tanks were empty.
At Sixth Army Headquarters in Golubinka, forty miles west of Stalingrad, German newspapermen badgered Gen. Friedrich von Paulus for permission to flash word home that the city had been taken.
Smiling cheerfully, Paulus parried their queries, saying, “Any time now, any time.”
But in his stifling quarters, the general played his gramophone, smoked endless quantities of cigarettes, and tried to calm his stomach, which was churning with dysentery;
In Germany, some newspapers printed a special edition with a banner headline: “
In Stalingrad’s main railroad station, west of Red Square, Lt. Anton Dragan’s company was enduring ferocious bombing that blew down the walls and buckled the iron girders. When the Germans surrounded him on three sides, Dragan took his men across the street to another building, the nail factory, from which he commanded a good view of the intersection leading east to the Volga.
Barely settled in a workshop, Dragan took stock of his supplies and realized he had no food, little ammunition, and no water. In a frantic search for something to quench their thirst, the Russians fired machine guns into drain pipes to see if any liquid remained. There was not a drop.
From the Tsaritsa Gorge to the slopes of Mamaev Hill, the German 295th and 71st divisions were suffering from Chuikov’s renewed strength. The 71st’s Division’s Intelligence Chief, Col. Gunter von Below, whose brother Nikolaus served Hitler as air attache, walked through the devastation near the main railroad station and found it difficult to comprehend the enormity of the destruction. As he carefully sidestepped debris, a master sergeant came up to him and pleaded, “What am I going to do? I have only nine men left.” Colonel Below sat beside the distraught man on a curb and they discussed the toll the Russians had taken of the sergeant’s company in past hours. After a while, the sergeant calmed down and went back to his nine soldiers. Gunter von Below remained, staring at the ruins. Thoroughly shaken, he wondered whether the Russians would collapse before his own division ran out of men.
Gunter von Below’s main antagonists, the soldiers of the 13th Guards Division, lay in heaps from Mamaev to Red Square. Nearly six thousand guardsmen had been killed, but they had bought the Russians several days of precious time.
One of the fortresses which had slowed the German timetable was the huge grain elevator, whose cement silos rose high on the plain just south of the Tsaritsa Gorge. For nearly a week, since September 14, a group of less than fifty able-bodied Russians had holed up in the corrugated metal side tower, and defied the guns of three Nazi divisions. Reinforced on the night of September 17 by Lt. Andrei Khoyzyanov and a platoon of marines dressed in striped shirts and navy hats, the garrison fought with renewed spirit, the men joking with each other while shells whistled through their hideout.
Once a German tank had approached and, under a white flag, an officer and interpreter cautiously asked for their surrender to the “heroic German Army.” The Russians shouted, “Go to hell!” warning the intruders to leave the tank behind and get out. When the Germans tried to jump into the vehicle, the marines blew it up.
For the next three days, German artillery pounded the stronghold, set the grain on fire with incendiary shells, and riddled the tower itself with high explosives. German infantrymen broke in and crept up the stairs, but the defenders managed to drive them back with knives, fists, and bullets.
Now, on the night of September 20, the exhausted garrison was almost out of ammunition, and the water supply had been used up completely. In a frantic search for something to drink, Lt. Khoyzyanov led his men out the tower door, across the field, a main road, and into a gully, where they stumbled on an enemy mortar battery. In the resulting melee, the startled Germans fled, leaving behind gallons of ice-cold water that the marines gulped down gratefully.
Completely dehydrated, Khoyzyanov suddenly felt faint from the water and collapsed on the ground. When he woke up, he was in a dark cellar. The shoe was gone from his right foot; his shirt was off. His head felt light and he could not move his arms and legs. Standing guard over him was a soldier from the German 14th Panzer Division. The grain elevator he had defended so heroically had passed into enemy hands. The Germans quickly put out the fires and saved most of the wheat, which would be significant in weeks to come.
A mile to the north, in another Russian strongpoint just off Red Square, Anton Dragan still occupied the nail factory. But when a Russian woman, Maria Vadeneyeva, ran through machine-gun fire to tell him the Germans were bringing up tanks, he knew his hours there were numbered.
On September 21, Dragan came under intense pressure. Enemy tanks and planes battered the building and forced a wedge between his company and the rest of the 1st Battalion of the 13th Guards, strung out across Red Square. By late afternoon, Dragan was nearly cut off from his countrymen.
At the Univermag Department Store, the Germans concentrated on battalion headquarters and killed nearly every Russian there. Dragan tried to send help, but the headquarters had been demolished and the staff annihilated. Dragan then took command of the battalion and sent a courier back to the Volga with a message for Colonel Yelin, the regimental commander. The courier died on the way, and in the 42nd Regiment bunker on the Volga shoreline. Yelin marked the entire 1st Battalion destroyed somewhere in the area of Red Square.
But Dragan was still alive. Leading his troops from building to building, he gave ground only when the Germans set fire to his hiding places. The battle raged past the fountain with its statues of children dancing in a circle around a crocodile, past
From the far-off Urals, more reinforcements had been rushed to the beleaguered city. And from the farthest reaches of Siberia, the 284th Division, under Col. Nikolai Batyuk, came with orders to move to the Volga crossing.
A Ukrainian of medium height, slim, with dark hair combed straight back, Batyuk suffered from a serious circulatory ailment and frequently had to be carried on the back of one of his aides. He did this only at night so his troops would not be aware of his weakness. An obviously determined man, on arrival he told Chuikov: “I came here to fight the Nazis, not for a parade.”
Few in Batyuk’s division wanted this battle. Mostly raw recruits, they were willing to fight the Nazis—but not at Stalingrad. Lt. Pyotr Deriabin agreed. Already badly wounded at Moscow, he had no illusions about what awaited his men in the burning city.
At Krasnofimsk, in the Urals, a hard core of veterans like Deriabin had taught their skills to eighteen- and nineteen-year-old boys, most of whom were Orientals from the Mongolian border area and had never seen a German. Then they marched and drove nearly seven hundred miles westward, chewing the roots of the
They began crossing the river on the misty morning of September 22. It was hours before the first group landed in the fiery city, and though German planes pounded them they survived the run in good shape. Deriabin tumbled into the Dolgy Ravine, and promptly fell into a troubled sleep. When he awoke, he went on to the Lazur Chemical Plant in the middle of the railroad loop between the riverbank and the slopes of Mamaev Hill, where the Germans were fighting furiously with the 13th Guards. The crest had changed hands countless times, but the Germans were still able to look down the throats of the new men from the 284th as they took position.
Alexei Petrov came across the Volga and was assigned to the northern sector near Latashanka. For ten days
