William Craig - Enemy at the Gates

Along that critical left flank, outside the Don River town of Akimovski, Gen. Carl Rodenburg was as anxious as Below about Russian intentions. In fact, the monocled veteran was terribly alarmed. His 76th Division had suffered such heavy casualties in fighting off persistent Russian probes that he had begun promoting wholesale lots from the noncommissioned ranks to compensate for officers killed in action. Every week, as he went to the division cemetery to pay homage to the dead, Rodenburg became increasingly pessimistic about the chances for victory at Stalingrad.

Other German soldiers were still relatively untouched by the battle. Pvt. Josef Metzler had come across the Don south of the Kalach bridge. A radio operator in an antiaircraft battery of the 29th Motorized Division, Metzler had found the summer quiet. He saw few Russians and had time to forage freely; once he even caught a pig that he and his comrades slaughtered and ate. When Metzler saw his first “slant eyes,” the Kalmuks who welcomed the invaders openly, he was sure the Russians were finished. He had the feeling that he was already in Asia and that nothing could stop the German advance. Born in Furth, near Nüremberg, the private was a man of strict scruples and Christian ideals. He always comported himself correctly; never once had he picked up clothing or other belongings from a fallen soldier, either German or Russian. To Metzler, that was obscene and almost sacrilegious. During September, promoted to private first class, he stayed on the outskirts of Stalingrad while his battery fired into the shattered city.

A former schoolteacher, Lt. Friedrich Breining went to the Volga as a sightseer, to look at the famous waterway. Commandeering a car, he drove through the safe zone afforded by the 16th Panzer Division’s bridgehead and stared down at the half-mile-wide waterway. He had expected the Volga to be like his own Rhine, with steep banks on both sides as between Mainz and Coblenz. But it was entirely different, and Breining came away from it disappointed.

On the way back to his unit, he dawdled, eating watermelon from the fields and enjoying the shade of some trees which he thought to be poplars. Late in the day, he arrived at the Tartar Wall, an ancient earthworks, ten feet high, which ran for about fifteen miles along the steppe. Once the wall had protected Russian settlers from invading Mongols. Now it simply gave added cover to the German tanks and men burrowed into the ground around it. Breining went into his trench beside it and sunbathed in the lovely, autumn weather. For the lieutenant, life was reasonably pleasant. His unit had suffered few casualties during the summer and few of his comrades anticipated any significant fighting during the fall.

For Pvt. Wilhelm Alter, the whole campaign was boring. A tailor in the 389th Division, he and a friend, shoemaker Emil Gehres, lived in a ravine west of Gumrak Airfield. At 4:00 A.M. each day, they got up, washed, ate breakfast, then went to work, mending clothes and repairing shoes for the combat troops. At 4:00 P.M., they stopped working, washed again, and went to supper. The 1 food was invariably good. Alter particularly liked the goulash.

A happy-go-lucky man who smiled easily, the tailor found the war an annoyance, an interruption from wife and home. The dull rumble of shelling in Stalingrad barely intruded on his thoughts.

The same held true for Dr. Herbert Rentsch, an immaculately groomed veterinarian who had just returned after being married in Dresden. Now in charge of all animals in the 94th Division, Rentsch went out each day to inspect his herd of twelve hundred horses, forty oxen and six camels. While he arranged to send four hundred of the horses off to the Ukraine for a rest, he requisitioned enough feed from the newly captured grain elevator in the southern sector of Stalingrad to take care of the rest of his charges.

On his daily tours of the grazing grounds, forty-five miles northwest of the city and well within German lines, Rentsch always rode his own horse, Lore. At these times, he found it easy to forget the distant sounds of war. When he gave Lore her head and she cantered across the flat plain, the doctor was at peace with the world.

Lt. Emil Metzger was in a euphoric mood. While his smoothly efficient crew fired on targets reported to them by spotter planes over Stalingrad, the lieutenant savored a letter from Kaethe, who had finally forgiven him for not coming home in August. She did not tell him that the letter explaining his delay had not reached her until after she spent hours waiting at the train station. Nor did she tell him how she had gone home that day, pounded the table in frustration and screamed: “To hell with him!” Instead, she congratulated him for being so selfless in letting a friend take his place in the furlough rotation.

Emil read her letter over and over, imagining the reunion they would have when the war was over. Still confident that Stalingrad would fall soon, he blithely ignored any conversations among fellow officers about the weak German left flank.

That weak left flank was being discussed in Moscow. On September 28, Joseph Stalin sat once more with the co-planners in Operation Uranus, Georgi Zhukov and Alexander Vasilevsky.

Stalin was relaxed, courteous, and attentive. The premier was particularly interested in the personalities of the generals commanding the various armies. He mentioned General Gordov. Both Zhukov and Vasilevsky agreed that while he was efficient, the man seemed unable to get along with his staff. Stalin suggested a change and Zhukov recommended Konstantin Konstantinovich Rokossovsky, an officer who had barely survived Stalin’s purges and wore a set of stainless steel false teeth as a reminder of his imprisonment and torture by the NKVD. Stalin endorsed the promotion wholeheartedly and also agreed to changing the names of several sectors. The Stalingrad Front became the Don Front; the Southeastern Front reverted to the Stalingrad Front. Both alterations were made to conform more readily to the geography of the region.

After further discussion of Operation Uranus, Stalin told Zhukov, “You had better fly back and do everything necessary to wear down the enemy…”

Before leaving, both Vasilevsky and Zhukov signed a map showing the plan for the counteroffensive. Stalin added the word, “Approved.” Then he wrote his own signature.

While Stalin was placing his personal endorsement on the plan to destroy the Sixth Army, Adolf Hitler left Vinnitsa to fly home. As the throbbing engines of his Ju-52 transport carried him across the Ukraine and then Poland, the Führer withdrew from his aides in sullen contemplation of the disastrous summer in southern Russia. His blitzkrieg on the steppe was foundering in the streets of Stalingrad. His thrust into the oil fields of the Caucasus was equally bogged down in the mountain foothills. But in Berlin he continued to deny these harsh realities and, on September 30, he launched into a plaintive defense of his accomplishments. Speaking at a Winter Relief Rally in the Sportspalast, he told his audience, “When Mr. Eden or some other nincompoop declares that they have a belief, we cannot talk with them, as their idea of belief seems to be different from ours….They believe that Dunkirk was one of the greatest victories in the world’s history….”

Silhouetted by banks of spotlights, Hitler continued:

What have we to offer? If we advance 1,000 kilometers, it is nothing. It is a veritable failure….If we could cross the Don, thrust to the Volga, attack Stalingrad—and it will be taken, you may be sure of that—then it is nothing. It is nothing if we advance to the Caucasus, occupy the Ukraine and the Donetz basin…

We had three objectives: (1) To take away the last great Russian wheat territory. (2) To take away the last district of coking coal. (3) To approach the oil district, paralyze it, and at least cut it off. Our offensive then went on to the enemy’s great transport artery, the Volga and Stalingrad. You may rest assured that once there, no one will push us out of that spot….