Soldiers scurried about in a harsh light of raging fires and bursting flares that illuminated the scene like mid-morning on a summer’s day. Vassili Chuikov anxiously prowled around the Pushkinskaya Street entrance of his bunker to get a breath of air. Spotting an officer, he called out, “Lieutenant, where are your men?” Anton Kuzmich Dragan told the general that he commanded the 1st Company, 1st Battalion, 42nd Regiment, 13th Guards. Chuikov gave him a terrifying order, “Hold the main railroad station.”
Dragan dutifully assembled his troops and moved toward the concrete terminal just west of Red Square. They came under vicious crossfire from several buildings and Dragan realized that the Germans were in the station ahead of him. But he kept on, creeping to the left, moving closer to the terminal. After a series of whispered instructions, Dragan and his men rushed the building. Grenades exploded, machine-gun tracers split the darkness and suddenly the Germans were gone. The Russians swiftly scattered into the maze of freight cars and cabooses and waited for the dawn. They had no idea that the Germans around them were suffering sixty percent casualties.
When the Germans burst into the residential section of the city, they came too fast for some civilians. The ferries had evacuated most of the population, including Anastasia Modina and her orphans, stationmaster Viskov and his wife, and Pravda editor Vodolagin, but some three thousand inhabitants still remained.
In the suburb of Dar Gova, the advance caught hundreds of these noncombatants in their homes. Among them was fifteen-year-old Sacha Fillipov and his family. While his parents and ten-year-old brother stayed inside their house, the diminutive, frail Sacha went out to fraternize with the enemy. A master cobbler from his training at trade school, Sacha introduced himself to German officers occupying a nearby building and offered his services to them. Amused at the thought of someone so young and delicate having such a skill, the Germans promised him work soling army boots.
Sacha returned home that night with the news that he was going to work for the enemy. He did not tell his parents that he had also contacted Russian intelligence officers and arranged to spy on German headquarters in Dar Gova.
Mrs. Katrina Karmanova was also caught by the swift German advance. She had lingered at home for days, carrying valuables to the backyard for burial. Silver, jewelry, family heirlooms, all were dumped into a hole and covered over. Now, with her son Genn, she listened to the sounds of machine guns at the end of the block and knew she had waited too long to leave.
An artillery shell exploded on the roof, setting the house on fire; she and Genn ran next door and hid behind a sofa in the parlor. Grenades popped outside and then a fiery string of tracer bullets flew through the room.
Genn suddenly cried out, “Don’t be afraid, Mother. Please pull the bullet out of my arm!”
With trembling fingers, Mrs. Karmanova picked at the metal and finally removed it. Ripping off a piece of her slip, she fashioned a crude bandage and then shouted: “Let’s get out or we’ll be killed.”
They ran into the street and fell into a zig-zag trench beside Russian soldiers and civilians. A little girl lay huddled up, her body punctured with shrapnel. She screamed and screamed: “Find my mama before I die.”
Mrs. Karmanova could not bear it. As she crouched under a hail of bullets and tried to block out the sounds of the dying child, she saw a family dart from shelter and run toward the river. At the same moment, a German sniper tracked them and quickly killed the son, the father, and then the mother. The sole survivor, a little girl, paused in bewilderment over her mother’s body. In the trench, Russian soldiers cupped their hands and hollered, “Run! Run!” Others took up the cry. The girl hesitated, then bolted from the corpses into the darkness. The German sniper did not fire again.
Throughout the night, Mrs. Karmanova and Genn stayed in the trench. A few yards away, rescuers frantically tried to save several soldiers buried alive by a shellburst. At dawn on September 16, during a temporary lull, she and Genn jumped up and ran to the Volga. The Germans let them go.
In their wooden cottage, eleven-year-old Natasha Kornilov and her mother were not as lucky. Wounded days previously by bomb fragments, they lay helpless while German soldiers broke down the front door and stood over them with machine guns. The woman thought they were about to be raped, but the Germans ignored them and ransacked the house for pots, pans, food, even bedding.
When they left, Mrs. Kornilov scrawled the word “Typhus” on a board and had Natasha put it up on the door. The ruse backfired. Within hours, a German medical team saw the sign and set fire to the supposedly plague-ridden home. As flames danced around her, Natasha dragged her crippled mother into the backyard and into a concrete storage shack. There, under a thin blanket on the cold floor, the Kornilovs listened to the gunfire from the direction of Red Square and wondered whether anyone would come to their rescue.
