From mid-September to mid-November 1942 the battle for Stalingrad was fought inside the city. Vasily Chuikov’s 62nd Army, never more than a few miles deep and in places only a few hundred yards, held a strip of the Volga’s west bank against repeated German assaults. The German Sixth Army took the city center, Mamayev Kurgan’s crest for long periods, and most of the great factories, but it never drove the defenders into the river.

A new commander for a broken army

By early September the 62nd Army had been driven out of the Don bend, where much of it had been encircled in August, and back into Stalingrad. On 12 September Andrei Yeryomenko, commander of the Southeastern Front, and Nikita Khrushchev, the front’s political commissar, briefed Lieutenant General Vasily Chuikov as the army’s new commander. Chuikov, 42, had served as military attaché in China and had commanded the 64th Army’s southern operational group in the summer fighting. His predecessor, Alexander Lopatin, had judged the city impossible to hold.

Chuikov’s army was weak and scattered. Its divisions were down to a fraction of their strength, some to a few hundred riflemen. Behind it lay the Volga, which had no bridge at Stalingrad; everything the army needed had to cross by boat, mostly at night. Across the river lay the army’s most important support: heavy artillery and Katyusha rocket launchers on the east bank, out of reach of German infantry, which could fire on targets the defenders reported. Chuikov kept his headquarters close to the front, first in a bunker in the Tsaritsa gorge and later in dugouts in the riverbank behind the factories.

September: the city center and the landing

On 13 September the German LI Corps under General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach attacked toward the city center and the central landing stage. The U.S. Army history records that by nightfall German troops had reached a wood about a mile west of Mamayev Kurgan. On 14 September they took the main railroad station, Stalingrad-1, a third of a mile from the river, and reached the Volga near the central landing. Ziemke and Bauer record that the station changed hands five times that morning and thirteen more times in the following days.

That night Major General Alexander Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards Rifle Division, about 10,000 men according to the same history, began crossing the river from Krasnaya Sloboda into the city center under fire. Its regiments went into action straight from the landing, fighting for the riverbank, the streets around the station and the slopes of Mamayev Kurgan. Losses were very high in the first days. The division’s arrival stopped the Germans from taking the central landing and holding the whole riverbank opposite the main crossing, and it remained in the central district for the rest of the battle.

Mamayev Kurgan, a burial mound about 300 feet high marked on Soviet maps as Height 102.0, overlooked the city center and the river crossings. LI Corps took the crest on 15 September; a Soviet regiment stormed it the next day. Soviet accounts say they held the hill for at least ten days after that, while German records describe repeated failed Soviet attempts after the 15th. For the rest of the battle both sides held parts of the slopes, and the summit was fought over again and again. The southern city, with its concrete grain elevator, was defended by Soviet troops, including naval infantry, until late September.

On 26 September Paulus reported that the swastika flag had been raised over the party and government buildings on the city’s Red Square. The 62nd Army had been pushed out of most of the center and the south. Its left flank, the 13th Guards, held a strip along the river in the central district; north of it, divisions held the slopes of Mamayev Kurgan, the workers’ settlements and the approaches to the factories. Between mid-September and November the army received nine rifle divisions, two tank brigades and a rifle brigade as reinforcements, according to Ziemke and Bauer, and fed them into the fighting as they arrived.

Pavlov’s House and the fight for buildings

In the central district the front settled into a line of fortified buildings, often across a street or a square from the enemy. On about 27 September a small group of the 42nd Guards Rifle Regiment, 13th Guards Rifle Division, led by Sergeant Yakov Pavlov, occupied a four-story apartment block facing 9 January Square. Reinforced to a garrison commanded by Lieutenant Ivan Afanasyev, the group held the building until Soviet counterattacks relieved the area on 25 November. Pavlov’s House became the best-known symbol of the defense; the story has been retold and embellished, and historians have since tried to separate the garrison’s documented record from later legend.

Fighting in the ruins favored the defender and small units. Rubble blocked tanks and gave cover to antitank riflemen; cellars and sewer pipes allowed movement out of sight. Both armies formed small assault groups with submachine guns, grenades, flamethrowers and demolition charges to clear buildings room by room. Chuikov ordered his troops to keep their front lines as close to the Germans as possible, a practice later summed up as “hugging” the enemy, so that German aircraft and artillery could not bomb Soviet positions without endangering their own men. Snipers on both sides worked from the ruins.

Among the Soviet snipers, Vasily Zaitsev of the 284th Rifle Division became the most famous through newspaper coverage during the battle. The National WWII Museum has published the recollections of another sniper, Boris Vetman, who had volunteered with his brother after the German invasion and fought at Stalingrad; such individual accounts show the battle at the scale of a single position. German soldiers’ letters, many of them never delivered, give the same experience from the other side.

