STALINGRAD FRONT

ON AUGUST sixth Colonel-General Yeremenko took over the com-mand of the forces of the Stalingrad front. Those were days of painand bitterness. A pitiless sun hung over the steppes,its great red dischazy behind a pall of fine dry dust raised by thousands of Red Armyboots, the wheels of carts, and the treads of tanks and tractors .. Thedust rose high up in the heavens covering the cloudless sky like aleaden shroud.

The armies were retreating. The faces of the men were dark andgloomy. Dust covered their clothing, their weapons, dust lay thicklyon the muzzles of guns, on the tarpaulin that covered the crates ofstaff documents, on the black polished lids of staff typewriters, onthe suitcases, bags and rifles piled carelessly on carts. The dry, greydust clogged the men's noses and throats. It dried and cracked theirlips. Dust penetrated the hearts and souls of the men, it made them

.restless, it found its way into the arteries ani! veins and turned theirblood grey. It was terrible, that dust, the dust of retreat. It corroded

the fine metal of faith, it dampened the fires that burned in valianthearts, it dimmed the vision of the gunners. There were momentswhen the men forgot their duty, their strength, their formidable weap-ons and they felt their senses reel. Germa.n tanks rumbled over theroads. German dive bombers hovered day and night over the Don,Messerschmitts swooped down on our supply trains. Smoke, fire, dustand suffocating heat. .

At times it seemed to the men that there was no oxygen in thisfcetid air which they inhaled through cracked lips, they felt the drygrey dust was choking them. In those days the faces of the marchingmen were as bloodless as the faces of the wounded who lay in thejolting trucks.

In those days the marching men felt the same urge to groan andcomplain as those who lay swathed in bloodstained bandages on strawpallets in village huts awaiting the ambulances. The great army of agreat nation was in retreat.

The first motor convoys of the retreating army entered Stalingrad.Down the broad thoroughfares of the city, past the plate-glass windowsof shops, past the soft drink stands painted a pale blue, past book-stores and toyshops rolled truckloads of grey-faced wounded, front-line trucks with dented fenders and shell-torn sides, staff cars withjagged cracks on windshields, cars covered with the dust and mud ofthe war roads, bringing the hot breath of war into the city and he-coming part of its being,

Alarm crept into the faces of the townsfolk. Outwardly everythingseemed as usual and yet everything was changed. But the mighty fac-tories continued to spew forth black smoke. Stalingrad industry workedday and night. .The Barricades and the Stalingrad Tractor Plantsbecame the arsenal of the Stalingrad front, and every night artilleryregiments and tank battalions brought into being by an all-out effort

. on the production line moved toward the front to replace those thatwere being crippled in the bitter, unequal struggle, to replace thosedestroyed at Kotelnikovo and Kletskaya and those lost in action atriver crossings.

The war was coming down on Stalingrad. The city girded itselfto meet the impact. Defence plans were drawn up at Staff Headquar-ters. Crossroads and city gardens where lovers had held their trystsnow acquired new meaning either as tactically advantageous or un-tenable, as commanding the vicinity completely or partially, as sup-'

parting the flanks or reinforcing the centre. Then the war reachedStalingrad. And the lovely steppe lanes lined with wild cherry trees,the gullies and hills bearing names given to them by our great-grand-fathers became communication lines, terrain, and heights designatedby numbers. I

The German Command believed the battering ram they had con-centrated for the main thrust was insuperable. They were confidentthat no force in the world was capable of withstanding Colonel-CeneralRichthofen's air corps, or von Bock's tanks and infantry. They ad-vanced on the Volga and Stalingrad, closing in from Tsymlyanskayaand Kotelnikovo in the south and from Kletskaya in the northwest.For the Germans the taking of Stalingrad and reaching the Volga werea foregone conclusion. They considered it a matter merely of di-viding the remaining distance by the average daily advance. And onthe basis of this simple arithmetic Hitler announced to the world thedate of Stalingrad's capture.

In those dark days of the August' retreat, at a time when theheavy air was filled with the roar of Colonel-Ceneral Richthofen's airsquadrons and the steppelands between the Don and the Volga bentunder the weight of tank columns, the marching feet of infantry divi-sions and the creaking wheels of von Bock's artillery regiments, tothis realm of flaming villages, this realm of smoke, flame and dry,hot dust, to this once peaceful land where hell had broken loose,came the commander of the new, Stalingrad front.

