14th Panzers from Hoth’s Fourth Army south of Stalingrad, plus individual replacements from the Ukraine, and these troops came as green soldiers.
Their first hours in combat were especially dangerous. They had to trust their instincts, to waken their animal senses and be alert to the slightest sound or movement. If they were slow to learn, they were soon dead. In the sector held by the 9th Flak Division, six new men entered the front line one night, and one by one their curiosity led them to look at the Russian positions. By ten the next morning, four of the six had been shot through the head.
Vassili Chuikov had organized an efficient intelligence organization to keep abreast of Paulus’s plans. Reconnaissance teams regularly monitored no-man’s-land, checking changes in German strength. Sometimes, select groups passed through the enemy lines to spy on troop movements in the rear, and to capture prisoners.
On October 9, a four-man commando squad found refuge in an abandoned railroad coal car on a track between Mamaev Hill and the Red October workers’ settlement. The Russians stayed inside the shelter most of the day, reporting back by radio now and then on German activity. They had located dozens of artillery pieces firing on the city from behind the northern slope of Mamaev; they had seen columns of German field guns and mortars moving on rear roads toward a rendezvous on the western outskirts of Stalingrad. Behind the guns came hundreds of trucks, carrying ammunition. The squad sensed a mass movement, a buildup taking place inside Sixth Army’s lines. But they needed a prisoner to confirm their hunch.
After dark, the commandos snipped a telephone cable and waited for the Germans to come and repair it. A flashlight soon appeared and when the German approached the break, the Russians shot him. One of them dressed up in his uniform and stood on the railroad embankment waiting for another German to walk the wire.
Another flashlight soon moved along the track and Pvt. Willi Brandt fell into the ambush. The Russians knocked him out and he revived to find four men standing over him, asking questions, demanding prompt answers. Terrified, Brandt gave his name, rank, and unit. Further, he told his interrogators that the German 24th Panzer Division had just been shifted toward the factories, the 94th Division had arrived from southern Stalingrad, and that Adolf Hitler had ordered the city taken by October 15.
The Russians had their answer. Warning Brandt that he had betrayed military secrets, they led him back to the railroad track and pointed out the road leading to his friends. In the darkness, the trembling Brandt expected a bullet in his back. None came and he kept walking. When he was out of range, he turned and waved, calling: “
Vassili Chuikov added the commando team’s information to his maps. Now that he knew the full weight of Sixth Army was bearing down on the factories, he ordered local attacks to push the Germans off balance, to delay the inevitable. But the Sixth Army threw the Russians back every time. They were too strong.
The Stukas came at first light on the morning of October 14, and hundreds of the black planes hovered over Stalingrad. Sirens screaming, they dove again and again. Although the day was sunny, a blanket of smoke from bomb bursts cut visibility to a hundred yards.
By 11:30 A.M., after two hundred German tanks had broken through Russian defenses around the tractor works, Gen. Erwin Jaenecke’s 389th Infantry Division burst into the mile-long labyrinth of shops. The works quickly became a charnel house. Millions of shards from the enormous glass skylights in the roofs littered the concrefe floors, and blood smeared the walls. Cannon shells and tracer bullets ricocheted through cafeterias, and Germans and Russians lunged at each other across chairs and tables. The eight thousand commandos of the Soviet 37th Guards Division met the Germans head-on in the factory complex and in the next forty-eight hours, five thousand of them were either killed or wounded. General Zholudev himself was a casualty. Buried in rubble to his neck by a direct hit on his command post, he waited for hours until he was rescued. Later he collapsed in shock at Chuikov’s headquarters when he tried to describe the annihilation of his men.
Chuikov had little time to sympathize. His entire army was in mortal danger. All telephone lines were cut. Scattered units sent runners to the riverbank asking for directions, or whether the Sixty-second Army was still functioning. Chuikov set up an emergency radio to transmit orders across the river and then relay them to isolated forces trapped in the rubble of the factories. Chuikov told each division and regiment to hold fast.
As for himself, the commander of the Sixty-second Army wondered how long he could survive. When he asked permission to send part of his staff to the safe side of the Volga, Yeremenko refused. In the meantime, thirty men around Chuikov’s bunker died from shells and bullets, and his bodyguards spent hours digging victims out of wreckage and bomb holes.
Around Mamaev Hill, Soviet troops had a bird’s-eye view of the intense fighting going on north of them. From his dugout Pyotr Deriabin saw German planes repeatedly diving into the billowing clouds of smoke and flame. When their bombs exploded, whole sections of the plants pirouetted into the sky before descending with dizzying velocity onto the ground and men below.
At the northwest corner of the Barrikady Gun Factory, the Russian 308th Division was pushed inside the machine shops and its commander, tall, slender Col. L. N. Gurtiev, was cut off from his troops. Chuikov sent a small party north to reestablish contact, and General Smekhotvorov led the group up the shoreline, crawling beneath the awesome fireworks display as guns on both sides of the river fired overhead. After nearly an hour, the relief squad tumbled into Gurtiev’s dugout. Old friends, the general and the colonel fell into each other’s arms and wept.
Across the river, General Yeremenko worried whether or not Chuikov could hold on. Sensing an increasing discouragement in the general’s radio reports, Yeremenko decided to return to the west bank for a personal assessment of the situation. Chuikov warned him not to come, but Yeremenko had been through battles before and bore scars from old wounds. On the night of October 16, he and his aides went by boat across the Volga. With shells bursting all around, they touched shore near the Red October Plant. The sky was almost as bright as day from German flares as the party walked north toward Chuikov’s command post. They climbed over mountains of wreckage and watched the wounded crawling past. Yeremenko stepped over them carefully and marveled at their strength in trying to make the final yards to the landing.
He missed Chuikov, who had gone with Kuzma Gurov, a member of the Military Council, to meet him at the landing. While they paced the bank and wondered what had happened to their guest, Yeremenko had traveled nearly five miles along the riverside to Sixty-second Army Headquarters. On the way, several of his aides died from bomb and shell splinters but he arrived unhurt and sat down to wait for his host to appear.
Hours later, Chuikov returned and the two men discussed imperatives. Chuikov wanted more ammunition and men, not whole divisions but replacements for decimated units. Yeremenko promised prompt action and then spoke to individual commanders about their problems. By phone he counseled Rodimtsev and Guriev, then sat beside Gen. Victor Zholudev while that normally stolid officer tried to explain how the 37th Guards had perished at the tractor plant. In the emotion of the moment, Zholudev broke down and cried as he described the annihilation of more than five thousand of his soldiers.
After Yeremenko consoled him as best he could, the front commander said good-bye to Chuikov and reaffirmed his pledge to supply him. He also ordered him to seek a less-exposed home for Sixty-second Army Headquarters.
Just before dawn on October 17, Yeremenko returned to the far shore in a better frame of mind. Chuikov had not lost his nerve even though in three days, he had lost thirteen thousand troops, nearly one quarter of his fifty- three-thousand-man army. On the night of October 14 alone, thirty-five hundred wounded had come to the Volga moorings. As these victims of the slaughter at the factories waited for rescue tugs, the river actually frothed from shells and bullets. And when some boats finally bumped ashore, not a crewman was left alive to pull the wounded on board.
Overhead, Soviet airplanes were appearing in strength for the first time. Shuttled in from other parts of Russia in the past ten days, they began to dominate the night skies over Stalingrad.
Unused to such interference, nervous German soldiers recoiled from the new menace and complained bitterly to their superiors. At Golubinka, forty miles west of the city, a Sixth Army Headquarters duty officer noted the new peril in his daily report:
