Stalingrad

In the spring of 1942, Soviet troops were in a difficult position. They had survived a difficult winter, but had not yet been able to turn back the German tide. Against the advice of General Georgy Zhukov, Stalin decided on an ill-fated attempt to attack the Germans in the south, to try to retake Kharkov. It turned into a bloody debacle in which over a quarter of a million Soviet troops were captured, and it led to a German breakthrough in the South. Fascist forces began marching toward the Volga and the stage was set for the most important military battle of the Second World War. Within a few months, the “invincible” German war machine would be broken and the tide of the war turned. But only after hundreds of thousands had perished and the city on the Volga bearing the vozhd’s name—Stalingrad—was turned into a pile of steaming rubble.

Stalin had expected Hitler’s main attack in 1942 to be on the Central Front, directed at Moscow. As a result, Soviet forces in the South were diluted to strengthen the Center, and they were unable to withstand the German onslaught, the main objective of which turned out to be driving to the Volga, cutting off Russia’s oil supplies from the Caucasus (and Lend-Lease, supplied through Iran), and cutting Russia in two.

Hitler’s task was made easier by the lack of a second front in Western Europe (which would not be opened for two years). Except for England, Hitler had virtually all of Europe quietly subdued, and he was able to send 25 divisions east. On June 28, a month after the failed Soviet counterattack on Kharkov, the German attack in the South began, directed at Voronezh. By July, Soviet forces had been beaten back to the Don River and, on July 28, the infamous Order #227 was issued by the Soviet Supreme Command: “Not a single step backward!” (Ni Shagu Nazad!)

The order harshly declared that the Soviet people were losing their faith in the Red Army, that many damned the army for fleeing east, allowing the people to be subjugated to the German yoke. The document ordered soldiers and officers to defend every meter of their homeland until the last drop of blood. It said the main flaw of the army was a lack of discipline in the troops, and it authorized summary execution of cowards and panic-mongers as traitors.

As a matter of fact, Order #227 drew on German expertise. After their crushing defeat near Moscow (see Russian Life Nov/Dec 2001), the German army formed over 100 “penalty companies”—made up of soldiers and officers who retreated or panicked—and threw them into the most dangerous segments of the front, so that those “at fault” could be cleansed of their guilt with their blood.

The Red Army established 10 penalty (shtrafniye) battalions composed of commanders who showed cowardice. They were stripped of their war medals and ranks and were sent to serve in the hottest, most dangerous spots along the front. The families of these “traitors” fell victim to repressions. As a result, the members of these shtrafniye battalions really had nothing to lose (but their lives) and soon became the Germans’ worst nightmare. Bard Vladimir Vysotsky, who composed quite a few poignant songs on the Great Patriotic War, later sang: “You’d better cut up the forest into coffins — the penalty battalions are going into the breach.” (Vy luchshe les rubite na groby – v proryv idut shtrafniye bataliony.)

Stalin ordered the creation of one to three shtrafniye battalions at Stalingrad, with 800 soldiers in each. Barrage (zagraditelniye) squads were formed in the rear of “shaky divisions”—another idea stolen from the Germans. Each Russian army was supposed to have three to five barrage squads, each with 200 soldiers.

Shortly after the signing of Order #227, the well-greased Soviet propaganda machine began to tell stories of the heroic deeds and unparalleled courage of Soviet soldiers. The day after Stalin’s order was issued, it became known that four soldiers, who had only two armor-piercing rifles between them, engaged battle with 30 enemy tanks and set 15 of them on fire. Such exploits were legion—almost a daily fact—like the pilot Rogalsky who, shot down over Stalingrad, directed his burning aircraft into a mass of German tanks.

“Not a Single Step Back!” was actually very controversial among the troops, and raised quite a few objections. This is plain to see now from the reports of the osobye otdely (Special Departments – aka military counter-intelligence). But then the vociferous malcontents were quickly silenced by their transfer to penalty battalions.

