Enemy at the Gates (22 page)

Inside the Barrikady itself, Maj. Eugen Rettenmaier, recently back from a two-week furlough in Germany, checked his four companies and found only thirty-seven men left out of four hundred. To his questions about missing individuals, he got the same answers over and over: killed, wounded, presumed dead.

Within hours, one six-hundred-man battalion of the pioneers came under Rettenmaier's wing. The other four battalions spread out along the main line of resistance and prepared for a coordinated assault on the area behind the Barrikady to the Volga.

Major Rettenmaier listened intently to their extraordinary briefing. Two Russian strongpoints had to be taken: one, the Chemist's Shop on the left side of a row of partially completed houses; the other, the Commissar's House or "Red House," several hundred yards west of the Chemist's Shop and somewhat nearer the Volga bank. The Red House, a clumsy brick fortress, dominated the gently sloping terrain.

The pioneers asked questions about the buildings and the cliff along the river. They were brisk, businesslike, but when Rettenmaier and others tried to explain that the Russians in Stalingrad fought a different kind of war, that they hid in cellars and used the sewer systems to good advantage, the pioneers said they had seen the worst already, in places like Voronezh. They were prepared for such tactics.

After midnight on November 9, the combat groups assembled in the machine shops of the Barrikady. Straining under the burden of satchel charges, shovels, grenades, and bandoliers of bullets, they shuffled through the gloom to their starting points.

In several large rooms at the eastern end of the factory, they waited for the signal to burst out onto open ground. Some men smoked furtively. Sgt. Ernst Wohlfahrt was a tense spectator. A virtual prisoner inside the Barrikady for weeks, he did not envy the pioneers their job. He himself had spent days hiding behind brick walls, afraid to raise his head. The Russians had never let him feel secure and he was pessimistic about the coming battle, despite the pioneers' cocky self-assurance.

Then a shattering explosion engulfed an adjacent room. Screams welled up and Wohlfahrt rushed in to find eighteen pioneers dead from a Russian booby trap. The survivors were suddenly subdued, fearful.

At 3:30
A.M
., German artillery fire passed over and down onto Russian lines, bringing their counterfire. When the German fire lifted, the pioneers moved onto open ground, lit by eerie flashes of gunfire. Watching them go across the cratered moonscape, Major Rettenmaier silently wished them Godspeed.

The Chemist's Shop fell without trouble. But at the Cornmissar's House, the engineers had walked into a trap. Every opening had been sealed up by debris, and from tiny peepholes, the Russians shot with deadly accuracy. Further south, Regiment 576 quickly reached the Volga, but again the Russians held on, stealing into caves and cracks, and the engineers rolled grenades down at them. The explosives bounced harmlessly by the openings and on into the Volga.

The next morning, when pioneers of the 50th Battalion finally broke into the Commissar's House, the Russians ran into the cellars. In a frenzy, the Germans tore up the floor, threw in cans of gasoline, and ignited them. Then they lowered satchel charges and detonated them. Smoke cartridges were laid down to blind anyone surviving the blasts and flames. From the outside, the house seeped smoke. Detonations shook the ground as the cellar broke apart under the blast, and a messenger ran across the field to tell Major Rettenmaier that the Commissar's House was in German hands.

But on the edge of the Volga, the engineers who had reached the shore line the day before discovered they had won a Pyrrhic victory. Of the group on the riverbank, only one man was not wounded. A large patrol went out to give aid, and within three hours it was reduced to three men.

Col. Herbert Selle had been fully confident that his pioneers could take the last bits of contested soil in Stalingrad. Within days, however, he knew the truth. The five battalions, numbering nearly three thousand men, had lost a third of their forces. Selle gave orders to collect the remnants of the battalions and form them into one effective combat group for further attacks.

In a letter to his family he acknowledged the tragic waste: "There will be many tears in Germany….Happy is he who is not responsible for these unwarranted sacrifices." For Selle, Stalingrad was no longer worth the price. He felt the battle had degenerated into a personal struggle between the egos of Stalin and Hitler.

