The fighting for Stalingrad begins

At the beginning of September 1942 the struggle for Stalingrad changed its character. Throughout August the Germans had been closing in on the city across the steppe, breaking one Soviet defence line after another between the Don and the Volga. On 2 and 3 September, after breaking through the front west of the city, the wings of the German 6th Army under General der Panzertruppe Friedrich Paulus and the 4th Panzer Army under Colonel General Hermann Hoth made contact, and the Soviet 62nd and 64th Armies withdrew to the last, inner defence ring, which by now ran along the edge of the built-up area. Many war chronologies record under 3 September that from this day one can speak of the battle of Stalingrad proper, because German troops stood in the suburbs and the Red Army had called up even civilian men and boys for the defence. The first part of that statement captures the turning point of those days well. The second needs qualifying, because the mobilisation of the city’s population looked different from what such a brief note suggests.

Between the Don and the Volga

On 23 August the German XIV Panzer Corps reached the Volga north of Stalingrad, and the Luftwaffe reduced much of the city to ruins. But Stalingrad could not be taken on the run. The corps stood in a narrow corridor between the rivers, cut off from the rest of the army and under attack from the north, while the Soviet armies still held the outer and middle rings of fortifications west and south of the city. Throughout the last week of August Paulus moved one infantry division after another into the corridor to keep open the link with the tanks on the Volga. The main assault on the city had to wait.

In the south Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army spent most of August unable to break through the hills defended by the 64th and 57th Armies. At the end of the month Hoth shifted his XLVIII Panzer Corps further west and on 29 August struck from a new direction, on a sector where the Soviet defences were weaker. The 64th Army’s front was broken, and German panzer and motorised divisions drove north, into the rear of the troops defending the western approaches to the city. At the same time the infantry divisions of the 6th Army’s LI Army Corps under General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach were attacking from the north-west. Both Soviet armies were in danger of being encircled while still out on the steppe.

Colonel General Andrei Yeremenko, commander of the Stalingrad Front and the South-Eastern Front, no longer had anything with which to close the breach. At the turn of August and September he ordered the 62nd and 64th Armies to fall back from the middle line to the inner defence ring. It was a risky move. The Soviet divisions, bled white in the fighting in the great bend of the Don, retreated across the open steppe under shellfire and air attack. Many of them were down to a few hundred rifles each. Some left behind their equipment, heavy weapons and wounded.

The two armies join hands

The withdrawal avoided a great encirclement, but it surrendered the steppe west of the city to the Germans. On 2 September the spearheads of the two German armies made contact, and on 3 September, according to most studies, they linked up in the Pitomnik area, a dozen or so kilometres west of Stalingrad. From then on the 6th Army and the 4th Panzer Army formed a single continuous front that enclosed the city in a semicircle from the north, west and south. Over the following days German units approached Gumrak, with its airfield and railway station, and the western districts of the city, and their artillery could now shell the whole of Stalingrad and the Volga crossings.

Behind the defenders there was now only the river, one and a half to two kilometres wide at that point. The 62nd Army held a sector several tens of kilometres long, from Rynok and Spartanovka in the north to Kuporosnoye in the south, but in many places it was only a few kilometres deep from the front line to the Volga. To its south, around Beketovka and Krasnoarmeysk, the 64th Army of Major General Mikhail Shumilov was holding on. Everything both armies needed, from ammunition and food to reinforcements, had to come across from the left bank – by ferries, barges, tugs and the boats of the Volga Military Flotilla, and increasingly only at night.

To the Germans the city seemed within arm’s reach. From the high ground to the west the troops could see the smoke over the Volga. At 6th Army headquarters the prevailing view was that the shattered Soviet divisions would not hold out for long. This optimism was shared by Adolf Hitler, who wanted Stalingrad taken as quickly as possible to free forces for Army Group A fighting in the Caucasus. Paulus knew, however, that his divisions were exhausted after six weeks of uninterrupted fighting, and that he had to keep part of his strength on the northern flank, where Soviet counter-attacks were just beginning.

“Delay is now equivalent to a crime”

In Moscow the reports of 2 and 3 September were received with an alarm bordering on panic. Since 26 August General of the Army Georgy Zhukov, recently appointed Deputy Supreme Commander, had been in the Stalingrad area. He was to strike from the north, from the Kotluban area, against the German corridor on the Volga, link up with the 62nd Army and cut off the XIV Panzer Corps. The troops who were to take part were only just arriving by train and marching to their positions.

On 3 September Joseph Stalin sent Zhukov a telegram which Zhukov later quoted in his memoirs. Stalin wrote that the situation at Stalingrad had deteriorated, that the enemy was three versts from the city, and that Stalingrad might be taken “today or tomorrow” unless the northern group of forces came to its aid at once. He demanded that the commanders of the troops north and north-west of the city attack without delay and throw all their aircraft into the battle, because “no delay is permissible” and “delay is now equivalent to a crime”. That same day Major General Kirill Moskalenko’s 1st Guards Army went over to the attack. According to Zhukov’s memoirs, he replied to Stalin that the main blow, involving two further armies, could begin on 5 September at the earliest, once ammunition had been brought up and the artillery moved forward, and Stalin reluctantly agreed.

The offensive at Kotluban

On 5 September the 1st Guards Army was joined by the 24th and 66th Armies. The offensive from the north, across the open steppe between the Don and the Volga, ended in failure. The Soviet divisions, many of them newly formed and poorly trained, went into the attack without adequate artillery support against Germans dug in on the hills. The Luftwaffe had command of the air and bombed artillery positions, tanks and infantry columns. According to figures cited in Western literature, of the roughly 120 tanks thrown into the attack on 5 September, about 30 were destroyed by aircraft alone. The troops advanced a few kilometres and lost thousands of men. According to Zhukov’s memoirs, on 10 September he reported to Stalin that with these forces it was impossible to break through the corridor and join up with the city’s defenders. The attacks nevertheless continued in successive rounds after that.

The offensive did not save the city, but it mattered: it forced Paulus to keep several divisions, including panzer divisions, on his northern flank, and he later lacked them for the assault on Stalingrad itself.

A city under siege

Stalingrad’s civilian inhabitants were part of this battle from the first day, but not in the way the phrase about “calling up men and boys” suggests. Since 1941 the city’s great factories had had destruction battalions and units of the opolcheniye, a volunteer workers’ militia made up of people who had not been called up to the army because of their age, health or work in the arms industry. On 23 August it was they, together with anti-aircraft gunners and soldiers of an NKVD division, who stood in the path of the German tanks in the northern suburbs. Tanks drove into battle straight off the assembly line of the Tractor Factory, often with crews made up of factory mechanics. Many workers were killed in the fighting in the north of the city, among them the commander of the workers’ tank brigade, the engineer Nikolai Vychugov. As regular divisions entered the suburbs, the surviving militiamen were gradually absorbed into Red Army units, most often into the brigades and divisions fighting in the northern part of the city.

On 25 August the city defence committee, headed by the first secretary of the regional Party committee, Aleksei Chuyanov, declared a state of siege in Stalingrad. Men of military age who had not yet been inducted were sent to units fighting in the city, and the assembly points also processed soldiers cut off from their units and stragglers rounded up by blocking detachments. Women, young people and older men had for weeks been digging anti-tank ditches and trenches, building barricades in the streets, fighting fires and carrying out the wounded. Women also served in air defence, signals and the medical services. Some teenagers volunteered for the army or helped the soldiers as messengers and guides, but there can be no talk of a general call-up of boys.

The hardest fate was that of those who did not fight. Until 23 August the authorities had permitted the evacuation of only part of the population, because the factories were to keep working to the end and a mass flight, it was feared, might weaken the will to resist. The decision to evacuate women, children and the wounded across the Volga was taken only on 24 August, and the crossing went on for weeks, with people queuing for overcrowded ferries under bombs and artillery fire. At the beginning of September tens of thousands of people were still living in the ruins. They sheltered in cellars, dugouts and the ravines along the river, often without water or food. Some of them were to live through the entire battle in German-held territory or on the front line.

The Luftwaffe over the city

Throughout September the skies over Stalingrad belonged to Luftflotte 4 under Colonel General Wolfram von Richthofen. Its bombers and Ju 87 dive bombers attacked Soviet positions, the crossings, vessels on the Volga and the factories from dawn to dusk. According to the calculations of the Swedish historian Christer Bergström, between 5 and 12 September the air fleet flew more than 7,500 sorties, an average of almost a thousand a day. The Soviet air force, weakened by its losses in August, could offer little against this, and by day traffic on the river almost came to a standstill. Crossings, ammunition transports and the evacuation of the wounded moved to the night.

The ceaseless bombing, however, had an effect the Germans had not expected. Ruined houses and collapsed factory halls turned into strongpoints in which the defenders could take cover, while the tanks lost their freedom of movement. A letter later found on a dead German officer says that the Volga could be seen, that it was “less than a kilometre” away, and yet it could not be reached.

Before the assault

After the armies had linked up, Paulus needed a few more days to regroup his divisions and bring up his artillery. The Soviet command made only partial use of this time. The 62nd Army had few rifles left, its divisions and brigades were shattered and intermingled, and its commander, Lieutenant General Anton Lopatin, believed that the city could not be held. A few days before the German assault Lopatin was removed, and after a short spell in which the army was directed by its chief of staff, a new and energetic general took command. Meanwhile, on 12 September, Hitler summoned Paulus and the commander of Army Group B, Colonel General Maximilian von Weichs, to his headquarters near Vinnytsia and demanded that the city be taken quickly. The next day the first great assault on Stalingrad began.

Place in the war

The days of 2 and 3 September closed the first phase of the fighting for Stalingrad, in which the Germans crossed the steppe and came up to the city. Russian historiography dates the start of the Battle of Stalingrad to 17 July, when the first clashes with the 6th Army took place on the Chir. For many Western historians the battle for the city itself begins on 23 August, when the Germans reached the Volga. September carried it into the streets. From 13 September there was fighting for the city centre, Mamayev Kurgan, the railway station and the grain elevator, and in October for the great factories in the north of the city. Yet the 62nd Army, commanded from 12 September by Lieutenant General Vasily Chuikov, was never driven into the Volga.

The choice both sides made at the beginning of September – Hitler to take the city at any price, Stalin to defend it at any price – turned Stalingrad into a place where for two and a half months the 6th Army bled itself white in street fighting, while its flanks on the Don were held by ever weaker Romanian troops. On 19 November 1942 the Red Army struck precisely at those flanks in Operation Uranus, encircling the 6th Army within a few days, and on 2 February 1943 the last of Paulus’s units in the city surrendered. A battle that had begun with the German conviction that the city would fall within days became the turning point of the war in the east.