Enemy at the Gates

by William Craig

  A short distance away from Wirkner’s improvised hospital, the Gumrak message center kept up a steady stream of “life and death” chatter to Army Group Don, recording the fading pulse beat of Sixth Army.

  +++ Herr General Paulus gave permission to Oberleutnant Georg Reymann, regiment 549, to marry Miss Lina Hauswald. Neustadt…. Please forward. [a proxy marriage]

  +++ Proposal of decoration General Pfeiffer sent…. Oberleutnant Boris received German Cross, gold.

  +++ Dead in action according to present information, Zschunke, Hegermann, Holzmann, Quadflieg, Hulsman, Rothmann, Hahmann….Losses of officers and troops not accountable at present, but very high….

  Later, Sixth Army radio: January 13, 9:30 A.M.

  +++ Ammunition is almost exhausted. For the assistance of the completely worn-out…troops, no reserves available in terms of men, tanks, antitank, and heavy weapons.

  A German transport plane circled over Pitomnik and asked permission to land. The request was denied and Gen. Wolfgang Pickert told the pilot to go around again, until Russian gunfire lifted enough to allow a safe touchdown. The plane made several turns before the pilot - warned the general he was running low on fuel. Reluctantly, Pickert ordered the aircraft back to Novocherkassk, from where he hoped to try another flight into the pocket.

  His mission to Manstein had failed. No one at Army Group Don ever offered any encouragement; no one in the Luftwaffe gave him hope, because barely seventy-five aircraft were left in running condition. More than four hundred transports had been shot down. Russian fighters ruled the skies.

  At Pitomnik, ground controllers finally cleared the runways for landings. From the hospital sheds, hundreds of wounded walked or crawled to the edge of the concrete strip. When Junkers and Heinkels roared in under sporadic gunfire, the crippled rushed the opened doors and hatches. Doctors and pilots stood them off with drawn pistols while “ticketed” casualties went on board.

  A major approached one pilot and offered him ten thousand reichsmarks for a seat on his plane. Before the pilot could reply, a mob of wild-eyed patients knocked the major aside and pushed into the aircraft. The pilot looked on helplessly. When he lifted off the runway a short time later, he carried a full complement of wounded. The major who offered him the bribe was left behind.

  On the same day, a special courier left Pitomnik with Paulus’s blessing. The general had ordered Capt. Winrich Behr to take the truth about the situation directly to Adolf Hitler. Still unable to believe that the Führer had written off his army, Paulus wanted Behr to emphasize the fact that unless the airlift brought forth a cornucopia of food and ammunition, Sixth Army would perish long before any spring offensive.

  Stunned and somewhat guilty at being chosen, Behr protested loudly. But his friend “Schmidtchen,” General Schmidt, convinced him to go and handed him Pass Number 7 as his key to freedom.

  Carrying the War Diary of the Sixth Army under his arm, “Teddy” Behr took off at 5:00 P.M. and soared over the darkened plain, lit fitfully by shellbursts and arching tracer bullets. In an hour, the captain was safe in Novocherkassk and there he rested briefly before the long trip to East Prussia.

  The plane that took Captain Behr from Pitomnik carried another batch of letters from husbands to wives, sons to parents. Though a strain of fatalism predominated, a surprisingly large percentage of them swore continued fealty to the Führer and the Fatherland.

  Captain Gebhardt, APO No. 20329, wrote to his wife:

  January 13, 1943

  Our boss will be flown out and he will take this letter with him…. So far, I am still doing well in spite of all the difficulties—the grim frost and the pressure exerted by the enemy. The moon is shining outside and its blue light gives a miraculous touch to the snow crusts on the walls of the stables in the ravine where we have dug into the ground. Work never ceases day and night but comradeship is exemplary so everything is bearable. We, too, can quote Wallenstein saying: “The night must come for our stars to shine.”

  And you at home in our beautiful house, you can live in peace. This is our right and due and this is what makes us proud. Just as the Winkelried long ago, we have caused the enemy to point all of his spears at us….Everything that will come from now on will be written in the book of fate…. They will consider “The battle without comparison,” the battle of Stalingrad, to have been the highest, and we swear every day that we will bring it to a decent end, come what may come.

  Captain Alt, APO No. 01876 to his wife:

  January 13, 1943

  I indicated to you yesterday what our position is. Today, unfortunately, our situation worsened again. In spite of all of this, we believe sincerely that we will be able to endure until they knock us out of here.

  Should the end be a different one, then may the Lord give you the poNN er to bear this heroically, as a sacrifice for our beloved Führer and our people.

  Captain [illegible] APO No. 35293 to his parents:

  January 13, 1943, 3:50 P.M.

  …I should like to thank you all for the love and troubles which you have spent on my behalf. You know that I have been a passionate soldier, that I became one because of personal conviction, and on this basis I swore my military oath when I was a recruit. Many difficult weeks are now behind us, but the all-decisive hour is still ahead…. Come what may, we shall never capitulate. Loyal to our military oath, we shall perform our duties believing in our beloved Führer, Adolf Hitler, and believing in the final victory of our glorious Fatherland.

  I shall never lament or complain. From the moment I became an officer in August 1939, I did not belong to myself any more but to my Fatherland. I do not want to become weak at this time. There is no human being who loves to die. However, if it has to be, then I have convinced myself that I want to be defeated in honest combat by superior enemy forces. With the boys I have around me, in the meantime we shall try to send as many of the Bolsheviks as we can to the happy hunting grounds. You should not be sad…. You should be proud during the days to come. It is still possible that a miracle will happen and that help will come in time.

  Our motto is and will be during the most difficult hours: “We shall fight to the last grenade.” Long live the Führer and our dearly beloved German Fatherland.

  Gefr. Schwarz, 12833, to his wife:

  January 13, 1943

  Well, the time has come to be very honest and to write a manly letter without trying to make things look better than they are…. During past days I was enlightened and saw very clearly that the end will be one about which nobody has spoken so far. But now I must express myself. There will be a day when you will hear about our battle to the last. Remember that words concerning heroic action are merely words. I hope that this letter will come into your hands because it is perhaps the last letter which I can write….

  I am sure that you will keep me in your mind and that you will tell the children everything when the proper time has come. You should not mourn my death. Should you ever feel that fortune wants to give you a hand, do not fail to grasp it…. You will have to live on your own and I am sure that everything will continue. You will have to take up a job and take care of the little ones. I shall carry you over my heart till the last moment. You will be with me till I take my last breath.

  I know you are a brave woman. You will overcome all this…. You have the children as the pledge of our joint life…. At some later date, perhaps you will be able to show them where we were happy together…. Live well with our dear children, embrace them with all of your power and love, take heart from them. They will give you strength and you will be able to take heart from them. Life will continue in the children. I wish all of you a good future with Germany, and I hope that she will end a winner.

  The Russian attack continued and the “Marinovka nose” disappeared from the maps in Soviet and German intelligence centers. The Kessel began to shrivel noticeably as German soldiers ran east before the enveloping arms of Russian pincers. Eight divisions— the 3rd, 44th, 60th, 76th, 113th, 297
th, 376th and 384th—already had been effectively destroyed. Only the 29th Motorized Division retained any strength to combat the enemy at the western side of the pocket.

  Gen. Ernst Leyser was there with his men, urging them from the houses and holes in which they cowered. He had only four tanks left but after dark, he broke cover and ran forward screaming: “Hurrah!” Hundreds of wounded and previously apathetic Germans suddenly jumped out to follow Leyser in an attack against the surprised Russians. The firefight was a confusion of men and shellbursts, dead, and more wounded crying in the bloodstained snow. Leyser had thrown the enemy off balance for a moment and he needed the time to plan another retreat. In the harsh morning light, his victory seemed Pyrrhic. But the general was delighted to find that some spirit remained in his exhausted soldiers. He hoped to find that again when he reached the last defense line—inside the city of Stalingrad.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  At 9:00 P.M. on January 15, at Rastenburg, East Prussia, Capt. Winrich Behr faced the Führer of the Third Reich. When he walked into the crowded conference room, Behr was understandably nervous. He was in the presence of many illustrious men. Generals Jodi and Schmundt, Marshal Keitel, General Heusinger, even Martin Bormann stood looking skeptically at him. But when Hitler walked up and smiled warmly, Behr gathered himself to do the job Paulus had entrusted to him.

  Hitler was charming, solicitous about the long flight and Behr’s comfort. When he asked the captain to speak freely, Behr launched into a detailed explanation of Sixth Army’s position. The captain was surprisingly blunt as he told of the dissolution of morale, the breakdown of officer leadership under pressure of Russian attacks, of starvation, and of guns blown up for lack of shells. Behr vividly described two hundred thousand men dying from official neglect.

  Then Hitler spoke. With Behr listening raptly, the Führer stood over a table and swept his hand back and forth across a map. Though he admitted that mistakes had been made, he hastened to assure Behr that another expedition was going to break the Russian ring and reach Sixth Army within weeks. In the meantime, Hitler continued, the airlift would enable Paulus to hold on. An aide broke in to assure Behr that sufficient flights were planned.

  Exasperated at mention of the airlift, Behr interrupted, “But the airlift has not worked.”

  Hitler seemed puzzled, saying that Luftwaffe reports showed enough sorties on good flying days to keep Sixth Army at a level above starvation. As Behr shook his head, he noticed Marshal Keitel furiously wagging a finger at him—like an irate schoolmaster scolding a student for talking back to an elder. Refusing to be intimidated, the captain went on, saying that while many times aircraft took off for the pocket, many of them failed to reach their destination because of enemy fire or bad weather. And lately, the captain added, planes that dropped food bombs by parachute aimed most of them into Russian lines.

  Emboldened, Behr made one final attempt to save his friends—Friedrich von Paulus, “Schmidtchen,” Eichlepp, the freezing grenadiers in the foxholes at Stalingrad—and he said: “It is of paramount importance that Sixth Army should know the quantities of supplies that will be flown into the fortress. It is too late for long-term planning. Sixth Army is at the end of its resources and demands a clear decision as to whether or not it may count on assistance and support within the next forty-eight hours.”

  Shocked at his own impertinence, Behr waited for swift retribution. Adolf Hitler stared at him. Generals and aides were stunned into silence. Keitel’s face was cherry red, almost apoplectic. Suddenly the Führer sighed deeply and shrugged. Smiling warmly at Behr, he told him he would discuss the matter immediately with his advisers.

  Convinced that he had done all he could, Behr saluted stiffly and left the room.

  Thirteen hundred miles to the east, the Russian ring around Pitomnik tightened as T-34 tanks moved within a quarter mile of the runways. Control-tower operators waved off further transport landings and six Messerschmitt 109 fighters roared off the strip to take refuge at the smaller, ill-equipped Gumrak Airport, a few miles to the east. On landing there, five of the fighters either overshot the runway or crashed into debris. The sixth plane circled hesitantly, then disappeared to the west, far beyond the Kessel. It landed eventually at Schacty and the pilot reported that Pitomnik was no longer under German control.

  With Pitomnik overrun, Sixth Army had suffered a mortal wound. The end was almost at hand.

  The transmitter at Gumrak relayed news of its final spasms to Army Group Don: “Composure of many troops… is highly commendable. Completely exhausted officers and men who have gone for days almost without food have pulled cannon for 20 kilometers through heavily snowed-in and often roadless steppes. Supply situation catastrophic. In some places troops cannot bring supplies to the front due to lack of fuel.”

  Field Marshal Manstein was not surprised. Threatened by Soviet tank raids himself, he had been forced to retreat another fifty miles west to Taganrog, from where he monitored the pulsebeat of his own operations. Along the upper Don, on nearly a two-hundred-mile-wide line from Pavlovsk northwest to Kasternoye, fresh Russian armies had attacked the few Italian divisions that had not been engaged in December, as well as the entire Second Hungarian Army. This latest drive quickly overwhelmed the satellite forces and opened another wide gap in Manstein’s left flank.

