A Writer at War (23 page)

Divisions on the move. People’s faces. Engineers, artillery, tanks. They are moving day and night. Faces, faces, their seriousness, they are the faces of doomed people.

Before the advance began, Donbass proletarian Lyakhov, soldier from the motorised infantry battalion of a tank brigade, wrote this note to his commanders: ‘Let Comrade Stalin know that I will sacrifice my life for the sake of the Motherland, and for him. And I won’t regret it even for a second. If I had five lives, I would sacrifice them all for his sake, without hesitating, so dear is this man to me.’

Grossman was interested in the daily grumbles of soldiers. In the following case, a soldier talked about the open steppe, where Luftwaffe pilots could spot field kitchens easily, and then moved on to that other soldierly preoccupation: boots.

‘Most men got killed because of kitchens. Corporals “get tanned” by the kitchens, waiting for food. It’s usually gone off by the time we get it. I’ve suffered so much because of my boots. I’ve been walking with blood blisters. I took the boots off a dead man because they didn’t have any holes, but they were too small for me.’

‘We, young soldiers, don’t even think of home, it’s mostly older soldiers who do . . . A corporal from the 4th Company called Romanov has let us down on the battlefield. We, the young soldiers who are properly brought up and conscientious, we endure all this with patience, but the moods of older soldiers are worse than ever.’

Grossman was particularly taken with Red Army soldier Gromov, an anti-tank rifleman, who at thirty-eight must have appeared ancient to the young conscripts. According to Ortenberg, Grossman spent a week with the anti-tank unit. ‘
He was not a stranger
any more in their family,’ he wrote. Ortenberg claimed the credit for the idea of writing about him, perhaps because Grossman’s portrait of Gromov was later hailed as a masterpiece, particularly by Ilya Ehrenburg. These were Grossman’s notes on what he called Gromov’s story:

‘When you’ve hit it, you see a bright flash on the armour. The shot deafens one terribly, one has to open one’s mouth. I was lying there, I heard shouts: “They’re coming!” My second shot hit the tank. The Germans started screaming terribly. We could hear them clearly. I wasn’t scared even a little. My spirits soared. At first, there was some smoke, then crackling and flames. Evtikhov had hit one vehicle. He hit the hull, and how the Fritzes screamed!’ (Gromov has light green eyes in a suffering, angry face.) ‘The number one carries the anti-tank rifle. The number two carries thirty cartridges for it, a hundred cartridges for [an ordinary] rifle, two anti-tank grenades, and a rifle. What a noise the [anti-tank rifle] makes. The earth trembles from it.’

‘Our main losses occur because we have to go and get breakfast and dinner ourselves. We can only go and get them at night. There are problems with dishes, we should get hold of buckets.’

‘We used to lie down during the night and advance during the day. The ground’s as flat as a tabletop.’

These notes, including Gromov’s words, were then refashioned into the piece for
Krasnaya Zvezda
, which so impressed Ehrenburg and others.

When on the march, one
’s shoulder bone aches like hell from the anti-tank rifle, and the arm becomes numb. It’s difficult to jump with the anti-tank rifle and difficult to walk on slippery ground. Its weight slows you down and upsets your balance.

Anti-tank riflemen walk heavily, in broad steps, and seem slightly lame – on the side where the rifle’s weight is. [Gromov] was filled with the anger of a difficult man, a man whom the war has taken away from his field, from his
izba
, and from his wife who had given birth to his children. This was the anger of a doubting Thomas who saw with his own eyes the huge troubles of his people . . . Walls of white and black smoke and grey-yellow dust rose in front of the anti-tank riflemen and behind them. This was what one usually calls ‘hell’ . . . He was lying on the bottom of the slit trench. The hell was howling with a thousand voices, and Gromov was dozing, stretching his tired legs: a soldier’s rest, poor and austere.

