The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [188]
Dawn on Monday, 14 October 1942 saw the massive Sixth Army offensive by which Paulus tried finally to force the Sixty-second Army off the right bank of the Volga. Three whole infantry divisions and more than 300 tanks were thrown against the factory district. Chuikov sent all the women and wounded back across the Volga, and on the night of 15 October many of the 3,500 wounded had to crawl towards the medical centres because there were no longer enough medical orderlies and stretchers to carry them.37 A building has been preserved at one of the ferry crossings near the factory district, called Crossing 62, and there is hardly a brick of it that does not contain a bullet or artillery scar of some kind. The heroism of the forty-day defence of the Barrikady Settlements by Colonel L. Lyudnikov’s 138th Red Banner Rifle Division, as it was pushed back to a 700-yard perimeter on the Volga and surrounded on three sides by the Germans at this crossing, was one of the epics of a battle that was full of them.
‘Women soldiers proved themselves to be just as heroic in the days of fighting as men,’ recorded Chuikov. For all the ferocity of the battle, at Stalingrad women served on or near the front line, in their capacity as doctors carrying out operations, medical orderlies as young as fifteen carrying wounded men (and especially their weapons) off the battlefields, telephonists (one of whom was buried twice under the rubble in one day but kept on working once freed), radio operators, sailors in the Volga Fleet, anti-aircraft gunners, and especially pilots, known by the Germans as the Flying Witches. Most doubled as blood-donors. Stalingrad might have been an abattoir, but it was an equal-opportunities one. Around 490,000 women fought in front-line roles in the Soviet armed forces during the Great Patriotic War, and a further 300,000 in other roles.38 This was something Nazi ideology would never have permitted the Wehrmacht to copy, yet it significantly contributed to the Soviet war effort. Some 40 per cent of all Red Army front-line doctors were women; graduates of the Central Women’s School for Snipers were credited with killing 12,000 Germans; three regiments of the 221st Aviation Corps were women, as were thirty-three Heroes of the Soviet Union.39
One act of particularly extraordinary heroism seen in the factory district was that of Marine Mikhail Panikako, who was about to throw a Molotov cocktail at a tank when a bullet hit it, drenching him with the burning liquid. ‘The soldier burst into a living sheet of flame,’ wrote Chuikov. ‘Despite the terrible pain he did not lose consciousness. He grabbed the second bottle. The tank had come up close. Everyone saw a man in flames leap out of the trench, run right up to the German tank and smash the bottle against the grille of the engine-hatch. A second later an enormous sheet of flame and smoke engulfed both the tank and the hero who had destroyed it.’40 Today, Panikako’s self-sacrifice can be seen as part of the superb 160-foot-long panorama in the Stalingrad Military Museum in Volgograd. Even when strained through the sieve of wartime and Cold War propaganda, such acts of courage were clearly outstanding, on both sides.
Also synonymous with Stalingrad heroism was the defence undertaken by Sergeant Jakob Pavlov and his Shturmovaya (storming groups), from 28 September for fifty-eight consecutive days, of a four-storey house 300 yards from the river.41 With machine guns and long-barrelled anti-tank guns, and their tactic of denying Panzers any easy targets, this platoon of the 42nd Guards Regiment held out valiantly under Pavlov, their lieutenant having been blinded. ‘Pavlov’s small group of men, defending one house,’ recalled Chuikov proudly, mischievously but accurately, ‘killed more enemy soldiers than the Germans lost in taking Paris.’42 It helped their subsequent fame that they came from a very wide geographical cross-section of the Soviet Union – including Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, an Uzbecki, a Tajik, a Tatar and an Abkhazian – and therefore seemed to symbolize