The dawn of August 7 engulfed the steppe country with a rush of blazing color and burning heat. In the gullies and hollows just outside the thatched huts of the village of Ostrov, twenty miles west of the Don River, Russian soldiers stretched and rubbed their eyes.
Tall, broad-shouldered Maj. Nikolai Tomskuschin faced a special personal dilemma. When, on July 15, he was ordered to take his artillery regiment onto the steppe to protect Sixty-second Army Headquarters, his superior had told him, “In the event of encirclement, save your men before your equipment.” But on July 28, Tomskuschin heard another command, this time from Radio Moscow and Premier Stalin, who told the Red Army to hold at all costs. “Not one step back” was the ultimatum Stalin issued.
As his men ate breakfast, German planes appeared overhead and Tomskuschin called Sixty-second Army Headquarters for further guidance. The line was dead. “Hello! Hello!,” he shouted. No one answered. The major dropped the phone and ran to find someone on the staff who could give him new orders. But he was stunned to find that Sixty-second Army Headquarters had disappeared. His commanders had fled to Stalingrad.
Trained for years to obey and serve, he hurried back to his regiment. In the next hours, German tanks blew up most of his .76-millimeter guns; Stuka dive-bombers burned the steppe grass around him with incendiary bombs. In desperation, Tomskuschin dispatched a messenger to the rear, to the bridge crossing the Don at Kalach, where he hoped there was some sort of headquarters. While he waited for orders, the blinding disk of the sun beat down, the Stukas hovered and dove. Casualties soared; by late afternoon more than four hundred men lay dead or wounded in the grass. The messenger never returned.
At twilight, Tomskuschin gathered his aides. “Assemble the men after dark,” he told them. “Head for the Don. Take everyone and everything that can move.”
He had made his compromise between conflicting orders.
In the sudden cool of nightfall, the men formed up and shuffled off to the east. Conversation was forbidden. Even so, weapons clanked against mess tins, and the troops cursed loudly when they stumbled. As the moon peeped fitfully through the clouds, Tomskuschin listened for suspicious sounds. Occasionally a rifle popped, but it was always far away, and the major whispered his troops on. Suddenly the darkness burst into a thousand lights, and tracer bullets ripped into the column from both sides of the road.
“Ambush!” Tomskuschin screamed. “Run, run to the river!”
The regiment stampeded into the darkness, but Tomskuschin stayed behind. It was quiet now, except for moans from the road, and he crawled into the high grass to await the dawn.
Lying under a brilliant canopy of stars, he thought of his family, safe in Sverdlovsk behind the Ural Mountains. He had not seen them for more than a year, since the war began and swept him to this wretched field. He thought, too, about his military career, irrevocably ruined since he had chosen to move back against Stalin’s orders. While he had no regrets about disobeying a senseless order that conflicted with his duty to his men, he had no illusions about the fate awaiting him back at headquarters. His offense was punishable by death.
As dawn streaked the sky, the major rummaged in a pocket for his wallet and took out wrinkled pictures of his wife and son, six-year-old Vladimir. He held the photos a long time before he put them down and reached for his pistol. As he raised the gun and fingered the trigger, the image of Vladimir seemed to rise up before him. He hesitated, wanting desperately to hold the boy in his arms. Even imprisonment in Germany might be better than destroying his last chance to see the child. He eased the pistol back in the holster.
The Germans found him in the high grass. “Ruki verkh!” they shouted; he raised his hands meekly in surrender. They took his wallet and ring, but they did not abuse him and he rode away from the battlefield on top of a German tank. Tomskuschin was not afraid. In fact, he felt invigorated. He had a dream to realize someday, back behind the Urals where little Vladimir watched for his return.
In the aftermath of the battle around Ostrov, the German Sixth Army counted its booty: “more than fifty-seven thousand prisoners, more than one thousand tanks destroyed.”
As a result, General Paulus saluted his men with a special message: “The Russian Sixty-second Army and great parts of the First Tank Army are destroyed.… Thanks to a brave advance … the possibility of this victory was set … We proudly think of the fallen … on to the next task set by the Führer.…”
Despite the fantastic success of Paulus’s forces in crushing the last Russian resistance west of the Don, the most immediate danger to Stalingrad was the Fourth Panzer Army, which was swinging northeast to join the assault on the city. Any advance they made would be along a major highway and rail line, and they had no rivers to cross.
