General Golikov’s hysteria reflected the increasing tendency among Soviet personnel to quit the city. While Golikov was forced to remain because of a direct order from Khrushchev, thousands of Russian officers and men sought safety on the eastern shore of the Volga. Some forged false papers; others hid on the ferries. All were desperate enough to chance a fatal encounter with NKVD police. But even the Green Hats were now leaving.
At his nearly deserted bunker in the Tsaritsa Gorge, General Lopatin tried valiantly to rally his dispirited soldiers. But the Sixty-second Army he commanded existed in name only. Having been badly battered west of the Don, its survivors had straggled into Stalingrad to seek refuge, not combat. Its front extended from the tractor factory to the grain elevator and it was ill-prepared to withstand the full weight of the oncoming Germans. An armored brigade possessed just one tank. An infantry brigade counted exactly 666 soldiers, of whom only 200 were qualified riflemen. A regiment which should have mustered 3000 troops listed 100. The division next to it, normally 10,000 strong, had a total of 1500. On the southern fringe of the city, the once great 35th Guards Division carried 250 infantry on its rolls.
With these statistics confronting him, General Lopatin lost confidence in his ability to save Stalingrad. When he confided his fears to Yeremenko, he lost his job.
Across the Volga, in the woods at Yamy, Yeremenko and Khrushchev held a hurried conference to choose a successor. Sifting the names of candidates, they quickly agreed that one general, Vassili Ivanovich Chuikov, the deputy commander of the Sixty-fourth Army, was best qualified for the job. A peasant whose career included work as a bellhop and shop apprentice before the Bolshevik Revolution, Chuikov had joined the Communist party in 1919 and within months became leader of a regiment during the Civil War. Six years later, at the age of twenty-five, he graduated from the prestigious Frunze Military Academy and went on to command an army in the Russo-Finnish War of 1939–1940. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Chuikov was stationed in Chungking, China, reporting the palace intrigues around the “Fascist” Chiang Kai-shek. Not until the spring of 1942 did he return to Russia, where, for the past six weeks, he had worked in General Shumilov’s Sixty-fourth Army as it fought the German Fourth Panzer Army on the steppe southwest of Stalingrad. Despite the constant retreats before the massed enemy tanks, Chuikov never succumbed to defeatism. Strong-willed, imbued with a belief in himself, he heaped scorn on those who lost heart. Argumentative to a fault, he readily chastised anyone who disagreed with his ideas about military matters.
His abrasive personality went hand in hand with his pugnacious appearance. Broad-shouldered, stocky, he had a jowly, seamed face. Tousled black hair fell into his eyes, and his smile revealed a row of gleaming gold teeth. Chuikov cared little about his dress, so ordinary and unkempt that he was frequently mistaken for the average foot soldier.
Yeremenko and Khrushchev felt that Chuikov’s dynamic manner far outweighed any deficiencies in temperament. Precisely because he was decisive, tenacious, and a brilliant improvisor on the battlefield, they believed that he was the right man to send into Stalingrad. Yeremenko phoned Stalin on the BODO line to get approval for the appointment, then called the general to Yamy for a conference.
On the evening of September 11, Chuikov appeared at the main ferry landing in Stalingrad. While waiting for a steamer, he wandered into a first aid station and immediately became furious at what he saw. Men with grievous wounds were lying on the floor, their blood-soaked bandages unchanged for hours. Unfed, they continually asked for water.
When Chuikov asked “Why?” of doctors and nurses, they shrugged their inability to cope with the staggering input of casualties. The reply seemed logical so Chuikov watched an operation, then went out to his jeep and sat brooding about the wounded until the ferry came in and transferred him to the far shore.
At 10:00 A.M. on September 12, he saluted Andrei Yeremenko and said: “Tovarishch commander, General Chuikov has arrived according to your order.”
Yeremenko greeted him warmly and offered to share breakfast. When Chuikov refused, the two men talked about general conditions in the Stalingrad area. Outside, an occasional German shell exploded in the nearby trees.
“Vassili Ivanovich,” Yeremenko got to the point. “I asked for you in order to offer you a new position.…” Though he had anticipated the new post, Chuikov looked genuinely startled as Yeremenko stared intently at him for a reaction, “… the position of commander of the Sixty-second Army. What do you think of that?”
Chuikov responded immediately, “V etom otnoshenii …” (“In this respect”), and Yeremenko remembered that Chuikov was fond of using this phrase in conversation, “… the appointment, of course, is extremely responsible.”
