Episode 16 - Sergeant Pavlov, Railway Crows and the Sixth Army targets the Red October plant

The Battle of Stalingrad

This is episode 16 which deals with the fighting in the city in the last week of September and first week of October 1942. Remember last episode we covered the ongoing battles around the Nail Factory, Mamaev Hill and the Grain elevator. The 62nd Army had experienced panic in the last week of September as the German divisions pushed hard against the Volga River bank, cutting off parts of the army. But reinforcements from Siberia had been rushed across the Volga River into Stalingrad and arrived in the nick of time, bolstering the defenders. Another famous soldier had also arrived in the city in mid-September, and that was Sergeant Jacob Pavlov. He’d jumped off the lorry which had brought him and his companions to within six miles of Stalingrad on the East Bank of the Volga. Sergeant Pavlov was part of the unit reinforing Major-General Alexander Rodimtsev’s much depleted 13th Guards Division which was concentrated around the Lazur Chemical Factory – an area known as the ‘tennis racket’ due to a rail track that ran around the area which was shaped exactly like a tennis racket. Pavlov was a short broad-shouldered man with penetrating grey eyes that surprised journalists who interviewed him after the war as they exuded warmth, rather than the thousand yard stare usually associated with veterans. He became known as the House Owner and ended the war with the Golden Star of the Hero of the Soviet Union. That’s double ironic because Pavlov never owned property his entire life. But he was a hero. The clue to his remarkable story is why he was dubbed with this nickname – and indeed his story stands out in the annals of all those told about Stalingrad. Pavlov was born in a village not far from the source of the Volga River far to the north in the province of Leningrad. He’d faced Hitler’s forces in Poland in the early days of Operation Barbarossa – particularly those of Field Marshal von Bocks’ central group. Since June 1941 he’d experienced nothing but fighting retreats. Now he was facing Hitler’s Nazi war machine at a place marking their most eastern advance which was a further irony considering what he was going to do. There would be no more retreating for Sergeant Pavlov. I’ll come back to his story through this series.

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