Stalin’s approval, Abakumov liquidated Beria’s senior lieutenants and replaced them with his own. When he personally cleaned out Beria’s safe, he found a document that really caught his attention. It was a file, and not just any file but Stalin’s, prepared by the tsar’s secret police, the Okrana. It was not the file of a suspect or revolutionary. It was that of an informer. From Beria’s notes, it became clear that this file in the hands of the NKVD and the senior staff of the Red Army had prompted preparations for a coup that Stalin preempted with the purges that had decapitated both organizations.¹⁸ For Abakumov, whether Stalin had been a traitor to the communist party was a matter of indifference. He would have served the tsar as diligently had he provided a ladder to power. Still, this poisonous document could prove useful. Who knew what course the war would take, and betting men were putting their money on the Germans.

‘Everybody off!’ men were shouting at the Pacific Fleet sailors in the railcars that had just pulled into a siding at the town’s rail yard. The men were all volunteers for the front and were to join the 2nd Battalion, 1047th Regiment of the 284th Rifle Division stationed there, 139 miles west of Sverdlovsk in the Urals.¹⁹ They got a hearty welcome from the Red Army soldiers who were amused by the sailor’s blue and white striped collarless shirt, the Navy’s emblematic telnyashka, under their pea jackets.

It was something that 27-year old Warrant Officer Vassili Grigorievich Zaitsev had come to take great pride in ever since he had been conscripted into the Red Navy in 1937. He had worked as a payroll clerk for the last four years, earning a promotion for his diligence and reliability. Like so many of his comrades he had volunteered for the front as soon as the war had started, but only recently had his request and that of so many others in the Pacific Fleet been approved to join the fighting at Stalingrad.

Zaitsev had grown up in the foothills of the Ural Mountains where his grandfather had taught him to shoot and hunt. The old man came from a long line of hunters and was devoted to Vassili, his favourite grandson, to whom he passed his vast experience of stalking and marksmanship. Bullets were expensive and had to be used with care. One shot, one kill, was the old man’s method. Young Vassili became an expert shot, never wasting a bullet and became so good at building hides that even his grandfather could not find them. To him tracking an animal was like reading a book. Like all bureaucracies the Red Navy failed to exploit this talent. Instead, because Vassili had taken accounting courses, they thought him a perfect payroll clerk. Some things never change.

However, anyone who got to know the payroll clerk would be struck by several things: ‘his modesty, the slow grace of his movements, his exceptionally calm character, and his attentive gaze. His handshake was firm, and he pressed your palm with a pincer-like grip.’²⁰

Chuikov had been ordered by the Front military council to report immediately to its headquarters on the east bank of the Volga. It took him hours to find one of the irregular transports coming from the other side. He had time to walk through the field hospitals huddled along the bank in dugouts and tents, crowded with wounded and overworked and overwhelmed staff. It was a depressing sight.

The next morning he reported and was briefed by Khrushchev while Yeremenko listened. ‘The conversation was brief,’ he wrote. ‘I had been appointed Commander of the 62nd Army.’ They told him Lopatin had been removed for defeatism. Khrushchev pointedly stated that his selection was based on Chuikov’s beating the enemy on the Aksay while in command of the Southern Group. Then Khrushchev asked him, ‘Comrade Chuikov, how do you interpret your task?’

Chuikov had not been prepared for such a question, but the answer quickly came from deep within.

They replied that he understood his mission completely.

Chuikov set out immediately to find his headquarters. As his ferry approached the right bank, he could see,

He found his headquarters on Mamayev Hill (or Kurgan), a vast artificial mound built ages ago by steppe nomads as a burial site and located in the centre of the city. He found the dugout and Krylov, yelling over the phone as shells hitting outside drizzled dirt from the rafters overhead on everyone. Here was a man that he might work with, just as tough and decisive as himself. That night he discovered what a hollow shell 62nd Army was. In his three armoured brigades there was only one tank left. One division had been reduced to a composite ‘regiment’ of 100 infantry, less than a company. The next division had only enough infantry left to amount to a battalion. His motorized brigade had barely 200 infantry. A division on the left bank had only 250 infantry. Only Colonel Sarayev’s NKVD division and two other brigades were more or less up to strength.

Worse yet was the sense of hopelessness that was spreading like the pox among the men, accelerated by Lopatin’s despair. Men were drifting back to the Volga to find a way across. Even senior staff officers were trying to get across, feigning illness. Nevertheless, he determined to attack on the 14th.

Chuikov’s first full day of command was welcomed by a German attack on the Kurgan itself. His command post bunker was struck so often that the telephone wires were cut again and again. He asked Yeremenko for several divisions to reinforce his disintegrating lines. Then he moved from the Kurgan, when the Germans had fought their way to within 800 yards of his command post, to a command bunker dug in the side of the Tsaritsyn gorge.

In the short time since he had arrived, he had observed that the German tactics were consistent with what he had experienced at Kalach and on the Aksay.

The solution seemed to be to reduce that expanse to no more than a grenade’s throw, to grasp the enemy by the buckle. ‘We must gain time. Time to bring in reserves, time to wear out the Germans; Chuikov told his assembled commanders. He pointed to the map of Stalingrad on the wall. ‘The scale was no longer the kilometre, rather it was the metre. The battle was for street corners, blocks of houses, individual houses.’ Krylov drew the enemy positions with a blue pencil (Soviet units in red, of course).²³

Chuikov knew he did not have a large force to throw at the enemy, and the enemy knew it, too. He recalled that the great Suvorov had said that ‘to surprise is to conquer’. Although his infantry were weak, he was able to call on strong artillery support. The guns thundered at 03.30 in the morning of the 14th. He spoke to Yeremenko who promised him that at sunrise the Red Air Force would be in the sky over the city to disrupt the inevitable Luftwaffe appearance. He also said that the 13th Guards Rifle Division had been released from Stavka reserve and would begin crossing the river that evening.

