Of the non-combat forces, a special role during the defense of Stalingrad was played by the NKVD troops, usually intended only to protect important facilities, maintain public order and state security in our territories, as well as to escort convicts or escort valuable cargo.
At the beginning of the war, such NKVD units did not have the appropriate weapons or training for conducting military combat; their personnel often changed in connection with the departure of the most trained fighters and commanders to the active army, and was replenished by conscripts of older ages with various kinds of health limitations. At first, the soldiers and commanders of the armed formations and special forces of the NKVD who died during the hostilities were not even taken into account in the army's combat losses.
In the total mass of active units and formations of the Stalingrad, South-Eastern, South-Western and Don fronts, the NKVD troops, according to rough estimates, accounted for about two percent of the personnel, however, in the Battle of Stalingrad they played an important role, and in some cases - a decisive one.
The NKVD troops were subdivided by type of operational purpose. Some fought against gangs and sabotage groups, while others guarded the rear of active armies and especially important industrial enterprises, railway facilities. They also performed escort functions. The NKVD units also ensured order and security in the territories entrusted to them, carried out guard duty at important military and national economic facilities and in settlements liberated from the occupiers.
The senior operational commander in the front line was the head of the NKVD troops for the protection of the rear of the active army. In operational terms, in addition to the NKVD troops, the local NKVD bodies and the police, the militarized security of industrial enterprises, and other armed formations were subordinate to him.
Before invading Stalingrad, German units fought bloody battles with Soviet soldiers for the Don. At this time, the 10th special rifle division of the NKVD under the command of Alexander Andreevich Saraev was left to guard the city. Initially, the tasks of the 10th division were to ensure order in the city, check documents, identify spies and saboteurs and organize defensive fortifications.
But on August 14, 1942, the Germans forced the Soviet units to retreat from their positions on the Don and leave their previously occupied positions. The Wehrmacht threw its vanguard forces to Stalingrad, hoping to capture the city on the move. On 23 August, the German Panzer Corps reached positions north of the city, capturing strategic heights. The 62nd Army at that time was fighting with the German units left in the rearguard. Soviet troops could not regroup so quickly and begin the defense of Stalingrad.
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Therefore, at first the city could only rely on its own strength. These forces became the 10th Rifle Division, the 178th, 91st, 249th regiments of the NKVD troops, two training tank battalions and some other units. They were faced with a truly impracticable task - to keep the city's defenses at any cost, to prevent the Germans from reaching the Volga until the 62nd Army units approached.
The first secretary of the Stalingrad regional party committee, Alexei Chuyanov, later recalled:
"A military thunderstorm approached the city with such speed that we could actually oppose the enemy with only the 10th division of the NKVD troops under the command of Colonel Saraev."
It should be borne in mind that the NKVD troops were never intended to conduct combined arms combat. For this, they did not have the appropriate weapons, other technical means of struggle, training. The participation of the 10th division in the hostilities on the outskirts of Stalingrad and in the city itself was forced and dictated by an extremely difficult military situation. But the division fighters coped with this task with flying colors!
The defense line was 35 kilometers. The 10th division of the NKVD was staffed with six rifle regiments: regiments from the 269th to the 273rd and 281st. The structure also included an artillery division, a separate combat support company, and a separate motorized rifle company.
The division consisted of soldiers from Irkutsk, Sverdlovsk, Novosibirsk, and the basis of two regiments (279th, 270th) were residents of Stalingrad, of whom there were about three thousand in the total composition of the division.
On the first day of their massive attack on the city - 23 August 1942 - the Germans made all of Stalingrad burn in flames, carrying out a massive bombardment. The enemy was much stronger along the entire front line, attacks did not stop one by one. But the fighters of the 10th division were able to close the enemy's entrance to the city from all possible directions, imposing fierce prolonged battles on him.
The 62nd Army could not come to the rescue as previously planned. Due to huge losses on September 2, the formations began to retreat, unable to withstand the onslaught of the Germans. The 24th Panzer Division of the Nazis immediately moved into the resulting gap, which had to be met by the same 10th Infantry Division.
The name of the machine gunner of the 272nd regiment of the 10th division of the NKVD Alexei Vaschenko is inscribed in gold letters in the chronicle of the Battle of Stalingrad. On September 5, 1942, during the assault on height 146.1, they shouted “For the Motherland! For Stalin! he closed the embrasure of the bunker with his body. By order of the troops of the Stalingrad Front No. 60 / n dated October 25, 1942, he was posthumously awarded the Order of Lenin. Today one of the streets of Volgograd bears the name of the hero.
Another immortal feat by a division fighter was accomplished at the Experimental Station. There the Germans threw 37 tanks against our battalion. From the fire of anti-tank rifles, grenades and a combustible mixture "KS" six of them burst into flames, but the rest broke into the location of our defense. At a critical moment, the junior political instructor, assistant for Komsomol work in the regiment, Dmitry Yakovlev, threw himself under a tank with two anti-tank grenades and blew himself up along with an enemy vehicle.
The 269th Infantry Regiment of the 10th Division of the NKVD of the USSR under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Kapranov ensured law and order in Stalingrad and suburban settlements from July 1 to August 23.
On August 23, 1942, the regiment urgently took up defensive positions in the area of height 102.0 (aka Mamayev Kurgan) and subsequently took an active part in its defense.
From September 8 to 12, the battles for the city became not only bloody, they became truly brutal, the Germans pulled more and more forces to Stalingrad. Only on September 12, the 62nd Army entered the city, and the 10th Division came under the command of Lieutenant General V. I. Chuikov.
On September 14, at 6:00, the Nazis from the line of the Historical Wall stabbed the heart of the city - its central part with a group of the tallest stone buildings, dominating next to them with a height of 102.0 (Mamayev Kurgan) and the main crossing over the Volga.
Particularly strong battles unfolded for the Mamayev Kurgan and in the area of the Tsaritsa River. This time, the main blow of 50 tanks fell on the junction between the 1st and 2nd battalions of the 269th regiment. At 14:00, two battalions of enemy machine gunners with three tanks went to the rear of the regiment and occupied the top of Mamayev Kurgan, opening fire on the village of the Krasny Oktyabr plant.
To return the height, a company of machine gunners of the 269th NKVD regiment of junior lieutenant Nikolai Lyubezny and the 416th rifle regiment of the 112th rifle division with two tanks went into a counterattack. By 6:00 pm, the height had been cleared. The defense on it was occupied by the 416th regiment and partly by the units of the Chekists. In two days of fighting, only the 269th regiment of the 10th division of the NKVD of the USSR destroyed more than one and a half thousand soldiers and officers, knocked out and burned about 20 enemy tanks.
Meanwhile, individual groups of German submachine gunners penetrated the city center, intense battles were going on at the station. Having created strong points in the State Bank building, in the House of Specialists and a number of others, on the upper floors of which the fire spotters sat down, the Germans took under fire the central crossing over the Volga. They managed to come very close to the landing site of Major General Alexander Rodimtsev's 13th Guards Division. As Alexander Ilyich himself wrote, “this was a critical moment when the fate of the battle was being decided, when one extra pellet could tug the scales of the enemy. But he did not have this pellet, but Chuikov had it."
On a narrow strip of coast from the House of Specialists to the complex of buildings of the NKVD, the crossing was defended by a consolidated detachment of the 10th division of the NKVD of the USSR under the command of the head of the UNKVD department, captain of state security Ivan Petrakov. Only 90 people - two incomplete platoons of fighters of the 10th NKVD division, employees of the regional NKVD Directorate, city militiamen and five firefighters repulsed the attacks of the 1st battalion of the 194th infantry regiment of the 71st rifle division of the 6th army of the Wehrmacht. In the official history, it sounds like this: "We ensured the crossing of the units of the 13th Guards Division …".
This means that at the last moment, at the last frontier, 90 Chekists stopped an entire army that captured all of Europe …
At the same time, despite the overwhelming advantage of the Germans, a detachment of soldiers of the state security bodies goes on an attack in the area of the brewery, repels two of our guns, previously captured by the Germans, and begins to beat them at the State Bank building, from the upper floors of which the Germans adjust the shelling of the pier and the central ferry. To the aid of the Chekists, the commander of the 62nd Army Vasily Chuikov throws his last reserve, a group of three T-34 tanks under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Matvey Weinrub, with the task of attacking high buildings on the embankment captured by the Germans.
At the turn: the cemetery with the surroundings, the village of Dar Gora - the House of the NKVD - the central part of the city - are defended by units of the 270th regiment of the 10th NKVD division under the command of Major Anatoly Zhuravlev. On September 15, at 17:00, the Germans struck at them two simultaneous strikes - in the forehead and bypass - from the side of the NKVD House.
