Inferno - Max Hastings [197]
An old woman spoke scathingly to Vasily Grossman about her country’s rulers: “These fools have allowed [the enemy] to reach the heart of the country, the Volga. They’ve given them half of Russia.” From the Kremlin came new slogans: “Not a step back … The only extenuating circumstance is death.” Stalin, facing disaster with half the European Soviet Union in German hands, made an appointment with reality which proved critical. In September he named Zhukov as the nation’s deputy supreme commander, then dispatched him to oversee the defence of Stalingrad and to prepare a major counteroffensive. He recognised the need to subordinate ideology to military necessity: the prohibited word “officer” was restored to the Red Army, and unit commanders were liberated from their subordination to commissars; henceforward, promotions would be determined by competence. The value of medals as incentives was acknowledged: by 1945 the Red Army had issued 11 million, against the U.S. 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 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 600 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. Gen. Vasily Chiukov, commanding the Sixty-second 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 the Number Two station, the freight station, the Number One station, the Lazur chemical plant, the Red October metal works, the Dzerzhinsky tractor factory and the 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 counterattack