The 24th Panzer Division, most of the 389th Infantry Division and the 100th Jager Division advanced towards the Red October metalworks and the Barrikady gun factory—‘the confusing tangle of a completely destroyed factory area’, as one Jäger described the huge complex, in which almost every window and roof had been smashed by bombing, with rusted machinery twisted out of recognition. ‘Already the first comrades were falling. The cries for medical orderlies increased. The fire intensified, but not just from in front, it was also now coming from both sides.’ Russian artillery shells and mortar-bomb explosions also caused heavy casualties with stone fragments from the rubble as well as shrapnel.
Next day, to speed the attack on the Red October complex, Paulus ordered the 94th Infantry Division and 14th Panzer Division up from the southern sector of the city. On the Russian side, the hard-pressed 62nd Army also received some badly needed reinforcements when General Stepan Guriev’s 39th Guards Rifle Division crossed the Volga. It was sent straight in to bolster the line on the right of the Red October works. Another fresh division, Colonel Gurtiev’s 308th Rifle Division, a second formation made up mainly of Siberians, also started to cross the Volga, but these additions barely made up the losses already suffered.
Chuikov soon faced an unexpected danger. On 1 October, the 295th Infantry Division infiltrated down gullies on Rodimtsev’s right flank. His guardsmen countered savagely, ambushing them at close quarters, with sub-machine-guns and grenades. But during the night, a large group of German infantry clambered through the main drain running down the Krutoy gully, and reached the Volga bank. They turned south and attacked the rear of Rodimtsev’s division. This raid coincided with another breakthrough on the right. Rodimtsev reacted quickly, ordering every company he could spare into impromptu counter-attacks, and the situation was saved.
On 2 October, the Germans attacked the oil-storage tanks on the river bank just above Chuikov’s headquarters. The tanks were not empty after all. Direct hits from German bombs or shells set them on fire. Burning oil poured down the hill, all around the headquarters and out into the river. Only the radio transmitter worked. ‘Where are you?’ Stalingrad Front headquarters signalled repeatedly. The reply eventually came back: ‘We’re where the most smoke and flames are.’
During the first week of October, Chuikov clearly had started to wonder whether they would be able to hold the rapidly narrowing strip of river bank. Everything depended on the Volga crossing. He knew that his badly mauled regiments had inflicted heavy casualties on the Germans, but the outcome of the battle depended on nerve as much as resources. They had no alternative but to stick with the 62nd Army’s slogan: ‘For the defenders of Stalingrad there is no ground on the other side of the Volga.’ This really had become a sacred oath for many soldiers. One of the most famous acts of courage occurred at this time on the southern part of the factory district, when German tanks advanced on a position held in the ruins of a school by a detachment of marine infantry attached to 193rd Rifle Division. They had run out of anti-tank grenades, so Marine Mikhail Panikako seized two petrol bombs. As he was poised to throw the first one, a lucky German bullet shattered it in his hand, covering him in flames. He hurled himself forward over the last few yards, and flung himself against the side of the tank, smashing the other one in a ball of fire on the engine decks behind the turret.
German commanders were also alarmed. Their men were exhausted, and morale had suffered. Soldiers in the 389th Infantry Division, for example, did not disguise their hopes that they would have to be posted back to France because of the heavy casualties they had suffered. German war cemeteries behind the lines were growing every day. Those who heard Hitler’s speech on 30 September from the Berliner Sportpalast were not encouraged when he boasted that the Allied powers did not appreciate Germany’s achievements, above all their advance from the Don to the Volga. Once again throwing down a gauntlet in the face of fate, Hitler insisted that ‘no man will shift us from this spot’.
11. Traitors and Allies
‘We Russians were ideologically prepared for the battle of Stalingrad,’ said an officer veteran. ‘Above all, we had no illusions about the cost, and were prepared to pay it.’ The complete truth would have been to say that the Soviet state and perhaps a majority of the soldiers had few illusions. It is not an insult to their courage—if anything, it confirms it—to remember also the minority who would not, or could not, stand the appalling strain of the battle.
The Soviet authorities were pitiless. ‘In the blazing city,’ wrote Chuikov, ‘we did not suffer cowards, we had no room for them.’ Soldiers and civilians alike were warned with Stalin’s quotation from Lenin: ‘Those who do not assist the Red Army in every way, and do not support its order and discipline, are traitors and must be killed without pity.’ All ‘sentimentalism’ was rejected. In total war, there were bound to be miscarriages of military justice, just as front-line troops risked being killed by their own artillery or aircraft.
Establishing a ferocious discipline was hard at first. Not until 8 October did the political department of the Stalingrad Front feel able to report to Moscow that ‘the defeatist mood is almost eliminated, and the number of treasonous incidents is getting lower’. That the Soviet regime was almost as unforgiving towards its own soldiers as towards the enemy is demonstrated by the total figure of 13,500 executions, both summary and judicial, during the battle of Stalingrad. This included all crimes classed by the commissars as ‘extraordinary events’, from retreating without orders to self-inflicted wounds, desertion, crossing over to the enemy, corruption and anti-Soviet activities. Red Army soldiers were also deemed guilty if they failed to shoot immediately at any comrades seen trying to desert or to surrender to the enemy. On one occasion in late September, when a group of Soviet soldiers surrendered, German tanks advanced rapidly to protect them from fire directed at them from their own lines.
Chuikov’s weakest units were the militia Special Brigades, made up mainly of workers from factories in the northern part of Stalingrad. Blocking groups of well-armed Komsomol volunteers or NKVD detachments were placed behind them to prevent retreat. Their commissars in black leather jackets and armed with pistols reminded the writer Konstantin Simonov of Red Guards in 1918. In the case of the 124th Special Brigade, facing the 16th Panzer Division up at Rynok, the blocking groups behind the lines forced those who were cracking under the strain to escape to the enemy. Dobronin reported to Khrushchev that, on 25 September, a group of ten deserters, including two NCOs, crossed over to the Germans. The following night another five men slipped away. According to the German report on the interrogation of the first group of these very same deserters, their company strength was down to fifty-five men. ‘Since their last attack on 18 September, in which they suffered heavy losses, they have been given no more tasks. Behind the front line there is a second line of Party and Komsomol members, armed with heavy machine-guns and machine pistols.’
A Soviet senior lieutenant from Smolensk deserted for a different reason. He had been captured in the battle for the Don bend in August, but managed to escape from German custody soon afterwards. When he reported for duty again with the Red Army, ‘he was arrested according to an order of Stalin, treated as a deserter’, and sent to a penal company in 149th Special Brigade sector.
Others deserted for reasons which led the Germans into a false optimism. ‘Morale among the Russians is really bad,’ an NCO from the 79th Infantry Division wrote home. ‘Most deserters are driven over to us through hunger. It’s possible that the Russians will suffer from a famine this winter.’