Enemy at the Gates

by William Craig

  In his enthusiasm, Paulus neglected to mention several nagging concerns. The dysentery he had first picked up in the Balkans during World War I was plaguing him. And on the strategy level, his left flank was worrisome. There, well to the north along the line of the tortuous upper Don, the armies of the satellite nations —Hungary, Italy, and Rumania—were struggling to hold the left flank while Sixth Army moved east. He was relying heavily on the strength of these puppet forces to blunt any enemy attack coming from that direction.

  The armies Paulus worried about were moving slowly. Farthest toward the northwest, soldiers of the Hungarian Second Army had begun to dig in along the upper Don. To their right, men of the Italian Eighth Army were preparing to occupy a long stretch of looping river line running toward the east. The Italians not only had been given the job of containing any Russian threat from across the river, they also served as a buffer between the Hungarians and the Rumanian Third Army, which was to hold the territory from Serafimovich to Kletskaya deep in the steppe. The German High Command had inserted the Italians between the other two armies to avoid conflict between ancient enemies, who might forget the Russians and go at each other’s throats.

  That rivalry was hardly an auspicious omen. It underlined the Germans’ desperate manpower situation, for the three satellite armies had been brought together in a haphazard manner. The Hungarian and Rumanian forces were staffed mostly by political officers who were unschooled in warfare. Both armies were riddled by corruption and inefficiency. The lowly soldier had it worst of all. Poorly led and poorly fed, he endured outrageous privations. Officers whipped enlisted men on the merest whim. When action got dangerous, many officers simply went home. One private wrote his family that even his priest had deserted in a moment of crisis. Worse, they were equipped with antiquated weapons: antitank guns were almost nonexistent; rifles were of World War I vintage.

  Many similar conditions prevailed in the Italian Army. Dragooned into service far from their homeland, wary of the bond between Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Fascist state, the troopers grumbled unhappily as they marched through shattered Russian towns and villages. These men had not come on any crusade for lebensraum (“space for living”); they moved toward the Don because Benito Mussolini bargained for Hitler’s favor with the bodies of his soldiers.

  The Italians had sent their best units into the Soviet Union. Proud military names such as the Julia, Bersaglieri, Cosseria, Torino, Alpini, graced the shoulder patches of troops struggling through the enervating heat. Their fathers had fought along the Piave and Isonzo rivers against the Austrians during World War I, and Ernest Hemingway immortalized their battles in A Farewell to Arms.

  Some of the Italian soldiers questioned the reasons they were fighting for the Nazi cause. At a railroad siding in Warsaw, twentyone- year-old Lt. Veniero Marsan had seen its harsh realities for the first time. From a train window, he watched a long line of civilians passing by. Apathetic, forlorn, each wore the yellow Star of David. Then Marsan saw the cruel-faced guards with guns, cocked and ready to fire. A chill rippled along his spine and, long after his train had rocked on into Russia, he brooded about what he had witnessed.

  For other Italians, the expedition into the steppe had different connotations. Crack Alpini soldiers guided mules along and kept their mountain-climbing gear under canvas. The nearest mountains were in the Caucasus, far to the south, and Hitler had decided to conquer them without the Italians. Shaking their heads in amazement, the elite Alpini trudged along the flat plains wondering why they were in Russia at all.

  But twenty-seven-year-old Lt. Felice Bracci was delighted with the great adventure. He had always wanted to explore the steppe country of Russia, to gaze on its timeless beauty. A recent university graduate, Bracci joined the Young Fascist League and went from there directly into Mussolini’s army.

  In his first battles in Albania, he was wounded and decorated for defending an outpost. When offered the choice of going to Libya or Russia, the decision was difficult to make: he wanted desperately to see the pyramids. Finally choosing the steppe, he now led a company of men eastward to the Don.

  Dr. Cristoforo Capone did not share Bracci’s cultural interests, but that mattered little. He, too, was pleased to be part of the Russian expedition. The seventh of nine children, he was the “rogue” in his family. Constantly good humored, he delighted everyone who met him. In his division, the Torino, the prankster, was easily the most popular man among soldiers trying to conquer homesickness.

  When the news came of the birth of his first daughter, Capone got permission for a month’s leave. With a last joke and a smile, the happy doctor waved goodbye to his friends and left the line of march for a reunion in Salerno. He hoped to be back in time for the finish of the “walkover” campaign.

  In the meantime, his comrades plunged doggedly ahead, dragging their antiquated cannon and rifles, singing songs of Sorrento and the sunlight. On their hats they wore bright green-and-red cockades; in their hearts they longed for home.

  Chapter Two

  Deep in a Ukrainian pine forest, outside the town of Vinnitsa and five hundred miles west of the German troops near the Don—on the same morning that Friedrich von Paulus wrote glowingly of the future to a friend—Adolf Hitler climbed the steps of a log cabin and swept into a starkly furnished conference room. Seating himself on an iron chair at the head of a map table with his back to a window, he listened carefully to the latest intelligence reports as they were explained by his chief of staff, the bespectacled, trimly mustachioed, Gen. Franz Halder.

  The meticulous Halder had no love for the man he served. He acted deferentially toward his Führer and accepted frequent tirades with the calm of one resigned to his fate. Before and during the war, Halder had schemed with other officers to overthrow Hitler and replace him with a monarchy. The dissident group was too timid and vacillating to initiate the coup, however, and watched passively as the German Army scored triumph after triumph under Hitler’s almost mystical leadership. By the summer of 1942, Halder was a captive in thrall to a despot.

  For weeks, though, he had reminded Hitler that the signs of Russian disintegration were illusory, that the enemy was not “kaputt.” Halder believed that the campaign in the previous winter had bled Germany white. The equivalent of eighty divisions, nearly eight hundred thousand men, were buried beneath the soil of Russia. Despite carefully doctored tables of strength, the majority of the German divisions were 50 percent under strength. And while more than a million besieged Russian civilians had starved to death during the nightmarish winter of 1941, Leningrad still clung to life. Moscow also remained as the nerve center of the Soviet state. Of more significance, the oil fields in the Caucasus pumped life-giving petroleum products to the Soviet war machine.

  As a result, Hitler had become obsessed with the importance of petroleum products to a mechanized state, and he had devised Operation Blue expressly to strangle Russia’s oil production and, thereby, her potential to wage modern war. To promote the offensive, he had flown to Poltava on June 1, and, surrounded by deputies such as Paulus, he put on a brilliant oratorical display that mesmerized everyone. Predictably, the generals failed to make any rebuttal to his proposal, which completely ignored German shortages in manpower and equipment and concentrated only on the abysmal state of the Red Army.

  Thus, Operation Blue had begun when the Fourth Panzer Army struck on June 28, due east toward the rail junction of Voronezh. Two days later, Paulus’s Sixth Army followed suit, covering the Fourth Army’s right flank and engaging Russian forces pulling back in disorder. Almost immediately, the Fourth Army ran into difficulties. Originally, Hitler planned to bypass Voronezh in hopes of trapping the Soviet armies on the open plains. But when German armor easily penetrated the outskirts and commanders radioed for permission to seize the rest of the city, Hitler vacillated, leaving the decision to Army Group B’s commander, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock. Amazed at being given a choice, Bock hesitated briefly, then sent two tank d
ivisions into Voronezh.

  The Russians had rushed in reinforcements, quickly pinning the Germans down in savage street fighting, and soldiers in the Fourth Army soon referred to Voronezh as a “cursed town.” Meanwhile, Hitler raged. The main Russian armies were slipping away, down a long corridor to the southeast between the Don and Donets rivers. Hitler demanded that Bock catch the Russians. The marshal tried, but the Russians withdrew rapidly, taking most of their trucks and tanks with them.

  To General Halder, this successful withdrawal was ominous. It meant the Soviet High Command still was retreating according to plan. But once again, when he told Hitler his fears, the Führer laughed aloud. Arrogant in his belief that the Russians were reeling, confused, and ripe for slaughter, the Führer began to tinker with the delicate balance of his own forces. He separated the army groups, sending Group A off at a right angle into the Caucasus while Group B drove straight ahead across the steppe toward Stalingrad. Worse, Hitler stripped the Fourth Panzer Army from Group B and attached it to the Caucasus operation. That left Paulus’s Sixth Army alone, driving on into the hostile depths of the Soviet Union.

  By his action, Hitler had weakened each army group and left them vulnerable to Soviet counterstrokes. The move also caused consternation within German Army Headquarters. Halder could not believe the Führer would commit such a blunder. Stunned, he went to his quarters and poured his agonized feelings into his diary: “…The chronic tendency to underrate enemy capabilities is gradually assuming grotesque proportions… Serious work is becoming impossible here. This so-called leadership is characterized by a pathological reacting to the impressions of the moment…”

  When Hitler pivoted an entire army across another’s path, he had defied the military maxim that any interference with the delicate internal functions of a massed body of troops frequently leads to chaos. And on the steppe roads of Russia, the Sixth Army stopped dead while swarms of vehicles and men from the Fourth Panzer Army cut left to right across its line of advance. Enormous traffic jams developed. Tanks of one army mingled with those of the other; supply trucks got lost in a maze of contradictory signposts and directions handed out by irate military policemen. Worse, the Fourth Army took the bulk of the oil and gasoline meant to fuel both armies.

  By the time the last Fourth Army tank had disappeared to the south, Paulus was commanding a stalled war machine. His supply lines were tangled, his tanks were without fuel, and he watched impotently as Russian rear guards vanished into the eastern haze. Furious at the delay, he began to wonder openly whether the enemy might now have enough time to organize a formidable defense line beyond the horizon.

  Only Hitler remained unruffled. He scoffed when Halder showed him an intelligence estimate of more than a million Russian reserves still uncommitted behind the Volga. Jubilant at the easy capture of Rostov, the gateway city to the Caucasus, on July 23, he executed another series of orders which reflected his growing confidence in an early victory. He transferred Field Marshal Erich von Manstein and his five divisions from the Crimea north to Leningrad—at the very time their strength was needed to guarantee success in the oil fields. He also uprooted two elite panzer divisions, the Leibstandarte and Grossdeutschland, from southern Russia and sent them off to France, because he was suddenly fearful of an Allied invasion from across the English Channel.

  Again, the bewildered Halder tried to instill a note of caution. At another briefing, he pushed a worn map across the table and drily explained that it showed where the Red Army had defeated Denikin’s White Army in the Russian Civil War of 1920. Halder ran his fingers along the line of the Volga near the old city of Tsaritsyn. The architect of the victory, he added, had been Joseph Stalin and the city was now called Stalingrad.

  Temporarily sobered by Halder’s obvious reference to the possibility of history repeating itself, Hitler had promised to keep a close watch on the progress of the Sixth Army and to pay particular attention to its flanks. In the last days of July, he moved swiftly to strengthen Sixth Army’s exposed position on the steppe. Completely reversing himself, he told the Fourth Panzer Army to turn around again and rejoin the drive to the Volga.

  Rushing toward the Caucasus, the Fourth Army’s panzers suddenly stopped dead and turned northeast. “So many precious days have been lost,” General Halder fumed in his quarters. But at least he was happy that Paulus now had a friendly army coming up on his right flank. Perhaps, thought Halder, the delay had not given the Russians the grace period they needed.

  By the evening of August 5, intelligence pouring into Vinmtsa tended to sustain that hope. Halder briefed Hitler that Sixth Army’s pincers were about to close on two enemy armies. And the Fourth Panzer Army confirmed the capture of Kotelnikovo, a key rail center, just seventy-three miles southwest of Stalingrad. Barring any unforeseen obstacles, Fourth Army anticipated a quick thrust to the Volga.

  At dinner that night, Adolf Hitler gloated over the situation. His strategy had been vindicated; he told everyone that the Soviet Union was about to collapse.

  Chapter Three

  While Hitler spoke of triumph, the streets of Moscow were totally dark. But behind drawn curtains in his Kremlin office, the premier of all the Russias, Joseph Stalin, was following his normal work schedule, which began in late afternoon and ended near dawn. The lynx-eyed Stalin had pursued this timetable for years. And from these sessions had come orders that brought terror to his people and subversion to nations around the world.

  He was a tyrant who once had studied for the priesthood, a revolutionaty who robbed banks to support the Bolshevist cause, a glutton, and a near drunkard. Upon the death of Lenin, he assumed total control of the Soviet Union. Those who served him endured his rages in silence; those who crossed him died violently.

  Stalin never forgot or forgave. He once told a Russian writer that Ivan the Terrible had not been ruthless enough because he left too many enemies alive. Stalin did not make the same error. Nearly twenty years after he broke with Leon Trotsky, one of his agents penetrated the exiled dissenter’s security screen in Mexico and drove an alpenstock through his skull. From Stalin’s office, emissaries emerged to slay thousands of Red Army officers in the 1937- 1938 purges. It was on his orders that more than ten million kulaks, farmers and landowners who balked at turning over their properties to the new Communist state, were killed. And it was from this apartment that the directive went out to sign the Nazi- Soviet nonaggression pact in August 1939, which Stalin believed gave him time to prepare for the inevitable war with Germany.

  In this decision, Stalin had trusted an equally cynical dictator, even when spies like Richard Sorge and a man called Lucy told him the exact date Germany proposed to attack the Soviet Union. Branding the information provided by these agents as part of a British plot to draw Russia into war, Stalin put his faith in Hitler’s word.

  It had been a colossal blunder. The Nazi invasion brought the Soviet Union to the brink of disaster and Stalin went into shock. Ten days passed before he rallied enough to resume command of his shattered armies and it was none too soon. By October 1941, Hitler had swallowed most of European Russia. In December, now only seven miles from Moscow, German scouts trained their binoculars on the turrets of the Kremlin. But the Russians held and the crisis eased.

  Stalin regained his equilibrium and learned from past mistakes. When the spies who had warned him about Hitler’s plans for invasion continued to send a torrent of vital information to Moscow, he paid closer attention. Operating out of Paris was Leonard Trepper, called the “Big Chief,” who ran a spy network known to German secret police as the “Red Orchestra,” because of its nightly radio chorus across Europe. Trepper, a Polish Jew, had been planted in France before the war. There he cultivated an influential circle of German businessmen and military leaders from whom he extracted masses of information. Hounded by German radio sleuths, who tracked his transmitters with special directional equipment, Trepper still survived. But his time was growing short.

  Other spies were relatively
invulnerable. In Switzerland, a Hungarian Communist named Alexander Rado ran both a publishing business and a spy ring. One of his agents, Rudolf Rossler, was probably the most valuable weapon the Soviet Union possessed. The shy, bespectacled Rossler, code-named “Lucy,” had contacts inside the High Command of the German Army. His sources, never identified to this day, provided him with almost every decision made by the FUhrer. Rossler had passed both strategic and tactical battle plans on to Moscow, usually within twentyfour hours of their having been approved. His communiqués were worth many divisions to Stalin.

  Thus, Moscow knew explicit details about Operation Blue: the names of the divisions involved in the attack, the number of tanks to be committed to battle, plus the operation’s ultimate goal of severing the Volga River lifeline and capturing the oil fields of the Caucasus. As the offensive progressed, Lucy also had forwarded each major shift in tactics, from Hitler’s indecision about taking Voronezh to his startling insistence on splitting his armies on the steppe.

  Yet Stalin was hesitant when Lucy told of Hitler’s confusion at Voronezh. The premier had always believed that the Germans intended to take Moscow from the south, and therefore might be using the drive toward the Caucasus as a feint to draw Russian reserves from the capital. But when Lucy’s torrent of “inner strategy” continued to accurately forecast the German Army’s course across southern Russia, Stalin began to base Russian defense plans on Lucy’s confidences.

  While Hitler chased two hares at the same time, Stalin, on July 13, had agreed to a plan set forth by his general staff (STAVKA) to withdraw Soviet units as far as the Volga, thereby forcing the Germans to spend the coming winter in open country. Almost a week later, when STAVKA received the astonishing news that the German Army groups had begun to split their forces on the steppe, Russian strategy changed again. Until this time, little consideration had been given to making a determined stand on the west bank of the Volga. Now Stalin made a decision of momentous significance. He sent an order to members of the City Soviet (city council) in Stalingrad to prepare for a seige. As of July 21 they were to organize the entire population in a frantic effort to build a fortified ring around the outskirts of the city while STAVKA tried to beef-up the small military garrison.