On September 17, with Germans pressing in from north and south of the Tsaritsa Gorge, Vassili Chuikov had to seek a new home. All during the day, while bullets ricocheted off rocks and shells exploded outside the Pushkinskaya Street entrance to the bunker, the headquarters staff of the Sixty-second Army scrambled away toward the main ferry. At midnight, Chuikov and his personal assistants went across the Volga to Krasnaya Sloboda, where they took hot baths and relaxed with food and drink.
As the hours passed, Chuikov failed to notice the sunrise. Suddenly panic-stricken, he and his men raced out to catch the ferry back to Stalingrad. The last boat was leaving the dock and Chuikov sprinted ahead. With a running leap, he fell on board and identified himself to the startled helmsman, who returned to pick up the rest of the army staff at the dock.
Several hours later, Chuikov set up a new headquarters five miles north of the Tsaritsa Gorge. Just a trench with some boards over it, it was in an open space between the Red October and Barrikady plants. On a slope above their bunker was an oil tank farm and a concrete oil reservoir. According to everyone familiar with the area, the tanks were empty.
At Sixth Army Headquarters in Golubinka, forty miles west of Stalingrad, German newspapermen badgered Gen. Friedrich von Paulus for permission to flash word home that the city had been taken.
Smiling cheerfully, Paulus parried their queries, saying, “Any time now, any time.”
But in his stifling quarters, the general played his gramophone, smoked endless quantities of cigarettes, and tried to calm his stomach, which was churning with dysentery; he had lost most of his hopes for a quick victory.
In Germany, some newspapers printed a special edition with a banner headline: “Stalingrad Gefallen!” The papers were bundled for distribution, then held at the last moment while Goebbels’s ministry sought confirmation from Paulus. He could not give it.
In Stalingrad’s main railroad station, west of Red Square, Lt. Anton Dragan’s company was enduring ferocious bombing that blew down the walls and buckled the iron girders. When the Germans surrounded him on three sides, Dragan took his men across the street to another building, the nail factory, from which he commanded a good view of the intersection leading east to the Volga.
Barely settled in a workshop, Dragan took stock of his supplies and realized he had no food, little ammunition, and no water. In a frantic search for something to quench their thirst, the Russians fired machine guns into drain pipes to see if any liquid remained. There was not a drop.
From the Tsaritsa Gorge to the slopes of Mamaev Hill, the German 295th and 71st divisions were suffering from Chuikov’s renewed strength. The 71st’s Division’s Intelligence Chief, Col. Günter von Below, whose brother Nikolaus served Hitler as air attaché, walked through the devastation near the main railroad station and found it difficult to comprehend the enormity of the destruction. As he carefully sidestepped debris, a master sergeant came up to him and pleaded, “What am I going to do? I have only nine men left.” Colonel Below sat beside the distraught man on a curb and they discussed the toll the Russians had taken of the sergeant’s company in past hours. After a while, the sergeant calmed down and went back to his nine soldiers. Günter von Below remained, staring at the ruins. Thoroughly shaken, he wondered whether the Russians would collapse before his own division ran out of men.
Günter von Below’s main antagonists, the soldiers of the 13th Guards Division, lay in heaps from Mamaev to Red Square. Nearly six thousand guardsmen had been killed, but they had bought the Russians several days of precious time.
One of the fortresses which had slowed the German timetable was the huge grain elevator, whose cement silos rose high on the plain just south of the Tsaritsa Gorge. For nearly a week, since September 14, a group of less than fifty able-bodied Russians had holed up in the corrugated metal side tower, and defied the guns of three Nazi divisions. Reinforced on the night of September 17 by Lt. Andrei Khoyzyanov and a platoon of marines dressed in striped shirts and navy hats, the garrison fought with renewed spirit, the men joking with each other while shells whistled through their hideout.
Once a German tank had approached and, under a white flag, an officer and interpreter cautiously asked for their surrender to the “heroic German Army.” The Russians shouted, “Go to hell!” warning the intruders to leave the tank behind and get out. When the Germans tried to jump into the vehicle, the marines blew it up.
For the next three days, German artillery pounded the stronghold, set the grain on fire with incendiary shells, and riddled the tower itself with high explosives. German infantrymen broke in and crept up the stairs, but the defenders managed to drive them back with knives, fists, and bullets.
