Stalingrad

very meagrely equipped. Instead of normal hospital beds, it had three-tiered bunks. One young woman surgeon, newly arrived, was worried not only about the physical state of the wounded. ‘They often closed in on themselves and wanted no contact with anybody else.’ She at first presumed that the wounded soldiersbrought back across the Volga out of the ‘hell’ of Stalingrad would never want to return. ‘On the contrary: it became apparent that soldiers and officers wanted to go back to the front.’ Amputees certainly showed no sense of relief at missing the fighting. In fact, most of those incapacitated or permanently scarred, like the artillery colonel whose face had been sliced up by shrapnel, felt that they were no longer proper men.
    Bad rations did not help either recovery or morale. Grossman, in an emotional state, clearly assumed that this was Russia’s fate at that time. ‘In hospital,’ he jotted in his notebook, ‘the wounded are given a very small piece of salted herring by nurses who cut them up with great care. This is poverty.’ In those days, before his eyes were opened, he seemed unable to recognize the truth. Soviet logic mercilessly dictated that the best rations went to the fighting troops. The wounded, if they were lucky, received three helpings of
kasha
, or buckwheat porridge, a day, nothing more. The salted herring seen by Grossman was an unusual treat.
    A more revealing hint of the state of mind controlling the Stalingrad Front medical services came from the results of ‘socialist competition’ in hospitals, reported to Shcherbakov in Moscow. The caterers came first, the surgeons came second, and the drivers came third. Any criteria on which this exercise was based utterly demeaned the genuine sacrifice of medical workers, who gave so much of their own blood for transfusion – sometimes twice in an evening – that they frequently collapsed. ‘If they don’t give blood’, a report explained, ‘soldiers will die’.
    In the great battle of attrition, the shipments of wounded to the east bank had to be matched by fresh ‘meat for the cannon’ taken across the Volga into the city. The
Stavka
drip-fed the 62nd Army with reinforcement divisions as their predecessors were shot to pieces. The new battalions were marched forward at nightfall for embarkation under the eyes of the NKVD troops. They could only stare across at the city on the skyline opposite, lit by fires, and try to ignore the smell of burning. Patches of the river were still aflame with oil. There were also NKVD detachments on many of the ships, ready to shootanyone who dived overboard in a final attempt to avoid their fate on the west bank. German shellbursts in the river ahead were enough to make many lose their head. If anybody panicked, a sergeant or officer would shoot the offender on the spot and roll his body over the side.
    The boats on which they had embarked bore every sign of the crossing’s dangers. One of the fire-fighting launches, refitted as a naval craft for the Volga flotilla, was said after one outward and return trip to have received 436 bullet and shell holes; only a single square yard of hull was untouched.
    The easiest targets for German guns were the rafts used by engineer regiments to ferry heavy supplies, such as timber for bunkers, across to the city. When one of these rafts drifted on to the west bank, and soldiers there ran forward to help unload, they found a sapper lieutenant and three of his men so riddled by machine-gun fire that ‘it seemed as though iron teeth had savagely torn the sodden logs of the raft and these human bodies’.
    Sixth Army headquarters knew that, with winter approaching, there was no time to lose. Even before Red Square and the grain silos south of the Tsaritsa were seized, it started to prepare for a knock-out blow in the industrial, northern half of the city.
    Chuikov had moved to his new headquarters on the Volga river bank half a mile north of the Red October metalworks early on the morning of 18 September. His staff officers, however, had chosen an unprotected site just below a huge oil-storage tank, which they assumed to be empty.
    Great efforts were made to bring across more ammunition and supplies at night, as well as reinforcements, which landed on the bank behind the Red October and Barrikady plants. Unessential personnel who could be better used elsewhere were evacuated. Most of the anti-aircraft defences round Stalingrad power station had been