Enemy at the Gates

by William Craig

  Following their orders of the night before, Marshals Vasilevsky and Zhukov were again closeted with Stalin. After shaking hands with them, an unusual thing for the premier to do, Stalin launched into an attack on his Allies, “Tens and hundreds of thousands of Soviet people are giving their lives in the fight against Fascism, and Churchill is haggling over twenty Hurricanes. And those Hurricanes aren’t even that good. Our pilots don’t like them.”

  Without pausing, Stalin asked, “Well, what did you come up with? Who’s making the report?”

  “Either of us,” Vasilevsky said. “We are of the same opinion.”

  Stalin looked at their map and asked, “What have you got here?”

  “These are our preliminary notes for a counteroffensive at Stalingrad,” Vasilevsky answered.

  Zhukov and Vasilevsky then took turns explaining their idea: after breaking through both the German flank defenses a hundred miles northwest of the city along the Don River, and fifty miles south of the city around the Tzatza chain of salt lakes, two Russian pincers would then meet near the town of Kalach. Hopefully they would trap most of Paulus’s Sixth Army in the forty-mile-wide land bridge between the Don and Volga.

  Stalin objected, “Aren’t you extending your striking forces too far?” When the marshals disagreed with him, he said, “We will have to think about this some more and see what our resources are.”

  While they argued the merits of the bold plan, General Yeremenko called from Yamy on the BODO line and Stalin listened intently to the news that the Germans were entering Stalingrad from the west and south.

  When Stalin hung up, he turned to Vasilevsky. “Issue orders immediately to have Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards Division cross the Volga and see what else you can send across the river tomorrow.”

  The three men parted with this warning from the premier. “…We will talk about our plan later. No one except the three of us is to know about it.”

  On the morning of September 14, the German 71st Division entered downtown Stalingrad on a two-mile-wide front. Captain Gerhard Meunch personally led the 3rd Battalion, 194th Infantry Regiment, as it tried to cross several city blocks and gain the river front. Until now, his men had suffered mostly from the heat or occasional Russian rear guards, and Meunch thought their chances of reaching the Volga before nightfall were excellent.

  But once they reached the congested avenues of the city, casualties rose sharply. From third- and fourth-floor windows, snipers riddled the columns, and hidden light artillery blew gaps in the ranks. The Germans found few places to hide, for they always had to force the battle and dig the enemy from the ruins of buildings.

  Still, by 2:00 P.M., the Third Battalion had closed to within a few hundred yards of the main railroad station just off Red Square, and Meunch received orders to seize the ferry landing at the Volga. Despite mounting losses, he was still confident. His men had captured several Russian couriers running through the streets with handwritten messages. Sensing that the Soviet Sixtysecond Army’s telephone communications had broken down, and that it was now increasingly dependent on isolated small groups to contain the Germans, Meunch assumed that his depleted battalion could manage the last half mile toward their goal.

  Meunch’s estimate of enemy problems was amazingly accurate. General Chuikov was in a desperate situation. Back again in the underground bunker at Tsaritsa Gorge, he had just been told that the 13th Guards Division would come to his aid and cross the river that night. But in the meantime, he had to find enough troops to hold the main ferry landing. Without the ferry, the center of Stalingrad was sure to fall.

  Around 4:00 P.M., Chuikov called in Colonel Sarayev, the NKVD garrison commander. General Krylov had already warned Chuikov about Sarayev’s attitude: “He considers himself indispensable and does not like carrying out the army’s orders.”

  When Sarayev arrived in the bunker, Chuikov sized up his guest and dealt with him bluntly, “Do you understand that your division has been incorporated into the Sixty-second Army and that you have to accept the authority of the Army Military Council?” When Sarayev grumbled and looked annoyed, Chuikov made the ultimate threat. “Do you want me to telephone the Front Military Council to clarify the position?”

  Faced with a reprimand or worse from Yeremenko and Khrushchev, Sarayev caved in and humbly answered, “I am a soldier of the Sixty-second Army.”

  Chuikov sent him to organize his fifteen hundred militiamen into squads of ten and twenty in strategic buildings in the heart of the city. These “storm groups” were his answer to the German superiority in troops, artillery, and planes—especially planes. Throwing away the Red Army textbook on tactics, he was substituting an idea he had first conceived on the steppe, where he watched enemy blitzkrieg tactics against the Sixty-fourth Soviet Army, and became convinced that he could not compete against German firepower. He countered by creating a series of minifortresses, commanding various street intersections. The small storm groups could act as “breakwaters,” funneling Nazi panzers into approach roads already registered on by Russian artillery. When the tanks lumbered along these predictable routes, they would face a murderous fire from heavy weapons. With the tanks bogged down, the storm group could then deal with German infantry, exposed behind the flaming armor. And by fighting at such close range, the storm groups also eliminated the threat of the German Luftwaffe. Afraid to bomb their own troops, the Stukas and Ju-88s would be unable to attack the Soviet strong-points.

  A mere half mile northeast of Chuikov’s bunker, a group of NKVD soldiers braced for the final German thrust to the river. Drawn up in an arc around the main ferry, the sixty soldiers waited for their commander, Colonel Petrakov, to return from a scouting mission along Pensenskaya Street. To figure out where the enemy was trying to break through, Petrakov and two aides walked as far north as the Ninth of January Square. The roar of small-arms fire was rolling over them from a distance, but they had neither seen a German nor heard any close-range shooting. The square was deserted, and Petrakov stood beside an abandoned car to assess his situation.

  Submachine-gun bullets suddenly whistled through the car windows, forcing Petrakov to duck for cover. Almost instantly German shells exploded up and down the square and he was knocked unconscious. Rescued by his men, he awoke in a tunnel at the edge of the Volga where he lay under an overcoat and heard that the Germans had rushed for the river and taken a series of buildings near the shore. From the House of Specialists (an apartment house for engineers), from the five-storey State Bank, and from the beer factory, the Germans were hollering: “Rus, Rus, Volga bul-bul!” (“Russians will drown in the Volga!”).

  Petrakov staggered to the tunnel entrance and looked out at the river for some sign of the 13th Guards Division. But the time for their crossing was still hours away and he had to keep the Germans from the ferry until then.

  When a small Russian boy wandered into the tunnel, the curious Petrakov asked his name. “Kolia,” he replied and told the colonel that the enemy had sent him to spy on Russian strength between the House of Specialists and the Volga. Petrakov smiled and asked Kolia to tell him instead about the Germans. Kolia knew exactly who his captors were: the 1st Battalion, 194th Infantry Regiment, 71st Division, commanded by a Captain Ginderling. Protecting Gerhard Meunch’s left flank, Ginderling was also trying to sweep to the main ferry before dark.

  As dusk approached, Ginderling sent his troops from the beer factory toward the ferry pier, just 750 yards away. Petrakov’s sixty men formed a skirmish line around the landing, fighting hard although their ammunition was dangerously low. Suddenly .a motorboat appeared from across the Volga carrying cases of ammunition and grenades. Resupplied, Petrakov’s NKVD soldiers now prepared to counterattack. The colonel had found a .76-millimeter gun on a side street, and while he tried to learn its parts, he issued the order to move out when he fired the fifth shot from his new artillery piece.

  Petrakov aimed the weapon at the State Bank, loaded the first shell very carefully and shot directly into the
cement building. As he readied another round, a launch chugged in behind him carrying men of the 13th Guards. But the Germans had seen them, too, and the launch was quickly surrounded by explosions.

  Bracketed by gunfire, Colonel Yelin, commander of the Guards’ 42nd Regiment, jumped off the boat into knee-deep water and ran up the embankment. When he met Petrakov, and heard that he was firing at the State Bank, Yelin angrily told him to stop because his own men were about to storm the building for handto- hand combat. The situation was still perilous, but no Russian was aware of one significant fact: the Germans attempting to drown them in the river were themselves on the verge of collapse.

