“There is no land for us beyond the Volga”
12 September 1942. Told the previous commander had lost faith, Chuikov was asked: how do you understand your task? "I swear: I'll either die in Stalingrad or defend it."
Commander of the 62nd Army in the rubble of Stalingrad. He held the city by “hugging” the enemy, keeping his command post within grenade range, and learned only later that his army had been the plan’s bait. That army, renamed the 8th Guards, walked all the way to Berlin. As he willed, he is buried on Mamayev Kurgan at Stalingrad, beside his soldiers.
Career Timeline
- 1942.9Commands the 62nd Army in Stalingrad
- 1943–45The 8th Guards Army, all the way to Berlin
- 1945.5.1Receives the first German surrender overtures in Berlin
- 1949–53Commands Soviet forces in Germany
- 1955/1960–64Marshal; C-in-C of Ground Forces
Related historical events
12 September 1942, a Command Post on the Volga's West Bank
Born the eighth of twelve children to a peasant family in Serebryanye Prudy in Tula province, Vasily Chuikov left home at twelve to work as an apprentice in Petrograd and commanded a Red Army regiment in the Civil War at eighteen. A graduate of the Frunze Military Academy who had also served as a military adviser in China, he was appointed in September 1942 to command the 62nd Army in Stalingrad, where the German Sixth Army had already broken into the city. His predecessor had not been confident the city could be held. Asked how he understood his task, Chuikov answered that he would defend the city or die there.
On the narrowing bridgehead along the Volga's west bank, Chuikov's 62nd Army worked out a way of fighting that cancelled the German superiority in firepower. He pressed his front line so close that it hugged the enemy, so German aircraft and artillery could not strike without hitting their own men, while small storm groups armed with rifles, grenades and engineer charges fought for a single building, a single floor. The words of the sniper Zaitsev, that for us there is no land beyond the Volga, became the oath of the whole army.
His command post sat in a bunker on the riverbank and was buried and burned out more than once, but it never withdrew to the east bank. For over two months the 62nd Army held the last few hundred metres of the city, while outside it the Red Army prepared the encirclement of Operation Uranus. The street war of Stalingrad cannot be explained without the commander Chuikov.
1 May 1945, Taking the Surrender in Berlin
Stalingrad's 62nd Army received the Guards title in April 1943, becoming the 8th Guards Army, and Chuikov led it west through Ukraine and Poland all the way to Berlin. In April 1945, after the bloody fight for the Seelow Heights, the 8th Guards broke into the streets of Berlin. The storm-group tactics forged in Stalingrad's street war now served the attacker.
At dawn on 1 May 1945 General Krebs, chief of the German Army General Staff, came under a white flag to Chuikov's command post to announce Hitler's suicide and attempt a ceasefire negotiation. Chuikov relayed the Soviet position that there would be no negotiation short of unconditional surrender, and on 2 May Weidling, commandant of the Berlin defence, submitted to him the written capitulation of the entire garrison. The commander of Stalingrad took the surrender of Berlin.
After the war Chuikov headed the Soviet forces in Germany, commanded the Soviet Ground Forces and served as a deputy minister of defence, becoming a Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1955. When he died in 1982 he was buried, by his own wish, not in Moscow but on Mamayev Kurgan in Volgograd, the hill where the soldiers of the 62nd Army lie. He is the only Soviet marshal buried away from the Kremlin Wall, beside his own men.