General Rodimtsev put the number of casualties in his division in the first weeks after arriving at Stalingrad at over four thousand. The account of nurse Vera Gurova gives this number a concrete reality. The twenty-two-year-old Gurova had already been through much—the Winter War against Finland and the heavy fighting as the Soviets retreated before the advancing Germans in the summer and fall of 1941. But nowhere did she see as many wounded as in Stalingrad. (She does not speak of the dead.) Each day, her medic battalion cared for six hundred to seven hundred newly wounded soldiers at the forward aid station. Because of the Volga, the injured could not be transferred rapidly to the field hospital on the other side of the river. They could be moved only at night, and the number who could be transported was limited, given the constant risk of enemy fire. Many of the wounded had to be treated and lodged in the field with whatever was available. General Chuikov writes in his memoir that the surgery unit of the 13th Guards Division worked in a massive drainage pipe on the steep western bank of the Volga. A secret NKVD report confirms the dramatic situation of the injured in September: “Over the course of fighting on September 15 the 13th Guards division suffered four hundred casualties and used up all the ammunition for automatic weapons. The transportation of the wounded to the east bank of the Volga is extremely difficult. The commander of the 13th Guards Division has no means to transport the wounded. The lightly wounded are making rafts, loading the seriously wounded onto them. To cross to the east bank they let themselves be taken by the Volga current. On the other shore they wander around villages, looking for help.”80
Almost 1 million Soviet women, far more than from any other warring nation, served in the Red Army during World War II, half of them as ordinary soldiers and the other as nurses, phone operators, laundrywomen, or antiaircraft assistants. Nurses had to assume that they would be sent to the front line and would aid the injured under enemy fire. Like the other medics with whom the Moscow historians spoke, they participated without complaint.
Gurova seemed to welcome the elimination of separate gender roles in war: “I think that a woman in the army is just as useful as a man,” she confidently explained. Because of her achievements, Gurova demanded membership in the party although she had not been in the Komsomol.
General Chuikov and other commanders and political officers interviewed in Stalingrad praised the women serving in the army, acknowledging that some showed more stamina than the men. What they did not speak about, and what Gurova only alludes to, was the difficult situation of women in the Red Army. Not only did they have to “man up”; they had to take sexual assaults from superiors in stride. Here again, Gurova internalizes the male perspective and criticizes some of the nurses in her unit for seducing the men. The reality in most cases was the other way around. She speaks proudly of having received the Medal for Battle Merit for the Finnish campaign, though male soldiers had another name for this order when awarded to women: “For Merit in Bed.” By the end of the war, the blanket accusations against women in the Red Army became louder. Women who entered into a liaison with officers were known as “campaign women,” abbreviated in Russian as “PPSh,”81 the nickname for the Soviet submachine gun. Doubts about their moral integrity made it difficult for many women to reenter civilian life after the war. In many cases women veterans did not tell their families about their war experiences.82 Nothing is known about Vera Gurova’s later life.
TRANSCRIPTS OF INTERVIEWS CONDUCTED ON THE STALINGRAD FRONT DURING THE DEFENSE OF STALINGRAD
Stalingrad, January 7, 1943
Interview conducted by scientific secretary A. A. Belkin
Stenography by A. I. Shamshina
62nd Army
13th Guards Rifle Division
Nurse Vera Leontyevna GUROVA83
I was born in 1920 in Krivoi Rog, in the Dnetropetrovsk region. I’m Ukrainian. I completed my medical training in Krivoi Rog, and then I volunteered on the Finnish Front. I’d specialized as a surgical nurse and I worked there as a senior surgical nurse. For the Finnish campaign I was awarded the Medal for Battle Merit, and for Kiev I received the Order of the Red Star. I got another Order of the Red Star in this division. Colonel Vavilov presented it to me. I was decorated for the fighting at Tim by a decree of the Don Front.
It was bad at Kiev, but not as bad as at Stalingrad. Mortars and shells were exploding all around while we were working, everything was coming down, all while we were trying to do complicated operations. I work in a medical battalion. At Kiev our working conditions weren’t as bad. We were in a large hospital, and while the shells could reach us, they didn’t bother us as much as they do here. Here we’ve had six or seven hundred wounded coming in every day. We’ve had to work day and night. Our building was constantly collapsing. The medical battalion was placed on the other side of the Volga with the second echelon in Burkova,84 while this place was simply a frontline aid station. I used to be over there, but I’ve come here as relief because there isn’t as much work over there now.
All the complicated operations are done at battalion level under more peaceful conditions. There’s no way you could operate on someone here and keep him for four to six days. Right now it’s quiet and there aren’t many wounded, but we had a lot of them back then.
Most were shrapnel wounds from mortars, shells, bombs. In Stalingrad most of our cases are shrapnel wounds. Before, when we were at Kharkov, our forward aid stations weren’t as important because we were able to get the wounded to the battalion station. But in Stalingrad they play a much larger role. We operate on people with abdominal wounds and keep them for a while. They could be dead by the time we got them to battalion. We transfer them on stretchers.
Army command set up this forward aid station during the battle because of the poor transportation. The station had two surgeons and a senior and junior nurse. They gave the men blood transfusions and operated on them, and after a few days’ recovery in a dugout the wounded were sent across the river. That’s where I was, because the brunt of the workload fell on that section of the medical battalion in the second echelon. We’ve never experienced anything as bad as we have here. I’ve never seen so many wounded.
Here I’ve come to understand that nurses have also got to be affectionate and cheerful. The wounded are watching you. They watch how you behave during bomb raids and react accordingly. I remember one time when we were being bombed just after we’d finished operating, and the men were still on the tables. This was at Kiev. There were a few times when I had to stay with them. At the divisional medical station our operating theater was in a tent. There were a lot of planes in the air. The surgeon finished up and left, but there were still six patients on tables who had to be carried out. That was when the bombing started. We stayed with them, me and another girl, and they looked at us and said: “Go on, save yourselves—we’re already wounded.”
There wasn’t anywhere for us to go. And besides, how could you leave with those men looking at you like that? This happened to me twice. I know the man’s wounded and in pain, and he knows that even one piece of shrapnel can do a lot of damage. But the thought of leaving a wounded man doesn’t even occur to me. That’s what I’m thinking when I go back to the tent to look after him. I came here to save him. I’m not married.85
A nurse in Stalingrad, 1942
I can say how I felt about my work just the same as any soldier can tell stories about attacking the enemy. There were times when you’d be on your feet two days running without realizing it, doing nothing but seeing to the wounded. As a senior nurse, I understood that I had to be both a qualified army nurse and an excellent organizer. So when we move to a new location, the surgeon tasks me, the senior nurse, with making sure our premises are ready. The other senior nurse and I must organize things so everything is ready to go and everyone is in their place. Here I was only assisting during simple operations, so I ended up spending all my time doing organizational work. I had to make sure we had everything we needed to keep the work going. If we ran out of something the surgeons and nurses would have to stop.
There was one patient who made us burst into tears. He was a young lieutenant, born in 1922. This was in Burkovka in October. He was wounded when he came to us, and his legs had to be amputated. He was from Ukraine. His whole family—his mother, his father, his girlfriend—they had stayed there, and he didn’t know if they were alive. He was telling us all of this and showing his great hatred for the enemy the whole time before his legs were amputated, while he was being prepped, and afterward he lay on the table for half an hour. The operation was performed under anesthesia. Then we gave him food and water, and he begged us to avenge him for as long as we remained in Stalingrad. Then he was sent to a hospital in the rear.
Very few of the seriously wounded lost their morale or started thinking only of themselves. Most of them stayed in good spirits, perhaps losing it for only a moment during surgery. Afterward a man would start telling us how he got wounded, show his anger and his desire to avenge the motherland. Some of the men with minor wounds show up no longer thinking of themselves as men. Others come with serious wounds without losing faith.
I’ve been a surgical nurse for five years, and there’s no end to the blood. I’d never seen such massive amounts of blood before. I know I should forget about it—this is my job. But of course that doesn’t mean I don’t sympathize with them, or that I look at them with indifference. I’ve experienced a lot, but I shouldn’t behave in such a way that it affects how I treat the wounded. During a difficult operation, if my mind is elsewhere and I’m not following the operation, I won’t get anything right.
I’m not in the Komsomol, but I am applying for membership in the party.
I think that a woman in the army is just as useful as a man, with certain exceptions, of course. But those exceptions exist in peacetime too. Sometimes I’m really offended when people treat a woman with contempt: a woman in the army? I know that I joined the army to do my duty. Let them think what they think.