The fighting in Stalingrad's factory district

In the second week of October 1942 a relative calm settled over ruined Stalingrad, but it was not the end of the German attack. General Friedrich Paulus’s 6th Army was regrouping for what its staff believed would be the decisive blow against the factory district in the north of the city. On the other side of the Volga, the Soviet command spent all those days ferrying division after division into the city by night. Under 12 October, popular chronologies record that the shipping of troops across the Volga straight into Stalingrad had proved a success and that the German attack had come to a halt. That is a simplification: the crossings did indeed keep the 62nd Army alive, but the German attack did not stop at all. Two days later, on 14 October, the Germans struck with a force the defenders had not yet experienced in this battle, and by the end of the month they had taken most of the factories. They came to a halt only in November, exhausted, a few hundred metres from the river.

Three factories on the Volga

The northern part of Stalingrad stretched in a narrow strip along the right bank of the Volga. There, from south to north, stood three great works: the Krasny Oktyabr (Red October) steelworks, the Barrikady gun factory and, furthest north, the Dzerzhinsky Stalingrad Tractor Factory – the pride of the first Five-Year Plan, which during the war produced T-34 tanks. West of the factories lay workers’ settlements of wooden houses and brick apartment blocks, and beyond them ravines running down to the river and hills from which the whole area could be seen. The thick-walled factory halls, cellars, culverts and slag heaps offered the defenders ready-made fortresses.

Having taken most of the city centre and the southern districts in the second half of September, the grain elevator included, Paulus shifted the weight of his attack northwards on 27 September. General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach’s LI Corps spent more than a week fighting its way through the workers’ settlements of Red October and Barrikady and over the slopes of Mamayev Kurgan. In the first days of October the Germans eliminated the Soviet salient at Orlovka in the north-west of the city and attacked the Tractor Factory settlement. The advance was slow, however, and losses so heavy that around 8 October Paulus halted it in order to bring his units up to strength and bring in fresh forces. The 305th Infantry Division arrived from the Don front, and General Wolfram von Richthofen’s Luftflotte 4, which in the first half of October had sent part of its strength against the oilfields at Grozny, was to return to Stalingrad in full force. It was these days of pause, around 12 October, that chroniclers took for a halt to the German offensive.

Crossing by night

The defence of Stalingrad depended on the Volga crossings. From mid-September almost the whole bank was within range of German artillery, and by day German aircraft ruled the river, so men, ammunition and food were brought across almost exclusively at night. This was done by the armoured cutters and minesweepers of the Volga Military Flotilla (PL), civilian steamers, tugs and barges, and ordinary rowing boats. They sailed under mortar fire and in the light of German flares, tied up at makeshift jetties below the steep bank, unloaded soldiers and crates, and took the wounded back with them. On the left bank, in the woods along the Akhtuba channel, stood the Soviet artillery, which supported the defenders with fire across the river throughout the battle.

By this route, at the turn of September and October, the divisions that were to defend the factory district over the following weeks arrived. Colonel Vasyl Horyshny’s (PL) (in Russian, Vasily Gorishny’s) 95th Rifle Division, which had crossed on the night of 18–19 September and was first thrown onto Mamayev Kurgan, moved to the Red October sector at the end of September. Alongside it stood Major General Fyodor Smekhotvorov’s 193rd Rifle Division and Major General Stepan Guryev’s 39th Guards Rifle Division. In the first nights of October two more divisions crossed the river: Colonel Leonty Gurtyev’s Siberian 308th Rifle Division, which took up positions in front of Barrikady, and Major General Viktor Zholudev’s 37th Guards Rifle Division, made up largely of former paratroopers. Zholudev’s guardsmen, some 7,000 strong, went straight into action in front of the Tractor Factory. In this way General Vasily Chuikov, who had commanded the 62nd Army since 12 September, received one or two fresh divisions for each crisis – usually only once the previous ones had been bled white. The German and Soviet trenches were often a few dozen metres apart, sometimes no more than the width of a street or the wall of a single factory hall.

14 October

On the morning of 14 October German artillery fire and bombs rained down on a sector some five kilometres wide in front of the Tractor Factory. The main blow was delivered by the fresh 305th Infantry Division and the 14th Panzer Division; south of the factory the 24th Panzer Division attacked, with the infantry divisions of LI Corps on the flanks. According to Western studies based on Luftwaffe records, Luftflotte 4 flew some 1,250 sorties that day and the Stukas dropped about 550 tons of bombs; Soviet accounts speak of several thousand sorties and say that the sun could not be seen through the smoke and dust. Chuikov later judged it the hardest day of the whole battle. Bombs severed communications, and the dugouts of the 62nd Army’s headquarters on the Volga came under such heavy fire that – as Chuikov recalled – his officers and men were killed in them, and contact with the divisions had to be kept up by runners and radio.

The attack crushed the 37th Guards Division. Zholudev himself was buried in his shelter and dug out only many hours later; the remnants of his regiments held out, surrounded, in the factory halls. According to the division’s records, of the roughly 7,000 men with whom it had crossed at the beginning of the month, about 250 remained in the ranks on 15 October. Neighbouring units also suffered heavy losses, among them Horyshny’s 95th Division, which by its own reports lost about three-quarters of its fighting strength in those days and on 17 October was reduced to a single regiment. On the afternoon of 14 October the Germans entered the halls of the Tractor Factory, and by the following day they had broken through to the Volga. The 62nd Army was cut in two: north of the breach, at Rynok and Spartanovka, Colonel Sergei Gorokhov’s (PL) group fought on, cut off and from then on supplied only by river.

General Andrei Yeremenko’s Stalingrad Front immediately sent more forces across the Volga. On the night of 15–16 October the first regiment of Colonel Ivan Lyudnikov’s 138th Rifle Division crossed to the bank behind Barrikady, and two more followed in the early hours of 17 October. Battalions of other divisions also arrived and were thrown into the defence of Red October. Every one of these crossings was made under fire; the boats now had to sail along a bank that was partly in German hands.

The halls of Barrikady and Red October

From 16 October a battle group made up of the 305th Infantry Division and the 14th Panzer Division attacked Barrikady. The fighting was for individual workshops, open-hearth furnaces, overhead cranes and sewers; a single hall could change hands several times in a day. The Germans called this fighting Rattenkrieg (PL) – “rat war”. The British correspondent Alexander Werth wrote that Gurtyev’s 308th Division repelled 117 German attacks in a month, 23 of them in a single day. According to the historian Antony Beevor, the halls of Red October and Barrikady became fortresses as deadly as Verdun, and the Soviet troops in them were so well concealed that the Germans often did not know where the fire was coming from. From 19 to 22 October rain and the first snow, together with the exhaustion of the German regiments – each of which could now field a battalion at most – brought a pause of several days. By the end of the month the Germans had taken most of Barrikady and a large part of the steelworks, but their battalions were dwindling to a few dozen men. The defenders now held only narrow strips of the riverbank, in places a few hundred metres deep.

The order of 14 October

On the same day that the assault on the Tractor Factory began, Hitler had Operations Order No. 1 issued to the armies on the Eastern Front. It stated that this year’s summer and autumn campaign was over, apart from operations still in progress and a few planned local attacks. The troops were to prepare for winter defence, build positions and quarters, and see the winter out on the lines they had won. The main exceptions were Stalingrad, which the 6th Army was to take in its entirety, and the fighting in the Caucasus around Tuapse and on the Terek. This was a tacit admission that the objectives of Case Blue – the oilfields of Baku and Grozny – would not be reached in 1942. Stalingrad, which had originally been meant merely to cover the flank of the drive into the Caucasus, became an end in itself, all the more so because Hitler had publicly assured the Germans in his Sportpalast speech of 30 September that the city would be taken. The new Chief of the Army General Staff, General Kurt Zeitzler, who had replaced Franz Halder in September, warned about the overstretched flanks on the Don, held by Romanian and Italian troops, but failed to persuade Hitler to break off the fighting in the city.

On the Soviet side, a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of 9 October abolished the institution of military commissars and restored single command in the Red Army. Commissars became deputy commanders for political affairs, and the politruks lost the right to countersign orders. The change, prepared since the summer, strengthened the position of line officers, including the commanders fighting in the ruins of Stalingrad. At the same time the harsh discipline of the “Not a step back!” order remained in force; blocking detachments and NKVD special departments shot men for desertion and “cowardice”, as the October reports of the Stalingrad Front’s political directorate also attest.

Pavlov’s House and the fight for every building

While the fate of the factories was being decided in the north, a war for individual houses went on in the city centre. From the end of September a group of soldiers of the 42nd Guards Regiment of General Alexander Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards Division, led by Sergeant Yakov Pavlov, defended an apartment building on 9 January Square, some 300 metres from the Volga. Reinforced to a few dozen men, with machine guns and anti-tank rifles, surrounded by mines and linked to the rear by a trench, the group held out until November, while civilians sheltered in the cellars. Pavlov’s House became in Soviet propaganda a symbol of the whole defence; some historians point out that German records do not confirm heavy assaults on this particular building. For the 62nd Army it was one of many strongpoints on which its tactics rested: small assault groups, fighting at grenade-throwing range, so that German aircraft and artillery could not strike without hitting their own men.

Place in the war

The October fighting in the factory district was the high point of the German effort at Stalingrad. The 6th Army took the Tractor Factory, most of Barrikady and part of the steelworks, but it did not drive the 62nd Army into the Volga. Its infantry divisions bled themselves white in fighting where superiority in tanks and aircraft counted for less than in the open field, and ever more forces were pulled into the city from the flanks – precisely where the Red Army was preparing its blow. The chroniclers’ statement that the Volga crossings “stopped” the Germans is therefore right in the longer view, though not for 12 October: it was the night crossings that allowed Chuikov to survive October.

Paulus launched his last great attack on the factories on 11 November, when ice floes were already drifting down the river; it brought the Germans to the Volga behind Barrikady as well, cutting off Lyudnikov’s division on a scrap of riverbank later known as “Lyudnikov’s Island”. Eight days later, on 19 November 1942, troops of the South-Western and Don Fronts smashed the Romanian armies on the Don, and on 23 November the ring around the 6th Army closed. The fighting in the factory district ended only on 2 February 1943 with the surrender of the last German units in the northern part of the pocket – in the ruins of the same Tractor Factory that had been fought over in October.