Yeremenko broke in, “The situation of the Army is very tense, and I am happy you realize the heavy load you bear.”
Chuikov nodded. “I think that, in this respect, I will not let you down.”
Satisfied with Chuikov’s responses, Yeremenko took him to see Khrushchev, who was quickly convinced that Chuikov meant to stand fast in Stalingrad. The meeting broke up on the implicit understanding that Front Headquarters would not deny Chuikov help when he asked for it. Then the new commander of the Sixty-second Army left to collect his belongings before the return trip to the west bank of the Volga.
On the same day, Gen. Friedrich von Paulus flew more than five hundred miles west to Vinnitsa in the Ukraine. There he spent hours with Adolf Hitler and discussed his chief concern, the left flank along the Don. Paulus asked the Führer to give him some “corset” units, a reserve for the puppet armies still moving into position. Hitler was most cordial and promised to look into the problem immediately. When he pressed Paulus about Stalingrad, the general told him the city should fall in a matter of days.
That evening Paulus dined with his old friend Franz Halder. Over good wine, they talked of the successful summer steppe campaign, and Paulus repeated his fears about the weakness of the puppet armies on his left flank. Halder told him he intended to keep after Hitler on the subject and the two men parted on an optimistic note.
Meanwhile, the three top men in Soviet military affairs were also in conference. Joseph Stalin, Georgi Zhukov, and Alexander Vasilevsky pored over the critical news coming from the battlefields. They noted that in the Caucasus, German Army Group A was beginning to slow down in its drive for the oil fields. But Stalin, still unsure that he had the strength to contain the enemy there, summed up the problem by saying, “They want to get at the oil of Grozny at any price.” Without pause he added, “Well now let’s see what Zhukov has to say about Stalingrad.”
Zhukov did not have good news. His northern forces could not break the German corridor from the Don to the Volga. Stalin went to a map and studied his list of reserves in other sectors while Zhukov and Vasilevsky stood to one side and discussed in hushed tones the possibility of an alternative solution, another way out.
Suddenly Stalin snapped, “What other way out?”
Both generals were shocked by his keen hearing. Stalin continued, “Look, you had better get back to the general staff and give some thought to what can be done at Stalingrad and how many reserves we will need to reinforce the Stalingrad group. And don’t forget the Caucasus front. We will meet again tomorrow evening at nine.”
While Stalin and his brain trust maneuvered in Moscow, Vassili Chuikov came ashore in Stalingrad to assume command of the Sixty-second Army. A rabble ran to meet him. Old men and women, little children crowded around; faces black with grime, they were a pathetic sight. The whimpering children begged for water, and that bothered Chuikov most of all, for he had none to give them.
He drove off to the Tsaritsa Gorge to meet his staff, but the headquarters was empty and he had to ask soldiers in the streets for directions to the new command post. Someone told him it was on Mamaev Hill and, driving there through the wreckage from the bombings and shellings of previous days, he was appalled at the flimsy antitank defenses. From his own experience, Chuikov knew the Germans would roll over them in seconds. He noticed something else: Though it was still summer, every leaf had fallen from the trees.
Reaching the southeastern slope of Mamaev, Chuikov climbed upward and stumbled upon the new headquarters, just a wide trench with a bench of packed earth along one wall and a bed and table on the other side. The roof was made of brush covered only by a foot of dirt.
Two people were in the dugout, a woman telephone operator and Gen. Nikolai Ivanovich Krylov, a heavyset man with a serious face. Since Krylov was arguing heatedly on the phone, Chuikov slipped his identification papers onto the table and waited while Krylov glanced casually at them. When he finished his call, the chief of staff of the Sixty-second Army reached out and shook hands with his new superior.
Still very upset about his telephone conversation, Krylov explained that he had just been speaking with an officer who had moved his own headquarters back to the edge of the Volga without permission. “In other words,” Krylov said, “[his]… command post is now behind us. It’s disgraceful.…”
Chuikov agreed and sat down. He needed time to grasp the situation; so, for the moment, he did not intrude on Krylov’s activities.
