What happened on August 23, 1942. Notifications. General Staff of the Red Army

A few years ago, on March 19, 2008, on the occasion of the 65th anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad in the Panorama Museum Battle of Stalingrad” there was a viewing and discussion of the television documentary film “Stalingrad. Chronicle of Victory. In it, along with the military theme at that time, for the first time, an attempt was made to designate and civic theme- the most sick and bypassed in films about Stalingrad.

The start was impressive. Air Marshal Ivan Ivanovich Pstygo is shown in close-up, on the whole screen, who authoritatively sums up August 23, 1942 - the most mournful date of Stalingrad. Quote: “On August 23, there was that terrible blow when 2,000 bombers passed through Stalingral and, according to the latest, probably the most probable data, 200,000 people died in Stalingrad!” That's exactly half of the city's population.

Yuri Panchenko. At the age of 16, he survived the entire Battle of Stalingrad in the Central District of the city. He has served in aviation for over 50 years. Author of the book "163 Days on the Streets of Stalingrad".

However, areas that were not bombed that day should be excluded from the total urban population. Then, in four districts of the city (out of eight) that were hit by German aircraft, where about 200,000 people lived, the entire population was killed. I'll clean up. I want to howl in horror.

And where is Pstygo's case of the wounded, who are counted to the dead as three to one?

That's another 600,000! In total, in a city with a population of 400,000 people, the number of victims on August 23 is ... 800,000 people, which is comparable to the population of Stalingrad and Astrakhan combined!

About dreamers

Our homegrown visionaries were more modest.

Oleg Naida, Ph.D. in Philosophy, counted 2,000 German planes in the sky of Stalingrad on August 23, which claimed the lives of more than 40,000 citizens.

Further losses of the civilian population began to grow like a snowball.

Iraida Pomoshchnikova, Chairman of the Association "Children of Military Stalingrad". In the book “We Come from the War,” six-year-old Irochka not only counted 2,000 enemy bombers in the sky of Stalingrad on August 23, but also counted the victims: 42,000 killed and 50,000 wounded. What an evil girl, but smart! At her age, I could only count up to ten, and even then on my fingers.

Vladimir Beregovoy, professor at the University of Economics in St. Petersburg, member of the Children of Military Stalingrad association. In his article "Triumph and Tragedy" which "announces the book-requiem about Stalingrad", he toughened the outcome of the ill-fated day: 46,000 residents of the city were killed and 150,000 were injured. Five-month-old Vovochka, retreating with his parents from Stalingrad, also counted the number of German planes that bombed the city on August 23 - more than 2000!

Enemy aircraft "... flew in formation-square of sixty-four aircraft ...". What is it - the Mughal shakhovnitsa or the Khrushchev method of square-nested sowing of corn? I even saw the "sticking out" corpses along the river bank and the Volga, red with blood. One thing is certain, Vovochka's parents were color blind. The water in the Volga really changed color, but not to red, but to black, because in the area of ​​​​the tractor factory, German aircraft bombed and burned a caravan of oil barges.

Tatyana Pavlova, historian. In his time-consuming publication “The Secret Tragedy: The Civilian Population in the Battle of Stalingrad”, he quotes the information of the city authorities, where 1816 corpses were buried by funeral teams from August 22 to 29, 1942 and 2698 wounded were picked up. But after a few pages in the same period from August 23 to 29, Pavlova considered that there was not enough blood on the streets of the city, and therefore she could not resist the temptation to punish the Stalingraders for 71,000 people (only killed and 142 wounded!) And after a couple of hundred pages even the Japanese remembered, "the total loss of the population of Stalingrad is 32.3% higher than the similar loss of the population of Hiroshima from the atomic bombing."

Vladimir Pavlov, St. Petersburg historian in the book “Stalingrad, Myths and Reality. A new look" proposes to declare August 23 "the day of national repentance of the communists in Russia" for the death of 500,000 citizens who fell in the Battle of Stalingrad. Moreover, he presented the forced eviction of the inhabitants of the city to Belaya Kalitva as a humane action of the German command.

Cool though!

All this is a fantasy of people, where each of them, spinning their own legend, frankly speculated, since none of them were in the city during the storming of Stalingrad.

Only the six-year-old Irochka Pomoshchnikova was in the northern town, which the Germans did not bomb on August 23rd.

Now the main thing. The bombing on August 23 is a prelude, these are flowers, and the berries ripened ahead. The brutal bombardment of the city began on the morning of 24 August and continued until 27 August. The peak of the blow is August 25th. In four days, the central districts of the city were burned, and the surviving population fled.

So, according to the testimony of ambitious dreamers, by the end of Sunday, the population of Stalingrad was finished. It was completely broken and crippled. Everything, to a single person! Soft-boiled eggs!

However, the realities of that ill-fated day tell a different story:

• the next morning in the Balkans (the central area of ​​the city) residents were given freshly baked bread. What is it, kalachi baked by the dead in the night?
• On the morning of August 24, as usual, the able-bodied population went to work. By tram, not by hearse! The tram went to the destroyed bridge of the Bannoy ravine at the Teschina stop (Vozrozhdeniye Square);
• the newspaper "Stalingradskaya Pravda" was published;
• the plumbing worked until August 25;
• firemen worked;
• ferry worked;
• there was an evacuation of hospitals, and these were 4,500 wounded soldiers, on the ships “Joseph Stalin”, “Memory of the Paris Commune” and “Mikhail Kalinin” that arrived in the city;
• hospitals operated on the outskirts of the city;
• anti-aircraft artillery of air defense worked;
• Soviet fighters constantly flew over the city;
• militias were being formed at the factories;
• The Stalingrad Committee of Defense, headed by the secretary of the regional committee, Chuyanov, worked without a break;

This is not a complete list of concerns that fell on the shoulders of the townspeople.

August 23rd is a shock that the population successfully coped with. But after the severe injuries received in the next four days, the city could no longer recover.

In the official report of the Stalingrad City Defense Committee No. 411-a dated August 27, 1942, in addition to a detailed list of damage inflicted by German aviation on the industrial and municipal services of Stalingrad, civilian casualties are indicated in all areas of the city that were bombed. Overall result: 1017 people were killed and 1281 people were injured. Naturally, this is not a complete list of victims. The casualty count continued. But this is not 40,000, not 70,000, not 200,000 or 500,000 people, wasted by today's irresponsible and ambitious people, who never existed in Stalingrad.

For the entire period of the Battle of Stalingrad, according to the reporting documents of the Stalingrad Party Archive, 42,754 residents of the city died from bombing and shelling. And according to the head of the region Chuyanov, the number of dead citizens is determined at 40,000 people.

The population of the city, caught on the anvil of battle, began to die like flies. People died in street battles, where the "fool-bullet" did not distinguish one from another. And dystrophy and typhus in the German "cauldron" - it's whipping bullets.

About death

And yet, why did people die?

From the bitter fate of my sixteen-year-old school and street classmates who lived in the Central District of the city:

• Yelivstratova Lyusya died together with her mother and two sisters from a German bomb on August 23, 1942;
• Tsygankov Misha was shot by the police along with his father for possession of a rifle;
• Vanin Petya was shot by a policeman for possession of a Komsomol ticket (policemen are former Soviet citizens, lackeys of the occupiers);
• Zavrazhin Vitya killed by a Soviet mine;
• Krasilnikov Sasha killed by a Soviet mine;
• Fefelova Ira is killed by a German bullet;
• Chernavin Leva went missing;
• Baryshev Igor burned;
• Mulyalin Vasya is wounded by a Soviet mine;
• Goncharov Vitya - a severe shrapnel wound to the head, lost an eye, a Soviet mine;
• Bernstein Misha - through a bullet wound in the chest by a German bullet;
• Kazimirova Lida - through a bullet wound in the neck by a Soviet bullet;
• my peer, whose name the memory has not preserved, was killed by an NKVD soldier for looting - he stole a pood of flour;
• four people managed to survive the entire Battle of Stalingrad in the center of the city without a single scratch.

It does not indicate those who died in the German cauldron from dystrophy. There are no witnesses. They all died of hunger at once. Whole families.

About the Germans in Stalingrad

The Germans are often presented in modern films as a kind of rascals, white and fluffy. This is because only five-year-olds are already testifying. One complains that the Germans stole a pot of baked milk from them. The other only remembered his own grandmother, who was baptized. The Germans entered - granny was baptized. Ours came - she was also baptized. On this, all their passions-muzzle dried up.

But in order to understand all the troubles that befell the population of the city in occupied Stalingrad, it is necessary to comprehend and link into one whole the main events that daily reduced the number of citizens. Rokossovskogo Street to No. 30. Here, during the occupation of the city, the German commandant's office was located - a punitive military organization. And opposite the commandant's office, in the former Iliodorov Monastery, the Germans set up a camp for imprisoned Soviet citizens.

And now about the "naughty" faces.

1. Major Helmut Speidel (died in the Beketovsky POW camp), the commandant of the occupied Stalingrad, marked the border of the forbidden zone from the hanged channels of railway bridges of the city's residents on Golubinskaya Street (tram viaduct near the prison, on Kubanskaya Street (viaduct near the Dynamo stadium), on Nevskaya Street, on pedestrian bridge across the railway.Hung from both sides of the bridge.
2. Chief corporal Helmut Jeschke, inspector of the commandant's office for civil affairs. Under his watchful eye was the population of the city. The Iliodorov Monastery, turned into a prison by the Germans, was reputed to be a place of an ominous plague of townspeople, from where every morning the policemen pulled out the corpses of people who had stiffened overnight and dumped them into an aviation funnel in the courtyard of the commandant's office.
3. Major Neibert, senior doctor of the commandant's office. In early December, after Neibert inspected the infirmary for captured wounded Soviet soldiers (located on Golubinskaya Street near the blood transfusion station), the wounded Red Army soldiers disappeared without a trace, and then a German hospital was housed in the vacated premises. Dr. Neubert was accompanied by German medical officials and a Russian woman who worked as a doctor in the infirmary.
4. Colonel Rudolf Kerpert (prisoned by a German tribunal), commandant of the infamous Dulag-205 Soviet POW camp in Alekseevka. In the German "cauldron", the food for the captured Red Army soldiers, driven to insanity by hunger, was comrades on the bunk, who lived yesterday.

War is not a pot of baked milk and sign of the cross old women. War is the ugliest form of human communication. The Germans for us have become worse than the plague, worse than cholera, worse than the Tatar yoke put together. You can forgive them with your mind, but not with your heart!

About 2000 aircraft

And lastly, this is about 2,000 bombers that bombed the city on August 23rd. Enemy aircraft took advantage of the corridor cut by German tankers from the Don to the Volga through Kotluban, Orlovka and the Tractor Plant, where the city's air defense was destroyed. Further, along the left bank of the Volga, the bombers entered the rear of the city with impunity, from where no one expected them. The anti-aircraft gunners were taken by surprise. They realized it when the first Heinkel squadron was already over the middle of the river. The sky literally boiled from explosions of anti-aircraft shells, but ... it was too late.

The bombers went in waves in squadrons with an interval between squadrons of the order of 15 minutes. The bombardment of the city began at 16:20 Moscow time and ended at sunset at 19:00, since planes do not fly in groups at night. At night, single planes were bombed with a large time interval.

Consequently, in two hours and forty minutes of daylight, with a fifteen-minute interval, only eleven groups - squadrons could pass. There are 9-12 aircraft in the squadron, multiplying, we get a real idea of ​​the number of enemy aircraft that took part in the bombing of the city on August 23. This is about 100 - 130 aircraft. So the exaggerated legend about two thousand bombers that attacked the city on August 23rd is a clear fantasy. The Germans did not have such a large number of bomber aircraft throughout Eastern Front. By the beginning of July 1942, that is, by the beginning of the attack on Stalingrad, the Germans had approximately 2,750 aircraft of all types. Of these, 775 bombers, 310 attack aircraft, 290 fighters, 765 reconnaissance aircraft, etc.

So, all the “eyewitnesses and witnesses” of the Battle of Stalingrad that I have mentioned, to whom we applaud on memorable dates, suffer from a common pathology - damage to the mind.

A requiem for Stalingrad is inappropriate. Let the Germans pray for themselves. We didn't invite them here. People. Know Stalingrad. Since there will soon be no one to remember Stalingrad.

Despite the obvious military superiority of the Germans, the Stalingraders desperately resisted the enemy, shooting down up to 120 fascist aircraft in the very first minutes of the attack, but when the city was enveloped in a veil of smoke, the situation changed fundamentally. The anti-aircraft artillery of the 1077th regiment lost the ability to accurately fire at enemy aircraft, and besides, it was faced with the task of holding back the onslaught of the German ground operation that was going along with the air strikes. The Wehrmacht armored vehicles approaching the city from the north, according to the plan of the Nazi commanders, were supposed to complete the work begun by the pilots and provide the Fuhrer with Stalingrad on a silver platter.

However, the Germans once again miscalculated, not taking into account the strong-willed nature of the Soviet people, who did not spare blood and life to protect their native land. By bombarding the city with propaganda leaflets calling for surrender and going under the progressive and invincible banner of the Fuhrer, the Germans planned to bring chaos to the ranks of a handful of resisters. However, civilians and militias, having turned the destroyed buildings into fortresses with firing points, did not respond to calls for betrayal and provided all possible assistance to the military, who were holding back the onslaught of the Wehrmacht.

On August 23, the Germans did not manage to carry out the “mini-blitzkrieg”, having smoked and bombed the city, they did not break through the defenses of Stalingrad, to the defense of which even those who had descended from the assembly line of the plant named after. Dzerzhinsky three tractors sheathed with armor.

For the obvious failure of the operation, General von Wittersheim, who commanded the 14th Panzer Corps of the Wehrmacht, was removed from his post, as he failed to take advantage of the monstrous head start given to him by the Luftwaffe pilots.

15:12 — REGNUM 75 years have passed since the tragic date of the barbaric bombardment of Stalingrad, and the memory of those terrible days is still alive in the hearts of the witnesses of these terrible events. Today, August 23, in Volgograd paid tribute to the victims of the massive attack of Nazi aircraft on the city on the Volga.

Stalingrad-battle.ru

Representatives laid flowers to the Eternal Flame on the Square of the Fallen Fighters public organizations, the administration of the Volgograd region and the city of Volgograd, the townspeople, many of whom had a chance to experience the horror of those terrible days. The children of military Stalingrad shared their memories, calling everyone to peace, so that no one would ever experience the horror of war. The ceremony participants honored the memory of the victims with a minute of silence.

Nikitenko Emilia © IA REGNUM

On the same day, a reburial ceremony for 1,002 defenders of the Fatherland was held at the Rossoshin Military Memorial Cemetery.

During prospecting work managed to establish the names of 30 fighters. Relatives of the Red Army soldier of the 35th Guards Rifle Division (8th Airborne Corps) Mikhail Makeev arrived in Rossoshki; corporal, squad leader of the 10th rifle division of the NKVD Nikolai Aristarkhov; Sergeant, wagon driver of the 258th Infantry Division Ilya Uryashev. The relatives were handed over the personal belongings of the defenders of Stalingrad found by the search engines.

Under farewell volleys, the remains of soldiers and officers who died during the Great Patriotic War on the territory of Volgograd and the Gorodishchensky district of the Volgograd region were interred. Since 1997, 19,387 fighters have found eternal peace at the Rossoshinsky Military Memorial Cemetery of Soviet soldiers who died near Stalingrad, 700 of them have been named. Previously, they were listed as missing, buried on the battlefield or in settlements (including Mamayev Kurgan) or were not listed at all in the Central Archive of the Russian Ministry of Defense.

August 23, 1942 was the most tragic day in the history of Stalingrad. On the morning of that day, the Germans, having broken through the defenses of the Soviet army, reached the Volga, finding themselves only three kilometers from the tractor plant.

At exactly 4:18 p.m., the whistling sounds of bombs falling from the sky tore through the air. A massive bombardment of the city began. In total, there was no end to air raids for two weeks. German bombers made up to two thousand sorties daily. From August 28 to September 14, 50 thousand bombs weighing from 50 to 1000 kilograms were dropped on Stalingrad. For every square kilometer of Stalingrad land, there were up to 5 thousand bombs and large-caliber fragments.

From the memoirs of the former instrument operator Raisa Galchenko: “ On August 23, we heard the rumble of engines from the direction of Gumrak. And soon they saw enemy planes. In just a few minutes, bombs began to explode not far from us. We were suffocating in the soot, but the fighters continued to shoot. No one went into hiding ... For us, days and nights merged into a continuous roar. All around the streets were on fire. The groans of the wounded were heard ...«

Stalingrad-battle.ru

A whole city on the Volga was practically wiped off the face of the earth. Not a single building remained in the center. 309 enterprises of the city turned into a pile of stones. At the plant "Red October" were put out of action 170 thousand square meters production areas, completely destroyed transport and crane facilities, mechanical and electrical equipment. From the summer of 1942 to the beginning of 1943, 8 thousand air bombs were dropped on the Stalingrad Tractor Plant. Only ruins remained of it.

Vasily Grossman. "For a Righteous Cause"

“Stalingrad has become a symbol of courage, steadfastness of the Russian people and, at the same time, a symbol of the greatest human suffering. This symbol will be preserved for centuries.” (British Prime Minister Winston Churchill)

On August 23, 1942, 75 years ago, Stalingrad was subjected to a barbaric bombardment. The capture of Stalingrad for Hitler meant not only the achievement of important strategic results, the disruption of communication between north and south, the disruption of communication between the central regions of Russia and the Caucasus.
The capture of Stalingrad not only determined the possibility of a broad invasion to the northeast, in a deep bypass of Moscow, and to the south, to achieve the final goals of the Third Empire's geo-expansion. The capture of Stalingrad was a foreign policy task - its solution could determine important changes and the position of Japan and Turkey.
The capture of Stalingrad was an internal political task - its fall would strengthen Hitler's position inside Germany, would be a real sign of the final victory promised to the German people in June 1941.
The fall of Stalingrad would be the atonement for the failed blitzkrieg, which, according to the Fuhrer's promise, was to end eight weeks after the start of the invasion of Russia. The fall of Stalingrad would justify the defeats near Moscow, Rostov, Tikhvin and the terrible winter sacrifices that shocked the German people.
The fall of Stalingrad would have strengthened the power of Germany over its satellites, would have paralyzed the voices of disbelief and criticism.
Hitler's demand: "Stalingrad muss fallen!" ("Stalingrad must be destroyed!") was born from other reasons, more weighty than the reality of the battlefields. So he wanted!

Hitler raised a bloody ax over Stalingrad. The first planes appeared at about four o'clock in the afternoon. From the east, from the Trans-Volga region, six bombers were approaching the city at high altitude. As soon as the German cars, having passed over the Burkovsky farm, began to approach the Volga, a whistle was heard and explosions immediately rumbled - smoke and chalk dust rose over the buildings hit by bombs. The planes were clearly visible in the transparent air. The sun was shining, thousands of window panes sparkled in its rays, and people, raising their heads, watched how quickly the German planes left to the west.
A young voice shouted loudly:
- These are crazy, some broke through, you see, they don’t even announce alarms.
And immediately sirens, steamboat and factory whistles wailed with depressing force. This cry, prophesying misfortune and death, hung over the city, it seemed to convey the longing that gripped the population. It was the voice of the entire city—not just the people, but all the buildings, the machines, the stone, the poles, the grass and trees in the parks, the wires, the tram rails—a cry of the living and inanimate, seized with a premonition of destruction. The rusty iron throat alone could give rise to this sound, equally expressing the horror of the bird and the anguish of the human heart. And then silence came - the last silence of Stalingrad.
The planes came from the east, from the Volga region, from the south, from the side of Sarepta and Beketovka, from the west, from Kalach and Karpovka, from the north, from Erzovka and the Market - their black bodies moved easily. Among the cirrus clouds in the blue sky, and like hundreds poisonous insects, escaping from secret nests, they strove for the desired victim. The sun, in its divine ignorance, touched the wings of the creatures with its rays, and they gleamed with milky whiteness - and there was something languishing, blasphemous in this resemblance of the Junkers wings to white moths.
The hum of the engines grew stronger, thicker, thicker. All the sounds of the city faded, compressed, and only thickened, poured, darkened the buzzing sound, conveying in its slow monotony the frenzied power of the motors. The sky was covered with sparks of anti-aircraft explosions, gray heads of smoky dandelions, and angry flying insects quickly glided among them .... The Germans walked several floors, occupying the entire blue volume of the summer sky ...
Having met over Stalingrad, the planes that came from the east and west, from the north and south, began to descend, and it seemed that they were descending because the summer sky sagged, sagged from the weight of metal and explosives reaching to the ground. So the skies sag under heavy clouds full of dark rain.
And a new, third sound arose over the city - the boring whistle of tens and hundreds of high-explosive bombs that had come off the planes, the screech of thousands and tens of thousands of incendiary bombs that rushed from open cassettes. This sound, which lasted three or four seconds, permeated all living things, and the hearts sank in anguish, the hearts of those who were destined to die in a moment with this anguish, and the hearts of those who remained alive. The whistle got louder and louder.
Everyone heard it! And the women running down the street from the melted lines to their homes, where their children were waiting for them. And those who managed to hide in deep cellars, separated from the sky by thick stone ceilings. And those who fell on the asphalt among the squares and streets. And those who jumped into the gaps in the gardens and pressed their heads to the dry earth. And the wounded, lying at that moment on the operating tables, and the babies who demanded their mother's milk. The bombs reached the ground and crashed into the city.
Houses died just as people die. Some, thin, tall, fell sideways, killed on the spot, others, squat, stood trembling and staggering, with their chests torn open, suddenly revealing what was always hidden: portraits on the walls, sideboards, night tables, double beds, jars of millet, unpeeled potatoes on table covered with oilcloth smeared with ink. bent naked water pipes, iron beams in interfloor ceilings, strands of wires. Red bricks, smoking with dust, piled up on the pavements. Thousand houses went blind and window panes they paved the sidewalks with small, shiny scales of fragments.
Under the blows of the blast waves, massive tram wires fell to the ground with a clang and screech, the mirror glass of the shop windows flowed out of the frames, as if turned into liquid. Tram rails, hunched over, crawled out of the asphalt. And by the whim of the blast wave, a plywood blue kiosk stood unbreakable, where they sold soda water, a tin arrow-pointer “cross here” hung, a fragile booth of a pay phone gleamed with glass.
Everything that has been immovable from time immovable - stones and iron - has been moving rapidly, and everything into which man has invested the idea and forces of movement - trams, cars, buses, steam locomotives - all this has stopped. Lime and brick dust rose thickly in the air, fog rose over the city, crawled down the Volga.
The flames of fires caused by tens of thousands of incendiary bombs began to flare up ... In the smoke, dust, fire, among the roar that shook the sky, water and earth, a huge city perished. This picture was terrible, and yet more terrible was the look of a six-year-old man, fading in death, crushed by an iron beam. There is a force that can raise huge cities from the dust, but there is no force in the world that could lift light eyelashes above the eyes of a dead child.
Only those who were on the left bank of the Volga, ten to fifteen kilometers from Stalingrad, in the area of ​​​​the Burkovsky farm, Verkhnyaya Akhtuba, Yam, Tumak and Gypsy Dawn, could see the whole picture of the fire as a whole, measure the enormity of the misfortune that befell the city.
Hundreds of bomb explosions merged into a monotonous rumble, and the cast-iron heaviness of this rumble made the earth tremble in the Trans-Volga region, the glass wooden houses rang, and the leaves on the oaks stirred. The lime fog that rose over the city covered the tall buildings and the Volga with a white sheet, stretched for tens of kilometers, crawled towards Stalgres, the shipyard, Beketovka and Krasnoarmeysk. Gradually, the whiteness of the fog disappeared, mixing with the yellow-gray smoky haze of the fires.
From a distance it was clearly visible how the fire burning above one building was united with the neighboring fire, how entire streets were burning, and how in the end the fire of the burning streets merged into one wall, living and moving. In some places, above this wall, which rose above the right bank of the Volga, tall pillars rose like towers, domes and fiery bell towers swelled. They sparkled with red pure gold, smoky copper, as if new town flame rose over Stalingrad.
The Volga smoked along the coast. Black sooty smoke and flames slid over the water—it was burning fuel flowing onto the water from broken tanks. And the smoke rose for many miles in a cloud. This cloud grew and, washed out by the steppe winds, began to spread across the sky, and many weeks later smoke hung over dozens of steppe versts around Stalingrad, and the swollen, bloodless sun went its own way in the white haze.
At dusk, the flames of the burning city were seen by women walking from the south to Raygorod with sacks of grain, and ferrymen at the crossing in Svetly Yar. The reflections of the fire were noticed by the old Kazakhs, who were riding carts to Elton; their camels, sticking out their drooling lips and stretching out their dirty swan necks, looked back to the east. Fishermen in Dubovka and Gornaya Proleyka saw the light from the north. From the west, officers from the headquarters of Colonel General Paulus, who had come to the bank of the Don, watched the fire. They smoked and silently looked at the bright spot that shimmered round in the dark sky.
Many people saw the glow in the night. What did it broadcast, whose death, whose triumph?

The force of the disaster was enormous, and all living things, as happens during forest and steppe fires, earthquakes, mountain landslides and floods, sought to leave the dying city. Birds were the first to leave Stalingrad - jackdaws flew in all directions, clinging low to the water, to the left bank of the Volga; overtaking them, sparrows flew in grey, now elastically stretching, now contracting flocks.
Big rats, which must have been in secret deep holes for years, having felt the heat of fire and vibrations of the soil, crawled out of the cellars of food warehouses and grain barns near the station, rushed about in confusion for several moments, blinded and deafened, and, driven by instinct, dragging their tails and fat gray backsides, crawled to the water, climbed on boards and ropes onto barges and half-flooded steamers standing near the shore.
Dogs with crazy, murky eyes jumped out of the smoke and dust, rolled down the slope and rushed into the water, swam towards Krasnaya Sloboda and Tumak.
But white and gray doves, with a force even more powerful than the instinct of self-preservation, chained to their homes, circled over the burning houses and, caught by a current of hot air, perished in smoke and flame.
The woman, raising her hands to the cruel, roaring sky, shouted:
What are you doing, villains, what are you doing?
Human suffering! Will future ages remember him? It will not remain, as will the stones of huge houses and the glory of warriors; it is tears and whispers, the last breaths and rales of the dying, the cry of despair and pain - everything will disappear along with the smoke and dust that the wind carried over the steppe.

At eight o'clock in the evening, the commander of the Fourth Air Fleet, Manfred von Richthofen, took to the air in a twin-engine military aircraft to assess what had been done.
From a height of four and a half thousand meters, a picture of a huge catastrophe illuminated by the setting sun was visible. The hot air lifted white smoke cleared of soot; this height-bleached smoke spread like a wavy veil above, it was difficult to distinguish it from light clouds;
It seemed that the largest Himalayan mountain, Gaurizankar, slowly and heavily rose from the womb of the earth, sticking out millions of pounds of red-hot, dense piebald and red ores. Every now and then a hot, copper flame broke through from the depths of the colossal cauldron, shooting sparks thousands of meters away, and it seemed as if a cosmic catastrophe appeared to the eyes.
Occasionally, the ground became visible, throwing small black mosquitoes, but the dense smoke instantly swallowed up this view. The Volga and the steppe were shrouded in a hazy fog, and the river and the earth in the fog seemed gray, wintery. Far to the east lay the flat steppes of Kazakhstan. A gigantic fire burned almost at the very border of these steppes.
The commander said abruptly:
- .... They will see on Mars ... Beelzebub's work ...
The fascist general, with his stony, slavish heart, at that moment felt the power of the man who led him to this terrible height, gave into his hands a torch with which German aviation lit a fire at the last frontier between East and West, showed the way for tanks and infantry to the Volga and huge Stalingrad factories.
These minutes and hours seemed to be the highest triumph of the inexorable "total" idea, the idea of ​​the violence of motors and trinitrotoluene against the women and children of Stalingrad. It seemed to the Nazi pilots, soaring over the Stalingrad cauldron of smoke and flame, that these minutes and these hours marked the triumph of German violence against the world promised by Hitler.
Forever defeated seemed to them those who, choking in smoke, in basements, pits, shelters, among the red-hot ruins, turned to dust dwellings, listened with horror to the triumphant and ominous hum of the bombers that reigned over Stalingrad.
But no! In the fateful hours of the death of a huge city, something truly great happened - in the blood and in the red-hot stone fog, not the slavery of Russia, not its death was born; in the midst of hot ashes and smoke, the strength of the Soviet man, his love, fidelity to freedom, lived indestructibly and stubbornly fought his way out, and it was this indestructible strength that triumphed over the terrible but futile violence of the enslavers.

MOSCOW, August 23 - RIA Novosti, Andrey Kots. Exactly 75 years ago, on August 23, 1942, Stalingrad was subjected to the first massive air bombardment, which literally mixed it with the ground. The fourth air fleet of the Luftwaffe hit the city with all its might and in half a day destroyed more than half of the housing stock. After heavy high-explosive bombs that demolished the frames of houses to the ground, incendiary ammunition went into action, causing numerous fires. A huge fiery whirlwind devastated the central regions and spread to the outskirts. Stalingrad, which flourished before the war, became like a plowed field with skeletons of buildings and chimneys. More than 40 thousand people died ... It seemed that the city drowned in fire and smoke would no longer be able to resist. But the bombing of August 23 was only the beginning of the heroic defense of Stalingrad by the Soviet troops, which lasted more than six months. About what preceded the air raid and why the city was still not given to the Germans - in the material of RIA Novosti.

fiery hell

By the beginning of the bombing, out of 400 thousand inhabitants of the city, about 100 thousand were evacuated. Most of the remaining adults and children were involved in fortification work - erected barricades, dug trenches and anti-tank ditches, masked strategically important objects. The preparation of Stalingrad for a long siege was in a hurry - the Wehrmacht was already close. At 4 p.m. on August 23, the shock grouping of the 6th German Army broke through to the Volga near the northern outskirts of Stalingrad, in the area of ​​​​the villages of Latoshinka, Akatovka, Rynok. The Soviet anti-aircraft batteries of the 1077th regiment were the first to attack the armored vehicles of the 14th tank corps. A fierce battle ensued.

And already a couple of hours later, the deep rumble of hundreds of bombers was heard over the city. Heinkels and Junkers with crosses on their wings went to Stalingrad wave after wave, 30-40 cars at a time. The first bombs fell on the city around six o'clock in the evening. According to eyewitnesses, the ground literally shook. Powerful explosions were heard at intervals of 10-30 seconds, and the roar was such that nothing else could be heard behind it.

“What appeared before us on August 23 in Stalingrad struck me as a severe nightmare,” Marshal of the Soviet Union Andrei Ivanovich Eremenko wrote in his memoirs after the war. to the sky in the area of ​​oil storage facilities. Streams of burning oil and gasoline rushed to the Volga. The river was burning, steamships were burning in the Stalingrad roadstead. The asphalt of streets and squares stankly smoked. Telegraph poles flared up like matches. There was an unimaginable noise that tore the ear with its hellish music. the height of the bombs was mixed with the rumble of explosions, the rattle and clang of collapsing buildings, the crackle of raging fire. The dying people groaned, women and children wept angrily and cried out for help. "

In just a day, the enemy made up to two thousand sorties. Nearly 1,000 aircraft took part in the attack. various types. They bombed in a continuous carpet, without choosing individual targets. The Luftwaffe pilots had one task - to wipe the city off the face of the earth. Needless to say, they were more than successful. By the end of the day, the main part of Stalingrad lay in ruins. Only on August 23, according to historians, from 40 to 90 thousand people died. About 50 thousand were injured. 309 city enterprises were destroyed. Factories "Red October", STZ, "Barricades" lost most of the workshops and equipment. Transport infrastructure and communications have been destroyed. The situation in the city was aggravated by the fact that it was almost impossible to put out the raging fires - the water supply system was disabled by bombs. It was impossible to pump water from the Volga either - spilled oil products were burning on its surface.

Terror strategy

Of course, Stalingrad resisted the air raid. On August 23, 1942, Soviet aviation and anti-aircraft artillery destroyed from 90 to 120 German aircraft. However, soon after the start of the bombing, the city was covered with a continuous smoke screen - it was very difficult to hit accurately from the ground in such conditions. The situation was also complicated by the fact that anti-aircraft gunners and anti-aircraft gunners of the 1077th regiment were forbidden to shoot at aircraft. Part continued to hold back the offensive German tanks on the northern outskirts of the city, heavy anti-aircraft guns, in the face of a shortage of anti-tank weapons, hit the enemy’s armored vehicles with direct fire from their 37 guns.

There is a known case when two tanks and three tractors, sheathed with armored steel, came to their aid from the tractor factory, with the support of a battalion of workers with three-rulers. There were no other troops in Stalingrad: units and formations of the 62nd Army continued to hold back the enemy several tens of kilometers from the city on the left bank of the Don. A handful of defenders managed to hold back the onslaught of the enemy - the Germans failed on August 23 and in the following days to break through the northern line of defense of the city. The commander of the 14th tank corps of the Wehrmacht, General von Wittersheim, was removed from command for the failure of the offensive.

© Photo courtesy of AST publishing houseLiberation of Stalingrad. Fighting on the streets of the city. Illustration from the book "The Immortal Regiment"

© Photo courtesy of AST publishing house

Thus, the main goal of the bombing - to suppress the resistance of the Soviet troops defending the city, and the subsequent assault on Stalingrad by ground units - the Germans failed to achieve on August 23. According to a number of military historians, the Wehrmacht could not take advantage of the results of the Luftwaffe. As a result, the bombing did not look like a military operation, but rather an act of terrorism. In the same way, one can also characterize how fiercely the Germans bombed transport with civilians evacuated from the city.

“The crossing of people to the left bank of the Volga was carried out by the ships of the Stalingrad River Fleet and the Volga Military Flotilla. On August 23-24, after all the berths were destroyed by air strikes, the Stalingrad rivermen organized the crossing by boats and longboats,” wrote in his book “Stalingrad. There is no land for us beyond the Volga, "military historian Alexei Isaev. - This stage of the evacuation took place under air strikes and even enemy artillery fire. The Borodino sanitary steamer with 700 wounded was shot at direct fire in the Market area and sank, only about 300 were saved people. The same fate befell the steamer "Joseph Stalin" with the evacuated residents. Of the 1,200 people on the ship, only about 150 people were saved by swimming."

Nevertheless, having withstood the first and most terrible air strike, the defenders of Stalingrad managed to prepare for defense. Reinforcements were able to break through to them, and the militias and civilians turned the ruins of their houses into a network of fortresses and firing points. And when the Germans broke into the city for the first time on September 14, 1942, a warm welcome awaited them. The seriously wounded Stalingrad took revenge on its offenders for a long time and consistently until February 2, 1943, going down in history as a symbol of the heroic resistance of the Soviet people and the grave for almost a million German soldiers. The phrase written in the diary of one of them became known to the whole world: “We have to go to the Volga only one more kilometer, but we can’t do it in any way. We are waging war for this kilometer longer than for all of France, but the Russians are standing, like rocks..."