Silhouetted by banks of spotlights, Hitler continued:
What have we to offer? If we advance 1,000 kilometers, it is nothing. It is a veritable failure….If we could cross the Don, thrust to the Volga, attack Stalingrad—and it will be taken, you may be sure of that—then it is nothing. It is nothing if we advance to the Caucasus, occupy the Ukraine and the Donetz basin…
We had three objectives: (1) To take away the last great Russian wheat territory. (2) To take away the last district of coking coal. (3) To approach the oil district, paralyze it, and at least cut it off. Our offensive then went on to the enemy’s great transport artery, the Volga and Stalingrad. You may rest assured that once there, no one will push us out of that spot….
In Stalingrad, “that spot” as Hitler referred to it in his speech, a few battered Russian units still managed to stymie German efforts to drive them into the Volga. In the central part of the city, Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards held a tiny sliver of land along the Volga from Pensenskaya Street north to the Krutoy Gully. At some points, their salient was only two hundred yards deep.
Searching for elbow room; the 42nd Regiment’s commander, Colonel Yelin, had picked out two buildings on Lenin Square that might be used for strongpoints. One was a badly damaged apartment house facing Solechnaya Street. The other building was sound. A second lieutenant named Zabolotnov took a squad to the undamaged one on the right and occupied it. The new post was labeled “Zabolotnov’s House” immediately, but he died within twenty-four hours. His men maintained the position.
As for the damaged building facing Solechnaya Street, Sgt. Jacob Pavlov and three other men crawled across a courtyard, threw grenades into first-floor windows, and helped each other inside, while the few Germans not killed by the blasts scrambled away across the square. In the basement, the squat, constantly smiling Pavlov discovered a small group of Russians, both military and civilians. Some were badly wounded, and Pavlov sent a runner to report that he had taken the house, but the messenger was forced back inside when the Germans counterattacked. He finally got through the next night, September 29, taking some wounded with him, and 13th Guards Division Headquarters sent more men to help Pavlov. The twenty men quickly organized their new home. They broke down a wall between two cellars, posted mortars and machine guns at key windows, and began to snipe at the enemy. Four more soldiers arrived, the final reinforcements from headquarters. During the breaks in the shooting, the small band of men—drawn by chance from all regions of the Soviet Union, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, the Ukraine —tried to make the best of a tense situation. They found an old phonograph and one record, whose melody no one recognized. But they played it continually and it soon began to wear out.
Outside the apartment house, German tanks constantly probed for a weak spot. But “Pavlov’s House” was a natural roadblock, commanding a wide field of fire and denying the enemy access to the Volga bank, only 250 yards away. Instead of bringing in planes or artillery to smash the obstacle, the Germans unaccountably continued to attack it head on and suffered the consequences.
North of Krutoy Gully, Col. Nikolai Batyuk’s 284th Siberian Division clung to the southern and eastern slopes of Mamaev Hill, although the Germans held the crest and poured shells down on the zigzag network of Russian trenches. Batyuk lost three hundred soldiers on September 28 alone, but his men held their thin line and refused to allow the enemy to sweep past them to the Lazur Chemical Plant and then on to the Volga.
Lt. Pyotr Deriabin had been stationed at the yellow brick Lazur plant for a short time and from his gun position on the grounds, frequently scanned the summit of Mamaev and the two green water tanks from which the Germans watched both him and river traffic to the east. Each time he did so, Deriabin felt the Germans were looking down his throat. And they were, for his mortar batteries came under such continuous attack that regimental headquarters ordered him to pull back to the tennis racquet-shaped railroad track circling the plant. There, in a series of caves in the embankment, the lieutenant paused to write to his only brother, fighting somewhere near Voronezh. He did not know that he had been killed during the summer.
He also wrote to his girl friend back in Siberia. Desperate to tell her where he was, he enclosed clippings from the Red Army newspaper,
Although Deriabin’s guns had to be moved from the premises, the Lazur Chemical Plant remained in Soviet hands. In one section of the block-long building, Russian instructors now conducted an intensive course in sharpshooting. Against the wall of a long room, they painted helmets, observation slits, and outlines of human torsos. At the other end, they stood over trainees and coached them on sniper techniques. All day long, the plant echoed to rifle fire from within as the recruits practiced shooting at the targets. Those who graduated from this impromptu school went immediately to the edge of no-man’s-land where they began to take a fearful toll of the enemy.
Already Russian newspapers had made the name Vassili Zaitsev famous. In but ten days’ time he had killed nearly forty Germans, and correspondents gloatingly wrote of his amazing ability to destroy his enemies with a single bullet. It was a skill he had learned while shooting deer in the forests around Elininski, his home in the Ural Mountain foothills. A shepherd in the summers, Zaitsev, at the age of fifteen, went off to technical school in Magnitogorsk. Later, he served as a bookkeeper in the Soviet Far East Fleet. On September 20, 1942, the broad- faced Zaitsev came to Stalingrad with the 284th Division. Now he was a national hero, and as his fame spread across no-man’s-land, the Germans took an inordinate interest in him. They called a Major Konings out from Berlin to kill him.
Unaware of the German plan, Zaitsev continued his one-man war and began to teach thirty other Russians his specialty. Blond Tania Chernova was one of his students. They also became lovers. Tania relished her new life. Undaunted by her ordeal on the Volga and in the sewer pipe, she had become a professional soldier, living in foxholes, drinking vodka, eating with a spoon she kept in her boot. She slept curled up beside strangers; she bathed in pails of water. She also learned how to take cover in the front lines, how to track the enemy through the telescopic sight and, most portantly, how to wait for hours before firing a single shot that killed.
During her training as a sniper, she went out on a special mission ordered by 284th Division Headquarters after captured prisoners had pinpointed a German headquarters located in a building between the Stalingradski Flying School and the Red October Plant. Tania and five men were assigned to dynamite it.
Late at night they passed through Russian outposts and crawled into enemy territory. When they heard an occasional voice, or flares burst overhead, they froze. An hour later, they found their target in a half-destroyed apartment house with one entire wall missing.
The patrol tiptoed up an intact stairwell while Tania brought up the rear. When the Russians reached the second-floor landing, the five men disappeared around the corner but a noise distracted her. She whirled to see a German soldier emerging from behind a post. “
She knocked him down and twisted his right arm under his body. Pressing deep into his throat with both hands, she held on while he thrashed about violently. His helmet fell off and suddenly Tania noticed her victim had bright red hair. She leaned harder on his windpipe. When he gurgled horribly, one of her patrol came back downstairs and whispered, “Tania, are you all right? Where are you?”
Seeing her plight, the other Russian pushed her away and smashed the red-haired man in the head with his rifle butt.
Tania got up from the corpse and ran to the floor above, where the dynamite was already in place. The sergeant ordered, “You do it,” and she lit the fuse. Forgetting all caution, the Russians pounded down the stairs. The noise they made alerted the Germans, who fired at the shadowy figures emerging from the building.
Racing back toward their own lines, the demolition team heard a shattering explosion and the German headquarters behind them blew apart in an orange ball of fire.,
On the right flank of Tania’s position, the 95th Division, under the leadership of bald-headed Col. V. A.
