ArchaeoHistories@histories_arch
When the German 16th Panzer Division approached Stalingrad from the north in August 1942, the first resistance they encountered was not from infantry, not from tanks, not from any of the prepared defenses the Red Army had positioned around the city. It was from a line of anti-aircraft guns manned by teenage girls.
The 1077th Anti-Aircraft Regiment had been stationed at Gumrak Airport on the northern edge of the city with one job: shoot down German planes. They were young, most of them volunteers, poorly supplied, and had no infantry support of any kind. When the Wehrmacht's Army Group Center swung north and came at the city from an unexpected direction, bypassing the prepared Soviet defenses entirely, the 1077th was simply the only thing standing between the German advance and Stalingrad.
They did not retreat. They lowered the elevation of their anti-aircraft guns and pointed them directly into the oncoming German armored column. An anti-aircraft gun fired horizontally at a tank at close range is a devastating weapon. The German advance stopped. Then it came back. The girls of the 1077th held their positions and kept firing.
For two days they fought. German tanks, German infantry, German aircraft. The 1077th had no support, no reinforcements, and no orders that had anticipated anything like what was happening to them. Captain Sarkisyan, commanding a nearby mortar battery, watched them from his position. Every time one of the anti-aircraft guns fell silent he assumed it had been wiped out. Every time, after a pause, it started firing again. He wrote about it afterward, the disbelief of watching those guns go quiet and then come back to life, over and over, across two days of continuous fighting.
When the Germans finally overran the positions and destroyed the last of the 1077th's guns, they went to assess what they had been fighting. The official Soviet records state that across those two days the regiment had destroyed or damaged 83 tanks and 15 armored personnel carriers, dispersed three infantry battalions, and shot down 14 aircraft. Thirty-seven gun positions had been wiped out.
The 16th Panzer Division filed their after-action report. In it they referred to the soldiers of the 1077th as "tenacious fighting women." From a German military unit in 1942, in the middle of a battle they expected to win easily, that is about as close to a tribute as language allows.
The Germans had not known, until they overran the positions, that they had been held up for two days by young women who had volunteered to defend an airport from air attack and found themselves instead in the path of an armored advance that nobody had planned for and nobody had prepared them to face. They had no orders for that situation. They improvised one: stay, lower the guns, and keep firing.
The Battle of Stalingrad lasted five months. It is remembered as one of the most brutal engagements in the history of warfare, the turning point of the Eastern Front, the moment the German advance into the Soviet Union began its long reversal. Entire libraries have been written about it. The names that appear most often are the names of generals.
The 1077th bought the city two days it desperately needed before a single one of those generals arrived. Their regiment was made up of teenagers who had never expected to fight a ground battle, in a city whose name they may have given everything to protect precisely because it was the name of the man who had sent so many of their families to Siberia. History is not always tidy about who it asks to hold the line.
They held it anyway.
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