William Craig - Enemy at the Gates

Yeremenko was right, but only to a degree. Hoth had lost patience with the discouraging and costly direct approach to Stalingrad. With a swollen casualty list preying on his mind, he formulated a radical maneuver, a sideslip around the enemy. Pulling his tanks and armored infantry out of the line by night, he regrouped them thirty miles to the west. To confound Russian spies, he replaced the withdrawn divisions with new units to maintain a semblance of continuity.

But Hoth’s plans were not as grandiose as Yeremenko envisioned, at least not in the beginning. The horse-faced general merely wanted to roll up the Russian hill system from the flank and, given extraordinary luck, perhaps pin the Russian Sixty-fourth Army against the Volga south of Stalingrad.

On the evening of August 29, Hoth unleashed his panzers north through Abganerovo and onto the steppe for twenty incredible miles. The thrust confirmed Yeremenko’s opinion that Hoth intended to meet Paulus out on the steppe, and he quickly authorized the painful withdrawal of his divisions from their positions south and southwest of the city. Unlike previous Soviet command decisions of the first months of the war, this one would save whole armies for another day, even though it entailed the possible loss of Stalingrad.

The retreat wrought terrible confusion. At 10:00 P.M. that same day, the Russian 126th Division received its order to pull back. When some regiments left ahead of others, a headlong flight began. Flanking divisions melted into the night. On the morning of August 30, the German 29th Motorized Division intercepted thousands of enemy soldiers wandering the steppe. The commander of the Russian 208th Division surrendered with his entire staff. Trucks, tanks, and hundreds of artillery pieces dropped into German hands without a fight.

“Papa” Hoth had unlocked the door to Stalingrad. Astounded at the sudden Russian collapse, he revised his goals and now sought what Yeremenko had mistakenly believed he always planned to do. He sent his panzers north to meet Paulus’s tanks coming from the corridor to the Volga. Army Group B Headquarters informed Friedrich von Paulus of the golden opportunity offered by the bold gambit: “In view of the fact that Fourth Panzer Army gained a bridgehead at Gavrilovka at 1000 hours today, everything now depends on Sixth Army concentrating the strongest possible forces…and launching an attack in a generally southerly direction…”

Inexplicably, Paulus did not move. Harried by the suicidal Russian attempts to break his thin corridor to the Volga, he refused to rush troops south for a linkup. Crucial hours passed. Another urgent cable went out to Paulus. Again he failed to respond. And while the German High Command tried to move its pincers, Andrei Yeremenko pulled back more than twenty thousand Russian soldiers on the steppe between the Don and Stalingrad.

Ever since he had ordered the destruction of the bridge at Kalach, Col. Pyotr Ilyin had held his position in the orchard on the southeastern edge of the town. With his ammunition running low, and only a hundred men left in his command, he had been unable to keep the Germans from crossing the Don by boat. During this period he had not received any new orders, but on the night of August 28, the Stalingrad radio finally contacted him. A hesitant voice from Sixty-second Army Headquarters asked, “Is that you, Comrade Ilyin? Where are you?”

“Yes, it’s me. We’re in Kalach.”

“In Kalach? The Germans are there.” The voice was incredulous.

Ilyin tried to explain how he was still holding out, even though Capt. Gerhard Meunch’s battalion had forded the Don and seized the old part of the town. The voice on the radio told him to wait a minute. Ilyin listened to the static, then the voice on the radio came back with another question: “Tell me, Comrade Ilyin, where is your command post?” Realizing the voice was trying to trap him, he immediately pinpointed his location, and was showered with congratulations for fighting so well. Then headquarters broke off the conversation.

Three nights later, as Yeremenko began disengaging his troops from the steppe, the voice called Ilyin again and told him to give up the orchard and make a run for the Volga. Within hours, his brigade stole out of Kalach in a thirty-eight-truck convoy. When the Germans sensed movement in the dark, they blazed away at the sound and Ilyin stood in the road, exchanging shots with Meunch’s battalion. Then he leaped into a car and rode off safely to Stalingrad.

On September 2, Paulus finally agreed to the southward drive toward Hoth, and within hours, the jaws of the pincers snapped shut. But Paulus had waited too long. Most of the Russian troops on the steppe had escaped into Stalingrad, and his seventy-two hours of indecision had given the enemy another chance to fight. Now the battle would be in the streets of Stalingrad, where blitzkrieg tactics were useless.

On September 3, Joseph Stalin sent a telegram to Marshal Zhukov at Malaya Ivanovka on the western bank of the Volga, fifty miles due north of Stalingrad:

The situation at Stalingrad has deteriorated further. The enemy stands two miles from the city. Stalingrad may fall today or tomorrow if the northern group of forces does not give immediate assistance. See to it that the commanders of forces north and northwest of Stalingrad strike the enemy at once…No delay can be tolerated. To delay now is tantamount to a crime…

In the five days he had been at the front, Zhukov had not yet performed a miracle, but he was attempting to coordinate Russian infantry attacks with meager air and tank strikes. Such an effort needed time. This Stalin would not allow him. When Zhukov called him, pleading for a delay until ammunition arrived in sufficient quantities, Stalin gave him until September 5. On that day, Zhukov launched “human wave” assaults, which crashed into the left flank of the German corridor from the Don to the Volga and immediately foundered. At nightfall, the German corridor was still intact.

Zhukov phoned Stalin with the bad news. After describing the carnage, he mentioned that Paulus had been forced to transfer some reserves from the outskirts of Stalingrad to contain him.

Stalin was elated. “That’s very good,” he said. “It is of great help to the city.”

When Zhukov cautioned that the Russian success was illusory, the premier dismissed it, saying, “Just continue the attacks. Your job is to divert as many of the enemy forces as possible from Stalingrad.”

With that Stalin hung up.

Adolf Hitler, the other grand chessmaster in the fateful game, paced the fragrant pine woods of Vinnitsa in growing frustration. He could not understand why the goals of Operation Blue had not been met. General Paulus had hit the Volga on August 23, but Stalingrad had not yet fallen. And in the Caucasus, where Army Group A strove for the prized oil fields, something else was going wrong.

Ever since the Germans had turned the corner at Rostov on July 23, and burst into the land mass between the Black Sea and the Caspian, the Russians had played a skillful game of will-o’- the-wisp, drawing the Nazis further and further from their supply bases. The German grenadiers of the First Panzer and Seventeenth Armies crossed parched desert, fields of six-foot-high sunflowers, and, on August 9, finally came to the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains where they captured the oil center of Maikop, only to find it burned to the ground by retreating Russians. Hitler then urged his commanders on toward Grozny, Batum, and Baku. Along the way, they acquired new allies: Moslems, Circassians, natives who rejected Communist rule. Still the Germans never trapped a large body of the Red Army. By September, with supply lines sluggish, their march toward the chief oil centers slowed. When Army Group A’s commander,. Marshal List, recommended regrouping, Hitler went into a tirade and threatened to fire him.