Chuikov takes command of the 62nd Army

On 13 September 1942 the German 6th Army launched its first great assault on Stalingrad. Its infantry divisions struck at the city centre, the railway station and Mamayev Kurgan, the hill that dominates the middle of the city. Facing them was the Soviet 62nd Army, commanded since the previous day by Lieutenant General Vasily Chuikov. War chronologies record under this date that the city was “completely surrounded” by the Germans and that Chuikov “took command of the defence”. Both statements need correcting. Stalingrad was not encircled: the Germans held it in a semicircle from the north, west and south, but its eastern side was closed by the Volga, and throughout the battle reinforcements, ammunition and food crossed the river into the city, albeit under fire. Nor did Chuikov command the whole defence. He took over one army, the one defending the city itself, while the front to which it belonged was commanded by Colonel General Andrei Yeremenko.

An army pinned against the river

At the beginning of September the wings of the 6th Army and the 4th Panzer Army joined up west of the city, and the 62nd and 64th Armies fell back to the inner defensive ring. Around 10 September German troops advancing from the south reached the Volga at Kuporosnoye, on the southern edge of the city. In doing so they cut the 62nd Army off from the neighbouring 64th Army, which went on defending itself further south, around Beketovka. From then on the 62nd Army held a strip of ruins several dozen kilometres long, from Rynok in the north to the southern suburbs near Kuporosnoye, but in depth, from the front line to the Volga, in places only a few kilometres wide.

Since the German air raid of 23 August and the bombing that followed, much of the city in which it now had to fight was a sea of rubble. The army was in poor shape. Its divisions and brigades, bled white in the Don bend and in the retreat across the steppe, often numbered only a few hundred men. Sources disagree on the strength of the whole army at the time, giving anything from about 20,000 to more than 50,000, depending on whether only front-line units or the rear services as well are counted. Ammunition, artillery and tanks were all in short supply. Its commander until then, Lieutenant General Anton Lopatin, had concluded that the army could not hold the city and was relieved. For a few days it was led by its chief of staff, Major General Nikolai Krylov, who was to remain at Chuikov’s side until the end of the battle.

“We shall defend the city or die there”

Chuikov was 42. In the Civil War he had commanded a regiment, in 1939 the 4th Army in the invasion of Poland and in the Winter War the 9th Army, after which he spent more than a year as the chief Soviet military adviser in China. In the summer of 1942 he commanded the 64th Army in the fighting on the approaches to Stalingrad, and after handing it over to Major General Mikhail Shumilov he led an operational group on its flank. He had a reputation as a tough, stubborn commander, not without a streak of bravado.

On 11 September he was summoned to front headquarters on the left bank of the Volga, where Yeremenko and the member of the front’s military council Nikita Khrushchev entrusted him with the 62nd Army. He formally took command on 12 September (some lists give 10 September). According to his memoirs, when asked how he understood his task, he replied that the city could not be surrendered and that he would either defend it or die there. In an interview with historians recorded in 1943 he told the same story more briefly: he gave his assurance that he would carry out the order, declined a cup of tea, got into his car and drove to Stalingrad.

The first days

Chuikov crossed into the city at night and reached the army’s command post, hidden in dugouts on the slope of Mamayev Kurgan. As he himself recounted in 1943, he found only a handful of staff officers there, since some of his deputies had already crossed to the left bank. Division and brigade headquarters were clinging to the riverbank, far from the front line. From his first hours the new commander resorted to the harshest measures. By his own account, on 14 September he had the commander and commissar of a regiment that had abandoned its positions shot, and soon afterwards two brigade commanders and their commissars. Word of this was meant to reach every officer. In the spirit of Joseph Stalin’s Order No. 227, “Not a step back!”, blocking detachments operated behind the front line. According to figures from Russian archives, between 13 and 15 September alone the 62nd Army’s blocking detachment detained 1,218 soldiers, most of whom were sent back to their units, while 21 were shot.

The assault of 13 and 14 September

Friedrich Paulus, pressed by Adolf Hitler, who on 12 September had demanded that he take the city quickly, regrouped the forces of General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach’s LI Army Corps. On the morning of 13 September, after an artillery bombardment and dive-bomber attacks, the 295th Infantry Division struck at Mamayev Kurgan and the 71st Infantry Division at the city centre and the station. South of the Tsaritsa the divisions of the 4th Panzer Army’s XLVIII Panzer Corps were attacking. On the first day bombs and shells cut most of the telephone lines on the Kurgan. According to Russian studies, Chuikov managed to get through to front headquarters only once, and in the afternoon he lost contact with his divisions. That night he moved his command post to a tunnel above the Tsaritsa, dug earlier as a shelter for front headquarters.

14 September was one of the worst days of the battle for the defenders. German units broke into the city centre, took part of Mamayev Kurgan, fought for Station No. 1, which changed hands many times over the next few days, and reached the Volga near the central landing stage. Machine guns and field guns could now fire on the crossing by which reinforcements were to arrive. Chuikov threw his last reserves into the fight, including his headquarters guard and his last tanks. The army staff found itself almost in the front line.

Rodimtsev’s guardsmen

No help could come from an attack from the north. General of the Army Georgy Zhukov, Deputy Supreme Commander since August, was indeed mounting successive attacks near Kotluban, but they tied down only part of Paulus’s forces. Rescue came from across the river. The Stavka sent to Stalingrad the 13th Guards Rifle Division of Major General Alexander Rodimtsev, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War. The division numbered about 10,000 men, but according to surviving reports about a thousand of them had no rifles. Rodimtsev crossed in daylight to confer with Chuikov, and on the night of 14–15 September his regiments began crossing to the right bank: on ferries, barges, boats of the Volga Military Flotilla and fishing boats, under German artillery fire and in the light of burning buildings. The last battalions did not cross until 15 September. The guardsmen went into action straight from the landing stages. They pushed the Germans back from the bank, retook part of the city centre and fought for the station. On 16 September one of the division’s regiments, together with a regiment of the 112th Rifle Division, recaptured the summit of Mamayev Kurgan, which was then fought over for weeks.

The division paid a very heavy price. According to an NKVD report of 16 September it lost about 400 men on its first day and was short of ammunition, artillery support and the means to evacuate its wounded; by the end of the month it was down to roughly 6,000 men. But the German 71st Infantry Division was exhausted too: according to its reports of 26 September, half its battalions were no longer fit to attack. The first assault had failed to throw the defenders into the Volga.

Fighting at close quarters

In those days Chuikov began to work out the way of fighting for which the 62nd Army would be famous throughout the battle. The Germans had superiority in the air and in artillery, so he ordered Soviet positions to be kept as close as possible to the German ones, within grenade-throwing range. Enemy aircraft and artillery could then not strike without risking hitting their own men. The infantry was to let tanks pass and cut them off from the infantry following behind, while the tanks were dealt with by artillery positioned a few hundred metres back. Counter-attacks were made mainly at night, when the Luftwaffe was not flying. The defence was built around individual buildings turned into strongpoints, cellars, ruins and factory halls. In time small assault groups armed with sub-machine guns, grenades and knives were sent in to attack. German soldiers called this kind of fighting the “war of the rats” (Rattenkrieg (PL)).

Everything depended on the Volga. Every night reinforcements and ammunition were ferried across the river, and the wounded and the last civilians taken back. When the Germans brought the central landing stage under fire, the crossings were moved to other points along the bank. On these supplies depended the life of an army that for the following months fought on a narrow strip of land between the Germans and the river, but was not encircled.

Place in the war

13 September marked the start of more than two months of fighting for the city itself. After the city centre and Mamayev Kurgan came the turn of the grain elevator in the south and of the great factories in the north – the Tractor Factory, the Barrikady works and the Red October steelworks – which were fought over in October. At the end of September soldiers of Rodimtsev’s division occupied a building on 9 January Square that went down in history as Pavlov’s House. The last great assault, launched on 11 November, squeezed the 62nd Army into a few bridgeheads on the Volga. On 19 November the Red Army began Operation Uranus and within a few days encircled Paulus’s 6th Army. On 2 February 1943 the last German units in Stalingrad capitulated.

For Chuikov, Stalingrad was the start of a road that led him to Berlin. In April 1943 the 62nd Army was renamed the 8th Guards Army in recognition of its service. Chuikov commanded it until the end of the war – on the Dnieper, in Ukraine, on the Vistula, at Poznań and in the battle for Berlin, where on 2 May 1945 the surrender of the German garrison of the Reich capital was signed at his headquarters.