13th Guards Rifle Division

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13th Guards Rifle Division

active
Country Soviet UnionSoviet Union Soviet Union
Armed forces Soviet UnionSoviet Union Red Army
Armed forces Land Forces
Type division

The 13th Guards Rifle Division (13 GSD, in Russian 13-я гвардейская стрелковая дивизия, 13-ja gwardeiskaja strelkowaja diwisija ) was a Soviet elite Infantry Division of the 62nd Army and was its commander Colonel General Alexander Rodimtsev in the Battle of Stalingrad known.

units

  • 42nd Guards Rifle Regiment
  • 39th Guards Rifle Regiment
  • 34th Guards Rifle Regiment
  • 32nd Guards Artillery Regiment
  • 4th Guard Anti-Tank Battalion
  • 8th Guards Pioneer Battalion
  • 14th Reconnaissance Company
  • 139. News Section
  • 12th Company "Chemical Warfare"
  • 11th Transport Company
  • 17. Field bakery
  • 15th Medical Battalion
  • 2. Veterinary hospital

history

The 13th GSD was set up on January 19, 1942 in the military district of Kiev ( Ukrainian Soviet Republic ). It was created by renaming the 87th Rifle Division, which was given Guard status at this time . In May 1942, the division was used in the Battle of Kharkov in the northern section of the offensive and suffered heavy losses. After the battle it was released from the front and re-equipped and reinforced. Many of the reinforcements were officer students with no previous combat experience. The division was in the midst of reinforcement and reorganization when it was ordered directly to the Stalingrad Front. It was thanks to this circumstance that around 1000 soldiers were still unarmed.

Use in Stalingrad

On September 14, 1942, after the LI. Army Corps of the Wehrmacht had started its major attack on the center of Stalingrad and the remaining NKVD units had already been pushed back to the Volga, Stalin ordered the deployment of this elite unit. In order to hold the inner city of Stalingrad at all costs, the 13th Guards Rifle Division was assigned to intervene directly in the fighting.

The order of action of the 13th GSD in Stalingrad consisted of the 42nd GSR (Colonel IP Jelin), the 34th GSR (Lieutenant Colonel DI Panichin) and on September 16, 1942 the 39th GSR (Major SS Dolgow) arrived on the eastern part of the Volga. The combat mission was that the GSR 42 and 34 clean the center and the main train station from the infiltrating enemy and the later arriving GSR 39 should recapture the Mamayev Hill . All combat units operating in the center of Stalingrad were subordinated to the division commander Rodimtzew. The 13th Guards Rifle Division played the decisive role in the defense of the Stalingrad town center. On the western Volgaufer there was a real landing operation, while on the Volgaufer firefights developed to secure the deployment area at the bridgehead for the advancing units. The fighting style of the guardsmen was very similar to that of the paratroopers , fighting was mainly in smaller units. Rodimtzew benefited from his street fighting experience from the Spanish Civil War .

The Battle of Stalingrad was the third encounter between the 13th Guards Rifle Division and the German 71st Infantry Division , which faced bitter battles in 1941 in Kiev and 1942 in Kharkov. On the night of September 15, 1942, the first units of the 42nd Guards Rifle Regiment were shipped across the Volga and embroiled in bitter infantry battles on the Volga. A large part of the 13th GSD was destroyed in low-level aircraft attacks by Stukas and artillery fire while crossing the Volga . The 42nd Guards Rifle Regiment was followed by the 39th Guards Rifle Regiment, which also intervened directly in the fighting.

It is reported that the 13th GSD already suffered very heavy losses in this phase, in the further battles the division lost a total of over 75 percent of its team strength (some historians even speak of a death rate of 97%). Rodimzew issued the following famous slogan for his division: “For us there is no land behind the Volga.” 10% of the soldiers were unarmed due to poor supplies and were sent straight to their deaths.

The fights of the 42nd Guards Rifle Regiment in the center of Stalingrad in the Grudinin mill, the nail factory and around the main train station are heavily heroized in Russian military literature. The fact is that it is thanks to the deployment of the 13th GSD that the major attack by the Wehrmacht was stopped in the city center and turned into the urban warfare of the so-called "rat war".

Lieutenant Anton Kuzmich Dragan received the order to recapture the main train station from room to room with a 50-man infantry platoon. In the area of ​​the main station and the nail factory, close combat battles of unprecedented severity took place over several days. The fighting was mainly with hand grenades around wall breakthroughs, attic floors and in the sewer system. The guardsmen broke through the inner walls, crawled across the attic to start fire attacks behind the German soldiers, hid under the floorboards, tactically withdrew from parts of the main train station and the nail factory, only to reappear in a raid at another location. Fire fights developed mainly in the corridors, with the individual rooms being cleaned with hand grenades. A memorial stone commemorates the 13th Guards Rifle Division in today's Volgograd: " Rodimtzev's guardsmen held out here to the last man ."

Tschuikow describes the retreat battles of the enclosed 1st Battalion / 42. GSR under Lieutenant Colonel FG Fedosejew on the way from the main train station to the nail factory, Uniwermag department store to the enclosed house on the corner of Krasnopiterskaya and Komsomolskaya Street, which ends with the complete annihilation of the Dragan group.

The great tension of the house-to-house fighting was expressed in the following quotes from the battle participants:

“ Indoor night fights are the most difficult form of combat. Terms such as vanguard, rearguard or flank are not applicable here. The enemy can be anywhere: on the floor above you, below you and around you. You hear something. Who breathes in the dark? Who is this? Friend? Enemy? How can you tell To ask him? What if he replies with a gun salvo? You have to decide, and quickly. Maybe you only have a moment for this, maybe only a split second separates you from a softly thrown grenade or a knife. "

- Alexander Rodimtzew, commander of the 13th Guards Rifle Division, on the fighting at Stalingrad Central Station

“It took us all day to clear a street from one end to the other and to set up barriers and rifle positions at the western end so that we could get another slice of the salami the next day. But at dawn the Russians fired from their old positions! It was a long time before we got behind her trick; they had punched holes in the attic chambers; at night they ran back over the rafters like rats and set up their machine guns by the window or behind a fireplace. "

- Soldier of the 71st Infantry Division on the fighting in Central Stalingrad

" At the moment the attackers are trying to drive armored wedges into the city at eight different positions, and these have become, as the Stalingrad High Command says; "Like a dead hand with spread fingers" felt. [] What is most appalling is that with the summer heat that has returned, the processes of decomposition are proceeding quickly and that both sides have no break in the fighting during which they can bury the fallen. Although attempts are being made to remedy the situation by sprinkling chlorine, this is not enough to curb the risk of epidemics. "

- Sovinformburo Советское информационное бюро, Совинформбюро (Sowetskoje informazionnoje bjuro, Sowinformbjuro) on September 22, 1942

“ It was a terrible sight in the reoccupied houses. Rooms, corridors, stairwells and courtyards were full of corpses. Many buildings were only recaptured after horrific hand-to-hand fighting, in which soldiers attacked each other with bayonets and rifle butts. Such battles often continued for long periods across the streets and squares of the city. From the hills overlooking Stalingrad you can see that larger parts of the city are shrouded in smoke. The fires in the contested streets cannot be extinguished. "

- Pravda Правда newspaper on September 22, 1942

“ It has happened that sections of our troops that were already completely enclosed were supplied through four or five houses, or that ceilings were breached in order to be able to fight German submachine gun shooters who had penetrated the lower floors from inside the houses. A concrete building containing hundreds of small apartments was fought over for four days, and now - after the northwest part of the city has been cleared again - the terrible marks of hand-to-hand combat can be seen in the stairwells, in the corridors, in rooms and basements. The facade of the huge building shows that light guns must have fired at close range. "

- Soviet information office Советское информационное бюро, Совинформбюро (Soviet informazionnoye bjuro, Sowinformbjuro) on September 23, 1942

Soldiers of an infantry platoon of the 39th Guards Rifle Regiment occupied Pavlov's house on January 9th and resisted the attacking German soldiers for over 50 days. Other combat troops of the 13th GSD conquered in mid-September 1942, melee against the 295th Infantry Division the Mamayev Hill back.