  By this time the field marshal’s combat groups were practically worn out. Groups Stahel, Fretter-Pico, Mieth, Hollidt had been badly depleted in the constant leap-frogging operations, which had so far managed to keep the Russians away from Rostov. Now, thinning their lines dangerously, they sideslipped again to the west ‘in order to slow the new Russian juggernaut moving south from the Don.

  Meanwhile, Gen. Erhard Milch had arrived at Manstein’s Taganrog quarters to supervise Hitler’s renewed attempt to supply Paulus. From airfields all over Europe, the energetic Luftwaffe officer had collected more than a hundred extra planes and rushed them into the shuttle service to the Kessel. But his last-ditch activities on behalf of Sixth Army depended in good part on a hardworking, well-coordinated staff at Gumrak Airfield.

  The only field capable of handling heavy traffic, Gumrak was an ugly scar across the pristine snow. A magnet to retreating troops, it drew long lines of trucks and men to it from the west, then spewed them out on the eastern side toward the Volga and Stalingrad. It had become a charnel house, a depository for the dead and dying, who littered the roads and fields around the runways.

  Very few of the Germans in the Kessel retained any hope of rescue. Some perked up with the sound of firing to the south and wondered whether Manstein had actually arrived. Others clung to stories of mythical divisions breaking into the Kessel from Kalach to the west. Realists like Emil Metzger ignored such rumors. With all ammunition gone and his guns blown up to deny them to the enemy, the lieutenant had taken his men into the line of march toward Gum rak and the Volga. As he waded through the drifts, his thoughts wandered back to Kaethe in Frankfurt. He tried hard to remember every detail of her face. It seemed certain that he would die on this godforsaken plain without ever getting the chance to hold her again.

  As the wind tore at him, Metzger began to toy with the thought of breaking out of the Kessel—all by himself if necessary.

  Like Metzger, Gottlieb Slotta was determined to live. He was already at Gumrak, where he hobbled toward a trainload of wounded, parked at a siding. When a Russian plane dove and released a stick of bombs, bricks and other debris landed on Slotta’s head. Shouting, “I’m not going to die like this!” he began running madly toward Stalingrad, five miles away. On both sides of the road, he saw heaps of men who had given up and died. But Slotta had no intention of relinquishing his fragile hold on life that way.

  Cpl. Franz Deifel was not sure life was worth fighting for anymore. Until this moment, he had been one of the few Germans inside the Kessel who pursued a relatively normal routine. He still hauled ammunition up the back slopes of Mamaev Hill and though his load was limited to only a few shells,
he went up the hill almost every day.

  By late January, Russian planes had begun to stalk individual trucks and men, and they finally found Deifel as he drove back to the ammunition dump outside the city. A bomb landed twenty feet away; shrapnel sprayed the vehicle and tore into his legs. He fell out of the cab and crawled into a house, where he pulled off his pants and tried to staunch the flow of blood. Another bomb exploded and the walls fell out, so he ran to a nearby trench, hid until dark, then stole back to the truck. By some miracle the engine started on the first try and heavy shellfire followed him down the road until he stopped at a dispensary.

  Ordered on to a hospital, Deifel found it to be a dimly lit bunker. At the entrance, he froze in horror at a pyramid of bodies which blocked the door. Nauseated, he broke away and limped back to his own quarters.

  A general withdrawal had been ordered, and Deifel hitched a ride on a truck headed back to Stalingrad. Just as the convoy started up, Russian shells exploded on the lead vehicles and blew them apart. Horns blared and drivers raged at the delay while Deifel wandered down the road. Dazed and frustrated, he sank down heavily on the corpse of a comrade and muttered: “Kiss my ass.” For the first time in his life, he thought of committing suicide.

  Behind the utterly depressed corporal, Gumrak Airport had become bedlam. On January 18, two days after Pitomnik had fallen, it was crammed with thousands of wounded from all around the Kessel. Doctors worked eighteen-hour tours of duty treating patients lying on cots, on floors, and outside in the snow. Delirious and pain-wracked soldiers bellowed in torment as medics jabbed needles into arms crawling with gray lice, then stripped the patients for surgery.