The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [183]
As well as reaching the Volga north of Stalingrad, on 23 August the Germans bombed the city’s giant oil storage tanks, setting them alight. The Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star newspaper) journalist Vasily Grossman, who specialized in reporting the activities of frontoviki (front-line troops), wrote of how:
The fire rose thousands of feet, carrying with it clouds of vaporized oil that exploded into flame only high in the sky. The mass of flame was so vast that the whirlwind was unable to bring enough oxygen to the burning molecules of hydrocarbon; a black, swaying vault separated the starry sky of autumn from the burning earth. It was terrible to look up to see a black firmament streaming with oil.9
The oil burnt for more than a week, and the pillars of heavy smoke could be seen throughout the region. At one point a spillage caused the Volga itself to catch fire. The battlefield commander of the Russian forces in the city, General Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov, recalled that ‘clouds of thick black smoke hung over us. Flakes of ash and soot descended on us all the time, so that everything at the command post turned black and looked black.’ The Luftwaffe dropped not just conventional bombs, but any random pieces of metal that could do damage such as plough-shares, tractor wheels, harrows and empty metal casks, which Chuikov remembered ‘whistled about the heads of our troops’.10 Grossman interviewed many of the leading figures in the defence of Stalingrad, including Chuikov, and he recorded in his 1964 novel Life and Fate: ‘An iron whirlwind howled over the bunker, slicing through anything living that raised its head above the earth’s headquarters.’11
Chuikov had joined the Red Army in 1918 aged eighteen. He fought in the Civil War and the Russo-Polish War and attended the elite Frunze Military Academy, before becoming Soviet military attaché to China for eleven years after 1926, thereby escaping some of the worst years of the purges. A protégé of Zhukov, he had fought in the Polish and Finnish campaigns of 1939–40 before being given command of the Soviet Sixty-second Army in Stalingrad. ‘He was a tough street-fighter, described by one of his staff officers as a “coarse” man – gruby – who had been known to hit officers whose performance displeased him with a big stick he carried.’12 For all that, he was a leader, who staked everything on the Red Army remaining on the right bank of the Volga.
The Luftwaffe’s initial bombing policy, which had the effect of turning Stalingrad almost into a lunar moonscape, eventually worked in the Soviet defenders’ favour. The rubble had to be fought over brick by brick, exactly the kind of warfare that benefited the far larger but less well-equipped Russian Army. Before the Germans’ arrival, Stalingrad had been inadequately fortified, with Chuikov observing that the barricades outside the city could be pushed over by a truck. Both K. A. Gurov, the Sixty-second Army’s senior commissar, and General N. I. Krylov, its chief of staff, agreed that the defences were ‘laughable’, and Chuikov accurately told Grossman that ‘In the defence of Stalingrad, divisional commanders counted more on blood than barbed wire.’13 Chuikov coined the expression ‘the Stalingrad Academy of Street-Fighting’ and, for all the Germans’ martial skill and bravery in that school, it was the Russians who graduated summa cum laude. The Germans called the brutal, hand-to-hand, no-quarter-given fighting in cellars and sewers, with rifles, bayonets, grenades and even spades, Rattenkrieg (rat warfare). Grossman cited an occasion when a German and a Russian patrol were both in the same house, unaware of the other’s proximity. When the Germans wound up a gramophone on the floor below, betraying their presence, the Soviet troops made