Stalingrad, August 1942 – February 1943
Despite their failure to conquer Russia, the Nazi invaders still met with remarkable success. In the summer of 1942, the German army commanded huge swathes of the country. So much, in fact, that before the war 40% of Russia’s population had lived in the areas the Germans now occupied. To the north, they had reached the city of Leningrad close to the Finnish border, and continued down past Moscow through the Voronezh front. To the south, they were close to the Volga river, and had got as far as the Caucasus mountains, barely a hundred miles from the Caspian Sea (see map). Millions of Soviet citizens had been killed and millions had fled east. Now, in the late summer of 1942, after more than a year of fighting, the German Sixth Army was fast approaching the industrial city of Stalingrad. Because it was named after Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, the city had great symbolic importance for both the Soviets and the Nazis. Both sides were determined to fight as if the outcome of the entire war depended on their victory. Perhaps it did.
The German Sixth Army’s arrival at the outskirts of Stalingrad was foreshadowed by a vast cloud of dust thrown up by their marching feet, and the tanks, trucks and artillery that trundled through the parched steppe of late summer. Most of the soldiers, young and still fresh, were in good spirits. The odds were very definitely on their side. Despite occasional heavy fighting, most of those who had trekked the thousand or so miles from the German border to the banks of the Volga had every reason to feel they were as invincible as Nazi propaganda had told them they were. Hitler’s armies had astonished the world with their string of victories.
But, when the Sixth Army got to Stalingrad, there were no longer vast open plains to sweep through, and they became bogged down in street fighting. It was the kind of warfare every soldier dreads. Intensely personal, horrific, terrifying hand-to-hand combat, where men fight men with grenades, bayonets, sharpened spades, and anything else they can grab to kill each other in the most brutal, bloody way. Among many of the personal accounts of the fighting to emerge was one by a young German army lieutenant. His numb description sums up the personal nightmare of Stalingrad so eloquently that it is mentioned in virtually all books and television documentaries about the battle:
“We have fought during fifteen days for a single house. The front is a corridor between burned-out rooms; it is the thin ceiling between two floors ... From floor to floor, faces black with sweat, we bombard each other with grenades in the middle of explosions, clouds of dust and smoke, heaps of mortar, floods of blood, fragments of furniture and human beings ... The street is no longer measured by dimension but by corpses ... Stalingrad is no longer a town. By day it is an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames. And when night arrives, one of those scorching, howling, bleeding nights, the dogs plunge into the Volga and swim desperately to gain the other bank. The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them. Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure.”
The battle raged from August 1942 to February 1943, and in such fearful and exhausting circumstances, the morale of each side would be a major deciding factor in the outcome. The Germans arrived convinced that victory would soon be theirs. The Russians fought desperately to cling on to what remained of their front line positions. They were overawed by the German army who, after all, had yet to face a serious defeat. At one point early in the struggle, nine-tenths of Stalingrad was in German hands. So confident in victory was the commander of the German Sixth Army, General Friedrich von Paulus, that he had already designed a medal commemorating the capture of the city.
To begin with, the casualty rate among the Soviet army was unsustainable. Reinforcements, rushed to Stalingrad to prop up its crumbling barricades, would arrive at a railhead on the other side of the Volga. They would be bundled out of cattle wagons to be greeted by the terrifying sight of a city in flames. It looked, quite literally, like a vision of hell. From the railhead, men were quickly transferred across the river by ferry. Even if they survived the heavy machine gun and artillery bombardments, and the strafing of the Stuka dive bombers as they crossed, these soldiers would be lucky to live for 24 hours.
As each area of the city was overtaken by fighting, Stalingrad was reduced to little more than a huge pile of rubble. German soldiers described the fighting as Rattenkrieg – the war of the rats – as men scurried and burrowed through the debris.
The commander of the Russian forces at Stalingrad was General Vassili Chuikov. He quickly grasped that the key to survival in the city would be small, individual encounters with the enemy, rather than a war of tanks, artillery and bombers. The most lethal soldier of all would be the sniper. In the bizarre landscape of the city, with its acres of demolished or burned-out factories and apartment buildings, Stalingrad was perfect sniper territory. A soldier would feel he could be killed at any moment by a sharpshooter perched atop some derelict eyrie. A handful of good snipers could completely demoralize an entire front line regiment. Because of their importance to the defenders, Soviet snipers were rewarded well for their efforts. A marksman with 40 kills, for example, won a medal and the title “noble sniper”.
