Russia at war 1941-1945

replaced by Lieutenant-General Lopatin, he was far from pleased:

A cavalry man in the past, General Lopatin had lately been in charge of an army

which, during the fighting on the Don, had become so scattered across the steppes that it was extremely difficult to assemble it again.

Plump and fair and outwardly very calm, Lopatin treated me to an excellent lunch

at his command post, but informed me that, in the absence of munitions, the 62nd

Army could not carry out the orders of the Army Group's chief of staff... I at once felt he lacked self-confidence, and doubted whether he could hold the right flank on the Don, since his troops were half-encircled.

[Yeremenko in his book {Stalingrad) defends Lopatin by saying that, since he was commander of the 62nd Army in July-August, he deserves a little share of its fame. To Chuikov he was a person to be got rid of as quickly as possible.]

Under constant air attack, Chuikov spent the rest of the day circling about the Don

steppes, looking for Lopatin's "lost divisions" Meanwhile, General Shumilov had been appointed commander of the 64th Army, and Chuikov was ordered to report to Gordov at Stalingrad.

At Stalingrad on August I, I found Gordov (so downcast only a few days before) in a gay, almost jocular mood. In talking to air-force General Khrukin, he sounded

entirely self-confident, as though the Nazis were on the point of being wiped out at any moment. "The Germans," he said, "have got bogged down in our defences, and with one blow we can destroy the whole lot." Remembering my vain search in the steppe for the lost divisions, which had just vanished, I came to the conclusion that the Commander of the Stalingrad Front simply did not know what was going on. He

was full of wishful thinking, and did not even know that, having broken across the Don at Tsymlianskaya and pushing, as they were, towards Kotelnikovo, the

Germans were preparing to strike a mighty new blow, this time at Stalingrad itself.

He would scarcely listen to my explanations, and cut me short by saying: "I know about the general situation as well as you do."

Full of foreboding, Chuikov returned to the front; but was no longer able to cross the Don; practically all the country inside the Bend had now been overrun by the Germans.

As an example of the chaotic lack of liaison between Russian units fighting inside the Bend, Chuikov tells how, while the 33rd Guards Division of the 62nd Army held up the Germans along a narrow sector of the front for several days, destroying or putting out of action no fewer than fifty German tanks and fighting almost literally to the last man, the troops on either side of them were doing nothing, "simply waiting for something to happen"; before long, they were attacked by strong German forces which broke through their lines.

The heroic stand of the 33rd Guards Division, had thus been almost in vain.

Yet as late as July 26 General Lopatin was sending optimistic reports to headquarters about important German forces being on the point of being encircled. "It was like the story of the man," Chuikov commented, "who said he had caught a bear. 'Well, bring him along.' 'I can't, the bear won't let me.' "

By the time the 62nd Army had retreated beyond the Don, it had been decimated, and

needed strong reinforcement.

On returning to the Front on August 2, Chuikov found that the situation had badly

deteriorated. Large German forces, outflanking the main Russian forces, had forced the Don at Tsymlianskaya, and after capturing Kotelnikovo, were advancing north towards

Stalingrad in a wide semi-circle through Plodovitoye and Tinguta in the Kalmuk steppes.

In many places, the Russians were being smashed by heavy air and tank concentrations.

Thus, two days later Chuikov learned that a troop train unloading fresh Siberian troops at Kotelnikovo station had been attacked by German aircraft and tanks and the losses had been so appalling that the colonel in command of these troops now retreating in disorder towards Stalingrad, was found in a state of complete nervous collapse.

I remember his pale face and his trembling voice. He was in a bad state... "Comrade General," he said, "I am a Soviet officer, and I cannot survive the death of a large part of my division. It is hard for me to assemble the survivors, who are completely demoralised. I cannot therefore continue to command the division."

I could not leave this without doing something about it... A few hours later when Colonel Voskoboinikov came to himself, I called in to see him, the chief of staff and the head of the division's political department. I ordered all three to establish contact with the troops scattered between Zhutovo and Abganerovo, and to take up

firm defensive positions on the north side of the Axai river.

Despite heavy losses among the Russian troops, Chuikov succeeded in organising a

defence line on the Axai river, and, on August 6, launched some successful counter-

attacks against the Germans and Rumanians.

As a result of this battle of August 6, the enemy suffered heavy losses. We captured eight guns and many small arms. I found that the scattered troops I had assembled during the retreat, had not lost their fighting spirit, and fought well. They boldly went into attack, and did not panic when the enemy counter-attacked. That was the main thing.

Farther east, at Abganerovo and Tundutovo, where other units of the 64th Army were

now concentrated, the Germans had also failed to break through. On that day, Chuikov was also glad to learn that Gordov had been replaced by Yeremenko as commander of the Stalingrad Front—though later he was not to remain on the best of terms with him.

The German advance on Stalingrad from the south and south-west was being slowed

down; but other difficulties were still in store. A large ammunition dump south of

Stalingrad had been destroyed by the German bombers, and the troops were, before long, to experience a serious shortage of ammunition. Even so, Chuikov, assisted by Ludnikov and other future heroes of the defence of Stalingrad, held the Axai line for over a week; but with the Germans outflanking all these troops from the east, they were ordered to withdraw north to the next natural defence line, the Myshkova river, some forty miles south of Stalingrad. During this fighting in the country between Don and Volga, virtually on the outskirts of Stalingrad, despite all the setbacks suffered inside the Don Bend, the Russians began to fight as seldom before. Chuikov gives many examples of suicidal

resistance when Russian soldiers, with grenades tied round them, would throw

themselves under enemy tanks. Many of the fresh troops that had only recently been

incorporated in the 62nd and 64th Army were "acquiring new experience every day, and were rapidly turning into mature and hardened troops". The German plan—to break through to the Volga and at the same time to encircle both the 62nd and 64th Army—

failed. These two armies were to bear the brunt of the Stalingrad fighting, the former inside Stalingrad, the latter south of it.

Hitler had ordered that Stalingrad be taken on August 25. On the tragic day of August 23

the Germans broke through to the Volga north of Stalingrad, on a five-mile front; on the same day, 600 planes attacked the city, killing some 40,000 civilians.

The enormous city, stretching for thirty miles along the Volga, was enveloped in

flames. Everything around was burning and collapsing. Sorrow and death entered

into thousands of Stalingrad homes.

Many thousands of civilians fled across the Volga; but Chuikov stresses the

determination shown by both the army and the civilian authorities to save Stalingrad at any price. North of the city, the Germans failed to widen their five-mile salient, while, in the south, the 64th Army was still preventing them, at that stage, from breaking through to the Volga.

But, during the days that followed, the German pressure grew worse and worse.

The troops of the 62nd and 64th armies were retreating towards their final

positions, inside Stalingrad. The roads were crowded with refugees. Peasants from collective and state farms were migrating, with their families and their livestock, many also taking their agricultural implements with them, and converging on the

Volga ferries.

Chuikov, returning from a visit to the east side of the Volga a few days later, describes the scene at one of the ferries:

From time to time a German shell would burst in the river, but this indiscriminate shelling was not dangerous... From a distance we could see that the pier was

crowded with people. As we drew closer many wounded were being carried out of

trenches, bomb-craters and shelters. There were also many people with bundles and suitcases who had been hiding from German bombs and shells. When they saw the

ferry arriving they rushed to the pier, with the one desire of getting away to the other side of the river, away from their wrecked houses, away from a city that had become a hell. Their eyes were grim and there were trickles of tears running

through the dust and soot on their grimy faces. The children, suffering from thirst and hunger, were not crying, but simply whining, and stretching out their little

arms to the water of the Volga.

During the last week of August and the first ten days of September, the Germans were advancing on Stalingrad from all directions, despite stiff Russian resistance; they had great superiority in weapons, above all in aircraft. By September 10 they broke through to the Volga south of Stalingrad, near Kuporosnoye, cutting the 62nd Army from the 64th.

As a result the 62nd Army was isolated within an irregular German "horse-shoe" of which the northern tip reached the Volga at Rynok and the southern tip at Kuporosnoye, about twenty miles downstream. At the time, the German air force did as many as 3,000

sorties a day; the Russians barely did more than 300. Nor did the Russians have any tanks to speak of.

The enemy had complete air superiority. This had a particularly depressing effect on our troops; and we were feverishly trying to think up some solution... A part of our anti-aircraft defences had been completely smashed, and most of the rest were moved to the left bank of the Volga. Here the guns could fire at German planes

hovering over the river and over a narrow stretch of the right bank; this, however, did not prevent German planes from being suspended over the city and the river

from dawn to dusk...

By September 10, morale among the troops was still very low.

The heavy casualties, the constant retreat, the shortage of food and munitions, the difficulty of receiving reinforcements ... —all this had a very bad effect on morale.

Many longed to get across the Volga, to escape the hell of Stalingrad... On

September 14 I met the former commander of the 62nd Army [Lopatin]; I was

struck by his mood of despair, by his feeling that it was impossible and pointless to fight for Stalingrad... As politely as possible, I suggested he report to the War Council [on the other side of the Volga]—in other words leave Stalingrad altogether.

This depressed mood of the former commander of the army was contagious... Three

of my aides, the men in charge of tanks, artillery and the engineering troops, all claiming to be ill, hastened to go beyond the Volga... All this was beginning to affect the ordinary troops...

Chuikov, aided by Divisional Commissar Gurov, General Krylov, and others proceeded

to give a number of pep-talks to the troops; about the same time, the War Council of the Stalingrad Front issued its famous order: "The enemy must be smashed at Stalingrad."

This had an electrifying effect on all the officers, soldiers and political personnel of the 62nd Army.

The German "horse-shoe" varied in depth; apart from a Russian salient at Orlovka in the north, the western extremity of which was about eleven miles from the Volga, the rest of the 62nd Army's bridgehead was, on an average, about five miles deep on September 13, before the first of the great German offensives against Stalingrad proper. The principal landmarks, from north to south, were Rynok (to the north of which the Germans had

crashed through to the Volga on August 23), Spartakovka Garden City, then the

Stalingrad Tractor Plant Garden City, with the Tractor plant itself nearer the Volga; then, the Barricades Garden City, and the Barricades Plant, to the east of it, also on the river bank; south of that, also on the river, was the Red October Plant, and slightly to the south-west, the Red October Garden City, south of which was the famous Mamai Hill,

the highest point in Stalingrad, for which ferocious fighting was to go on for months.

Mamai Hill marked, as it were, the border between the industrial north of Stalingrad and the business, administrative and residential south of the city, with its two railway stations, its Red Army House, its Univermag (department store), and other buildings that were to become famous during the later stages of the battle.

It was on September 12, two days after the 62nd Army had been isolated from the rest of the Soviet troops that Chuikov was appointed commander of the 62nd Army. The gloomy

Lopatin had been relieved of his command, and his chief of staff, General Krylov, who had had a fine record at Odessa and Sebastopol, had been temporarily in charge. Having been appointed commander of the 62nd Army by the War Council of the Stalingrad

Front, "with Comrade Stalin's approval", Chuikov declared to Khrushchev and Yeremenko: "We shall either hold the city or die there." Khrushchev assured him that all possible help would be given to Stalingrad's defenders. Chuikov kept on Krylov as his chief of staff.

The big German offensive started on September 13. Its main aim was to capture Mamai

Hill, the central part of Stalingrad, and so break through to the Volga. Chuikov's

command post was at first right on top of Mamai Hill, but:

The constant bombing and shelling of the hill continuously smashed our

communications, which made it impossible to direct the troops... So we moved to the Tsaritsa ravine, leaving only an observation post on top of the hill... During that whole day of the 13th, none of us, either officer or soldier, had had anything to eat.

Our lunch was being cooked in a small house on the side of the hill, but an enemy bomb destroyed both the kitchen and our lunch. Our cook tried to cook our dinner

in a field kitchen, but this was also smashed by a direct hit. Our cook wasn't going to waste any more food on us, so we stayed hungry all day. Glinka, our cook, and

Tasya, our waitress, were delighted when we transferred them to the new command

post.

This was a large, roomy and well-protected dugout, near the Volga, and between the two railway stations, which had earlier been the H.Q. of the Stalingrad Front.

Chuikov describes how, after their initial successes on the 13th, the Germans, now full of confidence, proceeded to occupy the central part of Stalingrad.

Our counter-attacks before daybreak were not unsuccessful at first; but once the

sun had risen German planes, in groups of fifty or sixty, proceeded to bomb our

counter-attacking forces non-stop... Our counter-attack failed. By noon, the enemy brought into action numerous tanks and motorised infantry... The main blow was

aimed at the Central Station. This was an attack of exceptional strength. Despite enormous losses, the Germans were now crashing ahead. Whole columns of tanks

and motorised infantry were breaking into the centre of the city. The Nazis were

now apparently convinced that the fate of Stalingrad was sealed, and they hurried towards the Volga... Our soldiers—snipers, anti-tank gunners, artillery-men, lying in wait in houses, cellars and firing-points, could watch the drunken Nazis jumping off the trucks, playing mouth organs, bellowing and dancing on the pavements.

Hundreds of them were killed, but more and more German troops were flooding the

centre of Stalingrad. The fighting was now within 800 yards of the 62nd Army's

command post. That night, Chuikov threw in his small reserve of nineteen tanks, to stop the Germans from breaking through to the Volga and to the Army H.Q.

It was during the critical night of September 14-15 that the famous Rodimtsev Division, 10,000 strong, began to arrive across the Volga.

Except for anti-tanks guns, the bulk of the division's artillery was to stay on the left bank.

Two infantry regiments of the Rodimtsev division were ordered to "clear the centre of Stalingrad " of the Germans, and another was ordered to occupy Mamai Hill and dig in there. Throughout the 15th, the fighting was extremely heavy; the Central Railway

Station changed hands several times, and, by the end of the day "it was hard to decide who was in possession of Mamai Hill". However, on the morning of the 16th, Mamai Hill was recaptured by the Russians, and the fighting for the Hill was to continue almost uninterruptedly until the end of January.

It was at the height of this fighting that the troops of the Stalingrad Front attempted to break through the German "Rynok" salient from the north. Chuikov tells with some irony how this offensive, conducted by Yeremenko and his deputy, the same old Gordov, came to nothing. For a few hours on September 18 the Stalingrad sky was clear of German

aircraft; they had gone to deal with the attempted Yeremenko breakthrough; soon

afterwards they were back over Stalingrad.

During that day the fighting was chiefly on Mamai Hill and around the Central Station.

The top of Mamai Hill was again recaptured "by the remnants of Sologub's division" and Colonel Yelin's regiment, which had advanced between 100 and 150 yards that day. On

the other hand, the Central Station was lost to the Germans that night, after five days'

bloody, often hand-to-hand fighting.

By this time [Chuikov relates] we had nothing left with which to counter-attack.

General Rodimtsev's 13th Division had been bled white. It had entered the fray

from the moment it crossed the Volga, and had borne the brunt of the heaviest

German blows... They had had to abandon several blocks of houses inside central

Stalingrad, but this could not be described as a withdrawal or a retreat. There was nobody left to retreat. Rodimtsev's guardsmen stood firm to the last extremity, and only the heavily-wounded crawled away... From what these wounded told us, it

transpired that the Nazis, having captured the station, continued to suffer heavy losses. Our soldiers, having been cut off from the main forces of the division, had entrenched themselves in various buildings around the station, or under railway

carriages— usually in groups of two or three men—and from there they continued

to harass the Germans night and day...

There is no doubt, as Chuikov himself admits, that it was the men of the Rodimtsev

Division who saved Stalingrad during the second half of September. But he pays this

tribute a little reluctantly: the reason being that, for months afterwards, the Rodimtsev Division continued to receive incomparably more publicity in the Soviet press (and,

consequently, throughout the world) than any other. In reality, it had suffered such appalling losses that, after the end of September, it played only a minor part in the Stalingrad fighting and occupied a relatively quiet sector.

Supplies for the 62nd Army inside Stalingrad had all to come from across the Volga; and the river, which is over a mile wide at Stalingrad, was under constant bombing during the day, and artillery and mortar fire during the night.

Units which had succeeded in crossing the Volga during the night, had to be put in position at. once, before dawn, and all supplies had to be immediately distributed among the troops, since they would otherwise have been destroyed by bombing...

We had neither horses nor cars ... everything that was brought across the Volga had to be carried to the firing line by the soldiers themselves—those very soldiers who, during the day, had to repel fierce enemy attacks and who at night, without sleep or respite, had to carry ammunitions, food and engineering equipment to the front

lines. This was terribly exhausting, and inevitably lowered their fighting capacity; and yet, that is how it went on in Stalingrad, day after day, and week after week, as long as the Battle of Stalingrad continued.

Another absolutely vital factor of the Stalingrad fighting (but one to which Chuikov refers as little as possible) was that practically all the artillery, katyusha mortars, etc.—

were on the other side of the Volga, and these represented a formidable force. Victor Nekrasov, the future novelist, who spent virtually the whole of the Stalingrad battle as a lieutenant of the Batyuk Division, in the Mamai Hill sector, told me:

Especially towards the end of October, when we had nothing but a few small

bridgeheads left on the right bank of the river, the number of troops there was

extremely small. Perhaps 20,000 in all.

[A leading Soviet military expert, General Talensky, in speaking to me about Stalingrad in 1945, put the figure rather higher: about 40,000. There was, he said, physically no possibility of having more people on the bridgeheads,]

But, on the other hand, the other side of the Volga was a real ant-heap. It was there that all the supply services, the artillery, air-force, etc. were concentrated. And it was they who made it hell for the Germans.

Exactly the same point is made by Konstantin Simonov in his new novel, Men Are Not Born Soldiers, an important corrective to the Chuikov story:

We could certainly not have held Stalingrad had we not been supported by artillery and

katyushas on the other bank all the time. I can hardly describe the soldiers' love for them... And as time went on, there were more and more and more of them, and we

could feel it. It was hard to imagine at the time that there was such a concentration of guns firing their shells at the Germans, morning, noon and night, over our

heads !

[Znamia, No. 11, 1963, p. 7.]

Even so, to the Russians on the bridgeheads, Stalingrad continued to be a peculiar kind of hell. Thus, of the reinforcements that came from across the river Nekrasov told me:

There were times when these reinforcements were really pathetic. They'd bring

across the river—with great difficulty—say, twenty new soldiers: either old chaps of fifty or fifty-five, or youngsters of eighteen or nineteen. They would stand there on the shore, shivering with cold and fear. They'd be given warm clothing and then

taken to the front line. By the time these newcomers reached this line, five or ten out of twenty had already been killed by German shells; for with those German flares

over the Volga and our front lines, there was never complete darkness. But the

peculiar thing about these chaps was that those among them who reached the front

line very quickly became wonderfully hardened soldiers. Real frontoviks.

In his account Chuikov refers to several "critical" days at Stalingrad, between September 12, when he took over the command of the 62nd Army and the middle of November,

when the last German offensive failed. In fact, every day was "critical", except that some days were even more so than others. Thus, September 21 and 22— i.e. a week after the Rodimtsev Division had joined in the fighting— were specially "critical". It was then that the Germans occupied a large part of the "business quarter" of Stalingrad and split the 62nd Army in two by breaking through to the Central Pier on the Volga.

One of the grimmest stories of Russian endurance that Chuikov tells is that of the 1st battalion of Colonel Yelin's regiment; this battalion had, for days, been fighting for the railway station; when the Germans captured this, the Russian survivors entrenched

themselves in a stone building in the neighbourhood, and finally only six survivors, all more or less seriously wounded, made their way to the Volga, and even so not until they had completely run out of ammunition. Here they improvised a raft of sorts, and drifted downstream, and were finally picked up by a Russian anti-aircraft crew and sent to

hospital. They had eaten nothing for three days. The dead and the heavily wounded had been left behind in their last stronghold inside central Stalingrad, now in the hands of the Germans.

The loss of the Central Pier required a reorganisation of the communication lines across the Volga. The Volga river flotilla continued to function, despite heavy losses, both north and south of the Central Pier; moreover, a foot-bridge, resting on empty iron barrels, was built across the river, farther to the north.

[The official map (in WOVSS, vol. 2, p. 440) shows that south of the Central Pier the Russians still held a small bridgehead in central Stalingrad, barely half a mile wide and a few hundred yards deep, on September 26; it was later abandoned, but it is not clear exactly when.]

To strengthen the rapidly dwindling Rodimtsev division, a number of other famous

divisions were transported to Stalingrad at the end of September—Batyuk's (largely

composed of Siberians) and Gorishnyi's. Rodimtsev was reinforced by 2,000 new men.

[The term "division" is in the case of Stalingrad misleading, since many of these

"divisions" were only 2,000 or 3,000 strong and often even smaller.]

Both sides had suffered staggering losses in the fighting in central Stalingrad. But, according to Chuikov, the Germans' breakthrough to the Volga at the Central Pier was only a "partial success", since their attempt to outflank the Russians to the north of them along the river failed completely. Here the Germans came up against the stubborn

resistance of the Rodimtsev, Batyuk and Gorishnyi divisions, the Batra-kov Brigade, and other troops. In this attempt, the Germans lost "dozens of tanks and thousands of men".

By September 24 the Germans had occupied most of central Stalingrad, and now aimed

their main blows at the industrial area in the north. Chuikov quotes with much

satisfaction a German observer, General Hans Dörr, who described the war in north

Stalingrad as follows:

These battles were in the nature of a positional or "fortress" war. The time for big operations was over... We now had to fight on the Volga heights cut by ravines; this industrial area of Stalingrad, built on extremely uneven ground, and composed of

buildings built of stone, iron and concrete, presented new difficulties. As a measure of length, a metre now replaced a kilometre. Fierce actions had to be fought for

every house, workshop, water-tower, raised railway track, wall or cellar, and even for every heap of rubble. There was nothing, even in World War I, to equal the

enormous expenditure of ammunition. The no-man's land between us and the

Russians was reduced to an absolute minimum, and, despite the intensive activity of our bombers and our artillery, there was no means of widening this "close combat"

gap. The Russians were better than the Germans at camouflage, and more

experienced in barricade fighting for separate houses; their defence lines were very strong... The catastrophe that later followed has eclipsed these weeks of "siege". But it is the story of heroic deeds by small units, storm groups and many nameless

German soldiers..."

If the Germans had reason to congratulate themselves on the heroism of their soldiers, the Russians had even more reason to do so, especially as German superiority in tanks and aircraft continued to be very great. By and large, the Germans, supported by aircraft and tanks, attacked during the day. For the Russians, as Chuikov says, "the night was their element". The effectiveness of the German tanks and aircraft was, however, limited by two factors: observing that the Germans were not good at precision bombing, Chuikov

had devised a tactic of "close combat", whereby the no-man's land never exceeded "the distance of a hand-grenade throw": this kept the Russian front lines more or less immune from air attack; as for the tanks, these found it more and more difficult to operate as the mountains of rubble accumulated in the streets of Stalingrad. Highly favourable to the Russians, too, was the powerful fire of the guns and katyusha mortars from the other side of the river; these caused havoc among any German troop concentrations, and in the

German positions, which were usually more exposed, and less well camouflaged than the Russians'.

On September 27, the Germans began their first big offensive against the industrial area of Stalingrad. "Hundreds of dive-bombers" attacked the Russians, and the Germans, though suffering heavy losses, crossed the Russian minefields and advanced between

2,000 and 3,000 yards. Gorishnyi's troops lost the top of Mamai Hill and what was left of them entrenched themselves on its north-east slope. "One more such day," Chuikov commented, "and we would have been thrown into the Volga."

Chuikov sent an SOS to the War Council asking for reinforcements, especially in the air.

[To Mr. Khrushchev personally, according to his 1959 book.]

Two infantry regiments, under General Smekhotvorov crossed the Volga that night and

were promptly sent to reinforce the troops in the Red October Garden City. The remnants of Gorishnyi's and Batyuk's troops counter-attacked on Mamai Hill. On the morning of September 28 the Germans resumed the attack, their planes concentrating not only on the Russian troops, but also on the Volga shipping. Of the six cargo ships on the Volga, five were put out of action that day. Some oil tanks in the neighbourhood of Chuikov's

command-post were set on fire by German bombing.

The staff at my command post were choking with the heat and smoke. The fire of

the flaming oil tanks was crawling down to our dugouts. Every dive-bomber attack

was killing people and putting our wireless sets out of action. Even Glinka, our cook, who had set up his field kitchen in a bomb crater, was wounded.

And yet, the German attacks lacked the coherence and self-assurance of the previous day.

Supported by tanks, entire battalions would hurl themselves into the attacks, and this enabled us to concentrate our artillery fire on them...I then appealed for help to General Khrukin, commander of our air force, and he threw in all he had. It was

during this big Russian air-raid that Batyuk's and Gorishnyi's troops again

attacked Mamai Hill; they made an appreciable advance, though they failed to seize the summit, which remained a no-man's land, and continued to be shelled by both

sides. That day, the Germans lost 1,500 men in dead alone, and some fifty tanks. On Mamai Hill alone, there were 500 German corpses.

Chuikov admits, of course, that the Russian losses were very heavy too.

Our tank units had 626 casualties (dead and wounded), Batyuk lost 300 men and the Gorishnyi Division, though continuing to fight, was bled white. Many hundreds of

Russian wounded were now on the river bank, waiting to be evacuated; with the

shipping losses that day this was no easy task. The delivery of ammunitions had also become extremely difficult. And, meantime, reconnaissance reported that the

Germans were preparing to launch another major attack against the Red October

plant. The real battle for industrial Stalingrad was only beginning.

On September 29, the Germans proceeded to "liquidate" the eleven-mile-deep and three-mile-wide "Orlovka" salient to the northwest of the industrial area of Stalingrad. Here again we find in Chuikov's book some angry polemics against the command of the

Stalingrad Front (now called the Don Front) beyond the German "Rynok" salient to the north of Stalingrad.

[ The changes in name, and in command, of the "fronts" to the north and south of Stalingrad have led to a lot of confusion. In early August Yeremenko was in command of the army groups both north (the "Stalingrad Front") and south of the city, with Golikov as his deputy in the south (the "South East Front")—and also of the troops inside the city.

Then on September 28 (i.e. before the Orlovka battle), according to both Yeremenko and the official history 'IVOVSS, vol. 2, p. 444) the army group to the north, previously the Stalingrad Front, was renamed the "Don Front", and placed under General Rokossovsky, and that to the south was now called the "Stalingrad Front" and was under Yeremenko

"as before". Chuikov's troops in the city came under command of the "new" Stalingrad front and were therefore still under Yeremenko. So when Chuikov criticises the

"Stalingrad Front" for not helping in the Orlovka battle from the north, he must really mean what had then become the Don Front. He is therefore in fact criticising

Rokossovsky and not, as would appear, Yeremenko.]

Twice before Yeremenko (and his deputy, Gordov, Chuikov's bête noire) had failed to break through the German salient and come to the rescue of the 62nd Army.

Chuikov argues that the existence of the Orlovka bulge gave the troops in the north a wonderful opportunity to cut through the German "Rynok" salient, which was only five miles wide; but once again, when the German attack on the Orlovka salient was serious, the opportunity to help the 62nd Army was missed.

The small number of troops under Andrusenko, Smekhotvorov and Sologub defending

the Orlovka bulge, had already suffered very heavy losses in the first two days of the German attack. Some, under Andrusenko, were then encircled, and fought on for nearly another week. Then, having run out of ammunition, 120 men broke out of the

encirclement on the night of October 8; the remaining 380 were left behind, dead or

severely wounded.

A few days before, the command of the Stalingrad [Don] Front asked me what

measures I was taking to hold the Orlovka bulge... What could I reply? The best

answer would have been that the Stalingrad [Don] Front should strike out from the north at the rear of the German divisions attacking Orlovka. But no one was

planning such a blow. For my own part, I had no reserves. With the Germans

threatening to strike a powerful blow at the Stalingrad Tractor Plant and the

Barricades Plant, I could not afford to help those in the Orlovka bulge.

Marshal Yeremenko, in his book, Stalingrad, published in 1961, i.e. two years after Chuikov's book, treats the liquidation of the Orlovka bulge as an inevitable war casualty, and makes no attempt to answer Chuikov's very serious charges of apathy and inactivity on the part of the commanders of the army-group to the north. It may well be that, with an eye on the coming Russian counter-offensive, the commanders of the "Stalingrad" or

"Don" Front preferred to remain inactive, trusting that Chuikov would somehow succeed in holding his Stalingrad bridgeheads. If so, it was a dangerous gamble, since on October 14, as we shall see, and again in November, the 62nd Army was very nearly wiped out.

*

For the Russians, October was the cruellest month in Stalingrad. On October I, Major-General Guriev's 39th Guards Division arrived in Stalingrad, where it was to defend the Red October Plant for many critical days. (Some of its survivors were later to fight all the way to Berlin). On the same day, another famous division crossed the Volga —that of

Colonel Gurtiev. These men, many of them Siberians, were to bear the brunt of some of the heaviest fighting in the northern part of Stalingrad during October.

[Gurtiev himself was to be killed at Orel in the summer of 1943.]

Equally tough new troops were the guardsmen under General Zholudev. These were

really guardsmen. All of them were young and tall, and healthy, many of them in

paratroop uniform, with knives and daggers tucked into their belts. They went in

for bayonet charges, and would throw a dead Nazi over their shoulder like a sack of straw. For house-to-house fighting, there was no one quite like them. They would

attack in small groups, and, breaking into houses and cellars, they would use their knives and daggers. Even when encircled, they went on fighting, and would die

crying: "For country and Stalin! But we shall never surrender."

[ In the second (1961) edition of Chuikov's book the mention of Stalin is deleted—both here and practically everywhere else.]

For Chuikov himself, October started particularly badly. His H.Q. near the Barricades Plant again happened to be close to some oil tanks; these were set aflame by German

bombers, and the burning oil poured across the H.Q.'s dugouts towards the Volga, and enveloped them in a sea of flame.

At first we almost lost our heads. What were we to do? Then my chief of staff,

General Krylov, gave the order: "Sit tight. Stay in the undamaged dugouts and keep up radio communications with the troops!" Then he said to me in a whisper: "Do you think we can hold out?" "Yes," I said. "At a pinch, we've got our revolvers."

"All right," he said. We understood each other perfectly.

I must admit that when I first looked out of the dugout, I was dazzled by the flames and overwhelmed. But Krylov's order brought me to my senses... Though encircled

by flames, we continued to work, and to direct the troops.

The fire went on for several days, and we had no other H.Q. in reserve. All our

troops, including our engineers, were fighting the Germans. So we had to carry on as best we could—in the surviving dugouts, in holes and trenches, often under

enemy fire. We did not sleep for several days and nights.

In these conditions, Chuikov was exasperated by the frequent phone calls from General Zakharov, Yeremenko's chief of staff, ostensibly asking for all kinds of details (which, in the circumstances, Chuikov was unable to supply) but, in fact, anxious to make sure that Chuikov's H.Q. still existed.

It was neither funny nor easy to spell out code words over the wireless with bombs and shells landing all round us. These unnecessary talks often resulted in the radio operators being killed, with the microphones in their hands.

Here, as elsewhere in the book, the frontovik's contempt for the staff officer living in relatively normal surroundings on the "safe" side of the Volga comes out strongly.

Worse still, after the flames had abated three days later, the Germans began to shell and bomb the Army H.Q. Numbers of men at the H.Q. were killed or wounded. With great

difficulty, the H.Q. was moved at night some 500 yards farther north, to the H.Q. of General Sarayev's division, which had been practically wiped out, and was now being

reconstituted on the other side of the Volga.

During all that first week of October, there had been heavy fighting in the industrial area of Stalingrad. By October 7, the Germans captured part of the Tractor Plant Garden City.

Often the Russians had some good luck, though. A katyusha hit at 6 p.m. that day wiped out a whole battalion of advancing German troops. Smekhotvorov's troops were,

meantime, fighting a stiff battle in the Red October Garden City. One building there changed hands five times during the day.

By October 8 it was clear that the Germans were preparing for an all-out offensive.

Hitler had promised his vassals to capture Stalingrad within the next few days. The German soldiers would shout from their trenches: "Russ, skoro bul-bul u Volga."

("You'll soon be blowing bubbles in the Volga. ") The German planes were showering leaflets on the city... These showed us surrounded on all sides by tanks and guns, and also mockingly reminded us of the "Stalingrad Front's" failure to break through to us from the north.

For four days—between the 9th and the 13th of October—there was a relative lull, and then, on October 14, all hell broke loose. Before this "final" German offensive, the depth of the main bridgehead held by the 62nd Army—i.e. the distance between the Volga and the front line was about two miles. If, Chuikov argues, the Germans had organised their attack properly, they could have broken through in one and a half or two hours. But the precautions taken by the Russians and the incredible stubbornness of their troops

prevented catastrophe. Nevertheless, it was touch-and-go.

Here is Chuikov's description of this "unforgettable" day:

The 14th of October marked the beginning of a battle unequalled in its cruelty and ferocity throughout the whole of the Stalingrad fighting. Three infantry and two

panzer divisions were hurled against us along a five-km. front... There were three thousand German air sorties that day. They bombed and stormed our troops

without a moment's respite. The German guns and mortars showered on us shells

and bombs from morning till night. It was a sunny day, but owing to the smoke and soot, visibility was reduced to 100 yards. Our dugouts were shaking and crumbling up like a house of cards... The main blow was delivered against Gorishnyi's,

Zholudev's and Gurtiev's troops, and the 84th tank brigade—all in the general

direction of the Stalingrad Tractor Plant and the Barricades Plant. By 11.30 a.m.

180 German tanks broke through Zholudev's positions to the stadium of the Tractor Plant... By 4 p.m. Sologub's, Zholudev's and Gurtiev's troops... were encircled but still fighting.

The reports from the various units were becoming more and more confusing... The

command and observation posts of regiments and divisions were being smashed by

shells and bombs. At my Army's command post thirty people were killed. The

guards scarcely had time to dig the officers out of the smashed dugouts of the Army H.Q. The troops had to be directed by radio; transmitters had been set up on the

other side of the Volga, and we communicated with them, and they then passed on

our orders to the fighting units on this side of the river.

... By midnight it was clear that the invaders had surrounded the Stalingrad Tractor Plant, and that fighting was going on in the workshops. We reckoned that the

Germans had lost forty tanks during the day, and around the Tractor Plant there

were 3,000 German dead. We also suffered very heavy losses that day. During the

night 3,500 wounded soldiers and officers were taken across the Volga; this was a record figure.

The Germans had managed to advance two kilometres (over a mile and a quarter) during the day; they had captured the Tractor Plant and had, indeed, cut the Russian forces in two. To the north of the Tractor Plant there was now only a small area in Russian hands: the small number of troops there were under the command of Colonel Gorokhov.

On the 15th the Germans continued to attack strongly; again thousands of bombs were

showered on the Russians, and the German tommy-gunners were trying to break through

to Chuikov's Army H.Q.

But von Paulus [says Chuikov] was short of that one battalion which might have

captured the Army headquarters, only 300 yards away. And yet we decided not to

move, and to fight on.

Nevertheless, Chuikov does not hesitate to describe the situation as "desperate"; owing to constant German air attacks, radio was working intermittently, not only on the right bank of the river, but also on the left bank, where an emergency command post had been set up. This was particularly serious since most of the Russian artillery was on the left bank, and communications were, for a time, as good as paralysed.

The Russian losses were mounting up at a disastrous rate. In two days' fighting

Zholudev's and Gorishnyi's troops had lost seventy-five per cent of their effective. On the night of October 15-16 a regiment under Colonel Ludnikov crossed the Volga and

entered the fray to the north of the Barricades Plant. But, as Chuikov says, this regiment, and the miserable remnants of the Gorishnyi and Zholudev divisions would have been

helpless against overwhelming German strength but for the Russian artillery on the other side of the river, the guns of the Volga flotilla and the stormovik planes which, with heavy losses, were breaking through the clouds of German planes and attacking the

advancing German troops. On the night of October 17-18 two more regiments of the

Ludnikov division crossed the Volga. That was also the night on which Chuikov was to receive a visit from General Yeremenko.

I went to meet him at the pier. Shells were exploding all over the place, and the Germans were shelling the Volga with their six-barrel mortars. Hundreds of

wounded soldiers were crawling to the pier. Often we had to step over dead bodies.

The meeting with Yeremenko was not a very happy one. Chuikov clamoured, above all,

for ammunition, and when, on the following day, he heard what was to be sent, he was furious. Instead of a month's supply, he was now promised a day's supply. He protested strongly, and the figure was "slightly revised".

[ Yeremenko gives a rather more dramatic account of his visit {Stalingrad, pp. 233-4).

"In talking on October 15 on the phone to Chuikov, I felt that the Army Commander's spirit had somewhat deteriorated. So I decided, without delay, to visit the 62nd Army.

The situation that had developed there was, indeed, alarming. Mamai Hill and (the

adjoining) height 107-5 ... were in enemy hands, and the Germans were dominating the city and keeping our river crossings under intensive fire, and so paralysing them...

(Chuikov) rather strongly protested against my visit, since it meant crossing the Volga under intensive shelling, and then walking five miles along the shore under rifle,

machine-gun and mortar fire... However, we were used to that kind of thing; we had

experienced such fire hundreds of times; in August and September the H.Q. of the War Council of the Front, being situated in the centre of Stalingrad, had been under constant bombing and shelling."

He then describes how he sailed for ten km. up the river, despite constant shelling, and landed near the Red October Plant. Owing to the constant German flares it was light all the time. Although all along the embankment mountains of wreckage were piled up and

the whole area was riddled with shell-holes and bomb-craters, there was an

"extraordinary animation" along this embankment: reinforcements and supplies were arriving all the time in a continuous stream, and the wounded were being evacuated—and all under constant shell-fire. Before Yeremenko had reached Chuikov's H.Q. near the

Barricades Plant, "a number of the comrades accompanying me had been killed or

wounded by bomb or shell splinters ". Yeremenko also tells how, while at Chuikov's H.Q., he talked to the commanders of

some of the famous Stalingrad divisions. Particularly pathetic was his talk with Colonel Zholudev, who had lost practically all his men in the last German offensive. "Over a thousand German planes attacked us, and then we were attacked by 150 German tanks,

followed by waves of infantry. And yet nobody abandoned his post." Zholudev spoke to Yerernenko with tears in his eyes...

It appears from his account that while the War Council of the Front was now stationed on the other side of the Volga, some ten km. south of the main fighting, it had been in central Stalingrad during August and part of September. This is apparently also where Khrushchev (and Malenkov?) were stationed at the time.

In his story, Yerernenko does not mention any disagreement with Chuikov.]

Altogether, Chuikov does not seem to have cared for visitors: he vetoed a visit to

Stalingrad by Manuilsky on behalf of the Central Committee. He declared that the

Stalingrad troops did not need any pep talks from Manuilsky and it would only annoy

Comrade Stalin if Manuilsky got killed— which was quite possible in the circumstances.

With the Germans increasingly active on the bank of the Volga near the Tractor Plant, Chuikov found it necessary to move his headquarters farther south, to a ravine near

Mamai Hill. These dugouts were to remain the Army H.Q. till the end of the Stalingrad Battle. This H.Q., inside the Volga cliffs was just over 1,000 yards from Mamai Hill—for that was now the maximum depth of the main Stalingrad bridgehead still in Russian

hands.

On October 19 and 20 the Germans continued their attacks, chiefly in the Barricades and Red October areas, but they already seemed to lack their former punch. Judging from the prisoners' statements, morale among the German troops, especially the newcomers, was low. The Russians were, however, also very short of troops, and Chuikov had to scrape the bottom of the barrel by drawing on all kinds of people in the Army's rear services—

shoemakers, tailors, and men in charge of horses, stores, etc.

These poorly trained or wholly untrained people became "specialists" in street fighting, as soon as they stepped on to the ground of Stalingrad. "It was pretty terrifying," they would say, "to cross over to Stalingrad, but once we got there we felt better. We knew that, beyond the Volga there was nothing, and that if we were to remain alive, we had to destroy the invaders."

It should be added that, by this time, the "prestige value" of having fought at Stalingrad was enormous.

Summing up the results of the fierce ten-days' fighting between October 14 and 23,

Chuikov says:

Both the Germans' strength and our strength were on the wane. In these last ten

days, the Germans had once again cut our army in two, and had inflicted on us very serious losses. They had captured the Tractor Plant, but had failed to destroy either the northern group [under Gorokhov] or the Army's main forces south of it. Yet the Germans still had reserves, as we knew from our reconnaissance... But our forces

had been decimated; the 37th, 208th and 193rd divisions were little more than

numbers. All they represented was a few hundred rifles.

The Germans renewed their attacks in the Barricades and Red October sectors, and

between the two factories they were now within 400 yards of the Volga. The last Russian Volga crossing was then in range of machine-gun fire. Stone walls had to be erected

across the ravines to stop these machine-gun bullets—no easy task in the circumstances.

On October 27, parts of a new division under General Sokolov began to arrive at

Stalingrad; but the crossing of the Volga met with great difficulties. Meantime, the Germans had struck another violent blow at the Red October Plant, and captured the

north-west part of the factory's territory. It was here that one of the most famous and deadly battles was to be fought for weeks afterwards.

Pending the arrival of reinforcements, Chuikov was reduced to all kinds of

"psychological" expedients.

One day we had the good luck of discovering on the battlefield three half-wrecked tanks, including one flame-throwing tank. We quickly had them repaired, and

Colonel Wainrub, my tank commander, decided to throw in these tanks along

Samarkand Street, where the Germans had nearly broken through to the Volga...

The attack started early in the morning, on October 28, before daybreak. The attack was supported by artillery and katyusha fire. We failed to capture a large area, but the effect was very impressive all the same. The flame-throwing tank destroyed

three enemy tanks, and the other two killed off the Germans in two trenches, which were promptly taken over by our men... The Nazi radio started screaming about

"Russian tanks", as though trying to justify Paulus's failure to finish us off.

[ This story of the three tanks is reminiscent of another piece of Russian "bluff" at Stalingrad, as described in one of Nekrasov's stories—that of a soldier who, with one machine-gun, pretended to have a whole trenchful of soldiers with him—a story which, he assured me, was based on fact.]

After two more days of heavy German attacks against Ludnikov's, Gurtiev's and Batyuk's men, there came a lull.

By October 30 we began to feel that we were winning the battle. It was clear that Paulus was no longer able to repeat his October 14 offensive which brought us to the brink of catastrophe.

But it was not over yet. The bridgeheads held by the Russians were only a few hundred yards deep in some places, and during the first ten days of November, the Russians made many attacks, mostly at night, in a vain attempt to enlarge them, if only slightly.

On November 11, the Germans launched their last major attack on the defenders of

Stalingrad. Advancing along a three-mile front, five German divisions, supported by

tanks and aircraft, tried to crash through to the Volga at one fell swoop. But the Russians were so well entrenched that the Germans made only little progress. The fighting went on, in Chuikov's words, "for every brick and stone, for every yard of the Stalingrad earth".

At Mamai Hill Batyuk's troops fought desperately against advancing enemy forces.

Factory chimneys were crashing down under the blow of shells and bombs. The

heaviest blows were struck at Ludnikov's and Gorishnyi's men. By noon, out of the 250 soldiers of the 118th Guards regiment, only six men were left. The colonel of the regiment was severely wounded. Throwing in reserves, the Germans then broke

through to the Volga along a 500-yard stretch; thus, for the third time, the 62nd Army was cut in two, and Ludnikov's division was cut off from the rest. But

nowhere else did the Germans make any appreciable progress. Heavy fighting

continued, as before, at the Red October and Barricades, and round Mamai Hill...

The 62nd Army had received some reinforcements during the previous days; in particular a large number of sailors of the Pacific Fleet had been drafted into Gorishnyi's division.

These Siberians were tough fighters.

The German attacks continued on the following day, without much effect, and, by the

middle of November 12 the offensive had petered out. Nevertheless, the Germans had

gained a little ground and had reduced the area in Russian hands still further. In some places, the distance between the German lines and the Volga, now covered with ice-floes, was barely 100 yards wide. Also, the Ludni-kov division was now isolated from the rest of the 62nd Army on a small bridgehead south of the Barricades, now in German hands.

Most of the Red October Plant had also been captured by the Germans. During the days that followed, the Russian attempt to break through the 500 yard German salient on the Volga dividing them from Ludnikov's men, failed. These had to be supplied by small PO-2 reconnaissance planes at night, and it was not until several days later that a few small

"armoured" [According to Yeremenko, any bullet could have pierced this "armour"]

cutters) of the Volga Flotilla reached the Ludnikov bridgehead through the ice-floes and evacuated 150 wounded men.

But Ludnikov's men had to fight on for more than another month before breaking out of their virtual encirclement.

It was only a week after the Germans' last all-out attempt to dislodge the Russians from the remaining Stalingrad bridgeheads that the great counter-offensive started, the Russian troops of the Don and North-West Fronts striking out from the north, and those of the Stalingrad Front from the south, and the two closing the ring at Kalach, at the eastern end of the Don Bend only four days later.

The news of the counter-offensive [See pp. 493 ff.]—which had been expected for some time—was received with immense joy and relief by the men of the 62nd Army. Stalin's

forecast of November 7 that "there would soon be a holiday in our street" was coming true.

For all that, the position of the 62nd Army at Stalingrad continued to be a highly

uncomfortable one. In the north, there was the small bridgehead held by Gorokhov's men.

Then, near the Barricades, there was another small bridgehead of half a square mile held by Colonel Ludnikov's men. The main bridgehead, about five miles long, was, in

Chuikov's words, "a narrow strip of ruins".

The left flank of the main bridgehead, held by Rodimtsev's men, was a strip of land only a few hundred yards wide. The maximum depth of the bridgehead, east of Mamai Hill,

was only a little over a mile. Chuikov's H.Q. was inside the Volga cliffs, east of Mamai Hill; he also had an observation post between the two, on the railway embankment. All the Russian positions were under German shell-fire, and most of them were even exposed to machine-gun fire. With the Germans holding part of the Mamai heights, they were able to subject the Russian Volga crossings to precision shelling. So Chuikov's two immediate targets were to join up with Ludnikov's men and to recapture the Mamai heights, which would in effect double the depth of the bridgehead there.

By November 20 the Volga, covered with ice-floes, was no longer navigable, and, with the great counter-offensive having begun, the 62nd Army could no longer expect any

reinforcements in either men or equipment, anyway. Only small quantities of food and ammunition could be flown over by PO-2 reconnaissance planes. It was not till December 16 that the Volga froze, and individual soldiers could now bring ammunition over the ice in small sleighs.

The problem of dislodging the Germans from their Barricades salient on the Volga was no easy one. They had entrenched themselves in the ruins of factory buildings, and two days of heavy shelling from the other side of the Volga did not make them give up. It took several days of often hand-to-hand fighting, with Ludnikov's men attacking from the north, and Gorishnyi's men from the south, before the salient was eliminated, with heavy casualties on both sides. The junction was not made till December 23.

On December 25 Guriev's men stormed the parts of the Red October Plant in German

hands; here it also came to hand-to-hand fighting for every room and workshop. The

Germans had turned the main office of the Red October Plant into a powerful firing-

point; and their resistance ended only when the whole building was smashed by artillery fire at close range. This kind of house-to-house fighting was to continue almost to the end. As Chuikov says:

The streets and squares of Stalingrad continued to be deserted.

Neither we nor the Germans could act openly. Whoever stuck his head out or ran

across the street was inevitably shot by a sniper or tommy-gunner.

Chuikov says that, even after they knew they were encircled, the German troops

continued to fight well, and remained confident that Manstein's tank army would break through to relieve them.

Up to the end of December they continued to live in hopes and put up a desperate

resistance, often literally to the last cartridge. We practically took no prisoners, since the Nazis just wouldn't surrender. Not till after Manstein's failure to break through did morale among the German troops begin to decline very noticeably.

The growing shortage of both food and ammunition began to tell. Nevertheless, in

numerous places in Stalingrad, even after January 10, when the final liquidation of the

"cauldron" had begun, the stiff resistance of the Germans continued, notably in the Mamai Hill area, which they were determined to hold to the last. Here they continued to resist and even to counter-attack up to January 25, i.e. a week before the final surrender of the German Stalingrad forces.

Chapter II THE "STALINGRAD" MONTHS IN MOSCOW—The

Churchill Visit and After.

Unlike the early months of the Invasion, when the communiqués were cagey in the

extreme, the war communiqués in the summer and autumn of 1942 were, on the whole,

remarkably candid. The loss of this or that town was sometimes only admitted after a few days' delay and the communiqués often used euphemisms such as "the approaches of Stalingrad" when in reality the fighting was already inside the city; but the general picture was almost perfectly clear throughout. From the beginning of August (after the post-Rostov reforms) to August 25—which started, as it were, a new phase in the fighting

—the communiqués were almost calculatedly cruel in their candour. As early as August 8, the communiqué spoke of fighting "north of Kotelnikovo", which meant that the Germans had crossed the Don in strength and were now advancing on Stalingrad from the south. More depressing still were the parts of the communiqués dealing with the German lightning advance into the Kuban and the Caucasus. In quick succession the losses of Krasnodar, the capital of the Kuban, of the oil city, Maikop, of Mineralnyie Vody,

Piatigorsk, Essentuki and Kislovodsk, the famous watering-places in the foothills of the Caucasus were announced. It was also admitted that the Germans were breaking through the mountains on their way to Novorossisk and the Black Sea Coast, and that, in the

Eastern Caucasus, they were pushing on towards the oil city of Grozny and the Caspian, with Baku as their target.

No doubt, there were stories of outstanding heroic deeds performed by individual units, and on August 19, Sovinformbureau published some more than improbable figures of

German losses. On the same day, the Red Star found some solace in the thought that the Germans were attacking on a much smaller front than in 1941, and with less "sureness of touch" than even in July 1942; more and more, the German offensive was working "in fits and starts", and the Russian resistance in the Don Bend had already upset Hitler's time-table.

The swift German advances into the Kuban and the Caucasus had a very depressing

effect in Moscow, though some experts were saying that the real test would come once the Germans had reached the mountains. Nevertheless, the loss of the Kuban country, one of the richest agricultural areas of Russia, was keenly felt. Even more was the thought that millions more Russians would now be under German occupation. But as the

Germans approached Stalingrad, there was a curious feeling from the start that here it would come to a real showdown. The very name Stalingrad, with all the legends woven round it since the Civil War, suggested that the place had a sort of symbolic (therefore political) significance, and that Stalin's own prestige was directly involved. It is hard to say by what subtle propaganda this idea was put across, but the germs of the "Stalingrad legend" were there even before the battle had started.

[ I find that in my Diary I wrote as early as July 13: "Black as things are, I somehow feel that Stalingrad is going to provide something very big. Stalin's own prestige is involved."

(Quoted in The Year of Stalingrad, p. 140).]

Yet it would be absurd to say that the possibility of the loss of Stalingrad was excluded; on the contrary, between the end of August and, roughly, the last week of October,

everybody was extremely conscious that the situation at Stalingrad was highly critical.

It was while the military situation in Russia looked particularly desperate that Churchill arrived in Moscow on August 12. The Russians were in full retieat in the North

Caucasus, and the Germans were approaching Stalingrad, and about to break through to the Volga north of the city.

Since the brief Anglo-Soviet honeymoon, which had culminated in the meeting of the

Supreme Soviet of June 18, relations had been rapidly deteriorating. The correspondence between Churchill and Stalin, especially in July and the beginning of August, points to growing exasperation on both sides. The three main points were the Second Front, the sending of convoys to Northern Russia and the Poles.

Churchill had become increasingly doubtful about the possibility of running convoys to Murmansk and Archangel. As early as May 20 he wrote that the PQ 16 convoy of thirty-five ships had left for Russia, but that "unless the weather is again favourable enough to hamper German air operations, we should expect the greater part of the ships and the war materials they carry to be lost." He proposed therefore that the Russians try to bomb German air bases in Northern Norway. Stalin replied that the Russians would give the convoy what air cover they could, but did not answer Churchill's suggestion about the bombing of Norwegian airfields; the Russians, obviously had no bombers available for the purpose.

As it happened, twenty-seven out of the thirty-five ships of the PQ 16 (the one on which I sailed) got through to Murmansk; but the next convoy, the PQ 17 ended in disaster.

Churchill wrote Stalin a long letter on July 18. He recalled that Britain had started running small convoys to Russia as early as August 1941, and that these were not

interfered with until December. The problem had become much more difficult after that.

In February 1942 the Germans had moved "a considerable force of U-boats and a large number of aircraft" to Northern Norway; nevertheless, the convoys "got through with varying, but not prohibitive losses". Not satisfied with these results, the Germans then sent their surface forces to the north.

Before the May convoy (PQ 16) was sent off, the Admiralty warned us that the

losses would be very severe if, as was expected the Germans used their surface

forces to the east of Bear Island. We decided to sail the convoy. The attack by

surface forces did not materialise, and the convoy got through with a loss of one-sixth, chiefly from air attack. But in the case of the PQ 17 convoy the Germans at last used their forces in the manner we had always feared... At the moment only four ships have arrived at Archangel, but six others are in Novaya Zemlya harbours.

These may, however, be attacked from the air separately.

In short, Churchill announced his decision to discontinue the Arctic convoys until further notice:

We do not think it right to risk our Home Fleet eastward of Bear Island... If one or two of our most powerful types were to be lost or even seriously damaged while the Tirpitz and her consorts... remained in action, the whole command of the Atlantic would be lost.

Food supplies by which Britain lived would be affected; and her whole war effort would be crippled.

Above all, the great convoys of American troops across the ocean, rising presently to as many as 80,000 a month, would be prevented... and a really strong Second Front in 1943 rendered impossible.

Churchill had decided to cancel the PQ 18 convoy, but proposed to send "some of the ships" to the Persian Gulf instead. The same letter also mentioned the "three divisions of Poles" who were anxious to get out of Russia, together with their women and children.

Stalin had agreed to their departure, but now Churchill was anxious:

I hope this project of yours, which we greatly value, will not fall to the ground on account of the Poles wanting to bring with the troops a considerable number of

women and children. The feeding of these dependants will be a considerable burden to us. But we think it well worth while bearing that burden for the sake of forming this Polish army which will be used faithfully for our common advantage.

These Poles were to move to Iran and Palestine, and Churchill was obviously in a hurry to get them all out of Russia. On July 23 Stalin sent a furious reply to this message: I gather, first, that the British Government refuses to go on supplying the Soviet Union with war materials by the northern route, and secondly,... is putting off the (Second Front) operation till 1943... Deliveries via Persian ports can in no way make up for the loss... In view of the situation on the Soviet-German Front, I state most emphatically that the Soviet Government cannot tolerate the Second Front in

Europe being postponed till 1943.

Stalin also violently criticised the Admiralty for mishandling the PQ 17 convoy, its dread of losing any warships, and its virtual decision to abandon the supply ships to their fate: Of course, I do not think that steady deliveries to northern Soviet ports are possible without risk or loss. But then no major task can be carried out in wartime without risk or losses... The Soviet Union is suffering far greater losses, and I never imagined that the British Government would deny us delivery of war materials precisely now, when the Soviet Union is badly in need of them.

Churchill was, clearly, thoroughly nettled by this obvious charge of gutlessness and bad faith, and in his very next message offered to meet Stalin at Astrakhan or in the Caucasus.

He said that another effort would be made to run a convoy to Archangel in September.

Stalin replied on July 31 inviting Churchill to Moscow. "The members of the

Government, the General Staff and myself cannot be away at this moment of bitter

fighting against the Germans."

Churchill promptly accepted to go to Moscow.

Churchill's story of that famous visit to Moscow is too well-known to need recalling here in any detail. But a few points should be mentioned. The visit was, obviously, distasteful to him. The task of telling Stalin that there would be no Second Front in 1942 "was like carrying a large lump of ice to the North Pole." The conversations ranged from extreme unpleasantness to a superficial mateyness; but there is little doubt that there was much about Stalin that impressed Churchill.

I met for the first time the great Revolutionary Chief and profound Russian

statesman and warrior with whom for the next three years I was to be in intimate, rigorous, but always exciting, and at times even genial association.

During his first meeting he gave him all the good reasons for not opening a Second Front in Europe in 1942, but then told him of operation "Torch" (the landing in North Africa).

Stalin "became intensely interested", and finally said: "May God prosper this undertaking." Stalin had quickly grasped the strategic advantages of "Torch": He recounted four main reasons for it: it would hit Rommel in the back... it would overawe Spain; it would produce fighting between Germans and Frenchmen in

France; it would expose Italy to the whole brunt of war.

I was deeply impressed with this remarkable statement. It showed the Russian

dictator's swift and complete mastery of a problem hitherto novel to him.

According to Churchill this first meeting went off remarkably well, but the next meeting was much less pleasant, and Churchill thought that, in the interval, Stalin had been influenced by the Council of Commissars, "who had not taken the news I had brought as well as he did." In an aide-mémoire Stalin handed Churchill during this second meeting he violently protested against the British decision not to have a Second Front in Europe in 1942. Further Notes were exchanged, to no great purpose.

In retrospect, the most interesting part of Churchill's story is Stalin's assessment of the military situation in Russia: he said a) that, with twenty-five divisions defending the Caucasus, the Germans would not cross the mountain range, and would not break through either to Baku or to Batum and, in two months, snow would make the mountains

impassable, and b) that he had other solid reasons for his confidence, including a counter-offensive on a great scale.

My own feeling (Churchill wrote to Attlee and Roosevelt) is that it is an even chance they will hold, but CIGS will not go as far as this.

[Churchill, The Second World War, vol. IV, pp. 425-8.])

There was also some inconclusive talk of a joint Soviet-British operation in Northern Norway.

Churchill records no talks with Stalin on the subject of the Poles; all he says is that, on his last night in Moscow, he had a meeting with General Anders. Of this he gives no

details.

On his last night (before seeing Anders) Churchill had gone to Stalin's private flat in the Kremlin to have dinner.

Molotov was also summoned. Stalin introduced me to his daughter, a nice girl, who kissed him shyly, but was not allowed to dine... The greatest goodwill prevailed, and for the first time we got on to easy and friendly terms. I feel I have established a personal relationship which will be helpful...He would rather have lorries than

tanks, of which he is making 2,000 a month. Also, he wants aluminium. On the

whole, I am encouraged by my visit to Moscow... Now they know the worst and,

having made their protest, they are entirely friendly, and this in spite of the fact that this is their most anxious and agonising time. Moreover, Stalin is entirely convinced of the great advantages of "Torch"...

[Ibid., pp. 450-1.])

Such is the gist of Churchill's story of his visit to Moscow in August 1942. The attitude to the Churchill visit, and to the Western Allies generally, on the part of the Moscow

population is a rather different story. Not only had the "Second Front communiqué" of June 11 been played up to a fantastic degree by the Soviet press, but it was also linked in the public mind with Stalin's somewhat ill-considered May-Day Order about "driving the Fascist invaders out of the Soviet Union in 1942." It was assumed that Stalin would have never issued such an order without being as good as certain that there would be a Second Front in the West.

Not only was the Russian population suffering very serious hardships (the winter had been terrible, and the spring and summer were not much better), but, when the military situation began to look truly catastrophic in July and August, the question of a Second Front in the immediate future became to many Russians almost a matter of life and death.

It should also be remembered that nearly every Russian one met had a father or brother, or son—or several brothers or sons—in the army, or else dead, wounded or missing. In the villages there were hardly any men left at all except youngsters or very old people.

Even at the height of the "honeymoon" there had been distrust of the Americans and especially of the British. The ratification of the Anglo-Soviet Alliance had been marked by a display of a lot of Soviet flags on public buildings, but no British flags. As we have seen, invidious comparisons were made between the desperate resistance at Sebastopol and the "gutless" surrender at Tobruk. I remember an educated-looking old woman in a tramcar saying:

"You can't possibly trust the British. Young people are not educated enough to know; but I know all about Dis-ra-eli" (she uttered the four-syllable name with a snarl); others were very distrustful of Churchill, whose attitude to Russia was often contrasted with that of Roosevelt, who was assumed to be much friendlier. During June, July and August, I

visited a variety of schools and talked to many young people. They were friendly; but there was only one thing they really wanted to know, and that was whether there was

going to be a Second Front, and if so, when.

There was little propaganda to popularise the British and American Allies. In June there were a few posters—one of three darts of lightning, with the Soviet, the American and the British flags striking down a toad-like Hitler, green with fear. Except for some newsreels of the Molotov visit to the USA and England, nothing much was made of the

alliance in either cinemas or theatres; and the only "pro-Allied" show I remember was a variety show at the Moscow Ermitage—which ended, somewhat fatuously, with an

exotic-looking young woman playing Tipperary on an accordion, and singing in a mixture of broken English and Russian, after which the whole company burst into what was meant to be a sort of Anglo-Soviet-American dance, in the setting of a great display of allied flags. The audience showed very little enthusiasm. This was at the beginning of July; the show was stopped soon after, and the three darts-of-lightning posters also disappeared, as well as the displays of the "Victory in 1942" slogan.

One of the minor accompaniments of the Anglo-Soviet Alliance and the American-Soviet Agreement was the formation in June of an Anglo-American Press Association; besides

being a gesture of special goodwill on the part of the Russians who had authorised this purely Anglo-American association to be set up, it gave them an opportunity to

concentrate their propaganda efforts on the British and American press.

As time went on, the exasperation about the lack of a Second Front grew. Stories went round Moscow of German leaflets showered on the Russians, saying "Where are the English?" [These were almost exactly like those dropped on French troops in 1939 and 1940.] or "The Rumanians and Hungarians are better allies to us than the English are to you."

In this atmosphere, the news of Churchill's visit was received with rather mixed feelings.

The first guess made by people like Ehrenburg was, roughly, the correct one: that

Churchill had come to "plead with Stalin and to withdraw the Second Front

communiqué". Apart from that the Russians were completely silent; and the two other sources of information, or rather, sources of hints, seemed unable to agree. The British Embassy kept hinting that Stalin and Churchill were "getting on like a house on fire" and, on the last day, Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr described the meeting as "an epoch-making event"—which was going to create a lot of confusion soon afterwards. Mr. Harriman and the Americans, on the other hand, kept on suggesting that the meetings had not gone well at all, and that if the Russians were to expect any immediate results from these bad-tempered meetings, they were going to be disappointed. It was also learned that the

British had asked for air bases in the Caucasus, a proposal the Russians had rejected.

However, even the Americans admitted that the atmosphere had improved somewhat

towards the end, and was "almost jovial" at the Kremlin banquet. It was said that Churchill had complimented Stalin on the "splendid Russian soldiers" to which Stalin had replied "Don't exaggerate. They aren't all that hot. In fact they are pretty bad still. But they are learning and improving every day; and they'll be all right before long."

The Russian public saw nothing of Churchill; he did not go to any theatre show; there was no embassy reception of any kind, and he even decided not to see the British and American press, who were seen instead by the Ambassador who then uttered that ill-considered phrase about the "epoch-making event".

However, the newsreel men were kept busy, and on his arrival at the airfield, Churchill's V-sign was interpreted by some Russians who saw it on the screen as meaning "Second Front". (In a cinema I heard a young girl, when the band played "God Save the King", asking her girl friend what the tune was, and receiving the reply: "Don't you know? That's the 'Internationale' in English.")

The communiqué published at the end of the Churchill visit and the editorials in the Russian press spoke of the close bonds between Britain and the Soviet Union, but were not very illuminating, and did not suggest any immediate results. Significantly, the Army paper, Red Star, did not publish an editorial of its own, but merely reprinted the Pravda editorial. Also, on the day of Churchill's departure, when, in his final statement, he said that he had "spoken his mind" to Stalin, Pravda printed an angry Yefimov cartoon ridiculing the German cardboard defences on the Channel—a theory Dieppe was,

unfortunately, going to disprove a few days later. Not that the Russians thought that Dieppe had proved anything, except perhaps a desire on the part of the British to show that the Second Front was "impossible".

The Russians also disliked Churchill's "hobnobbing" with General Anders during his Moscow visit, even though he appears to have had only one short meeting with him. It was (probably correctly) assumed that the stories Churchill was told about the

"imminent" defeat of the Red Army (whether he believed them or not) emanated in the first place from Anders, who, as the Russians knew only too well, was in a great hurry to pull the greatest possible number of Poles out of Russia. The story widely current in Moscow that Churchill had encouraged the Poles to leave the "sinking ship" added to Russian annoyance.

These stories did not appear in the press, but it should be remembered that the Party went in for a good deal of verbal propaganda, and kept up a fairly heavy barrage in this way against both the "saboteurs of the Second Front" and, more particularly, against the Poles.

In ideological terms, there were many "class enemies", and Churchill and certainly the Anders' Poles were amongst them. The fact that these Poles had some highly

understandable grievances against the Russians was, of course, overlooked.

On August 23 Stalingrad was bombed by 600 planes and to the north of the city the

Germans broke through to the Volga; this was not announced at the time. For the next week the communiqués rather vaguely (but ominously) spoke of "intensive" fighting northeast and north-west of Stalingrad, with occasional mentions of some local success.

During the first fortnight of September, the whole tone of the press was distinctly nervous in its comments on Stalingrad; and it was not till September 20 (five days after the arrival of the Rodimtsev division) that it began to speak of "heroic Stalingrad".

During the greater part of September, the press blew hot and cold: while admitting that the situation at Stalingrad was very serious, it gave some general reasons for being reasonably confident. Thus, much was made of the enormous progress made by the war

industries, of the supplies that were now reaching the army, and of the growing

discouragement among the Germans. In particular, much as he may have disliked doing

it, Ehrenburg frequently quoted desperate letters to German soldiers at the Russian front about the terror and horror of "British thousand-bomber raids". There was no Second Front, but the RAF was, all the same, having its uses.

Two things began to characterise the Soviet press coverage of Stalingrad during the last ten days of September: the detailed description of the peculiar nature of the fighting there (above all, the house-to-house fighting) and the birth of the Stalingrad Legend. Thus, on September 22, Red Star published an extremely detailed article on the technique of house-to-house (and even floor-to-floor and room-to-room) fighting.

[See The Year of Stalingrad, pp. 218-9.]

As for the Legend, the press was no longer as reticent as it had been during the first half of September. "Heroic Stalingrad" and the "heroic defenders of Stalingrad" now became daily phrases in the press. Simonov, Grossman, Krieger, and many other Soviet writers and journalists depicted the pathos, the grim and heroic atmosphere of the Stalingrad Battle. It was not until later that anyone questioned whether these articles were first-hand.

After the war, General Chuikov, in particular, debunked some of this reporting. But this was not always fair. Many Soviet reporters and, especially, photographers and cinema operators lost their lives at Stalingrad and in other battles.

Early in September the Russian press had applied the word "Verdun" to Stalingrad, and this word was seized on by the world press. But by the end of September, the Soviet press dismissed the parallel as absurd. Thus Yerusalimsky wrote in Red Star of September 27

that Stalingrad "by far exceeded Verdun", and pointed out that "Verdun was a first-class fortress; Stalingrad is not. Also, the Russian offensive in the east in 1916 diverted great German forces from Verdun;... now the opposite is true."

October 1942 was, as Stalin was to say a year later, the month in which the Soviet Union was in even greater danger than she had been at the time of the Battle of Moscow. The Battle of Stalingrad was going badly and on October 14 the city was very nearly lost.

There was also an acute deterioration in Anglo-Soviet relations. Wild accusations were hurled at Britain for playing a double game— which were not unrelated with the

extremely critical position at Stalingrad about the middle of the month.

The intensification of the Anti-British campaign (which had somewhat abated at the time of the Churchill visit and the Dieppe fiasco) had started some time before—to be precise, at the time of Wendell Willkie's visit to Moscow about September 20. Willkie had come as President Roosevelt's personal representative, and was made a great fuss of. His whole attitude to Russia contrasted, in Russian eyes, very favourably with Churchill's.

Photographs of him in the company of Stalin and Molotov appeared in every paper, and the most was made of his public utterances. He was shown a number of war factories and was taken on a trip to the Rzhev sector of the front west of Moscow, where the Russians were fighting a particularly fierce and heartbreaking "diversionist" action against the Germans, and suffering heavy losses with very little to show for it.

Several times Willkie clearly suggested that Roosevelt was all in favour of the Second Front that year, but he had met with opposition from the British generals, and from

Churchill himself.

I particularly remember the morning of September 26, just after his return from the

Rzhev sector of the front, when he invited me to breakfast at the Soviet Guest House in Ostrovsky Lane. He was wearing a smart blue silk dressing gown with white spots, and was the picture of health and vigour. He looked like a man who would live to be ninety.

How great his personal charm was everybody knows. The Russians were doing him

proud; there was caviare for breakfast, and even grapes, the first I had seen that year.

"It's a very tricky problem I'm up against," he said. "How is one to explain to the American public that the Russians are in a very grave situation but that their

morale is first-rate for all that?... I know the country is full of the most appalling personal tragedies but, at the same time, if I were to repeat all the wild talk I heard at dinner yesterday from Simonov, Ehrenburg and Voitekhov, with all their abuse

of the Allies, I think it would make a very bad impression in the States...

There followed this striking illustration of the grave doubts that existed in Washington in the summer of 1942 about Russia's power of survival.

"After all", said Willkie, "things are not as desperate as one thought they might be by now. Egypt is okay; the Russians are holding out, and even Stalingrad is still in their hands. I don't mind telling you that when I was leaving Washington five weeks ago, the President told me: '.... I just want to warn you. I know you've got guts, but you may get to Cairo just as Cairo is falling, and you may get to Russia at the time of a Russian collapse'."

I suggested to Willkie that the President was not perhaps being as competently informed from Moscow as he might be (I had in mind the pessimists at the US Embassy,

particularly General Michela and Colonel Park), to which Willkie nodded. Speaking of the Second Front, he thought it was taking a terrible risk to postpone it till 1943; for what if Russian offensive capacity was meantime reduced to nothing? (This, incidentally,

showed that if the Russians told Churchill something about their planned counter-

offensive, they hadn't told Willkie anything about it—why spoil his Second Front

fervour?).

The same day he made a statement to the Anglo-American press in which he spoke with

real emotion of the great Russian spirit of self-sacrifice he had observed everywhere; and then he uttered the famous phrase which was going to cause a lot of trouble:

Personally I am now convinced that we can help them by establishing a real Second Front in Europe with Great Britain at the earliest possible moment our military

leaders will approve. And perhaps some of them will need some public prodding.

The Russians took him at his word, and stick-in-the-mud British Blimps (modelled on

Low) began to appear in Russian cartoons. Churchill was furious, since Willkie's

statement had, in his view, undone much of the good of his own visit a month before, when he thought he had convinced the Russians that the Second Front in the near future was impossible. And although Stalin knew about "Torch" (which Willkie perhaps did not) the Russian press embarked on a savage anti-British campaign during October, when the situation at Stalingrad looked particularly desperate.

On October 6, barely a week after the Willkie statement, Yefimov published in Pravda a vicious cartoon of a number of bald-headed and walrus-moustached Blimps sitting round a table and facing two dashing young soldiers in American uniform. These two were

labelled "General Guts" and "General Decision", while the Blimps were called "General What-if-they-lick-us", "General What's-the-hurry", "General Why-take-risks", and so on.

On the same day Stalin answered the three-point questionnaire sent him by Henry

Cassidy, the A.P. correspondent. In his answer he said that the Second Front "occupied a place of first-rate importance in the current situation"; that "the aid of the Allies to the Soviet Union has so far been little effective", and that it was essential that the Allies

"fulfil their obligations fully and on time"; and, finally, in reply to Cassidy's question:

"What remains of the Soviet capacity for resistance?" Stalin said:

I think that the Soviet capacity of resisting the German brigands is in strength not less, if not greater, than the capacity of Fascist Germany, or of any other aggressive power, to secure for itself world domination.

Molotov added fuel to the flames by resorting to a curious trick. For nine months there had been lying in his folders a Note on war-crimes from the Czech Government and the French National Committee and endorsed by Governments of other Nazi-occupied

countries. He now replied to this Note and, in the last paragraph he said:

The Soviet Government considers it essential that any of the leaders of Nazi

Germany who happens to be in the hands of States fighting against Hitler Germany

be tried without delay by a special People's court, with all the rigour of the criminal law.

This Note was published on October 15 (one of the grimmest days in the Stalingrad

fighting). Its meaning was rubbed in four days later when Pravda published a violent editorial on Rudolf Hess:

So it now appears that Rudolf Hess arrived in England dressed as a German

airman; therefore, he is not being treated as one of the chief war criminals, but is, instead, being treated as a mere "war prisoner". So it was enough for this notorious war criminal to dress up... in order to evade his responsibility for his countless crimes, and thus to turn England into a sanctuary for gangsters.

Not to treat Hess as a war criminal, Pravda went on, was to treat him as "the representative of another State, as Hitler's envoy." And then came the story of "Hess's wife":

It is not accidental that Hess's wife should have appealed to certain British

representatives to be allowed to join her husband. It would seem from this that Frau Hess does not consider him a prisoner-of-war. It is time we found out whether Hess is a criminal .. .or the plenipotentiary representative of the Nazi Government in

England, with all the privileges of immunity.

Maybe the story of Hess's wife was a pure invention; or maybe it had been planted on the Russians by some diplomatic tipster. The purpose of this violent anti-British campaign is still not clear, and there are several possible explanations: the most pleasant is that Stalin knew about "Torch", and was trying to mislead the Germans —to make them think that there was nothing to worry about in the west. Certainly, the German press had an orgy of hee-hawing over the Anglo-Soviet quarrel over Hess. But there are also other possible explanations: things at Stalingrad were going badly, and a scapegoat was necessary, and, in any case, many Soviet leaders had a bee in their bonnet about "Lady Astor", the

"Cliveden Set" and other alleged British supporters of a deal with Hitler at Russia's expense. Although these were mentioned occasionally, the Hess article was the most

vicious anti-British attack throughout the war, and it certainly stirred up a great deal of anti-British feeling in Russia. The day the article appeared, I remember seeing a Polish officer standing in a queue outside one of the Gastronome shops in Moscow; people

started shouting at him, "Instead of queuing up for delicacies, you English had better do a little fighting." When he explained that he was a Pole, they left him alone.

The only comic relief was provided by the British Ministry of Information paper

published in Moscow, the Britansky Soyuznik. A day or two after the Pravda editorial on Hess, amongst a lot of notes on culture in England was a photo of "Madame Hess" giving a lunch-time piano recital at the London Royal Exchange. It was, actually, Dame Myra Hess, but how were the Russians to know that this was not Hess's wife playing to London bankers and stockbrokers?

The British reaction to the "sanctuary for gangsters" editorial were so sharp that the Russians decided not to persist in their campaign, though the bad humour persisted. At a public lecture given by Professor Yudin, one of the Party's great ideologists, on October 28, he argued that the reasons for the absence of the Second Front were entirely political: that unfortunately there were very strong Munichite influences inside the British

Government. He almost suggested that the purpose of the Hess article had been to stir up British public opinion, so that it should insist that the "Munichites" be thrown out of the British Government. Asked why the British Government was incapable of breaking this

resistance, he said: "I am not suggesting that Churchill cannot break it, but—". He shrugged his shoulders.

