Stalingrad

stretch their nerves.
    The Russians used both their twin-engined night bombers, which attracted the fire of every German flak battery on the front, and large numbers of manoeuvrable little U-2 biplanes which dropped small bombs on night raids. ‘The Russkies keep buzzing over us the whole night long,’ a pioneer corporal wrote home. The worst part was theeerie change in sound. In the distance, the U-2 sounded like one of its many nicknames, the ‘sewing machine’. Then, as the pilot approached his target, he would switch off the engine to glide in like a bird of prey. The only sound would be the swishing of air through its struts, until the bomb fell. Even though the bomb load was only 400 kilos, the aircraft’s psychological effect was considerable. ‘We lie exhausted in our holes waiting for them,’ wrote another soldier. The U-2 attracted more nicknames than any other machine or weapon at Stalingrad. Others included ‘the duty NCO’, because of the way it crept up unannounced, the ‘midnight bomber’, the ‘coffee-machine’ and the ‘railway crow’. Sixth Army requested Army Group headquarters to keep up Luftwaffe pressure on Russian airfields with round-the-clock attacks. ‘The Russians’ unchallenged air superiority at night has reached an unbearable level. The troops get no rest, and their strength will soon be completely dissipated.’
    There is no overt reference in surviving files to cases of battle stress. German medical authorities tended to use the euphemism of ‘exhaustion’, like the British, but their prescription was closer to the brutal simplicity of the Red Army. The German Army had refused even to acknowledge its existence. In 1926, nearly seven years before Hitler took power, war neurosis was simply abolished as a condition along with the pension that had gone with it. Take away the disease, went the argument, and you take away the reason for leaving the front line. Breakdown was classified as cowardice, and therefore could be a capital offence. It is thus impossible to say what proportion of disciplinary offences on either side at Stalingrad, especially desertion, was caused by battle shock and general strain. All one can be certain about from studies of comparable situations is that the rate of battle-shock casualties must have started to rise sharply in September as soon as the war of movement turned into a war of virtually stationary annihilation. Psychological casualties would have started to soar – if one goes by British studies of battle-shock cases at Anzio and Normandy – as soon as troops were pinned down or surrounded.
    Chuikov’s main disagreement with senior officers at front headquarters concerned the positioning of divisional, army and front artilleryregiments. Eventually, he won the argument that they should be based on the east bank of the Volga, because there was simply not enough room for them with his troops on the west bank. It would also have been increasingly difficult to transport sufficient supplies of artillery shells across the Volga, and ‘in Stalingrad, a field-gun was worth nothing without shells’.
    ‘One house taken by the Russians, one taken by the Germans,’ scribbled Vasily Grossman in his notebook just after his arrival. ‘How can heavy artillery be used in such a battle?’ He soon discovered the answer. Soviet artillery massed on the far side of the Volga, as Chuikov had insisted, did not attempt to shell German front-line positions. Their purpose was to hammer enemy lines of communications and, above all, smash battalions forming up for an attack. To achieve this, scores of Soviet artillery observation officers concealed themselves like snipers at the top of ruined buildings. The Germans, well aware of the danger they represented, treated them as a high-priority target for their own snipers, or anti-tank guns.
    Whenever a German troop concentration was spotted, and the target coordinates passed back to the batteries on the east bank by wireless or field telephone, the volume of fire was devastating. ‘On the other side of the Volga’, wrote Grossman, ‘it seemed as if the whole universe shook with the mighty roaring of the heavy guns. The ground trembled.’
    The only artillery batteries to remain on the west bank were
Katyusha
rocket launchers mounted on lorries. Hidden behind the high Volga bank, they would reverse out, almost to the water’s edge, fire their sixteen rockets in rapid succession, then drive back in again. The