William Craig - Enemy at the Gates

Around Mamaev Hill, Soviet troops had a bird’s-eye view of the intense fighting going on north of them. From his dugout Pyotr Deriabin saw German planes repeatedly diving into the billowing clouds of smoke and flame. When their bombs exploded, whole sections of the plants pirouetted into the sky before descending with dizzying velocity onto the ground and men below.

At the northwest corner of the Barrikady Gun Factory, the Russian 308th Division was pushed inside the machine shops and its commander, tall, slender Col. L. N. Gurtiev, was cut off from his troops. Chuikov sent a small party north to reestablish contact, and General Smekhotvorov led the group up the shoreline, crawling beneath the awesome fireworks display as guns on both sides of the river fired overhead. After nearly an hour, the relief squad tumbled into Gurtiev’s dugout. Old friends, the general and the colonel fell into each other’s arms and wept.

Across the river, General Yeremenko worried whether or not Chuikov could hold on. Sensing an increasing discouragement in the general’s radio reports, Yeremenko decided to return to the west bank for a personal assessment of the situation. Chuikov warned him not to come, but Yeremenko had been through battles before and bore scars from old wounds. On the night of October 16, he and his aides went by boat across the Volga. With shells bursting all around, they touched shore near the Red October Plant. The sky was almost as bright as day from German flares as the party walked north toward Chuikov’s command post. They climbed over mountains of wreckage and watched the wounded crawling past. Yeremenko stepped over them carefully and marveled at their strength in trying to make the final yards to the landing.

He missed Chuikov, who had gone with Kuzma Gurov, a member of the Military Council, to meet him at the landing. While they paced the bank and wondered what had happened to their guest, Yeremenko had traveled nearly five miles along the riverside to Sixty-second Army Headquarters. On the way, several of his aides died from bomb and shell splinters but he arrived unhurt and sat down to wait for his host to appear.

Hours later, Chuikov returned and the two men discussed imperatives. Chuikov wanted more ammunition and men, not whole divisions but replacements for decimated units. Yeremenko promised prompt action and then spoke to individual commanders about their problems. By phone he counseled Rodimtsev and Guriev, then sat beside Gen. Victor Zholudev while that normally stolid officer tried to explain how the 37th Guards had perished at the tractor plant. In the emotion of the moment, Zholudev broke down and cried as he described the annihilation of more than five thousand of his soldiers.

After Yeremenko consoled him as best he could, the front commander said good-bye to Chuikov and reaffirmed his pledge to supply him. He also ordered him to seek a less-exposed home for Sixty-second Army Headquarters.

Just before dawn on October 17, Yeremenko returned to the far shore in a better frame of mind. Chuikov had not lost his nerve even though in three days, he had lost thirteen thousand troops, nearly one quarter of his fifty-three-thousand-man army. On the night of October 14 alone, thirty-five hundred wounded had come to the Volga moorings. As these victims of the slaughter at the factories waited for rescue tugs, the river actually frothed from shells and bullets. And when some boats finally bumped ashore, not a crewman was left alive to pull the wounded on board.

Overhead, Soviet airplanes were appearing in strength for the first time. Shuttled in from other parts of Russia in the past ten days, they began to dominate the night skies over Stalingrad.

Unused to such interference, nervous German soldiers recoiled from the new menace and complained bitterly to their superiors. At Golubinka, forty miles west of the city, a Sixth Army Headquarters duty officer noted the new peril in his daily report:

The untouchable nightly air dominance of the Russians… [has] increased beyond tolerance. The troops cannot rest, their strength is used to the hilt. [Our] personnel and material losses are too much in the long run. The Army asks Heeresgruppe [Army Group B] to order additional attacks against enemy airports daily and nightly to assist the troops fighting in the front lines.

At the three main factories north of Mamaev Hill, the Germans attacked stubbornly, trying to crush the Russians. By October 20, they had seized all of the tractor plant’s shops and broken into the mammoth breastworks of the Barrikady. Further south, they occupied the western end of the Red October Plant.

In their frenzy to hurl every Russian into the Volga, the Germans even went after Jacob Pavlov’s stronghold in the relatively quiet central part of Stalingrad. Four tanks came into Lenin Square, stopped and fired pointblank into the building. But the wily Pavlov was ready for them. Because the tanks could neither elevate nor depress their cannon at such close range, he had moved some of his men to the fourth floor and others to the cellar. A single shot from his lone antitank gun put one enemy panzer out of action and machine-gun fire scattered the German infantry. As the foot soldiers bolted, the tanks skidded back to safety around the corner.

Pavlov and his group had a reunion shortly thereafter on the first floor. They had held the house now for three weeks.

The Barrikady Gun Factory was an awful place to see. In the morning sun, track rails girdling the plant shone with dampness. The dark, towering bulk of the shops was surrounded by shattered freight cars. Heaps of coral and red slag dotted the landscape. Over them hovered the smokestacks, what few were left standing, and everywhere there were shell holes, in the concrete buildings and in the ground.

Men lived in the holes, peeking out for a brief glimpse of the enemy. They had little hope of seeing their families again, of fathering sons, of embracing their parents. At the Barrikady, they just welcomed another dawn with the dew on the rails and the 1 sun blinding them with its malevolent intensity.

Ernst Wohlfahrt, a veteran of the French campaign, had been called up with other retired soldiers to replace losses in Russia, and the former artillery sergeant was now an infantryman with the 305th Division. Lugging a walkie-talkie, a rifle, and pistol, he picked his way through the rubble of a workers’ settlement. Russian katyusha rockets sounded overhead and as the Germans scattered desperately to avoid the “Stalin organs,” the fiery comets exploded up and down the street. Wohlfahrt hugged the ground. Next to him a man screamed “Mama!” and died.

Wohlfahrt left the body and ran ahead with his company, as Russian snipers picked off single men diving in and out of cover. Exhausted, Wohlfahrt leaned against a wall to catch his breath and a Russian climbed out of a cellar to sneak up behind him. Just as he put his rifle to Wohlfahrt’s ear, a German soldier came along, shoved his gun in the assailant’s back, and led him away.

Wohlfahrt stopped for the night in a vacant cellar, where he carefully arranged several wooden crates around his sleeping bag and lay down. A Soviet biplane, dubbed the “sewing machine” by the Germans because of its motor pitch, droned overhead and dropped a bomb squarely on top of his hiding place. The room disintegrated and the sergeant found himself lying twenty feet away from his bed, but unhurt. The wooden crates had saved his life.

Heinz Neist had an equally sinister introduction to the factories. The thirty-one-year-old veteran had never expected to be fighting. He had plotted diligently to avoid duty in the Wehrmacht, and for years his plan had succeeded when a friendly employer placed him on the indispensable list, subject to call only in a dire emergency. But the call finally came with the invasion of Russia, and Neist went off to basic training. Until he went into action, however, he maintained a reputation as one of the least ambitious soldiers in the army.