Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe. Max Hastings

was acknowledged: by 1945 the Red Army had issued eleven million, against the US Army’s 1.4 million.

      Stalin, profiting from experience as Hitler would not, delegated operational control of the battlefield, though his supreme authority was never in doubt. Such drastic steps were indispensable, to remedy the Red Army’s lamentable summer performance. ‘We have to learn and learn,’ wrote Commissar Pavel Kalitov on 4 September 1942. ‘For a start, we must stop being so careless.’ Nikolai Belov gloomily described an inspection by a senior officer of the army battle training staff: ‘Results deplorable. The Youssefs’ – the Red Army’s derisive term for men from Kazakhstan – ‘cannot turn left or right. What a terrible lot – complete mutton-heads. If we are given more Kazakhs we can consider ourselves doomed.’ But the Red Army was indeed learning, however painfully, and was receiving formidable reinforcements of men, tanks and aircraft.

      In the autumn and winter of 1942, the grey, charmless industrial city of Stalingrad became the scene of some of the most terrible fighting of the war. On Sunday, 23 August, the Germans heralded their assault with an air raid by six hundred aircraft: 40,000 civilians are said to have died in the first fourteen hours, almost as many as perished in the entire 1940–41 blitz on Britain. Thereafter, the Luftwaffe struck relentlessly. ‘We ploughed over the blazing fields of the Stalingrad battlefield all day long,’ wrote Stuka pilot Herbert Pabst. ‘It is incomprehensible to me how people can continue to live in that hell, but the Russians are firmly established in the wreckage, in ravines, cellars, and in a chaos of twisted steel skeletons of the factories.’ Paulus launched his first major ground attack on 13 September, and thereafter the struggle was waged amid a landscape of ruins. General Vasily Chuikov, commanding 62nd Army, wrote: ‘The streets of the city are dead. There is not a single green twig on the trees; everything has perished in the flames.’

      The concrete masses of the city’s transport hubs and industrial plants were swiftly reduced to rubble. Each became a scene of slaughter, their unlovely names etched into the legend of Russia’s Great Patriotic War: the grain elevator beside Number Two station, the freight station, Number One station, Lazur chemical plant, Red October metal works, Dzerzhinsky tractor factory and Barricades gun foundry. In the first phase of the battle, the Russians held a perimeter thirty miles by eighteen, which shrank rapidly. At Stalin’s insistence three infantry armies were thrown into a counter-attack against the northern flank – and beaten back. The Germans, in their turn, launched repeated efforts to capture two landmarks: Point 102, a Tatar mound that rose some 350 feet above the city, and the Volga crossing point just beyond Red Square, through which reinforcements and supplies reached the city and casualties were evacuated. On some nights, as many as two or three thousand Russian wounded were ferried in darkness across the mile of ice-floed water to the eastern bank.

      Each boat that took out casualties brought in men and ammunition. Reinforcements were herded aboard ferries to run the gauntlet of the crossing under Luftwaffe attack – sometimes in daylight, such were the exigencies of the siege. Aleksandr Gordeev, a naval machine-gunner, watching pityingly as soldiers clung to the deck rails rather than obey orders to descend into the hold: ‘The officers made them move down by kicking them, NCOs were swearing and shouting. Baida [his petty officer] and two big sailors were grabbing men who resisted and pushing them down the ladder. Crates of shells, bullets and rations were brought aboard. Looking at the stack of ammunition boxes five steps from our Maxim gun, I could imagine what would happen if they were hit.’ Soon afterwards, he watched another ferry carrying casualties sunk by Stukas. ‘The wounded, more than a hundred of them, were sitting or lying in the cabins while fugitives clambered up from the hold. There was a general, continuous howling sound that swelled above the bomb explosions.’

      New units were rushed into the battle as fast as they arrived. Sixty-Second Army’s commander Gen. Vasily Chuikov said, ‘Time is blood.’ Detonations of bombs and shells, the crackle of small arms and the thud of mortars seldom ceased, day or night. Chuikov remarked later of Stalingrad, ‘Approaching this place, soldiers used to say: “We are entering hell.” And after spending one or two days here, they said: “No, this isn’t hell, this is ten times worse than hell.”…A young woman soldier said: “I had been imagining what war was like – everything on fire, children crying, cats running about, and when we got to Stalingrad it turned out to be really like that, only more terrible.”’ She had joined the service with a group of friends from her home town of Tobolsk in Siberia. Most were posted to the embattled city, and few left it alive.

      The battle was fought in conditions that enabled Russian soldiers to display their foremost skill, as close-quarter fighters. There was no scope for sweeping panzer advances or imaginative flanking manoeuvres. Each day, German soldiers, guns and tanks merely sought to batter a path to the Volga yard by yard, through mounds of fallen masonry in which Russians huddled, cursed, starved, froze, fought and died. A letter was taken from the body of a dead defender, written by his small son: ‘I miss you very much. Please come and visit, I so want to see you, if only for one hour. My tears pour as I write this. Daddy, please come and see us.’

      Chuikov expressed to Vasily Grossman his sense of oppression: ‘There’s firing and thunder all around. You send off a liaison officer to find out what’s happening, and he gets killed. That’s when you shake all over with tension…The most terrible times were when you sat there like an idiot, and the battle boiled around you, but there was nothing you could do.’ On 2 October, Chuikov’s headquarters were engulfed by a torrent of blazing oil from nearby storage tanks which burst after being hit by German bombs. Forty of his staff died as a pillar of smoke and flame rose hundreds of feet into the sky. The tractor plant was the scene of nightmare clashes as filthy, exhausted and half-starved defenders strove to repulse German tanks crashing through the rubble. At one moment the Soviet bridgehead on the west bank of the Volga shrank to a depth of a mere hundred yards.

      The Russians fought with a desperation reinforced, as always, by compulsion. The price of unauthorised retreat was death. Vasily Grossman wrote: ‘On those anxiety-filled days, when the thunder of fighting could be heard in the suburbs of Stalingrad, when at night one could see rockets launched high above, and pale blue rays of searchlights roamed the sky, when the first trucks disfigured by shrapnel, carrying the casualties and baggage of retreating headquarters, appeared in the streets of the city, when front-page articles announced the mortal danger for the country, fear found its way into a lot of hearts, and many eyes looked across the Volga.’ Grossman meant, of course, that men yearned for escape eastwards from the cauldron. Those who made such attempts paid the price: some 13,500 soldiers were executed at Stalingrad for alleged cowardice or desertion, and many more were killed out of hand. In a typical report of 23 September, Beria reported that during the preceding twenty-four hours his NKVD ‘blocking detachments’ had detained 659 people: seven ‘cowards’ and one ‘enemy of the people’ were shot in front of their units. A further twenty-four were still held, including one ‘spy’, three ‘betrayers of the motherland’, eight ‘cowards’ and eight ‘enemies of the people’.

      Paulus launched repeated attacks, but again and again his forces proved just too weak to break through. There was no scope for subtlety, merely a hundred daily death-grapples between Germans and Russians who shared identical privations. Chuikov deployed his forces as close as possible to the enemy line, to frustrate Luftwaffe strafing. Bombardment had wrecked the city, but as the Allies would discover, ruins create formidable tank obstacles, and are more easily defended than open streets and intact buildings. Almost every soldier was always hungry, always cold. Snipers and mortars rendered careless movement fatal; many men died collecting ammunition or queuing at field kitchens. So did women. Chuikov paid unstinting tribute to their contribution as signallers, nurses, clerks, air defence spotters.

      The icy wind burnt faces deep red. Each day brought its own local crisis, while by night the Russians shifted across the river just sufficient reinforcements to sustain their precarious perimeter. Moscow sentimentalised many episodes for propaganda purposes, such as the story of a marine named Panaiko whose Molotov cocktail ignited, transforming him into a human pillar of flame. The doomed man stumbled towards a German tank, where he dashed a second Molotov against the engine grille, engulfing both tank and hero in fire. If some such tales were apocryphal, many were not. ‘Courage is infectious here, just as cowardice is infectious in other places,’ wrote