Enemy at the Gates

by William Craig

  When they left, Mrs. Kornilov scrawled the word “Typhus” on a board and had Natasha put it up on the door. The ruse backfired. Within hours, a German medical team saw the sign and set fire to the supposedly plague-ridden home. As flames danced around her, Natasha dragged her crippled mother into the backyard and into a concrete storage shack. There, under a thin blanket on the cold floor, the Kornilovs listened to the gunfire from the direction of Red Square and wondered whether anyone would come to their rescue.

  On September 17, with Germans pressing in from north and south of the Tsaritsa Gorge, Vassili Chuikov had to seek a new home. All during the day, while bullets ricocheted off rocks and shells exploded outside the Pushkinskaya Street entrance to the bunker, the headquarters staff of the Sixty-second Army scrambled away toward the main ferry. At midnight, Chuikov and his personal assistants went across the Volga to Krasnaya Sloboda, where they took hot baths and relaxed with food and drink.

  As the hours passed, Chuikov failed to notice the sunrise. Suddenly panic-stricken, he and his men raced out to catch the ferry back to Stalingrad. The last boat was leaving the dock and Chuikov sprinted ahead. With a running leap, he fell on board and identified himself to the startled helmsman, who returned to pick up the rest of the army staff at the dock.

  Several hours later, Chuikov set up a new headquarters five miles north of the Tsaritsa Gorge. Just a trench with some boards over it, it was in an open space between the Red October and Barrikady plants. On a slope above their bunker was an oil tank farm and a concrete oil reservoir. According to everyone familiar with the area, the tanks were empty.

  At Sixth Army Headquarters in Golubinka, forty miles west of Stalingrad, German newspapermen badgered Gen. Friedrich von Paulus for permission to flash word home that the city had been taken.

  Smiling cheerfully, Paulus parried their queries, saying, “Any time now, any time.”

  But in his stifling quarters, the general played his gramophone, smoked endless quantities of cigarettes, and tried to calm his stomach, which was churning with dysentery; he had lost most of his hopes for a quick victory.

  In Germany, some newspapers printed a special edition with a banner headline: “Stalingrad Gefallen!” The papers were bundled for distribution, then held at the last moment while Goebbels’s ministry sought confirmation from Paulus. He could not give it.

  In Stalingrad’s main railroad station, west of Red Square, Lt. Anton Dragan’s company was enduring ferocious bombing that blew down the walls and buckled the iron girders. When the Germans surrounded him on three sides, Dragan took his men across the street to another building, the nail factory, from which he commanded a good view of the intersection leading east to the Volga.

  Barely settled in a workshop, Dragan took stock of his supplies and realized he had no food, little ammunition, and no water. In a frantic search for something to quench their thirst, the Russians fired machine guns into drain pipes to see if any liquid remained. There was not a drop.

  From the Tsaritsa Gorge to the slopes of Mamaev Hill, the German 295th and 71st divisions were suffering from Chuikov’s renewed strength. The 71st’s Division’s Intelligence Chief, Col. Gunter von Below, whose brother Nikolaus served Hitler as air attaché, walked through the devastation near the main railroad station and found it difficult to comprehend the enormity of the destruction. As he carefully sidestepped debris, a master sergeant came up to him and pleaded, “What am I going to do? I have only nine men left.” Colonel Below sat beside the distraught man on a curb and they discussed the toll the Russians had taken of the sergeant’s company in past hours. After a while, the sergeant calmed down and went back to his nine soldiers. Günter von Below remained, staring at the ruins. Thoroughly shaken, he wondered whether the Russians would collapse before his own division ran out of men.

  Günter von Below’s main antagonists, the soldiers of the 13th Guards Division, lay in heaps from Mamaev to Red Square. Nearly six thousand guardsmen had been killed, but they had bought the Russians several days of precious time.

  One of the fortresses which had slowed the German timetable was the huge grain elevator, whose cement silos rose high on the plain just south of the Tsaritsa Gorge. For nearly a week, since September 14, a group of less than fifty able-bodied Russians had holed up in the corrugated metal side tower, and defied the guns of three Nazi divisions. Reinforced on the night of September 17 by Lt. Andrei Khoyzyanov and a platoon of marines dressed in striped shirts and navy hats, the garrison fought with renewed spirit, the men joking with each other while shells whistled through their hideout.

  Once a German tank had approached and, under a white flag, an officer and interpreter cautiously asked for their surrender to the “heroic German Army.” The Russians shouted, “Go to hell!” warning the intruders to leave the tank behind and get out. When the Germans tried to jump into the vehicle, the marines blew it up.

  For the next three days, German artillery pounded the stronghold, set the grain on fire with incendiary shells, and riddled the tower itself with high explosives. German infantrymen broke in and crept up the stairs, but the defenders managed to drive them back with knives, fists, and bullets.

  Now, on the night of September 20, the exhausted garrison was almost out of ammunition, and the water supply had been used up completely. In a frantic search for something to drink, Lt. Khoyzyanov led his men out the tower door, across the field, a main road, and into a gully, where they stumbled on an enemy mortar battery. In the resulting melee, the startled Germans fled, leaving behind gallons of ice-cold water that the marines gulped down gratefully.

  Completely dehydrated, Khoyzyanov suddenly felt faint from the water and collapsed on the ground. When he woke up, he was in a dark cellar. The shoe was gone from his right foot; his shirt was off. His head felt light and he could not move his arms and legs. Standing guard over him was a soldier from the German 14th Panzer Division. The grain elevator he had defended so heroically had passed into enemy hands. The Germans quickly put out the fires and saved most of the wheat, which would be significant in weeks to come.

  A mile to the north, in another Russian strongpoint just off Red Square, Anton Dragan still occupied the nail factory. But when a Russian woman, Maria Vadeneyeva, ran through machine-gun fire to tell him the Germans were bringing up tanks, he knew his hours there were numbered.

  On September 21, Dragan came under intense pressure. Enemy tanks and planes battered the building and forced a wedge between his company and the rest of the 1st Battalion of the 13th Guards, strung out across Red Square. By late afternoon, Dragan was nearly cut off from his countrymen.

  At the Univermag Department Store, the Germans concentrated on battalion headquarters and killed nearly every Russian there. Dragan tried to send help, but the headquarters had been demolished and the staff annihilated. Dragan then took command of the battalion and sent a courier back to the Volga with a message for Colonel Yelin, the regimental commander. The courier died on the way, and in the 42nd Regiment bunker on the Volga shoreline. Yelin marked the entire 1st Battalion destroyed somewhere in the area of Red Square.

  But Dragan was still alive. Leading his troops from building to building, he gave ground only when the Germans set fire to his hiding places. The battle raged past the fountain with its statues of children dancing in a circle around a crocodile, past Pravda, the City Soviet, the theater, and the bodies hanging in the hedges around the obelisk commemorating the fallen from the Civil War of 1918. At the intersection of Krasnopiterskaya and Komsomolskaya streets, Dragan brought the remnants of his shattered battalion into the basement of a three-storey apartment house. Scattering the surviving forty men around window openings, he sat behind a heavy machine gun and waited to die.

  From the far-off Urals, more reinforcements had been rushed to the beleaguered city. And from the farthest reaches of Siberia, the 284th Division, under Col. Nikolai Batyuk, came with orders to move to the Volga crossing.

  A Ukrainian of medium height, slim, with dark h
air combed straight back, Batyuk suffered from a serious circulatory ailment and frequently had to be carried on the back of one of his aides. He did this only at night so his troops would not be aware of his weakness. An obviously determined man, on arrival he told Chuikov: “I came here to fight the Nazis, not for a parade.”

  Few in Batyuk’s division wanted this battle. Mostly raw recruits, they were willing to fight the Nazis—but not at Stalingrad. Lt. Pyotr Deriabin agreed. Already badly wounded at Moscow, he had no illusions about what awaited his men in the burning city.

  At Krasnofimsk, in the Urals, a hard core of veterans like Deriabin had taught their skills to eighteen- and nineteen-year-old boys, most of whom were Orientals from the Mongolian border area and had never seen a German. Then they marched and drove nearly seven hundred miles westward, chewing the roots of the smolka plant, a licorce-tasting substitute for gum, and gulping down whatever vodka they could find on the way. At Kamyshin they gorged on watermelon, the best grown in Russia and the pride of the town, then climbed into Studebaker trucks, which transported them the rest of the way to the Volga.

  They began crossing the river on the misty morning of September 22. It was hours before the first group landed in the fiery city, and though German planes pounded them they survived the run in good shape. Deriabin tumbled into the Dolgy Ravine, and promptly fell into a troubled sleep. When he awoke, he went on to the Lazur Chemical Plant in the middle of the railroad loop between the riverbank and the slopes of Mamaev Hill, where the Germans were fighting furiously with the 13th Guards. The crest had changed hands countless times, but the Germans were still able to look down the throats of the new men from the 284th as they took position.

  Alexei Petrov came across the Volga and was assigned to the northern sector near Latashanka. For ten days he had been given hurried instructions in the use of a .122-millimeter cannon, but with time running out, the exasperated instructor finally told him to teach himself. As best he could, Petrov mastered the techniques of firing the heavy weapon that had a range of nearly six miles.

  The squat, wavy-haired sergeant had spent months as a construction worker in Kuibyshev before being drafted. There he unexpectedly met his brother, who told him the rest of his family— his mother, father, and sister—had been swallowed up in the Ukraine by the German advance. They had not been heard from in more than a year.

  When ordered into Stalingrad, Petrov went to the dock and saw that the other shore of the Volga was a solid wall of flames. Though scared to death, he knew he would go across. But other Russians would not, and Petrov watched as NKVD guards fired in the air over the deserters, and then killed them when they ran from the landing. After Alexei climbed on board the barge, the NKVD took no further chances. Guards lined the rails to prevent anyone from jumping overboard.

  Bombers came over, seeking out the steamers and tugs. German mortars behind Mamaev reached out for them, and Petrov cursed the slowness of the voyage as the river froze in a midday tableau. Feeling trapped and vulnerable, he crouched down to hide from shrapnel singing by his ears. Men slipped off the sides to drown. Bullets thudded into flesh and soldiers sagged against neighbors and died without a word. Petrov saw the Volga water clearly. It was a swirling mixture of water and bright red blood.

  His boat took nearly two hours to reach a landing site under the cliff. While the dead covered the deck, the living scrambled off. Nearly half of Petrov’s regiment had died crossing the river.

  Because most of his unit was already dead, he now had to fight as an infantryman. His baptism to war was brutal. Three scouts went ahead to gauge German strength. Two came back. Petrov picked up his field glasses and scanned no-man’s-land for the missing man.

  He was out there, spread-eagled on the ground. The Germans had thrust a bayonetted rifle into his stomach and left him face up in the open. Petrov and his squad went berserk. Screaming hoarsely, they jumped from their holes and ran forward. Bursting into a line of houses, they killed anyone who rose before them. When several Germans raised their hands in surrender, Petrov squeezed the trigger of his tommy gun and killed them all.

  He came to an elderly Russian soldier, bending over a woman. Her jet black hair streaming back in a carefully arranged way, she seemed to be sleeping. The man was moaning softly: “Dear girl, dear girl, why should a young person like you have to die in such a war?”

  Alexei Petrov stood beside the couple and cried bitterly as he looked down at the beautiful woman. Then he ran off to kill her tormentors.

  In the hallway of a house, he listened to a German wailing in one of the downstairs rooms. The soldier prayed: “Oh God, let me live after this war.” Petrov rammed the door open and saw a kneeling man who looked up at him pleadingly. Petrov fired into his face.

  Wild-eyed, he went from floor to floor, smashing open doors, looking for gray green uniforms. The pounding brought Germans out of different rooms; Petrov shot three more as they ran down the stairs.

  Exhausted, his anger eased. The house became very still. He stepped over the bodies on the stairway and went out the front door to find his own men.

  During the afternoon of September 23, another contingent from the 284th Division set out from the far shore on barges. Twenty-year-old Tania Chernova found space at the edge of a barge and sat down with her knees against her chest for the grim ride. Some of the 150 soldiers on board pleaded with the perky blond to move into the middle of the group and share some vodka. But she tossed her head in reply and stayed where she was.

  Tania had not wanted to be a soldier. As a child she had worn ballet slippers and practiced pirouettes; later, she had studied medicine. But when the Germans invaded Russia, Tania forgot her dreams of becoming a doctor, and embarked on a relentless war against the enemy, whom she always referred to as “sticks” that one broke because she refused to think of them as human beings.

  As a partisan, she had broken several “sticks” in the forests of Byelorussia and the Ukraine. The experience had hardened her outlook on life, and she looked forward with enthusiasm to renewing her vendetta in Stalingrad.

  The sky suddenly filled with red and orange balls of flame as the barge struggled laboriously through ugly water spouts toward a landing point somewhere near the Red October Plant. Tania started talking to two men, one about fifty and the other more her age, when a German plane dropped a bomb squarely in the center of the craft. Tania and her two comrades flew into the water and came up swimming for the Stalingrad shore. As they fought to stay afloat, the current carried them further downstream. Tania finally dragged herself onto a sandbar on the west bank of the river and ducked into a sewer outlet. The other two soldiers followed. They had no idea where they were or who controlled the land above them.

  Hoping to find an exit in safe territory, the three walked on in the blackened sewer. Their footsteps echoed hollowly as they felt their way. The stench made them gag; excrement clung to their shoes and pants. When the old man fainted, Tania and her friend dragged him for a while, but exhausted and nauseous themselves, they left him lying in the filth.

  Finally they climbed out of a manhole somewhere in the city. Tania saw a group of soldiers, mess tins in hand, lining up in front of a building. Famished, they got in line. A soldier turned around, his nose wrinkling in disgust, “What in God’s name is that smell?” He spoke in German. Tania decided to bluff her way through. Pretending not to hear him, she kept her place.

  In the mess hall, Tania and her companion sat side by side with Germans who complained bitterly about the sickening aroma. Somebody shouted, “What is that rotten stench?” Tania wrinkled her nose, too. A German officer suddenly recognized her as a Russian. Before he could react, a Russian cook rushed over to assure him she worked for the German Army. The officer ordered the two out, but the friendly cook took them into the kitchen and fed them. The German came back again and demanded they leave because they stank so badly.

  Still defiant, the two pariahs calmly walked out of the mess hall and searched for the Russian l
ines. At nightfall they crawled through no-man’s-land and met their countrymen, who gave them clean clothes, a drink, and new rifles.

  The German 71st Division continued to advance slowly toward the main ferry. Only a few places like the Dragan strongpoint still held out, and they made the cost frightful. On the morning of September 25, at the intersection of Krasnopeterskoya Street, Dragan had ten men left. During the previous night, two of his twelve men had deserted. A lieutenant and a private slipped out, ran down to the river, and made off on a raft. Only the lieutenant reached headquarters on the other side. Anxious to cover his tracks and convinced that the 1st Battalion was doomed, he reported everyone dead and said he personally had buried Anton Dragan near the Volga.

  But in his fortress, Anton Dragan was munching burned grain and waiting for the Germans to rush him. They came again and Dragan’s men threw their last grenades and heaved bricks through the windows. When the sound of a tank motor suddenly was heard, Dragan sent a soldier out with an antitank rifle and the last three shells. The Germans quickly seized him.

  An hour later, an enemy platoon appeared directly in front of Dragan’s machine gun. Immediately assuming the captured man had told the Germans this was the defenders’ blindspot, Dragan fired his last 250 bullets at the enemy. Finally out of ammunition and wounded in the hand by return fire, he propped himself up and stared numbly at the rows of dead men in the street.

  Shortly afterward, the nine Russian holdouts heard some Germans calling to them from outside. When they peeked out, they saw their captured comrade being pushed onto a pile of debris. While the First Battalion looked on, a German shot him in the head.

  Shaking hands and embracing, the nine Russians in the house said good-bye to each other. Dragan’s orderly laboriously scratched on a wall, “Rodimtsev’s guardsmen fought and died for their country here.” German tanks, black and squat, came around a corner and fired directly into the building. Something hit Dragan in the head and he passed out. When he woke up it was dark and his orderly was grabbing at him.