It was logical then, that the commander of the Fourth Panzer Army, horse-faced “Papa” Hoth, should relish his new assignment. His scouts had already worked their way to within twenty miles of Stalingrad’s outskirts and with luck, Hoth hoped to beat Paulus into the city. Even the latest intelligence reports of stiffening Soviet resistance at the low range of hills crossing the railroad and highway near Abganerovo just south of the city did not worry him. He was confident he could not be stopped.
Most of the Russian stragglers retreating toward Stalingrad would have agreed with this estimate of the situation. Disillusioned, desperate, they had been reduced to fighting each other for scraps of food and water—especially water, which was scarce on the barren steppe. At precious watering holes they found another enemy had been there before them: the Kalmucks, natives to the region and intensely anti-Communist, had thrown dead animals into the wells. The poisoned water quickly killed unwary drinkers.
One retreating Russian soldier, curly-haired Lt. Hersch Gurewicz, forgot his thirst as he dove into a ditch for the third time that day. The Stukas were back, like prehistoric birds, circling impudently, searching for carrion below. Gurewicz was exhausted. Chased by the Germans for more than a year, he had begun to wonder where it would all end. Just twenty-one years old, a native of Mogilev near the Polish border, he had first joined the Red Army in 1940 during the war with the Finns. Then, his mother had been a Communist party member, working for the military. His father taught violin at the Rimsky-Korsakov School of Music in Mogilev. The German invasion had brought death to both his mother and sister, who were tracked down and slain as partisans; his father and brother disappeared into the army and Hersch had been unable to locate them since.
Now in the ditch fifty miles southwest of Stalingrad, Gurewicz was a hardened veteran. He could tell by the sound of a shell whether it was close or meant for someone behind him; he knew the exact moment to run for cover when bombers began to hurtle down out of the sun. He knew other things, too, like the price of desertion. He had seen the “Green Hats” of the NKVD instilling their special brand of discipline. The NKVD first appeared on the battlefield in July when Joseph Stalin made the Red Army a scapegoat to appease public indignation and fear about the German advance across the steppe. Stalin’s Order Number 227 had unleashed a reign of terror. At countless roadblocks, the Green Hats inspected papers, asked curt questions, and shot anyone suspected of running from the front. Thousands of corpses lined the roads as a warning to those contemplating such desertion.
Gurewicz had seen mounds of bodies at the checkpoints, but they did not shock him for he had seen worse. The previous winter, fighting as a partisan, he had entered the town of Rudnia just after the Germans left. The body of a woman lay in the street. She was blonde, young, and must have been pretty, but her arms, extended upward, had no hands, and her legs had been cut off above the knees. Someone had slit her torso from navel to crotch with a knife or bayonet. Around the corpse stood a crowd of people crying loudly. One man spoke up in trembling indignation.
“This was our schoolteacher,” he said, weeping. “She taught our children.”
His stomach churning, Gurewicz had turned away.
Once when the Germans caught him, he had learned of their savagery firsthand. Trapped in an ambush, he was marched for miles with a rope around his neck as an object lesson to villagers. A sign pinned to his chest read: “I am a Russian Partisan.” Later, at Gestapo headquarters, he passed into the hands of specialists, two blond officers in black uniforms, who pulled him into a room where another partisan had been strapped onto a table. While Gurewicz watched, a German turned a lever and the table moved apart in sections like a rack. A terrible scream burst from the man’s throat and his leg bones snapped through his skin. The lever turned again and his arms ripped apart in jagged tears. When the man fainted, his torturers shot him dead.
Gurewicz then went to his own chamber of horrors, where he was pushed into a chair and his head was forced back. An interrogator hovered over his face and slowly threaded a thin wire up his nose. While Gurewicz tried to retch, the wire entered his lung, jerked horribly and he fell unconscious.
He awoke lying in the snow, his hands tied to a horse’s tail. He dimly heard someone shouting, then a slap and the horse reared and galloped off at full speed. Snow flew in his face. He gasped for breath. The horse bucked through drifts and smashed Gurewicz into the ground again and again. His head cracked against something solid, he felt a searing pain, then nothing.
Incredibly, he regained consciousness between the crisp sheets of a hospital bed in Moscow. He was alive only because his partisan comrades had followed him to Gestapo headquarters and ambushed his tormentors. Yet every night in the weeks that followed, Gurewicz dreamed of wires and broken bones and a schoolteacher with severed limbs. The nightmares always left him spent and fearful. But through it all, he never broke and cried.
