From the meadowland on the far shore of the Volga, the commander of the 13th Guards was about to cross into Stalingrad. Thirty-six-year-old Gen. Alexander Ilyich Rodimtsev was no stranger to war. Under the pseudonym “Pavlito Geshos,” he had gone to Spain in 1936 and fought with the Loyalists against Franco. Named a Hero of the Soviet Union for that exploit, he now paced the river’s edge and could not believe what he saw. On the western bank, Stalingrad burned brightly in the sunrise of September 15; the boats carrying his troops to the city were being chopped to pieces by artillery fire. While Rodimtsev watched, one craft was suddenly engulfed in smoke and then an ear-splitting explosion spread out from it for a hundred yards. When fountains of water fell back into the river, the boat and its sixty-five occupants had vanished.
Rodimtsev and his staff boarded their own launch and crouched below the gunwales as it backed slowly into the current. Shrapnel beat against the wood and geysers of spray washed over them from near misses. But the launch made it to the main ferry and Rodimtsev jumped off and ran north a quarter mile to his command post in Colonel Petrakov’s old tunnel, a poorly ventilated corridor with a ceiling formed from old planks. As dirt showered down on him from explosions, Rodimtsev met his advance party and learned that the Germans seemed to be trying to seize three miles of riverfront, from Tsaritsa Gorge up to Mamaev Hill.
Anxious to report to Chuikov, the general took five staff officers with him, ran down the embankment to the ferry landing, then cut west for a half mile into the underground bunker in the gorge. In that brief journey, shells killed three of his companions.
Chuikov embraced the dirt-covered Rodimtsev and made him sit down while the guards commander quickly briefed him on the status of the reinforcements. Most of his division was already across, but they were short about two thousand rifles. After Chuikov arranged to fill this need from army reserves, he asked Rodimtsev how he felt about the terrible assignment he had been given.
“I am a Communist,” he replied. “I have no intention of abandoning the city.”
Soldiers scurried about in a harsh light of raging fires and bursting flares that illuminated the scene like mid-morning on a summer’s day. Vassili Chuikov anxiously prowled around the Pushkinskaya Street entrance of his bunker to get a breath of air. Spotting an officer, he called out, “Lieutenant, where are your men?” Anton Kuzmich Dragan told the general that he commanded the 1st Company, 1st Battalion, 42nd Regiment, 13th Guards. Chuikov gave him a terrifying order, “Hold the main railroad station.”
Dragan dutifully assembled his troops and moved toward the concrete terminal just west of Red Square. They came under vicious crossfire from several buildings and Dragan realized that the Germans were in the station ahead of him. But he kept on, creeping to the left, moving closer to the terminal. After a series of whispered instructions, Dragan and his men rushed the building. Grenades exploded, machine-gun tracers split the darkness and suddenly the Germans were gone. The Russians swiftly scattered into the maze of freight cars and cabooses and waited for the dawn. They had no idea that the Germans around them were suffering sixty percent casualties.
When the Germans burst into the residential section of the city, they came too fast for some civilians. The ferries had evacuated most of the population, including Anastasia Modina and her orphans, stationmaster Viskov and his wife, and
In the suburb of Dar Goya, the advance caught hundreds of these noncombatants in their homes. Among them was fifteenyear- old Sacha Fillipov and his family. While his parents and tenyear- old brother stayed inside their house, the diminutive, frail
Sacha went out to fraternize with the enemy. A master cobbler from his training at trade school, Sacha introduced himself to German officers occupying a nearby building and offered his services to them. Amused at the thought of someone so young .and delicate having such a skill, the Germans promised him work soling army boots.
Sacha returned home that night with the news that he was going to work for the enemy. He did not tell his parents that he had also contacted Russian intelligence officers and arranged to spy on German headquarters in Dar Goya.
Mrs. Katrina Karmanova was also caught by the swift German advance. She had lingered at home for days, carrying valuables to the backyard for burial. Silver, jewelry, family heirlooms, all were dumped into a hole and covered over. Now, with her son Genn, she listened to the sounds of machine guns at the end of the block and knew she had waited too long to leave.
An artillery shell exploded on the roof, setting the house on fire; she and Genn ran next door and hid behind a sofa in the parlor. Grenades popped outside and then a fiery string of tracer bullets flew through the room. Genn suddenly cried out, “Don’t be afraid, Mother. Please pull the bullet out of my arm!”
With trembling fingers, Mrs. Karmanova picked at the metal and finally removed it. Ripping off a piece of her slip, she fashioned a crude bandage and then shouted: “Let’s get out or we’ll be killed.”
They ran into the street and fell into a zig-zag trench beside Russian soldiers and civilians. A little girl lay huddled up, her body punctured with shrapnel. She screamed and screamed: “Find my mama before I die.”
Mrs. Karmanova could not bear it. As she crouched under a hail of bullets and tried to block out the sounds of the dying child, she saw a family dart from shelter and run toward the river. At the same moment, a German sniper tracked them and quickly killed the son, the father, and then the mother. The sole survivor, a little girl, paused in bewilderment over her mother’s body. In the trench, Russian soldiers cupped their hands and hollered, “Run! Run!” Others took up the cry. The girl hesitated, then bolted from the corpses into the darkness. The German sniper did not fire again.
Throughout the night, Mrs. Karmanova and Genn stayed in the trench. A few yards away, rescuers frantically tried to save several soldiers buried alive by a shellburst. At dawn on September 16, during a temporary lull, she and Genn jumped up and ran to the Volga. The Germans let them go.
In their wooden cottage, eleven-year-old Natasha Kornilov and her mother were not as lucky. Wounded days previously by bomb fragments, they lay helpless while German soldiers broke down the front door and stood over them with machine guns. The woman thought they were about to be raped, but the Germans ignored them and ransacked the house for pots, pans, food, even bedding.
When they left, Mrs. Kornilov scrawled the word “Typhus” on a board and had Natasha put it up on the door. The ruse backfired. Within hours, a German medical team saw the sign and set fire to the supposedly plague-ridden home. As flames danced around her, Natasha dragged her crippled mother into the backyard and into a concrete storage shack. There, under a thin blanket on the cold floor, the Kornilovs listened to the gunfire from the direction of Red Square and wondered whether anyone would come to their rescue.
On September 17, with Germans pressing in from north and south of the Tsaritsa Gorge, Vassili Chuikov had to seek a new home. All during the day, while bullets ricocheted off rocks and shells exploded outside the Pushkinskaya Street entrance to the bunker, the headquarters staff of the Sixty-second Army scrambled away toward the main ferry. At midnight, Chuikov and his personal assistants went across the Volga to Krasnaya Sloboda, where they took hot baths and relaxed with food and drink.
As the hours passed, Chuikov failed to notice the sunrise. Suddenly panic-stricken, he and his men raced out to catch the ferry back to Stalingrad. The last boat was leaving the dock and Chuikov sprinted ahead. With a running leap, he fell on board and identified himself to the startled helmsman, who returned to pick up the rest of the army staff at the dock.
Several hours later, Chuikov set up a new headquarters five miles north of the Tsaritsa Gorge. Just a trench with some boards over it, it was in an open space between the Red October and Barrikady plants. On a slope above their bunker was an oil tank farm and a concrete oil reservoir. According to everyone familiar with the area, the