‘I fired at [the tank] again,’ [said Gromov]. ‘And I saw at once that I’d hit it. It took my breath away. A blue flame ran over the armour, quick like a spark. And I understood at once that my anti-tank shell had got inside and gave off this blue flame. And a little smoke rose. The Germans inside began to scream. I’d never heard people scream this way before, and then immediately there was a crackling inside. It crackled and crackled. The shells had started to explode. And then flames shot out, right into the sky. The tank was done for.’

Regimental commander Savinov, a wonderful Russian face. Blue eyes, red tan. There’s a dimple from a bullet on his helmet. ‘When the bullet hit me,’ Savinov said, ‘I became drunk and lay for fifteen minutes unconscious. A German had got me drunk.’

Civilians too were caught up in what was seen by both sides as the key battle of the war.

Spies. A twelve-year-old boy who could report on where [German] headquarters had been situated by its signal cables, kitchens and dispatch riders. A woman, to whom the Germans had said: ‘If you don’t go and don’t come back, we are going to shoot your two daughters.’

Soviet pitlilessness more than matched that of the Germans, when it came to forcing their own men into the attack. Stalin’s Order No. 227 – ‘Not One Step Back’ – included the instruction to each army command to organise ‘
three to five well-armed
[blocking] detachments (up to two hundred men each)’ to form a second line to ‘combat cowardice’ by shooting down any soldier who tried to run away. In the factory district of northern Stalingrad, Grossman came across Colonel S.F. Gorokhov, then commanding the 124th Brigade.

After the seventh attack, Gorokhov said to the commander of the blocking detachment: ‘Come on, that’s enough shooting at their backs. Come on and join the attack.’ The commander and his blocking detachment joined the attack, and the Germans were thrown back.

The defence of Stalingrad was stiffened by the most terrifying discipline. Some 13,500 soldiers were executed during the five-month battle. Most of these were during the earlier days when many men broke. Grossman heard about an ‘extraordinary event’, which was the official Soviet term for ‘betrayal of the Motherland’, a very broadly defined crime.

An extraordinary event. Sentence. Execution. They undressed him and buried him. At night, he came back to his unit, in his bloodstained underwear. They shot him again.

This may possibly refer to another case, but it is almost exactly what happened in the 45th Rifle Division, when the execution squad from the NKVD Special Department attached to the division failed to kill the condemned man, perhaps because their aim was affected by alcohol.
⁹
This soldier, like so many others, had been condemned to death for a self-inflicted wound. After shooting him, the execution squad buried him in a nearby shell-hole, but the condemned man dug himself out and returned to his company, only to be executed a second time. Usually, however, the prisoner was forced to undress before being shot so that his uniform could be issued to somebody else without too many discouraging bullet-holes.

A number of Soviet generals did not shrink from hitting even quite senior subordinates, although the striking of soldiers by officers and NCOs had been one of the most hated characteristics of the Tsarist Army.

Conversation of Colonels Shuba and Tarasov with the army commander:

‘“What?”

‘“May I say again . . . ?”

‘“What?”

‘“May I say again . . . ?”

‘He hit Shuba in the mouth. I [presumably Tarasov] stood still, drew my tongue in and clenched my teeth, because I was afraid to bite my tongue off or be left with no teeth.’

At this critical moment of the war, Grossman recorded in his notebooks a number of stories about Soviet and military bureaucracy.

Aircraft had been bombing our tanks for three days, and all this time telegrams about it were travelling through different chains of command.

Provisions for an encircled division were to be dropped by parachute, but the quartermaster didn’t want to issue the foodstuffs, because there was no one to sign the invoice.

A chief of reconnaissance could not get permission for half a litre of vodka, nor could he get a badly needed piece of silk which cost eighty roubles fifty kopecks.

Information on take-off. Applications for bombing missions.

A plane caught fire. The pilot wanted to save it and didn’t bail out by parachute. He brought the burning plane back to the airfield. He was on fire himself. His trousers were burning. The quartermaster, however, refused to issue him with new trousers because the minimum period hadn’t elapsed before a replacement could be provided for the old ones. The red tape lasted for several days.

A Yu-53 with a full load of fuel was burning in the clear evening sky. The crew bailed out with their parachutes.

