Enemy at the Gates

by William Craig

  Klava.

  Don’t worry, Vanya. We have gone to Astrakhan. Come to us.

  Yuri.

  Out on the Volga, battered tugs and steamers steered carefully around the northern tip of Golodny Island and edged in toward the landing. Docked amid a cacophony of whistles, they heeled over badly from the weight of passengers running up the gangplanks. When the boats cast off and reversed course for the far shore, the departing Stalingraders waved sorrowfully at the retreating shoreline of the city they had once called home.

  Overhead, German reconnaissance planes wove back and forth, noting the chaotic scene at the ferry and radioing the information back to their bases at Morosovskaya and Tatsinskaya on the steppe.

  A quarter mile west of the central landing on the Volga, Andrei Yeremenko juggled his reserves to contain Gen. Hans Hube’s 16th Panzers in the northern suburbs. When Col. Semyon Gorokhov stepped ashore with his six thousand-man brigade, he thought he was supposed to take them to fight on the southern fringes of the city. Instead, Yeremenko sent him north to the tractor factory to build a line girdling that plant. Another group, marines from the Soviet Far East Fleet, piled into a convoy of automobiles for a breakneck trip past Mamaev Hill to the trenches along the Mokraya Mechetka River, a mile above the tractor works. The marines rode to battle with their rifles sticking out the car windows.

  One traveler to the factory complex was Georgi Malenkov, Stalin’s personal watchdog in Yeremenko’s headquarters. If the general was nervous with Malenkov peering over his shoulder, Nikita Khrushchev was more so, for he and Malenkov were bitter rivals in the murderous world of Kremlin politics. Khrushchev knew that he had lost favor with Stalin because of his partial responsibility for the disastrous spring offensive at Kharkov which had resulted in the loss of more than two hundred thousand Red Army troops.{Khrushchev has claimed that he called Stalin’s dacha to ask permission to call off the Soviet offensive, and that Malenkov relayed Stalin’s order to continue the attack.

  Marshal Zhukov denies this in his memoirs, charging that, in reality, Khrushchev urged Stalin to ignore warnings of disaster and press the assault.} A master of intrigue himself, he realized that Malenkov would gladly report any of his mistakes to the premier.

  Malenkov had gone to the tractor factory, where under a broiling sun, his face flushed and hair hanging in wet strands, he exhorted the plant personnel to hold on until more help arrived. He spoke with great fervor while the pounding guns from the battle around Spartakovka to the north punctuated his sentences.

  After Malenkov finished speaking, the workers dispersed to the cavernous shops. Inside one of the rooms, Mikhail Vodolagin had finally brought out the emergency edition of Pravda, 500 singlesheet copies that he rushed out to the population with instructions to pass them on after reading. The main point of Vodolagin’s special issue was to instill a sense of continuity, a feeling that the city was still functioning and would survive. He made an urgent appeal for everyone to stay calm and not to give in to panic. His editorial proclaimed: “We will destroy the enemy at the gates of Stalingrad.”

  While the fledgling publisher moved his printing operations further south, to the less-threatened Red October Plant, civilian militia and regular troops rushed past the tractor factory toward the Mokraya Mechetka River where German combat groups were trying to overrun the stubborn Russian amateurs. The only German success had been the capture of the trans-Volga ferry terminus for the railroad to Kazakhstan. Around the approaches to the factories of Stalingrad, they had met constant and bloody rebuffs.

  One Russian woman, Olga Kovalova, dominated a section of the defenses protecting the tractor factory. Stalking the line, her head wrapped in a gaily colored kerchief, she screamed invective at militiamen whom she found derelict, clumsy, or incompetent. The men were used to her rough language. Olga had worked with them for twenty years, during which time she had become the first woman steel founder in the Soviet Union. Gruff and earthy, she had earned their respect and devotion.

  Her battalion commander, Sazakin, heard Olga badgering the workers and tried to get her out of the dangerous sector. “Olga,” he implored, “this is no place for a woman. Go back where you belong.”

