All Hell Let Loose (52 page)

It is important to view the events of the year in context. In 1941, Russia suffered 27.8 per cent of its total war losses. But in 1942 Kharkov, the Crimea and Kerch peninsula disasters accounted for even larger casualties. When Stalingrad was added, the year as a whole cost Russia 28.9 per cent of its overall casualties in the conflict, 133 per cent of the Red Army’s front-line strength. Posterity knows that Stalin learned vital lessons: he started to delegate military decisions to competent generals, and the worst blunderers were dismissed. The weapons created by Russia’s industrial mobilisation and production beyond the Urals began to reach her armies, increasing their strength while that of the Axis shrank. But none of this was apparent to the world in the summer of 1942. Germany still seemed irresistible on the battlefield, Russia at its last gasp.

Almost all British, and also later American, attempts to collaborate operationally with Stalin’s people foundered on the rocks of their ally’s secretiveness, incompetence, ill-will and paucity of means. The Royal Navy’s requests for the aid of Soviet warships and aircraft to cover British convoys approaching Murmansk and Archangel yielded meagre responses. In August 1942, an RAF Catalina delivered to north-west Russia two SIS agents, whom the Soviets had agreed to parachute into north Norway. Their hosts instead detained the two men incommunicado for two months before dropping them, still in summer clothing, inside Finland rather than Norway, where they were swiftly arrested, tortured and shot. Thereafter, the British recognised that cooperation with the Russians was an exclusively one-way proposition; that the consequences of placing Allied personnel at the mercy of Soviet goodwill were often fatal.

Nonetheless, the Western governments went to extravagant lengths to preserve a semblance of unity. When Gen. Anders, who had suffered in Stalin’s prisons between 1939 and 1941, met Churchill in Cairo in August 1942, he vehemently denounced the Soviet Union: ‘There was, I said, no justice or honour in Russia, and not a single man there whose word could be trusted. Churchill pointed out to me how dangerous such language would be if spoken in public. No good, he said, could come of antagonising the Russians … Churchill closed the talk by saying that he believed Poland would emerge from the war a strong and happy country.’ Anders allowed himself to be persuaded that ‘We Poles were now going home (so we thought) by a different route, a longer one, indeed, but one with fewer hardships.’ The Western Powers exerted themselves to sustain this delusion.

The Germans encountered the first units of the Stalingrad
Front
on 23 July, some eighty-seven miles west of the city. That night, Hitler made what proved the decisive blunder of the war in the east. He issued a new directive, declaring the objectives of
Blue
completed. Army Group A was ordered to overrun the Caucasus oilfields 745 miles beyond its existing positions – a longer advance than the German drive from the Siegfried Line to the Channel coast in May 1940. Its formations soon found themselves attempting to sustain a front five hundred miles wide with hopelessly inadequate forces, against stubborn Russian resistance. Meanwhile Army Group B commenced operations designed to close up to a line along the Volga and secure Stalingrad. Manstein was transferred northwards with five infantry divisions and the siege artillery he had used at Sevastopol, to end the tiresome resistance at Leningrad: following a change of policy, Berlin was now impatient to occupy the city. The next news from Sixth Army showed that its progress towards Stalingrad had become sluggish. Hitler, irked, ordered that Fourth Panzer Army should be diverted from the Caucasus to support Paulus. He thus divided his strength in a fashion which rendered each element of his forces too weak to attain its objectives.

But August 1942 was another season of Russian catastrophes. One of Stalin’s favourites, the old Bolshevik warhorse Marshal Semyon Budyonny, presided over a series of shambolic defeats in the northern Caucasus. Sixth Army wrecked Russian forces on the Don east of Kalach, taking 50,000 prisoners; an entire Soviet tank army collapsed, with crews abandoning their vehicles in panic. On 21 August, Paulus launched a dash from the Don to the Volga, blasting a path through the defenders with waves of dive-bombers. In two days, his forces reached the river nine miles north of Stalingrad. The city’s capture seemed imminent, and he dispatched to Hitler a draft of his plans for Sixth Army’s move into winter quarters. Far to the south, on 9 August mountain troops took Maikop, most accessible of the Caucasian oilfields, where Russian demolitions proved so thorough that it was deemed necessary to bring equipment from Germany to drill new wells. Army Group A’s spearheads began pushing east for the Caspian; Seventeenth Army was directed southwards through the mountains towards the Black Sea.

The entire Caucasian advance was hamstrung by Hitler’s orders to divert available fuel and ammunition supplies to Paulus. Among the Nazi hierarchy in Berlin, however, there was another surge of optimism. Rommel was at the gates of Cairo; armaments production was rising; Germany’s Japanese allies had achieved extraordinary triumphs, and the implications of American naval successes at the Coral Sea and Midway were barely comprehended. Dönitz’s U-boats were devastating Atlantic convoys; an Italian submarine commander reported that he had sunk an American battleship, and was decorated by Mussolini for his flight of fantasy. German civilian morale revived.

Only the technocrats who knew the economic and industrial secrets of the Reich were undeluded. The manpower situation remained desperate, and Germany was increasing aircraft output by sustaining production of obsolescent types. General Halder wrote in his diary on 23 July: ‘The chronic tendency to underrate enemy capabilities is gradually assuming grotesque proportions.’ In September, German difficulties mounted swiftly. Troops in the southern mountains encountered snowstorms, and repeated changes of objective wreaked havoc with operations. Again and again, German advances were delayed or halted by lack of fuel – First Panzer Army found itself immobilised for three weeks, conceding a precious breathing-space to Stalin’s commanders. Almost all available Luftwaffe support was diverted to Stalingrad, heedless of the cost to operations elsewhere. On 12 September, the first German troops entered the city.

Along the length of the front, Russian soldiers and civilians alike understood little of the Germans’ huge difficulties, seeing only the miseries imposed upon their own people by battlefield failure, slaughter and starvation. On 23 October Commissar Pavel Kalitov wrote in dismay from Logovo, on receiving the order for yet another retreat: ‘The civilians are howling. Everything is to be evacuated. Everywhere there is weeping, tears, grief. Just think of it: winter is about to begin, they must go out into the cold with their little ones … Where are they to go? Our units are falling back. The Germans are exploiting a weak point in our line. Our newspapers often use such phrases as: “under pressure of superior enemy forces”. But what about us? Why are we unable to mass such “superior forces”? What is wrong? The past sixteen months have taught us many lessons. It is so hard to abandon settlements … More victims, more bloody torture, more curses levelled at us. [The peasants say]: “That’s what they are like, our protectors.”’

An old woman spoke scathingly to Vasily Grossman about her country’s rulers: ‘These fools have allowed [the enemy] to reach the heart of the country, the Volga. They’ve given them half of Russia.’ From the Kremlin came new slogans: ‘Not a step back … The only extenuating circumstance is death.’ Stalin, facing disaster with half the European Soviet Union in German hands, made an appointment with reality which proved critical. In September he named Zhukov as the nation’s Deputy Supreme Commander, then dispatched him to oversee the defence of Stalingrad, and prepare a major counter-offensive. He recognised the need to subordinate ideology to military necessity: the prohibited word ‘officer’ was restored to the Red Army, and unit commanders were liberated from their subordination to commissars; henceforward, promotions would be determined by competence. The value of medals as incentives was acknowledged: by 1945 the Red Army had issued eleven million, against the US Army’s 1.4 million.

Stalin, profiting from experience as Hitler would not, delegated operational control of the battlefield, though his supreme authority was never in doubt. Such drastic steps were indispensable, to remedy the Red Army’s lamentable summer performance. ‘We have to learn and learn,’ wrote Commissar Pavel Kalitov on 4 September 1942. ‘For a start, we must stop being so careless.’ Nikolai Belov gloomily described an inspection by a senior officer of the army battle training staff: ‘Results deplorable. The Youssefs’ – the Red Army’s derisive term for men from Kazakhstan – ‘cannot turn left or right. What a terrible lot – complete mutton-heads. If we are given more Kazakhs we can consider ourselves doomed.’ But the Red Army was indeed learning, however painfully, and was receiving formidable reinforcements of men, tanks and aircraft.

In the autumn and winter of 1942, the grey, charmless industrial city of Stalingrad became the scene of some of the most terrible fighting of the war. On Sunday, 23 August, the Germans heralded their assault with an air raid by six hundred aircraft: 40,000 civilians are said to have died in the first fourteen hours, almost as many as perished in the entire 1940–41 blitz on Britain. Thereafter, the Luftwaffe struck relentlessly. ‘We ploughed over the blazing fields of the Stalingrad battlefield all day long,’ wrote Stuka pilot Herbert Pabst. ‘It is incomprehensible to me how people can continue to live in that hell, but the Russians are firmly established in the wreckage, in ravines, cellars, and in a chaos of twisted steel skeletons of the factories.’ Paulus launched his first major ground attack on 13 September, and thereafter the struggle was waged amid a landscape of ruins. General Vasily Chuikov, commanding 62nd Army, wrote: ‘The streets of the city are dead. There is not a single green twig on the trees; everything has perished in the flames.’

The concrete masses of the city’s transport hubs and industrial plants were swiftly reduced to rubble. Each became a scene of slaughter, their unlovely names etched into the legend of Russia’s Great Patriotic War: the grain elevator beside Number Two station, the freight station, Number One station, Lazur chemical plant, Red October metal works, Dzerzhinsky tractor factory and Barricades gun foundry. In the first phase of the battle, the Russians held a perimeter thirty miles by eighteen, which shrank rapidly. At Stalin’s insistence three infantry armies were thrown into a counter-attack against the northern flank – and beaten back. The Germans, in their turn, launched repeated efforts to capture two landmarks: Point 102, a Tatar mound that rose some 350 feet above the city, and the Volga crossing point just beyond Red Square, through which reinforcements and supplies reached the city and casualties were evacuated. On some nights, as many as two or three thousand Russian wounded were ferried in darkness across the mile of ice-floed water to the eastern bank.

Each boat that took out casualties brought in men and ammunition. Reinforcements were herded aboard ferries to run the gauntlet of the crossing under Luftwaffe attack – sometimes in daylight, such were the exigencies of the siege. Aleksandr Gordeev, a naval machine-gunner, watching pityingly as soldiers clung to the deck rails rather than obey orders to descend into the hold: ‘The officers made them move down by kicking them, NCOs were swearing and shouting. Baida [his petty officer] and two big sailors were grabbing men who resisted and pushing them down the ladder. Crates of shells, bullets and rations were brought aboard. Looking at the stack of ammunition boxes five steps from our Maxim gun, I could imagine what would happen if they were hit.’ Soon afterwards, he watched another ferry carrying casualties sunk by Stukas. ‘The wounded, more than a hundred of them, were sitting or lying in the cabins while fugitives clambered up from the hold. There was a general, continuous howling sound that swelled above the bomb explosions.’

New units were rushed into the battle as fast as they arrived. Sixty-Second Army’s commander Gen. Vasily Chuikov said, ‘Time is blood.’ Detonations of bombs and shells, the crackle of small arms and the thud of mortars seldom ceased, day or night. Chuikov remarked later of Stalingrad, ‘Approaching this place, soldiers used to say: “We are entering hell.” And after spending one or two days here, they said: “No, this isn’t hell, this is ten times worse than hell.” … A young woman soldier said: “I had been imagining what war was like – everything on fire, children crying, cats running about, and when we got to Stalingrad it turned out to be really like that, only more terrible.”’ She had joined the service with a group of friends from her home town of Tobolsk in Siberia. Most were posted to the embattled city, and few left it alive.

The battle was fought in conditions that enabled Russian soldiers to display their foremost skill, as close-quarter fighters. There was no scope for sweeping panzer advances or imaginative flanking manoeuvres. Each day, German soldiers, guns and tanks merely sought to batter a path to the Volga yard by yard, through mounds of fallen masonry in which Russians huddled, cursed, starved, froze, fought and died. A letter was taken from the body of a dead defender, written by his small son: ‘I miss you very much. Please come and visit, I so want to see you, if only for one hour. My tears pour as I write this. Daddy, please come and see us.’

Chuikov expressed to Vasily Grossman his sense of oppression: ‘There’s firing and thunder all around. You send off a liaison officer to find out what’s happening, and he gets killed. That’s when you shake all over with tension … The most terrible times were when you sat there like an idiot, and the battle boiled around you, but there was nothing you could do.’ On 2 October, Chuikov’s headquarters were engulfed by a torrent of blazing oil from nearby storage tanks which burst after being hit by German bombs. Forty of his staff died as a pillar of smoke and flame rose hundreds of feet into the sky. The tractor plant was the scene of nightmare clashes as filthy, exhausted and half-starved defenders strove to repulse German tanks crashing through the rubble. At one moment the Soviet bridgehead on the west bank of the Volga shrank to a depth of a mere hundred yards.