In fact, the fighting in the Don country helped to delay the German advance, which mattered later in the campaign when the ice and darkness finally set in. At the time, however, the breathing space seemed made for working on the great city’s defence. As in Moscow a year earlier, citizens were pressed into militia gangs and given shovels, carts and lumps of wood. Tank traps and trenches were prepared, defensive drills rehearsed. None of these preparations would prevent the cataclysm when it came, and local people seemed to sense that fact. While some exhausted Stalingraders dug, their neighbours, no less frightened, were streaming eastwards to the Volga, pulling carts, carrying bundles, driving stock.79 They were rushing to escape from a trap. Many of the bridges across the river had been mined, while the roads were already exposed to sporadic aerial machine-gun fire. Thousands of refugees would never make it to the sallow hills of Asia.
The attack came on Sunday 23 August. That day, 600 German planes circled over Stalingrad. They flew in low, carpet-bombing in relays. By nightfall there was little left above the ground but rubble, searing flame and smoke. ‘The streets of the city are dead,’ Chuikov would write as he toured his new battleground a few days after the catastrophe. ‘There is not a single green twig on the trees: everything has perished in the flames. All that is left of the wooden houses is a pile of ashes and stove chimneys sticking up out of them. The many stone houses are burnt out, their windows and doors missing and their roofs caved in. Now and then a building collapses. People are rummaging about in the ruins, pulling out bundles, samovars and crockery, and carrying everything to the landing stage.’80 Tens of thousands of civilians would never manage to escape. In that first day and night, an estimated 40,000 people died.81
The bitterest and most appalling phase of Stalingrad’s defence also began that August. For a few weeks, the Soviet 62nd and 64th armies retreated from the city’s western suburbs to a few strongholds in the centre and the north. By mid-September, the 62nd Army was holding the city on its own. Its orders were to destroy the enemy – the 6th Army of General Paulus – in the city itself. Soldiers holding the narrow strip of ruined earth along the Volga’s western bank were told to fight as if there were no land across the water on the eastern shore. What that would mean soon became clear. Chuikov’s men, reinforced by any troops who could be shipped across alive, clung to their bridgehead by contesting every house. Inside the ruins, sometimes in the dark, men fought with bayonets and their bare hands to hold each stairwell and each bullet-pitted room.
From October, Chuikov’s soldiers in the city would be supported by well-organized artillery, this time sensibly sited on the Volga’s eastern bank. But the enemy maintained complete superiority in the air. All troops in the city, German and Soviet – and the few civilians who had not succeeded in escaping after the first fatal days – were subject to unrelenting bombardment. So were the boats that brought supplies and men across the river from the Soviet side. The food ran out, bullets ran out, the cooling water in machine guns boiled. The men lived and died amid a litter of corpses and rubble, the bodies blending with the dust. As Chuikov himself recalled, ‘The heavy casualties, the constant retreat, the shortage of food and munitions, the difficulty of receiving reinforcements… all this had a very bad effect on morale. Many longed to get across the Volga, to escape the hell of Stalingrad.’82 His men were close to absolute despair. ‘It is all so hard that I do not see a way out,’ a soldier wrote home that October. ‘We can consider Stalingrad as good as surrendered.’83
For tens of thousands, there could never be escape. True, some of the top brass, as well as some police, shipped out to safer ground, leaving the men to face the wreckage and the flames alone.84 Chuikov himself is said to have requested several times to remove his headquarters to the safety of the other bank,85 but the general had no choice. His orders were to lead the soldiers by example. He had a relatively free hand over tactics, and the promise of daily replacements of men, but there would be no going back. The troops who disembarked at Stalingrad had no option except to fight. One sanction, which Chuikov was never ashamed to use, was the threat of a bullet in the back. The discipline the general maintained was savage even by the standards of Zhukov’s Red Army. But the Volga river, steaming from the heat of German shells, was a barrier more deadly than any secret police line. Just over half a million troops were massed for Stalingrad’s defence in July 1942. Well over 300,000 of these would die.86
The physical toll defies imagination. The day-today conditions on their own wore the men down; it was not just the bombing, the unrelenting noise, the dust, flame, cold and darkness. The city’s defenders relied entirely on the river boats to deliver supplies. As these began to fail, soldiers turned into scavengers, taking the boots, the guns and even writing paper from corpses. The reek of decayed flesh mingled with the hot metal and sweat. There was little enough clean water in the shelters where soldiers huddled at night, so washing was out of the question. Lice, always a problem at the front, infested clothing, gloves, bedding and the men’s own matted hair. Unlike the rats and birds that also moved among the ruins, these vermin were not even good to eat. The men had their own way of describing siege rations. ‘You’ll live,’ they would mutter, ‘but you won’t be able to fuck.’87 The bitter words ignored the fact that they still had to fight. Only the injured, proven in combat, stood a chance of a place on the boats that slipped back to the east bank every night. The hospitals filled up. Their staff worked to exhaustion.
The men’s own view was that ten days were as much as anyone could take. Even the toughest used to say that after the eighth or ninth day they were certain to be wounded, if they did not die.88 Most had grown used to the sounds and smells of war, and old hands felt that they could judge, even predict, their universe. It was the closest they might ever come to controlling the chaos at the front. ‘We knew by the flight of a shell if it would hit you or not,’ a survivor remembered. ‘We could also tell where a mine would land by the noise it produced.’89 But the endless struggle to remain alert destroyed a person’s concentration in the end. The archives do not talk about stress much – the Soviet army operated with less sensitive measures of the soldiers’ health and fitness – but, as one survivor put it, the men became ‘a little less than human’ as they strained to hear the shadows in the dark.90 ‘At least I can say that I saw a lot of heroic things,’ an officer wrote later to his wife, ‘but I also saw a lot of things that the Red Army ought to be ashamed of. I never thought that I’d be capable of the kind of ruthlessness that really borders on cruelty. I thought I was a good-hearted person, but it seems that a human being can hide within himself for a long time the qualities that surface only at a time like this.’91
Men also learned that there were worse outcomes than death. ‘Whether we like it or not,’ the same officer wrote, ‘we all end up thinking – what if I become a cripple? How will my wife react? You absolutely don’t want to think about the possibility of being crippled. Of course, it’s a real possibility, but you want to think of other things – of a full, healthy life.’92 A healthy life, perhaps, or else the catharsis of death. Soldiers began to find a kind of ecstasy in action, even in suicide. Against the blackness of their daily lives, the strangest things glowed with an unexpected light. Some accounts read like scenes from a macabre ballet; that is, the witnesses – all soldiers – had come to imagine action in cinematic terms, while the dead, the principals in these dramas, could not correct the script. Chuikov, who was no sentimentalist, described the death of a marine called Pankaiko in just this way. As the doomed man prepared to lob a petrol-filled bottle at a line of German tanks, a bullet ignited the fuel, turning him into a pillar of flame. But the marine was still alive, and somehow, with some last reserve of rage, or maybe from some grim reflex, he managed to reach for a second missile. ‘Everyone saw a man in flames leap out of the trench,’ Chuikov later wrote, ‘run right up to the German tank, and smash the bottle against the grille of the engine hatch. A second later an enormous sheet of flame and smoke engulfed both the tank and the hero who had destroyed it.’93