Toward midnight, the general who had arbitrarily relocated his command post arrived with his deputy. At this point, Chuikov asserted himself as army commander and berated the man, “What would your attitude be as a Soviet general, in command of a military sector, if one of your subordinate commanders and headquarters left the front without your permission? How do you regard your own action?…”
The general and his deputy hung their heads and did not reply. Chuikov kept lashing out at them, accusing them of cowardice. Before dismissing them, he demanded they return to their former position by 4:00 A.M. Then the outraged Chuikov went back to a study of the tactical maps. The arrows on them pointed to disaster. Less than half a mile away, troops of the German 71st and 295th divisions were about to lunge toward the vital main ferry linking Stalingrad with the far shore.
At 6:30 A.M. on September 13, the enemy attacked and, with communications among his ground units frequently cut by explosions, Chuikov had great difficulty in maintaining control of the battle. By late afternoon he had “almost completely lost contact with the troops.” But the Germans still had not been able to break into the downtown section of Stalingrad.
Exposed to incessant gunfire on Mamaev, and deprived of normal telephone and radio circuits, Chuikov suddenly told everyone in the crowded trench to pack up and leave for the Tsaritsa Gorge bunker, so hastily abandoned in recent days.
Following their orders of the night before, Marshals Vasilevsky and Zhukov were again closeted with Stalin. After shaking hands with them, an unusual thing for the premier to do, Stalin launched into an attack on his Allies, “Tens and hundreds of thousands of Soviet people are giving their lives in the fight against Fascism, and Churchill is haggling over twenty Hurricanes. And those Hurricanes aren’t even that good. Our pilots don’t like them.”
Without pausing, Stalin asked, “Well, what did you come up with? Who’s making the report?”
“Either of us,” Vasilevsky said. “We are of the same opinion.”
Stalin looked at their map and asked, “What have you got here?”
“These are our preliminary notes for a counteroffensive at Stalingrad,” Vasilevsky answered.
Zhukov and Vasilevsky then took turns explaining their idea: after breaking through both the German flank defenses a hundred miles northwest of the city along the Don River, and fifty miles south of the city around the Tzatza chain of salt lakes, two Russian pincers would then meet near the town of Kalach. Hopefully they would trap most of Paulus’s Sixth Army in the forty-mile-wide land bridge between the Don and Volga.
Stalin objected, “Aren’t you extending your striking forces too far?” When the marshals disagreed with him, he said, “We will have to think about this some more and see what our resources are.”
While they argued the merits of the bold plan, General Yeremenko called from Yamy on the BODO line and Stalin listened intently to the news that the Germans were entering Stalingrad from the west and south.
When Stalin hung up, he turned to Vasilevsky. “Issue orders immediately to have Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards Division cross the Volga and see what else you can send across the river tomorrow.”
The three men parted with this warning from the premier. “… We will talk about our plan later. No one except the three of us is to know about it.”
On the morning of September 14, the German 71st Division entered downtown Stalingrad on a two-mile-wide front. Captain Gerhard Meunch personally led the 3rd Battalion, 194th Infantry Regiment, as it tried to cross several city blocks and gain the river front. Until now, his men had suffered mostly from the heat or occasional Russian rear guards, and Meunch thought their chances of reaching the Volga before nightfall were excellent.
But once they reached the congested avenues of the city, casualties rose sharply. From third- and fourth-floor windows, snipers riddled the columns, and hidden light artillery blew gaps in the ranks. The Germans found few places to hide, for they always had to force the battle and dig the enemy from the ruins of buildings.
Still, by 2:00 P.M., the Third Battalion had closed to within a few hundred yards of the main railroad station just off Red Square, and Meunch received orders to seize the ferry landing at the Volga. Despite mounting losses, he was still confident. His men had captured several Russian couriers running through the streets with handwritten messages. Sensing that the Soviet Sixty-second Army’s telephone communications had broken down, and that it was now increasingly dependent on isolated small groups to contain the Germans, Meunch assumed that his depleted battalion could manage the last half mile toward their goal.
Meunch’s estimate of enemy problems was amazingly accurate. General Chuikov was in a desperate situation. Back again in the underground bunker at Tsaritsa Gorge, he had just been told that the 13th Guards Division would come to his aid and cross the river that night. But in the meantime, he had to find enough troops to hold the main ferry landing. Without the ferry, the center of Stalingrad was sure to fall.
Around 4:00 P.M., Chuikov called in Colonel Sarayev, the NKVD garrison commander. General Krylov had already warned Chuikov about Sarayev’s attitude: “He considers himself indispensable and does not like carrying out the army’s orders.”
