6

INSIDE THE CAULDRON

The Germans had been beaten at their own game. They were supposed to be the experts at surrounding large groups of the enemy and cutting them off. In German military manuals this mode of advance was called a Kesselschlacht, a ‘cauldron battle‘, and was a standard manoeuvre. The Germans had used it to great effect in the conquest of Europe, and the Sixth Army had employed it repeatedly in their advance across the Ukraine. But creating a cauldron was no use unless you could then keep the lid tightly on it. The Wehrmacht knew it was just as good at breaking out of encirclement as it was at imposing it. So no one inside the newly formed Kessel was unduly worried just yet.

The Russians tried to break the inner spirit and morale of us German soldiers by dropping leaflets showing a picture of the Kessel, said a Corporal Jodicke. I need hardly spell out the use to which this paper was put. Well into December we remained hopeful that we would be plucked out of the cauldron.

In these first days, as the encirclement was consolidated, the German chain of command was chaotic (though this too was at first seen as nothing more than a little local difficulty). Even after the trap snapped shut, some tank units were issued a series of hasty, contradictory orders that had them stampeding hither and thither across the steppe - just as General Heim‘s 48th Panzer had been made to do on the vital first day of Operation Uranus. Sergeant Roemer of the 16th Panzer Division was inside Stalingrad when the Russian attack was launched; for him, the next 72 hours were a wild-goose chase on ice.

On our return from the attack on Rynok, we learn that the Russians have broken through on the Don bend in large numbers. The division is put on alert for immediate departure. At daybreak on November 21st we set out at top speed towards the Don bend. We cross the Don at Peskovatka and arrive back at our earlier battle position.

We are making for Sukhanov, and intend to intercept the Russians there. The Don High Road is completely iced over. We haven‘t yet been fitted with anti-skid chains. Our Panzer slithers around as never before. During the following night our drivers perform the unimaginable. Armoured cars continuously slide right across the road or into a ditch. There were times when we managed to climb several metres uphill, but the slightest touch on the steering wheel had the Panzer sliding all the way down to the bottom again.

News from the front informs us that the Russians are already in Sukhanov. Our marching plans are changed. On the way we come across straggles of Romanians and lost German units. They‘re all flooding back across the Don bridge towards Stalingrad. We hear the craziest rumours: the Russians are supposed to have reached the Chir and Kalach already.

At about five in the morning we‘re ordered to take a short break in a village. The crews thaw out their frozen limbs. The whole village is crammed with stranded German and Romanian soldiers. At the local headquarters, where I‘m warming up with my crew, we discover that the Russians were ten kilometres from here yesterday evening.

At daybreak we drive on again southwards. It takes several hours for the section to get out of the village as the roads are so icy. Meanwhile we‘ve reached a German airfield. All the Panzers fill up, as we‘d almost run out of fuel. Then the airfield is abandoned, and all the aircraft blown up.

In the early afternoon we receive orders to drive the Russians out of the village again. ‘F‘ Company is in the lead. At the northern end we encounter the first Russians. They are very tough and won’t budge. We’re left with no alternative but to wipe them all out. In the evening the section turns back along the same road we had come down earlier. A platoon from ‘F’ Company stays behind to secure the northern exit from the village. I stay here as well with my Panzer. Towards 21.00 hours we drive back with our platoon to catch up with the section. We pass very many wrecked German vehicles on the way, indicating that the Russians had been here ahead of us. It’s panic stations all round, no one knows what’s going on.

In the evening of the 23rd we form a hedgehog defence. At about 20.00 hours we receive the order for all Panzers to cross back over the Don and halt the Russian tanks that have apparently broken through south of Stalingrad. ‘F’ Company is again out front. It is an unusually bright night. We approach, I’m the second vehicle, left of the road. Just 400 metres further on we come under heavy tank fire. All the tanks leave the road and drive off to the right. We land right in the middle of a field full of infantry and do heavy damage to them.

At night we reach our base. At last there’s something warm to eat, and coffee. Our ammunition and fuel is replenished, and off again across the Don back to the Stalingrad area. It’s a long time since we had any sleep, we can hardly keep our eyes open, but rest is out of the question. Together with the section we proceed southwards along the road towards Stalingrad.

At the end of his account Roemer notes that ‘Lieutenant F. summons the crews and informs us that we are encircled. But no one takes this very seriously or hangs their heads. This is nothing new to us, after all it’s not the first time.’ Such insouciance was commonplace. News of the encirclement gradually filtered down to all ranks, and was often greeted with a shrug of the shoulders. It took a few days for the news to reach everyone, but all Paulus‘s men were in the picture before he addressed the troops on the morning of the 27th. He sent this message, to be read out by commanders to all troops. ‘Soldiers of the Sixth Army ...‘ wrote Paulus,

... the Army is surrounded. That is not your fault. You have conducted yourselves with great tenacity until the enemy was at our backs. We have held him here. He will not achieve his aim, which is to annihilate us. There is much more that I must ask of you: to go through exertion and privation in the cold and snow; to stand fast and to hit back against greatly superior forces. The Führer has promised us help. We must hold on until it gets here. If the whole army stands as one man, then we can do it. Have no doubt, the Führer will get us out. Commander-in-chief, Paulus.

The slightly odd tone of this address must have troubled some of the more thoughtful men. Behind the sub-Churchillian call to hardship there is a weary note of resignation in the words, as well an implied criticism of the higher powers that allowed this dangerous situation to come about. And why was he telling them that it was not their fault? Who had said it was? Then there was that clunking rhyme in the last sentence. Clearly it was hoped that the men would take it up as a morale-boosting catchphrase. But soon enough it was being muttered with bitter, bitter irony: Drum haltet aus, der Führer haut uns raus.

