William Craig - Enemy at the Gates

Bracci and his fellow officers were barely alive. Twenty-four slept in shifts on the ice-covered floor, where they curled up in embraces to draw heat from each other. To pass the time, some men whispered stories of previous days and future dreams. Martini, Branco, and Giordano agreed to set up a restaurant in Rome with their savings. Franco Fusco wanted to go into business. Fasanotti talked about continuing his career as a public prosecutor.

One officer refused to talk of what might be. Instead, he announced that the trip was merely an exquisite torture conceived by the Russians, who would keep the train going endlessly until all its passengers died. It seemed that way. Just once a day, guards pulled the door open to give them a hunk of black bread and a bucket of water.

While the thirstiest howled for more than their share, Bracci and his friends carefully watched a soldier whittle the frozen bread into equal portions. The men never took their eyes off the knife as it shaved and jabbed the rock-like meal. Carefully handed out to groups of five, the bread was consumed immediately and then, in the dim light that seeped through cracks, the Italians rocked along in contemplative silence.

As the miles and days passed, each man attended to his bodily needs in a corner and a cone-shaped mound of excrement rose slowly, a daily calendar recording the length of the trip. The excrement was always gray, the color of the bread, their only sustenance.

Bracci slept as much as he could. But when he was awake, he thought often about his captors and he was torn by his feelings toward the Russian guards. In their strange dress, they looked like big wicked apes. Boisterous, crude, they showed no trace of sensitivity. Yet, Bracci knew that out on the lonely steppe of southern Russia, their women and children suffered, too. Like him, they loved and laughed, cried and bled. But the men who guarded the trail from Kalmikov and rode the train to prison camp as jailers were not the same, could not be related to those Russians who generously gave him food during the march. To these guards, the Italians were “mere objects"; not men, not slaves. They were nothing.

The prisoners’ train moved due north, toward Moscow and beyond. Behind it, on the road Bracci had marched along earlier, lay thousands of frozen corpses. Some had bullet holes in the torso. Most had gunshot wounds in the back of the neck.

Baggage peculiar to the Italian Army lay on the crusted snowtrail. Crucifixes, mass cards, pictures of Jesus Christ and the saints, had fallen near the dead. One victim sat placidly in a drift. Eyes wide open, a smile creasing his face, he held a black rosary in his hands. The soldier had begun the second decade of the beads when a Russian guard shot him.

Cristoforo Capone came along this same trail several days behind Bracci. The doctor saw the ravens Bracci had noticed circling and he heard the same shouts: “ Davai bistre!” “Davai bistre!” as Russian guards robbed the prisoners of their warm clothing and beat them when they protested. Capone, too, watched the weak fall down and winced at the sharp cracks of rifle fire as they died. Like Bracci, he huddled for many nights in below-zero weather with soldiers who screamed from the pain of frostbite or wailed to God about their cruel fate. The doctor pitied these men in their misery, but he had decided to live. Some unknown inner strength brought him to a railroad station and a section of floor in a freight car, where he now sprawled to rest.

While an Arctic wind whistled outside and the men clutched each other to transmit body heat, the train sped north. Capone began to lick the icicled walls to quench his raging thirst. Men died beside him each night and, in the morning, Russian guards opened the doors and screamed: “ Skolco kaput?” (“How many dead?”) That was all they cared about, the number of corpses they had to pull out and discard in the snow.

On the evening of January 8, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein entertained guests at Novocherkassk. Among them were Gen. Hans Hube, “ Der Mensch,” who had just returned from East Prussia. On the way back he traveled with Col. Günter von Below, who had been invalided out of Stalingrad in September with jaundice, and was returning to duty at a time when most German soldiers were praying to leave the pocket.

During their flight, Below had learned from Hube that the Führer was planning another attempt to extricate the Sixth Army. Three panzer divisions were supposedly coming from France and would be ready to attack by the middle of February. It was apparent to Below that the aggressive Hube had succumbed to Hitler’s mesmerizing personality and believed implicitly in this new rescue expedition.

At dinner that night Hube continued to talk about the promised panzers. But each time he tried to solicit Erich von Manstein’s opinions, the field marshal changed the subject. Throughout the meal, in fact, Manstein avoided any comment about the army inside the Kessel.

Later, over drinks with staff officers of Army Group Don, Below found one reason for Manstein’s negative responses when his companions told him that less than a hundred tons a day had been airlifted to Stalingrad. Without making any definite admissions about the Kessel being a hopeless trap, they convinced Below that he was “a condemned man having a last meal” before going to his death. The chastened colonel drank until a late hour.

The next day, January 9, he and Hube touched down at Pitomnik and went on to the crowded interior of the headquarters bunker at Gumrak, where Paulus and Schmidt awaited them. Extremely agitated, Paulus quickly told his visitors it was impossible for Sixth Army to hold out much longer. When Hube broke in to mention the tanks coming from France, Paulus merely shrugged in resignation. Still, as Hube kept insisting on the need to hold out until the panzer force arrived at the perimeter, Paulus began to show a spark of interest in the idea. A desperate man, stripped of options by the higher authority he would never disobey, Paulus had to force himself to believe in a miracle.

Only hours earlier, Hitler had again denied him the requested “freedom of action” about the Russian ultimatum of surrender. The Führer was insisting on a fight to the death, because “…every day the Army holds out helps the entire front….”

That message had settled Paulus’s mind on a basic issue. Tempted to give up the struggle, he dismissed that thought when “higher authority” declared Sixth Army’s agony to be a vital necessity. Thus he now listened to Hube’s ramblings about panzers coming from France and, at the same time, issued a stem warning to his troops about the Soviet peace offer: “…Any proposals of negotiations are… to be rejected, not to be answered and parliamentaries are to be repulsed by force of weapons…”

As the ultimatum’s time limit expired, an eerie quiet descended on the steppe. In their holes and trenches, German soldiers waited fearfully for Russian reaction to Paulus’s order for all-out resistance.

At dawn on January 10, the forty-eighth day of the Kessel, a red sun poked over the horizon and shone dully on the white steppe. On both sides of the front lines, soldiers moved about in cramped foxholes, flexing their arms and legs to drive away the chill of the subzero temperature. Around them the sounds of battle were muted. Only an occasional rifle shot echoed across no-man’s-land.

By 8:00 A.M., German troops standing in line for breakfast were commenting on the fact that the Russians had been unusually quiet for more than twenty-four hours. Two minutes later, as the Germans munched chunks of black bread and drank watery coffee, seven thousand Russian cannons roared in unison and the Sixth Army fortifications in the Karpovka Valley disappeared under a rainbow of fire. Along with the artillery barrage came clouds of Soviet planes, racing at low altitudes across the German lines to sow panic.