Stalin was beside himself with rage when he heard on 3 September that Stalingrad was encircled on the western bank. For General Yeremenko, the commander-in-chief of the Stalingrad Front, and Nikita Khrushchev, the member of his Military Council and thus chief commissar, the key question was who should be given the responsibility of defending the city itself. The candidate would have to take over the thoroughly demoralised and battered 62nd Army, which was cut off from its neighbour to the south, the 64th Army, on 10 September.

On the following day, 11 September, Yeremenko’s headquarters in a complex of tunnels in the Tsaritsa gorge came under direct fire. Grossman’s editor, Ortenberg, accompanied by the writer Konstantin Simonov, reached the headquarters that day. They spoke to a ‘gloomy’ Khrushchev, who found it hard to light a cigarette due to the lack of oxygen in the tunnel. When Ortenberg and Simonov woke the next morning, they found that the headquarters had departed while they slept. Stalin, still in a foul temper, had been forced to agree that Yeremenko must withdraw Stalingrad Front headquarters across the Volga. General Vasily Chuikov, a tough and thoroughly ruthless commander, was summoned to take command of the 62nd Army left on the west bank.
¹⁰
Grossman later interviewed all those involved.

Ortenberg (centre) and Konstantin Simonov (right) sending despatches back to Moscow from Stalingrad Front HQ, September 1942.

Khrushchev – Tired, white-haired, bloated. Looks perhaps like Kutuzov. Yeremenko – He has been wounded seven times in this war.

Yeremenko claimed the credit for selecting Chuikov.

‘It was I who promoted Chuikov. I knew him, he was never prone to panic . . . I knew Chuikov from peacetime. I used to drub him during manoeuvres. “I know how brave you are,” [I told him], “but I don’t need that sort of courage. Don’t make hasty decisions, as you tend to.”’

According to Chuikov, the interview with Yeremenko and Khrushchev went as follows:

‘Yeremenko and Khrushchev said to me:

‘“You have to save Stalingrad. How do you feel about it?”

‘“Yes, sir.”

‘“No, it isn’t enough to obey, what do you think about it?”

‘“It means to die. So we will die.”’

In his memoirs written during the Khrushchev era, Chuikov recounted the conversation in a slightly different way:

‘Comrade Chuikov,’ said Khrushchev
, ‘how do you interpret your task?’

‘We will defend the city or die in the attempt,’ came Chuikov’s reply.

Yeremenko and Khrushchev looked at him and said that he had understood his mission correctly.

As will be seen later, Grossman became disillusioned by the vanities and jealousies of the Stalingrad commanders after the battle, all of whom felt that their role had been insufficiently appreciated. Yeremenko was quite open in his boasting and his attempts to undermine Khrushchev.

‘I was a corporal during the last war and killed twenty-two Germans . . . Who wants to die? No one is particularly eager . . . I had to take terribly cruel decisions here: “Execute on the spot.”

‘Khrushchev proposed that we should mine the city. I telephoned Stalin [about it]. “What for?” [Stalin] asked.

“I am not going to surrender Stalingrad,” I said. “I don’t want to mine the city.”

‘“Tell him to fuck off, then,” [Stalin replied].’

‘We have held on thanks to our [artillery] fire and thanks to the soldiers. The fortifications were fucking bad.’

The inadequacy of Stalingrad’s defences was just about the only matter on which all the senior officers agreed. Chuikov observed that the barricades could have been pushed over with a truck. Gurov, the chief commissar of the 62nd Army, said that no fortifications had existed, and Krylov, the chief of staff, said they were laughable. ‘In the defence of Stalingrad,’ Chuikov said later to Grossman, ‘divisional commanders counted on blood more than on barbed wire.’

Chuikov, whom Grossman came to know very well during the course of the war, also liked to expound on his past experience and his role at Stalingrad. ‘I commanded a regiment at the age of fifteen,’ he said to Grossman of his time in the Russian civil war. ‘I was the chief adviser to Chiang Kai-shek,’ Chuikov added when talking of 1941. He did not mention that it was a great advantage to have been absent in China during that first disastrous summer of the war.