William Craig - Enemy at the Gates

In the woods, the stunned Changar had cursed and raised his rifle, but a companion knocked it down and warned him not to reveal their position. During the next months, as Changar retreated across Russia, the tormented cries of that bereaved woman followed him and, by October of 1942, he was killing Germans for the sheer pleasure of it.

For ten days now he had been involved in a bizarre contest. Ordered to occupy a half-demolished building west of the Barrikady Plant, he had led fifty men into it only to find a sizable German force entrenched in a large room across a ten-foot-wide hallway.

The corridor was impassable. No one on either side dared mount a rush, and Changar tried to estimate the size of the opposition. From the babble of voices, he judged it sufficient to hold him in check.

Days went by. Food and ammunition were passed in through the windows. Changar assumed the Germans were doing the same so he ordered special equipment: spades, shovels, and 170 pounds of dynamite.

The Russians broke through the concrete floor and started a tunnel. Digging two at a time, they slowly worked a passageway under the corridor. To mask the noise of the tools, they sang songs at the top of their voices. The Germans also burst into song from time to time, and Changar immediately figured the enemy was planning to blow him up, too.

On the eleventh day, Changar ordered a halt to further excavation. After carefully placing the dynamite at the end of the tunnel, he cut and lined a fuse along the dirt passage up into the main room.

The Germans were singing again, and someone on the other side of the hall had added a harmonica as accompaniment. While his men sang a last lusty ballad, Captain Changar lit the fuse and hollered to the two men still in the hole to “run like hell.”

With the fuse sputtering, everyone tumbled out the low windows and scattered hastily across the yard, but the explosion came too quickly. It picked them up and hurled them down again with stunning force. The shaken Changar looked back to see the strongpoint rising slowly into the air. It expanded outward, then broke into hundreds of pieces. A huge ball of fire catapulted up from the debris.

He rose and called for his men. Only two had failed to get clear, the men who had been in the hole. Changar realized he had cut the fuse too short and he worried about the error until the next day, when he went back to examine his handiwork. He counted three hundred sixty legs before he lost interest and left, satisfied that the 180 dead Germans were a partial payment for his error.

Further south near the Red October Plant, sniper Vassili Zaitsev stalked the front lines. By now he had killed nearly a hundred Germans and had been decorated with the Order of Lenin. His fame was spreading to all parts of the Soviet Union.

Furthermore, his students had amassed a formidable number of victims. Men like Viktor Medvedev and Anatoli Chekhov made the Germans afraid to lift their heads during daylight hours. And sharpshooter Tania Chernova now fired a rifle with unerring accuracy. Almost forty Germans had died in her sights, victims she continued to refer to as “sticks.” But Tania still had much to learn.

In the top story of a building, she settled down behind piles of bricks to monitor enemy traffic. Several other student snipers joined her as she waited for hours, tracking Germans who scurried back and forth between trenches. Tania and her squad followed each one with scopes zeroed in on heads and hearts. But no one fired, because Zaitsev had told them to wait for his approval before revealing their position.

Tania seethed at the order. Filled with disgust at having lost so many “sticks,” she fidgeted at the window and cursed the delay. When a column of German infantrymen suddenly burst into the open, she screamed: “Shoot!” and the room blazed with gunfire. Tania pumped shot after shot into the gray green uniforms and counted seventeen dead men sprawled on the pavement. Exultant, she sat back and exchanged congratulations with her friends.

But they had missed some Germans, who crawled back to their lines with exact coordinates of Tania’s ambush. In minutes, a succession of shellbursts blew the building in on the Russians. Tania left the dead and ran out to tell Vassili Zaitsev what had happened.

When he heard the distraught girl’s story, Zaitsev slapped her across the face with all his strength, berated her for her stupidity, and told her that she alone was responsible for the deaths of her friends. Stricken with guilt and afraid of Zaitsev’s wrath, Tania cried for hours.

In downtown Stalingrad, the static war continued, and outside Jacob Pavlov’s stronghold, decomposing bodies attested to his ferocious defense of the apartment house he had entered a month earlier. The Germans left him alone for short periods but they always came back, so in between battles, he set up an artillery spotting post on the fourth floor, protecting it with snipers who worked during daylight hours to keep the Germans down and nervous. On all battle maps at Sixty-second Army Headquarters, the house in no-man’s-land was now referred to as “ Dom Pavlov” (“Pavlov’s House”), and it had become both an integral fortification and a rallying point. Troops verified observations by saying that the Germans were seen moving two hundred yards west of Pavlov’s House; German tanks were reported one hundred yards north of Pavlov’s House. At General Rodimtsev’s command post in a battered grain mill, one hundred yards from the Volga, his staff watched the nightly tracer duels erupting around that outpost and felt a surge of satisfaction.

Underground tunnels had been dug from several directions into the house and Pavlov, the stocky, simple peasant, felt more and more like a division commander as he radioed back information. Given the code name “Lighthouse” by Rodimtsev, he reveled in his new-found importance.

On October 27, at 376th Division Headquarters on the left flank of the Sixth Army, generals Paulus and Schmidt sat listening to an intense, nervous intelligence officer. They paid rapt attention, for the young lieutenant, Karl Ostarhild, was warning them of imminent disaster.

Though awed by the presence of such illustrious superiors, Ostarhild briefed them with the confidence born of a complete grasp of his subject. He had spent weeks assembling his data from snooper planes, prisoners, visual observations, and radio intercept and had no doubts about his information.

“We have seen a large number of men and material concentrated in the region of Kletskaya,” Ostarhild said, outlining the danger to the north. “Our order to make reconnaissance of this concentration was fulfilled…. This is an attack army, armed to the teeth, and of considerable size. We have information about the units… their armaments, where they come from, up to the names of their commanders. We also know their attack plans, which extend to the Black Sea.”

Seemingly unmoved, Paulus brusquely asked for supporting documents. When he finished reading them, he asked: “Is this information known to my intelligence?” Advised by Schmidt that it was, though in less detail, Paulus told his worried advisers he would ask for more reserves to strengthen the defense.

After Paulus departed, the frustrated Ostarhild went back to his maps. He had done everything he could to alert the “brains” of the Sixth Army, but he wondered whether they had really grasped the enormity of the danger.

Back at Golubinka, General Paulus issued an unusual proclamation to his troops:

1. The summer and fall offensive is successfully terminated after taking Stalingrad…the Sixth Army has played a significant role and held the Russians in check. The actions of the leadership and the troops during the offensive will enter into history as an especially glorious page.