William Craig - Enemy at the Gates

It was also a day of heavy losses for the Russian 87th Guards Division. Jammed into a blocking position south of the Mishkova River as the result of Marshal Vasilevsky’s appeal to Stalin, the Guards had marched for a day and a half without pause from the Beketovka area, just below Stalingrad.

In the vanguard of the division was Sgt. Alexei Petrov, who had just trained a new gun crew for the offensive, and he urged his men to a faster pace. Snow obscured his vision and exhaustion became the main enemy, but he allowed no one to rest. Petrov himself held on to the barrel of the gun and slept while walking. Finally they arrived at the Mishkova River—and immediate combat with the 6th Panzer Division around Verkhne-Kumski.

Petrov had never seen nor heard such heavy shelling. Hour after hour, explosions blew the ground into pillars of frozen dirt and snow, and the horizons blossomed with endless flame. To Petrov, it was worse than in Stalingrad.

On the flat plain were thousands of bodies, tossed like broken dolls onto the ground. Most were Russians, victims of German artillery and Stukas. At the height of the bombardment, Petrov saw a tiny figure, no more than three feet high, waving his arms wildly. Amazed, Petrov looked more closely and saw that it was the upper body of a Russian soldier. Beside it on the ground lay a pair of legs and hips, neatly severed by a shellburst.

The man was looking at Petrov and his mouth opened and closed, sucking air, trying to communicate one last time. Petrov gaped at the apparition until the arms stopped flailing, the mouth slackened and the eyes glazed. Somehow the soldier’s torso remained upright and forlorn beside the rest of the body.

Still unsure of the relief force’s location, Paulus prepared for the crucial decision of how to link up with Manstein. After assigning the 53rd Mortar Regiment the dangerous job of leading the breakthrough, he moved armored combat groups to the southwestern corner of the pocket. But he could find only eighty tanks fit for action.

He also called on Maj. Josef Linden, whose engineer battalions had been decimated at the Barrikady Gun Factory a few weeks before, for two special assignments. The first was plowing clear the road network around the Kessel, a simple job on the surface, but exceptionally difficult because of the gasoline shortage.

The second task was equally vital: Two road construction battalions and a bridge company were needed to deactivate the minefields so that the German tanks and trucks could break out quickly when Paulus gave the word.

After four days of fighting, Manstein’s soldiers were still on the way to Stalingrad, but the attack had slowed to a snail’s pace. Combat Group Hunersdorff of the 6th Panzer Division had not yet captured Verkhne-Kumski and, supported by part of the battered 23rd Panzer Division, the replenished tankers went back to the village.

The drive bogged down again so the 6th slipped off to the west to out-flank the enemy. Around the village of Sogotskot, the Russians had prepared a vast network of rifle pits that made it impossible for tanks to advance. Nor would any of the Russians surrender. From distances of ten feet or less, the Germans shot into the trenches. “The tanks stood… like elephants with fully extended trunks,” and when the Russians raised their heads, the “trunks” recoiled and blasted them with point-blank fire. Still the Russians held. Finally, when Soviet armor came up to help, Combat Group Hunersdorff again had to back away as the twilight of December 16 obscured the land between the Aksai and Mishkova rivers.

In Stalingrad, every Russian along the Volga shore heard a tremendous crashing noise and Vassili Chuikov bolted from his cave to witness a glorious sight: An enormous wave of ice was pushing down past Zaitsevski Island. “Smashing everything in its path, it crushed and pulverized small and large ice floes alike, and broke logs like matchwood,” was how he described it later. And while the general held his breath, the monstrous ice pack slowed and, just opposite Chuikov’s fortress bunker, shuddered to a halt. For minutes it groaned and heaved. Behind it, thousands more chunks of ice slammed into the jam with terrific violence. The “bridge” held.

A short time later Chuikov sent sappers across the ice to see whether it would support traffic. By 9:00 P.M. they had returned safely, and he ordered planks to build a highway to the far side.

His supply problems were over.

Just a few hundred yards west of Chuikov’s jubilant cliffside headquarters, Capt. Gerhard Meunch was faced with his first case of insubordination. It had been triggered by the Führer’s “Christmas Drive,” the annual fund-raising campaign for the Nazi party that reached even into the Kessel.

One platoon from Meunch’s companies refused to make any donations. When he asked the reason, an officer said: “Captain, you will have to see for yourself what is wrong.”

Meunch went to visit the platoon, reduced to six men, and inquired about the trouble. The men told him they were no longer prepared to fight. One trooper added: “Captain, I will no longer play the game. We are fed up!”

Stunned by their attitude, Meunch wisely decided to say nothing. He sent the men to the rear and waited beside their machine gun until replacements came to fill the gap. Then he went to his command post, called for the rebels and told them they could sleep at his quarters that night.

In the morning, he shared breakfast with them, and as the group sat on the floor sipping hot coffee, Meunch watched them carefully and noticed they seemed a bit more relaxed. Gingerly he brought up the previous night’s difficulty. The rebels answered without hesitation.

The underlying cause of their mutiny was a letter from one of the soldier’s wives, who had asked why he was at the front while several of his friends stayed at home. The soldier had been so upset that he had read the letter to his friends. It had driven them into a state of rebellion as they, too, began to wonder why they had to fight the war for malingerers in Germany.

Meunch let them talk out their bitterness, then brought them back to reality. “According to martial law, you are liable to punishment,” he told them. “You know how refusal to obey an order will be punished. Are you prepared to return to your positions, and not desert or do foolish things? Can you promise that?”

They answered with a spontaneous chorus of yesses. One soldier went further, “We will fight for you as long as you command the battalion. But if you are wounded or killed, we wish to be free to make our decisions.”

Meunch considered the offer briefly, then chose to compromise. “All right, confirm it by handshake,” he replied. “As long as I command the battalion you will have to fight. Thereafter you may do what you want.”

The men shook hands with him on the bargain.

Later that day, December 17, 150 miles to the southwest at Novocherkassk, Erich von Manstein dined with Freiherr von Richthofen. While the two men sipped wine, they ranged over their mutual problems in trying to save the Sixth Army. Richthofen had just lost two of his bomber squadrons, which OKW had transferred without notice to another sector. To Richthofen, the move was tantamount to “abandoning Sixth Army to its fate….” He minced no words when he exclaimed that it was “plain murder!”

He had phoned Gen. Albert Jeschonnek back in East Prussia to make that charge. But Jeschonnek “formally disclaimed all responsibility” for the order. Now Richthofen confided this conversation to Manstein. Both men were appalled by the decisions being made from the safety of the Wolf’s Lair, more than a thousand miles away.

By the time dinner ended, the two were in agreement; they were “like a couple of attendants in a lunatic asylum.”