This highly specialized job requires both particular skills and an uncommon personality. It is one thing to kill a soldier when he is charging toward you with a bayonet. It is an entirely different matter to observe him coldly from a hiding place. He may be shaving, chatting to a friend, writing a letter home, or even squatting over a latrine. A sniper must kill him in cold blood, and at the moment when he is least likely to give away his own position. Sniping is a skill which requires great cunning and patience. Especially when one sniper is sent to stalk another. A sound knowledge of camouflage is essential. At Stalingrad, skilled snipers learned to fire against a white background, where the flash of their rifle shot could be less easily seen. Some snipers improvised special attachments to their rifles, which hid the flash of a shot. Some set up dummy figures to act as lures, returning to them regularly to move their position.
Early September was a particularly desperate time in the battle. It was then that Vasily Zaitsev, a sniper of the Russian 62nd Army, began to make a name for himself. In his first 10 days in the city, he managed to kill 40 German soldiers. Zaitsev was a 22-year-old shepherd from the Elininski forest of the Ural mountains. He had learned to shoot as a young boy, and was already a skilled marksman before he even joined the army. He had the broad, open face of a Russian peasant. All of this made him ideal material for Soviet propaganda newspapers. Such papers were desperately trying to instill some confidence and fighting spirit into the soldiers of the city. Zaitsev’s combination of ordinariness and special talent made him a perfect “people’s hero”. Even his name was just right – Zaitsev is a surname derived from the Russian word for “hare”. Animal cunning and speed were perfect attributes for a sniper. As his fame grew, his story was also taken up by national newspapers, newsreels and radio broadcasts.
Such was his success, the army had Zaitsev set up a sniper training school close to the front. Here, between forays to the German front lines, he passed on his skills to eager recruits. “Conceal yourself like a stone,” he told them. “Observe, study the terrain, compile a chart and plot distinctive marks on it. Remember that if in the process of observation you have revealed yourself to the enemy… you will receive a bullet through your head.” He taught his pupils how to use dummies, and other ruses, to lure enemy snipers into giving away their position. Sometimes he would taunt an opponent with a firing range target. Then, when he was confident he had discovered his enemy’s hiding place, he would hurry back to where his dummy had been, and swiftly catch his opponent off guard. Snipers sometimes played these games with each other. Zaitsev warned his pupils never to become angry at such tactics. The way to stay alive as a sniper was to “look before you leap”. A sniper needed to be intimately familiar with the territory in which he operated. Anything different, a pile of bricks here, a slightly-shifted pile of wooded planks there, would tell an experienced soldier that an enemy sniper lay hidden and waiting for his next victim.
Among Zaitsev’s pupils was a young woman named Tania Chernova. Like many Russian women, she fought as a front line soldier. Several of her family had been killed in the war, and Tania had a deep hatred for her enemy. She always called them “sticks” – targets – refusing even to think of them as human beings. She had a special skill as a sniper, and often fought alongside Zaitsev. Sharing the hardships of front line soldiers, they snatched meals eaten with a spoon kept in their boots, bathed in buckets of cold water, and slept huddled together in dark overcrowded shelters. As courtships went it was hardly flowers and candle-lit dinners, but in the intense atmosphere of the front, where death was often an instant away, the two became lovers.
From their careful monitoring of the Soviet newspapers and radio broadcasts, and their interrogations of captured Soviet soldiers, the Germans soon learned about Vasily Zaitsev. His worth to the Russians as a morale booster was obvious. The German Sixth Army high command also realized what a prize it would be to kill him. Besides, the success of Soviet snipers was making life so unpleasant for the German ground troops, that no one dared raise their head above the rubble in the hours of daylight.
An SS Colonel named Heinz Thorwald, head of the sniper training school at Zossen, near Berlin, was flown to Stalingrad to dispatch Zaitsev. He had several advantages over the Soviet sniper. He knew all about the techniques of his opponent, because Soviet newspapers and army training leaflets full of this information had been passed on to him. Zaitsev, on the other hand, knew nothing about him – although he had been tipped off that the Germans had sent one of their best snipers to kill him. For several days he kept his eyes and ears open for any clues as to the whereabouts of this Nazi “super-sniper”, as Zaitsev called him. Then, in a single day, his friend Morozov was killed and another comrade, Shaikin, was badly wounded. Both men were expert snipers. They had been outfoxed by someone of even greater talent.
Zaitsev hurried to the section of the front line where his comrades had been shot – the Red October factory district, a malignant landscape of twisted machinery and the skeletal framework of partially demolished buildings. Like a police inspector investigating a murder, he asked soldiers who had witnessed the shootings exactly what had happened, and where his comrades had been hit. Making use of his now considerable experience, he deduced that the shots had to come from a position directly in front of the area where these men had fallen. Across the lines, amid the tangled rubble, was the hulk of a burned-out tank. This was too obvious a spot for an experienced sniper. To the right of the tank was an abandoned concrete pillbox. But the firing slit there had been boarded up. Between these two landmarks, right in front of Zaitsev’s own position, was a sheet of corrugated iron lying amid piles of bricks. This, he thought, was the perfect place for a sniper to hide, then crawl away under cover of darkness.
As he studied the landscape, Zaitsev caught sight of the top of a helmet moving along the edge of an enemy trench, and instinctively reached for his rifle. But then he realized, by the way the helmet was wobbling along, that this was a trap. Colonel Thorwald almost certainly had an assistant who had placed the helmet on a stick and was waiting for Zaitsev to reveal his position by firing at this dummy target.
Putting his theory to the test, Zaitsev placed a glove on a small plank and raised it above a brick parapet in front of the iron sheeting. At once a shot rang out, piercing the glove and plank in an instant. Zaitsev looked at his plank carefully. The bullet had gone straight through it. His quarry was obviously directly under the iron sheet.
After dark, Zaitsev and his friend Kulikov scouted the area for suitable firing spots. The night wore on with occasional bursts of rifle fire, followed by sporadic mortar and artillery barrages. Every now and then a flare would shoot high into the air in a graceful arc, floating down in a bright blaze that cast harsh shadows over the still, sinister landscape.
When the sun rose the next morning it fell directly on them, so they waited. To have fired then, with the sunlight catching their rifles or telescopic sights, would have been too risky. But, by early afternoon, the sun had moved across the sky, and over to the German lines. At the edge of the iron sheet, something glistened in the bright light. Was it Thorwald’s rifle, or just a piece of broken glass? Kulikov offered the German sniper a target. Very carefully he raised his helmet above the broken brick wall they sheltered behind. A shot rang out, piercing the metal helmet. Kulikov rose slightly and screamed, as if he had been hit. Unable to contain his curiosity Thorwald raised his head a little from behind the iron sheet, to try to get a better look. It was the chance Zaitsev had been waiting for. He fired a single shot, and Thorwald’s head fell back. That night, Zaitsev crept up to his opponent’s position to take his rifle as a souvenir. You can still see the telescopic sight on display at the Armed Forces Museum in Moscow.
The course of the battle of Stalingrad makes up one of the great horror stories of modern history. The Germans, together with their Italian, Hungarian and Romanian allies, lost 850,000 men. The Soviets lost 750,000. But Stalingrad was not just the scene of a vast, prolonged battle, it was also a city of half a million people. In the first two days of the fighting, 40,000 of them were killed in German bombing raids. By the end, a mere 1,500 were still alive among the rubble, although some who had lived in the city before the Germans came had already fled to other parts of Russia.
The battle ended when Soviet forces outside Stalingrad surrounded the Germans, cutting them off inside the city. “There is not a single healthy man left at the front…everyone is at least suffering from frostbite,” ran a report by Sixth Army commanders to Berlin on January 18, 1943. “The commander of the 76th Infantry Division on a visit to the front yesterday came across many soldiers who had frozen to death.” But Hitler refused to allow his starving, demoralized Sixth Army to give in. Von Paulus and his troops went through a further two weeks of needless suffering before he defied direct orders and submitted to the Russians. Of the 91,000 Germans who surrendered, only 5,000 would ever return home. The rest died in captivity.
Sad to say, there was to be no happy ending to the relationship between Vasily Zaitsev and Tania Chernova. Shortly after Zaitsev survived his encounter with Colonel Thorwald, Tania was critically wounded. She and a small squad of soldiers had been sent out to assassinate von Paulus. On the way to the German front lines, one of them stepped on a mine. In the explosion, Tania received a near fatal stomach wound. Zaitsev was told she was not expected to live. But Tania survived. Several months later, while recovering in a hospital in Tashkent, far behind the front lines, she too received terrible news. Zaitsev had been killed in an explosion in the final weeks of fighting in Stalingrad. Sunk in despair, for weeks afterwards she would just stare into space. Eventually she recovered her health and even married, although the wound she received meant that she could never have children. For Tania, like so many others, the war had consequences she would have to bear for the rest of her life.
Only in 1969, when she was in her late 40s, did she learn that Zaitsev was still alive. After the war he had married, and became the director of an engineering school. It was bittersweet news, because she still loved him. The explosion she had been told about had happened. Zaitsev had also been caught by a mine. It had blinded him temporarily, but he too had recovered.
Note
The identity of Colonel Thorwald is a thorny historical issue. In some accounts he is referred to as Major Koning or Konig. Zaitsev wrote about the duel described here in his post-war memoirs, but does not mention his rival by name. No one doubts Zaitsev’s skill and achievements as a sniper, but some historians think the episode with Thorwald/Konig was made up, or at least heavily embroidered, by Soviet propagandists. The story about Tania Chernova is undoubtedly true, and was taken directly from her personal experience of the battle of Stalingrad given to American historian William Craig in his book ‘Enemy at the Gates’.