seriously wounded men within minutes of their being hit instead of sending them far to the rear for aid. In so doing, Kohler had gone against Wehrmacht traditions, but he was convinced he was right. That attitude was indicative of his personality, which now brought him to the middle of the road with a drawn gun. Impatient with incompetence, he acted without hesitation to correct the situation.
Kohler waited until his unit reentered the line, then jumped into a motorcycle sidecar and waved his driver on. Blinded by the sun, the man drove straight into a hole. Kohler smashed his head against the driver’s helmet, felt something in his face pop and cringed in agony. Feeling his mouth, he diagnosed the ailment immediately: a broken upper jaw. Nauseated from the pain, he swigged down some cognac and ordered the driver to catch up with the rest of the medical detachment.
At Golubinka, a clerk made a notation in the war diary of the Sixth Army: “1:00 P.M. Still further confirmed the enemy was surprised….”
The advance continued into the afternoon. Tank commanders tensed when they saw church steeples and white houses on the horizon. Clutching their throat microphones, they told their crews: “On the right is Stalingrad.” The men clambered up for a look at a montage of homes,
The Stukas came back and tanks fired point-blank into gun emplacements. Tankers who dismounted and stood over the blasted holes saw bits of calico and cotton dresses, arms and legs, and female torsos tossed carelessly about. They went back to their vehicles and told everyone that the Russians had sent women to fight them. The march to the Volga continued. Some of the tankers were sick to their stomachs.
The sun was low in the west when the first German tank came to a halt at the edge of a sheer cliff overlooking the Volga. Lt. Gottfried Ademeit, the son of a minister, stared in awe across the river. He could see almost a hundred miles into the mysterious flat land on the other side. As he put it, he “was looking into the heartland of Asia.”
When Hans Oettl arrived, he hopped down from his vehicle and joined the rush to bathe in the river while his goat, Maedi, feasted on the lush vegetables in the fields. German soldiers, officers and men, stripped and plunged into the cold water. Afterwards, recalling the scene, Oettl wondered openly why it had to be that war was the only way he could see such a magnificent natural wonder.
Behind the main column, late-arriving soldiers entered the suburbs of Rynok, just north of Stalingrad, and followed tramcars down the trolley tracks. When passengers looked back and saw troops dressed in strange uniforms, they panicked and jumped off the trains. The Germans laughed and left the Russians alone for the time being.
By 6:00 P.M., the German Sixth Army held a small stretch of the Volga north of Stalingrad. Hundreds of trucks and tanks moved up in support while radio operators of the 16th Panzer Division transmitted the news back to headquarters. It had been another fantastic day for General Paulus.
Most of Stalingrad had been asleep when the Germans crossed the Don. In the tractor works, men and women from the night crew were preparing sixty tanks for final assembly when, at 5:00 A.M., someone rushed in with news of the enemy breakthrough. Amid a babble of noise, supervisors called a meeting to organize defense lines around the factory.
To the south, deep inside the Tsaritsa Gorge, Andrei Yeremenko woke up to a barrage of frantic telephone calls from threatened outposts along the German line of march. Surprised at the audacity of the narrow thrust toward the Volga, the general quickly routed sleepy staff officers from beds all over town and ordered breakfast for himself from the bunker’s kitchen.
Only five hundred yards away, at Red Square, black loudspeaker boxes crackled to life and advised citizens of the possibility of air raids. Few people paid any attention to the message since the only German air activity in recent days had been made by reconnaissance planes. The City Soviet chairman, Pigalev, broadcast the warning, but did not mention the German tanks now heading for the northern part of the city. He feared the news would sow panic among the population.
Mrs. Vlasa Kliagina did not hear the loudspeakers because she had left home early to drop her infant son, Vovo, at a communal nursery. Then she and her daughter, Nadia, joined a neighborhood volunteer group at the southern suburb of Yelshanka where, at 7:30 A.M., with the temperature climbing into the high nineties, she continued to work on a primitive line of antitank trenches. Mrs. Kliagina had no idea that General Paulus was about to burst into the city from a completely different direction.
Less than two miles from Yelshanka, in the suburb of Dar Goya, an assistant station master, Constantin Viskov, collapsed into bed. He had just finished a grueling twelve-hour tour of duty, shuttling troops, refugees, and supplies through Railroad Station Number One. As Viskov fell into a deep sleep, his wife tiptoed about doing housework.
By 9:30 A.M., activity in the Tsaritsa Gorge accelerated as hundreds of soldiers passed in and out of the underground bunker’s two entrances. Plagued by phone calls, Yeremenko had not yet touched the breakfast on his desk. He was speaking now to the deputy comander of the Eighth Air Force, who relayed shocking news, “The fighter pilots flying reconnaissance have just returned. They said that a heavy battle is going on in the region of Malaya Rossoshka [twenty-five miles northwest of Stalingrad]. Everything is burning on the ground. They saw two columns of approximately one hundred tanks each and, after them, compact columns of trucks and infantry. They’re all moving into Stalingrad.”
Yeremenko told him to get as many planes as possible into the air.
The phone rang again: this time it was Nikita Khrushchev calling from his downtown apartment. When Yeremenko told him the news the commissar said he would come over as soon as he could. At 11:00 A.M., he was in the bunker, listening intently to Yeremenko’s briefing. Shocked at the extent of the German drive, Khrushchev shook his head. “Very unpleasant facts,” he said. “What can we do to keep them from Stalingrad?”
Yeremenko told him how he was trying to juggle forces to the northern part of the city and they discussed the problem of finding more reinforcements for the threatened suburbs. Everyone in the room was subdued, fully conscious that this might mean the fall of Stalingrad. They talked in low tones about the impact of such a calamity on the rest of the country. His hands sweating, Yeremenko tried to remain calm in front of his colleagues.
When Major General Korshunov called with a report that the Germans had just burned a huge supply depot out on the steppe, Yeremenko lost his temper. Disgusted by Korshunov’s hysterical tone, he shouted, “Carry on with your job. Stop this panic.” Then he hung up abruptly.
Two generals walked into the bunker to announce that a new pontoon bridge, the only one connecting Stalingrad with the far shore, had just been completed. Yeremenko thanked them for working so hard, then told them to destroy it. The officers stared at each other in astonishment, wondering if Yeremenko suddenly had gone crazy. He repeated his instructions. “Yes, yes, I said to destroy it. And quickly!”
When they still failed to react, he warned them that the bridge must not fall into German hands. The two generals left to carry out this draconian measure.
Near the mouth of the Tsaritsa Gorge, boredom and the noontime humidity had brought out dozens of swimmers like Lt. Viktor Nekrassov who, with a friend, dove into the sun-streaked water and floated lazily in the current. Launches and steamers struggled past and Nekrassov swam in their wake, listening contentedly to the guttural rumble of their diesel engines. When he tired, Nekrassov climbed from the water onto a pile of logs, where he stretched out to soak up the sun.
With his eyes screwed up tight to shut out the brilliant light, he tried to imagine how the Volga compared with the Dnieper at his home in Kiev. The lieutenant decided that his river had been peaceful, a joyous place for children, and that the Volga was totally different, filled as it was now with clamorous boat traffic. Another thing bothered Nekrassov. Few bathers in Stalingrad smiled these days.