At the same time, however, Yudin was very optimistic about the outlook at the front; thanks to the resistance of Stalingrad, the Germans had already lost their summer

campaign, and he was confident that neither the Japs nor the Turks would budge now. He already declared that Stalingrad would prove the great turning-point in this war.

He even alluded to some peace-feelers the Germans had put out via Japan, but said that it no longer depended on Germany when the war would end; whether or not there was

going to be a Second Front, the Soviet Union would fight on till the final defeat of Germany.

At the end of October the whole tone of the Russian press became, indeed, much more

optimistic. The communiqués and the press reports in the middle of the month had dwelt on the extreme seriousness of the situation; but by the end of October the worst seemed to be over. On October 28 Alexandrov wrote in Pravda:

The defence of Stalingrad has held up the Germans for three months. This means

that at Stalingrad they lost the most precious time they had this year for offensive operations.

In other words, the terrible danger that the country had felt in July and August had already been averted. Not that Stalingrad itself was necessarily out of danger yet, and nearly the whole of the Northern Caucasus was in German hands. Although they had

been held up at Mozdok on the way to Baku and had not advanced much beyond

Novorossisk on the Black Sea, the Germans suddenly scored a major success on

November 2 by breaking through to Nalchik on the way to Vladikavkaz, the northern

terminus of the Georgian Military Highway—the gate into Transcaucasia.

Even so, the whole atmosphere in Moscow on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the

October Revolution was distinctly optimistic. Something had clearly changed since the grim months of July and August. The biggest front-page publicity was given, on

November 6, to the "Oath of the Defenders of Stalingrad" addressed to Stalin:

... The enemy's aim was to cut our Volga waterway and then, by turning south to the Caspian, to cut off our country from its main oil supplies... If the enemy succeeds, he can then turn all his strength against Moscow and Leningrad...

Even at that stage, Stalingrad still said "if he succeeds", and not "if he had succeeded".

Apart from this reservation, the tone was confident throughout. After enumerating all that the defenders of Stalingrad had achieved and the losses the Germans had suffered there, they recalled Stalin's role in the defence of Tsaritsyn (the old name of Stalingrad) during the Civil War, and they declared themselves firmly convinced that, "fighting as we are under your direct guidance... we shall strike another smashing blow at the enemy and drive him away from Stalingrad."

The Oath to "dear Joseph Vissarionovich" did not go so far as to say that Stalingrad would be held; but the way in which they associated the city with the name and prestige of Stalin made failure extremely unlikely.

In sending you this letter from the trenches, we swear to you, dear Joseph

Vissarionovich, that to the last drop of blood, to the last breath, to the last heart-beat, we shall defend Stalingrad... We swear that we shall not disgrace the glory of Russian arms and shall fight to the end. Under your leadership our fathers won the Battle of Tsaritsyn. Under your leadership we shall win the great Battle of

Stalingrad.

The whole tone of the Oath was so confident that there was now, if anything, a tendency to underrate the dangers Stalingrad was still facing; nevertheless, people still felt instinctively that the worst was over, and this instinct proved right. The letters people were getting from soldiers in Stalingrad greatly contributed to the optimism. These were not official missives like the "Oath", each word of which had no doubt been carefully vetted by the political big-shots on the spot, but private letters; and in these it was clear that, despite the fearful mental and bodily strain, Russian soldiers were becoming

immensely proud of being in Stalingrad. To the Germans, on the other hand, the idea of being sent to Stalingrad was becoming increasingly terrifying.

Not only had the Soviet press been conducting an anti-British campaign in October, but the Churchill-Stalin correspondence during this period was far from cordial. Stalin

acknowledged the arrival of the PQ 18 convoy at Archangel rather curtly; he also

dismissed Churchill's estimate of German aircraft production as inaccurate; and in reply to Churchill's long letter of October 9 pressing him to accept an Anglo-American air force in the Caucasus (but also informing him that the Arctic convoys would have to be cut down) Stalin merely said: "Your message of October 9 received. Thank you. J.

Stalin."

However, with the situation in the Caucasus deteriorating (Nalchik had been captured by the Germans on November 2) Stalin, in his letter of November 8 showed renewed interest in the offer of twenty Anglo-American squadrons for the Caucasus.

In view of all the unpleasantness, especially in October, between the Soviet and British Governments (Churchill was particularly furious about the Hess outburst) Stalin's

November 6 broadcast came as a pleasant surprise to the Western Allies. No doubt he

knew by this time that Operation "Torch" had already started and that Rommel was in retreat in the Western Desert. He repeatedly stressed the importance of the Anglo-American-Soviet alliance, though he sounded ironical about the British in Libya, where they were fighting "only four—yes, four—German and eleven Italian divisions." He also said that, if only there were a Second Front, the Germans would by now have been driven back to Pskov, Minsk and Odessa. He spoke with satisfaction of the great improvement in the Russian fighting, and of the enormous progress made by the Soviet industries in the east. He also argued that the Germans had failed in their main objective which was not the occupation of the Caucasus (this was only their "secondary" objective) but the encirclement of Moscow from the east, after the fall of Stalingrad.

His Order of the Day on November 7 followed much the same line; without alluding

either to "Torch" or to the coming Russian offensive, it used, however, a phrase which enormously cheered— and intrigued—the Russians: "There will be a holiday in our street, too," meaning "it will soon be our turn to rejoice".

The news of the North African landing two days later created a big impression in

Moscow. Without understanding the enormous organisational complexity of the landing, people had the pleasant feeling that things in the west were at last on the move—not that this was quite the same as the "Second Front" they had hoped for. Later, in Stalingrad, I was told that the news of the North-African landing was flashed to all the army units and had a very good effect. In his second letter to Cassidy, dated November 13, Stalin

expressed great satisfaction over the successful progress of the North-African campaign.

"It opens the prospect of the disintegration of the Italo-German coalition in the nearest future", he wrote, adding that the operation clearly showed that the Anglo-American leaders "were capable of organising a serious war campaign" and that, in the Western Desert "the enemy troops had been smashed with great mastery." He predicted that Italy would soon drop out of the war. Although it was too early to say to what extent the

North-African campaign would relieve the pressure on the Soviet Union, he thought the effect would be "appreciable".

Stalin also said that the campaign "created the prerequisites for establishing a Second Front in Europe, nearer to Germany's vital centres", and would "shake France out of her lethargy".

Although many Russians were scandalised by the American deal with Darlan, we now

know that Stalin himself took a completely cynical or "realistic" view of the whole thing

—which is scarcely surprising when one looks back on 1939. In his letter to Churchill of November 27 he wrote:

As for Darlan, I think the Americans have made skilful use of him to facilitate the occupation of North and West Africa. Military diplomacy should know how to use

for the war aims not only the Darlans, but even the devil and his grandmother.

Altogether, after the North-African landing, there was a very marked improvement in

inter-allied relations. As Clark-Kerr, the British Ambassador remarked to me a few days later: "The Kremlin is now sending out warm rays."

Chapter III RUSSIANS ENCIRCLE THE GERMANS AT

STALINGRAD

There was only a lapse of thirteen days between the "Oath by the Defenders of

Stalingrad" and the beginning of the great Russian counter-offensive which ended in the Stalingrad victory two and a half months later. But in the course of these thirteen days the Germans launched one more desperate offensive against Chuikov's 62nd Army whose

position had been rendered even more difficult than before by the icefloes on the Volga.

These had practically stopped all communications across the river, and had made it

almost impossible even to evacuate the wounded. And yet, once this last German

offensive was smashed, the morale of the defenders of Stalingrad was higher than ever, all the more so as they had an inkling that something very important was about to happen.

Later, Stalingrad soldiers told me with what frantic joy, hope and excitement they heard the sound of distant but intensive gun-fire on November 19, between 6 and 7 a.m., that most silent hour of the day in Stalingrad. They knew what that gun-fire meant. It meant that they would not have to go on defending Stalingrad through the winter. Through the darkness, with scarcely a glimmer of light—for it was a dim, damp, foggy dawn—they

listened, as they put their heads out of their dugouts.

Neither on November 19, when the Don Army Group under Rokossovsky and the South-

West Army Group under Vatutin struck out southward towards Kalach, nor on the 20th,

when the Stalingrad Army Group under Yeremenko struck north-west from the area

south of Stalingrad to meet them was anything officially announced. Nor was there

anything in the communiqué of November 21. With unconscious irony, Pravda devoted its editorial that day to "The Session of the Academy of Sciences at Sverdlovsk."

It was not till the night of November 22 that a special communiqué announced the

tremendous news that Russian troops had struck out "a few days ago" from both northwest and south of Stalingrad, that they had captured Kalach and had cut the two railway lines supplying the Germans in Stalingrad, at Krivomuzginskaya and at Abganerovo. It was not yet explicitly stated that the ring around the Germans in Stalingrad had been closed, but the communiqué spoke of very heavy losses inflicted on the enemy, of 14,000

enemy dead, 13,000 prisoners, et cetera.

The excitement in Moscow was tremendous, and on everybody's lips there was this one

word: "nachalos!" —"it's started". Some instinct suggested to everybody that something very big could be expected from this offensive.

[ It is interesting to note that, a few days later, Colonel Exham, the British military attaché, reckoned that this offensive "would take the Russians all the way to Kharkov"

before the end of the winter, whereas General Michela and Colonel Park of the US

Embassy were saying that it was "darned smart of the Germans to get themselves

encircled at Stalingrad, and to tie up enormous Russian forces in this way—which would cause the Russians no end of embarrassments."]

The main points about this second and decisive phase of the Stalingrad battle are:

1) The three Russian "Fronts" together had 1,050,000 men against an almost equal number of enemy troops; about 900 tanks against 700; 13,000 guns against 10,000; and 1,100 planes against 1,200.

[ IVOVSS, vol. 3, p. 26. Elsewhere the History claims that the Russians had 1,200 tanks, most of them modern, whereas at Moscow they had only scraped together 750, mainly

obsolete.]

On the other hand, in the "main blow" sectors, Russian superiority was overwhelming which, according to the History, had never before been achieved in this war: a three-fold superiority in men and a four-fold superiority in equipment, especially in artillery and mortars.

Practically all this equipment had been made by Soviet industry during the summer and early autumn months, and only a small number of Western tanks, lorries and jeeps were used. Up to February 1943, 72,000 Western lorries had been delivered to Russia, but only a very small proportion of these were available by the time the Russian Stalingrad

offensive began.

2) Morale among the troops was extremely good.

3) The plan for the counter-offensive had been worked out "collectively" since August, chiefly by Stalin, Zhukov and Vassilevsky, in consultation with the commanders of the local Army Groups—Vatutin, Rokossovsky and Yeremenko.

[Zhukov, in order to make the "final arrangement", visited Vatutin's H.Q. on November 5

and that of Yeremenko on November 10. (IVOVSS, vol. 3, p. 26). But the idea that he

was probably the real brain behind the operation is minimised in recent histories.]

In October and November Vassilevsky and Zhukov visited the areas of the coming

operations.

4) The preparations for the offensive were an enormous feat of organisation and had been conducted with the greatest secrecy; thus, for several weeks before the offensive all mail was stopped between the soldiers of the three Army Groups and their families.

Although they bombed the railways leading to the area north of the Don, the Germans

never got a clear idea of how much equipment and how many troops were being brought

(mainly at night) to the area north of the Don and to the two main Russian bridgeheads inside the Don Bend; and the Germans never thought that the Russian counter-offensive (if any) could assume such vast proportions. More difficult still was the task of

transporting vast numbers of troops and enormous quantities of equipment to the

Stalingrad Front, in the south. The heavily-bombed railway line east of the Volga had to be used, and pontoons and ferries had to be organised across the Volga, almost right under the Germans' noses. Unlike the country north of the Don, where there were some forests, camouflage in the barren steppes south of Stalingrad was particularly difficult.

Even so, the Germans still had no idea of the weight of the coming Russian onslaught.

5) The German command, and Hitler in particular, were so obsessed with the prestige

problem of capturing Stalingrad that they did not give sufficient attention to consolidating the two flanks of what can conveniently be called the Stalingrad salient. Strictly

speaking, it was not a salient: there was a clear "front" on its north side, but in the south there was a sort of vast no-man's-land running through the Kalmuk steppes all the way to the northern Caucasus, with a few thin lines held here and there, mostly by Rumanian troops. In the north, too, some of the sectors of the front were held by Rumanians. The Rumanian troops had fought well round Odessa and in the Crimea, but at the beginning of winter in the Don steppes their morale was low. Here they were clearly not fighting Rumania's battle, but Hitler's, and their relations with the Germans were far from

satisfactory at any level. Further west on the Don, there were Italian troops, whose morale was also far from good. The Russians were fully aware of this, and rightly

regarded the sectors held by Rumanians and Italians as the weakest.

The offensive started along a wide front to the north of the salient at 6.30 a.m. on November 19 with an artillery and katyusha barrage; and Russian infantry and tanks began their advance two hours later. Owing to bad weather, little aircraft was used. In three days Vatutin's troops advanced some seventy-five miles, routing in the process the Rumanian 3rd Army and a number of German units that were hastily sent to the rescue of their allies. Despite strong resistance from the Germans and also some Rumanian units, Vatutin's troops of the South-West Front reached Kalach on the 22nd, meeting there

Yeremenko's forces which had broken through from the south, with rather less resistance from the enemy.

In the fighting, four Rumanian divisions were encircled, and soon afterwards surrendered, with General Lascar at their head. The same fate befell another encircled Rumanian

group commanded by General Stenescu. The routing of the Rumanian 3rd Army, as a

result of which the Russians took some 30,000 prisoners, had a far-reaching political effect on Hitler's relations with his allies. For one thing, after that Rumanian troops were placed under much stricter and more direct German supervision.

Yeremenko's Stalingrad Army Group, starting their attack one day later, advanced even more rapidly towards Kalach which it reached within less than three days, thus

forestalling the Northwestern Army Group and taking 7,000 Rumanian prisoners. The

right flank of Army Group Don, under General Rokossovsky had also struck out to.the

south on November 19, one of its prongs breaking through to General Gorokhov's

bridgehead on the Volga north of Stalingrad.

Within four and a half days the encirclement of the Germans in Stalingrad was

completed. The "ring" was neither very thick—it varied from twenty to forty miles—nor very solid, and the obvious next task was to strengthen and widen it. During the last days of November the Germans made an attempt to break through the 'ring" from the west, but they failed despite a few initial successes. What the Russians feared most was that

Paulus's 6th Army and units of the 4th Panzer Army inside Stalingrad would attempt to break out and abandon Stalingrad; but there was no sign of this happening and,

paradoxically, during the Russian breakthrough on the Don many Germans fled to

Stalingrad "for safety".

Some interesting details on the scene of this great battle were given me by Henry

Shapiro, the United Press Correspondent in Moscow, who was allowed to visit it a few days after the "ring" had closed. He went by train to a point some hundred miles northwest of Stalingrad, and travelled from there by car to Serafimovich, on that bridgehead on the Don which the Russians had captured in heavy fighting in October, and whence

Vatutin hurled his troops towards Kalach on November 19.

The railway line nearer the front had been heavily bombed by the Germans; all

stations were destroyed, and the military commandants and railway personnel

operated the railway traffic from dugouts and ruined buildings. All along the

railway towards the front there was a tremendous continuous flow of armaments:

katyushas, guns, tanks, ammunition—and men. The traffic continued day and night, and it was the same on the roads. It was particularly intense at night. There was very little British or American equipment to be seen, except an occasional jeep or tank; about ninety-nine per cent of the stuff was Russian-made. A fairly high

proportion of the food was, however, American—especially lard, sugar and spam.

By the time I got to Serafimovich, the Russians were not only consolidating the

"ring" round Stalingrad, but were now making a "second ring"; it was clear from the map that the Germans at Stalingrad were completely trapped, and couldn't get

out... I found among both soldiers and officers a feeling of self-confidence, the like of

which I had never seen in the Red Army before. In the Battle of Moscow there was

nothing like it. (Emphasis added.)

Well behind the fighting-line there were now thousands of Rumanians wandering

about the steppes, cursing the Germans and desperately looking for Russian

feeding-points, and anxious to be formally taken over as war prisoners. Some

individual stragglers would throw themselves on the mercy of the local peasants,

who treated them charitably, if only because they were not Germans. The Russians

thought they were "just poor peasants like ourselves".

Except for small groups of Iron-Guard men who, here and there, put up a stiff fight, the Rumanian soldiers were sick and tired of the war; the prisoners I saw all said roughly the same thing—that this was Hitler's war, and that the Rumanians had

nothing to do on the Don.

The closer I moved to Stalingrad, the more numerous were the German prisoners...

The steppe was a fantastic sight; it was full of dead horses, while some horses were only half-dead, standing on three frozen legs, and shaking the remaining broken

one. It was pathetic. 10,000 horses had been killed during the Russian

breakthrough. The whole steppe was strewn with these dead horses and wrecked

gun-carriages and tanks and guns—Germans, French, Czech, even British (no

doubt captured at Dunkirk)..., and no end of corpses, Rumanian and German. The

Russian bodies were the first to be buried. Civilians were coming back to the

villages, most of them wrecked... Kalach was a shambles: only one house was

standing...

General Chistiakov, whose H.Q. I finally located in a village south of Kalach—the village was under sporadic shell-fire—said that, only a few days before, the

Germans could still fairly easily have broken out of Stalingrad, but Hitler had

forbidden it. Now they had missed their chance. He was certain that Stalingrad

would be taken by the end of December.

[The Manstein offensive helped to upset this Russian time-table; if Stalingrad had fallen in December, the Russians might, indeed, have reached the Dnieper during their winter campaign, and might not have lost Kharkov, as they did in March 1943.]

German transport planes, Chistiakov said, were being shot down by the dozen, and

the Germans inside the Stalingrad pocket were already short of food, and were

eating up the horses.

The German prisoners I saw were mostly young fellows, and very miserable. I did

not see any officers. In thirty degrees of frost they wore ordinary coats, and had blankets tied round their necks. They had hardly any winter clothing at all. The

Russians, on the other hand, were very well-equipped—with valenki, sheepskin coats, warm gloves, et cetera. Morally, the Germans seemed completely stunned,

unable to understand what the devil had happened.

On my return journey I saw General Vatutin in a dilapidated school-house at

Serafimovich for a few minutes at four in the morning... He was terribly tired; he had not had a proper sleep for at least a fortnight, and kept rubbing his eyes and dozing off. For all that, he looked very tough and determined, and was highly

optimistic. He showed me a map on which the new Russian sweep into the western

part of the Don country was clearly marked.

My impression was that while the capture of Serafimovich in October had cost the

Russians heavy casualties, their losses in this well-planned breakthrough were

incomparably smaller than those of the Rumanians and Germans.

At this time, the Germans and their allies were still occupying vast territories of south-east Russia. The whole of the Kuban country and parts of the Northern Caucasus were in their hands; they were still at Mozdok on the road to Grozny, and at Novorossisk on the Black Sea. On November 2 they had captured Nalchik and had nearly captured

Vladikavkaz, at the northern end of the Georgian Military Highway, though here the

Russians scored a major success on November 19 by throwing in a strong force and

hurling the Germans back to the outskirts of Nalchik. At Mozdok, the Germans had failed to make any appreciable advance since the end of August. For months now Mozdok, like Stalingrad, had continued to figure in the communiqués. By aiming to drive the Germans out of the whole Don country west of StaUngrad, right up to Rostov and the sea of Azov (to begin with), the Russians rightly reckoned that if they succeeded in this they would almost automatically force the Germans to pull out of the Caucasus and the Kuban.

The even more ambitious Russian "Plan Saturn", adopted by the Supreme Command on December 3, a fortnight after the counter-offensive had started was, first, to liquidate the German forces trapped at Stalingrad and then capture the country inside the Don Bend, including Rostov, and to cut off the German forces in the Caucasus. According to the History Stalin telephoned Vassilevsky, the Chief of Staff, then in the Stalingrad area, on November 27 demanding top priority for the liquidation of the German Stalingrad forces, leaving the rest of "Plan Saturn" to the troops of Vatutin's South-West Front.

[IVOVSS, vol. 3, p. 43. ]

In the first days of December the troops of the Don and Stalingrad Fronts began

their offensive against the enemy forces trapped in Stalingrad. But no substantial results were achieved. That was why the Soviet Command decided to strengthen the

Soviet forces in this area very considerably, and to make more thorough

preparations for the operation. New units from the Stavka Reserve were being thrown in, including the 2nd Guards Army under the command of Lieut-Gen.

Malinovsky.

[Ibid., p. 43.]

The Germans had made a first attempt to break through to Stalingrad from the west at the end of November, but had failed. After that the Germans reorganised their forces by

forming a newly-named Army Group called "Don", the purpose of which was a) to stop the Russian advance into the Don country and b) to break the ring round Stalingrad. This Army Group included all the German and allied troops between the Middle Don and the

Astrakhan steppes, and its two big striking forces were to be concentrated at Tormasin inside the Don Bend and at Kotelnikovo, south of the Don Bend and some ninety miles

south-west of the Stalingrad pocket. Field-Marshal von Manstein, the "victor of the Crimea", whose prestige was high in the German army, was placed in charge of these operations.

But the formation of the great striking force, especially at Tormasin, met with

considerable delays due to enormous transport difficulties. According to the Russians, these were largely due to constant partisan attacks on the railways, so that reinforcements could only be brought to the Don country from the west in all kinds of roundabout ways.

As time was short, Manstein decided to attack with the Kotelnikovo striking force only.

Later he explained:

It was closer to Stalingrad, and it did not have to force the Don on its way there.

There was a good hope that the enemy would not expect a big offensive in this

sector... Facing the Kotelnikovo group there were, indeed, at first, only five Russian divisions, as against fifteen facing the Tormasin group.

[von Manstein, op. cit., p. 353.]

On December 12 Manstein's Kotelnikovo forces, including several hundred tanks, struck out on a narrow front towards Stalingrad along the railway from the Caucasus.

[ The Germans say about 250, the Russians 600.]

In three days it advanced thirty miles, despite strong Russian resistance. On December 15

the Germans succeeded in forcing the Axai river, but to the north of it the Russians had taken up defensive positions, and were receiving considerable reinforcements. The

German advance was slowed down; but by December 19, with hundreds of bombers

supporting them, they reached the Myshkova river, the last natural barrier between them and Stalingrad. They forced this river, too, and then, in von Manstein's words, the

Germans "could already see the glow in the Stalingrad sky." That glow was all that von Manstein was to see of Stalingrad. Postponing the "Operation Saturn" plans to "liquidate the Stalingrad bag", the Russian High Command gave first priority to smashing

Manstein's Army Group advancing from Kotelnikovo, and also his forces in the Tormasin area.

To deal with the former, Russian reinforcements were rushed to the Myshkova river,

barely twenty-five miles from the Stalingrad "bag", in particularly difficult conditions.

Malinovsky's 2nd Guards Army had to travel over 125 miles from beyond the Volga to

reach its destination; it was a forced march of twenty-five to thirty miles a day through the snow-covered steppe and in a howling blizzard. By the time Malinovsky's men

reached the Myshkova river, which the Germans had already forced in several places,

they were very short of petrol, and replenishments were delayed by the weather and the state of the roads. The Russians had to fight for several days with infantry and artillery alone, and it was not till December 24 that their tanks were able to enter the fray. But the Germans were held, and then on the 24th the Russians struck out with both tanks and

aircraft, and hurled them back to the Axai River where they were determined to make a stand; but now the Russian forces were striking heavier and heavier blows, and the

Germans were driven back to Kotelnikovo. This they abandoned on December 29, and

the remnants of Manstein's troops hastily retreated to Zimovniki and thence beyond the river Manych on the way to the Northern Caucasus. This river was fully sixty miles

south-west of Kotelnikovo, where the Manstein offensive had started on December 12.

In this attempt to break through to Stalingrad the Germans had lost (according to Russian claims) 16,000 dead alone, and a high proportion of their tanks, guns and vehicles. A few days after it was all over I was to see the scene of this extraordinary German retreat, all the way from the Myshkova river to Zimovniki.

A question that puzzled the Russians at the time, and for a long time afterwards, was why Paulus, with the rescue force only some twenty-five miles from the Stalingrad cauldron, did not attempt to break out to meet it, or at least make its advance to Stalingrad easier by a counter-attack which would at least have drawn off some of the Russian forces.

Since the war, a great deal has been written on this highly controversial operation—by von Manstein himself, by Walter Goerlitz, by Philippi and Heim and others. First of all, it still remains something of a puzzle what von Manstein (or "Gruppe Hoth", as the Germans usually call it) hoped to achieve, short of getting the whole of the German

forces at Stalingrad to break out; for it is very hard to see how Gruppe Hoth could have hoped to hold a narrow corridor to Stalingrad for any length of time, without the Russians cutting it. It seems clear that von Manstein undertook this operation with the "mental reservation" that, having broken through to Stalingrad, or got sufficiently near it, he could either persuade Hitler to give Paulus the order to pull his forces out of the Stalingrad cauldron, or confront Hitler with a fait accompli based on the force majeure argument that there was no other way.

There were four days, between December 19 and 23, while Gruppe Hoth was holding the

bridgeheads, north of the Myshkova river, when Paulus could have attempted a breakout with some chance of success. Manstein had two different operations in mind: first,

Operation Wintergewitter which aimed at establishing a link between Gruppe Hoth and Paulus's forces, largely for the purpose of rushing supplies by land to Stalingrad, since the airlift to Stalingrad had as good as broken down; and, secondly, Operation

Donnerschlag, meaning the breakout from the cauldron of the whole Stalingrad force.

Paulus argued that he needed several days for preparing either operation; the troops were in very poor physical condition, and needed food and other supplies ("at least ten day's rations for 270,000 men"), and there was also a desperate shortage of petrol; also 8,000

wounded would first have to be evacuated. In the last analysis, it seems apparent that, whether there was a good chance or not for the Stalingrad forces to break out, both Paulus and von Manstein dithered during those four crucial days of December 19 to 23, since no permission had been received from Hitler to abandon Stalingrad. Neither, it seems, was prepared to act without Hitler's express permission, since such a major act of disobedience to the Führer would set up a dangerous "revolutionary" precedent which might have a disastrous effect on the discipline of the Wehrmacht generally. Moreover, Hitler, they thought, might countermand any order that he had not himself given.

What also made Paulus hesitate (unlike at least one of his generals, von Seydlitz, who favoured a breakout) were the extravagant promises showered on him by Hitler: Goering had "guaranteed" that the troops at Stalingrad could be adequately supplied by air, and so could easily hold out till the spring of 1943, by which time the whole of the Don country would presumably be reconquered by the Germans. After the failure of Manstein's

attempt to break through to Stalingrad, Paulus (and Manstein, for that matter) consoled themselves with the thought that, despite the failure of the airlift, the German forces in the Stalingrad cauldron were still serving a useful purpose in tying down large Russian forces, while Manstein was now able to devote himself to an even more vital task than saving the 6th Army—namely, to keep the Rostov-Taman Gap open, and so enable the

much larger German forces in the Caucasus and Kuban to pull out with the minimum of

loss.

According to Walter Goerlitz, Paulus had, for many years, been a Hitler enthusiast, and therefore meekly accepted Hitler's order to cling to Stalingrad whatever the sacrifice. It was not till after the attempt on Hitler's life of July 20, 1944 that he was prevailed upon to join hundreds of other German officers and generals in their appeal to the German army and people to overthrow Hitler. Goerlitz thus tends to demolish the legend, partly built up by the Russians, that "von Paulus" (as they invariably called him) was a rather noble anti-Nazi figure. It is true that he later settled in Eastern Germany and advocated, right up to the time of his death in 1957, the closest co-operation between Germany and the Soviet Union. (Which does not prevent him from having been one of Hitler's most wholehearted planners of both the war in Poland and the invasion of Russia in 1941).

Recently, there have been some German writers to take the view that all the controversy of what Manstein and Paulus should have done between December 19 and 23 evades the

main issue, which was simply that the Manstein offensive had been badly planned and

that Paulus could not have broken out. As Philippi and Heim say:

There is really nothing to show that in those late December days a break-out of

those down-at-heel troops was still possible, even when one considers that the

prospect of breaking through to freedom would encourage them to perform

superhuman deeds of valour. When, on December 21, the OAK6 (i.e. the command

of the 6th Army) described the proposed breakout as a Katastrophenlösung... it was right in the sense that this could only amount to a gesture of despair by a large mass of people in very poor physical condition trying to fight their way to the Myshkova, across fifty km. of snowbound steppes and against a perfectly fresh, intact and

heavily-armed enemy. The conditions for Donnerschlag and Wintergewitter were equally unfavourable.

[ Philippi and Heim, op. cit., p. 195.]

Whether this is correct or not will no doubt remain a matter of controversy among

military historians; judging from the Germans I saw in Stalingrad over six weeks later, they must still have been in reasonably good condition around December 20; they had by then been encircled for less than a month, and were not yet anywhere near real starvation.

They also said that they were still "full of fight" at the thought of von Manstein about to break through to Stalingrad. Even in January, those still in reasonably good condition fought with the greatest stubbornness during the Russian liquidation of the cauldron.

While the 2nd Guards Army under Malinovsky was about to hurl back the Germans from

the Myshkova River, the Vatutin-Golikov advance into the Don country from the north

was successfully continuing.

Advancing rapidly both into the Middle Don and further west, this time with considerable air support (4,000 sorties in the first few days of the offensive), they routed the remnants of the Rumanian 3rd Army, the Italian 8th Army and dislocated that German "Tormasin"

striking force which was planning to attempt a breakthrough to Stalingrad—to coincide with the "Kotelnikovo" thrust. An area of some 15,000 square miles was liberated. To quote the History,

[ IVOVSS, vol. 3, p. 50.]

A smashing defeat was inflicted on the Italian 8th Army and on the left flank of

Army Group "Don". Five Italian divisions were smashed... and one brigade of Blackshirts. In the autumn of 1942 this army had about 250,000 men and now lost

about one half of its effectives. Heavy losses were also inflicted on operational group

"Hollidt", belonging to the left flank of Manstein's Army Group "Don". Five of its infantry divisions and one tank division were smashed...

[After quoting an Italian eyewitness account (Giusto Tolloy, Con l'armata italiana in Russia, Torino, 1947) on the encirclement of large Italian forces south of Boguchar and the panic caused among the Italian officers and soldiers, the History protests against certain Italian allegations that many thousands of Italian war prisoners

failed to return after the war. It argues that many of those whom the Italians counted as war prisoners had, in fact, found their death in battle "and found their grave in the steppes of the Don." It quotes Khrushchev's speech at Tirana (Albania) in 1959 saying that war was "like a fire—easy to jump in, but not so easy to jump out. Well, the Italians just got burned in the War." It adds, however, that a large number of Italians who had survived the Don Battle were murdered by the Germans, particularly at Lwow in 1943, after they had refused—this was after the fall of Mussolini—to swear allegiance to Hitler.

There is, in reality, another explanation for the failure of many of the Italians in Russia to return to Italy after the war; and there was a great deal of talk about this in Moscow towards the end of the war: although the leaflets dropped on Italian troops urging them to surrender to the Russians promised that they would be sent to a "warm climate", many thousands of Italian war prisoners were actually sent to camps in northern and central Russia, where large numbers died of pneumonia, tuberculosis, et cetera.]

After the failure of the Hoth-Manstein group to break through to Stalingrad, and its retreat to Kotelnikovo and beyond, Malinovsky's troops pursued them beyond the

Manych River, and were planning to break through to Rostov from the south-east. But

there is no doubt that the Russian offensive, which had achieved such spectacular results since November 19, and right through the rest of November and December in the Don

country, was now, by the beginning of the New Year, to meet with much suffer German

resistance. It was essential for the Germans to keep the "Rostov Gap" open as long as possible, for this remained the main escape route for the German forces which were now

—at the beginning of January—hastily beginning to pull out of the Caucasus and the

Kuban. Thanks to Stalingrad, Hitler's attempt to conquer the Caucasus had been a

complete failure.

Chapter IV STALINGRAD CLOSE-UPS

Close-Up I: The Stalingrad Lifeline.

By January 1, 1943, the Germans inside the Stalingrad Pocket—an oval measuring about forty-four miles from west to east and fourteen miles from north to south—had been

isolated from the outer world, except for some transport planes, for over six weeks. By December 24 all hope of being rescued by von Manstein's "Gruppe Hoth" had vanished.

It was during the first fortnight of January that, with a small group of other

correspondents, I was able to travel along that fantastic railway east of the Volga which had been for months the only lifeline for the Russian troops defending Stalingrad. It was along this line, too, that troops, equipment and supplies had been taken in October and November to the area south of Stalingrad, whence Yeremenko had struck out on

November 20.

Leaving Moscow on the morning of Monday, January 3, 1943, we travelled in an old-

fashioned, pre-revolution sleeping car attached to the Moscow-Saratov express. The

candlesticks were still inscribed "Compagnie Internationale de Wagon-Lits", and the washstand had beside it a brass plate saying, first in pre-revolutionary Russian spelling, and then in French: "Sous le lavabo se trouve un vase". Not that, in travelling in such relative luxury we were getting anything unheard of in the Soviet Union even in 1942-3; there were other people in the sleeping car—higher officials, "intellectuals" on some special mission, officers from the rank of colonel up, et cetera.

There was, of course, no dining car, and we had to do with "dry" rations, supplemented by the tea provided by the amiable old provodnik's samovar. The other carriages of the train were, however, "hard" third-class carriages, packed mostly with soldiers, and, with all the windows shut, extremely hot, stuffy and smelly with that characteristically Russian blend of smells, leather boots, black bread, cabbage fumes and makhorka tobacco.

It was foggy and thawing the day we left Moscow, and icicles were dripping outside the carriage window. We passed Kashira, with its burned-out houses, remnants of the

German advance on Moscow a year before—grim days which now seemed very far

away. Since the Stalingrad encirclement one now felt that nothing like that could ever happen again...

The next morning we reached Tambov and in the afternoon, Kirsanov. The station

platform was crowded. Just outside it was a big open-air kolkhoz market. It worked mostly on a barter basis. Butter cost here a third of the Moscow price, but most of the eggs and butter were bought with tobacco or soap... There were crowds of young soldiers on the platform, some carrying whole bundles of brand-new rifles. Many were about

eighteen, and seemed to be leaving home for the first time; on the platform were also crowds of elderly and old women, many of them crying, and a few making the sign of the Cross as they kissed the boys good-bye. The boys pretended to be quite unperturbed, and argued vigorously with the woman guard in the next carriage who claimed vociferously that it was full up. They squeezed in all the same...

At Saratov the next morning it was sunny and very cold, minus 25 °C. and with deep

snow. Saratov, with its handsome wide avenues, looked unusually prosperous. Numerous leading educational establishments had been evacuated here from Moscow, Leningrad

and other places, and the city had been nicknamed "Professaratov"... Theatres (including an opera house) and several cinemas were going strong. We had a large meal at the

Railwaymen's Club...

That night our carriage was joined on to a goods train. It had grown dark by now, and there was just enough light to see an immense number of trains of every kind at and

around Saratov Station, and to realise its importance as a railway junction... We crossed the great bridge across the Volga, and then travelled through what the maps called

"Autonomous German Volga ASSR", and it seemed clear now why the Soviet

Government did not wish to take any chances with the Volga Germans. They were

deported, a whole half-million of them—to Kazakhstan in August 1941. There had

already been some cases of railway sabotage in the "Autonomous German Volga

Republic" (with "Engels" as its capital!) at the very beginning of the war, and also stories of German airmen brought down over the area, being given shelter by the local Germans.

On Wednesday morning, Moscow seemed very far away. All night the train had travelled at good speed, and we were now in the endless waterless steppes of the Trans-Volga

country. There was very little snow, and through it rose tufts of untidy brown grass. We had just passed several wrecked railway-carriages, and beside the siding lay another railway wagon, its wheels in the air. It had already gone rusty. At the small station I talked to a group of railwaymen. Among them was an elderly man from Tomsk, a dour

Siberian with a long greyish moustache and a wrinkled face. "Stalingrad," he said, "yes, it's over there—not very far away, about a hundred kilometres from here. Oh yes, in

October we were right in the thick of it. Can't tell you how many times we were bombed

—but it was a hell of a lot of times. See that?" he said, pointing at the overturned wagon.

"I drove that train. They were lucky that day. Three direct hits on my train. Just went up in the air. Only the engine and the front carriage rolled on, all the rest was torn away and wrecked." I looked down the line: there was the wreckage of many more wagons and also of several lorries and armoured cars which must have been part of the train's cargo.

"Were many killed?" "Thirty-five," said the Tomsk man. "Thirty-five railwaymen and three soldiers. Their graves are over there," he said pointing to the east, a little way off the line. And it was strange how, in saying it, this tough Siberian said not mogily, but the affectionate diminutive mogilki, little graves.

A young railwayman joined in. He was fair and blue-eyed, and spoke with a soft southern accent. "I've been working on this line right through the Stalingrad business," he said.

"We railwaymen are really the same as soldiers. All the supplies to Stalingrad came along this line, so you can imagine the attention the Fritzes paid it. All around here has been bombed to blazes, except one small hut." Not far away from the railway line were more craters and piles of twisted metal, but also large numbers of new rails, stacked up. "We've got these spare rails all down the line," he said. "And the railway was never put out of action, except occasionally for a couple of hours. When you think of the amount of traffic along this line these last five months, they didn't really hit many trains." "That's true,"

said the Tomsk man, "but they gave us a lot of trouble dropping the bombs just beside the railway, and wrecking all the telephone and telegraph wires." The young railwayman smiled. "Well, it's a great comfort to know it wasn't in vain. The Fritzes are running like rabbits now. Yes, there were some fearful moments, but down here we never thought

they'd get away with it. We used to see a lot of people straight from Stalingrad, and they never lost hope... " He was from Bessarabia. " I got away by the skin of my teeth when the Rumanians surrounded our village. Followed the Red Army across the Pruth. I know I'll soon be back in Bessarabia, drinking good Bessarabia wine. It's a better country than this, I can tell you," he said, looking at the desolate steppe.

Another railwayman joined in, and also thought he would soon be "back home at

Kupiansk, in the Ukraine, near Kharkov". He was our engine-driver; his face was grimy with coal-dust, but his white teeth and pink gums were bright and moist as he smiled, and he had laughing Ukrainian eyes. I knew the name of Kupiansk only too well; it was the important railway junction which was among the first places the Germans had seized at the beginning of their summer offensive...

He talked about the chaos of the evacuation from the Ukraine in June 1942. "I was lucky," he said. "We received the order to evacuate the rolling stock. There was no time to look for my family, who were in a village nearby. At all the stations there were mobs of people hoping—often against hope—to be evacuated to the east. And then, would you believe it, at the third railway stop, right there on the station platform, were my wife and my little daughter. I shoved them quickly into one of the goods trucks, and so we all got away. Incredible luck, don't you think? " His wife and child were at Saratov now.

At length the train moved. For a long time we travelled through the steppe, without any sign of human life, except occasional haystacks. Then we passed some low L-shaped

mud-huts, the same colour as the earth. These were Kirghiz huts. There was a pale-blue sky over this ocean of perfectly flat steppe—it was like the first shots of Pudovkin's Storm over Asia. In fact, this was Asia; according to the map, the railway twice crossed through stretches of country which belonged administratively to Kazakhstan. How clearly one realised now why the men fighting at Stalingrad felt that beyond Stalingrad "there was nothing". Thousands had travelled to Stalingrad along this line.

Another station with L-shaped mud-huts, with two large shaggy camels outside one of

them, the same colour as the huts and the earth, also some horses, and an old Kirghiz woman, a perfect Asiatic with a long padded coat and a white cloth round her head,

below the fur cap with earflaps. Her face was wrinkled, dark-brown, with narrow eyes.

Here also were several soldiers, most of them Mongols. A young Russian soldier, with weather-beaten face and red eyes, came up, asked for newspaper to roll some cigarettes and said he had heard that Tsymlianskaya on the Don and Nalchik in the Caucasus had

been liberated from the Germans. He had just come from Stalingrad, along the railway from Leninsk. He had been in Stalingrad for two months. "Now the Fritzes are trapped like rats," he said. "But the svolochi are still cocky, shouting 'Russ, sdavais!' (Russian, surrender!). But things are going fine. They still have those transport planes to drop them food during the night; but when they try to get there during the day, we shoot every damned one of them down." Except for the redness of his eyes, due to chronic lack of sleep, he seemed none the worse for his two months at Stalingrad— though these last two months had, of course, been nothing like the terrible months of September and October...

A train coming the other way passed us; it had anti-aircraft guns on board, many wrecked Russian planes, and also a long string of oil tanks, coming from where—Baku perhaps?

For this was the only remaining line linking northern Russia with the Caucasus.

Leninsk, near the end of the branch line running from Baskunchak, was as far as we

could go by rail. It was some thirty miles from Stalingrad on the other side of the Volga, was the principal supply base for Stalingrad itself, and also for the Stalingrad Front...

Practically all the troops and equipment for the "southern pincer" had come through here.

It was also to Leninsk that the wounded from Stalingrad were normally evacuated. It had very strong antiaircraft defences, and was relatively undamaged. It still had the

appearance of an old-time district town. The wide main street was composed of shabby little brick houses, while in the side-streets there was nothing but wooden cottages, many with very beautiful wood carvings around the windows. The old-time atmosphere of this provincial backwater contrasted strangely with the modern slogans painted on every wall:

"Men of the Red Army, remember at Stalingrad your responsibility to your country!"

"Drive the German rats from the walls of Stalingrad!" "Glory to the men of Stalingrad!"

and so on. In the small public park was a statue of Lenin, and on the airfield just outside the town were numerous "aero-sleighs", with Red Cross markings, for the transport of the wounded.

We had a meal at the officers' mess, and met two surgeons from Leninsk Hospital. One of them, a small and dapper man, had gone through the whole of the Stalingrad battle at this transit hospital. "One of the worst features of this war," he said, "is that the proportion of the severely wounded is much higher than it was in any other war. It used to be eighty per cent light cases, and twenty per cent severe cases; now the severe cases are around forty per cent. Head injuries are much more frequent than in the last war, owing to mortar shells and bombs. It's the same on the German side; we know it from German army

doctors we have taken prisoner." He said that most of the German and Rumanian

prisoners suffered from frostbite. They were simply unprepared for this winter weather, and really seemed to imagine they were going to take Stalingrad in September and end the war! The Rumanians have those high fur hats, which look very decorative but don't protect the lower half of the face, or even the lower half of the ears. And instead of felt valenki the Germans now have some ridiculous ersatz valenki made of straw, and with wooden soles; the things are so clumsy that they can't even walk in them."

The atmosphere in the officers' mess was jovial, and there was little talk of all that this corner of Russia had gone through in the last months. A few toasts were drunk to "our gallant Allies"—not without a little touch of irony.

One of the girls who was serving us had a bandage tied round her cheek. I asked if she had been wounded. Next to me sat a pompous stout major. "Ah, yes," he said, "she was wounded. Our people are wonderful; when they are lightly wounded, they just go on with their work, wouldn't dream of stopping." "Nonsense," said the older surgeon, "she's just got a gumboil."

My heart warmed to the major; here was Gogol's immortal blow-hard Nozdrev back

again, and in the Red Army at that, and thirty miles from Stalingrad!

We had to wait for our bus in a room beside an empty hospital ward, with two young

nurses as our hostesses. The hospital was empty now, though the beds were all made,

ready to receive any sudden arrivals. But for several days now there had been no

wounded from Stalingrad; the Germans in the "bag" were perhaps running out of ammunition one of the girls suggested.

The girls were called Valya and Nadya. Valya was lively, red-cheeked and flirtatious in a coy way. She was twenty-one and married, with her husband in the Army. She was in

uniform, and when the war broke out had been studying biochemistry at the university.

The other girl had one of those full but pale Russian faces with large grey eyes, with perfect large white teeth and lips that were full without being sensuous.

From time to time they would put on a well-worn record on their portable gramophone—

bits from Werther or Manon of all things. When the gramophone played, they were silent.

Nadya wore a red woollen jumper which stressed the paleness of her beautiful face. "I am not a nurse," she said, "I am a medical statistician, attached to this hospital base." "Some statistics you must have had to do here through the autumn," I remarked. "Yes," she said,

"some statistics." Her home was in Stalingrad, and her address was 24 Frunze Street. It seemed odd that anyone should have an address at Stalingrad! "You should go to Stalingrad after the war," she said, with a faint smile. "Not that you will find my house there any more. It was destroyed like the rest of the city. And what a pity! We had those lovely boulevards, and so many fine new buildings, and public parks, and the new Volga Embankment; and, on Sundays, there were lots of young people everywhere, and lots of trees and flowers, and all those steamer and sailing-boats and motor-boats on the Volga.

It was a gay town. I was in my last year at school when the war started, and I joined up as a medical worker, after a short training."

A copy of Simonov's poems was lying on the table. I asked Valya if she liked Simonov.

"Yes, very much; we all do." "What, Wait for me?" "Yes, that, and much else." "Dear Simonov," said Valya sentimentally. Nadya said: "We'll have a glorious life after the war.

Stalingrad will be very beautiful again. We shall again go for holidays to the Caucasus, as we did before the war."

It was confirmed that day that the Germans had begun to pull out of the Caucasus;

Nadya's daydreaming wasn't so fantastic, after all.

We set out that afternoon from Leninsk to Raigorod across the delta-land of the Volga, between the narrow Akhtuba river and the Volga proper; flat wooded country with

several roads running to the Volga crossings opposite Stalingrad or south of it. There was a lot of traffic that afternoon, mostly army lorries, and an occasional peasant sleigh; and once we passed a sleigh drawn by a camel. Most of the life here seemed concentrated in the fishing villages on the Volga itself. Most striking along these roads through the delta-land were not only the numerous boards with Stalingrad slogans on them, but also notices like "Trench" and "Warming Station". These were part of the organisation of the

"lifeline"; the warming stations were dugouts, with a heated stove, off the road, where soldiers could stop to get warm; while the trenches were refuges during German air

attacks. Many dead horses were lying about, most of them half-decayed, but now frozen.

Our driver was a youngish man, who had been in Odessa during the siege, and had been evacuated by sea at the last moment; it was a fearful business, he said, as the ships were attacked by dive-bombers all the time, and many were sunk.

"I know these roads only too well," he said. "They used to be constantly attacked from the air. It was along these roads that we carried men and supplies to Stalingrad. Machine-gunning was the Fritzes' favourite sport; they killed lots of people and horses; but, especially after August, we had fighters in the air, and hundreds of lorries got through daily. My worst experience was on August 23, during the big raid on Stalingrad. You

can't imagine what it was like. The whole city was burning like a giant bonfire. There was the awful crash of masonry. I'd drive along a street between burning houses, and dozens of planes were in the air; and suddenly a large house would collapse just in front of you, and with all the dust you could hardly see where you were going; and there were a lot of dead people lying around. But I got away, and my lorry didn't have as much as a scratch. Right over the pontoon bridge, with stuff dropping into the water all round. The bridge didn't last long, I can tell you... " And, after that, day after day, he went on taking munitions to Stalingrad—"this side of the river, of course"—and evacuating the wounded. "It was a difficult time," he summed up in a typical understatement. "But it's going to be all right now."

We were not allowed to go to Stalingrad as yet, but by now we were only a few miles

away and at nightfall that evening we could see in the west a glow in the sky, and hear a gun firing every minute or so. It was relatively quiet at Stalingrad that night; but it was the eve of Rokossovsky's ultimatum to Paulus, and two days later the final liquidation of the German 6th Army was going to begin.

At last we reached the Volga crossing some fifteen miles south of Stalingrad. A few faint lights were flickering in the dark. The thud of sporadic gunfire had grown much fainter.

We drove smoothly over a wide pontoon bridge, lying flat on the ice. In the sky, on the right, was still that dim glow, that faint halo over Stalingrad. "It used to look different,"

the driver remarked, "when the whole town was burning for weeks. At Leninsk the whole sky used to be lit up at night." The bridge must have been nearly a mile long, though, in the dark, it was hard to say exactly. The bank on the other side was much steeper, and then we drove through a darkened village and then, through ten or fifteen miles of steppe, on to Raigorod.

We were billetted in a large hut requisitioned by the Army, and were given a meal—

borshch and some wonderfully cooked mutton —by a plump Ukrainian girl from

Kharkov and an elderly man with a hooked purple nose and a little toothbrush moustache; he was a Jew who had been a miner in the Donbas. He was talkative, but very gloomy,

since his family had been left behind. As he plaintively pleaded for the Second Front, one felt he was pleading for his wife and children.

After supper we received a visit from Major-General Popov, our first contact with the command of the Stalingrad Front. He had a typical Volga-Russian face, with high cheek-bones, lively dark eyes and a brisk business-like manner. He was one of the men who had organised the transport across the Volga of a large part of Yere-menko's army which had struck out from here towards Kalach on November 20. "These bridges played a great part in our offensive, though not at the very beginning; for, before the river froze, most of the stuff had to be taken across in boats. In fact, our most difficult problem was to supply Stalingrad itself. It couldn't be done from here; it had to be done direct from the opposite bank; for two weeks, before the Volga was properly icebound, hundreds of soldiers

would crawl on their bellies across the thin layer of ice, dragging behind them little sleighs with a couple of ammunition boxes—as much as the ice was likely to hold. The Germans continued to shell the river. All the same, most of them got across. Now the ice on the Volga is thick enough to be used for lorries and horse vehicles, though not strong enough for tanks; but we've got plenty of bridges now."

General Popov said it took three to five days to lay a pontoon bridge. In spite of all their bombing raids and reconnaissance flights the Germans had no idea until it was too late what a large number of troops had been brought over. Most of the work was done at

night, and during the day the troops were scattered in small groups over large areas. The Russians, he said, now had some American Dodges and jeeps, but not many; they also

used many "trophy" trucks made in practically every country in Europe; the French Renault trucks were particularly numerous. He hoped the production of these had been greatly reduced since the great RAF raids on the Paris works...

Close-Up II: The Scene of the Manstein Rout. — A Cossack Town Under the Germans. —

Meeting General Malinovsky.

The next day—January 7, 1943, we travelled in a blizzard across the completely flat and uninhabited Kalmuk steppes. Though it snowed heavily, it was not very cold—between

minus 5° and minus 10° centigrade. We were no longer in cars, but in a dilapidated old bus, used until recently as an ambulance for taking the wounded to Leninsk. In the

middle stood a small metal stove—a burzhuika—which was being conscientiously stoked with small bits of wood by Gavrila, an elderly north-Russian muzhik with a kindly rough-hewn face and a stubbly chin. He looked like a good-natured bear. Occasionally the

burzhuika smoked ferociously and the smoke mingled with the fumes of the exhaust pipe seeping into the bus through the half-broken back door. This strange-looking dismantled ambulance was typical, in a way, of the shortage of proper motor transport from which the Red Army was still suffering.

Gavrila had two sons in the army and had no news of one of them almost since the

beginning of the war. During the whole Stalingrad battle he had been a stretcher-bearer attached to this ambulance. "It was no fun for the wounded," he said, "to travel in this bone-rattler. But our men can stand a lot. It's true that before being sent off on their journey they always got a shot of morphine..."

It was about a hundred miles from Raigorod to Abganerovo on the Stalingrad-Caucasus

railway, and another sixty from there to Kotelnikovo.

Not very far west of Raigorod was a string of lakes in the Kalmuk steppes which had

been the first line of defences protecting the right flank of the Germans' Stalingrad salient. From a distance, through the heavily falling snow, one could see a patch of the black water of one of the salt lakes, and a little farther along we stopped to look at an enormous dump of wrecked German tanks and armoured cars. All this wreckage had

been collected over a fairly large area around the lakes—where the Russians had crashed through the lines held by the Rumanians. Thousands of Rumanians had surrendered here on November 20 and 21. There was no sign of them now except for a few tin hats, half-filled with snow. They had a large "C" in front and the Royal crown of Rumania; "C"

stood for Carol, even though Carol was no longer king.

As we drove through the steppes the snow was coming down so heavily that our

conducting officer, Colonel Tarantsev, wondered whether we'd make it. However, by the afternoon the weather cleared and the steppe was dazzling-white in the sun as we

approached the Stalingrad railway. At one point we crossed the Axai River; here also Rumanian helmets were lying about, half-buried in the snow, and a lot of wrecked

vehicles, but no German helmets. It had been further west that the Germans had crossed the Axai in their last push, and it was not until we reached Abganerovo and Zhutovo on the Stalingrad-Caucasus railway line that we first saw the traces of the Manstein

offensive of only a few days before. Abganerovo had been completely wrecked by

bombing during the German summer offensive, but there was a lot of rolling-stock on the railway. Zhutovo was some ten miles down the line, which ran parallel to the road. A number of goods trains steamed past; the Russians had already put the line back to the broad Russian gauge.

Zhutovo looked a pleasant enough village, with gardens and orchards and small Russian cottages. A crowd of youngsters gathered round us, and also two young women with

babies in their arms. The women told the usual story of how they had hidden in cellars during the last German occupation. "Thank God," one of them said, "our people came back soon, and the Germans hadn't even time to burn down our houses." There were two little boys there], aged about ten. One wore an enormous high sheepskin hat which came right down over his ears; the other wore a pair of army boots, about six sizes too large for him. "Where did you get all this?" I asked. "Got my hat off a dead Rumanian," Number One said proudly. "And these boots?" "Oh, that's off the dead Fritz, over there in the orchard. Would you like to see him? " I followed the two boys along a narrow path. Here, among the apple-trees, lay the dead German. His face was covered with snow, but his

feet, purple and glossy like those of a wax figure, were bare. He had no overcoat, only an ordinary tunic with an eagle and swastika. "Why don't they take him away?" I asked.

"The soldiers will take him away some time, I suppose," said the owner of the boots;

"they've got other Fritzes to collect round here. He's no bother in the cold weather."

Was the little fellow callous? I don't know... The Germans had brought war so deeply into his life, had made him live so intimately in the company of death, that one could hardly blame him. Corpses had become part of his daily routine, and to him there were only good corpses and bad corpses. A few days later I heard of a village on the Don

where the kids used a frozen German as a sleigh for sliding down a hill... I don't know if this story was true.

Kotelnikovo, which was to be our base for about a week, was a large town of some

25,000 people, and it had been occupied by the Germans and Rumanians between August

2 and December 29, when von Manstein's troops were driven out after their abortive

attempt to break through to Stalingrad, and I soon heard what it had been like under the German occupation. Kotelnikovo had been in the operational zone throughout the

occupation, and the German Army seemed to have been in full authority there; moreover, it was considered Cossack country, and the Germans refrained here from large-scale

savagery. Edgar Snow and I were billeted in a small wooden cottage belonging to an

elementary teacher, who was living there with her very decrepit old mother and her only child, a fifteen-year-old boy called Gai. Her husband was a railwayman, but had not been heard of since last June.

Kotelnikovo was not a story of great German atrocities. It was simply a story of German contempt and of Russian bitterness and humiliation, as told by the forty-year-old Russian school-teacher and her fifteen-year-old son. Just that—nothing more. But quite enough.

It was a sprawling town, with an administrative and shopping centre, and an important railway depot; the rest of the town consisted of many long streets of wooden cottages and gardens; all round was the flat steppe of the trans-Don country. Our house had two small rooms—the kitchen and the bedroom. Between the two was a large Russian stove, and it was very warm. Elena Nikolaevna was exuberant, plump, with fat arms and two golden

front teeth that glittered in the light of her one and only kerosene lamp. After presenting us to babushka, a tiny shrivelled creature who sat huddled in a corner of the kitchen, near the blacked-out window, she took the kerosene lamp and showed us into the bedroom,

leaving babushka in the dark. "Babushka will be all right," she said, "she is used to peeling potatoes in the dark." In the bedroom were two large beds, a table and a bookcase. "What a life we've had these last five months!" she exclaimed. "First we had some Rumanians here, and then the Germans—a tank crew of five men. Rough, hard people;

but then, I suppose, they looked upon us as enemies. Don't know what they would have been like in peace-time..."

