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a ‘bandit battalion’ of women soldiers, commanded by a redhead.
watching ‘the German searchlights playing on the clouds’, he wondered if he would ever see his sweetheart again.
At that stage, the only interest in Stalingrad was to eliminate the armaments factories there and secure a position on the Volga. The capture of the city itself was not considered necessary.
The Sixth Army would then move towards Stalingrad to secure the north-east flank, while Kleist’s First Panzer Army and the Seventeenth Army would occupy the Caucasus.
The German divisions advanced across immense fields of sunflowers or corn.
the German pincer attack west of the Don closed uselessly.
concentrating defence on cities, not on arbitrary lines on the map.
sunflower seeds, which German soldiers jokingly called ‘Russian chocolates’.
Sixth Army would take and occupy Stalingrad.
If the Germans then advanced across the Volga, forty miles further on, the country would be cut in two.
The German gunners in shorts, with their bronzed torsos muscled from the lifting of shells, looked like athletes from a Nazi propaganda film,
Young peasants drafted in from collective farms were pitifully ignorant of modern warfare and weaponry.
an officer had ordered them to shoot two wounded Red Army soldiers they had found ‘hiding in a ditch’.
Utvenko spent the next day hiding in a field of sunflowers with some twenty soldiers.
According to Russian superstition, if your memorial service took place when you were still alive, you would not go to an early grave.
their aerodrome was no more than a large field planted with watermelons and surrounded by tomato plants, which the local peasants continued to harvest even while fighters landed and took off.
many Germans felt convinced that they must be close to total victory. The Russian hydra could not go on for ever growing more heads for them to chop off.
The setting sun behind their tanks threw long shadows in front of them towards the east. Beyond Kalach, the steppe stretched ahead to Stalingrad.
Some units were rewarded with extra rations of chocolate and cigarettes for their exertions, which they enjoyed during the relative cool of the evening.
The fighting had been hard. ‘The only consolation’, a pioneer wrote home, ‘is that we will be able to have peace and quiet in Stalingrad, where we’ll move into winter quarters, and then, just think of it, there’ll be a chance of leave.’
Stalingrad curved for twenty miles along the high western bank of the Volga.
the Stalingrad tractor factory, which had converted to the production of T-34 tanks,
‘Oh, they’re finished now! They’ve been wiped out!’ But each time, after a pause, the guns started to fire again. ‘This’, declared Grossman, ‘was the first page of the Stalingrad defence.’
‘The Russian woman has long been fully prepared for combat duties and to fill any post of which a woman might be capable. Russian soldiers treat such women with great wariness.’
they drove them off the production line and straight into battle.
their first glimpse of white apartment buildings on the high western bank had reminded them of Athens.
‘This shitty Russia’ was a common reaction in letters home at this time.
Hitler was often ready to despise mundane requirements, such as fuel supplies and manpower shortages, as if he were above the normal material constraints of war.
’Do not count days; do not count miles. Count only the number of Germans you have killed. Kill the German—this is your mother’s prayer. Kill the German-this is the cry of your Russian earth. Do not waver. Do not let up. Kill.‘
‘Time is blood,’
rectangular concrete grain elevator which dominated the Stalingrad skyline.
As they had approached the Volga, the parched dusty steppe ended, with maple trees announcing the nearness of water. An arrowed sign, nailed to a tree, bore the single word ‘Ferry’.
They were being sent into an image of hell.
The 13th Guards Rifle Division suffered 30 per cent casualties in the first twenty-four hours, but the river bank had been saved. The few survivors (only 320 men out of the original 10,000 remained alive at the end of the battle of Stalingrad)
On 17 September, the temperature dropped suddenly. Men put on woollen garments under their jackets, which were in most cases disintegrating already.
Paulus chose the huge grain silo as the symbol of Stalingrad in the arm badge he was having designed at army headquarters to commemorate the victory.
The Landser had already started to lose track of time in this alien world, with its destroyed landscape of ruins and rubble. Even the midday light had a strange, ghostly quality from the constant haze of dust.
an over-extended defence line which petered out in the northern Caucasus.
‘fighting in the brick-strewn, half-demolished rooms and corridors’ of apartment blocks, where there might still be a vase of withered flowers, or a boy’s homework open on the table.
assault squads, generally six or eight strong, from ‘the Stalingrad Academy of Street Fighting’.
The Russians also kept up the tension by firing flares into the night sky from time to time to give the impression of an imminent attack.
manoeuvrable little U-2 biplanes which dropped small bombs on night raids. ‘The Russkies keep buzzing over us the whole night long,’ a pioneer corporal wrote home.
September as soon as the war of movement turned into a war of virtually stationary annihilation.
the hand grenade proved essential. Red Army soldiers called it their ‘pocket artillery’.
The city had been without fresh water since the pumping station was destroyed in the August raids.
‘My face is completely disfigured,’ he wrote, ‘and consequently I will now be the lowest form of life in the eyes of women.’
’Hei, Rus, bul-bul, sdavaisa!‘, their pidgin Russian for: ’Surrender or you’ll be blowing bubbles!‘
The ration of rough makhorka tobacco,
vodka ration, theoretically 100 grams a day.
The casualties they carried or dragged down to the edge of the Volga were left uncared for until, long after nightfall, they were loaded like sacks of potatoes on to the supply boats, empty for the return crossing.
