William Craig - Enemy at the Gates

Shivering in formation, Bracci wondered whether the speaker would mention starvation as a factor contributing to his imminent death, but the expatriate Italian did not. When he finished, the prisoners had to parade past a cameraman, who filmed their misery for some unknown audience.

On New Year’s Eve, Bracci tried to forget his plight. Lying on the frozen barracks floor, he listened as Colonel Rosati took his comrades on a gourmet visit of Rome’s best restuarants: the elegant “Zi,” the Bersagliera, and on to the dining room atop the Tarpeian rock.

When the colonel recited the meal he would order in each establishment, his audience groaned. “Thursday, gnocchi,” Rosati savored the words and men chewed endlessly on nothing. Spittle formed in their mouths; their stomachs churned. Someone told Rosati to shut up, but the protestor was shouted down by others desperate to hold off reality. “Saturday… tripe,” the colonel went on and added mellow white wines to the menu.

Outside the barracks, a roaring wind blew gusts of snow through the paneless windows onto the huddled “diners.” Ignoring the chill, they listened raptly: “Monday… cannelloni, in cream sauce….”

At 10:00 P.M. on December 31, Russian artillery around the Kessel exploded in a frenzied acknowledgement of the holiday. Because they knew Soviet gunners were operating on Moscow time, two hours ahead of German clocks, Sixth Army troops had prepared for the deluge. Hunkered down in their holes, they rode out the fifteen-minute salvo welcoming in a year of promised glory for Soviet Russia.

Inside Stalingrad, the expectations of Russian troops ran high. The ice bridge across the Volga was the main reason for their attitude. From Acktuba and Krasnaya Sloboda, hundreds of trucks now crossed the river daily, bringing white camouflage suits to replace tattered gray brown uniforms. In the middle of the river, traffic masters waved food convoys to depots set up under the cliff. Cases of American canned goods began to litter foxholes strung along the defense line from Tsaritsa to the tractor works. Ammunition piled up to the point where Russian gunners now fired antitank shells at lone German soldiers.

On New Year’s Eve, discipline in the revitalized Sixty-second Army relaxed and, along the shore, high-ranking Soviet officers held a series of parties to honor actors, musicians, and ballerinas visiting Stalingrad to entertain the troops. One of the troupe members, violinist Mikhail Goldstein, stayed away and went instead into the trenches to perform another of his one-man concerts for the soldiers.

In all the war Goldstein had never seen a battlefield quite like Stalingrad: a city so utterly broken by bombs and artillery, cluttered with skeletons of hundreds of horses, picked clean by the starving enemy. And always there were the grim police of the Russian NKVD, standing between the front line and the Volga, checking soldiers’ papers and shooting suspected deserters dead.

The horrible battlefield shocked Goldstein and he played as he never played before, hour after hour for men who obviously loved his music. And while all German works had been banned by the Soviet government, Goldstein doubted that any commissar would protest on New Year’s Eve. The melodies he created drifted out through loudspeakers to the German trenches and the shooting suddenly ceased. In the eerie quiet, the music flowed from Goldstein’s dipping bow.

When he finished, a hushed silence hung over the Russian soldiers. From another loudspeaker, in German territory, a voice broke the spell. In halting Russian it pleaded: “Play some more Bach. We won’t shoot.”

Goldstein picked up his violin and started a lively Bach Gavotte.

At the stroke of midnight, Berlin time, a soldier of the German 24th Panzer Division at the northeastern part of the Kessel raised his machine pistol and fired a magazine full of tracer bullets into the sky. Others in his unit spontaneously followed his salute. The idea flared quickly along the perimeter west to the 16th Panzers, then to the 60th Motorized and on around the curve to the Marinovka “nose,” through the 3rd Motorized and down to the 29th Division, eastward along the southern edge of the pocket, past the 297th and 371st to the Volga, and back to the darkened streets of Stalingrad where men poked rifles and machine guns through slits and blasted an arc of kaleidoscopic fireworks above the brooding bulk of the factories. The rainbow of fire circled the fortress for minutes as German soldiers welcomed a New Year shorn of hope.

To those standing in the middle of the steppe, around Pitomnik and Gumrak, the pyrotechnics proved only the futility of the German position. The entire horizon was a band of flame from tracer bullets. Buz they formed a complete circle of fire around Sixth Army.

On the first day of 1943, Adolph Hitler remembered Paulus at Stalingrad: “To you and your brave army I send, also in the name of the whole German population, my warmest New Year’s wishes. I am aware of the difficulty of your responsibility. The heroic attitude of your troops is appreciated. You and your soldiers should begin the New Year with a strong faith that I and the… German Wehrmacht will use all strength to relieve the defenders of Stalingrad and make their long wait the highest achievement of German war history….”

At an officers’ mess inside the Kessel, blond Lt. Hans Oettl was surrounded by men wishing him a happy birthday. Seated in front of his own blue china, from which he had eaten for years, he watched a cook ladle out a huge steaming portion of goulash filled with thick chunks of meat. Astounded and delighted, Oettl began to eat.

The door suddenly burst open and a military policeman stormed in, demanding to know whether anyone had seen his watchdog. In the sudden silence, Hans Oettl looked at his companions, now staring uncomfortably at the floor, then his gaze returned slowly to the goulash and mountain of meat in front of him.

While the policeman thundered threats against anyone who might have killed his pet, the lieutenant deliberately raised his fork and chewed a portion of the policeman’s German Shepherd.

Sgt. Albert Pflüger had waited patiently for a flight home, but when bad weather closed off most of the shuttle, he suddenly made up his mind to go back to his men in the 297th Division. Still drugged by pills and nearly crazed by the itching of lice under the cast on his arm, he hitched a ride to a railroad siding near Karpovka and boarded the small train that ran for a few miles toward the suburbs of Stalingrad.

In a freight car, Pflüger found company: two Rumanian enlisted men and six Rumanian officers, who stood menacingly over them. While the train moved along in fitful starts and stops, one officer told Pflüger the soldiers were prisoners who had been condemned to death for stealing food. While they talked, for some reason Pflüger could not fathom, another officer suddenly whipped the two men mercilessly.

At Peschanka, Pflüger jumped down from this depressing scene, and within hours he found his first sergeant, who greeted him exuberantly and took him to his old unit. In only a few days, six of Pflüger’s men had been wounded or killed. But the survivors welcomed him and the company butcher showered him with hoarded chocolate, cigarettes, and tins of meat.

Glad to be back with his own people, Pflüger quickly dismissed the memory of missing the flight at Pitomnik.

In Novocherkassk, Field Marshal Eric von Manstein greeted the New Year in a somber mood. His attempt to save Paulus was a failure, and he knew that the fate of the Sixth Army was sealed.

But another crisis, of even greater magnitude, was at hand. Four hundred miles south of Stalingrad, Army Group A, cornprising the First Panzer and Seventeenth armies, stood alone and vulnerable in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. Unless Manstein brought these armies north, safely through the bottleneck city of Rostov, the Russian High Command could effect the “super-Stalingrad Kesser that Stalin sought.