Angry, Meyers crawled back a safe distance, looking for the Battalion mortar teams. They had a good number of the small 5cm version, and several 8cm Granatwerfers. He wanted to put fire on the enemy to discourage any further attack, and those mortars were his only ranged firepower. When the men started dropping the shells into those tubes, his eyes narrowed. Payback, he thought.
Snipers had a way of getting to a man like that. They sat out there somewhere in the broken buildings, as quiet and unseen as the death they brought to their enemies. But it was not the way Meyers wanted to die in battle. It seemed so inglorious. It was death by stealth and ambush, from an enemy that would not show his face. Yet that was just one private little slice of war. It wasn’t the slashing maneuver of Balck’s Panzer Regiment flanking his enemy when the Ghost Division appeared out of the morning mist like phantoms. There was no dash, or valor, or honor in that kind of a fight. It was war at its gritty heart, just men with rifles, in a haunted and broken city, creeping about from one blasted building to another trying to kill one another.
Stumpfeld’s radio call had not gone unheeded. As sunset neared, he had friendly battalions to either side, and the enemy attack had been halted. The breakthrough his battalion had led, and the gap they had found, had just become a new wrinkle in the front, sealed off by the 39th Regiment of the Guards and those T-34s. One of the first things Lieutenant Meyers did was to take stock of what he had left. There were still 17 of the 27 squads the battalion had started with.
Penetrations like the one Stumpfeld had led his men into had the effect of forcing the enemy to adjust their lines. Most of the open country west of the city had been yielded to the enemy, and now the defenders were being compressed into the long flat stretch of the city itself. As they did so, the strength of that defense hardened. The first offensive blows of Thor’s Hammer had beaten down the irregularities in the lines, but as it compressed, the metal on that anvil was beginning to show its strength.
Meyers had his satisfaction for the death of his commanding officer when he ordered that mortar barrage. But the Russians answered it with the heavy howitzers of their shore battery firing from the Metalworks in Petroleum Syndicate 1. Both sides could throw stones, but the rounds the Russians sent in literally shook the ground when they fell. Meyers and his men endured a five-minute pounding from four BR-18 305mm Howitzers. One squad position in a house a twenty yards to his left took a direct hit, and the structure just blew apart. When the dust and smoke settled, Meyers’ squad count was down to 16.
“So now the real fighting begins,” said Shumilov. “The belly war. Our men will be crawling around in the rubble and snow from this point forward. And the front lines, if they can be called that, will be the floors between levels in any given house or building.”
“True,” said Chuikov. “City fighting is a special kind of fighting. Things are settled here not by strength, but by skill, resourcefulness and swiftness. The buildings in a city are like breakwaters. So we must hold firmly to strong buildings, and establish small garrisons in them capable of all around fire in case they become encircled. The fighting will go on in those buildings—for a cellar, for a room, for every corner is a corridor.” Those were words he would recall and write again in his memoirs after the war, at least in Fedorov’s history. Whether he would remember them in this recounting of events, or ever live to write them down, remained unsettled.
“Everything here is a matter of feet and yards now, not miles. We must wage a bitter fight for every house, workshop, water tower, railway embankment, wall, cellar and every pile of ruins. We have given them all the ground we can afford to yield.”
“What about Yelshanka?” said Shumilov. “I’ve got the better part of two divisions holding that, and 90 percent of that front is now being manned by Volkov’s dogs. Then the Germans bunched up, and they’ve been trying to cut through to the causeway near the Cannery for the last two days.”
“That is what they will continue to do,” said Chuikov. “They want to reach the Volga wherever they can, and cut our defense into smaller isolated pockets. But as long as we control the ferry sites, I can still move troops at night from one place to another. So it really doesn’t matter where we make a stand. One broken building is as good as another.”
Shumilov nodded. “What will become of it?” he asked. “Can Rokossovsky get through to us any longer?”
Chuikov smiled. “Have you looked at a map of the front lines to the north lately? The Germans pushed east of Voronezh before we finally stopped them. Then the line runs down along the Don towards the Chir now after Zhukov’s counteroffensive has ended. On the other side, the Volga reaches north, and Volkov controls the east bank there as far as Samara. The whole front line looks like a deep well, leading right here to Volgograd. And here we sit, like a pair of frogs at the bottom of that well, croaking at one another in the night. No, Mikhail Stepanovich, Zhukov moved 13th Tank Corps behind 65th Army, but let us not fool ourselves. There will be no further counterattacks here to try and save us.”
“13th Tank Corps? What about the Shock Armies?”
“They are being pulled out. 65th and 66th Armies are extending their lines, and consolidating near the Don. Don’t you see? We’re too deep in that well. Anything Zhukov sends is just throwing good money after bad. What more will they do here? They threw four Shock Armies at the Germans—pushed all the way to Nizhne Chirskaya, but they could not hold that ground for more than two weeks. So here we will sit. We’ll both be named Heroes of the Soviet Union, and that will be that. Don’t expect any relief from the rest of the Army. The most we will get from here on out will be the grateful thanks of the nation.”
“Damn….” Shumilov swore quietly. “Now I regret yielding all that ground south of the Don. If we could have held Volkov back on the old fortification lines, then Zhukov’s attack would have had the SS in a bag for sure!”
“Which would have meant nothing,” said Chuikov. “You saw how quickly they broke through. They probably sent every reserve unit they had in the south to do so, but they stopped that last operation Zhukov mounted. What was it called? Saturn. Well, he’s running out of planets, isn’t he? So here we sit.”
“Then there will be no winter offensive?”
“Oh, I never said that. No, those Shock Armies must be going somewhere if they are pulling them north of the Don. And Steiner’s SS went somewhere too. They are in the Donbass now, and the Donets Basin. They want to clear that area, and take Rostov. We’re just a boil on their backside. That’s why they pulled out all but one of their really good divisions. But the fact that they left the Brandenburgers here is a very clear message.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean they intend to take this city, stupid as that might seem. They wouldn’t leave a good division like that here unless they meant to finish the job. Hitler must have insisted on it. No General worth the name would put ten divisions into this mess, at least not willingly.”
“We put ten here,” said Shumilov.
“Which is why they put ten in—tit for tat.” Chuikov leaned back, running his broad hand over that lion’s mane of curly dark hair. The rumble of distant artillery fire intervened, and both men sat listening to it for some time.
“So then,” said Shumilov at last. “We fight like the men in the Kirov Pocket fought, and like the 2nd Guards fought in Voronezh.”
“Yes,” said Chuikov, “and like the men in the Donets Basin and Rostov will fight, and after that the Army of the Kuban. All we are doing here is being stubborn. As long as we are here, then they need to leave those ten divisions here with us. So like I said, we fight now for every building—every room.”