At the same time, the 2nd battalion was attacked in the back by ten tanks. Two of them were set on fire, but the remaining eight vehicles were able to break through to the position of the 5th company, where up to two platoons of personnel were buried alive in the trenches with caterpillars. In the twilight at the command post of the 2nd battalion, only ten miraculously survived in that terrible meat grinder of the Chekists of the 5th company managed to gather.
The chief of staff of the regiment, Captain Vasily Chuchin, was seriously wounded, who suffered from the local use of chemical warfare agents by the enemy. By his order of September 20, the commander of the 10th division of the NKVD of the USSR, Colonel Alexander Saraev, poured the remnants of the 270th regiment into the 272nd regiment. A total of 109 people were transferred there with two "magpie" cannons and three 82-mm mortars …
The 271st Infantry Regiment of the 10th Division of the NKVD of the USSR, commanded by Major Alexei Kostinitsyn, took up defensive positions along the southern outskirts of Stalingrad. On September 8, after a massive air raid, enemy infantry moved on it. On September 12 and 13, the regiment fought in a half-ring, and from September 15 for almost two days - in an encirclement ring. The battles these days went on along the Volga, on a patch within the boundaries of an elevator - a railway crossing - a cannery.
This forced staff workers to be thrown into battle. The hero of those days was the clerk of the political unit of the regiment, the sergeant of state security Sukhorukov: on September 16, during an attack with fire from a machine gun, he destroyed six fascists, and then three more in hand-to-hand combat. In total, he recorded seventeen killed enemy soldiers and officers to his personal account in September battles!
At the same time, the 272nd "Volzhsky" regiment dug in at the turn of the station "Stalingrad-1" - a railway bridge across the Tsaritsa River. On September 19, the regiment commander, Major Grigory Savchuk, is wounded, and the commander of the regiment is the battalion commissar Ivan Shcherbina. Having located the command post of the regiment headquarters in the bunker of the former command post of the city Defense Committee in the Komsomolsk Garden, Ivan Mefodievich writes his famous note, which is now kept in the Museum of Border Troops in Moscow:
Hello friends. I beat the Germans, surrounded by a circle. Not a step back is my duty and my nature …
My regiment did not disgrace and will not disgrace Soviet weapons …
Comrade Kuznetsov, if I am lost, my only request is my family. Another sadness of mine - I should have given the bastards in the teeth, i.e. I regret that I died early and personally killed only 85 of the fascists.
For the Soviet Motherland, guys, beat your enemies !!!"
On September 25, enemy tanks took the command post in a ring and began to shoot it point-blank from tower guns. In addition, chemical warfare agents were used against the defenders. After several hours of being under siege, I. M. Shcherbina led the surviving staff workers and 27 headquarters guards to a breakthrough. They pierced their way with bayonets. Unfortunately, the brave commissar in that unequal battle died the death of the brave: enemy bullets mortally wounded him at the Gorky Theater …
During September 26, the remnants of the regiment in the amount of 16 fighters under the command of the junior political instructor Rakov remained firmly in a semi-encirclement on the banks of the Volga until the evening, while the fragments of two neighboring separate rifle brigades of the Red Army, defeated by the enemy, were hastily transported to the left bank. And a handful of brave Chekist warriors killed up to a company of the Nazis and destroyed two enemy machine guns.
The main task - to hold the city until the arrival of fresh reserves of the 62nd army - the 10th rifle division of the NKVD troops of the USSR fulfilled with flying colors. Of the 7,568 fighters who entered the battle on August 23, 1942, about 200 people survived. On October 26, 1942, the last on the left bank of the Volga was the administration of the 282nd regiment, which defended the height of 135.4 at the tractor plant. However, in burning Stalingrad, the combined regiment company of 25 bayonets, formed from the remnants of the combined battalion, remained to fight. The last soldier of this company was out of action due to injury on November 7, 1942.
For a total of 56 days, the soldiers of the division defended Stalingrad, they destroyed about 15 thousand Nazi soldiers and 113 Nazi tanks. Later, the 10th division of the NKVD was awarded the Order of Lenin for the brilliant performance of combat missions.
More than seventy rifle formations, more than a dozen tank and mechanized corps contributed their military labor to the Stalingrad victory. The personnel of many and many of them became famous for their heroism and courage, their banners were deservedly decorated with orders of various dignities. But only one division - the 10th NKVD troops received the highest award of the USSR - the Order of Lenin.