Now, on the night of September 20, the exhausted garrison was almost out of ammunition, and the water supply had been used up completely. In a frantic search for something to drink, Lt. Khoyzyanov led his men out the tower door, across the field, a main road, and into a gully, where they stumbled on an enemy mortar battery. In the resulting melee, the startled Germans fled, leaving behind gallons of ice-cold water that the marines gulped down gratefully.
Completely dehydrated, Khoyzyanov suddenly felt faint from the water and collapsed on the ground. When he woke up, he was in a dark cellar. The shoe was gone from his right foot; his shirt was off. His head felt light and he could not move his arms and legs. Standing guard over him was a soldier from the German 14th Panzer Division. The grain elevator he had defended so heroically had passed into enemy hands. The Germans quickly put out the fires and saved most of the wheat, which would be significant in weeks to come.
A mile to the north, in another Russian strongpoint just off Red Square, Anton Dragan still occupied the nail factory. But when a Russian woman, Maria Vadeneyeva, ran through machine-gun fire to tell him the Germans were bringing up tanks, he knew his hours there were numbered.
On September 21, Dragan came under intense pressure. Enemy tanks and planes battered the building and forced a wedge between his company and the rest of the 1st Battalion of the 13th Guards, strung out across Red Square. By late afternoon, Dragan was nearly cut off from his countrymen.
At the Univermag Department Store, the Germans concentrated on battalion headquarters and killed nearly every Russian there. Dragan tried to send help, but the headquarters had been demolished and the staff annihilated. Dragan then took command of the battalion and sent a courier back to the Volga with a message for Colonel Yelin, the regimental commander. The courier died on the way, and in the 42nd Regiment bunker on the Volga shoreline. Yelin marked the entire 1st Battalion destroyed somewhere in the area of Red Square.
But Dragan was still alive. Leading his troops from building to building, he gave ground only when the Germans set fire to his hiding places. The battle raged past the fountain with its statues of children dancing in a circle around a crocodile, past Pravda, the City Soviet, the theater, and the bodies hanging in the hedges around the obelisk commemorating the fallen from the Civil War of 1918. At the intersection of Krasnopiterskaya and Komsomolskaya streets, Dragan brought the remnants of his shattered battalion into the basement of a three-storey apartment house. Scattering the surviving forty men around window openings, he sat behind a heavy machine gun and waited to die.
From the far-off Urals, more reinforcements had been rushed to the beleaguered city. And from the farthest reaches of Siberia, the 284th Division, under Col. Nikolai Batyuk, came with orders to move to the Volga crossing.
A Ukrainian of medium height, slim, wih dark hair combed straight back, Batyuk suffered from a serious circulatory ailment and frequently had to be carried on the back of one of his aides. He did this only at night so his troops would not be aware of his weakness. An obviously determined man, on arrival he told Chuikov: “I came here to fight the Nazis, not for a parade.”
Few in Batyuk’s division wanted this battle. Mostly raw recruits, they were willing to fight the Nazis—but not at Stalingrad. Lt. Pyotr Deriabin agreed. Already badly wounded at Moscow, he had no illusions about what awaited his men in the burning city.
At Krasnofimsk, in the Urals, a hard core of veterans like Deriabin had taught their skills to eighteen- and nineteen-year-old boys, most of whom were Orientals from the Mongolian border area and had never seen a German. Then they marched and drove nearly seven hundred miles westward, chewing the roots of the smolka plant, a licorce-tasting substitute for gum, and gulping down whatever vodka they could find on the way. At Kamyshin they gorged on watermelon, the best grown in Russia and the pride of the town, then climbed into Studebaker trucks, which transported them the rest of the way to the Volga.
They began crossing the river on the misty morning of September 22. It was hours before the first group landed in the fiery city, and though German planes pounded them they survived the run in good shape. Deriabin tumbled into the Dolgy Ravine, and promptly fell into a troubled sleep. When he awoke, he went on to the Lazur Chemical Plant in the middle of the railroad loop between the riverbank and the slopes of Mamaev Hill, where the Germans were fighting furiously with the 13th Guards. The crest had changed hands countless times, but the Germans were still able to look down the throats of the new men from the 284th as they took position.
