Stalingrad - Antony Beevor [249]
* There can be little doubt that the ‘violation’ propaganda in the late summer of 1942 contributed significantly to the mass rape committed by the Red Army on its advance into German territory in late 1944 and 1945.
* Two other sons of Soviet leaders, Vladimir Mikoyan and Leonid Khrushchev, served in Red Army aviation at Stalingrad. Vasily Stalin, who was much more of a playboy, soon escaped combat duties to make a propaganda film about the air force.
* The list of nicknames and slang is almost endless. Bullets were ‘sunflower seeds’ and mines were ‘gherkins’. A ‘tongue’ was an enemy sentry captured for interrogation purposes.
* Apart from one well-known member of a tank crew, Yekaterina Petlyuk, very few women served as combat soldiers in the city. In the air armies supporting Stalingrad Front, however, there was a women’s bomber regiment led by the famous aviator, Marina Raskova. ‘I had never seen her close to,’ Simonov wrote in his diary after meeting her at the Kamyshin aerodrome, ‘and I did not realize that she was so young and so beautiful. Maybe I remember it so well because soon afterwards I heard that she was killed.’
* Some 270,000 Ukrainians had already been recruited from prison camps by 31 January 1942. Others were civilian volunteers. The Stadtkommandantur in Stalingrad, according to one NKVD report, had 800 armed and uniformed Ukrainian youths for sentry and escort duty.
* Grossman seems to have been going through a period of spiritual idealization, seeing the Red Army soldier in quasi-Tolstoyan terms. ‘In war,’ he wrote in another notebook, ‘the Russian man puts a white shirt on his soul. He lives sinfully, but he dies like a saint. At the front, the thoughts and souls of many men are pure and there is even a monk-like modesty.’
* Jaundice was recorded separately. ‘Jaundice especially predominates here,’ wrote one officer. ‘And since jaundice means a ticket home, everybody is longing to get it.’ There do not appear to be any recorded examples of soldiers eating picric acid from shells, to make them turn yellow, as in the First World War.
* Intelligence could be a dangerous branch in which to serve. On 22 November, three days after the great offensive began, the head of intelligence of 62nd Army was charged with ‘defeatism and counter-revolutionary ideas’ and accused of giving false information about the enemy. It is impossible to know whether the officer in question was being held responsible for political crimes or incompetence, either his own or as a scapegoat for a superior.
* Volsky was already in almost everybody’s bad books. Just before the attack, he had written a personal letter to Stalin, ‘as an honest Communist’, warning that the offensive would fail. Both Zhukov and Vasilevsky had had to fly back to Moscow on 17 November. After hearing their arguments, Stalin telephoned Volsky from the Kremlin. He retracted his letter. Stalin was curiously unruffled. The possibility cannot be ruled out that this was a precautionary ploy to be used by Stalin against Zhukov and Vasilevsky in case Operation Uranus failed.
* . Hitler, they thought, could be persuaded to step down as commander-in-chief by senior officers. A change of regime might then be accomplished without the disastrous chaos and mutiny of November 1918. This was an astonishingly naive reading of Hitler’s character. The slightest opposition was more likely to trigger a fearful bloodbath. It was the younger ones, such as Tresckow and Stauffenberg, who recognized that Hitler could be removed only by assassination.
* The figures given at the time and in recent accounts range widely, sometimes without defining the nationalities involved. The most significant discrepancy is between the 51,700 Hiwis reported with divisions in mid-November, and the 20,300 listed in Sixth Army ration returns on 6 December. It is hard to know whether this was due to heavy casualties, Hiwis taking the opportunity to escape during the retreats of late November,