A Writer at War (25 page)

Grossman with Vysokoostrovsky (centre) at Stalingrad, September 1942.

‘I’ve been recommended for the Order of the Red Star for the second time, but to no effect so far, just as before. I’ve got this letter taken from a dead soldier; it’s written in a child’s scribble. There are the following words at the end: ‘I miss you very much. Please come and visit, I so want to see you, if only for one hour. I am writing this, and tears are pouring. Daddy, please come and visit.’

He also wrote to their old German-speaking nanny, Zhenni Genrikhovna Henrichson, whom many years later he put into his novel
Life and Fate
.

You already know about
our terrible grief: the death of Misha.

Sorrow has come to our family too, Zhenni Genrikhovna. Please write to me at my new address: 28 Field Post, 1st Unit, V.S. Grossman (don’t mention my position in the address). Have you heard from Papa? Where is he now? I don’t know at what address to write to him.

Grossman at this point had no idea that his nephew, Yura Benash, a young lieutenant in Stalingrad who had been trying to contact him having read his articles, had been killed in the fighting.

1
Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich (1894–1971), a commissar in the civil war, he rose in influence by supporting Stalin against Trotsky. He oversaw much of the construction of the Moscow metro and played a leading part in the destruction of the Ukrainian intelligentsia during the Great Terror. In 1939, he became head of the Communist party in the Ukraine and, in 1941, organised the evacuation of factories to the east as the Germans advanced. After the war, following the death of Stalin in 1953, he led the coup against Beria and took power. He denounced Stalin at the XX Party Congress in 1956, but his attempts at liberalisation were inconsistent with other actions, such as the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956.

2
A
kerosinka
(a ‘kerosene lamp’ or ‘Primus’) was the nickname for a very simple, canvas-covered biplane, the Polikarpov U-2, which had been designed as a training aircraft and was also used as a crop sprayer. They were called a
kerosinka
because they could catch fire in no time. At Stalingrad, they were often piloted by young women between eighteen and twenty years old. They would fly across the front line during the night, stopping their engines and dropping small bombs on German lines. The bombs were ineffective, but the tactic terrified and wore the Germans down. They called the aircraft ‘coffee grinders’ and referred to the young women pilots as ‘night witches’.

3
Presumably this means that it dropped a recognition flare to warn Red Army soldiers in the front line not to fire at them.

4
A steppe ground squirrel, or gopher.

5
Traditional Russian cabbage soup.

6
The Insulted and the Injured
(1861) by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

7
This means that they are taking all they can from life while they still have a chance.

8
The beginning of this notebook, entitled ‘North-West of Stalingrad, September 1942’, has been lost or destroyed.

9
The 45th Rifle Division became the 74th Guards Rifle Division on 1 March 1943 as a tribute to its role at Stalingrad. It stayed with the 62nd Army, later the 8th Guards Army, until the end of the war.

10
General Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov (1900–1982) commanded the 4th Army in the invasion of Poland in 1939, then the 9th Army in the Russo-Finnish War. From 1940–2 he served as military attaché in China. After Stalingrad, his 62nd Army became the 8th Guards Army and he commanded it all the way to victory in Berlin where he conducted surrender negotiations with General Hans Krebs. From 1949–53 he was Commander-in-Chief Soviet Forces in East Germany and from 1960–61, he served as Deputy Minister of Defence.

11
The 13th Guards Rifle Division was founded on 19 January 1942, on a basis of the 87th Rifle Division. General Aleksandr Ilyich Rodimtsev (1905–1977) had won the gold star of Hero of the Soviet Union as an adviser in the Spanish Civil War, particularly for his role at the Battle of Guadalajara in 1937, when Mussolini’s blackshirt divisions were put to flight.

