Island of Fire: The Battle for the Barrikady Gun Factory in Stalingrad - Jason Mark
This is an excellent and meticulous military microhistory of some of the most desperate fighting of the Second World War.
In late October 1942, the German Sixth Army prepared to expend some of the last of its strength in what the Nazis believed would be the final battle for Stalingrad before the onset of severe winter weather. General Paulus ordered up five battalions of pioneers, German combat engineers suited to attacking obstacles and emplacements, to spearhead the push at the head of his exhausted infantry regiments in the city. Although the German attack, Operation HUBERTUS, was under-resourced, the pioneers captured several city blocks in the district around the Red Barricade factory and pushed all the way to the Volga River, cutting the Soviet bridgehead in the city in half.
138th Rifle Division, under the command of Colonel I. I. Lyudnikov, managed to hold on in the northern part of the bridgehead, but they were almost totally cut off from other Soviet forces. (Fragments of other Soviet units also survived in the bridgehead, but 138th Rifle Division was by far the largest, and Lyudnikov assumed command over the other Soviet forces there.) The ice-choked Volga made resupply by boat almost impossible, and German artillery and AT guns shot up anything else that tried to make it to Lyudnikov and his troops. Air resupply was unreliable, as it could only happen at night, and many packages landed inside German lines. One of the only ways that the Red Army fliers could even find Lyudnikov's lines was by having his men light signal fires, but the Germans quickly caught on and lit their own fires all over the city. One airman was seized with a brainwave and radioed Lyudnikov to have his troops extinguish their lights all at once, which he did, making the Soviet front lines clear once more. The airman later commented that the area looked like an island in a sea of fire, and the name caught - the northern part of the bridgehead became "Lyudnikov's Island" even in the official 62nd Army reports, and "island of fire" gave the book its name.
Meanwhile, the Germans continued their inexorable advance, methodically capturing house after house. The rest of the Soviet troops in 62nd Army, further south, hurled themselves at the Germans in the area of the fuel tank complex to try to break through, but were unable to push the Germans out. Lyudnikov's Island was reduced to a few houses and the divisional CP by 19 November, and probably would have been destroyed within a week. There were only a few hundred combat effective soldiers within the bridgehead, and they had extremely low stocks of ammunition and food. But on that date, the Soviet counteroffensive north and south of Stalingrad began. Within days, the Germans were surrounded, and although Nazi attacks on the "island" continued for two more days it was the Germans who were now stuck. The ice on the Volga hardened into a walkable crust, and the "island" began to receive supplies again. It was another two and a half weeks before 138th Rifle Division was able to finally make contact with the rest of the 62nd Army in a single continuous bridgehead, but the worst had passed.
At that point, the Soviets shifted to the offensive, and it was their turn to suffer tremendous casualties assaulting German-held strongpoints. The Barrikady district had to be won back house by house, just like it had been lost. But this time resources were on the Red Army's side, not the Wehrmacht's, and the German pocket slowly contracted. The German collapse picked up speed in January as the last Nazis fled the Barrikady for the area around the bread factory, which is where they surrendered in early February. Much of the rest of the book is taken up by describing the future lives of most of the soldiers in the story and by referential appendices.
The book is extremely thoroughly researched, and it is hard for me to imagine that the author left any stones unturned in terms of primary sources. It is an intimate and personal examination of actual soldiers' experiences. The detail is exhaustive, which is wonderful, because I have almost never come across a better and more evocative description of what combat was actually like in the Second World War than this. You get their letters, their postwar writings, their official reports, and interviews conducted after the war. The book is lavishly equipped with photographs of the people who participated on both sides, as well as aerial photographs of the city immediately after the fighting overlaid with text labels. There are many more maps in the book than in many other military histories, and they are clear and well labeled. Mark is respectful of the men on both sides and does justice to their stories, and his text offers an outstandingly real depiction of the fighting; there are no higher goals in writing history.
Lyudnikov looms large in the book, and rightfully so; the man's conduct in the bridgehead during October, November, and December made him the Platonic ideal of a Soviet officer of the Great Patriotic War. He was dramatic and inspiring, learned from mistakes, possessed excellent military instincts, and endured tremendous personal danger at his soldiers' side. He invariably makes an appearance in Soviet and Russian films about Stalingrad, which makes sense because you barely have to do any writing for him; just take down what's in his memoirs and you've got the perfect film character. Of all the stories in the book, his sticks the best.
More than anything else, though, this is a book about stories. There are melancholy stories, like the tale of Captain Rettenmaier, a father in his fifties leading men young enough to be his sons, stuck far from home and family over Christmas as the Soviet ring drew tighter. There are horrifying stories, like the accounts of the vicious back-and-forth battles for the P-shaped house ("Komissarhaus" to the Germans). There is black humor, at which soldiers have always excelled. There are stories of nail-biting tension, like the travails of the "Rolik" signal post, trapped in a cave only a few meters from Germans for weeks, and stories of unexpected compassion, as when a German officer pretended a soldier blinded in one eye had actually been blinded in both so the soldier could get a spot on a medical airlift out of the surrounded city. And, of course, there are scores of instances of tremendous heroism.
I would strongly recommend the book to anyone with even a passing interest in the topic. It is excellent.
Nice.
Never finished it.
(unless it becomes what i would like it to be; namely an attempt by Betteridge to cover up for his own responsibility for the loss of the Moonstone, by producing a bizarre version of what he was tasked to do. Maybe it isn't this at all, though 
).
