William Craig - Enemy at the Gates

On that square, bodies sprawled grotesquely across the grass and sidewalks. Crimson puddles marked where they fell. Other trails of blood etched crazy patterns on the streets, showing where men had dragged themselves to cover.

The Univermag was desolate, smashed: Window manikins had tumbled in awkward positions; bullets stitched paths up and down their lifeless forms. Inside, Russians and Germans huddled in death along the aisles. The store had become a morgue.

The Pravda building had collapsed in the bombings of August 23. The City Soviet, the Red Army Club, and the Gorki Theater were now vacant, ugly from blackened holes and gaping windows. On side streets, merchants’ stores had been flattened. Rotted tomatoes and watermelon pulp splashed over the sidewalks. Fragments of bodies mixed with the vegetables. Flies swarmed over the remains.

In what once had been a fashionable restaurant just east of the mouth of Tsaritsa Gorge, Russian doctors and nurses struggled to evacuate the wounded. More than seven hundred victims had gone out the day before by boat, a motley collection of vessels that were barely seaworthy and which landed under the fire from the German 71st Division. Now nearly six hundred more victims were being carried to the shoreline.

The Germans crept closer. Their machine guns sprayed a withering fire into the masses huddled at the dock. Russian soldiers formed a defense line and held the Nazis off until the last patients crawled feebly on board. When the Germans finally broke into the restaurant, they vomited from the stench of ether and blood and of those who had died and lay unburied.

At last the main ferry had been taken. Except for isolated pockets of resistance, the German Sixth Army held the Volga shoreline for several miles north and south of the Tsaritsa Gorge. Only the factory district in northern Stalingrad remained to be conquered.

At Vinnitsa, this good news failed to stir Adolf Hitler, who sulked bitterly in his log cabin. For more than two weeks after his explosive argument with General Jodi, the Führer had refused to socialize with the men who served him. Enraged by the “insubordination” within his staff, disgusted with the lack of progress in the Caucasus and along the Volga, on September 24 he met with Franz Halder and fired him. In an icy voice, Hitler told the general that they both needed a rest, that their nerves had frayed to the point where neither could help the other. Halder bowed out gracefully and went to his quarters to pack. But before departing, he wrote a short note to his friend and pupil, Friedrich von Paulus, out on the steppe:

24 September 1942

….A line to tell you that today I have resigned my appointment. Let me thank you, my dear Paulus, for your loyalty and friendship and wish you further success as the leader you have proved yourself to be.

Paulus received Halder’s letter just as his soldiers raised a huge swastika over the pockmarked entrance to the Univermag Department store in the central part of the city.

But Paulus had no desire to celebrate, for he had just learned the staggering cost of the six weeks’ passage from the Don to the banks of the Volga: more than seventy-seven hundred German soldiers dead; thirty-one thousand wounded. Ten percent of the Sixth Army had been lost. Moreover, he knew the worst battle had not yet been joined. North of the ferry landing, north of heavily contested Mamaev Hill, lay the key to the city—the factories. There, the Sixth Army faced the ultimate challenge. And Paulus was running out of men and ammunition.

Returning to his isolated quarters at Golubinka on the high western bank of the Don, he listened to his gramophone and tried to quell his dysentery. A tic on his cheek had become almost uncontrollable.

Paulus sent another urgent cable to Army Group B; “Rifle strength in the city failing more rapidly than reinforcements. Unless decline halted, the battle will stretch on.”

Some of Paulus’s men shared his increasing gloom. One of them was Lt. Hans Oettl, who had become a forward observer on the front lines a few miles north of the tractor plant. Each day Oettl looked through his field glasses, and pinpointed Russian positions. His batteries fired barrages of shells over his head, down onto the enemy. It had gone on like this for weeks, and nothing had shaken the Russians loose. Opposite him, Russian militiamen had been replaced by seasoned troops ferried across the Volga at night. For Oettl there was a sharp awareness that the war was not ending as abruptly as he had hoped. He had also come to realize that the young officers in his division were woefully inadequate. Though many wore the Order of the Ritter Kreuz on their breast, few if any had ever received training in the art of street fighting. They were dying at an alarming rate.

During lulls in the fighting, Oettl rested in his bunker and worried about the future. Outside, his red-ribboned goat, Maedi, grazed contentedly, oblivious to the gunfire that never seemed to stop.

At Vertaichy, out on the steppe, Deputy Chief Quartermaster Karl Binder plunged into his new job, supplying the men of the 305th Division from the Lake Constance region of southern Germany. Well-fed, gregarious, a veteran of the German Army since the days of the Freikorps before Hitler, Binder immediately noticed the poor morale of the units in the northernmost sector held by Sixth Army. They were unwashed, discouraged, and begging for decent rations.

When Binder inquired into the reasons for their condition, he was told the enemy constantly harassed them, never giving them a chance to rest. Russian artillery dropped hundreds of shells into the German lines; Russian divisions mounted brief, small infantry attacks. Although the Russians failed to gain ground, they inflicted a mounting toll of casualties.

Binder took hold of his new job swiftly. Within days, the experienced scrounger found sausages and beer, pumpernickel, even wine for his men. In the officers’ quarters, he learned more about the battle on the steppe. One of the staff, Lieutenant Colonel Codre, warned, “Stalingrad will still give the Germans the shock of their lives, because the Russians are far from beaten.” Codre went on, “A nagging worry for us is the supply line back to the Ukraine. The Sixth Army requires 750 tons a day to survive, and all of it comes over a single track to the railhead at Chir.” Sobered by these comments, Karl Binder began to worry more about that tenuous lifeline to the rear.

In the meantime, he wrote faithfully to his wife back in Stuttgart. He asked for his children and assured everyone that the campaign was going well. But he never mentioned Codre’s pessimistic prophecy.

Capt. Gerhard Meunch was still in the same U-shaped building he had occupied on the night of September 14, just two hundred meters from the Volga. Ever since then, with less than fifty men left in his battalion, he had tried again and again to reach the riverbank. But the Russians always drove him back, and at one point, some of Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards even came after him. While Meunch held the ground floor, the Russians blew a hole in the cellar and climbed in. The Germans rushed up some artillery to help the besieged captain and, after he and his men escaped by ladder, the guns smashed in the bottom of the buildings and knocked down another nearby home. Ten Russians crawled out of the wreckage and surrendered to Meunch, who went back inside what was left of the U-shaped structure to await relief.

At Sixth Army Headquarters in Golubinka, Col. Günter von Below paused to say good-bye to his friends before going to Kharkov for treatment of an acute case of jaundice. He was depressed by the cost of taking downtown Stalingrad. But as a trained intelligence officer, he was even more concerned with the overall strategic position of Sixth Army on the steppe. When he mentioned the exposed left flank to Arthur Schmidt, the chief of staff agreed with him that it was a “festering boil,” and confided that both he and Paulus worried about it constantly. Leaving headquarters a short time later, Below was still convinced that Stalingrad could be taken. But since no one had been able to reassure him about the vulnerable flank, he wondered what would happen to Sixth Army should the Russians decide to counterattack in great strength.