By late August, German forces had taken the Donets basin, the Crimean peninsula and had raised the German flag atop Mount Elbrus. On August 23, German planes made some 2,000 sorties attacking Stalingrad. Over 20 ships were hit in the Volga waterway and oil storage tanks were hit, their contents flowing in an infernal stream into the Volga. The whole river was on fire, with flames nearly a kilometer high. Over 300,000 Stalingraders were evacuated beyond the Volga, and on August 25, a state of siege was declared in Stalingrad. Hitler’s 6th Army, under General Friedrich von Paulus, encircled the city.

On August 27, General Georgy Zhukov, who had been commander of the Western Front since his decisive victory at the Battle of Moscow, was promoted to Deputy Supreme Commander, second only to Stalin, who held the title of Supreme Commander. Together with the Red Army’s Chief of the General Staff, General Alexander Vasilevsky, Zhukov was put in charge of the Battle of Stalingrad.

By early September, the Germans had pierced Soviet defenses, seizing several strategic heights above the city and key positions in the approaches to the city. Only a few kilometers separated them from Stalingrad. On September 13th the Germans began the storming. The central railway station changed hands more than 10 times. The “House of Sergeant Pavlov”—a brick building which occupied a dominant position above the city—was turned into an unassailable point of Russian resistance. Its defenders withstood a 58-day seige, barring the enemy from reaching the Volga. Here, as Marshal Vasily Chuykov later wrote, the Germans lost more soldiers than during the seizure of Paris. Sergeant Pavlov—the defender of the house—was later awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

It was not only soldiers who displayed heroism. Generals sacrificed themselves too. The overcoat of Major General V. A. Gladkov, of the 35th rifle division, bore 160 bullet and fragment traces when he died. And the food rations were the same for generals and soldiers alike: 25 grams of dried bread, 12 grams of cereals and five grams of sugar. As to ammunition, 30 cartridges were alloted for each gun. And women fought alongside the men. Maria Ulyanova fought as a defender of Sergeant Pavlov’s House from the very first day; Valentina Pakhomova pulled over a hundred wounded soldiers from the battlefield.

As the battle for Pavlov’s House raged, Zhukov and Vasilevsky were in Moscow with the Stavka, or Central Command. Stalin told them to come up with a plan to save Stalingrad. They came up with a plan that foresaw a prolonged period of “active defense,” to wear down the Germans, then a sudden and overwhelming counterattack that would decimate the foe and split their army in two. Success required the utmost stealth and secrecy (codenamed “Uranus,” the plan was kept secret for some time from many top generals), and for the next two months, massive amounts of men and material were carefully moved into reserve positions above and to the east of Stalingrad.

Meanwhile, German command threw as many as six divisions into a very narrow portion of the front. Hundreds of aircraft provided air support. The defense provided by the 62nd Russian army was pierced and it ended up being cut off from the units of the Stalingrad Front in the North and the South-East Front to the South. At this very critical point, on September 16, the 13th Division of the Guards, under the command of General Alexander Rodimtsev, broke out of encirclement. Rodimtsev’s division took Mamaev Mound (known as Hill 102 at the time) by storm, and the defense of the hill raged for the next 135 days. The steep slopes of Mamaev Mound became much less so from the weeks of bombing and artillery shelling. Some places on the hill bore more metal than dirt. Even in winter, the hill stood out like a blackened eye.

The Germans pummeled the 62nd army day and night. Sometimes the Soviets had to repulse as many as 10 attacks in a day. They were fighting not only for factory workshops but over the debris of buildings. Workers of the Stalingrad Tractor Plant repaired damaged tanks at night, right next to the front lines. A quarter million civilians took part in building lines of defense at radii of 50, 100, 150 and 500 km from the city.