Nevertheless, the pioneers had dealt the Russians a stunning blow. Col. Ivan Ilyich Lyudnikov's 138th Division had been trapped on the shore and held a shrinking pie-shaped slice of land only four hundred yards wide and one hundred yards deep. In front of it lay the dead of the 118th Regiment, which had met the pioneers on the open ground and in the rows of partially destroyed houses. Only six of its 250 soldiers escaped to refuge inside the wedge. Lyudnikov's forces now numbered only several hundred men and women capable of resistance, and he radioed Sixty-second Army Headquarters for help.

In Moscow, the Russian General Staff pursued its strategy. Overjoyed that the Germans continued to rivet their attention on the ruins near the Volga bank, STAVKA speeded up the movements of men and supplies to the flanks.

It also called on its espionage networks for new information:

November 11, 1942

To Dora: [Lucy Network in Switzerland]

Where are the rear defense locations of the Germans on the southwest of Stalingrad and along the Don? Are defense positions being built on sectors Stalingrad-Kletskaya and Stalingrad-Kalach? Their characteristics?...

The Director

Thus the Russians collected almost every scrap of intelligence they needed. Some of it came from personal observations by the mastermind, Georgi Zhukov, who cabled Stalin his impressions from the front:

Number 4657

November 11, 1942

I have just spent two days with Yeremenko. I …examined enemy positions facing the 51st and 57th Armies…I gave instructions for further reconnaissance and work on the operations plan on the basis of information obtained…it is urgent that the 51st and 57th Armies be provided with warm outfits and ammunition no later than November 14.

Konstantinov

[Zhukov's code name]

Finally the German High Command made a move to guard its flanks. The 48th Panzer Corps, stationed more than fifty miles southwest of the ominous Russian bridgeheads at Kletskaya and Serafimovich on the Don, received priority orders to move up to the threatened sector.

Led by Lt. Gen. Ferdinand Heim, a close friend and former aide to Paulus, the 48th clanked onto the roads and headed northeast. But only a few miles after starting out, the column ground to a halt when several tanks caught fire. In others, motors kept misfiring and finally refused to run at all. Harried mechanics swarmed over the machines and quickly found the answer. During the weeks of inactivity behind the lines, field mice had nested inside the vehicles and eaten away insulation covering the electrical systems. Days behind schedule, the 48th Corps finally limped into its new quarters. It was almost totally crippled. Out of one hundred four tanks in the 22nd Panzer Division, only forty-two were ready for combat.

No one notified Hitler about the status of his reserves.

General Richthofen was doing what he could to harass the Soviet buildup. He sent his planes to the Kletskaya and Serafimovich bridgehead areas to hit rail lines and troop concentrations. But the Russiazg kept coming across the thinly frozen Don on pontoon bridges, some of them laid a foot beneath the river's surface to hide them from accurate artillery fire and dive-bombers. Discouraged and frustrated, Richthofen confided his fears to his diary:

November 12. The Russians are resolutely carrying on with their preparations for an offensive against the Rumanians….Their reserves have now been concentrated. When, I wonder, will the attack come?...Guns are beginning to make their appearance in artillery emplacements. I can only hope that the Russians won't tear too many big holes in the line!

On their narrow wedge of land on the Volga, the 138th Red Army Division kept in touch by radio with army headquarters further down the river. Colonel Lyudnikov talked openly, without code. Neither Chuikov nor he mentioned the other's name. Chuikov promised help but had no idea where to find it.

Lyudnikov understood his superior's predicament. He had only to look behind him at the moving ice pack coming downstream to realize that Chuikov himself was in trouble. Boats could not navigate through the floes; all footbridges had been torn away; supplies were being cut back drastically.

Burrowed into the sides of the ravine where Lyudnikov's remnants held on, four men, known to their comrades as the Rolik group, challenged the German pioneers. When the Germans hung over the steep embankment and let down satchel charges of dynamite, the Rolik men snipped the wires dangling in front of them and the explosives dropped into the Volga. The group shot back at the Nazis as Lyudnikov's men listened intently to the sounds of the struggle. When Rolik was quiet "everyone trembled." When the shooting resumed, shouts were heard: "Rolik's firing! Rolik's firing!" The word passed from trench to trench and buoyed the Russians immensely.