It was reported that the hand-to-hand fighting around Mamai Hill was so intense that it was impossible to bury neither Russian nor German soldiers during the artillery fire.

At the end of the Battle of Stalingrad , only 320 out of 10,000 men survived the fighting. Presumably 3,000 guardsmen died within the first 24 hours after arriving in Stalingrad due to the extreme hardship of the hand-to-hand fighting.

Stalin praised the 13th GSD for their great commitment in the battle for Stalingrad by awarding every single soldier in this unit the quality of a sniper .

Further use

After the battle for Stalingrad, the 13th GSD was almost completely reorganized and reinforced with fresh forces. In 1943 she took part in Operation Polkovodets Rumyantsev , a strategic offensive between Belgorod and Kharkov , on the Voronezh Front as part of the 5th Army .

In the final offensive on the German Reich , the 13th GSD formed part of the 1st Ukrainian Front . After the end of the war, the division was reorganized as the 13th Mechanized Guard Division and dissolved in the 1950s. The traditions of the 13th GSD lived on in the 13th Guards Panzer Division in the Great Association of the Southern Soviet Forces, which was disbanded in the 1980s.

Trivia

In the computer game Call of Duty and Call of Duty 2 , the operations of the 13th GSD around the Red Square, the main train station and the Pavlov House are modeled.

In the computer game Company of Heroes 2 , a fight is fought from the landing head to the main station of Stalingrad with the indication of the 13th GSD.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Nikolai Krylow: Stalingrad . The decisive battle of World War II. Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, Cologne 1981, ISBN 3-7609-0624-9 , pp. 143 .
  2. ↑ a b Nikolai Krylow: Stalingrad . The decisive battle of World War II. Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, Cologne 1981, ISBN 3-7609-0624-9 , pp. 153 .
  3. ↑ a b Nikolai Krylow: Stalingrad . The decisive battle of World War II. Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, Cologne 1981, ISBN 3-7609-0624-9 , pp. 160 .
  4. ↑ Nikolai Krylow: Stalingrad . The decisive battle of World War II. Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, Cologne 1981, ISBN 3-7609-0624-9 , pp. 154 .
  5. ↑ a b Nikolai Krylow: Stalingrad . The decisive battle of World War II. Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, Cologne 1981, ISBN 3-7609-0624-9 , pp. 157 .
  6. ↑ Will Fowler: Battle for Stalingrad. The conquest of the city - October 1942, Vienna 2006, p. 51
  7. ↑ later this quote was ascribed to the sniper Saizew in Nikolai Krylow Stalingrad - The decisive battle of the Second World War, Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, Cologne 1981, p. 174, ISBN 3-7609-0624-9
  8. ↑ Dragan and his soldiers proceeded to frustrate the Germans in an epic room-by-room struggle for control of the depot for nearly three weeks in http://sites.google.com/site/gophermunitionsworks/13th-guards-rifles-division -rkka
  9. ↑ Will Fowler: Battle for Stalingrad. The conquest of the city - October 1942, Vienna 2006, p. 52
  10. ↑ Nikolai Krylow: Stalingrad . The decisive battle of World War II. Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, Cologne 1981, ISBN 3-7609-0624-9 , pp. 167 .
  11. ↑ Will Fowler: Battle for Stalingrad. The conquest of the city - October 1942, Vienna 2006, p. 52
  12. ↑ Will Fowler: Battle for Stalingrad. The conquest of the city - October 1942, Vienna 2006, p. 54
  13. ^ Janusz Piekałkiewicz: Stalingrad. Anatomy of a battle. Heyne, Munich 1993, p. 203
  14. ^ Janusz Piekałkiewicz : Stalingrad. Anatomy of a battle. Heyne, Munich 1993, p. 204
  15. ^ Janusz Piekałkiewicz: Stalingrad. Anatomy of a battle. Heyne, Munich 1993, p. 207

literature

  • Guido Knopp: Stalingrad - Das Drama , Bertelsmann Verlag, 2002
  • Antony Beevor: Stalingrad , Orbis Verlag, 2002
  • Nikolai Krylow: Stalingrad, The decisive battle of the Second World War , Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, Cologne 1981, ISBN 3-7609-0624-9