Alexei Petrov came across the Volga and was assigned to the northern sector near Latashanka. For ten days he had been given hurried instructions in the use of a 122-millimeter cannon, but with time running out, the exasperated instructor finally told him to teach himself. As best he could, Petrov mastered the techniques of firing the heavy weapon that had a range of nearly six miles.
The squat, wavy-haired sergeant had spent months as a construction worker in Kuibyshev before being drafted. There he unexpectedly met his brother, who told him the rest of his family—his mother, father, and sister—had been swallowed up in the Ukraine by the German advance. They had not been heard from in more than a year.
When ordered into Stalingrad, Petrov went to the dock and saw that the other shore of the Volga was a solid wall of flames. Though scared to death, he knew he would go across. But other Russians would not, and Petrov watched as NKVD guards fired in the air over the deserters, and then killed them when they ran from the landing. After Alexei climbed on board the barge, the NKVD took no further chances. Guards lined the rails to prevent anyone from jumping overboard.
Bombers came over, seeking out the steamers and tugs. German mortars behind Mamaev reached out for them, and Petrov cursed the slowness of the voyage as the river froze in a midday tableau. Feeling trapped and vulnerable, he crouched down to hide from shrapnel singing by his ears. Men slipped off the sides to drown. Bullets thudded into flesh and soldiers sagged against neighbors and died without a word. Petrov saw the Volga water clearly. It was a swirling mixture of water and bright red blood.
His boat took nearly two hours to reach a landing site under the cliff. While the dead covered the deck, the living scrambled off. Nearly half of Petrov’s regiment had died crossing the river.
Because most of his unit was already dead, he now had to fight as an infantryman. His baptism to war was brutal. Three scouts went ahead to gauge German strength. Two came back. Petrov picked up his field glasses and scanned no-man’s-land for the missing man.
He was out there, spread-eagled on the ground. The Germans had thrust a bayonetted rifle into his stomach and left him face up in the open. Petrov and his squad went berserk. Screaming hoarsely, they jumped from their holes and ran forward. Bursting into a line of houses, they killed anyone who rose before them. When several Germans raised their hands in surrender, Petrov squeezed the trigger of his tommy gun and killed them all.
He came to an elderly Russian soldier, bending over a woman. Her jet black hair streaming back in a carefully arranged way, she seemed to be sleeping. The man was moaning softly: “Dear girl, dear girl, why should a young person like you have to die in such a war?”
Alexei Petrov stood beside the couple and cried bitterly as he looked down at the beautiful woman. Then he ran off to kill her tormentors.
In the hallway of a house, he listened to a German wailing in one of the downstairs rooms. The soldier prayed: “Oh God, let me live after this war.” Petrov rammed the door open and saw a kneeling man who looked up at him pleadingly. Petrov fired into his face.
Wild-eyed, he went from floor to floor, smashing open doors, looking for gray green uniforms. The pounding brought Germans out of different rooms; Petrov shot three more as they ran down the stairs.
Exhausted, his anger eased. The house became very still. He stepped over the bodies on the stairway and went out the front door to find his own men.
During the afternoon of September 23, another contingent from the 284th Division set out from the far shore on barges. Twenty-year-old Tania Chernova found space at the edge of a barge and sat down with her knees against her chest for the grim ride. Some of the 150 soldiers on board pleaded with the perky blond to move into the middle of the group and share some vodka. But she tossed her head in reply and stayed where she was.
Tania had not wanted to be a soldier. As a child she had worn ballet slippers and practiced pirouettes; later, she had studied medicine. But when the Germans invaded Russia, Tania forgot her dreams of becoming a doctor, and embarked on a relentless war against the enemy, whom she always referred to as “sticks” that one broke because she refused to think of them as human beings.
As a partisan, she had broken several “sticks” in the forests of Byelorussia and the Ukraine. The experience had hardened her outlook on life, and she looked forward with enthusiasm to renewing her vendetta in Stalingrad.
The sky suddenly filled with red and orange balls of flame as the barge struggled laboriously through ugly water spouts toward a landing point somewhere near the Red October Plant. Tania started talking to two men, one about fifty and the other more her age, when a German plane dropped a bomb squarely in the center of the craft. Tania and her two comrades flew into the water and came up swimming for the Stalingrad shore. As they fought to stay afloat, the current carried them further downstream. Tania finally dragged herself onto a sandbar on the west bank of the river and ducked into a sewer outlet. The other two soldiers followed. They had no idea where they were or who controlled the land above them.
