Stalingrad

far side of the great river.
    On the river bank, they were rapidly issued with ammunition, grenades and rations – bread, sausage and also sugar for their brew-ups. Rodimtsev, after his meeting with Chuikov, decided not to wait until darkness had completely fallen. The first wave of guardsmen were rushed forward in the twilight to a mixture of gunboats from the Volga flotilla and commandeered civilian craft – tugs, pinnaces, barges, fishing barques, even rowing boats. Those left to wait their turn on the eastern bank tried to calculate how long it would be before the boats returned for them.
    The crossing was probably most eerie for those in the rowing boats, as the water gently slapped the bow, and the rowlocks creaked in unison. The distant crack of rifle shots and the thump of shell bursts sounded hollow over the expanse of river. Then, German artillery, mortars and any machine-guns close enough to the bank switched their aim. Columns of water were thrown up in midstream, drenching the occupants of the boats. The silver bellies of stunned fish soon glistened on the surface. One gunboat of the Volga flotilla received a direct hit, and twenty members of a detachment on board were killed. Some men stared at the water around them to avoid the sight of the far bank, rather like a climber refusing to look down. Others, however, kept glancing ahead to the blazing buildings on the western shore, their steel-helmeted heads instinctively withdrawn into the shoulders.They were being sent into an image of hell. As darkness intensified, the huge flames silhouetted the shells of tall buildings on the bank high above them and cast grotesque shadows. Sparks flew up in the night air. The river bank ahead was ‘a jumble of burned machines, and wrecked barges cast ashore’. As they approached the shore, they caught the smell of charred buildings and the sickly stench from decaying corpses under the rubble.
    The first wave of Rodimtsev’s guardsmen did not fix bayonets. They leaped over the sides of boats into the shallow water of the river’s edge and charged straight up the steep, sandy bank. In one place, the Germans were little more than a hundred yards away. Nobody needed to tell the guardsmen that the longer they tarried, the more likely they were to die. Fortunately for them, the Germans had not had time to dig in or prepare positions. A battalion of the 42nd Guards Regiment on the left joined the NKVD troops, and pushed the Germans background the main station. The 39th Guards Regiment on the right charged towards a large red-brick mill (kept, bullet-riddled, to this day as a memorial), which they cleared in pitiless close-quarter combat. When the second wave arrived, the reinforced regiment pushed forward to the rail track which ran past the base of the Mamaev Kurgan.
    The 13th Guards Rifle Division suffered 30 per cent casualties in the first twenty-four hours, but the river bank had been saved. The few survivors (only 320 men out of the original 10,000 remained alive at the end of the battle of Stalingrad) swear that their determination ‘flowed from Rodimtsev’. Following his example, they too made the promise: ‘There is no land for us behind the Volga.’
    The Germans at first saw Rodimtsev’s counter-attack as little more than a temporary setback. They were convinced that their advance into the centre of the city was irreversible. ‘Since yesterday the flag of the Third Reich flies over the city centre,’ wrote a member of the 29th Motorized Infantry Division on the following day. ‘The centre and the area of the [main] station are in German hands. You cannot imagine how we received the news.’ But soldiers, shivering in the colder weather, ‘dream already of underground winter quarters, glowing Hindenburg stoves, and lots of post from our beloved homes’.
    German infantry companies had advanced down the Tsaritsa gorge. The entrance to 62nd Army headquarters came under direct fire, and the Tsaritsyn bunker filled with wounded. Soon, the warm moist air became unbreathable. Staff officers were fainting from lack of oxygen. Chuikov decided to change the site of his headquarters yet again, this time by crossing the river, driving north, and then crossing back to the west bank.
    The struggle became intense for the Mamaev Kurgan. If the Germans took it, their guns could control the Volga. One of the NKVD rifle regiments managed to retain a small part of the hill until reinforced by the remainder of