The battle began with the main attack on the tractor plant from the south-west. At midday, part of XIV Panzer Corps recommenced its push from the north. Chuikov did not hesitate. He committed his main armoured force, the 84th Tank Brigade, against the major assault of three infantry divisions spearheaded by the 14th Panzer Division. ‘Our support from heavy weapons was unusually strong’, wrote an NCO in the 305th Infantry Division. ‘Several batteries of Nebel-werfer, Stukas shuttle-bombing and self-propelled assault guns in quantities never seen before bombarded the Russians, who in their fanaticism put up a tremendous resistance.’
‘It was a terrible, exhausting battle’, wrote an officer in 14th Panzer Division, ‘on and below the ground, in ruins, cellars, and factory sewers. Tanks climbed mounds of rubble and scrap, and crept screeching through chaotically destroyed workshops and fired at point-blank range in narrow yards. Many of the tanks shook or exploded from the force of an exploding enemy mine.’ Shells striking solid iron installations in the factory workshops produced showers of sparks visible through the dust and smoke.
The stamina of Soviet soldiers was indeed incredible, but they simply could not withstand the force at the central point of the attack. During the first morning, the German panzers broke through, cutting off Zholudev’s 37th Guards and the 112th Rifle Division. General Zholudev was buried alive in his bunker by an explosion, a common fate during that terrible day. Soldiers dug him out and carried him to army headquarters. Others seized the weapons of the dead and fought on. The dust-covered German panzers smashed right into the huge sheds of the tractor plant, like prehistoric monsters, spraying machine-gun fire all around, and crunching the shards of glass from the shattered skylights under their tracks. During the close-quarter fighting which followed, there were no clear front lines. Bypassed groups of Zholudev’s guardsmen would suddenly attack as if from nowhere. In such conditions, a wise German medical officer set up his forward dressing station inside a smelting furnace.
By the second day of the offensive, 15 October, Sixth Army headquarters felt able to record: ‘The major part of the tractor works is in our hands. There are only some pockets of resistance left behind our front.’ The 305th Infantry Division also forced the Russians back across the railway lines at the brickworks. That night, after 14th Panzer Division’s breakthrough into the tractor works, its 103rd Panzer Grenadier Regiment boldly cut through to the Volga bank by the oil tanks, harried by Soviet infantry attacking out of gullies. Fortunately for 62nd Army, Chuikov had been persuaded to move his headquarters, because communications were so bad. The fighting had hardly slackened. The 84th Tank Brigade claimed to have destroyed ‘more than thirty medium and heavy fascist tanks’ for the loss of eighteen of their own. The brigade’s human losses were ‘still being calculated’ when the report went in two days later. Although the figure for German tanks was almost certainly optimistic, the brigade’s junior commanders demonstrated inspiring courage that day.
The commissar of a light-artillery regiment, Babachenko, was made a Hero of the Soviet Union for his bravery when a battery was cut off. The defenders’ farewell radio message received at headquarters read: ‘Guns destroyed. Battery surrounded. We fight on and will not surrender. Best regards to everyone.’ Yet, using grenades, rifles and sub-machine-guns, the gunners broke the enemy encirclement and made a fresh stand, helping to restore the sector’s line of defence.
There were countless cases of unsung bravery by ordinary soldiers—‘real mass heroism’, as the commissars put it. There were also trumpeted incidents of individual bravery, such as a company commander of 37th Guards Rifle Division, Lieutenant Gonychar, who with a captured machine-gun and just four men, managed to disperse an attacking German force at a critical moment. Nobody knew how many Red Army soldiers died that day, but 3,500 wounded were taken back across the Volga that night. The overworked medical orderlies suffered so many casualties that many of the wounded crawled to the river bank alone.
German commanders out in the steppe demanded constant news of progress in the city. ‘Factory walls, assembly lines, the whole superstructure collapses under the storm of bombs,’ wrote General Strecker to a friend, ‘but the enemy simply reappears and utilizes these newly created ruins to fortify his defensive positions.’ Some German battalions were down to fifty men. They sent back the corpses of their comrades at night for burial. Inevitably, a certain cynicism arose in German ranks about their leadership. ‘Our General,’ a soldier of 389th Infantry Division wrote home, ‘Jeneke [Jaenecke] he’s called, received the Knight’s Cross the day before yesterday. Now he’s achieved his objective.’
During the six days of fighting from 14 October, the Luftwaffe maintained relays of aircraft attacking river crossings and troops. There was hardly a moment when German aircraft were not overhead. ‘The help of our fighter force is needed,’ noted the political department of Stalingrad Front in a coded criticism of Red Army aviation passed on to Moscow. In fact, the 8th Air Army was down to fewer than 200 machines of all types, of which only two dozen were fighters. Yet even Luftwaffe pilots shared the growing suspicion of ground troops that the Russian defenders of Stalingrad might prove invincible. ‘I cannot understand’, one wrote home, ‘how men can survive such a hell, yet the Russians sit tight in the ruins, and holes and cellars, and a chaos of steel skeletons which used to be factories.’ These pilots also knew that their effectiveness would soon decrease rapidly as daylight hours shortened and the weather deteriorated.
The successful German thrust to the Volga just below the Stalingrad tractor plant entirely cut off the remains of the 112th Rifle Division and the militia brigades which had been facing XIV Panzer Corps to the north and west. While encircled fragments of Zholudev’s 37thGuards Rifle Division continued to fight on in the tractor plant, the remnants of the other formations were squeezed southwards. The great threat to the 62nd Army’s survival was a German thrust down the river bank, cutting off Gorishny’s division from the rear.
Chuikov’s new headquarters were in constant danger. Its close-defence group was frequently thrown into the fighting. Since the 62nd Army lost communications so often, Chuikov asked permission for a rear headquarters group to cross to the left bank, while a forward group, including the whole military council, remained on the east bank. Yeremenko and Khrushchev, only too aware of Stalin’s reaction, refused point-blank.
Also on 16 October, the Germans pushed down from the tractor works towards the Barrikady plant, but the combination of Russian tanks buried in the rubble and screaming salvoes of Katyusha rockets from the river bank broke up their attacks. That night, the rest of Lyudnikov’s 138th Rifle Division was brought across the Volga. As they marched forward from disembarkation, they had to step over ‘hundreds of wounded crawling towards the landing stage’. The fresh troops were thrown into an oblique line of defence just north of the Barrikady works.
General Yeremenko also crossed the river that night to assess the situation for himself. Leaning heavily on a walking stick after his wounds the previous year, he limped up the bank to the overcrowded bunkers of 62nd Army headquarters. The craters and smashed timbers of dugouts which had received direct hits left little to the imagination. Objects and individuals alike were covered in dust and ash. General Zholudev broke down in tears, recounting the destruction of his division in the tractor works. Yet next day, after Yeremenko’s return, Front headquarters had to warn Chuikov that even less ammunition would be available.