The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [186]
During the battle of Stalingrad, the NKVD shot around 13,500 Russian soldiers – the size of an entire fully manned division – for treachery, cowardice, desertion, drunkenness and ‘anti-Soviet agitation’. The condemned men were ordered to undress before execution, so that their uniforms could be reissued ‘without too many discouraging bullet-holes’.26 Stalin’s ‘Not One Step Back’ Order No. 227 of July 1941 had made provision for each army command to detail up to one thousand men to ‘combat cowardice’. In circumstances as terrible as those at Stalingrad, any lesser punishment would probably have led to mutinies and mass desertion. ‘The only extenuating cause for withdrawing from a firing position’, Komsomol (Young Communist League) members were told, ‘is death.’27
Burials during the battle took place at night, with volleys fired not into the air, but at the German lines. Chuikov ordered that the no man’s land between the front lines should be kept as small as possible, both to wear down the enemy’s nerves and to give the Luftwaffe as little opportunity as possible to strafe the Russian lines, for fear of killing their own troops. (Ever-present Russian black humour was at its sharpest during Soviet friendly-fire incidents, with jokes such as ‘Here we go, the Second Front has opened at last!’) 28 The close proximity of the lines meant that soldiers could call out to each other. ‘Rus,’ one German joked about the Russians’ supposedly unreliable Uzbecki troops, ‘do you want to swap an Uzbeck for a Romanian?’ There were incidents of grenades being tossed such short distances that they could be tossed back before they exploded.
Coming at right angles from the Volga is a succession of deep, narrow balkas (gullies), which can still be seen today and which were fought over with particular fierceness as they provided good cover for both defenders and attackers, who could turn each other’s flanks if they won possession. ‘Command posts or mortar units use it,’ Grossman wrote of the series of balkas. ‘It is always under fire. Many people have been killed here. Wires go through it, ammunition is carried through it.’ Describing the German onslaught of 27 September 1942 in the first volume of his memoirs, The Beginning of the Road, Chuikov recalled that telephone communication broke down, constant smoke hampered visual reconnaissance, Staff and signals officers were killed and his command post was under attack the entire time, and he remembered concluding: ‘One more attack like that and we’ll be in the Volga.’29 There were in fact plenty more attacks just like that, with Chuikov’s headquarters having to move once more, but the Red Army somehow managed to hold on to at least parts of the right bank throughout the battle.
The failure to dislodge the Soviets was one of the reasons that Hitler dismissed Halder as chief of the General Staff on 24 September. ‘After [the] situation conference,’ wrote Halder, ‘farewell by the Führer. My nerves are worn out; also his nerves are no longer fresh. We must part. Hitler talked of the necessity for educating the General Staff in fanatical faith in The Idea. He is determined to enforce his will also onto the army.’30 Hitler appointed in Halder’s place the recently promoted Brigadier-General Kurt Zeitzler, who had ‘a reputation for brutality towards subordinates and subservience to superiors’, and certainly showed lickspittle servility towards Hitler.31
‘There were daily quarrels