  When she failed to respond, he ordered her to leave. Olga turned, fixed him with a malevolent stare and answered: “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Sazakin threw up his hands and left her alone. Hours later, he spied a colorful splotch of clothing in a clump of high grass and went to investigate. He found Olga lying on her back, the bright kerchief smeared with blood. Her left eye was missing. She had been dead for some time.

  Once again the Germans tried to stampede the civilian population. The Stukas came back to bomb the jammed embankment beside the main ferry landing. With no place to hide, the masses 1 there weaved back and forth like a pendulum, first close to the cliff wall for shelter and then out again when the Stukas dove past. Clusters of bombs found them and the shoreline was slippery with blood. Medical teams pulled the dead from the footpaths as the living pushed each other on to the boats that were to evacuate them. But the Stukas were sighting on them, too; they dropped to hundred-foot altitudes and machine-gunned the vessels.

  In the hazy sunlight of the warm afternoon, the Volga erupted in a chain of fierce explosions, and several boats of the rescue fleet broke apart and sank with almost no survivors. The surface of the river was soon dotted with bodies, bobbing lazily in the current that carried them downstream to a rendezvous with the Caspian Sea.

  There was no change in the pattern of fighting during the next three days. The Germans tried to consolidate their gains; Yeremenko’s troops fought desperately to hold their positions to the north and south of the city, but it was becoming increasingly clear that drastic measures would have to be taken if Stalingrad was to be saved. The pressure of the German assaults was wearing down the defenders.

  Late in the evening of August 27, a Red Army staff car sped from Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport across the city to the Kremlin. Inside sat Marshal Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov, a barrelchested, forty-six-year-old peasant. No stranger to crisis, in 1939 Zhukov had faced a surprise Japanese attack at the Khalkin Gol in Manchuria and won a tremendous victory over the vaunted Kwantung Army. That triumph earned him promotion at a time when Stalin was killing fifty percent of his Red Army officer corps in an orgy of paranoia. In September 1941, when Nazi tanks ringed Leningrad, Stalin sent him there to mastermind the defense. Zhukov raged around that city, executing derelict officers, sacking generals, molding a rigid discipline which helped the people of Leningrad brace and hold.

  Later, Zhukov again plunged into battle, this time in front of Moscow, where enemy panzers had broken through on the road from Smolensk and precipitated a disorderly evacuation of the capital by many government employees: Zhukov toured the lines, rallying demoralized divisions and creating an elastic defense which, when aided by the advent of a brutal winter, crippled the Wehrmacht west of Moscow.

  Now Stalin needed his special talents in the struggle for the Volga. Surrounded by members of STAVKA, the premier greeted Zhukov somberly and filled him in on developments around Stalingrad. Then he ordered the marshal to take personal charge of overall strategy in that crucial region.

  During the dinner that followed, Stalin outlined the temporary measures he had introduced to harass the enemy. He was bringing elements of three armies—the First Guards, the Twenty-fourth and Sixty-sixth—against the fragile blocking corridor the Germans had created from the Don to the Volga. But these piecemeal attacks had proven ineffectual, Stalin admitted; he wanted Zhukov to find a workable solution. Before the two men parted, Stalin told him he was giving him a new title, Deputy Supreme Commander of the Red Army, which made Zhukov second only to Stalin in rank.

  As the marshal prepared for his trip, he could not know that the first problem he would have to solve was the accelerating breakdown in morale among Russian troops. Few Russian soldiers believed the Germans could be stopped short of the Volga. Defeatism inf
ected the conversations of both headquarters staffs and enlisted men. The Germans themselves were amazed at the torrent of prisoners coming into their lines. OKW in East Prussia received a cable from Sixth Army stating that the battle value of enemy soldiers was judged to be very poor: “Many deserters, some even coming in… with their tanks.”

  Inside the perimeter of the newly arrived Soviet 64th Division, stationed twenty-five miles due north of Stalingrad, morale was particularly bad. A German air raid had leveled the field hospital, killing many of its nurses and doctors. Wounded men back from the battlefield told horrifying stories of enemy superiority, and these tales spread fear among the inexperienced troops. They started to slip away singly, in pairs, and finally, in large groups.

