grad Vasily Zaitsev was credited with killing 242 Germans. Ultimately, he was blinded by a land mine. Many of the tense battles were fought near the Central Train Station were Soviet guardsmen barricaded the train cars against German attackers. The German Luftwaffe was making thousands of attacks a day and their artillery bombarded the city so to neutralize this. General Chuikov ordered his forces to remain very close to the German troops so that German air strikes would endanger their own forces. The city was surrounded by German forces. For Russian reinforcements to arrive they would have to cross the Volga river while under German fire. Witnesses said that on some days the river would turn red with the blood of the dead soldiers. Fighting was continual and never stopped. Sometimes it might slow down, but minutes later it would start again with new energy. General Chuikov described one German attack, "That morning you could not hear the separate shots or explosions: the whole merged into one continuous deafening roar." The overpowered Soviets had been driven back and Germany occupied eighty percent of the city. Because the two sides would often be very close to each other, hand to hand fighting was very common. Many battles were fought with knives and bayonets. Bodies piled up in the streets and the city became a hellhole as one German lieutenant said, "Stalingrad is no longer a town. By day it is an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames...Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure." Infantry dominated the battles because tanks had a difficult time maneuvering through the ruins. The deployment of tanks in the city was a serious error, as they were virtually useless, and they would not be available as a reserve force in case of a Soviet counterattack. After a few months of fighting, several events put pressure on Ger...