THE STORMING OF THE L-SHAPED HOUSE

The encirclement of the Germans took some of the pressure off Chuikov‘s men, who were still thoroughly besieged inside the city. The fighting within Stalingrad was no less deadly now, but as one soldier remarked: ‘After November 19th we knew that it wouldn‘t get any harder.‘ The Germans naturally turned their attention away from the city and began to contemplate the problem of the Kessel. The 62nd Army used the enemy‘s distraction to push the front line away from the banks of the river, so winning themselves a little breathing space.

The slow reconquest of Stalingrad was about to begin. It was a matter of attacking one building at a time, then using it as a base to move on to the next enemy strongpoint. In this way, house by broken house, the city would be liberated. One major objective of the Russian fight-back was the building known as the L-shaped house‘, a little to the north of Pavlov‘s House. This huge, solid, five-storey building had been a thorn in the left flank of the 62nd Army for ten weeks. Ivan Glazkov was a sergeant with the 34th regiment of the 13th Guards‘ Division, in whose sector the L-shaped house was located.

Why was this house so terrifying to us? Because it had a field of vision over the whole Volga from the 62nd crossing to the point where it bends, downstream towards Beketovka. The Germans had moved into it before we forced a crossing of the Volga on the night of the 14th September. If we, the 34th Regiment, had managed to get there sooner, then this house, standing a mere thirty or forty metres from the precipice overlooking the Volga, would have been ours. Right from the outset, the L-shaped house caused problems in the 2nd battalion‘s sector on the regiment‘s left flank - by day and especially by night. We regimental scouts under the command of Lieutenant Sorokin stormed this fortification more than once, only to retreat with heavy losses, having failed in our mission of capturing a tongue. Other subunits stormed this damned building, too. A lot of men were deployed, but none of them were able to achieve anything.

The place where the L-shaped house stood was the Germans‘ closest point to the Volga in the 34th Regiment‘s sector. Indeed, it was probably the closest point to the Volga for the entire 13th Division, which was protecting the 62nd Army‘s left flank all the way from the brewery to the Dolgaya Balka. We called this the ‘Mitiz factory sector‘.

The scout Vyacheslav Belov often used to say that a tank would drive up to the house at night and start firing at the crossing, but he was mistaken. The sound was, indeed, similar to that of a tank shot. But after the house was captured we discovered that there was a gun in the angle of the letter ‘L‘ on the ground floor. By day, the window was bricked up. The gun had a brake on the mouthpiece of its barrel, and the noise it made after the gun was fired was amplified by being trapped in the corner of the house, and so sounded to us like a tank shot.

Now, in the last weeks of November, the time had come to take back the L-shaped house once and for all. The planning was meticulous. The whole operation was an object lesson in urban warfare, and demonstrated just how much the Russians had learned in the smoke and rubble of Stalingrad. It needed something more cunning than the usual three-team shock group. Nikolai Alexenko of 13th Guards was involved in the attack. He explains the nature of the problem.

The house was 150 metres from our trenches, dugouts and pillboxes. The Germans had turned it into one of their best observation posts and strongpoints. From its upper stories they were able to look down on the Volga as if it were on the palm of their hand. But more than that: they had a view of the left bank and of the village of Krasnaya Sloboda where our divisional artillery was located, as well as our support units such as supply and the cookhouse.

The stone cellar of the L-shaped house had ferro-concrete walls dividing it into separate rooms: the Germans had turned it into a real fortress. On the ground floor they had placed artillery pieces, and on the upper floors there were mortars and machinegun nests. Anything that moved on the Volga in the hours of daylight was instantly subjected to a storm of gunfire. Consequently, the Volga was dead in our sector during the hours of daylight.

So the house had to be taken. There had already been some rushed, ill-prepared attempts, but they had all failed. Our company did not have any part in these attempts to take the house by frontal assault, but from our gun-ports we could see separate shock groups coming under machinegun fire and rolling back or being cut to bits where they were. Our men died before they could even get near the house. It growled and snapped at us like an angry, wounded wolf. The commanders came to the conclusion that it could not be captured at a running jump.

And so on December 1st a large storm group was formed to take the house. The group consisted of a team of machinegunners and sub-machinegunners, riflemen, two flamethrowers and a platoon of anti-tank men.

Our own commander, Lieutenant Dorosh, was in Moscow at some kind of seminar or conference at the time, so our company was not included in the attack force. But that evening Dorosh arrived back from Moscow (it had taken him ten days), and as soon as he heard about the planned attack he went to the regimental commander and asked that our antitank platoon replace the one that had been slated for the job. Tf I have earned a trip to Moscow at a time when blood is being spilt all around,’ he said ‘Then how is it that I have not earned the right to take part in the attack on the L-shaped house?‘ The regimental commander agreed with him and acceded to his request.

Dorosh was a young Leninist as well as a guardsman. He was well-built, disciplined, neat, smart. The men in our company were constantly amazed that his leather boots were never dirty, that he could keep his tunic-collar white, and he was always clean-shaven. Lieutenant Dorosh made the same demands on us as he did on himself. He was both straightforward and approachable.

Lieutenant Sidelnikov was appointed commander of the storm group, Lieutenant Isayev was his deputy. During the night of December 1st, we went on parade on the banks of the Volga, at the HQ of the 34th Guards Rifle Regiment. The order to attack the house was read out to us by the regimental commander, Major V.K. Kotsarenko. Here, at the HQ, we ate our supper and received our 100 grams of narkom vodka.

The Russian acronym narkom is short for narodny kommissariat -‘people‘s commissariat‘, or government ministry. At the start of the war, all Red Army soldiers had been entitled to a ration of 100 grams of vodka a day. But in May 1942 this sizeable dose of Dutch courage was restricted to front-line soldiers. The new ruling came from the People‘s Commissariat of Defence, hence the soldiers‘ name for a tipple that was the perk of a man about to go into the fray.