Hoping to find an exit in safe territory, the three walked on in the blackened sewer. Their footsteps echoed hollowly as they felt their way. The stench made them gag; excrement clung to their shoes and pants. When the old man fainted, Tania and her friend dragged him for a while, but exhausted and nauseous themselves, they left him lying in the filth.
Finally they climbed out of a manhole somewhere in the city. Tania saw a group of soldiers, mess tins in hand, lining up in front of a building. Famished, they got in line. A soldier turned around, his nose wrinkling in disgust, “What in God’s name is that smell?” He spoke in German. Tania decided to bluff her way through. Pretending not to hear him, she kept her place.
In the mess hall, Tania and her companion sat side by side with Germans who complained bitterly about the sickening aroma. Somebody shouted, “What is that rotten stench?” Tania wrinkled her nose, too. A German officer suddenly recognized her as a Russian. Before he could react, a Russian cook rushed over to assure him she worked for the German Army. The officer ordered the two out, but the friendly cook took them into the kitchen and fed them. The German came back again and demanded they leave because they stank so badly.
Still defiant, the two pariahs calmly walked out of the mess hall and searched for the Russian lines. At nightfall they crawled through no-man’s-land and met their countrymen, who gave them clean clothes, a drink, and new rifles.
The German 71st Division continued to advance slowly toward the main ferry. Only a few places like the Dragan strongpoint still held out, and they made the cost frightful.
On the morning of September 25, at the intersection of Krasnopeterskoya Street, Dragan had ten men left. During the previous night, two of his twelve men had deserted. A lieutenant and a private slipped out, ran down to the river, and made off on a raft. Only the lieutenant reached headquarters on the other side. Anxious to cover his tracks and convinced that the 1st Battalion was doomed, he reported everyone dead and said he personally had buried Anton Dragan near the Volga.
But in his fortress, Anton Dragan was munching burned grain and waiting for the Germans to rush him. They came again and Dragan’s men threw their last grenades and heaved bricks through the windows. When the sound of a tank motor suddenly was heard, Dragan sent a soldier out with an antitank rifle and the last three shells. The Germans quickly seized him.
An hour later, an enemy platoon appeared directly in front of Dragan’s machine gun. Immediately assuming the captured man had told the Germans this was the defenders’ blindspot, Dragan fired his last 250 bullets at the enemy. Finally out of ammunition and wounded in the hand by return fire, he propped himself up and stared numbly at the rows of dead men in the street.
Shortly afterward, the nine Russian holdouts heard some Germans calling to them from outside. When they peeked out, they saw their captured comrade being pushed onto a pile of debris. While the First Battalion looked on, a German shot him in the head.
Shaking hands and embracing, the nine Russians in the house said good-bye to each other. Dragan’s orderly laboriously scratched on a wall, “Rodimtsev’s guardsmen fought and died for their country here.” German tanks, black and squat, came around a corner and fired directly into the building. Something hit Dragan in the head and he passed out. When he woke up it was dark and his orderly was grabbing at him.
The building had fallen down, but in the basement, the six survivors called each other’s names. Buried alive, the air going fast, their only hope was to dig their way out. Their wounds aching, and their teeth caked with accumulated dust and grime, they kept clawing at the rubble. Suddenly a cool breeze hit them and they saw stars in the autumn sky.
Dragan sent a man out to reconnoiter. He returned in an hour with the news that Germans were all around, so the men cautiously left the house one by one. To their left they heard the vicious rolling gunfire on Mamaev and saw the fireworks of tracer bullets. The smell of cordite was heavy. But on Komsomolskaya Street it was relatively quiet. The Germans owned the Volga there.
When patrols nearly stumbled upon them, Dragan’s group came back to the ruins. They waited again, until the moon was obscured, then, silhouetted by flames from railroad cars and houses, they edged closer to the river. Another patrol passed in front of them. When one German lingered by a truck, Dragan sent a man to kill him. The Russian buried a knife in him, put on the German’s greatcoat, and approached another patrolling soldier, whom he also knifed. Suddenly the way to the river was open. The Russians scurried across the railway line and fell to the ground at the edge of the Volga. Their lips cracking from the cold water, they drank and drank.
