VASSILY GROSSMAN

Vassily Grossman (1905-1964) was a wartime correspondent for the Sovietperiodical Krasnaya Zvezda. In late 1942 he wrote a report on the battle of Stalingrad, documenting the valiant efforts of a division of Siberian troops under the command of Coloniel Gurtiev. Like all wartime reporting, including Hilde Marchant's stories of the blitz, Grossman's account was shaped by its propagandistic aims. In this particular case, the Siberian troops are described in much the same manner as the "heroes of labor" whose astounding acts of industrial production were celebrated during the 1930s. However, Grossman's eyewitness testimony also provides a lively and sympathetic portrait of the Red Army, conveying the dogged determination and loyalty of the many soldiers who died defending Russia-if not necessarily Stalinismfrom the ferocious Nazi onslaught.

Colonel Gurtiev is a lean man of fifty. When the First World War broke out in 1914 he left the St. Petersburg Polytechnic where he was studying in his second year to volunteer for the army, and fought as a gunner at Warsaw, Baranovichi and Chartoriisk.

Gurtiev has been in the army for twenty-eight years, seeing active service and training officers. His two sons went off to the front as lieutenants. He has left his wife and daughter behind in faraway Omsk. On this terrible and solemn day he thought of his lieutenant sons, his daughter and his wife, and the many young officers he had trained, and his whole long, hard, Spartan life. The time has come when all the principles of military science, morale and duty which he taught his sons, his pupils and fellow soldiers will be put to the test, and he looked anxiously at the faces of the Siberians-the men from Omsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk and Barnaul-the men with whom it was his destiny to repel the enemy onslaught.

The Siberians came to the Volga wellprepared. The Division had been well-trained before being sent to the front. Colonel Guttiev had trained his men thoroughly and wisely, had never stood for any nonsense and if anything had been over-exacting. He knew that however hard military training might be-the night practice raids, the lying in trenches and slits being "ironed" by tanks, the long forced marches-the real thing was far grimmer. He had faith in the fortitude and stamina of his -Siberians. He had tested it on the way to the front, when throughout the whole long journey there had been only one incident: one of the soldiers had dropped his rifle from the moving train, and had leapt down, picked it up and run three kilometres to the next station to rejoin his regiment. He had tested their stamina in the Stalingrad steppes, where his men had had their baptism of fire and calmly repelled a surprise attack of thirty German tanks. He had tested their endurance during the last leg of the march to Stalingrad, when they had covered two hundred

kilometres in fortY-eight hours. Yet he still looked anxiously at the faces of the men, now that they were there on the front line, where they would be bearing the brunt of the main attack.

Hardly had the division had time to entrench itself in the stony ground of Stalingrad, hardly had the command post moved into a deep gallery cut in the sandy escarpment above the Volga, the communications lines been laid and the transmitters begun to tap out their messages to the artillery positions on the other side of the river, hardly had the first pale light of dawn pierced the darkness, than the Germans opened fire. For eight hours solid the German Junkers dive-bombed the Division's positions, for eight hours, without a moment's pause, wave after wave of German planes passed over, for eight hours the sirens wailed, the bombs whistled through the air, the earth trembled and what was left of the brick buildings crashed to the ground. For eight hours the air was dark with smoke and dust and deadly splinters zipped everywhere. Anyone who has heard the whine of the air rent by falling bomb, anyone who has experienced an intense ten-minute bombing raid by the Luftwaffe will understand what eight hours of solid aerial bombardment by dive-bombers means. For eight hours the Siberians kept up a constant barrage of fire at the enemy aircraft, and the Germans doubtless felt something like despair as the whole area of the plant, burning and shrouded in a black cloud of dust and smoke, crackled with rifle shots, rattled with machine-gun fire, the short thuds of anti-tank rifles and the regular, angry fire of ack-ack guns. It would seem that everything living must be broken, annihilated; yet there were the Siberian Division, dug into the ground, uncowed and unbroken, keeping up a continuous deadly barrage of fire. The Germans had thrown in their heavy mortars and artillery. The monotonous hiss of mines and the crash of shells merged with the whine of sirens and the roar of exploding bombs. So it continued until nightfall. Then in solemn silence the Red Army men buried their dead comrades. That was the first day, the "house-warming". The German mortar-batteries kept up their racket all night, and few of the men got any sleep.

in the course of a month the enemy launched one hundred and seventeen attacks against the Siberian Division.

There was one terrible day when the German tanks and infantry attacked twenty-three times. And all twenty-three attacks were repulsed. Every day except three for a month, the Luftwaffe was in the air over the Division's positions for ten to twelve hours-three hundred and twenty hours in the whole month. The operations department counted up the astronomical number of bombs dropped on the Division. It ran into tens of thousands; so did the number of Luftwaffe sorties. All this on a front little over a mile long! The roar of explosions was enough to deafen the whole of mankind, the fire and metal was enough to wipe a whole country off the map. The Germans thought they were breaking the morale of the Siberians. They thought they had exceeded the limits of human endurance, the power of human hearts and nerves to stand up to such punishment. But, amazingly, the men had not crumpled, had not gone insane, had not lost control of their hearts and nerves, but had instead become stronger and calmer. The sturdy, tight-lipped Siberians had become even sterner, even more tight-lipped; their cheeks had become hollow, and their eyes more determined. Here where the brunt of the German attack was borne there was no singing, no accordions, no light conversation in the short lulls in the fighting. Here men were undergoing a superhuman strain. There were times when no one slept for three or four days and nights, and talking with his men Gurtiev was pained to hear a soldier say quietly:

"We've got everything, Comrade Colonel; nine hundred grammes of bread, and hot meals in thermoses twice a day without fail-but we're just not hungry."

After almost twenty days the Germans launched a "decisive" attack on the plant. Never in history had an assault been preceded by such massive preparation. The Luftwaffe and the heavy mortars and artillery showered the Division with bombs and shells for eighty hours solid: three days and nights that were a chaos of smoke, fire and thunder. The whistle of falling bombs, the scream of mortar shells from the six-barrel "goofies", the thunder of heavy shells and the protracted wail of the sirens was alone enough to deafen peoplebut they were only the prelude to the thunder of explosions. jagged tongues of flame spurted up and the air was rent by the howl of tormented metal. For eighty hours it went on, then the preparation finished suddenly at five in the morning and immediately German tanks and infantry advanced to the attack. The Germans managed to penetrate into the plant workshops, their tanks roared at its very walls, they broke through our defences and cut off the command posts from the forward lines. It would have seemed that deprived of their commanders, further resistance by the troops would have been impossible, and that the command posts, under direct enemy attack, would be wiped out. But an extraordinary thing happened: every trench, every dugout, every firingpoint and every fortified ruin became a separate, isolated fortress with its own command, its own communications. Sergeants and rank-and-file soldiers assumed command, and skilfully repulsed all attacks, And in this bitter, critical hour, the commanders and HQ staff turned the command posts into fortified strong-points, and fought like rankand-file soldiers to repulse the enemy attacks. Chamov beat off ten attacks. A giant, red-haired tank commander defending Chamov's command post used up all his grenades and ammunition and then took to hurling stones at the advancing Germans. Chamov himself manned a mortar.

The golden boy of the Division, Mikhalyev, was killed by a direct bomb hit on the command post. "Theyve killed our father," said the men. Major Kushnaryov, who replaced Mikhalyev, transferred his command post to a concrete pipe that passed beneath the workshops. Along with his Chief-of-Staff, Dyatlenko, and six other staff officers he successfully defended the entrance to the pipe for several hours with a few boxes of grenades, repulsing numerous German attacks.

This battle, unequalled in its cruelty and ferocity, lasted for several days and nights uninterrupted. It was fought for every step of a staircase, for every corner in a dark passage, for every machine and the space between them, for every gas pipe. No one took a step back in this battle. And if the Germans gained some ground it meant that there was nobody left alive to defend it. Everyone fought like the giant red-haired tankman, whose name Chamov was never to learn; like the sapper Kosichenko, who, his left arm broken, took to removing the pin of his grenades with his teeth. It was as if the fallen were giving added strength to the living, and there were moments when ten men held a line that had been defended by a whole battalion. The workshops changed hands many times in the course of the battle. The Germans succeeded in occupying several buildings and workshops. It was in this battle that the German offensive reached its climax. This was the highwater mark of their main attack. As if they had lifted a weight that was too heavy for them, they overstrained some inner spring that had set their battering-ram in motion.

The German onslaught began to fatter. They had three divisions, the 94th, the 305th and the 389th, fighting the Siberians. Their hundred and seventeen infantry attacks cost 5,000 German lives. The Siberians withstood this superhuman pressure. Two thousand tons of scrap metal from enemy tanks littered the ground in front of the plant. Thousands of tons of bombs, mines and shells had fallen on the factory yard and on the workshops, but still the Division held out. The troops faced death, without ever once looking back, for they knew that behind them lay the Volga and the fate of Russia.

One cannot help wondering how this tremendous strength was forged. It was partly the national character, the tremendous sense of responsibility, and that stolid Siberian stubbornness, excellent military and political training and strict discipline. But there was something else I should like to mention as having played no mean role in this great, tragic epic-and that was the amazingly fine morale and the strong bond of love that united all the men of the Siberian Division. A spirit of Spartan simplicity was characteristic of the whole staff. It was reflected in ordinary, everyday details, in the refusal to accept the rationed hundred grammes of vodka that was theirs by right throughout the whole long Stalingrad battle, and in their sensible, calm, business-like manner. I saw the love that united the men of the Division, in the deep distress with which they mourned the loss of their fallen comrades.

I saw it in the moving meeting between the grey-haired Colonel Gurtiev and the battalion nurse, Zoya Kalganova, when she returned to duty, after her second wound. "Hello, my dear child," Gurtiev said quietly, and quickly went forward with outstretched hands to greet the thin girl with close-cropped hair-just like a father greeting his own daughter.

This love and faith in one another was what helped the soldiers in the heat of battle to take the place of their commander and the commanders and staff to take up machine-guns, hand-grenades, and incendiary bottles to repulse the German tanks approaching the command post.

The wives and children of these men will never forget their husbands and fathers who fell in the great battle on the Volga. They cannot be forgotten, these fine, true men. There is only one worthy way in which our Red Army can honour the sacred memory of the men who bore the brunt of the enemy's main attack-and that is by an unlimited, liberating offensive. We believe that the hour of this offensive is at hand.