Similarly stubborn defences of semi-fortified buildings in the centre of the town cost the Germans many men during those days. These ‘garrisons’ of Red Army soldiers from different divisions held out defiantly, also suffering terribly from thirst and hunger. There was a violent battle for possession of the Univermag department store on Red Square, which served as the headquarters of the 1st Battalion of the 42nd Guards Rifle Regiment. A small warehouse known as ‘the nail factory’ formed another redoubt. And in a three-storey building not far away, guardsmen fought on for five days, their noses and parched throats filled with brick dust from pulverized walls. Their wounded died in the cellars, untended once their young nurse succumbed to a chest wound. Six men, out of what had originally been close to half a battalion, escaped in the last moments when German tanks finally smashed in the walls.
Of the German gains in the centre of the city, the most serious for the Red Army was their advance to the central landing stage. This enabled them to strike at the main night-time crossing points with artillery, Nebelwerfer launchers and machine-guns, firing by the light of magnesium parachute flares. They were determined to stop reinforcements and supplies from reaching the defenders.
The main station, having changed hands fifteen times in five days, ended with the Germans as occupants of the ruins. Rodimtsev, in agreement with Chuikov’s policy, ordered that the front line was always to be within fifty yards of the Germans, to make it hard for their artillery and aviation. The men of his division took a special pride in their marksmanship. ‘Each Guards soldier shot like a sniper’ and thus ‘forced the Germans to crawl, not to walk’.
German soldiers, red-eyed with exhaustion from the hard fighting, and mourning more comrades than they ever imagined, had lost the triumphalist mood of just a week before. Everything seemed disturbingly different. They found artillery fire far more frightening in a city. The shellburst itself was not the only danger. Whenever a tall building was hit, shrapnel and masonry showered from above. The Landser had already started to lose track of time in this alien world, with its destroyed landscape of ruins and rubble. Even the midday light had a strange, ghostly quality from the constant haze of dust.
In such a concentrated area, a soldier had to become more conscious of war in three dimensions, with the danger of snipers in tall buildings. He also needed to watch the sky. When Luftwaffe strikes went in, a Landser hugged the ground in exactly the same way as a Russian. There was always the fear of Stukas failing to see the red, white and black swastika flags laid out to identify their positions. Often, they fired recognition flares to underline the point. Russian bombers also came in low, certainly low enough to reveal the red star on the tailplane. Much higher in the sky, fighters twinkled in the sun. One observer noticed that they twisted and turned more like fish in the sea than birds in the air.
Noise assailed their nerves constantly. ‘The air is filled’, wrote a panzer officer, ‘with the infernal howling of diving Stukas, the thunder of flak and artillery, the roar of engines, the rattle of tank tracks, the shriek of the launcher and Stalin organ, the chatter of sub-machine-guns back and forth, and all the time one feels the heat of a city burning at every point.’ The screams of the wounded affected men most. ‘It’s not a human sound,’ one German wrote in his diary, ‘just the dull cry of suffering of a wild animal.’
In such circumstances, the longing for home became acute. ‘Home is so far away—Oh, beautiful home!’ wrote one wistfully. ‘Only now do we know quite how wonderful it is.’ Russian defenders, on the other hand, clearly regarded homesickness as a luxury they could not afford. ‘Hello, my dear Palina!’ wrote an unknown soldier to his wife on 17 September. ‘I am well and healthy. No one knows what’s going to happen but we shall live and we shall see. The war is hard. You have the information about what is happening at the Front from the news. The mission of each soldier is simple: to destroy as many Fritzes as possible and then to push them back towards the west. I miss you very much but nothing can be done as several thousand kilometres separate us.’ And on 23 September, a soldier called Sergey wrote to his wife Lyolya, with a simple message: ‘The Germans won’t withstand us.’ There was no mention of home.
A renewed attempt by the three Soviet armies on the northern front to attack the Sixth Army’s left flank failed on 18 September. The rapid redeployment of Luftwaffe squadrons against the threat, combined with counter-attacks from XIV Panzer Corps, proved far too effective on the open steppe. A second attempt failed the following day. All the three armies achieved, at great cost, was to spare the 62nd Army from Luftwaffe attack for less than two days.
Chuikov, knowing that there would be no let-up, started to bring Colonel Batyuk’s 284th Rifle Division, mainly Siberians, across the Volga. He held them in reserve below the Mamaev Kurgan, in case the Germans established themselves solidly round the central landing stage, and then thrust north up the river bank in an attempt to cut his army off from behind. On the morning of 23 September, a few hours after the last of Batyuk’s Siberians had reached the west bank of the Volga, the division was thrown into the attack in an attempt to clear the Germans from the central landing stage and link up with the Soviet troops isolated south of the Tsaritsa. But the German divisions, although suffering heavy losses, forced them back. On that day, which happened to be Paulus’s fifty-second birthday, the Germans finally secured the broad corridor which cut off the left wing of the 62nd Army in its pocket south of the Tsaritsa gorge.
With predictable thoroughness, the Germans continued their attempts to crush resistance in this southern sector of Stalingrad. Two days later they achieved a breakthrough. This led to a panic in two militia brigades, which were already virtually out of food and ammunition. The collapse, however, started at the top, as Stalingrad Front headquarters reported to Shcherbakov in Moscow. The commander of 42nd Special Brigade, ‘left the line of defence, pretending that he was off to consult with the staff of the army’. The same happened with the 92nd Special Brigade, despite its strengthening with marine infantry. On 26 September, the commander and commissar, followed by their staff, abandoned their men, also ‘pretending that they were off to discuss the situation with higher command’, but in fact they withdrew to safety on the large island of Golodny in the middle of the Volga. The following morning, ‘when the soldiers learned that their commanders had deserted them, the majority rushed to the bank of the Volga and started preparing rafts for themselves’. Some of them tried paddling out to Golodny island on tree trunks and pieces of driftwood, some just swam. The enemy, spotting their desperate attempts to escape, opened fire with mortars and artillery, and killed many in the water.
‘When Major Yakovlev, the commander of the machine-gun battalion, by then the highest-ranking officer of the brigade left on the west bank, learned that the brigade commander had deserted and sown panic among the troops, he took over command of the defence.’ He soon found he had no communications, since the signallers were among those who had escaped to the island. Aided by Lieutenant Solutsev, Yakovlev rallied the remaining troops, and established a defence line which, in spite of the shortage of men and ammunition, held against seven attacks over the next twenty-four hours. All this time, the brigade commander remained on the island. He did not even try to send more ammunition to the defenders left behind. In an attempt to hide what was happening, he sent fictitious reports on the fighting to 62nd Army headquarters. This did him little good. Chuikov’s staff became suspicious. He was arrested and charged with ‘Criminal disobedience of Order No. 227’. Although no details are given in the report to Moscow of the sentence pronounced by the NKVD tribunal, clemency is hard to imagine.