William Craig - Enemy at the Gates

In his diary that evening, the aggressive, flamboyant Luftwaffe general, Freiherr von Richthofen, summed up the results of his pilots’ operations over the stricken city, “A sudden alert sent out by VIII Air Corps put the whole of Air Fleet Four into the air, with the result that we simply paralyzed the Russians….”

It was true. The city’s pulse slowed, numbed by the blows that had killed nearly forty thousand people.

Close to midnight, with the Tsaritsa Gorge completely ringed by fire, a bone-tired General Yeremenko picked up the BODO conference phone to speak with Stalin. Within minutes, the premier was on the line, listening as Yeremenko confessed that the situation was very bad, so bad that city officials wanted to blow up some of the factories and transfer the contents of others across the Volga. The general stressed, however, that both he and Commissar Khrushchev opposed such a move.

Stalin was furious.

“I do not want to debate this question,” he shouted. “The evacuation and mining of the plants will be interpreted as a decision to surrender Stalingrad. Therefore the State Defense Committee forbids it.”

With this order, Stalin left Yeremenko to cope with the Germans knocking at the city gates.

According to the tactics devised by General Paulus, the three German divisions crossing the steppe on Sunday, August 23, were supposed to forge a forty-mile-long corridor from the Don to the Volga. This barrier of steel would seal off Stalingrad from the north and prevent reinforcements from filtering down to the aid of the city. In theory, the plan was sound. In practice, it required perfect coordination among the participating units.

By midnight of August 23, the 16th Panzer Division on the outskirts of Stalingrad had outrun its support. Twelve miles to its rear, the 3rd Motorized Division halted for the night. Another ten miles back, the 60th Motorized Division had bogged down in a giant traffic snarl. Completely separated from each other, the three divisions became a chain of “islands” dropped in the middle of a hostile sea. Until these islands joined into a solid land bridge extending outward from the main body of the Sixth Army, each would be extremely vulnerable to Soviet counterattacks.

While the Russian Military Council in Stalingrad dispatched the workers’ militia to trenches north of the tractor works, Gen. Hans Hube ordered his 16th Panzers into a circular defense perimeter , a hedgehog, with the division’s heavy artillery covering a 360-degree front. At the same time, Hube issued instructions for an immediate attack if there was any opportunity to take advantage of tactical surprise.

At 4:40 the next morning, his gun batteries opened a furious barrage on Russian positions around Spartakovka and the Mokraya Mechetka River. Shortly afterward, panzers of Combat Group Krumpen roared out from the hedgehog onto the softened targets only to run into withering fire from hastily fortified Soviet trenches.

In a miracle of overnight organization, Russian militia had dug interlocking strongpoints and assimilated the rudiments of modern warfare. Now, dressed in work clothes or Sunday finery, they crouched behind mortars and machine guns and challenged the finest tank army in the world. When Combat Group Krumpen staggered under their hail of shells, the Russians even opened a counterattack, sending unpainted T-34 tanks straight from the factory assembly lines at the Germans. The situation suddenly reversed, General Hube radioed Sixth Army Headquarters for information about his tardy supporting divisions.

They, too, were under heavy pressure. The 3rd Motorized at the town of Kuzmichi, had just captured a Soviet freight train bulging with American Ford trucks and Willys jeeps, but it had to turn into its own hedgehog formation to face a reckless onslaught by the Russian 35th Guards Division, which was pouring down from the north to widen the gap between the 3rd and 60th Motorized to the west. Led by packs of tanks, Red Army soldiers spilled across the steppe and descended on the flanks of both divisions.

Unaware of the situation, Dr. Ottmar Kohler tended to his patients at a makeshift hospital along a railroad siding, twenty-five miles west of the Volga. He was still in great pain from the broken jaw he had sustained the day before in the motorcycle accident. Unable to eat properly, he was living on chocolate and cognac. To keep his loose upper jaw in place, Kohler worked with a piece of cork clenched in his mouth.

As the surgeon concentrated on an operation, a soldier yelled into the operating room, “The Russians have broken through!” Kohler kept working and, when he finished, went to the door to see several Soviet tanks squashing German vehicles only a hundred yards away. The sight brought a roar from his throat. Spitting out the cork, he screamed, “Load the wounded!”

At that instant, concealed German antiaircraft guns fired earsplitting salvos directly at the enemy tanks, which blew up, and scattered flaming fuel and bodies across the ground. The shooting increased as other Russian tanks came to duel with the German artillery.

Rooted to the doorway, Kohler noticed a German sergeant and his six-man squad walking unconcernedly around the corner of the hospital. Trailing their guns in the dirt, the soldiers came up to him and the sergeant asked, “What the hell’s going on around here?”

In reply, the astonished Kohler asked his own question, “What the hell are you going to do about it?”

The sergeant shrugged in indifference, and begged to be allowed to rest. When Kohler looked into the man’s eyes, he held his temper, for it was clear to him the soldier had just undergone a harrowing experience. In the midst of the earthshaking shelling, he ordered food and rum for his guests.

They stretched out against a wall and watched the battle escalate. Hundreds of Russian troops were marching toward them across a grassy field. Their arms linked together, they were singing songs in loud harmony. When the sergeant stopped eating he wiped his hands on his uniform and told Kohler he was ready for orders. The doctor suggested that the squad do a little fighting and asked the name of the sergeant’s commanding officer. “Captain Holland,” he said, adding in a hollow voice that Holland’s head had just been shot off by a Russian tank.

Kohler knew now what haunted the sergeant so he left him alone, jumped on a pile of manure and trained his binoculars on the incredible parade coming at him from the meadow. Behind him a German staff car careened into the yard and an officer standing in the back seat hollered, “Just what in hell is going on around here?”

Used to that question by now, Kohler merely waved a greeting. “Come up on my manure pile and see for yourself.”

Giving the officer his glasses, he pointed to the enemy infantry. The man swore in delight, handed back the binoculars, raced to his car and sped off toward an artillery command post.

Kohler fixed his attention on the marching soldiers, whose songs drifted toward him, on the balmy summer breeze. As the doctor stared in horrified fascination, geysers of earth suddenly blossomed among them and jagged holes appeared where men had been moments before. Kohler watched as the steppe grass turned red and the singing was replaced by the shrieks of the dying.

Sickened by the slaughter, the doctor lowered the glasses, climbed down off the dung heap and went to care for his own wounded. Bending over the operating table, he carefully put another cork in his mouth to keep his throbbing jaw in place.

Twenty miles southwest of Ottmar Kohler’s dispensary, Sixth Army commander, Friedrich von Paulus, read the radio messages from his three divisions on the steppe and lost his initial exuberance over the “lightning” victory of the previous day. He now faced the chilling prospect of losing one or more of these units unless he could send enough reinforcements and supplies to help them forge that barrier of steel to the Volga. As a precautionary measure, Paulus alerted the Luftwaffe to begin dropping ammunition and food into the most distant of the islands, General Hube’s 16th Panzer hedgehog at the outskirts of Stalingrad. Meanwhile, the general wondered how he was going to take that city in the next twenty-four hours, as Hitler expected him to do.