World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF RUSSIA: Fight for Factories

Straight from battle Russian tanks lurched into the great Dzerzhinsky tractor plant for repairs, rumbled out again next morning to rejoin the fight. The Red October and Red Barricade plants kept grinding out guns and ammunition despite fire and bomb. Sprawling along the Volga in northern Stalingrad, the three plants were keystones to the city’s defense—forts no less than arsenals. As the siege neared its 60th day, fighting focused on those factories.

The Nazis opened a new attack with an air bombardment. All of the Red Barricade plant, “a spectacle of utter chaos,” was captured, said a German communiqué. The Spartakovka settlement near by, where factory workers had dwelt, also fell to the Germans. The Dzerzhinsky factory was plastered with tons of bombs. As the fighting surged into new parts of northern Stalingrad, the section of railway yards, oil tanks and huge warehouses, the Germans tried to mushroom north & south from captured positions. Russian flank attacks halted them.

Behind the Russians in Stalingrad a two-mile pontoon bridge, built of rough planks supported by empty gasoline cans, gave access across the Volga. Since Sept. 18 German bombers had dropped tons of explosives attempting to smash the bridge, but had done only minor damage and that was quickly repaired. But the floating bridge was a slender thread.

“It would be wrong to underestimate the seriousness of the situation,” said a Red Army regimental officer. “There are some grave ordeals ahead. Nevertheless Stalingrad will fight on and it may hold.”