Foreign News: FROM STALINGRAD’S RUINS

This report of a trip through battle-torn Stalingrad was written by Author Konstantin Simonov, published in Moscow’s Krasnaya Zvezda and cabled to TIME by its Moscow Correspondent Walter Graebner:

Stalingrad is no longer a city of cheerful crowds scrambling down steep brown banks for an afternoon swim or an excursion on the Volga. It is no longer a city of men & women riding or walking to work with dinner pails and laced sacks over their arms. Stalingrad is now a grey smoking city above which fire dances day & night and ashes float in the air. Stalingrad is a soldier city burned in battle. Barges have stopped moving food, fuel and lumber up & down the river. Now ferryboats ply back & forth carrying supplies to the embattled city and removing its wounded and dead (including many civilians trapped in burning buildings) to the east bank. The wounded go to hospitals; the dead are laid out for burial on the shore.

Already many streets of the city no longer exist. Others are pitted with craters or full of crashed bombers. The Germans are trying to convert Stalingrad into an uninhabitable hell.

It is evening and we are standing on the outskirts of the city. Before us is the battlefield: smoking hillocks and flaming streets. Everywhere there is a bluish-black smoke cut by fairy arrows rf mortar fire from our guards. White German flares light up the long circular front. First we hear the Nazi bombers roar toward the city, then the explosions of their bombs. Next comes the roar of our bombers sailing west. They drop yellow flares to illuminate the German position, and a few seconds later they drop cargoes of death.

On the east bank of the Volga we see the supply system in operation. The sky above us is rose-colored. Our ferryboat is overloaded with five trucks full of munitions, a company of Red Army men and a number of nurses. Bombs are whistling all around. Next to me sits a doctor’s assistant, a young Ukrainian woman named Victoria Tshepnya. This is her fifth crossing. Doctors’ assistants and nurses gathered the wounded themselves. They took them all the way across the city and loaded them on ferryboats which crossed the river. It was impossible to operate hospitals in the city.

Victoria and another Ukrainian reminisce about their native city of Dniepro-petrovsk. Both feel that the city is not really in German hands. To them it is still Russian.

As the ferryboat approached the landing stage, Victoria confessed: “You know me, always a little frightened to get out. I’ve already been wounded twice, once very seriously. But I don’t believe I’ll die yet because I haven’t begun to live.”

It must be frightful to have been wounded twice, to have fought for 15 months, and now to make a fifth trip to a flaming city. In 15 minutes she will pass through burning buildings, and somewhere under the rain of shrapnel and bombs will pick up a wounded man and bring him back to the ferryboat. Then she will make her sixth trip.

We Are in the City. Near the river the streets are still black, except when bombs land. In that moment the outline of the buildings is silhouetted against the sky and reminds one of a fortress. Indeed Stalingrad is a fortress. Underground we enter the staff headquarters. Telegraph girls, their faces pale from sleepless nights and explosion dust, tap out dots and dashes. Communication officers pass with quick steps. In their dispatches they do not write about the hills, valleys or heights, but about suburbs, streets and sometimes even single buildings. I try to light a match, but it is quickly smothered. Here underground there is not enough oxygen.

Now we are riding through the streets in a dilapidated gazik [old make, small Soviet car] to a command point. We pass a gate through which roll squeaking wagons loaded with fresh bread. Evidently the building housed a bakery. The city is still alive.

At dawn we arrive at a half-finished building [all nonmilitary construction in Russia stopped at war’s outbreak] in which a brigade staff is headquartered. The street bordering it on the north along the German lines has been smashed by mortar fire. At one intersection, where I remember the policeman who used to direct traffic, a tommy-gunner now stands, showing the passing soldiers a dip in the road invisible to the Germans.

Midmorning finds us seated in the plush chairs of an observer’s post in a fifth-floor apartment that used to be occupied by an engineer and his family. On the floor stand pots removed from the window ledge, and in their place is a range finder used for long-distance observation. In a village several kilometers away we see German mobile units on the move. An instant later several of them touch off our well-hidden mines and blow up. The angered Germans reply with a mortar barrage directed at nothing in particular.

Then I walk over to a table in the middle of the room. In the center is a vase of wilted flowers and near it are schoolbooks and a pad of paper bearing a child’s handwriting. He had just finished a composition about pioneers. In this apartment, as in thousands of others, life stopped for civilians on a word.

Toward evening we arrive at a glass factory. The entrance is heavily guarded. Severely examining our documents, they remind me of Red Guards in 1918. Inside we see the director, firemen, watchmen and members of the factory workers’ guard. Though machine tools have been evacuated, the workshop remains; guarding it are elderly men who have given their best years to the factory.

The director tells us how several days ago German tanks broke through defenses in one area and rushed toward the factory. When the news reached the factory the men decided that somehow they had to close the breakthrough. The director ordered the workshop manager to finish repairs on several tanks. Meanwhile other workers sat in the tanks and studied their operation. Then & there they formed themselves into tank crews.

Ten or 15 minutes later the repairs were finished and the tanks crawled out of the factory gates. They met the Germans on a stone bridge which was the only means by which the Nazis could advance over a deep gully. The Soviet tanks were followed by the workers’ infantry [called Opolchenie]. Furious battle raged all day around the bridge and in the valley.

Meanwhile the streets around the factory were quickly transformed. Everything that the Russians could lay hands on was used—boiler plates, shells of tanks, barrels, bricks, sandbags. Wives brought bullets to husbands while girls from workshops served as nurses. Many perished that day, but for that price the river line was held until regular reinforcements could be brought up.