Stalingrad

headquarters. The 94th Infantry Division attacking the northern pocket at Sparta-kovka was also ground down
    ‘In the last two days’, noted a report to Moscow of 6 November, ‘the enemy has been changing his tactics. Probably because of big losses over the last three weeks, they have stopped using large formations.’ Along the Red October sector, the Germans had switched to ‘reconnaissance in force to probe for weak points between our regiments’. But these new ‘sudden attacks’ were achieving no more success than the old ones preceded by heavy bombardments.
    Also during the first week of November, the Germans started ‘to install wire netting over windows and shell holes’ of their fortified houses so that hand grenades would bounce off. To break the netting, 62nd Army needed small-calibre artillery, of which it was short, yet it was increasingly difficult to ship anything across the Volga. Red Army soldiers started to improvise hooks on their grenades to catch on to the netting.
    Soviet forces hit back in any way they could during early November. Gunboats of the Volga flotilla, some with spare T-34 tank turrets mounted on the forward deck, bombarded 16th Panzer Division at Rynok. And the ‘heavy enemy night bombing attacks’, continued to wear down the resilience of German soldiers.
    ‘Along the whole of the eastern front’, wrote Groscurth to his brother on 7 November, ‘we are expecting today a general offensive in honour of the anniversary of the October Revolution.’ But observance of the twenty-fifth anniversary was restricted on a local level to Soviet soldiers ‘exceeding their socialist promises to destroy Fritzes which they made in socialist competition’. Komsomol members especially were expected to keep an accurate tally of their score. In 57th Army, the chief political officer reported, ‘Out of 1,697 Komsomol members, 678 have not yet killed any Germans’. These underachievers were presumably taken in hand.
    Some celebrations of the October Revolution did not attract the approval of the authorities. A battalion commander and his second-in-command bringing forward reinforcements for 45th Rifle Division ‘got drunk’ and were ‘missing for thirteen hours’. The battalion was left wandering around aimlessly on the east bank of the Volga. A number of Stalingrad Front divisions had little with which to celebrate,either because the special vodka ration was not delivered, or because it arrived too late. Several units did not even receive their food ration that day.
    Many soldiers, deprived of vodka, resorted to desperate substitutes. In the worst case, the effects were not immediately apparent. The night after the anniversary celebration, twenty-eight soldiers from 248th Rifle Division died on an approach march out in the Kalmyk steppe. No medical assistance was sought and nobody admitted to knowing what the matter was. Officers pretended to think that they had died from cold and exertion on the march. The NKVD Special Department was suspicious, however, and autopsies were performed on twenty-four of the bodies. Death was determined to have been caused by excessive consumption of ‘anti-chemical liquids’. The soldiers had drunk large amounts of a solution designed to be taken in minute quantities in the case of a gas attack. This noxious liquid apparently contained some alcohol. One of the survivors was interviewed in hospital. He admitted that someone had claimed it was ‘a sort of wine’. The NKVD refused to accept that this might be a straightforward case of theft of army material and drunkenness. The case was deemed to be ‘an act of sabotage to poison soldiers’.
    On 8 November, the day after the anniversary of the Revolution, Hitler made a long speech to the Nazi ‘Old Combatants’ in the Burgerbraukeller in Munich. The broadcast was heard by many in the Sixth Army. ‘I wanted to reach the Volga’, he declared with heavy irony, ‘to be precise at a particular spot, at a particular city. By chance it bore the name of Stalin himself. But don’t think that I marched there just for that reason, it was because it occupies a very important position… I wanted to capture it and, you should know, we are quite content, we have as good as got it! There are only a couple of small bits left. Some say: “Why aren’t they fighting faster?” That’s because I don’t want a second Verdun, and prefer instead to do the job with small assault groups. Time is of no importance.