  Near the railroad station, Captain Meunch counted his ranks and realized that the one day’s fighting in Stalingrad had cost him most of his battalion. Almost two hundred of his men lay dead or wounded on the streets leading to Red Square. Now the railroad station was an even more deadly obstacle. Although the Russians had not yet occupied it in strength, Meunch was instinctively afraid of it. Hidden inside its vast network of tracks, cabooses, and freight cars, a small group of snipers could tear his reduced force to pieces.

  He decided to bypass it and called in an air strike. It came quickly. But the Stukas missed the target and dropped their bombs in the midst of Meunch’s troops.

  As darkness fell, the captain assembled his battalion in the U-shaped, unfinished Government House where, from the terrace, he first saw the Volga. He made another head count and found he had less than fifty men left to take the ferry. Recognizing that his 3rd Battalion no longer had the power to accomplish that on its own, Meunch told his soldiers to take cover and settle in for the night.

  Barely five hundred yards from Meunch’s U-shaped building, the 13th Guards were now ashore in strength. Two regiments and one battalion from another regiment made it across the Volga through the shellfire, landed, and ran up the gradual incline directly into battle. In the dark, the Russians got lost and stumbled over the wreckage of previous days, but they managed to form a defense line before dawn.

  On Mamaev Hill, squads and platoons dug frantically into the side of the former picnic grounds. But the German 295th Division had already taken the crest where two green water towers provided a sheltered command post. The noise on Mamaev was dreadful. One Russian soldier likened it to two steel needles pressing in on his eardrums and reaching into the brain. The sky was ripped by explosions that turned faces a dull red, and to Colonel Yelin it seemed everyone was about to die.

  Somehow the Russians managed to hold the hillside. Casualties were enormous. Yelin had to send in men piecemeal to fill holes torn in the line. Soldiers never knew their comrades’ names before dying together in the scooped-out ground.

  At his headquarters, Chuikov tried to gauge the situation on the hill, but could not because of contradictory information. He also had other problems. His command post along the Tsaritsa Gorge was under siege. At the Pushkinskaya Street entrance, messengers and staff ran in and out. Some men entered just to escape the bullets and shells tearing through the air. The heat in the bunker was unbearable. Drenched with sweat, several times Chuikov walked out into the fresh air to maintain his equilibrium. German machine-gunners fired close to him, but he did not mind. The bedlam inside the shelter seemed worse.

  From the meadowland on the far shore of the Volga, the commander of the 13th Guards was about to cross into Stalingrad. Thirty-six-year-old Gen. Alexander Ilyich Rodimtsev was no stranger to war. Under the pseudonym “Pavlito Geshos,” he had gone to Spain in 1936 and fought with the Loyalists against Franco. Named a Hero of the Soviet Union for that exploit, he now paced the river’s edge and could not believe what he saw. On the western bank, Stalingrad burned brightly in the sunrise of September 15; the boats carrying his troops to the city were being chopped to pieces by artillery fire. While Rodimtsev watched, one craft was suddenly engulfed in smoke and then an ear-splitting explosion spread out from it for a hundred yards. When fountains of water fell back into the river, the boat and its sixty-five occupants had vanished.

  Rodimtsev and his staff boarded their own launch and crouched below the gunwales as it backed slowly into the current. Shrapnel beat against the wood and geysers of spray washed over them from near misses. But the launch made it to the main ferry and Rodimtsev jumped off and ran north a quarter mile to his command post in Colonel Petrakov’s old tunnel, a poorly ventilated corridor with a ceiling formed from old planks. As dirt showered down on him from explosions, Rodimtsev met his advance party and learned that the Germans seemed to be trying to seize three miles of riverfront, from Tsaritsa Gorge up to Mamaev Hill.

  Anxious to report to Chuikov, the general took five staff officers with him, ran down the embankment to the ferry landing, then cut west for a half mile into the underground bunker in the gorge. In that brief journey, shells killed three of his companions.

  Chuikov embraced the dirt-covered Rodimtsev and made him sit down while the guards commander quickly briefed him on the status of the reinforcements. Most of his division was already across, but they were short about two thousand rifles. After Chuikov arranged to fill this need from army reserves, he asked Rodimtsev how he felt about the terrible assignment he had been given.

  “I am a Communist,” he replied. “I have no intention of abandoning the city.”

