World: At Stalingrad

The Germans were in Stalingrad. The Germans had reached the Volga.

> Said a German correspondent broadcasting from the Stalingrad front: “The horizon seems to heave up. Gigantic mushrooms of greenish black and white are spreading everywhere. On my right Panzers are in position. Straight ahead infantry have reached the first houses.”

> Said another German: “It is a miracle our troops reached the Volga. Soviet defenses were more than terrific. German soldiers have become silent after what they have gone through. Today they are living for their tanks only. They are separated from reality. They want to be left alone. They all want one thing—rest.”

> Said a Russian eyewitness: “Seeing the city, the Germans, satanic with ferocity, stumble over thousands of corpses of their own men and past hundreds of smashed German tanks as they try to force into the city.”

> Said the Moscow radio: “Fighting has become exceptionally tense and bloody.”

From fragments such as these the world learned of one of the great battles in history. “Not a single battle in past wars has shown such a picture of continuous movement and maneuver on both sides,” said the army newspaper Red Star. “The enemy is forever regrouping for flank attacks or attempts at encirclement while our forces are also continuously maneuvering and counterattacking the enemy’s flanks and rear.”

Russian reserves, drawn from western Siberia where Marshals Voroshilov and Budenny have been training huge new armies, were thrown into the Stalingrad struggle to relieve weary Red Army fighters who had been hammered slowly back toward the Volga during torrid August and September weeks. The reserves came from training camps in Western Siberia, not from the front line in the east where a section of the Red Army guards against any Japanese attack. If Marshal Timoshenko expected Stalingrad to fall he was almost certainly withdrawing—and saving —the bulk of his veteran troops for battles to come.

Casualties. Neither side detailed its casualties.* Russian communiqués told of wiping out detachments of 150 to 300 Germans, destroying a half-dozen tanks, infinitesimal losses in a battle involving more than a million men and great masses of war equipment. In fact, the communiqués from Moscow notably failed to bear out the non-military reports of mountainous German losses. Perhaps those who wrote the communiqués did not yet have an overall view; perhaps they were not ready to tell the full story.

A Communist Party statement said German casualties in south Russia had reached 1,300,000 dead. But the announcement did not specify whether the figure covered the entire war or only the past three months. The last Russian report on German casualties, issued Aug. 8, had listed 480,000 German dead. (At various times Germans and Russians each have estimated that the other had lost ten million dead, wounded and missing.)

The Red Army, outnumbered in both planes and tanks, put its reliance on artillery, in the defense-in-depth which Russia’s soldiers perfected while they were losing Sevastopol and Rostov. Well behind the lines were medium heavy guns, in the middle of the city medium artillery, in the front ranks light artillery, anti-tank guns, machine-gun nests. All batteries were defended by tommy gunners, and at key points throughout the city small, speedy mobile units were in action rushing to meet each newly threatened advance. Medium artillery attempted to smash advancing tank columns before they deployed in battle formation, light artillery struck as the tanks drew closer and anti-tank guns opened up at less than 1,000-yard range; artillery and infantry closed around isolated German units. The tactics were good, as witnessed by the slowness of the German advance. But they were not enough to halt Marshal Fedor von Bock’s creep through smashed, smoking ruins toward the heart of Stalingrad. As a new week started the Germans claimed they had reached a vital harbor section of the city which stretched 25 miles along the Volga bend; they won, lost, then won again a hill from which they shelled the heart of bomb-beaten Stalingrad.

* The Russians announced that in the Caucasus they had killed Colonel General Paul Ludwig Ewald von Kleist, commander of the First German Tank Army. Berlin, however, denied he had fallen. Prussian von Kleist led the first armored forces into Belgrade in April 1941, spearheaded drives into Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk, commanded tanks which first captured Rostov last November, only to lose it a few weeks later. This year his Panzers again had rolled into Rostov and then far beyond to the south.