Dorosh spent a long time giving a thorough inspection to every member of the anti-tank platoon, continued Alexenko. Is everything tucked in and strapped up? No loose equipment that might make a noise? Nothing‘s been forgotten?

Lieutenant Dorosh had gone off to Moscow in his summer uniform. While he was away, we had all been issued with our winter uniforms. Now our commander had his on too: big felt valenki on his feet instead of those polished boots; fur hat with earflaps instead of his officer‘s forage cap. We could hardly recognize him as he walked up and down in front of us. What had become of his soldierly bearing? He walked like a big bear cub now. ‘Comrade guards lieutenant,‘ piped up one of the men. ‘Tell us about Moscow.‘ ‘First we‘ll take the house, then I‘ll tell you all there is to know about Moscow,‘ replied the lieutenant.

About two o‘clock in the morning, when all was set for the attack, it suddenly started to snow. This was the first big snowfall in Stalingrad that cold winter. It fell in great, even flakes and soon covered the ground in a thick layer. Winter had truly come - and that changed the situation. Now we needed white overalls as well as white cloths to camouflage our guns. We knew from previous failures that we had to be able to crawl all the way up to the house unobserved.

We began our crawl towards the L-shaped house a short way downriver from the pillboxes of our anti-tank unit, on the cusp between the 34th and the 42nd Regiments. The sappers had managed to make a path through the minefield and to cut the barbed wire before the snow began to fall. Sidelnikov and Isayev went first, crawling on their stomachs, and behind them came the tommygunners and riflemen, the machinegunners and the flamethrowers. We, the anti-tank men, were bringing up the rear. I crawled along second-to-last, behind my number one, a Tatar from Kazan called Gabdurakhman. I was dragging a gas-mask bag containing shells for the anti-tank gun, and I was carrying my rifle without its bayonet. Right next to me was Lieutenant Dorosh. In one hand he held his TT pistol, and in the other he had a grenade. Everybody was in brand-new camouflage suits, and all the guns were wrapped in broad white bandages.

Back in September our anti-tank unit had received some reinforcements. Our company got a sergeant named Dubov (who at this moment was advancing at the head of the unit) and two privates - Kalinin and Stepanov. All three had come to us from the prison camps: they were ‘enemies of the people‘. Rather than sit in prison, they had been sent to the front. They were all strong and brave lads. In the very first battle with us, they had shown themselves to be devoted patriots who loved their motherland.

Thousands of men - victims of the purges of the 1930s - were released from prison camps and fed into the war effort at times when things were looking bad for the Russians. Among them were many military specialists arrested during the great purge of the armed forces in 1937-38. They were not pardoned or officially rehabilitated, but most were only too glad to be allowed to put their skills at the service of their country. Their comrades-in-arms knew this, and they knew well enough that the camps were full of innocent citizens.

We came to the end of barbed wire, and stopped about thirty metres from the house, said Alexenko. Noiselessly we crawled into position, then we lay low. Softly-softly now. From time to time a German tracer bullet would arc towards the Volga or a flare would fizz away to the side of us, but then deathly quiet would fall again. I didn’t even notice Lieutenant Dorosh come crawling up to me.

Your heart beats hard when you are waiting for the signal to attack. Snow was still falling in fat flakes. As dawn drew near there was a little mist. The L-shaped house was all quiet. But from beyond the Volga we could hear loudspeakers playing music. The sound of a Russian song wafted over: ‘Out on the steppe, the wide Don steppe, a young lad went a-walking ...’

At this time Sergeant Ivan Glazkov was in a trench not far away. He was among the scouts who had cleared a path for the main attack force, and so had been waiting in the cold for longer than Alexenko. In the dark before dawn he made his final preparations for the attack, and got a piece of advice from one of his men.

Our regimental scouts huddled in the trench, said Glazkov. I remember, as if it were yesterday, Lyosha Burba whispering to me: ‘Vanya, you may be the sergeant and section commander, and this may be the last time we storm the house, but a bullet could find you too, so you’d better put your helmet on.’ I had gone on reconnaissance many times before without a helmet. Mishchenko would follow my example; he was from Rostov-on-Don, and we saw him as a bit of a reckless character. Vanya Proshchenko, on the other hand, from the Kuban, was the most composed and level-headed man in our team, and putting on his helmet he said: Well lads, even if we don’t take the house today, we’ll at least manage to get a foothold on the ground and first floors, and others will storm the rest of it later.’

At six o’clock a series of red rockets was launched from the command post of the HQ of the 34th regiment. This was the signal for the attack to begin. It was the moment Alexenko had been waiting for.

‘For motherland and for Stalin!’ called Sidelnikov, jumping up. ‘Hurrah!’ shouted Dorosh. He too leaped up and bounded forward with great tigerish steps. He overtook the entire storm group and was one of the first to reach the house. We were right behind him and charged through the window holes and the gaps in the walls. We were in the house before we fired a shot. Now we were fighting hand-to-hand. It was fiercest at the entrance to the cellar, where groups of sleepy fascists were spilling out through the doors. Dubov and Kalinin were doing a good job blocking the way out of the basement. They were using the butts of their rifles, and sticking the fascists with their bayonets, while the flamethrower men sent streams of fire through the doorway.

At dawn Lieutenant Dorosh went down wounded. He toppled over backwards, dropping his pistol. His lower jaw was smashed. I was right by him at that moment. I lifted him up and Sergeant Dubov pulled a field dressing out of his tunic and bandaged him. Then a worse thing happened: a German on the next floor up dropped a grenade through a gap in the ceiling. It fell at our feet and exploded. Dubov was thrown to the side, and I was slightly wounded in the hand by shrapnel. Lieutenant Dorosh slipped out of my grasp and fell dead to the floor.

Lieutenants Sidelnikov and Isayev were wounded too, and had been carried out of the house. So the sun was not yet up, and we did not have an officer left. Sergeant Marchenko, who was a machinegunner, took command of the entire storm group upon himself. So far we had occupied only a few rooms on the ground floor. We could not get any further because ahead of us was a solid wall without windows or doors.