It was General Chuikov who coined the phrase the Stalingrad Academy of Street-Fighting. Chuikov’s idea was to keep the Germans constantly engaged. He ordered his troops to site their trenches as close to the enemy as possible, because that would make it harder for the Luftwaffe, which enjoyed air supremacy by day, to distinguish between the two opposing forces. Chuikov boasted to Grossman:

‘During air raids our soldiers and Germans ran towards each other to hide in the same holes. [The Germans] could not strike our front line with their air attacks. At the Red October plant they demolished a fresh division of their own.’

Grossman emphasised this proximity in an essay written towards the end of the battle.

Sometimes, the trenches dug
by the battalion are twenty metres from the enemy. The sentry can hear soldiers walking in the German trench, and arguments when Germans divide up the food. He can hear all night the tap dance of a German sentry in his torn boots. Everything is a marker here, every stone is a landmark.

The way to wear the Germans down was by small-scale night attacks, to prevent them sleeping, and playing on their fear of darkness, and of the hunting skills of the Siberian troops. Snipers also provided a powerful psychological weapon as well as a boost to Soviet morale.

Chuikov could be as wasteful of lives as any Soviet general – especially in the early days when he ordered one counter-attack after another to blunt the German advance – but he also quickly recognised the advantage of close-combat engagements, using small groups armed with grenades, sub-machine guns, knives, sharpened spades and a flame-thrower.
This savage system of fighting in cellars, sewers and in the ruins of apartment blocks became known to the Germans as
Rattenkrieg
. Chuikov told Grossman later in the battle:

‘Stalingrad is the glory of the Russian infantry. Our infantry has taken and made use of German weapons and ammunition. We didn’t just receive attacks, we had to attack. Retreat meant ruin. If you retreated, you’d be shot. If I did, I’d be shot . . . A soldier who’d spent three days here considered himself an old-timer. Here, people only lived for one day . . . Weapons for close-quarter combat have never been used as they have in Stalingrad . . . [and our men] didn’t fear tanks any longer. Our soldiers have become so resourceful. Even professors wouldn’t be able to think up their tricks. They can build trenches that are so good you wouldn’t notice soldiers in them even if you step on their heads. Our soldiers were on an upper floor [in a building]. Some Germans below them wound up a gramophone. Our men made a hole in the floor and fired [through it] with a flame-thrower . . . “Oh, may I report to you, comrades, what a fight it was!”’

Grossman was fascinated by the way soldiers watched, learned and improvised new methods to kill the enemy. He was especially interested by the snipers and got to know the two star snipers in Stalingrad quite well. Vasily Zaitsev, who was made the biggest star by Soviet propaganda – the character played by Jude Law in the film
Enemy at the Gates
– had been a sailor with the Pacific Fleet based in Vladivostok. He belonged to General Nikolai Batyuk’s 284th Division of Siberians.
¹
Anatoly Chekhov, whom Grossman accompanied on a sniper mission to observe him at work, was part of Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards Rifle Division. It may well have been the case that Chuikov’s jealousy of Rodimtsev and the press coverage of his Guards Division led to Chekhov’s exploits being subordinated to those of Zaitsev. Rodimtsev told Grossman about Chekhov during his October visit. ‘Red Army soldier Chekhov killed thirty-five fascists [during the fighting]. I wanted to give him some leave. He’s killed enough Germans to deserve a lifetime’s leave.’ Grossman then went to interview Chekhov.

Chekhov, Anatoly Ivanovich. Born 1923. ‘We moved to Kazan in 1931. I was at school there for seven years. Then my father took to drinking, and left my mother. There were also my two sisters. I had to leave school although I was a top pupil. I liked geography very much, but I had to stop . . . A notice appeared on 29 March 1942, and I volunteered for sniper school. In fact, I had never shot anything as a child, not even with a slingshot. My first experience of shooting was from a small-calibre rifle. I scored nine out of fifty. The lieutenant got very angry: ‘Excellent marks in all subjects, but you shoot badly. We’ll never make anything of you.’ But I wasn’t dismayed. I began to study theory and weapons. First, the experience of shooting with a proper rifle – chest shots and head shots. We were given three rounds and I hit the target [each time]. And from then on I became the best shot. I volunteered for the front.

