Methodically I stepped along the water line trying to keep my boots dry, while stooped over looking for something, anything, that might be metallic and "connect" me with this place and history. Connections must be found - they cannot be purchased in a gift shop. The Volga was calm, dappled by sunlight and flowing with power south. A hundred yards off shore a reddish hydrofoil
sliced a course north.
Ahead was a quarter mile of uninterrupted shoreline. To the right the river stretched away a mile or so to the eastern shore. On my left the bank rose up and away over two hundred feet. On top was a squat, granite platform supporting the turret of a Russian T-34 tank. A four inch hole in the turret created by an armor piercing projectile killed the crew. The tank's 76.2 mm gun slightly elevated, was pointed west and even in death seemed to be acquiring targets. A series of similar tank memorials are spaced along the west shore of the Volga and indicate the "high water mark" of the German assault on Stalingrad. For five months, one week and three days - August 1942 to February 1943 - the battle raged. The city was reduced to gutted structures and rubble. Amid winter temperatures of -20 to -30 degrees (F) surviving inhabitants had neither heat nor light. One million were killed and another million were wounded or captured in the most horrific combat since Verdun - 1916. The German 6th Army - 350,000 men - was encircled and destroyed. The Wehrmacht would never recover from the losses incurred at Stalingrad and thereafter would be fighting a "defensive" war. In the 1960's, surviving German POWs - a total of 10,000 men - were repatriated to Germany from the Soviet Gulag. In the post Stalin USSR the city's name reverted back to Volgograd. *
I continued my walk seeking a connection to this history. Once as a callow faced lad, I was stumbling along near a rampart at Fort William Henry in Lake George, NY. One of my large shoes kicked up what first appeared to be a stone but upon examination was a 50 caliber "mini ball". I was now "connected" with life two hundred years earlier, with men and women who used muzzle loading weapons, lived, loved and died around the fort. The mini ball remains a prized possession.
Now along the shore of the Volga I reached down and picked up a metal fragment, two inches long and a half inch wide. One side was encrusted with tiny stones and sediment. The other smooth and slightly rounded like a piece of a small barrel or shell casing. In the 1980's it was still possible to walk the streets of Volgograd and see the facade of an occasional building pockmarked by small arms fire and shrapnel. But maybe this fragment had absolutely nothing to do with the battle on the Volga.
The sun was dipping and the T-34 relic above was beginning to cast a shadow down towards the river. I put the fragment in my pocket and began the walk back to city center. On the way I passed a department store with a bronze plaque affixed to the wall next to a bright window display. It stated that Field Marshall Friedrich Paulus had used this building as the Headquarters of the 6th Army - from here its surrender order had been issued.
*See - Lt. Gen. Vasili Chuikov The Battle for Stalingrad NY: Holt Rinehart and Winston; 1964.
Also - Wikipedia; Wikimedia for photos and Robswebster.com.
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