Glazkov and his men now joined the first wave of the storm group inside the house. Skirmishing was still going on.

We had all been waiting in the trench for our gunners to fire off a volley. As soon as they did, two of them were killed by the fascists‘ bullets, even though the fascists were shooting more or less at random. We were all wearing camouflage suits and it would have been almost impossible for them to spot us against the snow. Nevertheless, the others immediately fired another volley at the house.

We had all been waiting in the trench for our gunners to fire off a volley. As soon as they did, two of them were killed by the fascists‘ bullets, even though the fascists were shooting more or less at random. We were all wearing camouflage suits and it would have been almost impossible for them to spot us against the snow. Nevertheless, the others immediately fired another volley at the house. This time they hit their target so we, firing from our sub-machineguns, took the ground floor of the house. The spot that had been hit was already in ruins, and there were no fascists left alive there. We had killed them all with grenades or sub-machinegun fire. So we had seized a bridgehead in the house - but what next? Forty or fifty metres of the house, including the bend of the house, were still in German hands. They regrouped and started a counter-attack. Fascists were holed up in the cellar beneath us and the neighbouring room. We had to drive them out, so we started taking it in turns to hack away at the wall with a crowbar and a pickaxe, which warmed us up nicely. A hole was soon made. We threw bottles of flammable liquid through it and, firing our sub-machineguns continuously, we hacked at the wall until the hole was big enough to climb through.

Part of the house was now in our hands - but only a part of it. We spent the whole day stubbornly defending the house from the fascists‘ counter-attacks. There were few of us left. Lyosha Burba was injured, as was Mishchenko, and there remained only myself, Vanya Proshchenko, and another two men who had only arrived the day before: Sergeant Chernushchenko and Gyena Kuklyov.

The operation was precariously close to becoming another costly failure. ‘There were Germans all around,‘ said Alexenko. ‘Behind the wall, in the cellars, on the upper storeys, and on three sides of us outside the house.‘ But it was the Russians‘ move. Sergeant Marchenko, the self-appointed commander, decided that brute force might work.

Marchenko assessed the situation and decided to wait for darkness, withdraw the storm group from the house back towards the Volga, then blow up the blank wall together with the fascists and continue the attack from there.

Late in the evening, sappers crawled up to the house. They laid several charges of TNT at the base of the blank wall, and as soon as they lit the fuse we all withdrew.

Not quite all the Russians left the building. The suggestible Sergeant Glazkov was persuaded by one of his subordinates to hang around and watch the demolition job close up:

Vanya Proshchenko then said to me: ‘Comrade Sergeant, let‘s not leave!‘ So we climbed into the cellar, which we had just retaken from the Germans, and hid there waiting for the explosion to come. At around three in the morning there was the roar of an explosion, followed by shouts of ‘Hurrah!‘ and the lads who had been mustering in the newly dug trench threw themselves at the remaining section of the house and took it by storm. Vanya Proshchenko and I joined in the assault, firing from our sub-machineguns and throwing grenades. Picking our way through the ruins to the bend of the house, we came across the following scene: a fascist was lying beside a banner with a knife in his belly and a sub-machinegun around his neck. It was a large fascist banner; we tore it down, and later I took it to Major Kotsarenko at headquarters.

Nikolai Alexenko was also looking for a dead body in the ruins.

I went to the place where my commander Lieutenant Dorosh had been lying, along with the others who had fallen. But they were all buried deep below the broken wall of that five-storey house. By four o‘clock in the afternoon on December 3rd, the L-shaped house was entirely in our hands. In one section of the basement there were still some Germans. They were shouting out, but the way in to them was completely blocked up with the wreckage of the wall we had blown up.

From the upper floors you could look out across the tortured, spoiled centre of the city. ‘Can you see Pavlov’s House from here?‘ asked some fellow in a rather unmilitary sheepskin coat with no insignia on it. ‘They are on the attack too, you know.’ He had a camera and some flashbulbs. He clicked and clicked away with it, taking lots of photographs of the town, of Mamayev Kurgan and of the Volga.

Our first anti-tank company took heavy losses in the storming of the L-shaped house. My friend Nikolai Karpenko was seriously wounded that day. He and I had been chums since we were boys. He was my neighbour, and my comrade in battle. For three months we ate together from the same pot. He was hit in the head by shrapnel. He whispered something to me as he lay bleeding, but I couldn‘t make it out. The only bit I could get was this: he was calling to his mother. She had been ill for a very long time. When he left for the war she was bedridden, and could not even get up to see him off at the gate. Now he was bleeding to death, and feeling sorry that he had to die without seeing his mother one last time.

Only four of our 16 men came out alive from the L-shaped house. Stepanov and Kalinin ‘atoned for their guilt with their blood‘, as the saying went. Stepanov was killed by machinegun fire; Kalinin was seriously wounded in the stomach and sent across the Volga ...

With the capture of the L-shaped house, the front line moved forwards 300 metres. The German invaders lost an important observation post and strongpoint. Two regiments of our division could now move freely in daylight and maintain contact with the left bank. These were the first steps on the journey of our guards division from the Volga to the Elbe.

ON LYUDNIKOV’S ISLAND

The grand offensive out on the cold steppe subtly altered the nature of the fighting inside Stalingrad. It was as if every German in the city now had to look over his shoulder, to keep an ear open for the enemy approaching from behind. The very chatter of the machineguns acquired a nervous note. The reporter Vasily Grossman noticed a change in the music of the urban battle, a new motif in the noisy opera of war. His keen ear picked this up when listening to the sounds coming from the factory district.