Returning to duty he became an officer in the Red Army, and went to an advanced infantry training school at Krasnodar in the Caucasus, at that time far behind the front lines. But the summer of 1942 quickly brought German tanks to the edge of the city and forced Gurewicz and his fellow students into an authorized retreat to the Volga. Now on the dusty road to Sety, he cringed as the Stukas nosed over into their dives. The concussions from explosions swept over him and pounded the breath from his body. One blast caught a cadet out in the open and ignited Molotov cocktails that were strapped to his back. A human torch, the soldier danced convulsively, his back exploding in brief orange puffs as the gasoline fed on his body.
Ignoring the planes, Gurewicz ran from the ditch to help. Kneeling over the charred, sizzling body, he saw a monstrous sight: the man’s chest had burned away, exposing the entire rib cage and his furiously pumping heart. The man he once had known was no longer recognizable. His face had melted. Gurewicz stared in horror. Another bomb exploded nearby and there was a sharp pain in his back. But he remained kneeling beside the blackened lump in the road until the heart contracted one last time, and stopped.
Only then did he leave what remained of his friend. Bleeding heavily from his own shrapnel wounds, he went on to Sety for first aid and then rode an ambulance through Stalingrad to a recuperation center across the Volga. As his back healed slowly, he began to badger doctors about releasing him to active duty. They told him to be patient. The summons would some soon enough.
To save his southern flank, Yeremenko ordered his retreating soldiers to hold at Abganerovo, while he reinforced them with whatever fresh troops he could find. The last antitank guns that he could locate on August 9 were ordered to dig into the hills overlooking the highway and the railroad; fifty-nine tanks were sent on a suicidal attack. It was not much of a holding action, Yeremenko knew, but it might at least buy a day’s time.
Meanwhile, along his Don River flank to the west of Stalingrad, the bridge at Kalach was the key to the situation. Thus, Col. Pyotr Ilyin received orders directly from Yeremenko to hold or destroy the bridge. The men of Ilyin’s 20th Motorized Brigade were hollow-eyed with fatigue. Running low on both guns and ammunition, they dug in at an orchard on the outskirts of Kalach and listened quietly as Ilyin explained that they were to be a rear guard. Ilyin tried to assure them that other Russian divisions would protect their flanks, that with this added support they could hold their position on the river. Few men in the brigade believed him, and he was thankful that none of them deserted that first night.
Across the Don all was silent. From their positions on the low, flat east bank, Russian soldiers could not see past the lip of the three-hundred-foot bluff across the river that was controlled by the Germans. Ilyin sent scouts across the river where they trained binoculars on enemy troop concentrations, and for several days an uneasy quiet descended on that part of the steppe. Ilyin took advantage of the situation to carefully dig in his few artillery pieces and the last of his machine guns at strategic points. Then he waited.
On the morning of August 15, the scouts tumbled back down the palisades on the far shore and screamed: “They’re coming!” Behind them, German soldiers suddenly lined the cliff. On Ilyin’s orders, sappers blew the explosive charges they had placed under the bridge. It heaved into the air with a shattering roar. When the smoke cleared, the western section had fallen into the river and the eastern part was on fire. Ilyin had gained some time.
Behind the protection of the high bluffs on the opposite shore, the Germans plotted new tactics and twenty-eight-year-old Capt. Gerhard Meunch made the rounds among his men. Recently made a battalion commander in the 71st Division, an extraordinary promotion for one so young, Meunch wanted to make sure his troops understood that he cared about them. He listened patiently as they griped about the heat, the food, and the lack of mail. Finally satisfied that they appreciated his interest, he went to an observation post at the edge of the Don cliff. Below lay Kalach, a cluster of old houses with an apple orchard on the outskirts. Beyond it, in the hazy distance, Meunch could see almost to Stalingrad.
In the apple orchard across the river, Colonel Ilyin had just learned that the other Russian divisions protecting his flanks had melted away, and he was left alone to hold the German Sixth Army at bay. To complicate matters, Ilyin was unable to raise anyone in Stalingrad headquarters by radio for instructions.
As if sensing his dilemma, the Germans came for him right away. At point-blank range, Ilyin’s gunners blew apart their fleet of rubber boats. But more than twenty-five miles upstream, Sixth Army engineers under Maj. Joseph Linden, a bookish-looking technician from Wiesbaden, had thrown two pontoon bridges across the Don. Faced only by scattered resistance, the engineers quickly secured a bridgehead on the eastern shore, and Paulus ordered three divisions toward the three-hundred-foot spans. Hundreds of tanks plowed up the roads and fields on their way to the river. They stopped on the western side of the Don while the cautious Paulus tidied up his lines, refitted his armor, demanded more quartermaster supplies, and coordinated more Luftwaffe bomber support from improvised steppe airfields.
