of high grass and went to investigate. He found Olga lying on her back, the bright kerchief smeared with blood. Her left eye was missing. She had been dead for some time.
Once again the Germans tried to stampede the civilian population. The Stukas came back to bomb the jammed embankment beside the main ferry landing. With no place to hide, the masses 1 there weaved back and forth like a pendulum, first close to the cliff wall for shelter and then out again when the Stukas dove past. Clusters of bombs found them and the shoreline was slippery with blood. Medical teams pulled the dead from the footpaths as the living pushed each other on to the boats that were to evacuate them. But the Stukas were sighting on them, too; they dropped to hundred-foot altitudes and machine-gunned the vessels.
In the hazy sunlight of the warm afternoon, the Volga erupted in a chain of fierce explosions, and several boats of the rescue fleet broke apart and sank with almost no survivors. The surface of the river was soon dotted with bodies, bobbing lazily in the current that carried them downstream to a rendezvous with the Caspian Sea.
There was no change in the pattern of fighting during the next three days. The Germans tried to consolidate their gains; Yeremenko’s troops fought desperately to hold their positions to the north and south of the city, but it was becoming increasingly clear that drastic measures would have to be taken if Stalingrad was to be saved. The pressure of the German assaults was wearing down the defenders.
Late in the evening of August 27, a Red Army staff car sped from Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport across the city to the Kremlin. Inside sat Marshal Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov, a barrelchested, forty-six-year-old peasant. No stranger to crisis, in 1939 Zhukov had faced a surprise Japanese attack at the Khalkin Gol in Manchuria and won a tremendous victory over the vaunted Kwantung Army. That triumph earned him promotion at a time when Stalin was killing fifty percent of his Red Army officer corps in an orgy of paranoia. In September 1941, when Nazi tanks ringed Leningrad, Stalin sent him there to mastermind the defense. Zhukov raged around that city, executing derelict officers, sacking generals, molding a rigid discipline which helped the people of Leningrad brace and hold.
Later, Zhukov again plunged into battle, this time in front of Moscow, where enemy panzers had broken through on the road from Smolensk and precipitated a disorderly evacuation of the capital by many government employees: Zhukov toured the lines, rallying demoralized divisions and creating an elastic defense which, when aided by the advent of a brutal winter, crippled the Wehrmacht west of Moscow.
Now Stalin needed his special talents in the struggle for the Volga. Surrounded by members of STAVKA, the premier greeted Zhukov somberly and filled him in on developments around Stalingrad. Then he ordered the marshal to take personal charge of overall strategy in that crucial region.
During the dinner that followed, Stalin outlined the temporary measures he had introduced to harass the enemy. He was bringing elements of three armies—the First Guards, the Twenty-fourth and Sixty-sixth—against the fragile blocking corridor the Germans had created from the Don to the Volga. But these piecemeal attacks had proven ineffectual, Stalin admitted; he wanted Zhukov to find a workable solution. Before the two men parted, Stalin told him he was giving him a new title, Deputy Supreme Commander of the Red Army, which made Zhukov second only to Stalin in rank.
As the marshal prepared for his trip, he could not know that the first problem he would have to solve was the accelerating breakdown in morale among Russian troops. Few Russian soldiers believed the Germans could be stopped short of the Volga. Defeatism infected the conversations of both headquarters staffs and enlisted men. The Germans themselves were amazed at the torrent of prisoners coming into their lines. OKW in East Prussia received a cable from Sixth Army stating that the battle value of enemy soldiers was judged to be very poor: “Many deserters, some even coming in… with their tanks.”
Inside the perimeter of the newly arrived Soviet 64th Division, stationed twenty-five miles due north of Stalingrad, morale was particularly bad. A German air raid had leveled the field hospital, killing many of its nurses and doctors. Wounded men back from the battlefield told horrifying stories of enemy superiority, and these tales spread fear among the inexperienced troops. They started to slip away singly, in pairs, and finally, in large groups.
With the division on the verge of dissolution before ever seeing combat, its commanding officer acted decisively to curb the epidemic. Calling a general assembly of regiments, he stood before them and berated them for shirking their duties to the Motherland. The colonel charged his men with the same guilt as those who had already run off and told them he intended to punish them for cowardice.
His harangue ended, the colonel moved purposefully to the long lines of massed soldiers. A pistol in his right hand, he turned at the end of the first row and began counting in a loud voice: “One, two, three, four.” As he reached the tenth man, he wheeled and shot him in the head. As the victim crumpled to the ground, the colonel picked up the count again: “One, two, three….” At ten, he shot another man dead and continued his dreadful monologue: “One, two….”
No one bolted. Nurses standing beside the formation sucked in their breath at the macabre scene. The colonel’s mournful voice stabbed at the troops, “… six, seven….” Men mentally guessed their place in line and prayed the colonel would finish before he got to them. When the last bullet in the revolver thudded into a man’s brain, the commander shoved the pistol back in his holster and walked away.
An officer bellowed, “Dismiss!”
The order ricocheted across the parade field, and soldiers broke from formation and scattered in all directions. Behind them six of their comrades lay in a neat pattern on the grass.
Less than twenty miles south of this grotesque ceremony, the Germans clinging to the 16th Panzer Division hedgehog at the Volga faced annihilation. A Fourteenth Corps officer put it succinctly when he complained to Paulus: “If this situation continues, I can name the exact day when… we… will cease to exist.” He was complaining about the supplies that were still blocked by Soviet interference.
A five-hundred-car freight train finally broke past Russian rail blocks on August 28, to deliver ammunition and food to the surrounded tankers. Its timely arrival saved the fiery General Hube an embarrassing moment. He had just agreed with irate staff members to pull back from the Volga and try to reach Sixth Army’s main lines back at the Don. In five days of fighting against the factory workers of Stalingrad, Hube had not been able to reach the tractor plant. But now, replenished with artillery and mortar shells, the general turned his heavy weapons back on the militia holding the
In his underground bunker at Tsaritsa Gorge, Andrei Yeremenko scanned his maps, which told an ugly story. On his right flank, he had held Hube at bay with a motley collection of civilians and military units. But Stalin’s attempts to interdict the German corridor had failed, and the 3rd Motorized Division had finally linked up with the 16th Panzers to seal off an eighteen-mile stretch of steppe running from the Don to Stalingrad. Also, the 60th Motorized Division bringing up the rear was about to complete the junction of the German islands and completely block any further penetrations by Soviet troops coming down from the north to reinforce the city.
In the center of Yeremenko’s front, the main body of Paulus’s Sixth Army was massing for a broad sweep over the steppe from Kalach east to the very heart of Stalingrad. And to hold this region, Yeremenko could count at best twenty-five thousand combat soldiers, the remnants of the battered Sixty-second Army, which was virtually destroyed in the Germans’ pincers in early August beyond the Don.
Over on his left flank, southwest of the city, Yeremenko looked with some satisfaction at the defense line he had engineered in the low hills from Abganerovo on to Tinguta and Tundutovo. The line had brought German general “Papa” Hoth to the verge of apoplexy as Russian antitank guns pummeled his armor and decimated his grenadiers. But Yeremenko could not afford to relax about the situation there. In recent hours, his Intelligence had noted an ominous series of complicated troop movements behind the German lines. Opinion in the Tsaritsa Gorge was divided, but Yeremenko guessed that Hoth had lost patience with frontal assaults and was attempting to outflank the hill line, creating another pincers with Paulus in order to trap both the Sixty-second and Sixty-fourth Red Armies outside Stalingrad. If he succeeded, the battle for Stalingrad would end within days.
Yeremenko was right, but only to a degree. Hoth had lost patience with the discouraging and costly direct approach to Stalingrad. With a swollen casualty list preying on his mind, he formulated a radical maneuver, a sideslip around the enemy. Pulling his tanks and armored infantry out of the line by night, he regrouped them thirty