The battle continues in the factories, where the dark, tattered walls are suddenly illuminated by the white and pink lights of gunfire. Cannons peal and boom; mines go off with a clear, dry, resounding bang; the precise enunciation of tommyguns and machineguns is heard. The sounds of battle in the factories at night speak of a new page in the struggle for Stalingrad. The sounds are no longer the elemental roar which rises high into the air, or falls from the sky in great waves, or flows unstoppably over the huge expanse of the Volga. This is now a battle of snipers. Volleys of bullets and shells fly swiftly and directly between the workshops. They are not like the slow shining hyperbolas of aerial warfare. In the short distances between the shops they resemble bright spears or arrows thrown by invisible warriors in the darkness. They suddenly appear from the stones of the walls, penetrate the cold stone of other walls, and disappear into them.

Weeks after it was first hemmed in, Colonel Ivan Lyudnikov’s 138th Rifle Division was still holding a patch of ground in the Barricades factory. Now there were only 500 men left in the division, and they were surrounded on three sides by German troops. A couple of hundred yards behind them was the Volga, and the Germans were constantly threatening to slip in between them and the river and cut them off from that side too. They had little contact with the rest of the city.

Lyudnikov‘s predicament was, in a sense, a microcosm of the battle of Stalingrad. The Russians were aware that the 138th was fighting on, and their fight came to be seen as one of those symbolic encounters - like Pavlov‘s House and the Nail Factory - which defined the struggle for the Russians, and typified the grim righteousness of their fight. And as with those other mini conflicts, the soldiers‘ strange gift for toponymy supplied a name for this little battleground. It was dubbed ‘Lyudnikov‘s Island‘, and as such it became part of the contemporary geography and the future mythology of Stalingrad. Vladimir Borisov was a supply officer for the 138th Division. His job meant that he went constantly backwards and forwards from the left bank of the river to the front line in the city. Even in the first days of November, before the 138th was cut off completely, he had his work cut out.

You see, the ’Island’ itself was a territory of no more than 500 metres across. I well remember the regimental command post, which was located like a swift‘s nest in the high bank of the Volga. The fritzes would run up the edge of the cliff and throw grenades down at us. The work of us quartermasters was very difficult at that period. The Germans had occupied most of the bank and all the approaches to the river from the rear of the island were well covered.

I often had to take food and so forth up to the front. The enemy was laying down constant fire on our bank to stop supplies being brought across the river. Under such fire we would bring up supplies by car to an area near our front line, then unload and repack everything into a small boat. Sometimes we would get covering fire from the far bank. The boat would go right up the enemy positions at the riverbank, still under constant fire. Sometimes, to be safer, supplies such as shells and bullets would be put on a separate boat and towed along behind. In this way we tried to keep up the supply of ammunition.

On November 6th, the chief of supply Spiridonov and I decided to celebrate the anniversary of the October Revolution with the regiment. We got a shipment together and crossed to the other side. There was drizzling rain, as always in the autumn, and the clay bank of the river was slippery and hard to climb. We got to the ‘gully of death’ and checked the German enfilades, and then made a run for it. In my haste I tripped over a dead body and fell straight on top of it. I got covered in mud as I kissed the face of that unknown dead comrade. But there was no time to stop and think. I jumped straight up and we ran on to the command post, where they were glad to see us. We had a good celebration of Revolution Day - and then we were cut off.

Vladimir Sokolov, a captain with the 295th artillery regiment, was on Lyudnikov’s Island from the start.

It was the hardest time we went through in the whole of the Great Patriotic War. The enemy came stronger and stronger and they were more and more reckless. Drunken fascists, pushing towards the Volga, came straight at us. But the bodies just piled up at the edge of our trenches, where they formed a kind of rampart. Once they hardened in the frost they were practically impervious to bullets, which actually strengthened our defence.

On the 16th November our commander, comrade Lyudnikov, gave an order to the effect that each soldier and officer should receive 25 grammes of dried bread per day, and that each rifle and machinegun be issued 30 bullets a day. Anything else we needed we had to get from the enemy.

The daily norm of both bread and bullets could easily be consumed in a few seconds. Capturing the enemy’s resources was the only means of continuing the fight. To kill a man was no longer enough: it was crawling over and taking his weapon that counted. Nevertheless, with a little imagination it was possible to make a little go a long way - as Sokolov found when he went on his rounds of the besieged island.

I was sent to check up on our ‘garrisons’. I remember the garrison of Sergeant Morozov from the 344th Rifle Regiment. When I arrived, or rather crawled up, he had the following arsenal: one Maxim gun, two German machineguns, two German sub-machineguns, one of our own machineguns, one anti-tank gun, two dozen anti-tank grenades, and about three dozen ‘lemons’ - that is, hand grenades. Morozov’s partner was asleep in the dugout, and Morozov was carrying on a conversation with himself - quite loudly and using different voices. He would shoot off a couple of rounds every now and then - first from one weapon, then another, then a third, always in different directions and from different comers of his strongpoint. Very occasionally he threw a grenade. In this way he created the impression that there was an entire platoon defending the place.

And what was most surprising for me was this: he never for one moment looked the least bit afraid. Alone, in total darkness apart from the odd flare (after which it always seemed even darker), with a cunning enemy who was armed to the teeth right in front of him. But there was Morozov with his Olympian calm, his slow, carefully calculated peregrinations around his territory, his clever use of weapons, his cool-as-a-cucumber shout-it-loud dialogues in their various voices and intonations. All this made me not just admire him, but also want to learn from him. He knew the magnificent art of valour.

You could not help but be envious of such deathless heroism. He was one person, on his own, but he had absolute faith in victory. But there were hundreds -thousands - like him at Stalingrad.

THE AIRBRIDGE TO STALINGRAD

The Germans who surrounded Lyudnikov were themselves surrounded by a much larger contingent of Russians. In the last week of November the unstable borders of the Kessel congealed and solidified like a puddle in a pothole. The cauldron acquired definite form and extent. Its front line encompassed a large lozenge of Russian earth, about 40 miles (64km) wide and 20 miles (32km) deep. The eastern end of it was anchored in the city; the tapering western end was out in the bleak and empty steppe, and reached as far as the village of Marinovka, some way short of the Don. In the north it extended to Samofalovka, and in the south to Varvarovka.

Looking at the Kessel on his operational charts, Hitler had another of his grossly self-deluding ideas: he designated Stalingrad a Festung -a fortress - as if by speaking the word he could conjure up the battlements and thick walls that the Sixth Army so conspicuously lacked. It was a laughable misnomer, but ‘Fortress Stalingrad‘ is how the encirclement was described henceforth in German communiques and press reports.

The Russians did not know it at first, but they had surrounded a quarter of a million men of the Sixth Army. This was nearly three times as many as their own intelligence services had estimated. In the first days after the encirclement, the Russians did not rush to attack the surrounded men - the first task was to strengthen their own stretched lines and prevent a rapid breakout. German commanders inside the Kessel were already planning to burst through the encirclement to the south-west before the Russians could strengthen the ring. The plans did not get far.

Early on the 24th November, while Paulus and I were preparing the necessary measures for a breakout to the south, we received a ‘Führer decision‘ from Army Group, said General Arthur Schmidt, Paulus’s chief of staff. It said that the Sixth Army was to stay in Stalingrad and wait to be relieved. We reacted to this order with astonishment, since we had expected some sort of discussion with the Army Group, and were fairly certain of the breakout. Paulus and I came separately to the same conclusion. It now seemed to us more impossible than ever to act against an order of the High Command or the Army Group.

Hitler had absolutely forbidden the army to break out of encirclement straight away. Stalingrad was not to be relinquished, and the Sixth Army was to deploy all around the edge of this territory with the barrels of their guns pointing outwards - the classic ‘hedgehog‘ defence, writ large. Hitler‘s intention was to organize a relief column that could smash through from the outside. In the meantime, the army would be supplied from the air. On the 22nd, Hitler had asked Goring whether his Luftwaffe could supply the Sixth Army, to which Goring replied ‘Yes, it can be done.’ The Reichsmarschall then boarded his luxury train and went to France for a holiday.

While Goring was off collecting paintings in Paris, a furious row developed over the logistics of the proposed airlift to Stalingrad. The Sixth Army estimated that it needed a minimum of 550 tons of fuel, arms and food every day in order to remain fighting fit. Goring‘s supply experts of the Luftwaffe averred that 300 tons a day was possible, but only if aerial combat operations were scaled down and - crucially - if the Russian weather permitted.

In fact, the weather had already turned bad. There was fog and low cloud, and the temperature was diving well below zero. Consequently, in the first days of the encirclement a mere trickle of supplies made it into the Kessel - far less than the Luftwaffe‘s already inadequate pledge. Werner Beumelberg was a Luftwaffe major with the Fourth Air Fleet. He could see at once that the airlift was a hopeless undertaking. This is his analysis of the situation on the ground and in the air, as it deteriorated through the last days of November and into December.

On the 24th November, 47 Junker 52s carrying 80 tons flew in, 27 of which either crashed or were lost under enemy fire. On 25th November 30 Ju 52s flew in carrying 55 tons of fuel and 20 tons of munitions with a loss of 9 Jus. On the 26th November Heinkel 111 fighter planes were also diverted from their real task for the first time to bring in supplies for the Kessel. This use of these planes subsequently became commonplace, until a point was reached when combat needs became so urgent that ferrying supplies had to be set aside.

Wide-ranging measures were introduced to bring in all available Luftwaffe transport planes from the front and from back home, and also to use rail transport to bring in the necessary provisions. Both took time to organize. By the 30th November, 80 planes had been put in place, 15 of them were lost, and 40 tons of fuel and 20 tons of munitions had been landed in the Kessel.

But by now the provision of rations was becoming urgent. It was an endless process. By the time the daily provisions had been increased to 200 tons and more, the needs of the Sixth Army had increased several times over, because in between the peak achievements on a particular day, there were days when the weather prevented any flights from coming in. With the loss of some of the positions outside the fortress the fighters no longer had sufficient range to protect the planes by day.

Meanwhile the units of the Sixth Army inside were fighting for every metre of ground, at first still in the certain expectation of relief from outside. But from the very start they operated under the severest shortage of heavy weapons, fuel, munitions and, day by day, fewer rations. Russian pressure on the west and south-west front increased unremittingly. Even when 60 Russian tanks were destroyed on December 2nd, the very next day there were 100 new ones in place to attack. When German fighter planes destroyed 43 enemy planes over Stalingrad on one day, with flak destroying another nine, the very next day 100 new Russian planes were flying.

General von Richthofen himself saw Beumelberg‘s figures, and was well aware that his air fleet had been given a completely impossible task. He knew there was no way the Luftwaffe could ever fly in 300 tons a day, and he made frequent phone calls to highly placed Luftwaffe acquaintances in Berlin, trying to get someone to tell Hitler so. He also sent a report to Paulus urging him to break out, orders or no orders. The army has a clear choice.‘ said von Richthofen. ‘It must break through to the south-west, or face destruction within days.‘

Göring‘s own staff officers did not need von Richthofen to tell them that the assurances of their commander-in-chief were worthless, but they felt unable to undermine the Reichsmarschall by saying so officially. Instead, Army Chief of Staff Zeitzler, appalled that the Sixth Army was being condemned to starvation by the Luftwaffe‘s empty promises, took up the cudgel on behalf of the men on the ground. When Goring got back from Paris on the 27th, Zeitzler arranged a confrontation in Hitler‘s presence. First, the army man explained the impossibility of transporting the tonnage required with the aircraft available, then asked the Führer to summon Goring. Hitler did so, and then put a straight question: ‘Goring, can you keep the Sixth Army supplied by air?‘ Goring made the Nazi salute and declared: ‘Mein Führer, I assure you that the Luftwaffe can keep the Sixth Army supplied.‘ ‘The Luftwaffe certainly cannot,‘ retorted Zeitzler. ‘You are in no position to give an opinion on that!‘ shouted Göring.

But Zeitzler had done his homework. ‘Herr Reichsmarschall,‘ he said, ‘Do you know what tonnage has to be flown in every day?‘ Goring flushed. ‘I don‘t, but my staff officers do,‘ he said lamely. This allowed Zeitzler to make his case - and the logic was overwhelming. ‘Allowing for all the stocks at present with the Sixth Army, allowing for absolute minimum needs and the taking of all possible emergency measures, the Sixth Army will require delivery of 300 tons a day. But since not every day is suitable for flying, this means that about 500 tons will have to be carried to the Sixth Army on each and every flying day if the irreducible minimum average is to be maintained.‘

‘I can do that,‘ said Goring. ‘That‘s a lie,‘ shouted Zeitzler. He knew that even if every plane in the Luftwaffe were brought to Stalingrad -from France, from North Africa, from the Caucasus and the Russian north - it would still not be enough to guarantee a delivery of 500 tons on flying days. He looked to Hitler, who after a moment‘s thought pronounced judgment: ‘The Reichsmarschall has made his report to me, which I have no choice but to believe. I therefore abide by my original decision.‘

Hitler‘s siding with Goring was a nail in the coffin of the Sixth Army. But the Führer‘s final decision had probably been taken days before the row between his two commanders. On the day the Kessel closed, 23 November, he had lost his temper with the turbulent Zeitzler and screamed at him: ‘The Sixth Army will stay where it is. If necessary they will hold out all winter, and I shall relieve them by a spring offensive.‘ Tragically for the men in the Kessel, it would all be over much sooner than that.

WINTER STORM AND THUNDERCLAP

The consequences of Hitler‘s determination to go ahead with the airlift were immediately felt inside the cauldron.

From the very first day of the encirclement, everything was in short supply, said Werner Beumelberg. Some divisions still had some horses, which they had to share out with others. Little by little the horses ended up in the field kitchens. There were insufficient field bakeries in the Kessel, so bread had to be flown in, and that took up a great deal of space in the aircraft. There was hardly any fuel, because the large depots were far behind lines on the other side of the Don. Ammunition had to be used sparingly from the first. Transport movements inside the Kessel were severely hampered, the road network was incomplete, snow drifts had to be cleared, and the enemy had a clear view of our men. Every day that provisions were not replenished made the situation worse. But the army’s needs could never be met. It was living from hand to mouth. In fact, every day it was living beyond its means, and it was easy to calculate at what point there would be nothing left at all.

Peter Wunschel was an intelligence officer with the 384th Infantry Division, under the command of General Strecker. Before the war he had been a journalist by trade, and he had a hack‘s nose for a looming catastrophe. The day after the completion of the encirclement, he heard something that sounded to him like a great disaster scoop. Unfortunately for Wunschel, it looked as if the disaster was about to happen to him.

It was probably the 24th November that the General returned from the discussion at Army HQ, following the formation of the Kessel. We are shutting ourselves in of our own free will. The core of this information, the full significance of this sentence, struck me like a screaming headline.

Wunschel added that ‘the mass of the Sixth Army firmly believed that this Kessel would be broken through from the outside, as all others had been before,‘ and this remained the Sixth Army’s last best hope: they could hold out for a little while, even on starvation rations, so long as they knew that help was on its way.

The task of opening what Hitler called the ‘land corridor’ to the Kessel fell to Field Marshal Erich von Manstein. He was admired both by Hitler and by the mass of German soldiery. He was one of the architects of the conquest of France, and he was also the man who had subjugated the Crimean peninsula earlier in the Russian campaign. Now he was brought south from Leningrad and charged with the salvation of the Sixth Army.

At Kotelnikovo, 80 miles (130km) south-west of the southern edge of the Kessel, Manstein began to assemble his forces. It was a hotchpotch army: there were two panzer corps - the 48th and the 57th - which were all that was left of General Hermann Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army; then there was the 11th Panzer Division, said to be the toughest unit on the entire eastern front, which was brought up from the Caucasus; also from the Caucasus came the 23rd Panzer Division, and the Sixth Panzer Division was on its way from France. With the additional support of infantry and Romanian cavalry, Manstein’s strike force amounted to 500 tanks and about 75,000 men.

The Field Marshal had also scraped together a motley collection of 800 transport vehicles - Russian ones, German ones, Czech ones, captured American and British lend-lease trucks. These were loaded with 300 tons of food and fuel, ready to roll into the Kessel as soon as the tanks had blasted a channel through the snowbound, Russian-held flatlands. As this strike force made ready, Manstein sent a message to Paulus: ‘We will do everything to get you out.’

Manstein’s new command was designated Army Group Don, and the relief operation was given the name Wintergewitter - ‘Winter Storm’. Hoth was given the key task of leading the relief column. The sole aim of Winter Storm was to resupply the Sixth Army within its ‘fortress’, to give it the means to fight on. But in defiance of Hitler, Manstein cannily laid plans for a second operation - code-named Donnerschlag - ‘Thunderclap’ - the goal of which was to effect the evacuation of the Sixth Army down the corridor hacked out by Army Group Don. Manstein seems to have regarded this as the real point of the exercise: carry out Winter Storm first, then invoke Thunderclap and get the Sixth Army out of Stalingrad before it was too late. Hitler would rant and rave, but by then it would be a fait accompli.

Winter Storm was delayed for some days by an actual winter storm, but the operation finally got under way on 12 December. The tanks were painted white for camouflage, and looked like mechanical wraiths as they moved out of Kotelnikovo and headed north-east. The Germans made reasonable progress in the first two days: their main obstacle was not the Russians but the snow-filled balkas, as dangerous and invisible as a mountain crevasse.

Meanwhile, inside the Kessel, hopes began to rise. The watchword of Paulus’s cold and famished men was ‘Der Manstein kommt’ -‘Manstein is coming!’ Karl P—, a Landser with the 376th Infantry Division, could not contain his excitement at the thought that the Stalingrad ordeal would be coming to an end, and so rather overestimated the Field Marshal’s progress. In a letter home written on the 14th, he wrote:

The worst is over for the moment. We’re all hoping to be out of the Kessel by Christmas. For the time being we’re still encircled, but the Russians are again encircled by German troops. General von Manstein is still 30 kilometres away.

You’ll have to forgive me for writing so badly and incoherently. If you could see where I am as I write, you’d understand. I’m down here in a bunker, that’s been holed to the left and right, at the front and the rear. I’ve got to write fast, I’ve no idea when I’m going to have to run for it. It’s my fourth attempt at writing this letter. Now I have to stop, rations are being served. Dear parents, the war is soon going to be over. Once this Kessel battle is over, the war in Russia will be finished.

But Manstein’s good initial progress proved deceptive. On the very day that Karl P— of the 376th was jotting down his dream of a Christmas in Germany, Sixth Panzer encountered the Soviet Fourth Mechanized Corps and 13th Tank Corps, which were rushing to meet them headlong. The opposing armoured columns locked horns between the Aksai and Myshkova rivers, about 40 miles (65km) from the Kessel. A brief thaw turned the ground to a quagmire, and for three days the tanks thrashed around like mud wrestlers in the hills above the village of Verkhnye-Kumsky.

Meanwhile the Russians launched a new operation, one that would put paid to the German rescue effort. Operation Little Saturn involved a tank-led thrust to the south from the upper Don, 100 miles (160km) away to the west of Stalingrad. One aim was to prevent any reinforcements reaching Manstein. A second goal was to capture the large airfield at Tatsinskaya, which was Richthofen’s main depot for supplying the Sixth Army. While this offensive was under way, elements of the Soviet 51st Army moved behind Hoth’s column to cut off Kotelnikovo in the rear.

By the 19th the relief column had escaped the mudbath of Verkhnye-Kumsky and had stumbled on across the River Myshkova. But here, on the northern side of the river, the Germans met a new opponent: General Rodion Malinovsky’s fresh and powerful Second Guards Army. Konstantin Glukhikh was with them, and from the ground he watched the slow disintegration of the German airbridge to Stalingrad.

Under cover of night, columns of seamen and infantrymen moved along a newly rolled snow road. Behind them, on horse-drawn trailers, moved the artillery. Bringing up the rear, with their headlights switched off, crawled our signallers‘ trucks.

A few hours later, we could tell we were drawing close to the front. We could hear night artillery and exchanges of machinegun fire. Soon after, we found ourselves in a sort of corridor. Shells were whistling over our heads, coming first from one side, then from the other. To both sides of us, flares were flying up into the dark sky. All our units turned to face the enemy approaching the ring. At daybreak, a fierce battle flared up around the Krep state farm and the village of Vasilyevka. It went on almost uninterruptedly for about five days.

The corridor between the ring and Manstein’s attacking army had become too narrow. And the enemy was launching one attack after another. Our soldiers and commanders realized that there was nowhere to go, and fought to the death to prevent the enemy’s getting through to the ring.

We observed scenes like the following many times: on the horizon you’d spot a hulking big transport plane adorned with swastikas, and no sooner had it reached territory occupied by our units than a couple of Soviet fighters would appear on its tail. One turn, and the transport plane would start to break up, and boxes, packages, loaves of bread and jars of preserves would fall to the ground from it as if from a sack full of holes.

And every time, our soldiers would run out of their dugouts and trenches and shout things like ‘Bravo!’ and ‘Well done!’

Manstein’s column stalled on the Myshkova river, 30 miles (48km) short of the Kessel, on 19 December. Both sides could look up and see the German planes ‘falling like apples from a tree in a gale’. That day, Manstein sent an emissary to Paulus. This ambassador from the world of the living was a Major Eismann, and his mission was to persuade Paulus at least to attempt a breakout now that help was nearby, to meet Manstein part way. Paulus refused, saying that he had only enough fuel for 15 miles (24km), that his men were too weak, and that in any case the Führer had forbidden it.

When Eismann returned empty-handed, Manstein appealed directly to Hitler, who made the reverse case. He said that there was no point in giving the order for a breakout, because Paulus had made it clear that he did not have the means to carry it out. Neither leader would take responsibility for the final decision: they manhandled it back and forth like two men juggling with a ticking time bomb.

On 23 December, the Tatsinskaya airfield fell to the Russians. A third of the German transport fleet was destroyed on the ground: individual planes were rammed by Russian tanks as they taxied on to the runway to escape. Those that made it out would henceforth have to fly twice the distance - from the airfield of Salsk and Novocherkassk, to bring supplies to the Sixth Army. The relief column on the Myshkova river was by this time in danger of becoming surrounded. On the day of the Tatsinskaya disaster Manstein ordered it to withdraw. The attempt to rescue Paulus‘s beleaguered men had ended in total failure.

On 29 December, elements of General Pavel Rotmistrov‘s Seventh Tank Corps liberated the town of Kotelnikovo, the base from which Manstein‘s relief column had set out two weeks before. Here the first Russian soldiers into the town found a depot filled with delicacies that had been intended for the Sixth Army’s Christmas celebrations: candied fruit, Dutch cheeses, wine from France, Danish bacon, tinned fish and vegetables. The boxes containing these riches all bore a stamp: ‘FOR GERMANS ONLY’. Tut not all our tankmen can speak German,’ wrote the wry Rotmistrov in his report on the find, ‘so due to a lack of education they ate the stuff.‘