Stalingrad - Antony Beevor [110]
The Russians themselves had noticed the number of ill Germans with surprise and spoken of a ‘German sickness’. The doctors in Berlin could only speculate that ‘the troops’ reduced resistance’ had been due to cumulative stress, and short rations. The most vulnerable appear to have been the youngest soldiers, those aged between seventeen and twenty-two. They alone accounted for 55 per cent of these deaths. Whatever the exact causes, there can be no doubt that the health of the Sixth Army was already a matter of serious concern in early November, when the worst prospect appeared to be no more than yet another winter in bunkers under the snow.
While the Soviet 64th Army launched attacks to bring troops down from Stalingrad, the 57th Army seized a dominant hill between the Romanian 20th and 2nd Infantry Divisions. Further out, down in the Kalmyk steppe, the 51st Army carried out raids deep into the Romanian positions. One night, Senior Lieutenant Aleksandr Nevsky and his company of sub-machine-gunners infiltrated through the defence line to raid the headquarters of the 1st Romanian Infantry Division in a village to the rear, where they caused chaos. Nevsky was badly wounded twice during the action. The Stalingrad Front political department, following the new Party line of invoking Russian history, decided that Nevsky must belong to the bloodline of his glorious namesake. This ‘fearless commander, the full inheritor of his ancestor’s glory’, was awarded the Order of the Red Banner.
In the city, the great German offensive had petered out at the very end of October through exhaustion and a lack of ammunition. The last attack by 79th Infantry Division against the Red October factory collapsed on 1 November under heavy artillery fire from across the Volga. ‘The effect of massed enemy artillery has decisively weakened the division’s attacking strength,’ noted Sixth Army headquarters. The 94th Infantry Division attacking the northern pocket at Sparta-kovka was also ground down
‘In the last two days’, noted a report to Moscow of 6 November, ‘the enemy has been changing his tactics. Probably because of big losses over the last three weeks, they have stopped using large formations.’ Along the Red October sector, the Germans had switched to ‘reconnaissance in force to probe for weak points between our regiments’. But these new ‘sudden attacks’ were achieving no more success than the old ones preceded by heavy bombardments.
Also during the first week of November, the Germans started ‘to install wire netting over windows and shell holes’ of their fortified houses so that hand grenades would bounce off. To break the netting, 62nd Army needed small-calibre artillery, of which it was short, yet it was increasingly difficult to ship anything across the Volga. Red Army soldiers started to improvise hooks on their grenades to catch on to the netting.
Soviet forces hit back in any way they could during early November. Gunboats of the Volga flotilla, some with spare T-34 tank turrets mounted on the forward deck, bombarded 16th Panzer Division at Rynok. And the ‘heavy enemy night bombing attacks’, continued to wear down the resilience of German soldiers.
‘Along the whole of the eastern front’, wrote Groscurth to his brother on 7 November, ‘we are expecting today a general offensive in honour of the anniversary of the October Revolution.’ But observance of the twenty-fifth anniversary was restricted on a local level to Soviet soldiers ‘exceeding their socialist promises to destroy Fritzes which they made in socialist competition’. Komsomol members especially were expected to keep an accurate tally of their score. In 57th Army, the chief political officer reported, ‘Out of 1,697 Komsomol members, 678 have not yet killed any Germans’. These underachievers were presumably taken in hand.
Some celebrations of the October Revolution did not