The tenacity of Soviet troops quashed German attempts to carry out a rapid, blitzkrieg offensive. In late September, General Franz Halder was fired as head of the German General Staff and General Kurt Zeitzler took over. Hitler sent Jodl to the Caucasus, where he was to use his troops to distract the Red Army from Stalingrad. But Jodl soon saw that the Wehrmacht was exhausted, that the territory they had seized was more than could be held by the size of the army which occupied it. He rightly surmised that a debacle loomed. Jodl also noted, in his report to the Führer, that “US aid to the Soviets”—the vast US supplies sent under Lend-Lease—was having a significant impact. Soviet pilots were flying US-made AeroCobras from Alaska to the Western Front; whole caravans of US ships were delivering foodstuffs and machine tools to Murmansk; US-made jeeps (“Dodges”) were shipping in by sea.

Soviet snipers also had a huge impact on the events at Stalingrad, and particularly on morale during this period of “active defense.” Vasily Zaitsev personally shot 242 German soldiers; Soviet soldiers who apprenticed themselves to Zaitsev added another 1,106 to that list. “There is no land for us behind the Volga,” was Zaitsev’s motto. In all, 400 snipers of the 62nd Soviet army liquidated over 6,000 Germans. As retold in the recent American movie, Enemy at the Gates, in response to Zaitsev’s decimation of their units, the fascists allegedly sent to Stalingrad the head of the Berlin Sniper School, Major Koenings. Four days later, the Wehrmacht major was killed in a sniper’s duel with the Russian.

By early November, German troops in and around Stalingrad were spent. While they still occupied much of the western portion of the city, an October Nazi offensive to “finally and decisively take Stalingrad” had been successfully repulsed by the 62nd army. Meanwhile, controlled Soviet counterattacks all along the front kept German troops pinned down and unable to redirect forces to the southern battle.

At 7:30 in the morning on November 19, the period of “active defense” of Stalingrad came to an abrupt end. Soviet troops on the Southwest Front surged through defenses occupied by Romanian troops northwest of Stalingrad. Meanwhile, attacks south of Stalingrad and further to the north ensured that Soviet troops would not be flanked and aimed at encircling the German 6th Army.

In his memoirs, Zeitzler cited the following reasons for German defeat on this day: the snowstorm, the -20oC biting frost, and the “crowds of fleeing Romanians” who impeded the activity of Reserve Tank Corps X. Zeitzler saw what the Russians had in mind and urged Hitler to order his 6th Army to abandon Stalingrad in order to strike the Soviets in the West. Hitler went beserk: “I won’t leave the Volga!”

Within three days, the Russian plan succeeded in driving back the Germans and encircling Paulus’ once invincible 6th Army. Hitler ordered Paulus to establish a circular defense and told the General Staff to stay in the city. Soviet troops then re-directed their strikes westward, to keep German forces from performing a breakout of the encircled army. Hitler ordered that Paulus’ army henceforth be referred to as “the troops of the Stalingrad fortress.” But that was just linguistic juggling. The area of encirclement actually stretched 40 km west to east and 20 km from north to south, including plenty of barren steppe, a few villages and the majority of Stalingrad. Germans troops were forced to construct defenses in snowstorm and frost conditions without proper construction materials or fuel. They were ordered “to use horse meat for food.”

By November 24, the encircled group of German forces consisted of 20 German divisions and two Romanian armies totaling 330,000 soldiers. Of these, 100,000 were later taken prisoner. The remainder died of combat, famine or cold. Only the remnants of General Hoth’s tank army and rear services succeeded in breaking out of the encirclement.

Goering promised to send supplies by air. Over 600 German military cargo planes located in the Don steppe were supposed to deliver 600 tons of cargo by air, but the weather and Russian air defenses only allowed half to get through. A last attempt to break the encirclement from outside in December faltered quickly, over 45 km from the city limits.

In early January, Soviet command began its Koltso (“Circle”) strategy, to dismember and destroy the encircled German troops. On January 8, 1943, emissaries were sent to the embattled German fortress, demanding immediate surrender of the city. Paulus was given a lengthy document that guaranteed safe passage for those who surrendered and the right to return home after the war. The alternative was liquidation. Paulus got in touch with Hitler asking for a carte blanche in negotiations but was resolutely rebuffed.

Hitler had told the German people that the stoic resistance of the 6th Army did not allow the Russians to launch an offensive elsewhere along the front. Only to General Jodl (who was very close to the Führer) did Hitler admit that he had no faith in the salvation of the 6th Army. Nonetheless, Hitler sent a huge number of German orders, medals and promotions to the moribund soldiers marooned in the city.

On January 10, the Soviet army began a general offensive across the Stalingrad front, launched simultaneously from the north, the south and the west. For several days the Soviets tightened the rope around Paulus’ neck. German artillery units, short of ammunition, destroyed their guns; German drivers, short of gas, set fire to their vehicles. There were no medical supplies or facilities to treat the wounded and they were left to die.

On January 24, the last German plane flew west and the Soviet army occupied the airport. On January 26, German forces were cut in two, and, on January 31, Paulus—whom Hitler had promoted to the rank of field marshal just the day before—was taken prisoner at his headquarters in the basement of a city department store. Two-thirds of the Germans surrendered. Only the 11th army corps would not lay down its arms, and was fully destroyed by the Soviets.

On February 2 the encircled army capitulated. The last cable sent to Hitler’s headquarters read: “Long Live Germany!” But it was the name of Stalingrad that would live on, with streets and towns around the world taking the name of the Russian city that symbolized the turning of Allied fortunes in the Second World War.

The Battle for Stalingrad lasted 200 days and ranged over 100,000 square kilometers. Over two million participants employed some 26,000 field guns and mortars, as well as 2,000 tanks and as many aircraft. German losses (killed, wounded, and taken prisoner) totalled 1.5 million persons—one quarter of its total Eastern Front forces. Over sixty divisions were destroyed at Stalingrad, and a three day period of mourning was declared in Germany.

Later, towards the end of the war (in the summer of 1944), many of the Germans taken prisoner near Stalingrad were made to march through the streets of Moscow, so that the Soviet people could see the army which planned to invade their homeland and enslave its people. Following behind the German columns were city trucks, symbolically washing off the streets where the enemies had trod. Authorities on the radio asked the population “to remain calm” during the prisoners’ march, and Muscuvites showed no signs of vindictiveness at the sight of the German column, just staring blankly at the march down Tverskaya street. In fact, many gave the prisoners pieces of bread from their scarce food rations.

On December 22, 1942 the Soviet government instituted the medal “For the Defense of Stalingrad.” Over 700,000 participants of the battle received the medal.

In May 1944, US President Franklin Roosevelt sent a telegram to the city of Stalingrad, stating: “On behalf of the people of the United States I send this document to the city of Stalingrad to express our admiration of its valiant defenders … Their glorious victory stopped the wave of invasion and became a turning point in the war of allied nations against the forces of aggression.”

In 1961, Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd as part of a de-stalinization of place names and an eradication of the “cult of personality” that surrounded Stalin during his lifetime. The city had actually been founded in 1589 as Tsaritsyn, and was renamed Stalingrad in 1925 in honor of Stalin, who had organized the city’s defense during the Russian Civil War.

On October 15, 1967, an impressive monument was unveiled atop Mamaev Mound. A 72-meter high statue of a woman with outstretched arm wields a sword and her face is wrenched into a battle cry—it is a symbol of the Motherland fighting back. The sculptor was Yevgeny Vutechich who is also known for his monument to the warrior-liberator in Treptov Park in Berlin. For many years, especially during the rule of Leonid Brezhnev (a war veteran himself), the memorial complex at Mamaev Mound was a place of great reverence for millions of Soviets who traveled there to pay homage to the courage of the defenders of Stalingrad—those who broke Hitler’s charge to the Volga—many at the cost of their lives.   RL

Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s WWII memoirs have been republished by Cooper Square Press, under the title Marshal Zhukov’s Greatest Battles. While often excruciatingly detailed, it is also quite illuminating on the battles going on with the Stavka about the conduct of the war. A link for where to purchase the book is available on the Russian Life website, as are links to additional reading.