floor windows, snipers riddled the columns, and hidden light artillery blew gaps in the ranks. The Germans found few places to hide, for they always had to force the battle and dig the enemy from the ruins of buildings.
Still, by 2:00 P.M., the Third Battalion had closed to within a few hundred yards of the main railroad station just off Red Square, and Meunch received orders to seize the ferry landing at the Volga. Despite mounting losses, he was still confident. His men had captured several Russian couriers running through the streets with handwritten messages. Sensing that the Soviet Sixtysecond Army’s telephone communications had broken down, and that it was now increasingly dependent on isolated small groups to contain the Germans, Meunch assumed that his depleted battalion could manage the last half mile toward their goal.
Meunch’s estimate of enemy problems was amazingly accurate. General Chuikov was in a desperate situation. Back again in the underground bunker at Tsaritsa Gorge, he had just been told that the 13th Guards Division would come to his aid and cross the river that night. But in the meantime, he had to find enough troops to hold the main ferry landing. Without the ferry, the center of Stalingrad was sure to fall.
Around 4:00 P.M., Chuikov called in Colonel Sarayev, the NKVD garrison commander. General Krylov had already warned Chuikov about Sarayev’s attitude: “He considers himself indispensable and does not like carrying out the army’s orders.”
When Sarayev arrived in the bunker, Chuikov sized up his guest and dealt with him bluntly, “Do you understand that your division has been incorporated into the Sixty-second Army and that you have to accept the authority of the Army Military Council?” When Sarayev grumbled and looked annoyed, Chuikov made the ultimate threat. “Do you want me to telephone the Front Military Council to clarify the position?”
Faced with a reprimand or worse from Yeremenko and Khrushchev, Sarayev caved in and humbly answered, “I am a soldier of the Sixty-second Army.”
Chuikov sent him to organize his fifteen hundred militiamen into squads of ten and twenty in strategic buildings in the heart of the city. These “storm groups” were his answer to the German superiority in troops, artillery, and planes—especially planes. Throwing away the Red Army textbook on tactics, he was substituting an idea he had first conceived on the steppe, where he watched enemy
A mere half mile northeast of Chuikov’s bunker, a group of NKVD soldiers braced for the final German thrust to the river. Drawn up in an arc around the main ferry, the sixty soldiers waited for their commander, Colonel Petrakov, to return from a scouting mission along Pensenskaya Street. To figure out where the enemy was trying to break through, Petrakov and two aides walked as far north as the Ninth of January Square. The roar of small-arms fire was rolling over them from a distance, but they had neither seen a German nor heard any close-range shooting. The square was deserted, and Petrakov stood beside an abandoned car to assess his situation.
Submachine-gun bullets suddenly whistled through the car windows, forcing Petrakov to duck for cover. Almost instantly German shells exploded up and down the square and he was knocked unconscious. Rescued by his men, he awoke in a tunnel at the edge of the Volga where he lay under an overcoat and heard that the Germans had rushed for the river and taken a series of buildings near the shore. From the House of Specialists (an apartment house for engineers), from the five-storey State Bank, and from the beer factory, the Germans were hollering: “
Petrakov staggered to the tunnel entrance and looked out at the river for some sign of the 13th Guards Division. But the time for their crossing was still hours away and he had to keep the Germans from the ferry until then.
When a small Russian boy wandered into the tunnel, the curious Petrakov asked his name. “Kolia,” he replied and told the colonel that the enemy had sent him to spy on Russian strength between the House of Specialists and the Volga. Petrakov smiled and asked Kolia to tell him instead about the Germans. Kolia knew exactly who his captors were: the 1st Battalion, 194th Infantry Regiment, 71st Division, commanded by a Captain Ginderling. Protecting Gerhard Meunch’s left flank, Ginderling was also trying to sweep to the main ferry before dark.
As dusk approached, Ginderling sent his troops from the beer factory toward the ferry pier, just 750 yards away. Petrakov’s sixty men formed a skirmish line around the landing, fighting hard although their ammunition was dangerously low. Suddenly .a motorboat appeared from across the Volga carrying cases of ammunition and grenades. Resupplied, Petrakov’s NKVD soldiers now prepared to counterattack. The colonel had found a .76- millimeter gun on a side street, and while he tried to learn its parts, he issued the order to move out when he fired the fifth shot from his new artillery piece.
Petrakov aimed the weapon at the State Bank, loaded the first shell very carefully and shot directly into the cement building. As he readied another round, a launch chugged in behind him carrying men of the 13th Guards. But the Germans had seen them, too, and the launch was quickly surrounded by explosions.
Bracketed by gunfire, Colonel Yelin, commander of the Guards’ 42nd Regiment, jumped off the boat into knee-deep water and ran up the embankment. When he met Petrakov, and heard that he was firing at the State Bank, Yelin angrily told him to stop because his own men were about to storm the building for handto- hand combat. The situation was still perilous, but no Russian was aware of one significant fact: the Germans attempting to drown them in the river were themselves on the verge of collapse.
Near the railroad station, Captain Meunch counted his ranks and realized that the one day’s fighting in Stalingrad had cost him most of his battalion. Almost two hundred of his men lay dead or wounded on the streets leading to Red Square. Now the railroad station was an even more deadly obstacle. Although the Russians had not yet occupied it in strength, Meunch was instinctively afraid of it. Hidden inside its vast network of tracks, cabooses, and freight cars, a small group of snipers could tear his reduced force to pieces.
He decided to bypass it and called in an air strike. It came quickly. But the Stukas missed the target and dropped their bombs in the midst of Meunch’s troops.
As darkness fell, the captain assembled his battalion in the U-shaped, unfinished Government House where, from the terrace, he first saw the Volga. He made another head count and found he had less than fifty men left to take the ferry. Recognizing that his 3rd Battalion no longer had the power to accomplish that on its own, Meunch told his soldiers to take cover and settle in for the night.
Barely five hundred yards from Meunch’s U-shaped building, the 13th Guards were now ashore in strength. Two regiments and one battalion from another regiment made it across the Volga through the shellfire, landed, and ran up the gradual incline directly into battle. In the dark, the Russians got lost and stumbled over the wreckage of previous days, but they managed to form a defense line before dawn.
On Mamaev Hill, squads and platoons dug frantically into the side of the former picnic grounds. But the German 295th Division had already taken the crest where two green water towers provided a sheltered command post. The noise on Mamaev was dreadful. One Russian soldier likened it to two steel needles pressing in on his eardrums and reaching into the brain. The sky was ripped by explosions that turned faces a dull red, and to Colonel Yelin it seemed everyone was about to die.
Somehow the Russians managed to hold the hillside. Casualties were enormous. Yelin had to send in men piecemeal to fill holes torn in the line. Soldiers never knew their comrades’ names before dying together in the scooped-out ground.
At his headquarters, Chuikov tried to gauge the situation on the hill, but could not because of contradictory information. He also had other problems. His command post along the Tsaritsa Gorge was under siege. At the Pushkinskaya Street entrance, messengers and staff ran in and out. Some men entered just to escape the bullets and shells tearing through the air. The heat in the bunker was unbearable. Drenched with sweat, several times Chuikov walked out into the fresh air to maintain his equilibrium. German machine-gunners fired close to him, but he did not mind. The bedlam inside the shelter seemed worse.
