David Robbins - War of the Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad

He followed the swaying sight, squeezing for the shot he knew would serve only to give his position away. Suddenly he heard a cry of “Urrah! Urrah! Rodina!” Lieutenant Bolshoshapov leaped from behind a charred brick wall dressed only in his white underwear, ammo belt, and boots. He held his rifle over his head and charged, followed by waves of seminaked, smoking Siberians. Zaitsev stiffened, not believing his eyes. Without thinking, his legs lifted him from behind cover. He took a deep breath and screamed, “Urrah!’’ He pumped his rifle in the air and joined the charge.

He felt like a demon, running and firing into the maw of the Germans. The sight of themselves, fearless in their underwear and boots, guns blazing, drove him and his company into the Nazi line with a fierceness Zaitsev had never known. He felt exhilarated, bounding over debris, running and shooting. Closing in on the Nazi positions, his wrath grew so intense that, screaming, he crossed his eyes. He lost his balance and tripped over his running feet. Just as he hit the ground, the sailor before him was struck in the chest. The man’s arms flew open, his legs buckled in front of Zaitsev, and he skidded to his knees like a duck landing on water.

Looking over the body, Zaitsev saw the lieutenant and the men chase the Germans. The Nazis fled down an alley, firing over their shoulders.

One of the Red soldiers who’d been pinned down helped Zaitsev to his feet.

“You guys are crazy!” he laughed. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. In your underwear.”

Zaitsev touched his bloodied knee. “I tripped,” he murmured.

The soldier looked about at the many bodies on the ground. He patted Zaitsev on the back. “Go join your unit.”

The men walked to the spots where they had stripped off their burning uniforms. Each put back on whatever tatters he could retrieve of his scorched navy shirt.

The company settled in for the night. Fresh uniforms and food were delivered. Couriers brought with them the report of a comment made by Zhukov to Batyuk. The general had been amazed at how much the Siberian sailors seemed to dislike their new army uniforms. Apparently the commander had credited the company with burning the outfits off while still wearing them.

THE VIOLENCE OF THE LAST WEEK OF SEPTEMBER branded the lessons of house-to-house fighting into Zaitsev’s eyes. Before each attack, he crouched in a trench or a bunker, listening to the advice of veterans who’d survived in the city for a fierce month.

Often the battles for the buildings became hand-to-hand, the bludgeon as deadly as the bullet, the enemy’s breath and blood as close to Zaitsev as his own. For a large number of the Siberians, the three days’ training on the steppe had been worthless. During their first few days in battle, many of his friends had been killed taking unnecessary risks. But none had run away, and none had died without his weapon in his hands. The days lurched past. The bodies grew in grisly heaps under the smoking skies.

Zaitsev moved in the rubble with the grace and confidence of an animal. His taut frame and lean, muscled arms pulled him through the debris without rest, keeping enough in reserve to hold his rifle deadly still or whip a grenade almost as far as his big friend Viktor Medvedev. In hand-to-hand fighting, Zaitsev could be savage. His army knife, though bulkier than the skinning blades of his youth, slashed like a talon in his hand.

The Germans did not adjust well to the special tactics of street fighting. While the Reds captured strategic buildings with small platoons called “storm groups,” the Nazis simply threw more men into battle as if by pouring enough blood on a street they could win it. Sometimes during an attack, bodies piled so high in an alley that the corpses alone blocked the Nazis’ advance.

At the end of Zaitsev’s first two weeks in Stalingrad, the Germans had fought their way to the Volga in the city center to control the downtown area and the main landing stage of the Russians, Krasnaya Sloboda. By mid-October the Sixty-second Army had been cut in half, north and south.

The strongest Russian bridgehead was in the rubble of the factory district, five kilometers north of downtown. The Siberians were assigned to reinforce the Thirty-seventh Guards in defending the Tractor Factory, the northernmost of the three huge plants.

After a thirty-six-hour artillery barrage, the Germans attacked the Tractor Factory in the early hours of October fifth. Zaitsev, tunneling into the debris under a swarm of bullets, saw his first sniper team. The soldiers were small and thin, not powerful warriors at first glance. One man’s helmet was too big for him, covering his ears. He tipped it above his eyes to see where he was crawling. Both snipers carried rifles with scopes attached.

Even while Zaitsev’s unit dug deeper into the wreckage for cover, the snipers crept into the debris, like hunters, toward their prey.

TANIA CHERNOVA STOOD ON THE SHORE WITH HER company, 150 soldiers from the 284th Division. In front of her a barge rolled gently at the dock in the black shallows.

Across the Volga, flames loomed and snapped. German fighter-bombers sprang from nighttime clouds, glowing red on their undersides from the fires raging below them. The planes dove to unleash their bombs at low altitudes. Their engines screamed, wings whistling to bank up and out, speeding the pilots away from the blasts and smoke.

Tania stared at the misery of the city. This was the heroic battleground of Stalingrad; its name was on the lips of every Russian. Stalin, the vozhd, the Supreme Leader, had made it clear: Stand and fight here at all costs in that apocalypse across the Volga.

Eleven women were in Tania’s company, each dressed in jackboots and uniforms without insignia. They did not have rifles; as radio operators or field nurses, they would not need weapons.

On the road to the river, Tania had marched past a hundred artillery pieces operated by women. She could have requested to join them, working the big guns and Katyushas, the fiery racks of missiles suspended on the beds of American Ford trucks. But Tania had spent the last year fighting with the Russian resistance in the forests of Byelorussia and outside Moscow. She’d left the partisans one month ago to come to Stalingrad and continue her vendetta against the Nazi “sticks.” She could not think of the Germans as human. They were pieces of wood, sticks. Men could not do what she had seen the Nazis do.

In the center of her group, a general with a shaved head was ending his speech. “The defenders of Stalingrad need help,” he cried, “to stave off the charging enemy. The Tractor Factory in the northern quarter of the city has come under heavy assault. Soldiers fighting in the factory and throughout Stalingrad are not taking a single step back. But their lives, and the life of Mother Russia, depend on fresh troops entering the battle.”

The general thrust his fist over his head. He shouted, “Urrah!” Tania and her group raised their fists and bellowed, “Urrah! Urrah!” The eyes around her darted from the cheering general to the blazing city. Fear, she thought; it shows first in the eyes.

The rickety barge at the dock had been loaded with supplies and awaited its human cargo. The general finished his speech. Guards herded the soldiers into line to board the boat.

Tania shouldered her backpack filled with cheeses, bread, and a bottle of vodka, all given to her by townspeople along the road. A short man with a thick, hard belly strode to the head of the line. He ran up the gangplank with surprising nimbleness, jumping over the gunwales onto the deck. Tania recognized him as a commissar, a Captain Danilov, who’d addressed the soldiers on the beach before the bald general’s lecture. He called the soldiers to join him, to “step into history.”