The Germans who thought in terms of arithmetical calculationsbelieved that this flaming inferno they had created could evoke nothingbut panic, weakness, apathy and disbelief in the favourable out-come of the war for the Russians. They rubbed their hands gleefully:after the long retreat and th~ heavy losses they had sustained, theRussians, crushed by the weight of their reverses, would never beable to offer serious resistance in this steppe country where camelsroamed and the desert loomed, and hence would hardly attempt astand at the city on the steep bank of the Volga with its broad expansebehind their backs. The Russians knew very well that the great riverlay behind them, but they knew also that thefate of their country wasto be decided here.

Though worn out by the battles on the Severny Donetz, on theOskol and the Don, the Russian troops took up positions in front

. of the city on the Volga and there was no power on earth that could

dislodge them. Whence this strength, how did it come into being?Vlhat was the source of this power that held the men steadfast on theVolga cliffs?

The Germans expected that their smashing blow would gain mooinentum as the days passed. They thought it was a matter of arithme-tical progression as it had been in Poland and Holland, in Franceand Belgium, in Yugoslavia and Greece. There, on the fifth day ofthe offensive the German columns had moved twice as fast as on thefirst, and on the tenth day, twice as fast as on the fifth. In Westernand Southeastern Europe the Germans advanced like an avalanchesweeping down a mountainside; at Stalingrad their advance was morelike the movement of a cart climbing a winding mountain path.

And now I shall tell you of the miracle that came to pass, a mir-aele founded on great faith in the strength of the people and in thepeople's love of freedom.

Colonel-General Yeremenko is a massively built, broad-shoulderedman of fifty who in spite of his, bulk is agile in his movements. WhenYeremenko puts on his spectacles to read a paper or to study themap he looks like a village school-teacher relaxing over a book in theschool room after class. But when he reaches suddenly for the receiverto order an artillery commander to "intensify fire!" or to "hang onto them, hang on to them like a kite!"; when he issues curt commandsto shift several artillery regiments from one sector of the front toanother, or when he orders anti-aircraft batteries to straddle a Ger-man supply air line just spotted in the steppes, one realizes at oncethat Yeremenko is not. merely the man to take charge of staticgranite defences, one feels that here is a master of swift and suddenoffensive.

Colonel-General Yeremenko is a man of great military experience.He knows soldiering from bottom up; in 1914 he himself took partin a bayonet charge in which he killed twenty-two Germans. He is aGeneral who has risen from the ranks. And when in the midst ofdirecting a ,complex operation, listening to reports and issuing briefcommands, when between talking to a general whose troops have bro-ken through to the enemy's trenches and issuing orders to the for-ward air units to go into action, he picks up the receiver and sternlyenquires why it is taking so long to supply the men with felt boots,you realize that for him war is a grim job of work stripped of allromantic ilIusiom3.

"Who wants to die ?" he said to me once, chuckling in his oldman's way. "No one wants to die." .

For Yeremenko war is part of life. The laws of war are the lawsof life. There are no mysterious Kantian "things in themselves."Yeremenko's appraisal of the fighting manand the general is foundedon sober common sense. He knows the difference in the behaviourof a family man who is prone to complain of his lumbago and thatof a headstrong youth who does not pause to consider his actions.

"The best age for a soldier is between twenty-five and thirty,"he says. "At that age he does not yearn for a quiet life, he does notthink continually of his family, and he has already lost the reckless-ness of youth. A soldier cannot get along on courage alone, he hasto have some experience of life, some ordinary horse sense."

Yeremenko knows the vicissitudes of war, he has experienced themin the course of his long years of army service. ·One of those whohad organized the defence of Smolensk, he had encountered theenemy's main-forces before this, had seeri the German plans go awry,tempos slow down, and the seemingly inexorable movement of theGerman tank columns checked for the first time since the outbreakof the great war. And what he saw convinced him of the strength ofour defences. He tested the power of our offensive when troops underhis leadership broke through the enemy's lines on the Kalinin frontand took Peno, Andreapol, Toropets and moved on Vitebsk. But helearned also the bitterness of reverses, realized the treacherous pow-er of the enemy when the Cermans broke through at Bryansk andOrel.

