Stalingrad

apartment block, which had received a direct hit. ‘Before filling in the grave,’ the son remembered, ‘we searched for his head, but could not find it.’ Her mother-in-law, Goncharova, the wife of the Cossack veteran, was lost in the chaos. Somehow the old woman managed to live through the battle to come, surviving for just over five months in a bunker. They did not find each other again until the end of the war, nearly three years later.
    The aerial assault on Stalingrad, the most concentrated on the
Ostfront)
represented the natural culmination of Richthofen’s career since Guernica. * Fourth Air Fleet aircraft flew a total of 1,600 sorties that day and dropped 1,000 tons of bombs for the loss of only three machines. According to some estimates, there had been nearly 600,000 people in Stalingrad, and 40,000 were killed during the first week of bombardment.
    The reason why so many citizens and refugees still remained on the west bank of the Volga was typical of the regime. The NKVD had commandeered almost all river craft, while allotting a very low priority to evacuating the civil population. Then Stalin, deciding that no panic must be allowed, refused to permit the inhabitants of Stalingrad to be evacuated across the Volga. This, he thought, would force the troops, especially the locally raised militia, to defend the city more desperately. ‘No one bothered about human beings,’ observed one of the boys trapped behind with their mothers. ‘We too were just meat for the guns.’
    While Richthofen’s bombers pounded Stalingrad, the armoured spearhead of 16th Panzer Division had advanced virtually unopposed across the steppe for nearly twenty-five miles. ‘Around Gumrak’, the division recorded, ‘enemy resistance became stronger and anti-aircraft guns began firing wildly at our armoured vehicles from the north-west corner of Stalingrad.’
    This resistance came from the batteries operated by young women volunteers, barely out of high school. Few had fired the guns before, owing to the shortage of ammunition, and none of them had been trained to take on targets on the ground. They had switched targets from the bombers over the city on sighting the panzers, whose crews‘seemed to think they were on a Sunday promenade’. The young gun crews furiously wound the handles, depressing the barrels to zero elevation – the Soviet 37-mm anti-aircraft guns were fairly crude copies of the Bofors – and traversed on to the leading armoured vehicles.
    The German panzer crews quickly overcame their initial surprise, and deployed to attack some of the batteries. Stukas soon arrived to deal with others. This unequal battle was watched in anguish by Captain Sarkisyan, the commander of a Soviet heavy-mortar battalion, who later related what he saw to the writer Vasily Grossman. Every time the anti-aircraft guns fell silent, Sarkisyan exclaimed: ‘Oh, they’re finished now! They’ve been wiped out!’ But each time, after a pause, the guns started to fire again. ‘This’, declared Grossman, ‘was the first page of the Stalingrad defence.’
    The German spearhead pushed on for the last few miles. At about four in the afternoon, just as the August sunlight was softening, they reached Rynok, to the north of Stalingrad, and there ‘the soldiers of the 16th Panzer Division gazed on the Volga, flowing past right before their eyes’. They could hardly believe it. ‘We had started early in the morning on the Don,’ recalled one of Strachwitz’s company commanders, ‘and then we were on the Volga’. Somebody in the battalion produced a camera and they took photographs of each other, standing on the backs of their vehicles, gazing through binoculars to the far shore. These were included in Sixth Army headquarters records with the caption: ‘The Volga is reached!’ The camera, turned southwards, took other souvenir pictures. One showed columns of smoke from the Luftwaffe raids and is recorded as ‘view from the outskirts of Stalingrad on fire’.
    Soon after their arrival, the fighter ace Kurt Ebener and a companion from the ‘Udet’ fighter wing wheeled over the Volga just north of Stalingrad. The pilots spotted the tanks and panzer grenadiers below, and ‘a feeling of overwhelming joy and relief for their comrades on the ground below’ inspired victory rolls and other aerobatics in celebration.
    Like the other panzer commanders, Captain Freytag-Loringhoven stood on top of his tank to gaze through binoculars