Filling their mess tins at field kitchens, German troops now spoke openly about furloughs back in Germany and civilian jobs awaiting them after a final thrust to the Volga. Their mood was jubilant, their expectations heady.
On the evening of August 22, two men stood in a garden near the German bridgehead and talked urgently of the next day’s work. One of them was Gen. Hans Hube, of the 16th Panzer Division. A courier handed him a dispatch. Hube read it quickly and said, “The balloon goes up at 0430 hours tomorrow, Sickenius.”
Colonel Sickenius acknowledged the news and Hube dismissed him.
“Till tomorrow, Sickenius.”
“Till tomorrow, Herr General.”
Hube paused, touched his only hand to his cap, and remarked, “Tomorrow night in Stalingrad!”
Forty miles to the east, signs had been posted on trees throughout Stalingrad exhorting the citizens. “Death to the Invader!”, they read. But few civilians knew exactly where the enemy was.
In the Tsaritsa Gorge, Andrei Yeremenko agonized over the obvious buildup going on in Paulus’s sector. Intelligence showed that the Germans were planning another classic pincer movement with Sixth Army acting as the left arm and Hoth’s Fourth Panzers as the right. And though he had been able to stall Hoth temporarily in the hills around Abganerovo, Yeremenko knew he had too few reserves available to cope with such a combined attack.
On the political front, at least, he had scored an impressive victory. A new-found friend, Commissar Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, had proven a reliable ally in recent days as Yeremenko argued about the dual command problem with STAVKA on the BODO line, the direct telephone link to the Kremlin. Khrushchev was Stalin’s political emissary to the military council in the Tsaritsa command post, and he had backed Yeremenko fully in his campaign to realign divisions of authority. Finally, on August 13, Stalin had given Yeremenko supreme responsibility for both fronts and demoted the irascible General Gordov.*
Now in complete charge of Stalingrad’s defense, Yeremenko had to cope immediately with another unexpected problem; the city’s garrison commander had disappeared, leaving chaos behind. Without a local leader, the city’s forces floundered. Their confused state was most noticeable in the streets. Military vehicles were getting lost and accidents proliferated at intersections as drivers jockeyed for the right of way and drove far faster than regulations allowed. Since discipline was broken, hundreds of Russian garrison troops were beginning to desert to the far side of the Volga.
With all his problems out on the steppe, General Yeremenko struggled to restore order within his own house.
The thunder of tank motors shattered the early morning darkness of August 23, and from the steppe, lines of German panzers moved awkwardly to the bridges that crossed the Don. They maneuvered carefully onto the pontoon tracks and gingerly picked their way to the far side. Trucks followed, carrying infantry, ammunition, food, medicine, and fuel. The movement attracted the attention of the Russians, who fired artillery in the general direction of the noise. But their aim was erratic, and the panzers and support troops quickly assembled into three fan-shaped combat groups on the eastern side of the river. At a signal, they roared across the steppe, beneath a stunning, sudden dawn. The sky was gray, then brilliantly orange and red and violet, and finally a yellow gleam that seared the tankers’ eyes, and made them marvel at the beauty of the Russian prairie.
Lt. Hans Oettl was ecstatic as he saw the sky turn into an azure blue, untrammeled by clouds. For Oettl, a twenty-two-year-old former city employee in Munich, the Sunday morning was absolutely perfect. Even the enemy was cooperating. Only sporadic gunfire intruded from the flanks as the tank column headed toward the Volga. He watched in fascination as Stukas dove on unseen positions to silence the opposition. When the planes returned, the lieutenant waved gaily at them, and they responded by sounding their sirens in acknowledgment. Marveling at the technical cooperation within his army, Oettl patted his pet goat in satisfaction. He had found Maedi wandering alone on the steppe, put a red ribbon around her neck, and kept her ever since as an affectionate friend. Now Maedi stood beside her master while his tank column whirled by through dense clouds of dust.
Wheels and treads loosed billowing clouds of grime. Most men tied handkerchiefs over their mouths and wore goggles. At the tip of the spearhead, radio operators of the 16th Panzer Division kept Sixth Army Headquarters informed of each kilometer they clicked off.