He knew how fickle are the fortunes of war, and even at the timeof our biggest suceesses he did not consider the Germans beaten.

The Stalingrad epic was preceded by battle: of unparalleled feroc-ity and heroism in the steppes south of the city. It was from herethat the Germans had originally intended to break through to the city,and it was here that they encountered' a steel wall of resistance. Gen-eral Shumilov's forces repulsed the enemy's onslaught on the flatplains which afforded the German air force and tank units ample op-portunity for manoeuvre. The battles here were nothing like thosefought later on in the streets and squares of Stalingrad. The differ-ence was as between night and day. Yet here in the open plains werefirst manifested that remarkable resolution and self-sacrifice that waslater to be the distinguishing feature of the entire great Battle of

Stalingrad. Here in the steppes everything was so different. Thingshappened that could never happen in the city. For instance, a sentryon duty on the fringe of a mine field once saw a hare dash into themined section of the plain followed by a bush-tailed red fox. Thesentry saw both animals=-the ipursued and the pursuer-blown topieces on the mines. He tried to reach them and fell wounded severelyby a mine splinter. At that moment German tanks appeared from thefar side of the field, skirting the mined area, and the wounded sentryopened rifle fire to warn his comrades of the enemy's approach.

. Here in the steppe the Battle of Stalingrad began, here the crewsof anti-tank guns commanded by Sergeant Apanasenko and Kiril Het-man repulsed the attacks of thirty heavy tanks; here the Donbasworker Lyakhov wrote his vow before going into attack; here in thesteppes KV tanks commanded by Colonel Bubnov fought so valiantlythat to this day you can hear stories of this indestructible tank brigade.Here it was that twenty-five of Colonel Denisenko's Guardsmen stormedan enemy-held height. Fifteen survived the first dash forward; sixwere left after the second; the third spurt cost the lives of threemore. Such was the courage of these men that when two of the lastthree fell dead, the sole survivor of the twenty-five, threw himselfforward, reached the crest and taking cover behind a disabled Germantank opened machine-gun fire.

Here in the steppe the Germans were stemmed. Unable to getthrough to the city from the south, they concentrated all their forcesat the elbow of the Don, and managed to breach our defences atVertyachy village. Enemy armour cut through to the northern out-skirts of the, city not far from the Tractor Plant. That was on August23, 1942.

The Germans had intended to take possession of the factories, pushon to the river and complete the capture of Stalingrad by August 26.It was then that the German forces concentrated on the direction ofthe main thrust clashed with our 62nd Army. The great battle began,followed breathlessly by the nations of the world.

Lieutenant-Ceneral Chuikov took over the command of the 62nd. Army at the crucial hour of the Battle of Stalingrad. He reported atYeremenko's command post, which was located deep underground inthe western suburbs of flaming Stalingrad. We do not know what Ye-remenko said to Chuikov when he despatched him on his arduous mis-sion. That will remain between the two men.

The commander of the front had known Gen~ral Chuikov for manyyears, in peace and in war. He knew of Chuikov's courage, his inde-fatigable energy, his stubborn resolution; he knew that Chuikov neverswerved from his objective. "That man never succumbs to panic," saidthe commander of the front..

It was a colossal job that fell to the lot of General Chuikov. "Standto the death!" became his watchword and the device of his aides Go-rokhov, Rodimtsev; Guryev, Gurtiev and Batyuk. They demonstratedtheir loyalty to this device in the unprecedented ordeals of the Sta-lingrad Battle; so did the commanders of the regiments and battalions,companies and platoons that made up 5talingrad's divisions and sodid the tens of thousands of fighting men who would not yield aninch of the ground they set out to defend.

General Chuikov and his assistants shared with the men all theordeals of those bloody battles. There were no defences in depth inStalingrad, no distinction between front and rear in this city stretchingin a narrow strip along the bank of the Volga for a distance of sixtykilometres. Reduced to a heap of smouldering ruins, Stalingrad hadbecome one vast trench, one huge dugout. And in the midst of thisvast trench that was rocked day and night by explosions, 'in the midstof the blazing fires and the roar of German bombers, were Lieutenant-General Chuikov, Commander of the Army, his generals and colonelswho commanded the divisions, and the fighting men, the machine-gunners, sappers, anti-tank gunners, artillerymen and infantry.

For a hundred days and a hundred nights Chuikov and his assist-ants toiled in this hell. In this hell their staffs went about theirtasks calmly and deliberately, in this hell battle plans were drawn up,conferences held, decisions taken, orders drawn up and signed.

In the face of the incredible stubbornness of the 62nd Army theGermans realized that they could not take5talingrad by advancingalong the entire -Iront. 50 they decided to break up our defences, tostrike wedges into the 62nd Army, to split it by sections the way yousplit a heavy log that defies a single blow of the axe, After tremen-dous efforts, at the price of enormous losses, they succeeded in driv-ing narrow spearheads into the Volgadefences in three places. Theybeliev~d that these wedges would split up the 62nd Army. But theywere .mistaken, The wedges were driven in, but the 62nd Army re-mained as solid and united as before, subordinate to the will of itscommander, indestructible, unbreakable, integral. It seemed a miracle:

an army separated' from its rear by the Volga .swollen by the autumnrains, an army with three heavy German wedges piercing its bodycontinued to fight as a single, smooth-working mighty organism.

What is the explanation for this miracle ? The Germans had blun-dered, the Germans did not understand, were incapable of grasping the:inner organic structure of the 62nd Army. They thought that it was.a chunk of timber that could be rent asunder by the axe, but insteadthey found it to be true steel, the steel compounded of tinymicroscop-ic crystals knit together by the mighty force of molecular cohesion.Each of these crystals was steel. There was not, and there never could.be a wedge in the world capable of splitting that steel. The protractedretreat had not demoralized our troops as the Germans had expected.In the dust of the steppe roads, in the lurid glare of burning villages,the bitterness, the wrath, the determination to die rather than submitto the will and the evil force of the slave-owning invaders had steadilymatured. This stern emotion had become common to all the men atthe front, from the Commander-in-Chief to the rank-and-file soldier. Itwas this emotion that formed the cornerstone of Stalingrad's defence.

Commanders and men alike shared a sense of tremendous respon-sibility for the fate of the nation. This consciousness permeated theentire spiritual being of the 62nd Army. It was expressed in the wayRed Army men, corporals and sergeants, when cut off from their com-mand posts for days at a time, would take over the command them-selves and display remarkable competence and intelligence in defend-ing strongpoints, dugouts and fortified buildings. It was this con-sciousness, which at the critical moment transformed the soldier intothe commander, that prevented the Germans from disrupting thesmooth-working mechanism of the army as a whole.

The men who fought in the ranks of the 62nd Army joined the'great brotherhood of the Stalingrad defence. This brotherhood boundmen of different ages and nationalities closer than ties of blood andkinship. To me the symbol of this stern brotherhood is the memory ofthree wounded men walking slowly and painfully to the dressing sta-tion. These three bleeding men walked arm in arm clinging closelyto one another; staggering from weakness, stumbling as they went.And when one, of them could walk no longer the other two almostcarried him between them.

I assumed that they were buddies, that they perhaps hailed fromthe same, town or village.

"No," one of them who had a dirty bloodstained bandage overhis eyes, replied in a Iow, cracked voice. "We are from Stalingrad."

The great force that cemented the men 01 the 62nd Armywas their faith in one another, ,a faith born of the battles for.Stalingrad.

"My first and chief principle in war is a constant and unfailingconsideration for the men," 'says General Yeremenko. "This means pri-marily placing the troops in the most advantageous conditions vis-a-vis the enemy, to see that they are properly supplied with ammunition,equipment and clothing." Then he laughs and adds: "And, of course,it is important that they have something to eat too, and the hotter and'more nutritious the food the better." ,

This constant care and attention was felt by all the troops of thefront. It was felt by the Commander-in-Chief of the 62nd Army too,who invariably received brief encouraging notes from the commanderof the front at difficult moments and powerful support from the ar-tillery directly under the commander of the front.

Colonel Gorokhov stationed on the right flank of the 62nd Armywas keenly conscious of this solicitude too. For more than two monthsCorokhov's forces had been cut off from the right bank communications.by two German wedges; they had stood on a narrow strip of landpressed back to the bank of the Volga. And time and again throughoutthese two months at moments of superhuman tension Gorokhov heardthe calm friendly voice and warm greetings backed by the annihilatingwork of the long-range guns and the Katyushas.

Faith in one another knit together the entire Stalingrad front fromCommander-in-Chief to rank-and-filer.i'I'his faith was summed up mostfittingly by the Red Army man who walked up to the Colonel-Generalin Stalingrad arid said:

"Why, I have known you for a long time, Comrade CommandedI served with you in the Far East.", And if the Red Army men knew their Colonel-Ceneral, he knewhis men. He always speaks with the greatest respect and affection ofthe fighting men of the Stalingrad front:

"Here in Stalingrad our Red Army man has demonstrated, thestrength and maturity of the Russian national spirit."

The enemy did not succeed in smashing our defences 'at Stalin-grad, 'the nohle edifice' of the' 62rid Army did notcrurrible under theterrific impact of the battering ram. The powerful forces that united

the molecules of steel proved stronger than the evil that had conqueredEurope.

The 62nd Army stood firm and triumphed. The day came whenGeneral Chuikov and his assistants Hodimtsev, Gorokhov, Gurtievand Guryev, gave the order to close in on the German forces surround-ed in the Stalingrad area! The day came when the 62nd Armywent over from the defensive to the offensive. This offensive, the plarifor which was born in those scorching, dusty August days, those an-guished suffocating nights when the ruddy glare of the conflagrationsthat blazed on the Don could be seen on the Volga, when the flamesgf· burning Stalingrad brought the wrath of the Red Army man towhite heat, this long-awaited offensive came to pass. The first stageof the Battle of Stalingrad is over. Those were a hundred days thelike of which the world has never known. The battle inside the city,a battle in which factory workers coming out of their workshops afterthe shift saw German tanks pour over the crest of a neighbouringhill to attack our forward formations; the battle in which the ar-moured cutters of the Volga river fleet gave battle to German tankson the Stalingrad riverfront; the battle whose mighty wings hoveredover the steppeland! There in the steppes hares maddened by theawful din leapt into the trenches into the arms of our soldiers whofondled them, stroked the trembling little beasts tenderly and said:"Don't be afraid, we won't let the Jerries get you!"

The first stage of this battle is over. Colonel-General Yeremenko,reclining on his cot with his wounded leg resting on a pillow is talk-ing briefly over the phone to the commanders of the armies.

The centre of the Stalingrad fighting has shifted from the black-ened ruins, from the narrow, debris-heaped alleys and the factoryworkshops to the wide open spaces of the Volga plains. Yes, the firststage of the great Battle of Stalingrad is over. Deserved honours awaitits participants. Colonel Gurtiev, Colonel Gorokhov, Colonel Sartsevhave been promoted to the rank of generaL

Thousands of fighting men and commanders have been decorated.But the greatest reward for the fighting men and commanders of

the Stalingrad front is the eternal gratitude of the people.In one of the backwaters of the Volga near a Stalingrad factory

stood a barge wedged into the ice. In that barge lived 600 workers,their wives, mothers and children awaiting evacuation. One dark, cold

. evening a man entered the barge-hold. He walked past the dejected old

workmen sunk in gloomy thoughts, past the sad, silent old women,past a young, exhausted woman who had given birth to a son thc daybefore on the cold, damp floor of the hold, past the children sleepingon the piles of bundles. And by the dim light of the kerosene lamp theman began to read aloud from a paper:

"A few days ago our troops stationed on the approaches to Stalin-.grad launched an offensive against the German fascist forces .... "

It was as if a fresh breeze from the Volga had swept the dark,stuffy barge-hold. The people wept. The women wept, the grim metalworkers wept, grim-faced old veterans wept. May these tears of grati-tude be the people's reward to those who bore the fearful burdenof the defence of Stalingrad, those whose blood saved Stalingrad fromthe enemy.

Qecember 1942.