‘I wanted to be someone who destroyed the enemy on his own. I first thought about it when I read the newspaper. I wanted to be famous. I learned to judge distances by sight. I don’t need an optical device. My favourite books? I didn’t read much, actually. My father would get drunk and we would all scatter, sometimes I couldn’t even do my homework. I never had my own corner.

‘I took part in the attack on the morning of 15 September. I was advancing to Mamaev Kurgan . . . I had the feeling that this wasn’t war, that I was simply teaching my section to camouflage in the field and to shoot. We shouted “
Urra!
” and ran about two hundred metres. Then their machine gun opened up and wouldn’t let us work. I crawled as I had been taught, and slithered. And I fell into a trap. There were three machine guns around me, and a tank. I’d set myself a task, so I didn’t look back. I knew that my section wouldn’t desert me. I was shooting point-blank, at a range of five metres. [The machine-gunners] were sitting side-on to me. I knocked both of them down. Then three machine guns, a tank and a mortar began firing at me at the same time. I and my four soldiers lay in a crater from nine in the morning till eight in the evening . . . After this I was appointed the commander of a mortar platoon.

‘When I was given a sniper’s rifle, I chose a place on the fifth floor. There was a wall and its shadow concealed me. When the sun came out, I slipped downstairs. From there I saw the German house a hundred metres away. There were sub-machine-gunners and machine-gunners there. They were there during the day, they sat in
basements. I went out at four in the morning. It starts to get light at this time. The first Fritz ran to get some water for the chiefs to have a wash. The sun was already rising. He ran side-on to me. I didn’t look at their faces much, I looked at their uniforms. Commanders wear trousers, jackets, caps and no belts, privates wear boots.

‘I sat on the landing of a staircase. I’d arranged my rifle behind the grill so that the smoke would drift along the wall. At first they walked. I knocked down nine on the first day. I knocked down seventeen in two days. They sent women, and I killed two out of five.
²
On the third day I saw an embrasure! A sniper. I waited and fired. He fell down and cried out in German. They stopped carrying mines and getting water. I killed forty Fritzes in eight days.

‘When it was sunny, there was a shadow on the wall when I moved [so] I didn’t shoot them when it was sunny. A new sniper appeared by the open window . . . This sniper had me cornered. He fired at me four times. But he missed. Of course, it was a pity to leave. Well, they’ve never drunk from the Volga. They went to get water, and they carried reports, dinner and ammunition . . . They drank filthy water from locomotives. They went to get water in the morning, with a bucket.

It is more convenient for me to shoot [a man] when he is running. It’s easier for my hand and eye. It’s more difficult when he is standing still. The first one appeared. He walked five metres. I took aim at once, a little in front of him, about four centimetres from his nose.

‘When I first got the rifle, I couldn’t bring myself to kill a living being: one German was standing there for about four minutes, talking, and I let him go. When I killed my first one, he fell at once. Another one ran out and stooped over the killed one, and I knocked him down, too . . . When I first killed, I was shaking all over: the man was only walking to get some water! . . . I felt scared: I’d killed a person! Then I remembered our people and started killing them without mercy.

‘The building [opposite] has collapsed inside down to the second
floor. Some [Germans] sit on the staircase, others on the second floor. There are safes, all the money in them has been burned.
³

‘Some girls are living on the Kurgan. They make bonfires and cook. [German] officers go to see them.

‘Sometimes you see the following picture: a Fritz is walking and a dog barks at him from a yard, and he kills the dog. If you hear dogs barking at night, this means the Fritzes are doing something there, roaming about, and the dogs bark.

‘I’ve become a beast of a man: I kill, I hate them as if it is a normal thing in my life. I’ve killed forty men, three in the chest, the others in the head. When you fire, the head instantly jerks back or to the side. He throws up his arms and collapses . . . Pchelintsev, too, had been sorry to kill: his first one, and the second, ‘How could I?’