The attack achieved some success in the centre, but at dawn the Luftwaffe arrived in strength and defeated Chuikov’s air support. Units of 50-60 aircraft then bombed and strafed his attacking units, ‘pinning them to the ground. The counter-attack petered out.’

The Soviet troops in the centre of 62nd Army’s line had been all but wiped out. Chuikov looked about for any reserve. He faced down NKVD Colonel Sarayev who finally accepted that he was a soldier of the 62nd Army. His own lines were stretched thin, but he had 1,500 worker militia, and these Chuikov used to garrison a number of large buildings in the path of the Germans, each under the command of a reliable communist. It was not enough.

At noon the Germans struck back in great strength, overran the Kurgan, and despite heavy loss seemed on their way to break through to the river landing stage where the 13th Guards were scheduled to land. Already some of their heavy machine guns were raking the landing stage. The Germans thought they had won the battle and many were cheering and dancing for joy. News of the loss of the Kurgan spread through the Soviet defenders and came close to breaking their nerve. They had already seen all the artillery returned to the eastern bank and interpreted it as the first stage in the abandonment of the city. Rather it was a clever decision on Chuikov’s part to mass his artillery where it could be easily deployed and controlled. It was far easier to feed the guns their ammunition on that side rather than haul it across the river.

Chuikov now threw in his last reserve — nine tanks, his own staff officers and political section, almost all of them communists, and the headquarters guard company. Major General A. I. Rodimtsev, commander of the 13th Guards, arrived to see Chuikov. He reported that he had a full division of 10,000 men, but a thousand lacked arms. Chuikov stripped all but his infantry of their small arms to make up the shortfall.

Still it seemed the Germans would win the race to the landing stages. Chuikov then made a crucial decision. Rodimtsev’s regiments would have to begin crossing now, in broad daylight. The Germans would reach the Volga and overrun the landing stages if they waited for dusk. Already the Germans had reached the embankment north of the landing stages and occupied a number of buildings. At this desperate moment a member of Chuikov’s staff recalled the scene as Rodimtsev was about to take his leave, Chuikov embraced him and said, ‘I can’t see either of us surviving this. We’re going to die, so let’s die bravely, fighting for our country.’

The Germans had already occupied buildings near the ferry, and their machine guns swept over the landing stages, killing the ferry commander and then his commissar who took his place:

Groups of German infantry were approaching the landing stages. All seemed lost, the city fallen, when the defenders were suddenly seized with a great rage and everywhere flung themselves at the Germans. ‘We stood together, firing and firing — until our guns were almost melting from the heat.’

Now, on the east bank, Rodimtsev addressed the men of the first regiment to cross. They were terrified of the swarming Stukas and knew it was a death sentence to attempt to cross in daylight. Even if a man fell into the water alive, the weight of his equipment would carry him to the bottom. He reminded them of who they were and what they had already gone through. He calmed the recruits by telling them that battle would make them veterans. Then he pointed to the dying city and told them that the fate of their Motherland now hung in the balance. It would be a determined body of men that marched down to the landing stages to fill the boats clustered there.

Many died on the way across the river either from direct hits on their boats or sinking beneath the water. The others did not even wait for the boats to reach the landing stages but leapt into the water and raced ashore to close with the enemy as German machine guns winnowed their ranks. The ferocity of their attack stunned the Germans. One unarmed and bleeding soldier was seen to throw himself at a German soldier, snap his neck, and throw the corpse over his shoulder before moving on to the next one. They cleared the Germans from the embankment and pushed them back. Half the men who had crowded aboard those boats had died by the time the Germans had been thrown out of their lodgement. That night most of the rest of 13th Guards got across the river shepherded at the landing stages and into the city by Chuikov’s surviving staff.²⁴

With the day the Luftwaffe showed up in massive force to hammer the 13th Guards who were trying to orient themselves as they moved through the streets. Seydlitz’s LI Corps resumed the attack as XLVIII Panzer Corps fought its way along the Volga shore. The arrival of the 13th Guards threw a rock into the gears of the German attack. The railway station changed hands four times, but by nightfall was still held by Rodimtsev’s men. That night they retook the Kurgan. They had been the margin that kept the Germans at bay.

As hard had been the blows of Seydlitz’s corps, the greatest damage done to 62nd Army was by XLVIII Panzer Corps attacking from the southeast. The 24th Panzer Division’s two Kampfgruppen struck deep into the city and by midmorning had taken the rail junction barely a mile from the Volga. The Soviet infantry fought for every building and ‘had to be individually thrown out of every street in hard hand-to-hand and close combat’. The 29th Motorized Division fought its way north along the Volga bank with the massive grain elevator looming ahead of them to the north:

Symptomatic of the day’s setbacks was a report by the NKVD that pointed to instances of outright collaboration with the Germans and a disintegration of morale. The 62nd Army’s NKVD blocking detachment had arrested 1,218 men drifting to the rear and the Volga bank. They shot twenty-one and detained another ten. The rest were sent back to their units. Worse yet was the arrest of the commander and commissar of a regiment who had deserted their unit: