William Craig - Enemy at the Gates

Several nights a week Sacha left home to report enemy troop movements. He always returned safely, and went to bed without giving his parents any details. Though they knew he worked for the Red Army, the Fillipovs never pressed their son for information.

One night he rushed home to warn them to get out of the house by dawn. They followed his instructions and in the morning, Russian artillery shells rained down on a German staff headquarters only a few doors away. Sacha had given his superiors the exact coordinates.

In the Beketovka Bulge, five miles south of Stalingrad, a dramatic buildup of Soviet troops and equipment had been completed. These were the southern strike armies requisitioned by Zhukov for Operation Uranus, and a small percentage of the troops had come from the holocaust in Stalingrad.

One of them was Lt. Hersch Gurewicz. He had finally left the factory area with its ceaseless noise and filth, and gone to the far shore where he ate Spam from America and for the first time, got a glimmer of hope. While munching the canned food, he realized that help was coming from outside Russia and that the “senseless” holding operation around the factories might have some meaning after all. Counting the ranks of his antitank unit, he hoped this was true. Of his one hundred men, eighty had perished in Stalingrad.

Instead of a rest period of two weeks, the lieutenant received new orders. With his company’s ranks refilled, he went south on the eastern shore of the Volga and then across to the area of Beketovka. While no one mentioned an offensive, the feeling of it was in the air.

After his orgy of killing on the streets of Latashanka in September, Sgt. Alexei Petrov had returned to his .122-millimeter gun and lived in a shellhole three hundred yards west of the Volga cliff.

Like his batterymates, Petrov never washed or changed his uniform. He was infested with lice. The gray bugs nested all over his body, even in the seams of his trousers. His only diversion was lining them up on the ground on a bet to see who could field the largest army of parasites. A rumor that he was being relieved turned into a joyful reality, and Petrov crossed the Volga to a rest camp where, for days, he luxuriated in hot baths and suffered the delousing process without protest.

Refitted with winter clothing, including a white parka and valenki (fur boots), he was propelled back into the war. Sent south of Stalingrad, the sergeant taught a new gun crew the rudiments of firing a heavy-caliber fleldpiece, while the ever-present political officers harangued them on the need for determination against the Fascists.

Petrov listened to the politrook and thought often about his family, somewhere beyond the western horizon. He had never received a clue to their whereabouts, and the burden of not knowing the truth preyed on his mind.

Nikita Khrushchev also appeared in the Beketovka Bulge. Clothed in a fur coat and hat, the commissar went from camp to camp, joking with soldiers and asking about their gripes. He was in an excellent mood.

His comrade, Gen. Andrei Yeremenko was not. Fidgeting at his new headquarters on the western side of the Volga, Yeremenko worried about his part in Operation Uranus. He also seethed over the slight he had experienced when Marshal Rokossovsky assumed defense of the city. Yeremenko felt he deserved better from Stalin.

The hours to Uranus rushed by, but in Stalingrad the Germans ignored reality.

Satisfied that the 48th Panzer Corps was strong enough to hold the left flank, Paulus obeyed Hitler’s edict to hit the Russians hard while the river ice interrupted Chuikov’s supply lines. North of the captured tractor factory, the 16th Panzer Division attempted once again to seize the suburb of Rynok, which the panzers first had entered on that lovely summer afternoon in August.

From north and south the 16th Panzers attacked, only to find the town bristling with Russian guns, a labryinth of trenches, hidden stationary tanks, and bazookas. But the German soldiers methodically moved down the streets, blowing up bunkers and pillboxes. Russian and German corpses left a ghastly trail.

A battalion led by Captain Mues cleared the area south of town, reached the Volga, and turned north. It was Mues’s intention to shake hands in the center of Rynok with German units cutting into it from other directions. Fog and a light snow began to obscure vision but the aggressive Mues pushed on. Fearless, revered by his men as “immortal,” he was tracked by a Soviet sniper, who put a bullet in his brain. The attack stopped abruptly as Mues’s troops gathered around the stricken officer, now unconscious and near death. They ignored the bullets and cried over the man they loved.

An officer from another regiment finally came, lifted Mues in his arms and staggered away with the heavy burden. Soldiers who had fought with the captain through Russia broke down and collapsed. Others became fearful and timid as news of his death spread like a bushfire.

The Russians continued to hold Rynok. The 16th Panzer Division was inside the suburb, but in twenty-four hours, it had occupied only five blocks.

With Uranus less than thirty-six hours away, Joseph Stalin got cold feet. Behind the blacked-out windows in his Kremlin apartment, he paced the floor, alternately sucking his pipe and running its mouthpiece through his mustache, listening all the while to Marshals Zhukov and Vasilevsky. Both men had received urgent summonses to come to the Kremlin. On the eve of H-hour, when they were most needed at the front lines, neither marshal had expected he would have to debate the merits of the operation.

But they had reckoned without the “insubordination” of one of their field commanders, Gen. Viktor T. Volsky, whose 4th Mechanized Corps was to act as right flank for the southern prong of the offensive. From his headquarters near the Tzatza lakes, south of Stalingrad, the depressed general had written a personal letter to Stalin, warning him “as an honest Communist” that lack of adequate manpower and material meant disaster for the Red Army in the coming attack.

Stalin acted quickly to protect himself and brought the marshals directly to the capital to answer the charges. Zhukov and Vasilevsky rendered a controlled, dispassionate recital of the facts. Evidently satisfied, the premier went to the phone and called Volsky. Without any show of anger, he reassured the general that the offensive had been properly conceived. While Zhukov and Vasilevsky listened in amazement, Stalin cordially accepted Volsky’s apologies and hung up.

Vasilevsky received permission to fly back immediately to the Don Front, but Stalin kept Zhukov in Moscow, ostensibly to plan a diversionary attack west of the capital to throw the Germans off balance. Near the Tzatza lakes, the chagrined General Volsky tried to recover from his conversation with the premier. Sweating profusely, the pale officer pulled out a handkerchief and coughed into it. Clots of blood stained the cloth as he wiped his mouth.

For weeks Volsky had been hiding the truth from everyone. An old nemesis, tuberculosis of the throat, had returned to ravage his system. Physically and psychologically, the commander of the 4th Tank Corps was unfit to participate in an undertaking of such magnitude, but he refused to give in to the disease and go to a sanitarium. For Volsky, the road to Uranus had been filled, with heartbreak and dogged determination to conquer his affliction. He had spent months in hospitals, resting, reading, and waiting for the doctor’s certificate of good health. Now on the eve of the great counterstroke against the Nazis, he had no intention of relinquishing his command.

But the illness was preying on him. He had lost weight; he drank only tea and nibbled biscuits. Moreover, he suffered fits of melancholia, which tended to affect his judgment. It had been during one of those depressions that he had written his pessimistic letter to Joseph Stalin.