William Craig - Enemy at the Gates

In fifteen minutes, when the phone conversation resumed, Yeremenko had not gotten control of himself. “I can’t understand….Please tell Stalin I want to say here until the enemy is completely destroyed.”

Zhukov suggested he tell Stalin himself, and Yeremenko said he had already tried but was unable to get through Poskrebyshev, Stalin’s personal secretary, who had insisted that all such matters were Zhukov’s responsibility. On behalf of the shattered Yeremenko, Zhukov called Stalin immediately, but the premier remained adamant about placing Rokossovsky in charge.

Retreating to his private quarters south of Stalingrad, Andrei Yeremenko burst into tears. When Nikita Khrushchev tried to calm him, he was furious: “Comrade… you don’t understand. You’re a civilian. You forget how we thought we were doomed, how Stalin used to ask if we could hold out for three more days. We all thought the Germans would capture Stalingrad, and we would be made scapegoats. Maybe you don’t foresee what will happen, but I do: The new Don Front will get all the glory for the Stalingrad victory, and our armies of the Southern Front will be forgotten.”

Khrushchev could not console his friend.

The German counterattack against Russian General Badanov’s Twenty-fourth Tank Corps had temporarily regained control of Moro and Tazi, the airstrips for the shuttle to Stalingrad. But the triumph proved of little consequence, for bad weather and faulty equipment continued to plague the Luftwaffe. Tonnage into the Kessel wavered between eighty and two hundred tons daily. Hundreds of Russian antiaircraft batteries were now emplaced along the flight path, in direct line with the German radio beacon to Pitomnik, and they began to take an awesome toll of the lumbering transports. In just five weeks, nearly three hundred of them were shot down.

Pitomnik Airfield itself mirrored the mounting disaster of Sixth Army. The pulse of the Kessel, it lay in the middle of an arterial network of highways that drew a microcosm of despair and hope to its runways and buildings. These roads had been kept clear for weeks by Major Linden’s special task force. But even his herculean efforts faltered before the terrible handicaps imposed by the winter storms. As his men worked in blizzards, the brutal winds forced them to wear gas masks to protect their faces from frostbite. When one storm ended, another began. Though snow plows moved up and down the arteries constantly, eventually the acute shortage of fuel slowed their schedule, bringing Major Linden to the brink of despair.

As the New Year approached, the roads to Pitomnik clogged again with drifts. On either side of the highways, soldiers now stuck the legs of hundreds of dead horses into the snow as trail markers for truck drivers.

Col. Lothar Rosenfeld, a former police boxing champion, monitored the field’s heartbeat. Riding a small panje pony, he maintained rigid discipline over both the air shuttle and the hordes of wounded and couriers seeking passage from the pocket. One of his frequent visitors was Hitler’s liaison officer, Maj. Coelestin von Zitzewitz, who had been suspect since the day he arrived from Supreme Headquarters as an observer.

From the beginning, Gen. Arthur Schmidt and some others had held Zitzewitz at arm’s length and, shortly after his arrival, Schmidt even interfered with one of his dispatches to East Prussia. Convinced that Zitzewitz was “painting too grim a picture” at that time in early December, Schmidt insisted on altering the message to reflect a more optimistic tone.

Zitzewitz had learned his lesson. From then on, he only sent off reports after Schmidt had gone to bed. Far from being a yesman, the major wrote unvarnished accounts of the debacle he witnessed. He went everywhere: to the front-line foxholes, to hospitals, ammunition dumps, and icy ravines. In the mile long balkas at Baburkin, Gorodische, and Dimitrevka, he followed German troops into their dark, clammy bunkers where lack of fuel spawned colds, pneumonia, and an increased weakness to other infections. Improper sanitation in these refuges was also bringing out armies of lice.

Zitzewitz sat among hordes of mice and rats that overran the bunkers and gnawed scraps of food hoarded by Germans in knapsacks and pockets. The rodents were ravenous. He witnessed one case where they even descended on a soldier whose feet were badly frostbitten. While he slept, they chewed off two of his toes.

Above all, Zitzewitz monitored Pitomnik where the wounded crowded into hastily laid-out hospitals and waited for doctors to ease their pain while the Junkers and Heinkels circled and landed or flamed and crashed.

The major spared nothing in his attempt to alert Hitler to the whole truth. But his grim reports had an unanticipated impact at the Wolf’s Lair. In discussing them, Reichmarshal Hermann Goering shook his head in disbelief. “It is impossible that any German officer could be responsible for defeatist messages of this sort,” he declared. “The only possible explanation is that the enemy has captured his transmitter and has sent them himself.”

Thus, Zitzewitz’s reports were dismissed as Russian propaganda.

Stragglers from the Italian Eighth Army could have assured Hermann Goering that Zitzewitz’s chronicles of despair were totally authentic. They were still plodding through knee-deep snow toward far-off prison camps.

Lt. Felice Bracci had continued marching in a northerly direc Enemy tion, across the silvery ice of the upper Don River that he once hoped to ford as a conqueror. Now he was sure it was a bewitched stream, never to succumb to an invader’s boots. For several agonizing days, Bracci had kept his mind and body functioning as the “long black snake” of captives passed numerous villages where Russian women unaccountably smiled and threw crusts of bread and frozen potatoes into his outstretched hands.

Some Russians exchanged food for wedding rings, clothing or blankets. When Bracci offered a piece of adhesive tape from a roll he had saved, a villager thrust a large piece of black bread at him in payment. Bracci wolfed it down in seconds.

On December 28, Russian guards stopped the Italians at a huge barracks near a railroad station. Jammed into the dark building with hundreds of other prisoners, Bracci spent the next three days clinging to sanity. Some of his friends had contracted gangrene from frostbite and screamed without letup. Italian doctors amputated the worst limbs with homemade knives and the moans of the patients, operated on without anesthesia, drove everyone to despair.

Surrounded by bedlam, by prayers for God’s mercy, Bracci and his comrades scrounged bits of wood and lit small fires in a corner of the room. The tiny blazes nourished them somewhat while the Russians subjected them to a propaganda campaign.

Two Soviet officers, one a woman, came into the barracks, and speaking fluent Italian, they asked why Bracci and his friends had come to wage war on Russia and whether the soldiers were really Fascists. The Russians told the captives that Mussolini and Hitler were finished and ended their harangue with the lie that King Victor Emmanuel had died recently of a broken heart. The woman then took out scraps of paper and pencils and asked the prisoners to write messages back to loved ones in Italy. Taking a pencil in his numbed fingers, Bracci wrote: “I am alive… I am well….” He had no hope that his words would ever arrive in Rome.

The propaganda barrage continued into the next day, when all the Italian officers were lined up to hear a speech from a bespectacled civilian speaking from atop a car. In flawless Italian, the man cursed the Fascist government and warned his listeners that it was extremely unlikely they would ever leave Russia alive. The cold, he claimed, would “mow them down.”