Stalingrad Battle
Soldiers began to find a kind of ecstasy in action, even in suicide.
Chuikov, who was no sentimentalist, described the death of a marine called Pankaiko. As the doomed man prepared to throw a gasoline-filled bottle at a line of German tanks, a bullet ignited the fuel, turning him into a pillar of flame. But the marine was still alive, and somehow, with some last reserve of rage or maybe from some grim reflex, he managed to reach for a second missile. “Everyone saw a man in flames leap out of the trench,” Chuikov later wrote, “run right up to the German tank, and smash the bottle against the grille of the engine hatch. A second later an enormous sheet of flame and smoke engulfed both the tank and the hero who had destroyed it.”
“It was pretty terrifying,” a survivor told Alexander Werth, “to cross over to Stalingrad, but once we got there we felt better. We knew that beyond the Volga there was nothing, and that if we were to remain alive, we had to destroy the invaders.”
Russian troops fighting in the ruins of Stalingrad, Russia, 1942
“I cannot understand how men can survive such a hell,” a pilot in the Luftwaffe wrote home. “Yet Russians sit tight in the ruins, and holes and cellars, and a chaos of steel skeletons which used to be factories.” “The Russians are not men, but some kind of cast-iron creatures,” another German concluded.
Until November Paulus’s men could still believe that they would beat the Slavic devils, crushing them as they had been doing for seventeen months. Their German rear guard would support them, their planes deliver vital food, rescue the wounded. As the thermometer dropped and the nights grew longer, however, it was the Red Army and not the invader that would take the initiative.
| “At the bottom of the trenches there lay frozen green Germans and frozen grey Russians and frozen fragments of human shapes, and there were helmets, Russian and German, lying among the brick debris... How anyone could have survived was hard to imagine. But now everything was silent in this fossilized hell, as though a raving lunatic had suddenly died of heart failure.” Alexander Werth*, in Stalingrad, February 1943 |
The ruins of Stalingrad were the icons of Red Army stoicism; nevertheless, it was planning, not just endurance, that would save the Soviet cause. In November 1942, a massive operation, led by Rokossovsky, managed to encircle Paulus’s trapped Sixth Army, cutting off its retreat from the city. As Soviet and German troops dueled within the city, more than a million Red Army soldiers were gathering beyond the horizon. Armies were brought into position on three fronts, forming a giant trap round Stalingrad.
Damaged buildings in Stalingrad, Russia, Oct 1942
The operation, which began on 19 November, was a swift and complete success. General Paulus held out till the end of January. But action and a glimpse of victory raised Soviet morale. For the invaders, suddenly besieged, Stalingrad was a terrible shock, a catastrophe after the victories of 1941. “We have not received any Christmas packages yet,” a soldier in Paulus’s Sixth Army wrote home on 10 January. “We have absolutely nothing to eat, our strength is ebbing away in front of our eyes, we’ve turned into wrecks… I’ve reached the point where I no longer thank the Lord that he has spared my life thus far. I see death every hour.”
Soviet troops had always had lower expectations. They were not dreaming of their Christmas trees or of the sweets and cakes that they had never known. If they thought about home, it was about the life their enemy had destroyed. But now, backed up by their spectacular Katyushas and by the first friendly aircraft that they had seen since 1941, they seized a chance to take revenge. The Germans, in other words, were facing a kind of antiprogress, losing one by one the things that made them feel human. Red Army men, by contrast, were getting their first scent of real success. “The prestige value of having fought at Stalingrad,” Werth wrote, “was enormous.”
From Ivan’s War by Catherine Merridale
* Alexander Werth was a British correspondent in the Soviet Union from June, 1941 till 1946, writing for the newspaper Sunday Times and the BBC. His Russian was perfect!
Photos from http://www.2db.com