On November 14, Chuikov reported to Front Headquarters: "No ships arrived at all. Deliveries of supplies have fallen through for three days running. Reinforcements have not been ferried across, and our units are feeling an acute shortage of ammunition and rations….The drifting ice has completely cut communications with the left bank."

Chapter Fifteen

On November 15, the newspaper
Das Reich
carried an article by Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda, that signalled a significant shift in thinking. Goebbels had decided to prepare the German people for any eventuality—including disaster in Russia.

"We have thrown the national existence into the balance," he wrote. "There is no turning back now."

Meanwhile, Marshals Zhukov and Vasilevsky shuttled back and forth between Moscow and the Stalingrad fronts. They walked the terrain, spotted artillery targets and German troop concentrations for special attention, and met with their generals to refine tactics.

During Zhukov's visit to General Vatutin's command post north of the Don River bridgeheads at Serafimovich and Kletskaya, Stalin reached him with an important telegram:

November 15, 1942

Comrade Konstantinov:                                                  
Personal

You can set the moving date for Federov and Ivanov [the offensives by Vatutin and Yeremenko] as you see fit, and let me know when you come back to Moscow. If you think it necessary that either one or the other move one or two days earlier or later, I empower you to decide that question according to your own best judgment.

Vasilyev [Stalin's code name]

Zhukov and Vasilevsky checked their preparations on both fronts and agreed to begin the counterattack in the northern sector on November 19, and on the southern front a day later. Stalin approved the plan without comment.

Operation Uranus would commence within ninety-six hours.

From the Obersalzburg, where he had been resting since the Beer Hall Speech, Adolf Hitler radioed a message to Sixth Army Headquarters on the steppe:

I know about the difficulties of the battle for Stalingrad and about the loss of troops. With the ice drifting on the Volga, however, the difficulties are even greater for the Russians. Making use of this [time] span we will avoid a bloodbath later on. I expect therefore that the Supreme Command, with all its repeatedly proven energy, and the troops, with their courage often demonstrated, will do their utmost to break through to the Volga at the metallurgical works and at the gun factory and occupy these parts of town.

In accordance with Hitler's orders, the pioneers turned right and left along the Volga and tried to roll up the fanatical defense behind the Barrikady. The battle lasted all day and on that night, two Soviet biplanes came up the river at only a fifty-foot altitude and hovered over Lyudnikov's position. A circle of bonfires lit by the trapped Russians illuminated the small area in which it was safe to drop supplies. But as the pilots prepared to unload bales of food from their open cockpits, the Germans lit another chain of bonfires to confuse them. Since the pilots were unable to gauge the extent of Lyudnikov's territory, most of the supplies they dropped fell into German lines or sank in the Volga.

At a field kitchen in the rear, west of the Barrikady, cook Wilhelm Giebeler waited for news of his 336th Battalion. Ever since the battle for the factory district began, a friend, a dispatch runner, had kept him informed of the action at the front. The first day, he had come back and told him everything was going well; the next he had returned with snapshots, letters, and other personal effects of men Giebeler had known well. He told the cook to send them on to their next of kin. By now Giebeler had hundreds of small bundles to mail back to Germany.

Listening to the symphony of shells and grenades exploding to the east, he thumbed through the letters and pictures and waited for his friend to make his nightly visit. But the man did not appear. Giebeler never saw him again—nor any other soldiers of the 336th Battalion.

General von Richthofen had not given up his feud with Sixth Army Headquarters. In a telephone conversation with Chief of Staff Kurt Zeitzler at Rastenburg on the night of November 16, the outspoken Luftwaffe commander exploded:

"Both the command and the troops are so listless…we shall get nowhere….Let us either fight or abandon the attack altogether. If we can't clear up the situation now, when the Volga is blocked and the Russians are in real difficulty, we shall never be able to. The days are getting shorter and the weather worse."