Stalingrad

Rodimtsev’s 42nd Guards Rifle Regiment and part of another division just before dawn on 16 September. The new arrivals attacked the summit and shoulders of the hill early that morning. The Mamaev Kurgan was now completely unrecognizable from the park where lovers had strolled a few weeks before. Not a blade of glass remained on the ground, now sown with shell, bomb and grenade fragments. The whole hillside had been churned and pocked with craters, which served as instant trenches in the bitter fighting of attack and counter-attack. Guardsman Kentya achieved fame by tearing down the German flag erected at the summit by soldiers of the 295th Infantry Division, and trampling on it. Much less was heard of unheroic episodes. A Russian battery commander on the Mamaev Kurgan was said to have deserted because ‘he was afraid of being held responsible for his cowardice during the battle’. The gun crews had panicked and run away when a group of German infantry broke through and attacked the battery. Senior Lieutenant M. had displayed ‘indecisiveness’ and had failed to kill Germans, a capital offence at such a time.
    At eleven o’clock on the night of 16 September, Lieutenant K., a platoon commander in the 112th Rifle Division, some five miles to the north, discovered the absence of four soldiers and their ΝCO. ‘Instead of taking measures to find them and stop this act of treason, all he did was report the fact to his company commander.’ At about 1 a.m., Commissar Kolabanov went to the platoon to investigate. As he approached its trenches, he heard a voice call in Russian from the German positions, addressing individual soldiers in the platoon byname, and urging them to cross over: ‘You should all desert, they’ll feed you well and treat you well. On the Russian side, you’ll die whatever happens.’ The commissar then noticed several figures crossing no man’s land towards the German side. To his fury, other members of the platoon did not fire at them. He found that ten men, including the sergeant, had gone. The platoon commander was arrested and court-martialled. His sentence, presumably either execution or a
shtraf
company, is not recorded. In the same division, a captain apparently tried to persuade two other officers to desert with him, but one of them ‘did not agree and executed the traitor’, but one cannot be sure that this version of events was not camouflaging a personal argument.
    The Germans counter-attacked again and again over the following days, but Rodimtsev’s guardsmen and the remnants of the NKVD rifle regiment managed to hold on to the Mamaev Kurgan. The 295th Infantry Division was fought to a standstill. Their losses were so heavy that companies were merged. Officer casualties were particularly high, largely due to Russian snipers. After less than two weeks in the line, a company in Colonel Korfes’s regiment of the 295th Infantry Division was on its third commander, a young lieutenant.
    ‘Skirmishes to the death’ continued on the Mamaev Kurgan and German heavy artillery continued to bombard Soviet positions for the next two months. The writer Vasily Grossman observed the shells throw the soil high into the air. ‘These clouds of earth then passed through the sieve of gravity, the heavier lumps falling straight to the ground, the dust rising into the sky.’ Corpses from the battle on its blackened slopes were disinterred and then buried again in the ceaseless, churning shellfire. Years after the war, a German soldier and a Russian soldier are said to have been uncovered during clearance work. The two corpses had apparently been buried by a shell burst just after they had bayoneted each other to death.
    In Zhukov’s deliberate understatement, these were ‘very difficult days for Stalingrad’. In Moscow, US Embassy officials were certain that the city was finished, and the mood in the Kremlin was extremely nervous. On the evening of 16 September, just after dinner, Poskrebyshevcame in silently and placed on Stalin’s desk a transcription from the General Staff main intelligence department. It was the text of an intercepted radio message from Berlin. ‘Stalingrad has been taken by brilliant German forces. Russia has been cut into two parts, north and south, and will soon collapse in her death throes.’ Stalin read the message several times, then stood for a few moments at the window. He told Poskrebyshev to put him through to the
Stavka.
Over the telephone, he dictated a