Above them, the Germans discovered the dead bodies. While the Russians feverishly constructed a small raft from logs and sticks, the Germans fired at random toward the river. Dragan and his men finally pushed off into the current and drifted downstream. Just before dawn their raft bumped ashore on Sarpinsky Island where Russian artillerymen found them, hollow-eyed, in rags, but alive. Dragan ate his first food in three days—fish, soup, and bread—then reported the presence of the six men of his First Battalion. The rest lay dead around Red Square.
On that square, bodies sprawled grotesquely across the grass and sidewalks. Crimson puddles marked where they fell. Other trails of blood etched crazy patterns on the streets, showing where men had dragged themselves to cover.
The Univermag was desolate, smashed: Window manikins had tumbled in awkward positions; bullets stitched paths up and down their lifeless forms. Inside, Russians and Germans huddled in death along the aisles. The store had become a morgue.
The Pravda building had collapsed in the bombings of August 23. The City Soviet, the Red Army Club, and the Gorki Theater were now vacant, ugly from blackened holes and gaping windows. On side streets, merchants’ stores had been flattened. Rotted tomatoes and watermelon pulp splashed over the sidewalks. Fragments of bodies mixed with the vegetables. Flies swarmed over the remains.
In what once had been a fashionable restaurant just east of the mouth of Tsaritsa Gorge, Russian doctors and nurses struggled to evacuate the wounded. More than seven hundred victims had gone out the day before by boat, a motley collection of vessels that were barely seaworthy and which landed under the fire from the German 71st Division. Now nearly six hundred more victims were being carried to the shoreline.
The Germans crept closer. Their machine guns sprayed a withering fire into the masses huddled at the dock. Russian soldiers formed a defense line and held the Nazis off until the last patients crawled feebly on board. When the Germans finally broke into the restaurant, they vomited from the stench of ether and blood and of those who had died and lay unburied.
At last the main ferry had been taken. Except for isolated pockets of resistance, the German Sixth Army held the Volga shoreline for several miles north and south of the Tsaritsa Gorge. Only the factory district in northern Stalingrad remained to be conquered.
At Vinnitsa, this good news failed to stir Adolf Hitler, who sulked bitterly in his log cabin. For more than two weeks after his explosive argument with General Jodl, the Führer had refused to socialize with the men who served him. Enraged by the “insubordination” within his staff, disgusted with the lack of progress in the Caucasus and along the Volga, on September 24 he met with Franz Halder and fired him. In an icy voice, Hitler told the general that they both needed a rest, that their nerves had frayed to the point where neither could help the other. Halder bowed out gracefully and went to his quarters to pack. But before departing, he wrote a short note to his friend and pupil, Friedrich von Paulus, out on the steppe:
24 September 1942
… A line to tell you that today I have resigned my appointment. Let me thank you, my dear Paulus, for your loyalty and friendship and wish you further success as the leader you have proved yourself to be.
As always,
Halder
Paulus received Halder’s letter just as his soldiers raised a huge swastika over the pockmarked entrance to the Univermag Department store in the central part of the city.
But Paulus had no desire to celebrate, for he had just learned the staggering cost of the six weeks’ passage from the Don to the banks of the Volga: more than seventy-seven hundred German soldiers dead; thirty-one thousand wounded. Ten percent of the Sixth Army had been lost. Moreover, he knew the worst battle had not yet been joined. North of the ferry landing, north of heavily contested Mamaev Hill, lay the key to the city—the factories. There, the Sixth Army faced the ultimate challenge. And Paulus was running out of men and ammunition.
Returning to his isolated quarters at Golubinka on the high western bank of the Don, he listened to his gramophone and tried to quell his dysentery. A tic on his cheek had become almost uncontrollable.
Paulus sent another urgent cable to Army Group B; “Rifle strength in the city failing more rapidly than reinforcements. Unless decline halted, the battle will stretch on.”
Some of Paulus’s men shared his increasing gloom. One of them was Lt. Hans Oettl, who had become a forward observer on the front lines a few miles north of the tractor plant. Each day Oettl looked through his field glasses, and pinpointed Russian positions. His batteries fired barrages of shells over his head, down onto the enemy. It had gone on like this for weeks, and nothing had shaken the Russians loose. Opposite him, Russian militiamen had been replaced by seasoned troops ferried across the Volga at night. For Oettl there was a sharp awareness that the war was not ending as abruptly as he had hoped. He had also come to realize that the young officers in his division were woefully inadequate. Though many wore the Order of the Ritter Kreuz on their breast, few if any had ever received training in the art of street fighting. They were dying at an alarming rate.
