William Craig - Enemy at the Gates

Behind the main column, late-arriving soldiers entered the suburbs of Rynok, just north of Stalingrad, and followed tramcars down the trolley tracks. When passengers looked back and saw troops dressed in strange uniforms, they panicked and jumped off the trains. The Germans laughed and left the Russians alone for the time being.

By 6:00 P.M., the German Sixth Army held a small stretch of the Volga north of Stalingrad. Hundreds of trucks and tanks moved up in support while radio operators of the 16th Panzer Division transmitted the news back to headquarters. It had been another fantastic day for General Paulus.

Most of Stalingrad had been asleep when the Germans crossed the Don. In the tractor works, men and women from the night crew were preparing sixty tanks for final assembly when, at 5:00 A.M., someone rushed in with news of the enemy breakthrough. Amid a babble of noise, supervisors called a meeting to organize defense lines around the factory.

To the south, deep inside the Tsaritsa Gorge, Andrei Yeremenko woke up to a barrage of frantic telephone calls from threatened outposts along the German line of march. Surprised at the audacity of the narrow thrust toward the Volga, the general quickly routed sleepy staff officers from beds all over town and ordered breakfast for himself from the bunker’s kitchen.

Only five hundred yards away, at Red Square, black loudspeaker boxes crackled to life and advised citizens of the possibility of air raids. Few people paid any attention to the message since the only German air activity in recent days had been made by reconnaissance planes. The City Soviet chairman, Pigalev, broadcast the warning, but did not mention the German tanks now heading for the northern part of the city. He feared the news would sow panic among the population.

Mrs. Vlasa Kliagina did not hear the loudspeakers because she had left home early to drop her infant son, Vovo, at a communal nursery. Then she and her daughter, Nadia, joined a neighborhood volunteer group at the southern suburb of Yelshanka where, at 7:30 A.M .,with the temperature climbing into the high nineties, she continued to work on a primitive line of antitank trenches. Mrs. Kliagina had no idea that General Paulus was about to burst into the city from a completely different direction.

Less than two miles from Yelshanka, in the suburb of Dar Goya, an assistant station master, Constantin Viskov, collapsed into bed. He had just finished a grueling twelve-hour tour of duty, shuttling troops, refugees, and supplies through Railroad Station Number One. As Viskov fell into a deep sleep, his wife tiptoed about doing housework.

By 9:30 A.M. ,activity in the Tsaritsa Gorge accelerated as hundreds of soldiers passed in and out of the underground bunker’s two entrances. Plagued by phone calls, Yeremenko had not yet touched the breakfast on his desk. He was speaking now to the deputy comander of the Eighth Air Force, who relayed shocking news, “The fighter pilots flying reconnaissance have just returned. They said that a heavy battle is going on in the region of Malaya Rossoshka [twenty-five miles northwest of Stalingrad]. Everything is burning on the ground. They saw two columns of approximately one hundred tanks each and, after them, compact columns of trucks and infantry. They’re all moving into Stalingrad.”

Yeremenko told him to get as many planes as possible into the air.

The phone rang again: this time it was Nikita Khrushchev calling from his downtown apartment. When Yeremenko told him the news the commissar said he would come over as soon as he could. At 11:00 A.M .,he was in the bunker, listening intently to Yeremenko’s briefing. Shocked at the extent of the German drive, Khrushchev shook his head. “Very unpleasant facts,” he said. “What can we do to keep them from Stalingrad?”

Yeremenko told him how he was trying to juggle forces to the northern part of the city and they discussed the problem of finding more reinforcements for the threatened suburbs. Everyone in the room was subdued, fully conscious that this might mean the fall of Stalingrad. They talked in low tones about the impact of such a calamity on the rest of the country. His hands sweating, Yeremenko tried to remain calm in front of his colleagues.

When Major General Korshunov called with a report that the Germans had just burned a huge supply depot out on the steppe, Yeremenko lost his temper. Disgusted by Korshunov’s hysterical tone, he shouted, “Carry on with your job. Stop this panic.” Then he hung up abruptly.

Two generals walked into the bunker to announce that anew pontoon bridge, the only one connecting Stalingrad with the far shore, had just been completed. Yeremenko thanked them for working so hard, then told them to destroy it. The officers stared at each other in astonishment, wondering if Yeremenko suddenly had gone crazy. He repeated his instructions. “Yes, yes, I said to destroy it. And quickly!”

When they still failed to react, he warned them that the bridge must not fall into German hands. The two generals left to carry out this draconian measure.

Near the mouth of the Tsaritsa Gorge, boredom and the noontime humidity had brought out dozens of swimmers like Lt. Viktor Nekrassov who, with a friend, dove into the sun-streaked water and floated lazily in the current. Launches and steamers struggled past and Nekrassov swam in their wake, listening contentedly to the guttural rumble of their diesel engines. When he tired, Nekrassov climbed from the water onto a pile of logs, where he stretched out to soak up the sun.

With his eyes screwed up tight to shut out the brilliant light, he tried to imagine how the Volga compared with the Dnieper at his home in Kiev. The lieutenant decided that his river had been peaceful, a joyous place for children, and that the Volga was totally different, filled as it was now with clamorous boat traffic. Another thing bothered Nekrassov. Few bathers in Stalingrad smiled these days.

As he dozed on into the afternoon, Nekrassov thought more and more about the Germans on the steppe and he wondered what would happen to Stalingrad when the enemy finally reached the Volga. He could see himself crouching in the scrub grass on the far shore while German shells blasted up huge fountains of water.

Fifteen miles north of Nekrassov’s lumber pile, the nightmare he envisioned had already begun.

Machinist Lev Dylo had just met his first Germans. He tried to run, but was thrown to the ground and manhandled. One soldier snatched his watch. Others prodded him to his feet and marched him across a field. Dylo waited until he saw a deep ravine, then plunged into it and escaped. The Germans did not shoot.

Dylo ran two miles to the tractor works and burst in on his superiors.

“They’re here. Hurry!” he shouted, but the factory supervisors had already been alerted. The first battalions of workers’ militia, some wearing uniforms but most in civilian clothes, were marching out to man barricades along the Mokraya Mechetka River.

In factory courtyards up and down the main north-south highway in Stalingrad, political commissars and foremen processed thousands of workers for duty. They told each group, “Whoever can bear arms and whoever can shoot, write your names down.” Those who signed got a white armband, a rifle, and a bandolier of ammunition before they moved off in platoons to the riverbank. Workers not selected went to the settlement houses to alert relatives of those who had gone into the lines.

Pyotr Nerozia hurried home from one of these meetings at the Red October Plant to say good-bye to his family which was being evacuated that afternoon across the Volga. He arrived too late and found only a note saying that his wife and children had already left for Uralsk. Though relieved that they had gotten off safely, Pyotr felt a sudden loneliness. The stillness of the house bothered him and he left for a walk. Near the aviation school, he stopped in a field, picked up a watermelon, then turned and went back home. In the kitchen he started to fry two eggs.