October: the factories

After the center fell, Paulus turned north to the industrial district. In late September and early October German divisions attacked the workers’ settlements west of the Red October and Barrikady plants and the Orlovka salient beyond them. On 6 October the attack was suspended because infantry strength had fallen too low. The U.S. Army history gives a telling figure for that date: the average German infantry battalion in the city was down to 3 officers, 11 noncommissioned officers and 62 men.

With reinforcements, including the 14th Panzer Division and fresh infantry, the Sixth Army opened its largest assault on 14 October against the Dzerzhinsky Tractor Factory. Behind heavy air and artillery preparation, German troops broke through to the Volga on 14–15 October and split the 62nd Army’s bridgehead. The Soviet 37th Guards Rifle Division, which had just arrived, and other units around the factory suffered very heavy losses. A northern group of Soviet forces under Colonel Sergei Gorokhov was cut off in the Rynok–Spartanovka area and held on there, separated from the main army.

The fighting then moved south into the Barrikady gun factory and the Red October steel plant. Colonel Leonty Gurtiev’s 308th Rifle Division and Colonel Ivan Lyudnikov’s 138th Rifle Division fought in and around Barrikady; Major General Stepan Guryev’s 39th Guards Rifle Division held parts of Red October; and Colonel Vasily Gorishny’s 95th Rifle Division fought on Mamayev Kurgan and in the factory district. Inside the plants, combat moved from shop to shop and across rail yards and slag heaps, with workshops changing hands repeatedly. The Germans brought in assault guns and heavy infantry guns to fire into buildings at close range.

By the end of October the 62nd Army held only a few narrow strips of riverbank in the north, in places a few hundred yards deep, plus the 13th Guards’ sector in the center. Chuikov’s headquarters was in dugouts in the riverbank behind the Red October plant. Soviet artillery east of the river, by then numbering many hundreds of guns and mortars, broke up German attacks as they formed. The Germans held about nine-tenths of the city, but each attack cost them infantry they could not replace.

November: Operation Hubertus

Hitler insisted that the city be taken before winter. In early November the Sixth Army received five engineer (pioneer) battalions, flown in from other sectors, for a final assault on the remaining Soviet positions. Operation Hubertus opened on 11 November against the area between the Barrikady and Red October plants. German assault engineers took several strongpoints and reached the Volga behind the Barrikady, isolating Lyudnikov’s 138th Rifle Division in a pocket about 400 yards wide along the river, later called Lyudnikov’s Island. The division held it, supplied by boat and by air drops, until the counteroffensive changed the situation.

Hubertus was the last German attempt to finish the battle in the city. It took ground but failed to clear the west bank. A week later, on 19 November, the Soviet counteroffensive described in Chapter 4 began far to the northwest. German losses in the city fighting had been heavy throughout: the U.S. Army history counts Sixth Army losses from 21 August to mid-November at 1,068 officers and about 39,000 men. Soviet losses in the 62nd Army were higher still, but were made good, at great cost, by the steady flow of divisions across the river.

Why the 62nd Army held

Several factors explain why the defense held. The Volga gave the Soviets a protected line of supply and allowed the east-bank artillery to dominate the battlefield. The ruins neutralized much of the German advantage in tanks and coordination. The Stavka fed in just enough divisions to keep the defense alive while it built up reserves for the counteroffensive, a choice that kept the Sixth Army committed to the city. Discipline enforced under Order No. 227, political mobilization and the soldiers’ own determination all played parts that historians still weigh differently.

From the German side, the city fight consumed the Sixth Army’s strength in exactly the kind of battle its organization was least suited to. German soldiers called it the Rattenkrieg, the “war of the rats,” fought in cellars and sewers rather than on open ground. Paulus repeatedly asked for infantry replacements and engineer units, and received some, but never enough to clear the riverbank. Every division drawn into the ruins was a division unavailable to strengthen the flanks on the Don and in the steppe. Hitler’s public statements in the autumn, promising that the city would be taken, made a withdrawal to a shorter line politically difficult even when his generals advised it.

Several of the units that held the city carried its name onward. The 62nd Army became the 8th Guards Army and ended the war in Berlin under Chuikov. The 95th Rifle Division became the 75th Guards Rifle Division and fought on the northern face of the Kursk salient in July 1943. The ruins they fought in are now part of the memorial landscape described in Chapter 9, and the battle’s maps can be compared with others in The Maps of World War II.

Gallery · 8 photographs · select to enlarge

Fighting in the ruins and factories

Sources and further reading

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