All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [196]
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