When Sarayev arrived in the bunker, Chuikov sized up his guest and dealt with him bluntly, “Do you understand that your division has been incorporated into the Sixty-second Army and that you have to accept the authority of the Army Military Council?” When Sarayev grumbled and looked annoyed, Chuikov made the ultimate threat. “Do you want me to telephone the Front Military Council to clarify the position?”
Faced with a reprimand or worse from Yeremenko and Khrushchev, Sarayev caved in and humbly answered, “I am a soldier of the Sixty-second Army.”
Chuikov sent him to organize his fifteen hundred militiamen into squads of ten and twenty in strategic buildings in the heart of the city. These “storm groups” were his answer to the German superiority in troops, artillery, and planes—especially planes. Throwing away the Red Army textbook on tactics, he was substituting an idea he had first conceived on the steppe, where he watched enemy blitzkrieg tactics against the Sixty-fourth Soviet Army, and became convinced that he could not compete against German firepower. He countered by creating a series of mini-fortresses, commanding various street intersections. The small storm groups could act as “breakwaters,” funneling Nazi panzers into approach roads already registered on by Russian artillery. When the tanks lumbered along these predictable routes, they would face a murderous fire from heavy weapons. With the tanks bogged down, the storm group could then deal with German infantry, exposed behind the flaming armor. And by fighting at such close range, the storm groups also eliminated the threat of the German Luftwaffe. Afraid to bomb their own troops, the Stukas and Ju-88s would be unable to attack the Soviet strong-points.
A mere half mile northeast of Chuikov’s bunker, a group of NKVD soldiers braced for the final German thrust to the river. Drawn up in an arc around the main ferry, the sixty soldiers waited for their commander, Colonel Petrakov, to return from a scouting mission along Pensenskaya Street. To figure out where the enemy was trying to break through, Petrakov and two aides walked as far north as the Ninth of January Square. The roar of small-arms fire was rolling over them from a distance, but they had neither seen a German nor heard any close-range shooting. The square was deserted, and Petrakov stood beside an abandoned car to assess his situation.
Submachine-gun bullets suddenly whistled through the car windows, forcing Petrakov to duck for cover. Almost instantly German shells exploded up and down the square and he was knocked unconscious. Rescued by his men, he awoke in a tunnel at the edge of the Volga where he lay under an overcoat and heard that the Germans had rushed for the river and taken a series of buildings near the shore. From the House of Specialists (an apartment house for engineers), from the five-storey State Bank, and from the beer factory, the Germans were hollering: “Rus, Rus, Volga bul-bul!” (“Russians will drown in the Volga!”).
Petrakov staggered to the tunnel entrance and looked out at the river for some sign of the 13th Guards Division. But the time for their crossing was still hours away and he had to keep the Germans from the ferry until then.
When a small Russian boy wandered into the tunnel, the curious Petrakov asked his name. “Kolia,” he replied and told the colonel that the enemy had sent him to spy on Russian strength between the House of Specialists and the Volga. Petrakov smiled and asked Kolia to tell him instead about the Germans. Kolia knew exactly who his captors were: the 1st Battalion, 194th Infantry Regiment, 71st Division, commanded by a Captain Ginderling. Protecting Gerhard Meunch’s left flank, Ginderling was also trying to sweep to the main ferry before dark.
As dusk approached, Ginderling sent his troops from the beer factory toward the ferry pier, just 750 yards away. Petrakov’s sixty men formed a skirmish line around the landing, fighting hard although their ammunition was dangerously low. Suddenly a motorboat appeared from across the Volga carrying cases of ammunition and grenades. Resupplied, Petrakov’s NKVD soldiers now prepared to counterattack. The colonel had found a .76-millimeter gun on a side street, and while he tried to learn its parts, he issued the order to move out when he fired the fifth shot from his new artillery piece.
Petrakov aimed the weapon at the State Bank, loaded the first shell very carefully and shot directly into the cement building. As he readied another round, a launch chugged in behind him carrying men of the 13th Guards. But the Germans had seen them, too, and the launch was quickly surrounded by explosions.
Bracketed by gunfire, Colonel Yelin, commander of the Guards’ 42nd Regiment, jumped off the boat into knee-deep water and ran up the embankment. When he met Petrakov, and heard that he was firing at the State Bank, Yelin angrily told him to stop because his own men were about to storm the building for hand-to-hand combat. The situation was still perilous, but no Russian was aware of one significant fact: the Germans attempting to drown them in the river were themselves on the verge of collapse.
