Local actions at company level would break out all the time as
each side constantly attempted to improve its position. A German tank
would appear at the corner of a street; slowly it would swing around
and grind cautiously toward the Russian-held buildings, iron hatches
closed tight, the crew trembling with the anticipation of combat. The
Russian infantrymen would watch it pass, trembling, too, while they
waited for the rest of the German force to show its hand. Another
tank appears at the street corner; it halts there, and follows its
compatriot's progress with the gradual traverse of a still silent
turret. Then suddenly, an explosion. A Russian 76-mm. antitank gun
at the eastern end of the street opens fire; the range is less than
fifty yards, but it seems to have missed, and at once the whole scene
becomes animated in a storm of noise and pain. The German tank
accelerates desperately in reverse, the cover tank fires
instantaneously at the Russians' gun smoke; at the same time a
section of German infantrymen, armed with submachine guns and
grenades, rise from the rat runs in the rubble, where they have been
crawling, and empty their magazines at the antitank gun. As they do
so Russian snipers who have been lying motionless for hours in the
eaves of skeletal buildings, high on the ledges of tottering facades,
pick them off one by one. If the action does not escalate, with each
side calling in more and heavier weapons in support, it will soon die
away, leaving only the wounded exposed to view, crying in agony where
they lie, until dark.
These "quiet" days were dominated by the sniper. It was
an art at which the Russians excelled. Individual marksmen of
particular skill soon became known, not only to their own side but
also to the enemy, and the Russian ascendancy became so marked that
the head of the snipers' school at Zossen, Standartenführer SS
Heinz Thorwald, was sent to Stalingrad in an attempt to restore the
balance. One of the crack Soviet snipers was set the task of catching
him. He has described how
The arrival of the Nazi sniper set us a new task: we had to
find him, study his habits and methods, and patiently await the right
moment for one, and only one, well-aimed shot.
In our dug-out at nights we had furious arguments about the
forthcoming duel. Every sniper put forward his speculations and
guesses arising from his day's observation of the enemy's forward
positions. All sorts of different proposals and "baits"
were discussed. But the art of the sniper is distinguished by the
fact that whatever experience a lot of people may have, the outcome
of an engagement is decided by one sniper. He meets the enemy face to
face, and every time he has to create, to invent, to operate
differently. There can be no blue-print for a sniper; a blue-print
would be suicide.
I knew the style of the Nazi snipers by their fire and
camouflage and without any difficulty could tell the experienced
snipers from the novices, the cowards from the stubborn, determined
enemies. But the character of the head of the school was still a
mystery for me. Our day-by-day observations told us nothing definite.
It was difficult to decide on which sector he was operating. He
presumably altered his position frequently and was looking for me as
carefully as I for him. Then something happened. My friend Morozov
was killed, and Sheykin wounded, by a rifle with telescopic sights.
Morozov and Sheykin were considered experienced snipers; they had
often emerged victorious from the most difficult skirmishes with the
enemy. Now there was no doubt. They had come up against the Nazi
"super-sniper" I was looking for. At dawn I went out with
Nikolay Kulikov to the same positions as our comrades had occupied
the previous day. Inspecting the enemy's forward positions, which we
had spent many days studying and knew well, I found nothing new. The
day was drawing to a close. Then above a German entrenchment
unexpectedly appeared a helmet, moving slowly along a trench. Should
I shoot? No! It was a trick: the helmet somehow or other moved
unevenly and was presumably being held up by someone helping the
sniper, while he waited for me to fire.
"Where can he be hiding?" asked Kulikov, when we left
the ambush under cover of darkness. By the patience which the enemy
had shown during the day I guessed that the sniper from Berlin was
here. Special vigilance was needed.
A second day passed. Whose nerves would be stronger? Who would
outwit whom?
Nikolay Kulikov, a true comrade, was also fascinated by this
duel. He had no doubt that the enemy was there in front of us, and he
was anxious that we should succeed. On the third day, the political
instructor, Danilov, also came with us to the ambush. The day dawned
as usual: the light increased and minute by minute the enemy's
positions could be distinguished more clearly. Battle started close
by, shells hissed over us, but, glued to our telescopic sights, we
kept our eyes on what was happening ahead of us.
"There he is! I'll point him out to you!" suddenly
said the political instructor, excitedly. He barely, literally for
one second, but carelessly, raised himself above the parapet, but
that was enough for the German to hit and wound him. That sort of
firing, of course, could only come from an experienced sniper.
For a long time I examined the enemy positions, but could not
detect his hiding place. From the speed with which he had fired I
came to the conclusion that the sniper was somewhere directly ahead
of us. I continued to watch. To the left was a tank, out of action,
and on the right was a pillbox. Where was he? In the tank? No, an
experienced sniper would not take up position there. In the pillbox,
perhaps? Not there either—the embrasure was closed. Between the
tank and the pillbox, on a stretch of level ground, lay a sheet of
iron and a small pile of broken bricks. It had been lying there a
long time and we had grown accustomed to its being there. I put
myself in the enemy's position and thought—where better for a
sniper? One had only to make a firing slit under the sheet of metal,
and then creep up to it during the night.
Yes, he was certainlv there, under the sheet of metal in
no-man's-land. I thought I would make sure. I put a mitten on the end
of a small plank and raised it. The Nazi fell for it. I carefully let
the plank down in the same position as I had raised it and examined
the bullet-hole. It had gone straight through from the front; that
meant that the Nazi was under the sheet of metal.
"There's our viper!" came the quiet voice of Nikolay
Kulikov from his hide-out next to mine.
Now came the question of luring even a part of his head into my
sights. It was useless trying to do this straight away. Time was
needed. But I had been able to study the German's temperament. He was
not going to leave the successful position he had found. We were
therefore going to have to change our position.
We worked by night. We were in position by dawn. The Germans
were firing on the Volga ferries. It grew light quickly and with
daybreak the battle developed with new intensity. But neither the
rumble of guns nor the bursting of shells and bombs nor anything else
could distract us from the job in hand.
The sun rose. Kulikov took a blind shot; we had to rouse the
sniper's curiosity. We had decided to spend the morning waiting, as
we might have been given away by the sun on our telescopic sights.
After lunch our rifles were in the shade and the sun was shining
directly on to the German's position. At the edge of the sheet, of
metal something was glittering: an odd bit of glass or telescopic
sights? Kulikov carefully, as only the most experienced can do, began
to raise his helmet. The German fired. For a fraction of a second
Kulikov rose and screamed. The German believed that he had finally
got the Soviet sniper he had been hunting for four days, and half
raised his head from beneath the sheet of metal. That was what I had
been banking on. I took careful aim. The German's head fell back, and
the telescopic sights of his rifle lay motionless, glistening in the
sun, until night fell . . .
For the 6th Army's last offensive both tactics and organisation
had been revised. The Panzer divisions had already virtually lost
their identity with their tanks split up in company packets to
support the infantry. Four more pioneer battalions had been flown
into the city, and these were to be used as spearheads to four
separate thrusts aimed at completing the fragmentation of the
defenders' position. The last "rectangles," as they were
called, would then be pulverised by concentrated artillery fire. The
old, wasteful house-to-house technique, where one building could
consume a whole company in its stairways, balconies, attics, and
corridors, was employed only as a last resort. On both sides the
infantry had gone underground: cellars, drains, saps, tunnels—these
made the contour of the battlefield. Only the tanks crept slowly
about on the surface, watched from their precarious nests by the
snipers.
Paulus' attack, which started on llth November, was as misguided
and as hopeless as had been the last winter offensive of Army Group
Centre against Moscow twelve months before. Within forty-eight hours
it had degenerated into a series of violent personal subterranean
battles without central direction. Many small groups of Germans
managed to cover the last three hundred yards to the Volga, but
having arrived at the river, they would themselves be cut off by
Russians moving back across the narrow corridors they had opened. For
four more days fighting of a desperate ferocity flared and slackened
between these isolated groups. Prisoners were no longer being taken,
and the combatants had little hope of personal survival. Filled with
alcohol and benzedrine, bearded, exhausted from days without sleep or
relief, they had lost all sense of motive and purpose save the
ultimate obsession of close combat—to get at one another's
throats.
By 18th November total exhaustion and shortage of ammunition
imposed a lull. During the night the crackle of small arms and the
thud of mortars died down and each side began to take in its wounded.
Then, as dawn came to lighten the smoke clouds, a new and terrible
sound overlaid the dying embers of the battle in Stalingrad—the
thunderous barrage of Voronov's two thousand guns to the north. Every
German who heard this knew that it presaged something quite outside
his experience.
Although the Russian artillery had always been quite good they
would not keep up their fire for long periods at a time. But that day
[19th November] was different . . . continuous drum-fire since dawn
with the scream of a
Katyusha
discharge every minute or so.
At nine thirty on the morning of the 19th the sound was swollen by
the guns of Tolbukhin, Trufanov, and Shumilov as they debouched from
their positions to the south, and the scale of the Red Army's
counterblow, together with the threat it posed to the whole German
position, began to percolate to the officers of the 6th Army.
Paulus had already taken two steps to "deal with" the
Russian threat, following his (disastrously inaccurate) estimate of
Russian strength and intentions formed on 9th November. The Rumanian
Army had been reinforced by a close support group under Colonel
Simons, and the 48th Panzer Corps had been moved into the small bend
of the Don as mobile reserve. Simons' group consisted of a
Panzergrenadier
battalion with an antitank company and a few
pieces of heavy artillery. The Panzer corps itself had barely the
strength of a division, and 92 out of its total tank strength of 147
were Czech 38-T's, manned by Rumanians. The 14th Panzer, with an
additional 51 Mark IV's, had also been put into the corps, but had
been so disorganised by its experiences in street fighting that it
was not fully extricated by the time the Russian offensive started.
For three days, from 19th November to the evening of the 22nd, the
German and Rumanian front broke up along a length of over fifty miles
in the north and thirty in the south. Into the breach Zhukov was
pouring six armies, flattening the resistance of a few defiant
pockets, brushing aside the paltry efforts of Simons' group and the
debilitated 48th Panzer corps. The 6th Army staff went sleepless for
two nights as they struggled to regroup the precious Panzers and pull
back their infantry from the smoking maze of Stalingrad to protect
the collapsing flanks. In Paulus' rear confusion was absolute; the
western railway from Kalach had already been cut by Russian cavalry
in several places; the sound of firing came from every direction, and
periodically broke out between Germans going up to the front and
ragged groups of Rumanians in leaderless retreat. The huge bridge at
Kalach, over which every pound of rations and every bullet for the
6th Army passed, had been prepared for demolition, and a platoon of
engineers were on duty there all day on 23rd November in case the
order to destroy the bridge should come through.
At half past four that afternoon tanks could be heard approaching
from the west. The lieutenant in charge of the engineers thought at
first that they might be Russians, but was reassured when the first
three vehicles were identified as Horch personnel carriers with 22nd
Panzer Division markings; assuming that it was a reinforcement column
for Stalingrad, he instructed his men to lift the barrier. The
personnel carriers halted on the bridge and disgorged sixty Russians,
who killed most of the engineer platoon with tommy guns and made the
survivors prisoners. They removed the demolition charges, and
twenty-five tanks from the column passed over the bridge and drove
southeast, where that evening they made contact with the 14th
Independent Tank Brigade from Trufanov's 51st Army. The first tenuous
link in a chain that was to throttle a quarter of a million German
soldiers had been forged, and turning point in World War II had
arrived.