This year, 1942, the Germans were concentrating their attack in the south-eastern direction. In January 1941 the German armies were advancing along the entire front stretching from sea to sea. In this war the whole crushing weight of the German invasion had fallen on Russia. The First World War was a terrible ordeal for Russia, but then the fiendish foe had had to divide his forces between the Eastern and the Western fronts. The Division was to make a stand and fight to the death. Yes, behind was the dark, icy-cold Volga, behind was the fate of Russia. The officers and men of the regiment called it the Ravine of Death. Sergeyenko's regiment was defending the deep ravine which ran down to the Volga through the Barricades Garden City. One of the command posts was set up in a concrete-lined canal that passed beneath the main workshops. The Barricades Plant was to be defended by Markelov's and Mikhalyev's regiments. Behind was the cold, dark Volga.ĭuring the night the sappers broke up the asphalt and dug trenches with picks in the hard, stony ground, cut firing-holes in the strong walls of the workshops, and made shelters in the cellars of the ruined buildings. The Division was to take up positions in front of the plant and stand to the death.

The asphalted yard was pock-marked with bomb craters and scattered everywhere were steel splinters torn off by explosions, like thin shreds of material. A factory always looks rather stark and gloomy, but one could surely find no scene in the world more gloomy than the one these men saw on that October morning in 1942: the dark mass of the workshops, the wet, gleaming rails, already rusted here and there, the wrecked goods wagons, the piles of steel tubes scattered around the vast yard, as large as a city square, the brown slag heaps and mounds of coal, the great factory pipes, damaged in many places by enemy shells. In the night, Colonel Gurtiev's Siberian troops took up defensive positions. In the Main Line of Attack describes life and death in a division of Siberian troops who had to bear the brunt of the most frenzied period of Nazi attacks on Stalingrad, withstanding 80 straight hours of bombardment, and more. But in 1942, his views were less ambiguous, celebrating the unquestionable courage of Soviet troops and highlighting the horrors of this hideous war.

Years later, in his novels For A Just Cause and Life and Fate, Grossman would present a somewhat controversial view of that battle. As such, he was an eye-witness to and participant in the historic Battle of Stalingrad. 'In the Main Line of Attack by Vasili Grossman - from ĭuring the Great Patriotic War, Vasili Grossman was a correspondent for the army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda.

Life and destiny grossman