During lulls in the fighting, Oettl rested in his bunker and worried about the future. Outside, his red-ribboned goat, Maedi, grazed contentedly, oblivious to the gunfire that never seemed to stop.
At Vertaichy, out on the steppe, Deputy Chief Quartermaster Karl Binder plunged into his new job, supplying the men of the 305th Division from the Lake Constance region of southern Germany. Well-fed, gregarious, a veteran of the German Army since the days of the Freikorps before Hitler, Binder immediately noticed the poor morale of the units in the northernmost sector held by Sixth Army. They were unwashed, discouraged, and begging for decent rations.
When Binder inquired into the reasons for their condition, he was told the enemy constantly harassed them, never giving them a chance to rest. Russian artillery dropped hundreds of shells into the German lines; Russian divisions mounted brief, small infantry attacks. Although the Russians failed to gain ground, they inflicted a mounting toll of casualties.
Binder took hold of his new job swiftly. Within days, the experienced scrounger found sausages and beer, pumpernickel, even wine for his men. In the officers’ quarters, he learned more about the battle on the steppe. One of the staff, Lieutenant Colonel Codre, warned, “Stalingrad will still give the Germans the shock of their lives, because the Russians are far from beaten.” Codre went on, “A nagging worry for us is the supply line back to the Ukraine. The Sixth Army requires 750 tons a day to survive, and all of it comes over a single track to the railhead at Chir.” Sobered by these comments, Karl Binder began to worry more about that tenuous lifeline to the rear.
In the meantime, he wrote faithfully to his wife back in Stuttgart. He asked for his children and assured everyone that the campaign was going well. But he never mentioned Codre’s pessimistic prophecy.
Capt. Gerhard Meunch was still in the same U-shaped building he had occupied on the night of September 14, just two hundred meters from the Volga. Ever since then, with less than fifty men left in his battalion, he had tried again and again to reach the riverbank. But the Russians always drove him back, and at one point, some of Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards even came after him. While Meunch held the ground floor, the Russians blew a hole in the cellar and climbed in. The Germans rushed up some artillery to help the besieged captain and, after he and his men escaped by ladder, the guns smashed in the bottom of the buildings and knocked down another nearby home. Ten Russians crawled out of the wreckage and surrendered to Meunch, who went back inside what was left of the U-shaped structure to await relief.
At Sixth Army Headquarters in Golubinka, Col. Günter von Below paused to say good-bye to his friends before going to Kharkov for treatment of an acute case of jaundice. He was depressed by the cost of taking downtown Stalingrad. But as a trained intelligence officer, he was even more concerned with the overall strategic position of Sixth Army on the steppe. When he mentioned the exposed left flank to Arthur Schmidt, the chief of staff agreed with him that it was a “festering boil,” and confided that both he and Paulus worried about it constantly. Leaving headquarters a short time later, Below was still convinced that Stalingrad could be taken. But since no one had been able to reassure him about the vulnerable flank, he wondered what would happen to Sixth Army should the Russians decide to counterattack in great strength.
Along that critical left flank, outside the Don River town of Akimovski, Gen. Carl Rodenburg was as anxious as Below about Russian intentions. In fact, the monocled veteran was terribly alarmed. His 76th Division had suffered such heavy casualties in fighting off persistent Russian probes that he had begun promoting wholesale lots from the noncommissioned ranks to compensate for officers killed in action. Every week, as he went to the division cemetery to pay homage to the dead, Rodenburg became increasingly pessimistic about the chances for victory at Stalingrad.
Other German soldiers were still relatively untouched by the battle. Pvt. Josef Metzler had come across the Don south of the Kalach bridge. A radio operator in an antiaircraft battery of the 29th Motorized Division, Metzler had found the summer quiet. He saw few Russians and had time to forage freely; once he even caught a pig that he and his comrades slaughtered and ate. When Metzler saw his first “slant eyes,” the Kalmuks who welcomed the invaders openly, he was sure the Russians were finished. He had the feeling that he was already in Asia and that nothing could stop the German advance. Born in Furth, near Nüremberg, the private was a man of strict scruples and Christian ideals. He always comported himself correctly; never once had he picked up clothing or other belongings from a fallen soldier, either German or Russian. To Metzler, that was obscene and almost sacrilegious.