A plane was zooming overhead. "That's a German plane; I know it by the sound. Makes me a bit nervous when they fly about at night. It's these transport planes that still try to take food to the Germans encircled at Stalingrad." Suddenly we heard a stick of bombs go off with a whine and somewhere, a long distance away, there was the sound of two not very loud explosions.

At the end of July the Secretary of the Raikom told Elena Nikolaevna that she and her family would be evacuated; but the Germans bombed the railway station to blazes, and occupied the town on August 2, before anything could be done. So all the teachers were left behind. One of them went to see the German commandant to ask when the schools

would open, but was told "not yet". So the teachers were left without any jobs. The population were summoned to a meeting to elect a starosta, or mayor, but the first two were invalidated by the Germans, and in the end they virtually appointed a railwayman called Paleyev to be starosta. He seemed a good man; but later he must have sold himself to the Germans. There were also some railwaymen who formed the local police; they

would bully the local people, make them carry bricks, and dig, and build fortifications for the Germans.

"But how did you live?"

"One can hardly call it living. We were very short of food—nine ounces of flour a day per person, and nothing else. I used to do some work for the Rumanian officer when he lived here; but all he would give me for a whole day's washing was half a loaf. It was a shame. But then, I suppose, the Rumanians didn't have much. Some of the soldiers, far from giving us anything, asked for food; I'd give them a slice of bread, it was better that way; they would have taken it anyway. The Germans are a proud people, very different from the Rumanians. Occasionally they'd give me something—a tin of fish or a few

cigarettes. All the time they were here they gave me two tins of fish; it wasn't much, was it? I used to wash and scrub for them all day, and they'd send me out for water to the well. It was a slave's life. And Gai, my boy and babushka and I had to live in the little kitchen, all huddled together, and the five Germans lived here, in this room; some

sleeping on the bed, and the others on the floor. They had a lot of drink and food, and thought at first they were staying here indefinitely. In the morning they'd shout 'Matka, Wasser zum waschen!' They used to call everybody Matka, damned cheek! In the middle of December one of the man said: 'Russ nicht zurück, we've chased them fifty miles away'. It's quite true, the firing could no longer be heard. But on December 28 one of the men said: 'Russ kommt zurück'. You see, one wants to live, especially when you've got a young boy to look after, so I expressed no joy. Four of them went away without a word, only the fifth one said: 'Auf wiedersehen, Matka'. They were very gloomy. They weren't so bad, those five Germans, but they thought we were just their slaves. In other houses they behaved much worse, and the Rumanians were terrible—wouldn't leave the women

alone. There was a lot of rape in the town. I didn't hear of anybody being shot; but thirty, or maybe fifty people were taken away by the Germans. Or perhaps they followed them

voluntarily, people like the polizei. They were going to mobilise all the young people for work in Germany, and they sent out leaflets, but I don't think they had time to do

anything much..."

And then she described how, on the last night, the Germans set fire to all the public buildings in Kotelnikovo; but they hadn't time to burn down the whole town; there was much firing going on, and, in the middle of the night the streets were empty: the Germans had gone and the Russians had not yet come in.

So this was the room where the German tank crew had lived. The house was intact; partly no doubt because it was hardly worth looting. Here was a book-case with school-texts of physics and chemistry and Russian literature, and a lot of family photographs on the wall; and the Germans had left behind—how odd to find it here, in the wilds of the trans-Don steppes!—a map and index of the Paris Metro, and a copy of the Wittgensteiner Zeitung of December 4 with an editorial: "50. Geburtstag Francos: der Erretter Spaniens".

The next morning we met Gai, Elena Nikolaevna's fifteen-year-old son. He was fairly

tall, but extraordinarily thin. He had a bright, intelligent, slightly monkey-like face, and spoke beautiful Russian in a clear, silvery voice. "Is that what the Germans have reduced you to?" I said. "No, I was always rather thin; but it was, of course, upsetting to live under the Germans; they got on one's nerves; and also, we didn't have enough food. But when I went with mother last year to Stalingrad to see a well-known specialist, he said I was quite all-right, just a little anaemic... I am sorry I wasn't here last night, but when the Germans were here I never went out at night, and very seldom even during the day—one just didn't feel like it. Now I go out to see my comrades—the ones I used to go to school with." "Yes, it's a blessing," said Elena Nikolaevna, "Gai will now be able to go to school again. He is the cleverest boy in his form—full marks in every subject. He has read all the classics, but his chief interest is science, and he wants to go into the Navy... "

I was to have many other talks with Gai after that. He would talk about anything—about himself, and his future career, and the Germans, and the films he had seen. "I like American films," he said. "Here in Kotelnikovo Song of Love and The Great Waltz and Chaplin's City Lights were a great success. Before the war we had a very good time, you know. I was a Pioneer myself, and would be in the Komsomol by now, but for the

German occupation. All our young people were preparing to be engineers, or doctors, or scientists. I want to enter the Naval Academy. If the Germans had stayed, the girls would have been expected to wash floors and the boys to look after the cattle. They didn't regard us as human beings at all... That's just how it was under the Germans." "Did they kick you about?" "No, they simply took no notice of me. Sometimes they'd ask: 'What form are you in?' or 'Where's your father?' I'd say he was in the Red Army. They would look cross, but say nothing." "Did they ever say what sort of government they were going to set up here?" "Yes, they would say: 'Everybody will work for himself; no more kolkhozes and no more communism. We aren't going to stay here; we have only come to liberate

you from the Jews and the Bolsheviks'. They put up pictures of Hitler on the walls; they were called 'Hitler the Liberator'. He hardly looked human. Completely beastly face. Like a savage from the Malayan jungle. Terrifying. They opened the church; first they had a Rumanian priest, later a Russian. I once went when the Rumanian was still there. Inside were crowds of Rumanian soldiers. At one point they'd all go down plunk on their knees.

Then they would carry round a dish, and the Rumanians would put money on it—roubles, or marks or lei. .. It didn't make much difference. All money was pretty useless. The mark was worth ten roubles, but the marks they had here were occupation marks, without a

water-mark, and were as good as useless... The Germans had a passion for destroying

things. They tore up all the vegetables in our allotment. And they burned down the public library the last night they were here, and they wouldn't even leave my little library alone,"

said Gai, pointing at the bookcase. "They tore up the Russian magazines, and tore out of the books all the Stalin and Lenin pictures. So silly, don't you think? It was those tank men. Queer chaps. You should have seen them at Christmas. They went all sloppy. They had got a lot of parcels from Germany. They lit a tiny paper Christmas tree, and

unwrapped enormous cakes, and opened tins, and winebottles, and got drunk, and sang

sentimental songs about something or other." "Where were you at that time?" "Just where we always were, next door in the kitchen." "Did they not offer you any wine or cake?"

"Of course not; wouldn't even occur to them. They didn't look upon us as people."

"Weren't you hungry?" "Of course I was, but I would have hated to take part in their festivities." He produced a lighter from his pocket. "They left it here by mistake. I found it under one of the beds. We have no matches, so it's a useful gadget to have. But I don't like having anything from those people... Yes, I lost a lot of weight. The bombs got on my nerves, I suppose, and also the feeling that I was no longer a human being. They

never stopped rubbing that in. They had no respect for anybody—they'd just undress in front of women; we were just a lot of slaves. And there was also no food; no kolkhoz market, and it's very bad for your system if you get no fats," he concluded with a scientific air.

Elena Nikolaevna would talk a lot about herself and about babushka, her mother. She was the last survivor of a Cossack family, ruined during the Civil War. Her father had been a small farmer in a Cossack stanitsa on the Don; but he hadn't much of a business head, and the farm had gone to pot during the Civil War, so he sold his farm to a kulak for ten sacks of flour. They moved to Novocherkassk, but in the typhus epidemic both her father and her brother died. "I was only eighteen then, and I entered the Komsomol, and got a small scholarship for the Novocherkassk music school, where I was taught singing"; but she couldn't make much of a living with that, and it was not enough to support her mother as well, so when her future husband, a railwayman, asked her to marry him, she agreed.

"He's a good man, my husband, though he hadn't much education. But he is in the right Bolshevik traditions; his father also had been a railwayman for forty years, and had received an inscribed gold watch from Kaganovich himself." Later, after settling down in Kotelnikovo in her husband's little house, she took a correspondence course in

elementary teaching. It was during the days when thousands of schools were opening

throughout the Soviet Union, and Elena Nikolaevna was as good as anybody for this

simple job. This coquette of thirty-eight or so no doubt dreamed of all she might have been but for the Civil War. "I used to look pretty good and kulturno" she said, "when I was younger, with my hair waved and with a nice summer frock." And she described how she had her two perfectly good front teeth crowned in gold, because it was "fashionable"

at the time.

And babushka sat in the corner, and would say how awful it was with those Germans in the house, and "I would cry and cry, thinking I would soon die, and how awful it was to leave my dear ones in all this misery... But now that our own dear people are back I think I'll live to a hundred," she said as her little face screwed up into a toothless smile... And she'd go on, talking almost to herself: "I used to know English and American gentlemen.

My husband used to be an izvoshchik, had a fine phaeton on springs; he used to drive English and American gentlemen across the Don; they were engineers. That was a long

time ago, still under the Tsar..."

And Elena Nikolaevna's husband, the railwayman? They had last heard of him in June

1942. He was at Voronezh then. Now that the postal service had been restored at

Kotelnikovo, they might hear from him soon. They might—or they might not...

"You can say what you like," Elena Nikolaevna said one day (not that anybody had said anything), "but our Soviet régime is a good régime. Even babushka, to whom it was all very strange at first, has now become very fond of it. And look at this little house of ours.

Five roubles rent a month is all I pay; you wouldn't get a house so cheap in any other country." Here was, indeed, a strangely mixed family: the grandmother still thinking of the good old days under the Tsar, the mother with her Cossack background and her petit bourgeois instincts; the father a real Soviet proletarian; and the boy who could only see a happy future for himself under the Soviet system with its stress on education—to all these people the Germans were unspeakably odious.

This was not quite general in a town like Kotelnikovo; I saw a large Cossack family on whom a number of Germans had also been billeted; they had been allowed to keep a cow and dozens of chickens, and a sort of modus vivendi had been established between themselves and the Germans, "who were very fond of eggs and milk".

One of the members of this family worked on a near-by kolkhoz, and contributed what she could to the "good living" of both her family in Kotelnikovo and of their German guests. The kolkhozes in the area had not been disbanded, though the Germans kept promising that they would be under the New Order.

The German capture of Kotelnikovo on August 2 had been so sudden that only about

one-third of the population could be evacuated—and in terrible conditions at that. Many had been bombed on the railway or machine-gunned on the roads, and much of the cattle that was being evacuated to the Astrakhan steppes had also been killed in air-raids before it reached its destination. According to Comrade Terekhov, chairman of the local

executive committee who had taken up his duties again the day after the town was

liberated, four people were shot by the Germans for harbouring a Soviet officer; and some 300—mostly young people—had been taken away to Germany as slave labour;

many more would have been taken, and the whole town would have been destroyed if the Germans had had time to do so. Some, he said, had collaborated voluntarily with the

Germans, and had left with them; others, including several railwaymen, had been forcibly drafted into the polizei, and, though they had to go through "certain motions", they had remained loyal to the Soviets. Certain cases of "excessive matey-ness " with the Germans were going to be looked into...

Outside Kotelnikovo the Russians had captured an enormous ammunition dump, two

Fokke-Wulf 189's, completely intact, and a number of other German aircraft. The

Russian air force sergeant to whom I talked said he didn't care for the idea of using German planes: "It's a tricky business. Our anti-aircraft gunners are too sharp for that. At Stalingrad we got five Me.l09's in perfect condition, and we thought we'd use them. All five were shot down by our own guns the very first day. Damned if I'd go up in a German plane. Signalling is all very well, but the chap on the ground thinks the Fritz is cheating, and he just won't miss a chance of having a crack at a Messerschmidt..." He said these planes here had got stuck for lack of water. It often happened on these improvised

airfields in the steppe.

There was still a good deal of air activity; from increasingly distant airfields—their closest base was now at Salsk, 125 miles from Kotel-nikovo and 220 miles from

Stalingrad—the Germans were still trying to send their transport planes to Paulus's

trapped army. They were being shot down by the dozen, and very few were now getting

through. Goering's promise to Hitler to carry 500 tons of supplies a day to Stalingrad had proved a complete myth. The many captured German airmen we saw during those days

were obviously disheartened by the "near-suicide" job they had to do, and doubted whether Stalingrad could hold out, though several argued that, in the spring, there would be a new German offensive, and that Stalingrad would be taken. Rostov would

"certainly" not be abandoned. The captured infantry-men—many of whom had wandered about the steppe for a week trying to catch up with the rapidly retreating Germans and were very hungry—were even more demoralised. The fanatical Nazis, especially among

the Goering boys, still thought a defeat of Germany quite impossible, but thought the war might end in a draw: Stalingrad was already having that effect on them.

The nearest we got to the front was at Zimovniki some sixty miles down the Stalingrad-Caucasus line. The Germans had cleared out of the town only two days before, and were now fighting a stiff rearguard action some five miles south of it. There was intense air activity. As we approached Zimovniki across miles and miles of completely flat snow-covered steppe (we passed another enormous ammunition dump the Germans had

abandoned in a hurry) Russian fighters zoomed overhead every minute; dogfights were

going on not far away, and the fighters were also pursuing the retreating Germans. But they were now retreating more slowly: the remnants of their two tank divisions which had tried to break through to Stalingrad had been reinforced by the SS Viking Division,

brought up from the Caucasus. Gunfire could be heard very clearly, and once a shell

landed a short distance away, a cloud of yellow smoke rising from it. Now and then there came from the south a loud booming noise; that was the famous Russian katyusha mortar in action. The pleasant little town had been badly damaged by shelling, and a grain

elevator was still burning; the local inhabitants told much the same story as in other liberated towns; during the four days' fighting at Zimovniki they had hidden in cellars, with very little food, and only snow to suck, instead of water.

The street signs were still in Rumanian or German, and on the pedestal of the Lenin

statue there was only half a leg still standing. The big clubhouse had been used as a barracks by the Germans. The whole floor was covered with bundles of straw on which

they had slept. The rostrum was still decorated with fir-branches and the tables and the heaps of straw were littered with what looked like the remains of a Christmas party—

dozens of empty wine and brandy bottles, mostly French, empty tins and German

cigarette and biscuit cartons. Here also lay a pile of magazines, one of them showing German soldiers basking in deck-chairs on a verandah overlooking the Black Sea—was

this Anapa?—and carrying a touristy article on "Der herrliche Kaukasus und die Schwarzseeküste". So they had already been making themselves at home in the Caucasus.

The magazine was only three weeks old; now they were beating it from the Caucasus as fast as their legs would carry them...

Much grimmer was the sight in the little park behind the clubhouse. Russian soldiers were digging a common grave for the Russians who had been killed at Zimovniki only

two or three days before. There, in the park, seventy or eighty Russian corpses were placed in rows, in horrible frozen attitudes, some sitting up, some with their arms wide apart, some with their heads blown off; also, some elderly bearded men, and young boys of eighteen or nineteen with open eyes... How many common graves like this were being dug every day along the 2,000 mile front? ...

Marshal Malinovsky, Mr Khrushchev's Minister of Defence, now very heavy, stout and

seemingly humourless, and well over sixty, was a very different man in 1943. He was

then a dapper young Lieutenant-General of forty-four, a very fine specimen of military manhood, admirably groomed in his smart uniform, tall, handsome with long dark hair

brushed back, and with a round sunburned face, which did not show the slightest sign of fatigue after several weeks of continuous campaigning. He looked much less than forty-four. He was then still in command of that 2nd Guards Army which had played a leading part in smashing Manstein's Kotelnikovo offensive. Before long he was going to succeed Yeremenko as commander of the Stalingrad Front (to be renamed the "Southern Front") and was going to recapture Rostov in February 1943.

He received us on January 11 at his H.Q. in the large school-house in a big village on the Don. After telling us of his experiences as a soldier of the Russian Expeditionary Force in France in World War I,

[At that time he told the story as mildly and as "tactfully" as possible. As a member of the Expeditionary Corps of 20,000 men he had, together with the others, sailed from

Vladivostok to Marseilles via Singapore and the Suez Canal; he had fought at Laon and Arras; he had seen British and Anzac troops in action, as well as French poilus, Malgaches and Senegalese. At Amiens the Russians had fought side-by-side with the

British. With a significant little smile Malinovsky said: "I liked those English and Scottish troops; they are slow, but they are reliable. I liked the way they shaved every morning and went into action smoking their pipes." Later, the Revolution broke out in Russia and "there was some trouble with the Russian troops in France." They did not feel any longer like "fighting for France"; they were put in a camp at Courtine; here there was more trouble, and the French shot three or four hundred of them. However, the bulk of the Russians were sent home in the end, except for some who had stayed in France,

usually because of some French woman. When he returned to Russia, he joined the Reds in the Civil War. Later, the story of the massacre of the Russians at Courtine was to be told in Russian books (and, indeed, by Malinovsky himself) in much stronger terms.]

Malinovsky outlined the first stage of the Stalingrad battle, which ended with the

encirclement of the German forces and the Russian westward drive into the Don country.

The second stage was to have begun on December 16, but the Russians were forestalled by von Manstein's thrust towards Stalingrad on the 12th.

He said that this striking force was composed of three infantry and three tank divisions, one brought from the Caucasus and another from France. They had about 600 tanks and

were well supported from the air.

[According to the Germans about 250 (tanks).]

After describing the Russian rearguard action between December 12 and 16, the

"defensive battles" fought for the next week on the Axai and the Myshkova rivers, the Russian counter-offensive which had hurled the Germans beyond Zimovniki, and the

other offensive which had smashed the German "Tormasin Group" in the Middle Don, Malinovsky made a number of significant points:

For the first time the Germans are showing signs of great bewilderment. Trying to fill in gaps, they are throwing their troops about from one place to another—which shows that they are short of reserves. Many of their troops are retreating west in a disorderly way, and abandoning enormous masses of equipment. Such troops are an

easy target for our aircraft. Most of the satellite troops have been knocked out

altogether.

The German officers we have captured are extremely disappointed in their high

command and in the Führer himself. They have none of the self-assurance they had

last summer.

We have considerable difficulties arising from our long lines of communication, but we are overcoming them fairly successfully. And the Red Army has certainly

changed and evolved. There were some truly revolutionary changes in the Red

Army organisation in the summer of 1942.

[This was a clear allusion to those "post-Rostov" reforms described in an earlier chapter.]

Secondly, there is far more drive and punch in our troops than there used to be; our winter offensive of 1942-3 is on a much larger scale than that of the winter of 1941-2. Our men have far greater experience, and an intense hatred of the Germans. And they can now face situations which they could not face a year ago—for example an

onslaught by 150 enemy tanks. Well-armed with anti-tank weapons, our troops

successfully faced such attacks in this last Manstein offensive.

On the Stalingrad encirclement he said: