Memories of the Eastern Front: War on the Rocks: The Motherland Calls: The Battle of Stalingrad, 75 Years Later: "In September, Stalin sent General Vasily Chuikov to take command of the embattled survivors of the 62nd Army...
...tenaciously clinging to rubble on the west bank of the Volga, with only a few hundred meters between its front lines and the river to its back. Chuikov recalled the grim moment:
When I got to army headquarters I was in a vile mood. Three of my deputies had fled.... But the main thing was that we had no dependable combat units, and we needed to hold out for three or four days.... We immediately began to take the harshest possible actions against cowardice. On the 14th I shot the commander and commissar of one regiment, and a short while later, I shot two brigade commanders and their commissars. This caught everyone off guard. We made sure news of this got to the men...
Despite his brutality, Chuikov earned the respect of his soldiers, taking the same risks they did. He was buried alive several times by German bombardments and kept his headquarters in the city, less than 200 meters from the German front line. In the face of ferocious Soviet resistance, the Germans poured more and more men into the battle at Hitler’s command. By November, the German High Command had committed 1.2 million men, or about half of its strength facing the Red Army, to the southern front...