  With the division on the verge of dissolution before ever seeing combat, its commanding officer acted decisively to curb the epidemic. Calling a general assembly of regiments, he stood before them and berated them for shirking their duties to the Motherland. The colonel charged his men with the same guilt as those who had already run off and told them he intended to punish them for cowardice.

  His harangue ended, the colonel moved purposefully to the long lines of massed soldiers. A pistol in his right hand, he turned at the end of the first row and began counting in a loud voice: “One, two, three, four.” As he reached the tenth man, he wheeled and shot him in the head. As the victim crumpled to the ground, the colonel picked up the count again: “One, two, three….” At ten, he shot another man dead and continued his dreadful monologue: “One, two….”

  No one bolted. Nurses standing beside the formation sucked in their breath at the macabre scene. The colonel’s mournful voice stabbed at the troops, “… six, seven….” Men mentally guessed their place in line and prayed the colonel would finish before he got to them. When the last bullet in the revolver thudded into a man’s brain, the commander shoved the pistol back in his holster and walked away.

  An officer bellowed, “Dismiss!”

  The order ricocheted across the parade field, and soldiers broke from formation and scattered in all directions. Behind them six of their comrades lay in a neat pattern on the grass.

  Less than twenty miles south of this grotesque ceremony, the Germans clinging to the 16th Panzer Division hedgehog at the Volga faced annihilation. A Fourteenth Corps officer put it succinctly when he complained to Paulus: “If this situation continues, I can name the exact day when… we… will cease to exist.” He was complaining about the supplies that were still blocked by Soviet interference.

  A five-hundred-car freight train finally broke past Russian rail blocks on August 28, to deliver ammunition and food to the surrounded tankers. Its timely arrival saved the fiery General Hube an embarrassing moment. He had just agreed with irate staff members to pull back from the Volga and try to reach Sixth Army’s main lines back at the Don. In five days of fighting against the factory workers of Stalingrad, Hube had not been able to reach the tractor plant. But now, replenished with artillery and mortar shells, the general turned his heavy weapons back on the militia holding the balkas at the northern border of the city.

  In his underground bunker at Tsaritsa Gorge, Andrei Yeremenko scanned his maps, which told an ugly story. On his right flank, he had held Hube at bay with a motley collection of civilians and military units. But Stalin’s attempts to interdict the German corridor had failed, and the 3rd Motorized Division had finally linked up with the 16th Panzers to seal off an eighteen-mile stretch of steppe running from the Don to Stalingrad. Also, the 60th Motorized Division bringing up the rear was about to complete the junction of the German islands and completely block any further penetrations by Soviet troops coming down from the north to reinforce the city.

  In the center of Yeremenko’s front, the main body of Paulus’s Sixth Army was massing for a broad sweep over the steppe from Kalach east to the very heart of Stalingrad. And to hold this region, Yeremenko could count at best twenty-five thousand combat soldiers, the remnants of the battered Sixty-second Army, which was virtually destroyed in the Germans’ pincers in early August beyond the Don.

  Over on his left flank, southwest of the city, Yeremenko looked with some satisfaction at the defense line he had engineered in the low hills from Abganerovo on to Tinguta and Tundutovo. The line had brought German general “Papa” Hoth to the verge of apoplexy as Russian antitank guns pummeled his armor and decimated his grenadiers. But Yeremenko could not afford to relax about the situation there. In recent hours, his Intelligence had noted an ominous series of complicated troop movements behind the German lines. Opinion in the Tsaritsa Gorge was divided, but Yeremenko guessed that Hoth had lost patience with frontal assaults and was attempting to outflank the hill line, creating another pincers with Paulus in order to trap both the Sixty-second and Sixty-fourth Red Armies outside Stalingrad. If he succeeded, the battle for Stalingrad would end within days.

  Yeremenko was right, but only to a degree. Hoth had lost patience with the discouraging and costly direct approach to Stalingrad. With a swollen casualty list preying on his mind, he formulated a radical maneuver, a sideslip around the enemy. Pulling his tanks and armored infantry out of the line by night, he regrouped them thirty miles to the west. To confound Russian spies, he replaced the withdrawn divisions with new units to maintain a semblance of continuity.

  But Hoth’s plans were not as grandiose as Yeremenko envisioned, at least not in the beginning. The horse-faced general merely wanted to roll up the Russian hill system from the flank and, given extraordinary luck, perhaps pin the Russian Sixty-fourth Army against the Volga south of Stalingrad.

  On the evening of August 29, Hoth unleashed his panzers north through Abganerovo and onto the steppe for twenty incredible miles. The thrust confirmed Yeremenko’s opinion that Hoth intended to meet Paulus out on the steppe, and he quickly authorized the painful withdrawal of his divisions from their positions south and southwest of the city. Unlike previous Soviet command decisions of the first months of the war, this one would save whole armies for another day, even though it entailed the possible loss of Stalingrad.

  The retreat wrought terrible confusion. At 10:00 P.M. that same day, the Russian 126th Division received its order to pull back. When some regiments left ahead of others, a headlong flight began. Flanking divisions melted into the night. On the morning of August 30, the German 29th Motorized Division intercepted thousands of enemy soldiers wandering the steppe. The commander of the Russian 208th Division surrendered with his entire staff. Trucks, tanks, and hundreds of artillery pieces dropped into German hands without a fight.

  “Papa” Hoth had unlocked the door to Stalingrad. Astounded at the sudden Russian collapse, he revised his goals and now sought what Yeremenko had mistakenly believed he always planned to do. He sent his panzers north to meet Paulus’s tanks coming from the corridor to the Volga. Army Group B Headquarters informed Friedrich von Paulus of the golden opportunity offered by the bold gambit: “In view of the fact that Fourth Panzer Army gained a bridgehead at Gavrilovka at 1000 hours today, everything now depends on Sixth Army concentrating the strongest possible forces…and launching an attack in a generally southerly direction…”

  Inexplicably, Paulus did not move. Harried by the suicidal Russian attempts to break his thin corridor to the Volga, he refused to rush troops south for a linkup. Crucial hours passed. Another urgent cable went out to Paulus. Again he failed to respond. And while the German High Command tried to move its pincers, Andrei Yeremenko pulled back more than twenty thousand Russian soldiers on the steppe between the Don and Stalingrad.

  Ever since he had ordered the destruction of the bridge at Kalach, Col. Pyotr Ilyin had held his position in the orchard on the southeastern edge of the town. With his ammunition running low, and only a hundred men left in his command, he had been unable to keep the Germans from crossing the Don by boat. During this period he had not received any new orders, but on the night of August 28, the Stalingrad radio finally contacted him. A hesitant voice from Sixty-second
Army Headquarters asked, “Is that you, Comrade Ilyin? Where are you?”

  “Yes, it’s me. We’re in Kalach.”

  “In Kalach? The Germans are there.” The voice was incredulous.

  Ilyin tried to explain how he was still holding out, even though Capt. Gerhard Meunch’s battalion had forded the Don and seized the old part of the town. The voice on the radio told him to wait a minute. Ilyin listened to the static, then the voice on the radio came back with another question: “Tell me, Comrade Ilyin, where is your command post?” Realizing the voice was trying to trap him, he immediately pinpointed his location, and was showered with congratulations for fighting so well. Then headquarters broke off the conversation.

  Three nights later, as Yeremenko began disengaging his troops from the steppe, the voice called Ilyin again and told him to give up the orchard and make a run for the Volga. Within hours, his brigade stole out of Kalach in a thirty-eight-truck convoy. When the Germans sensed movement in the dark, they blazed away at the sound and Ilyin stood in the road, exchanging shots with Meunch’s battalion. Then he leaped into a car and rode off safely to Stalingrad.

  On September 2, Paulus finally agreed to the southward drive toward Hoth, and within hours, the jaws of the pincers snapped shut. But Paulus had waited too long. Most of the Russian troops on the steppe had escaped into Stalingrad, and his seventy-two hours of indecision had given the enemy another chance to fight. Now the battle would be in the streets of Stalingrad, where blitzkrieg tactics were useless.

  Chapter Eight

  On September 3, Joseph Stalin sent a telegram to Marshal Zhukov at Malaya Ivanovka on the western bank of the Volga, fifty miles due north of Stalingrad: