Enemy at the Gates

by William Craig

  One officer refused to talk of what might be. Instead, he announced that the trip was merely an exquisite torture conceived by the Russians, who would keep the train going endlessly until all its passengers died. It seemed that way. Just once a day, guards pulled the door open to give them a hunk of black bread and a bucket of water.

  While the thirstiest howled for more than their share, Bracci and his friends carefully watched a soldier whittle the frozen bread into equal portions. The men never took their eyes off the knife as it shaved and jabbed the rock-like meal. Carefully handed out to groups of five, the bread was consumed immediately and then, in the dim light that seeped through cracks, the Italians rocked along in contemplative silence.

  As the miles and days passed, each man attended to his bodily needs in a corner and a cone-shaped mound of excrement rose slowly, a daily calendar recording the length of the trip. The excrement was always gray, the color of the bread, their only sustenance.

  Bracci slept as much as he could. But when he was awake, he thought often about his captors and he was torn by his feelings toward the Russian guards. In their strange dress, they looked like big wicked apes. Boisterous, crude, they showed no trace of sensitivity. Yet, Bracci knew that out on the lonely steppe of southern Russia, their women and children suffered, too. Like him, they loved and laughed, cried and bled. But the men who guarded the trail from Kalmikov and rode the train to prison camp as jailers were not the same, could not be related to those Russians who generously gave him food during the march. To these guards, the Italians were “mere objects"; not men, not slaves. They were nothing.

  The prisoners’ train moved due north, toward Moscow and beyond. Behind it, on the road Bracci had marched along earlier, lay thousands of frozen corpses. Some had bullet holes in the torso. Most had gunshot wounds in the back of the neck.

  Baggage peculiar to the Italian Army lay on the crusted snowtrail. Crucifixes, mass cards, pictures of Jesus Christ and the saints, had fallen near the dead. One victim sat placidly in a drift. Eyes wide open, a smile creasing his face, he held a black rosary in his hands. The soldier had begun the second decade of the beads when a Russian guard shot him.

  Cristoforo Capone came along this same trail several days behind Bracci. The doctor saw the ravens Bracci had noticed circling and he heard the same shouts: “Davai bistre!” “Davai bistre!” as Russian guards robbed the prisoners of their warm clothing and beat them when they protested. Capone, too, watched the weak fall down and winced at the sharp cracks of rifle fire as they died. Like Bracci, he huddled for many nights in below-zero weather with soldiers who screamed from the pain of frostbite or wailed to God about their cruel fate. The doctor pitied these men in their misery, but he had decided to live. Some unknown inner strength brought him to a railroad station and a section of floor in a freight car, where he now sprawled to rest.

  While an Arctic wind whistled outside and the men clutched each other to transmit body heat, the train sped north. Capone began to lick the icicled walls to quench his raging thirst. Men died beside him each night and, in the morning, Russian guards opened the doors and screamed: “Skolco kaput?” (“How many dead?”) That was all they cared about, the number of corpses they had to pull out and discard in the snow.

  On the evening of January 8, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein entertained guests at Novocherkassk. Among them were Gen. Hans Hube, “Der Mensch,” who had just returned from East Prussia. On the way back he traveled with Col. Günter von Below, who had been invalided out of Stalingrad in September with jaundice, and was returning to duty at a time when most German soldiers were praying to leave the pocket.

  During their flight, Below had learned from Hube that the Führer was planning another attempt to extricate the Sixth Army. Three panzer divisions were supposedly coming from France and would be ready to attack by the middle of February. It was apparent to Below that the aggressive Hube had succumbed to Hitler’s mesmerizing personality and believed implicitly in this new rescue expedition.

  At dinner that night Hube continued to talk about the promised panzers. But each time he tried to solicit Erich von Manstein’s opinions, the field marshal changed the subject. Throughout the meal, in fact, Manstein avoided any comment about the army inside the Kessel.

  Later, over drinks with staff officers of Army Group Don, Below found one reason for Manstein’s negative responses when his companions told him that less than a hundred tons a day had been airlifted to Stalingrad. Without making any definite admissions about the Kessel being a hopeless trap, they convinced Below that he was “a condemned man having a last meal” before going to his death. The chastened colonel drank until a late hour.

  The next day, January 9, he and Hube touched down at Pitomnik and went on to the crowded interior of the headquarters bunker at Gumrak, where Paulus and Schmidt awaited them. Extremely agitated, Paulus quickly told his visitors it was impossible for Sixth Army to hold out much longer. When Hube broke in to mention the tanks coming from France, Paulus merely shrugged in resignation. Still, as Hube kept insisting on the need to hold out until the panzer force arrived at the perimeter, Paulus began to show a spark of interest in the idea. A desperate man, stripped of options by the higher authority he would never disobey, Paulus had to force himself to believe in a miracle.

  Only hours earlier, Hitler had again denied him the requested “freedom of action” about the Russian ultimatum of surrender. The Führer was insisting on a fight to the death, because “…every day the Army holds out helps the entire front….”

  That message had settled Paulus’s mind on a basic issue. Tempted to give up the struggle, he dismissed that thought when “higher authority” declared Sixth Army’s agony to be a vital necessity. Thus he now listened to Hube’s ramblings about panzers coming from France and, at the same time, issued a stem warning to his troops about the Soviet peace offer: “…Any proposals of negotiations are… to be rejected, not to be answered and parliamentaries are to be repulsed by force of weapons…”

  As the ultimatum’s time limit expired, an eerie quiet descended on the steppe. In their holes and trenches, German soldiers waited fearfully for Russian reaction to Paulus’s order for all-out resistance.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  At dawn on January 10, the forty-eighth day of the Kessel, a red sun poked over the horizon and shone dully on the white steppe. On both sides of the front lines, soldiers moved about in cramped foxholes, flexing their arms and legs to drive away the chill of the subzero temperature. Around them the sounds of battle were muted. Only an occasional rifle shot echoed across no-man’s-land.

  By 8:00 A.M., German troops standing in line for breakfast were commenting on the fact that the Russians had been unusually quiet for more than twenty-four hours. Two minutes later, as the Germans munched chunks of black bread and drank watery coffee, seven thousand Russian cannons roared in unison and the Sixth Army fortifications in the Karpovka Valley disappeared under a rainbow of fire. Along with the artillery barrage came clouds of Soviet planes, racing at low altitudes across the German lines to sow panic.

  When the first monstrous thunderclap of the cannonade smashed against his reinforced shelter, Sgt. Albert Pflüger fell off his cot. Though the main bombardment was nearly five mild to the west, wave upon wave of concussive shock showered dirt on him and shook the ground as if it were “a storm-ridden sea.” Dragging himself from the floor, Pflüger ran out to his headquarters command post where the phone was ringing incessantly with reports of entire units wiped out, and others reeling back from the shattered front.

  Mobs of frenzied soldiers were already inundating the rear and Pflüger watched them stagger by: shell-shocked, hysterical, trickling blood from the mouth, nose, and ears. They were the survivors of General Voronov’s “god of war,” the heavy artillery.

  Pioneer Colonel Herbert Selle was on his way to the “nose” of the pocket in the Karpovka Valley when the Soviet offensive broke over him. Switching direction, he headed instead for the
headquarters of the 76th Division, which was holding a precarious position at the western side of the perimeter. There Selle met the monocled, extraordinarily calm, Gen. Carl Rodenburg, who told him the Russians had already broken through the center of his line. As they spoke, enemy shells banged into the ravine and “white- and mud-colored clouds of snow and dust rose into the air.” Selle left quickly.

  His car passed a wretched mob of wounded, pleading with drivers to take them along, and Selle picked up nearly a dozen of them. They tumbled inside the car, clung to the running boards or draped themselves over the hood. The strange ambulance drove on to Gumrak where the wounded helped each other into the hospital. Watching them go, Selle wondered what effect such a grisly sight would have on Gen. Kurt Zeitzler back in East Prussia. If he could see these wretches inside the Kessel would Zeitzler continue to parrot Hitler’s orders to fight to the last bullet?

  At Pitomnik, Russian shells fell on the runways and scattered personnel unloading supplies from planes. Quartermaster Karl Binder was leading a column of trucks into a nearby ration depot when explosions bracketed his vehicle and blew up ammunition dumps in the fields.

  Hurrying the loading of gasoline, clothing, and cases of food, Binder hollered for the trucks to scatter. Just as he waved them off, a shellburst tossed him into a snowdrift. Unconscious, he lay there for hours until another truck driver pulled him out and sped on to Gumrak. When he revived, Binder discovered that by some miracle he had not been wounded, and that his trucks had brought back enough rations to feed the 305th Division for eighteen days— enough for nearly three weeks, if the front lines held. But the Soviet bombardment went on and on, and after two hours it had burst the German perimeter like an eggshell. Soviet T-34 tanks quickly roared through the gaps; mounted infantry followed. In the north, they punched a hole between the 113th Division and the 76th. To the west, the Austrian 44th Division vanished under a torrent of fire and steel. So did the 376th and 384th German divisions. That part of the front caved in and the village of Dimitrevka fell quickly to Russian armor. In the south, Albert Pflüger’s 297th Division had broken apart in the area between Zybenko and Peschanka and the Russians smashed through with impunity.

  Only in the southwest corner, at the Marinovka “nose” salient, did German resistance contain the enemy for any length of time. There, as General Schmidt had predicted earlier to Colonel Selle, the main Russian drive centered on the valley of the Karpovka River, where Sixth Army bunkers had been built into the sides of the gorge. Schmidt assumed the enemy wanted to drive the Germans from these entrenchments onto the open steppe and thus force a Napoleonic retreat eastward to Stalingrad. His analysis was almost perfect. His only error was in thinking the attack would come ten days later.

  In that exposed salient, the 3rd and 29th Motorized Divisions stood side by side and tried to cling to the “nose.” But within a few hours, the 3rd Motorized had its flanks beaten in, and was forced to pull back hastily to reorganize beyond the Rossoshka River. Still the 29th Division held on, and the Russians attacked it over the crest of Cossack Hill. Hundreds of tanks, crowded close together, led the parade and infantrymen clung to the turrets from which huge red flags flew briskly. Behind the T-34s came long columns of foot soldiers, wading through hip-deep snow. The Germans stared in awe at this massive display of might and then, with the pressure proving irresistible, gave ground.

  By the end of the day, the Sixth Army was on the run toward the ruins of Stalingrad.

  On January 11, the situation in the Kessel deteriorated further. Gen. Carl Rodenburg still wore the monocle in his right eye, but he had lost much of his quiet confidence. The day before, he possessed fifty heavy-caliber weapons in his artillery regiment. Now one of his officers rushed up to him and gasped: “General, here is the last gun.” Thirty soldiers had dragged it for seven miles to the new line of resistance.

  As he clasped the officer’s hand and thanked him warmly for his stupendous achievement, Carl Rodenburg knew that the battle inside the Kessel was futile. Then the general went out to find the rest of his 76th Division. Once it had been ten thousand strong, now it was just the size of a battalion, six hundred men.

  Sixth Army radio: 9:40 A.M. “Enemy broke through on a wide portion of the front line….Isolated strongholds are still intact. We are trying to rally and train last available parts of supply and construction units…to set up a blocking line.”

  It was a hopeless delaying of the inevitable. Again, at 7:00 P.M., Sixth Army radio reported to Manstein: “Deep penetration east of Zybenko…more than six kilometers wide. Enemy had very heavy losses….Our own losses were considerable. Resistance of the troops diminishing quickly because of insufficient ammunition, extreme frost, and lack of coverage against heaviest enemy fire.”

  Capt. Winrich Behr returned from a trip to the front lines and, in a hurried letter, described his impressions to Klaus von Below. Behr told his friend what Sixth Army Headquarters had not mentioned in any messages to the outside world. German soldiers had begun to desert in large numbers; many officers in the field had lost the will to lead. Blankets over their heads, the men slept at sentry posts; without tanks behind them as support, terrified Germans now ran in the face of enemy assaults.

  Behr said he thought the general feeling in the pocket had become one of simple self-preservation. He went on to berate leaders who directed the airlift. Bitterly he suggested that Below “…put some Jews or some black market operators…” in charge and let them run it at a profit. He closed with an appraisal of his superiors. “Paulus,” he said, “means the heart” of Sixth Army. The general had “the backbone of a chief….”

  On the other hand, Schmidt, whom both Behr and Below had known for years through family connections, posed a special problem. Though Behr liked him, he understood why the general irritated so many high-ranking officers. Imperious, acerbic, Schmidt seldom displayed the inner qualities, the “good side” that he possessed. Behr found that a pity, since Schmidt had to work with generals now facing a situation without parallel in German military history.

  In a rambling schoolhouse south of the Kessel, Second Guards Army Commander Rodion Yakovlevich Malinovsky took time out to entertain a group of Allied newsmen. Among them were Alexander Werth, United Press correspondent Eddy Gilmore, and Ralph Parker from The New York Times. Tall, with long dark hair brushed back, the ruddy-faced Malinovsky quickly admitted to his guests that Manstein’s December offensive toward Stalingrad 1 had caught the Russians napping. But then he hailed the gains of the Red Army counteroffensive and its effects on the enemy, “For the first time the Germans are showing signs of bewilderment. Trying to fill in gaps, they are throwing their troops about from one place to another….The German officers we have captured are extremely disappointed in their high command and in the Führer himself….”

  When the reporters asked him about the drive to crush Paulus in the Kessel, Malinovsky was bluntly confident: “Stalingrad is an armed prisoners camp, and its position is hopeless….”

  Sixth Army Radio: January 12. “Continuous bombardments since 7 A.M. Cannot reply…. Since 8 A.M. heavy enemy attacks along all front lines with numerous tanks….Army has ordered as a last means of resistance that every soldier has to fight to the last bullet at the place he is holding right now.”

  At Pitomnik, a single Russian T-34 tank broke through the thin perimeter defense and clanked onto the crowded runway. Its appearance induced panic among the Germans who stampeded away from the planes, the hospitals, the wounded, and ran east on the road to Gumrak and Stalingrad. The tank leisurely cruised the strip, firing at a wide choice of targets, and “the heart of the fortress” skipped several beats.

  Hearing the news of the tank’s appearance, Gen. Arthur Schmidt jumped to the phone and screamed his outrage at half a dozen officers responsible for protecting the field. Schmidt’s anger galvanized the chagrined commanders into restoring Pitomnik to service after a short delay. But in the confusion, in one of those miraculous incidents of war, the
Soviet T-34 simply disappeared in the haze and escaped.

  Later that day, Paulus dispatched one of his most trusted generals for help. Wolfgang Pickert, leader of the 9th Flak Division, flew through a raging snowstorm to Novocherkassk. During the flight, he scribbled notes of his arguments on the margin of a newspaper in his own special shorthand code in case the plane was shot down. It was an unnecessary precaution. He landed safely and rushed to confer with Army Group Don about chances for a dramatic upsurge in supplies.

  Inside the shrinking Kessel, on the road between Karpovka and Pitomnik, trucks moved carefully through congested traffic. In one of them, Sgt. Ernst Wohlfahrt rode beside the driver. Recently detached from artillery spotting inside the dread Barrikady Gun Factory, Wohlfahrt was glad to be out in the open, where he could raise his head without fearing that a sniper might take it off.

  Behind him, someone shouted that Russian tanks had broken into the convoy. The driver floored the accelerator and the truck leaped ahead, straight at several wounded men scrambling frantically to get out of the way. One vehicle after another hit them and rolled their bodies under the wheels. Wohlfahrt saw arms and legs flailing madly when his truck smashed into the victims and passed on. Looking back, Wohlfahrt noticed that no one slowed down to remove the corpses.

  On the western side of the pocket, curly-haired Hubert Wirkner crouched in his snowhole. His feet were frozen; flesh came off them in long strips. His right hand had been punctured by shrapnel, but he had not been able to find a doctor.

  While Wirkner stoically endured the pain, a Russian T-34 tank fired a shell directly at him. Two companions took the full force of the explosion. One man’s face disintegrated; the other’s right arm flew into the air. Wirkner’s body was a sieve. Hauled from the gory pit by friends, he was taken to Gumrak, where thousands of soldiers lay unattended. Wirkner was placed in a converted horse stable, fifty yards long, with perhaps twenty men around him on cots. A medic assured him that his chances for a flight out of the Kessel were good.