The Siege of Stalingrad

It ./ SIECE OF

~GES

GRAD

OF PICTURES AND TEXT

,

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THIS IS THE EPIC STORY OF THE SIEGE OF

STALINGRAD TOLD IN PHOTOGRAPHS, WORDS AND MAPS FROM

AUGUST 23,d, ]942, 'ro*FEBRUARY 3.d,

]943

The Communist Party of Great Britain dedicates this book to all men and women fighting Fascism. Let the story of Stalingrad serve as an inspiration and a reminder of the sublime heights to which courage can rise in defence of the things which humanity holds dear

T HE time is winter's end. 1943. The food trains arc headed south now, from Saratov. Tambov, and the regions of the Middle Volga. And they say that in their wake the birds arc flying the birds that have not been seen on the Lower Volga since the Germans came and stripped the forests and gutted the cities and blasted the countryside with a hurricane of steel and fire. Now the Germans are gone from the Lower Volga. Now there is a smell of life about. and a smell of food in the starving villages. Even the ruins arc beginning to pulse with warmth again. So the birds are returning, strung out in a long cloud behind the trains. The trains race down by Aleksikovo, through Kachalinsk, and not until the line branches off at Gumrak do the passengers see what the birds had seen from miles back. As the train stops for a breather at Kratenkaya, the army officers, the young

technicians, the press correspondents, crowd at the windows and point arms, hands, fingers, eyes, field-glasses to the south-east. There, spread out before them. and straggling for miles up and down the river, is the unforgettable city, the capital of glory-Stalingrad. There it is, ill natura, undeniably. In that city which once housed half a million people, hardly a house stands in all the six miles between the Square of the Heroes of the Revolution in the city's centre, to the famous Red October Works in the north. Around the central square tall buildings show their bones to the air, the skeletons of buildings that house the skeletons of men. The trees, the lovely squares, the roofs which the birds quitted last August are no longer there. Millions of shell pocked bricks and mountains of twisted metal are all that remain of the famous Dzerzhinsky Tractor Works, the factories of Red October and the Red Barricade. Deep 1,000 lb. bomb craters,

BEFORE THE FASCISTS CAME. STALINGRAD WAS A HAPPY. THRIVING CITY filled with ice, pit the almost trackless streets. And here and there a frozen corpse still stares up pale through the icc. All over the city hangs the sick smell of rubble and death. Even the sparkling frost and the cheerful jets of steam from the locomotives and the lively fussy comments of the birds cannot dissipate that shocking deathliness. And yet the city is coming back to life. Sledges pulled by sturdy Kalmuk ponies go dashing across the snow. Men arc drawing water through holes in the ice, and walking carefully over the rubble with their buckets. A couple

of German Dfisoners are fussing around. helping to build a temporary memorial to a group of Red Army officers and men. They try to hammer

nails in with an iron bar, but the nails buckle. Without roughness, without politeness, a Red Army man pushes them aside, as one who has no feeling for dogs would push a dog aside. He knocks in the nails himself. Behind a sheJlpitted wall shots are heard that echo sharply through the ruins. A Soviet guardsman is unfreeL~ ing his tommygun. A group of tiny figures trail across the ice-women and children come out of

THE PEOPLE OF STALINGRAD WERE PROUD OF THE HANDSOME CITY THEY HAD BUILT

THEY LOVED PEACE AND THEIR FAMILIES-THEY WERE THAT KIND OF PEOPLE

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IN SPITE OF THE WAR, THE BIG ;>;EW RAILWAY STATIO;>; WAS GOI'iG FORWARD their holes in the ground and return to the city.

You can hear the children even from this distance. when only a few weeks back a man shouting in his comrade's ear would be inaudible above the

ow sound carries in desolate noise of battle. Stalingrad. The battlefield is dead. and it is sordid nnd horrifying as only a dead battlefield can be. Round a fire a group of Red Army men are melting snow in a bucket. One of their comrades brings something to show them that he has just caught among a pile of shallered brick and plaster. In the cold sunlight he stands grinning, stroking a mouse with the back of his finger. Slowly the train steams past this dC50lation.

The technicians from Moscow slart getting their luggage together. The young men from the Tramway Trust, from the Commissariat of Light Induslry and the Commissariat of Ri"er Transport get up from their seats. The doctors sent down from the Moscow Medical Institute oren their carriage door as the train comes to a halt. All are an\ious to get to work. And their work is nothing less than the restoration of the beautiful cilY of Stalingrad. Only a few months ago these twisted gianl skeletons of buildings \\-ere not so openly exposed. Then they wore a decent mask of concrete and cement. Then they \\ere skyscrapers, grain

dt;\awl's. theatrcs and museums. StalingraiJ, with its \\- ide and himdsomc avcnues. its boulevards of sycamore and chestnut, its workers' flats in the flo\l,cring parks. was a prize city. Fe\\cr than 60.000 people lived in the woodenhuued town of Ts.uitsyn. on the Volga. But more than half a million li\cd in stntcly Stalingrad. Yct they MC the same city. separated by a quarter of a centur}. It \I,as to Tsaritsyn that Stalin came in June. 1918. in the grim and hungry days of the Ci ... il \Var. He came ilS commissioner for food supplies in all South Russia. The }oung SO\iet Republic \I,as hemmed in by a ring of firc from the battlefronts. Intenenlion and counter-rc\olution \\cre tr}ing to strangle 50\ iet po\\-cr. The 50\ iet Republic was cut off from its supplies of ra\\- materials and grain. Moscow and Pctrograd \\ere staning. Hunger had become thc second most dangerous enem) of the \\-orling-c1ass re\.olution. Tsarits}n \\-as the \\-cdge that di\ ided the counterre\oIutionary forces in the east and the south. HO\\ THE BREAK-THROt.:GH HAPPE:\ED

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Only Tsaritsyn prc\cntcd them from linling up and dc.ding a great united blow at Moscow. Besides this. though the South was not fat, there \\-as grain. Stalin's job was I\\'ofold. To gather food for the star... ing North: to prc\ent the counter-revolution from taking Stalingrad. To those 1\'