Near the railroad station, Captain Meunch counted his ranks and realized that the one day’s fighting in Stalingrad had cost him most of his battalion. Almost two hundred of his men lay dead or wounded on the streets leading to Red Square. Now the railroad station was an even more deadly obstacle. Although the Russians had not yet occupied it in strength, Meunch was instinctively afraid of it. Hidden inside its vast network of tracks, cabooses, and freight cars, a small group of snipers could tear his reduced force to pieces.
He decided to bypass it and called in an air strike. It came quickly. But the Stukas missed the target and dropped their bombs in the midst of Meunch’s troops.
As darkness fell, the captain assembled his battalion in the U-shaped, unfinished Government House where, from the terrace, he first saw the Volga. He made another head count and found he had less than fifty men left to take the ferry. Recognizing that his 3rd Battalion no longer had the power to accomplish that on its own, Meunch told his soldiers to take cover and settle in for the night.
Barely five hundred yards from Meunch’s U-shaped building, the 13th Guards were now ashore in strength. Two regiments and one battalion from another regiment made it across the Volga through the shellfire, landed, and ran up the gradual incline directly into battle. In the dark, the Russians got lost and stumbled over the wreckage of previous days, but they managed to form a defense line before dawn.
On Mamaev Hill, squads and platoons dug frantically into the side of the former picnic grounds. But the German 295th Division had already taken the crest where two green water towers provided a sheltered command post. The noise on Mamaev was dreadful. One Russian soldier likened it to two steel needles pressing in on his eardrums and reaching into the brain. The sky was ripped by explosions that turned faces a dull red, and to Colonel Yelin it seemed everyone was about to die.
Somehow the Russians managed to hold the hillside. Casualties were enormous. Yelin had to send in men piecemeal to fill holes torn in the line. Soldiers never knew their comrades’ names before dying together in the scooped-out ground.
At his headquarters, Chuikov tried to gauge the, situation on the hill, but could not because of contradictory information. He also had other problems. His command post along the Tsaritsa Gorge was under siege. At the Pushkinskaya Street entrance, messengers and staff ran in and out. Some men entered just to escape the bullets and shells tearing through the air. The heat in the bunker was unbearable. Drenched with sweat, several times Chuikov walked out into the fresh air to maintain his equilibrium. German machine-gunners fired close to him, but he did not mind. The bedlam inside the shelter seemed worse.
From the meadowland on the far shore of the Volga, the commander of the 13th Guards was about to cross into Stalingrad. Thirty-six-year-old Gen. Alexander Ilyich Rodimtsev was no stranger to war. Under the pseudonym “Pavlito Geshos,” he had gone to Spain in 1936 and fought with the Loyalists against Franco. Named a Hero of the Soviet Union for that exploit, he now paced the river’s edge and could not believe what he saw. On the western bank, Stalingrad burned brightly in the sunrise of September 15; the boats carrying his troops to the city were being chopped to pieces by artillery fire. While Rodimtsev watched, one craft was suddenly engulfed in smoke and then an ear-splitting explosion spread out from it for a hundred yards. When fountains of water fell back into the river, the boat and its sixty-five occupants had vanished.
Rodimtsev and his staff boarded their own launch and crouched below the gunwales as it backed slowly into the current. Shrapnel beat against the wood and geysers of spray washed over them from near misses. But the launch made it to the main ferry and Rodimtsev jumped off and ran north a quarter mile to his command post in Colonel Petrakov’s old tunnel, a poorly ventilated corridor with a ceiling formed from old planks. As dirt showered down on him from explosions, Rodimtsev met his advance party and learned that the Germans seemed to be trying to seize three miles of riverfront, from Tsaritsa Gorge up to Mamaev Hill.
Anxious to report to Chuikov, the general took five staff officers with him, ran down the embankment to the ferry landing, then cut west for a half mile into the underground bunker in the gorge. In that brief journey, shells killed three of his companions.
Chuikov embraced the dirt-covered Rodimtsev and made him sit down while the guards commander quickly briefed him on the status of the reinforcements. Most of his division was already across, but they were short about two thousand rifles. After Chuikov arranged to fill this need from army reserves, he asked Rodimtsev how he felt about the terrible assignment he had been given.
“I am a Communist,” he replied. “I have no intention of abandoning the city.”