At Golubinka, Sixth Army’s new command center on the west bank of the Don, General Paulus read a dispatch: “9:45 A.M. Russians seem surprised about attack and not too strong between Rossoshka and Don.… In north we count on heavy resistance.…”
But resistance in the north, on the tank group’s left flank, was almost nonexistent. The panzers pushed ahead easily and Hans Oettl continued to relish the beauty around him. It was the most beautiful day he had seen during the war.
Noon passed and the panzers kept driving eastward into the haze. The sun turned from its zenith and dropped behind tank commanders standing in their turrets. Their faces were caked with dirt but they were happy; within a short time they expected to see the Volga. Some officers reminded themselves that the river was more than one thousand miles from Germany.
Behind the 16th Panzers, the 3rd Motorized Division tried desperately to keep pace, but slowly fell behind as the dust clouds blinded the drivers. Further to the rear, the 60th Motorized Division was in a hopeless snarl, with horns honking and tempers flaring. A man stepped from the side of the road and faced a column of trucks. Pointing a pistol directly at the first vehicle, he yelled, “If you don’t let us through, you’ll get it right in the tires!”
The astonished soldier pulled over to give Dr. Ottmar Kohler the right-of-way. Kohler, a brilliant, acerbic surgeon, had served with the division since its formation in Danzig in 1939. He was fed up with delays. He believed his place was up front with the wounded. For months he had been promoting a plan whereby doctors could treat seriously wounded men within minutes of their being hit instead of sending them far to the rear for aid. In so doing, Kohler had gone against Wehrmacht traditions, but he was convinced he was right. That attitude was indicative of his personality, which now brought him to the middle of the road with a drawn gun. Impatient with incompetence, he acted without hesitation to correct the situation.
Kohler waited until his unit reentered the line, then jumped into a motorcycle sidecar and waved his driver on. Blinded by the sun, the man drove straight into a hole. Kohler smashed his head against the driver’s helmet, felt something in his face pop and cringed in agony. Feeling his mouth, he diagnosed the ailment immediately: a broken upper jaw. Nauseated from the pain, he swigged down some cognac and ordered the driver to catch up with the rest of the medical detachment.
At Golubinka, a clerk made a notation in the war diary of the Sixth Army: “1:00 P.M. Still further confirmed the enemy was surprised.…”
The advance continued into the afternoon. Tank commanders tensed when they saw church steeples and white houses on the horizon. Clutching their throat microphones, they told their crews: “On the right is Stalingrad.” The men clambered up for a look at a montage of homes, balkas, and smokestacks that passed beside them, and cheers echoed along the column. Then shells erupted around the lead tanks and they buttoned up for a fight.
The Stukas came back and tanks fired point-blank into gun emplacements. Tankers who dismounted and stood over the blasted holes saw bits of calico and cotton dresses, arms and legs, and female torsos tossed carelessly about. They went back to their vehicles and told everyone that the Russians had sent women to fight them. The march to the Volga continued. Some of the tankers were sick to their stomachs.
The sun was low in the west when the first German tank came to a halt at the edge of a sheer cliff overlooking the Volga. Lt. Gottfried Ademeit, the son of a minister, stared in awe across the river. He could see almost a hundred miles into the mysterious flat land on the other side. As he put it, he “was looking into the heartland of Asia.”
When Hans Oettl arrived, he hopped down from his vehicle and joined the rush to bathe in the river while his goat, Maedi, feasted on the lush vegetables in the fields. German soldiers, officers and men, stripped and plunged into the cold water. Afterwards, recalling the scene, Oettl wondered openly why it had to be that war was the only way he could see such a magnificent natural wonder.
Behind the main column, late-arriving soldiers entered the suburbs of Rynok, just north of Stalingrad, and followed tramcars down the trolley tracks. When passengers looked back and saw troops dressed in strange uniforms, they panicked and jumped off the trains. The Germans laughed and left the Russians alone for the time being.
By 6:00 P.M., the German Sixth Army held a small stretch of the Volga north of Stalingrad. Hundreds of trucks and tanks moved up in support while radio operators of the 16th Panzer Division transmitted the news back to headquarters. It had been another fantastic day for General Paulus.
* During this period, Stalin was entertaining British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had flown to Moscow with depressing news: the Allies would not be able to launch a cross-channel invasion in 1942. On hearing this, Stalin was furious, but he was mollified somewhat when Churchill, accompanied by Averell Harriman, disclosed plans for the invasion of North Africa (Operation Torch), which was scheduled for that coming November.