  Chapter Ten

  Soldiers scurried about in a harsh light of raging fires and bursting flares that illuminated the scene like mid-morning on a summer’s day. Vassili Chuikov anxiously prowled around the Pushkinskaya Street entrance of his bunker to get a breath of air. Spotting an officer, he called out, “Lieutenant, where are your men?” Anton Kuzmich Dragan told the general that he commanded the 1st Company, 1st Battalion, 42nd Regiment, 13th Guards. Chuikov gave him a terrifying order, “Hold the main railroad station.”

  Dragan dutifully assembled his troops and moved toward the concrete terminal just west of Red Square. They came under vicious crossfire from several buildings and Dragan realized that the Germans were in the station ahead of him. But he kept on, creeping to the left, moving closer to the terminal. After a series of whispered instructions, Dragan and his men rushed the building. Grenades exploded, machine-gun tracers split the darkness and suddenly the Germans were gone. The Russians swiftly scattered into the maze of freight cars and cabooses and waited for the dawn. They had no idea that the Germans around them were suffering sixty percent casualties.

  When the Germans burst into the residential section of the city, they came too fast for some civilians. The ferries had evacuated most of the population, including Anastasia Modina and her orphans, stationmaster Viskov and his wife, and Pravda editor Vodolagin, but some three thousand inhabitants still remained.

  In the suburb of Dar Goya, the advance caught hundreds of these noncombatants in their homes. Among them was fifteenyear- old Sacha Fillipov and his family. While his parents and tenyear- old brother stayed inside their house, the diminutive, frail

  Sacha went out to fraternize with the enemy. A master cobbler from his training at trade school, Sacha introduced himself to German officers occupying a nearby building and offered his services to them. Amused at the thought of someone so young .and delicate having such a skill, the Germans promised him work soling army boots.

  Sacha returned home that night with the news that he was going to work for the enemy. He did not tell his parents that he had also contacted Russian intelligence officers and arranged to spy on German headquarters in Dar Goya.

  Mrs. Katrina Karmanova was also caught by the swift German advance. She had lingered at home for days, carrying valuables to the backyard for burial. Silver, jewelry, family heirlooms, all were dumped into a hole and covered over. Now, with her son Genn, she listened to the sounds of machine guns at the end of the block and knew she had waited too long to leave.

  An artillery shell exploded on the roof, setting the house on fire; she and Genn ran next door and hid behind a sofa in the parlor. Grenades popped outside and then a fiery string of t
racer bullets flew through the room. Genn suddenly cried out, “Don’t be afraid, Mother. Please pull the bullet out of my arm!”

  With trembling fingers, Mrs. Karmanova picked at the metal and finally removed it. Ripping off a piece of her slip, she fashioned a crude bandage and then shouted: “Let’s get out or we’ll be killed.”

  They ran into the street and fell into a zig-zag trench beside Russian soldiers and civilians. A little girl lay huddled up, her body punctured with shrapnel. She screamed and screamed: “Find my mama before I die.”

  Mrs. Karmanova could not bear it. As she crouched under a hail of bullets and tried to block out the sounds of the dying child, she saw a family dart from shelter and run toward the river. At the same moment, a German sniper tracked them and quickly killed the son, the father, and then the mother. The sole survivor, a little girl, paused in bewilderment over her mother’s body. In the trench, Russian soldiers cupped their hands and hollered, “Run! Run!” Others took up the cry. The girl hesitated, then bolted from the corpses into the darkness. The German sniper did not fire again.

  Throughout the night, Mrs. Karmanova and Genn stayed in the trench. A few yards away, rescuers frantically tried to save several soldiers buried alive by a shellburst. At dawn on September 16, during a temporary lull, she and Genn jumped up and ran to the Volga. The Germans let them go.

  In their wooden cottage, eleven-year-old Natasha Kornilov and her mother were not as lucky. Wounded days previously by bomb fragments, they lay helpless while German soldiers broke down the front door and stood over them with machine guns. The woman thought they were about to be raped, but the Germans ignored them and ransacked the house for pots, pans, food, even bedding.