World: For Stalin’s City

The Germans inched on into the environs of Stalingrad. Day by day, for four weeks, they had sent mountains of men and machines to batter the Red Army back across dusty steppes toward the Volga. Colossal expenditures bought each hillock, each ravine, each village, exacting of the Russians losses at least as heavy. The precise location of the battle line was not revealed by either Berlin or Moscow communiqués, but Moscow reported this week that fighting was going on “in Stalingrad.” The heaviest pressure and steadiest German progress was from the southwest, toward the Volga bend directly below Stalingrad. There the Germans had lost as many as 60 tanks on a single sector, but slowly they thundered on.

Fresh Russian plane, tank and artillery forces were moved up to the front in an attempt to offset the weight of German numbers. Rested flyers, gunners and tank crews brought with them hope to the stubbornly retreating Red Army.

Stalingrad’s fate depended upon the success of such fighters. There were no natural defenses. Between the Don and Volga elbows, a strip from 45 to 80 miles wide, the plain rises imperceptibly from the west to east until it reaches about 240 ft. above sea level, then falls away sharply in a few miles to the Volga, which at Stalingrad is 40 ft. below sea level.* The few ravines dividing the plain are knee-deep brooks. There are no forests such as help to screen Moscow. The Nazis had merely to cross the plain between two rivers. Sprawling along the Volga for 25-miles, Stalingrad’s shoestring outline provides not even a compact area to defend. A break-through at any point could cut the defending forces in two.

The smoke of German bombs already had blotted out much of the industrial smoke which rose over Stalingrad during three Five-Year Plans that changed a country town into a modern city, that upped its population from 150,000 to 500,000. From the great tractor plant on Stalingrad’s northern outskirts to the metallurgical works on the southwest, chemical, machinery, leather, oil and many other industrial plants were scattered through the city. Most of them were turned to war production, so that when the battle neared Stalingrad tanks rolled from factory to front. Interspersed among the factories were workers’ housing developments, many gardens, miles of parks.

But even as the city was modernized, Stalingrad’s color and flavor still derived from the life teeming on the many-storied landing stages of the broad, slumberous Volga. A small part of the city lies on the river’s east bank, with salt marshes and treeless wastes stretching on into Asia.

Precious factories by last week had been stripped of some of their machinery, which was shipped with skilled workers to safety beyond the Urals. River boats and barges, operated entirely by women, had ferried part of the famed Dzerzhinsky tractor plant (now converted to tank manufacture) up the Volga to Kazan, where it was transshipped on flat cars by the Trans-Siberian railway. Other factories still were producing war supplies. Soldiers and workers fighting one battle mingled in the crowded boulevards of the city.

Soviet War Correspondent Ilya Ehrenbourg expressed what the people of Stalingrad, the Red Army and all Russia felt about their great battle for Stalingrad:

Friends can be chosen. Wives, too, can be selected. But not a mother. There is only one mother, and she is loved because she is a mother. In front of Stalingrad we are defending our mother—Russia.

* The Caspian, into which the Volga empties, is a salt sea 83 ft. below sea level.