During September, promoted to private first class, he stayed on the outskirts of Stalingrad while his battery fired into the shattered city.
A former schoolteacher, Lt. Friedrich Breining went to the Volga as a sightseer, to look at the famous waterway. Commandeering a car, he drove through the safe zone afforded by the 16th Panzer Division’s bridgehead and stared down at the half-mile-wide waterway. He had expected the Volga to be like his own Rhine, with steep banks on both sides as between Mainz and Coblenz. But it was entirely different, and Breining came away from it disappointed.
On the way back to his unit, he dawdled, eating watermelon from the fields and enjoying the shade of some trees which he thought to be poplars. Late in the day, he arrived at the Tartar Wall, an ancient earthworks, ten feet high, which ran for about fifteen miles along the steppe. Once the wall had protected Russian settlers from invading Mongols. Now it simply gave added cover to the German tanks and men burrowed into the ground around it. Breining went into his trench beside it and sunbathed in the lovely autumn weather. For the lieutenant, life was reasonably pleasant. His unit had suffered few casualties during the summer and few of his comrades anticipated any significant fighting during the fall.
For Pvt. Wilhelm Alter, the whole campaign was boring. A tailor in the 389th Division, he and a friend, shoemaker Emil Gehres, lived in a ravine west of Gumrak Airfield. At 4:00 A.M. each day, they got up, washed, ate breakfast, then went to work, mending clothes and repairing shoes for the combat troops. At 4:00 P.M., they stopped working, washed again, and went to supper. The food was invariably good. Alter particularly liked the goulash.
A happy-go-lucky man who smiled easily, the tailor found the war an annoyance, an interruption from wife and home. The dull rumble of shelling in Stalingrad barely intruded on his thoughts.
The same held true for Dr. Herbert Rentsch, an immaculately groomed veterinarian who had just returned after being married in Dresden. Now in charge of all animals in the 94th Division, Rentsch went out each day to inspect his herd of twelve hundred horses, forty oxen and six camels. While he arranged to send four hundred of the horses off to the Ukraine for a rest, he requisitioned enough feed from the newly captured grain elevator in the southern sector of Stalingrad to take care of the rest of his charges.
On his daily tours of the grazing grounds, forty-five miles northwest of the city and well within German lines, Rentsch always rode his own horse, Lore. At these times, he found it easy to forget the distant sounds of war. When he gave Lore her head and she cantered across the flat plain, the doctor was at peace with the world.
Lt. Emil Metzger was in a euphoric mood. While his smoothly efficient crew fired on targets reported to them by spotter planes over Stalingrad, the lieutenant savored a letter from Kaethe, who had finally forgiven him for not coming home in August. She did not tell him that the letter explaining his delay had not reached her until after she spent hours waiting at the train station. Nor did she tell him how she had gone home that day, pounded the table in frustration and screamed: “To hell with him!” Instead, she congratulated him for being so selfless in letting a friend take his place in the furlough rotation.
Emil read her letter over and over, imagining the reunion they would have when the war was over. Still confident that Stalingrad would fall soon, he blithely ignored any conversations among fellow officers about the weak German left flank.
That weak left flank was being discussed in Moscow. On September 28, Joseph Stalin sat once more with the co-planners in Operation Uranus, Georgi Zhukov and Alexander Vasilevsky.
Stalin was relaxed, courteous, and attentive. The premier was particularly interested in the personalities of the generals commanding the various armies. He mentioned General Gordov. Both Zhukov and Vasilevsky agreed that while he was efficient, the man seemed unable to get along with his staff. Stalin suggested a change and Zhukov recommended Konstantin Konstantinovich Rokossovsky, an officer who had barely survived Stalin’s purges and wore a set of stainless steel false teeth as a reminder of his imprisonment and torture by the NKVD. Stalin endorsed the promotion wholeheartedly and also agreed to changing the names of several sectors. The Stalingrad Front became the Don Front; the Southeastern Front reverted to the Stalingrad Front. Both alterations were made to conform more readily to the geography of the region.
After further discussion of Operation Uranus, Stalin told Zhukov, “You had better fly back and do everything necessary to wear down the enemy.…”
Before leaving, both Vasilevsky and Zhukov signed a map showing the plan for the counteroffensive. Stalin added the word, “Approved.” Then he wrote his own signature.