The Germans counter-attacked again and again over the following days, but Rodimtsev’s guardsmen and the remnants of the NKVD rifle regiment managed to hold on to the Mamaev Kurgan. The 295th Infantry Division was fought to a standstill. Their losses were so heavy that companies were merged. Officer casualties were particularly high, largely due to Russian snipers. After less than two weeks in the line, a company in Colonel Korfes’s regiment of the 295th Infantry Division was on its third commander, a young lieutenant.
‘Skirmishes to the death’ continued on the Mamaev Kurgan and German heavy artillery continued to bombard Soviet positions for the next two months. The writer Vasily Grossman observed the shells throw the soil high into the air. ‘These clouds of earth then passed through the sieve of gravity, the heavier lumps falling straight to the ground, the dust rising into the sky.’ Corpses from the battle on its blackened slopes were disinterred and then buried again in the ceaseless, churning shellfire. Years after the war, a German soldier and a Russian soldier are said to have been uncovered during clearance work. The two corpses had apparently been buried by a shell burst just after they had bayoneted each other to death.
In Zhukov’s deliberate understatement, these were ‘very difficult days for Stalingrad’. In Moscow, US Embassy officials were certain that the city was finished, and the mood in the Kremlin was extremely nervous. On the evening of 16 September, just after dinner, Poskrebyshev came in silently and placed on Stalin’s desk a transcription from the General Staff main intelligence department. It was the text of an intercepted radio message from Berlin. ‘Stalingrad has been taken by brilliant German forces. Russia has been cut into two parts, north and south, and will soon collapse in her death throes.’ Stalin read the message several times, then stood for a few moments at the window. He told Poskrebyshev to put him through to the Stavka. Over the telephone, he dictated a signal to Yeremenko and Khrushchev: ‘Report some sense about what is happening in Stalingrad. Is it true Stalingrad has been captured by the Germans? Give a straight and truthful answer. I await your immediate reply.’
In fact the immediate crisis had already passed. Rodimtsev’s division had arrived just in time. Already during that day, German commanders were conscious of the reinforcements brought across the river, such as Gorishny’s 95th Rifle Division and a brigade of marine infantry detailed to reinforce the gravely weakened 35th Guards Rifle Division south of the Tsaritsa. The Luftwaffe also noticed an increase in the number of aircraft put up against them by the 8th Air Army, although Soviet fighter pilots still suffered from an instinctive fear of the enemy. ‘Whenever an Me-109 appears,’ complained a commissar’s report, ‘a merry-go-round starts, with everyone trying to protect their own tail.’
Luftwaffe personnel observed, above all, an intensification of antiaircraft fire. ‘As soon as Stuka squadrons appear,’ noted the liaison officer with 24th Panzer Division, ‘the sky was covered with countless black puffs from flak fire.’ A fierce cheer rose from Russian positions below when one of the hated Stukas exploded in mid-air in a burst of smoke, and bits of flaming wreckage dropped away. Even the much faster fighters suffered from the increasingly heavy fire from across the Volga. On 16 September, a Luftwaffe NCO, Jüirgen Kalb, was forced to bale out of his stricken Me-109 over the Volga. He parachuted into the river and swam to the river bank where Red Army soldiers awaited him.
Luftwaffe bomber crews were allowed little respite. Every aircraft was required for shuttle-bombing. On 19 September, one pilot calculated that in the last three months he had flown 228 missions: as many as during the previous three years over ‘Poland, France, England, Yugoslavia and Russia combined’. He and his crew were in the air six hours a day.
Based mostly on improvised airfields out in the steppe, their life on the ground was a rush of hastily snatched meals, jangling field telephones, and an intensive study of maps and air reconnaissance photographs in the operations tent. Back in the air, identifying targets was not easy when below stretched ‘an unbelievable chaos of ruins and fires’, and huge widening columns of black oily smoke billowed from the blazing oil tanks, blotting out the sun up to an altitude of 10,000 feet.
Mission requests came constantly from the army: ‘Attack target area A 11, north-west sector, the large block of houses, heavy enemy resistance there.’ The Luftwaffe pilots, however, did not feel they were achieving much by continuing to pulverize a wasteland of ‘torn apart, burnt-out factory sheds, in which not a wall was left standing’.
For the ground crews, ‘mechanics—armament, bomb and radio specialists’, preparing aircraft for take-off ‘three, four, five times a day’ there was no respite. For aircrews, their only moments of peace came at dusk and at dawn, but even then they did not linger long beside the airfield, gazing at the sky above this ‘limitless country’: already by the third week in September, the frosts were sharp. On 17 September, the temperature dropped suddenly. Men put on woollen garments under their jackets, which were in most cases disintegrating already. ‘The soldiers’ clothing’, noted a doctor, ‘was so worn out, that frequently they were obliged to wear items of Russian uniform.’
While the bitter struggle for the Mamaev Kurgan continued, an equally ferocious battle developed for the huge concrete grain silo down by the river. The rapid advance of Hoth’s XLVIII Panzer Corps had virtually cut off this natural fortress. The defenders from the 35th Guards Division cheered and joked when reinforcements from a marine infantry platoon commanded by Lieutenant Andrey Khozyanov reached them during the night of 17 September. They had two old Maxim machine-guns and two of the long Russian anti-tank rifles, which they used to fire at a German tank when an officer and an interpreter appeared under a flag of truce to ask them to surrender. German artillery then ranged on to the vast structure preparing the ground for the Saxon 94th Infantry Division, whose insignia were the crossed swords of Meissen porcelain.
The fifty-odd defenders fought off ten assaults on 18 September. Knowing that they could not expect resupply, they conserved their ammunition, rations and water carefully. The conditions in which they continued to fight over the next two days were terrible. They were choked with dust and smoke, even the grain in the elevator had caught fire, and they soon had almost nothing left to drink. They were also short of water to fill the barrel jackets of the Maxim machine-guns. (Presumably the marines resorted to their own urine for the purpose, as was so often the practice in the First World War, but Soviet accounts avoid such details.)
All their grenades and anti-tank projectiles had been expended by the time more German tanks arrived to finish them off on 20 September. Both Maxims were put out of action. The defenders, unable to see inside the elevator for smoke and dust, communicated by shouting to each other through parched throats. When the Germans broke in, they fired at sounds, not at objects. That night, with only a handful of ammunition left, the survivors broke out. The wounded had to be left behind. Although a fierce fight, it was hardly an impressive victory for the Germans, yet Paulus chose the huge grain silo as the symbol of Stalingrad in the arm badge he was having designed at army headquarters to commemorate the victory.