Enemy at the Gates (26 page)

Binder collected what equipment he could from the ruins, then returned to the bridge at Akimovski to wait for his cattle. Lost somewhere in the near blizzard of the previous night, the herd had not been seen by anyone.

On a bluff overlooking the town, Binder stared west into the vast steppe. Close by him, two Russian prisoners were being
interrogated
by a German officer, who suddenly shouted something and waved a pistol. When one of the Russians bolted, the German shot him in the back of the head.

Horrified, Binder rushed over and begged the officer to spare the other prisoner's life. He said he could use him as a driver. The officer shrugged disdainfully and holstered his weapon. Binder led the Russian back to his car, where the prisoner poured out a torrent of thanks in fluent German. The young man explained that he had learned the language while studying medicine in Moscow.

Russian shelling increased; dead bodies lined the roads, and wounded men called for help. A Rumanian officer waved feebly from a clump of bushes, and Binder and his new friend went to him. The man had wounds in an arm and his right leg. After Binder cut open his trousers, the Russian medical student took his knife and skillfully picked pieces of shrapnel from the lacerations. The Rumanian fainted.

Binder heard his cattle coming long before they showed on the horizon. With shells bursting intermittently in the town of Akimovski, he stood patiently at the bridge and listened to the sound of hooves hitting the ground. Then they appeared, a mass of animals, raising a huge cloud of snow as they ran ahead of the shouting herdsmen. Their noses dripping icicles, their eyes caked with ice and snow, they passed over the bridge into corrals in the deep
balkas
between the Don and Volga.

Satisfied with his coup, Binder dropped the Russian and wounded Rumanian officer at a dispensary and started setting up new depots for his division on the east side of the Don.

Only a few miles away, Gen. Arthur Schmidt was briefing Friedrich von Paulus at Sixth Army headquarters about the deteriorating situation. After announcing that the 24th Panzer Division was having difficulty negotiating immense snowdrifts on the way from Stalingrad to defend the vital bridge at Kalach, he added that a Russian tank column had just been reported within range of Golubinka itself.

Paulus abruptly terminated the discussion. "Well, Schmidt, I will no longer stay here. We will have to move. . . ."

Paulus suddenly seemed agitated and even Schmidt lost some of his calm. The two men said a curt good-bye to their staff and went out to pack.

They took off a short time later and flew first to Gumrak Airport, five miles west of Stalingrad. After a brief conversation there with General Seydlitz-Kurzbach, they flew southwest to the communications center of Chir, from where Paulus hoped to maintain reliable radio contact with higher headquarters.

In the meantime he acted quickly to smash the second stage of the Soviet counterattack by sending the 29th Motorized Division into battle south of Stalingrad. On alert, to join General Heim's 48th Panzer Corps west of the Don, the 29th was able to move swiftly through rolling fog on the right flank of the Russian Fifty-seventh Army, which was pushing past negligible resistance from Rumanian outposts. The counterattack stunned the Russians.

Both sides suffered losses as the first tanks opened fire, and, when mounted infantry clashed, the full battle was joined. The fog lifted and German observers saw a Soviet armored train passing by to the west. Behind it several other freight trains had stopped to disgorge Red Army foot soldiers. German panzers sighted on these inviting targets and poured hundreds of shells into the packed boxcars. Through binoculars, the gunners watched countless Russian bodies cartwheeling into the air and down onto the snow.

On either side of the railroad embankment, Soviet tanks milled about, ramming each other and firing aimlessly. German batteries shot point-blank into these vehicles and the Russian 13th Mechanized Corps, ninety tanks strong, began to blaze and explode. Sensing a chance to completely seal the Russian breakthrough on the southern flank, 29th Division commander, Gen. Ernst Leyser, prepared to annihilate the burning enemy force. But as he did so an order reached him from Army Group B, more than two hundred miles away at Starobelsk, to pull back and guard the Sixth Army's rear at the Don.

In the fading afternoon light of November 21, the frustrated Leyser reluctantly broke contact and rode off to the northwest. From nearby fields, tanks started to fire over his car at unseen targets. The general suddenly had no idea whether they were friends or foes.

General Leyser's temporary victory brought a brief dividend to Paulus. News of the bloody defeat of the Russian 13th Corps quickly filtered back to Gen. Viktor Volsky's 4th Tank Corps and the tubercular general slowed his drive, now aiming for Kalach on the Don. Still spitting phlegm into his handkerchief, the cautious officer refused to go on and insisted on reinforcements against renewed German assaults. But the Germans had gone.

Agonizing over the rupture of both his flanks, General Paulus made up his mind about the future. He authorized a dispatch to Army Group B at Starobelsk and recommended the obvious: withdrawal of the Sixth Army from the Volga and Stalingrad to positions more than a hundred miles to the southwest, at the lower Don and Chir rivers.

Army Group B commander, Freiherr von Weichs, forwarded the recommendation to OKW headquarters in Rastenburg, East Prussia, with a strong endorsement. He shared Paulus's conviction that an immediate withdrawal was the only alternative to total disaster.

And disaster was close at hand. South of Stalingrad, General Yeremenko's units, after crushing the Rumanians, split "Papa" Hoth's Fourth German Tank Army in two. At a weather-beaten farmhouse outside Businovka, "Papa" Hoth sat besieged. Outside, the wind howled at the windows which were boarded over and stuffed with bits of paper and cloth. Inside, flickering candles shone on a band of weary staff officers, trying to keep in touch with their scattered combat groups on the steppe.

Messengers arrived in a stream with pleas from trapped regiments. At a solitary telephone, an officer scribbled down final words from decimated formations as they fell under Russian armor.

Hoth was helpless. With the Rumanian forces destroyed, he had too few guns and tanks to stop the enemy. It had also become apparent that the Soviet plan was breathtaking in scope. Colored arrows on the battle maps already showed a distinct arc to the northwest, around his pitiful forces, toward Kalach and its bridge over the Don. If the bridge should fall before Sixth Army pulled back from the Volga, Hoth foresaw a mass grave for the Germans in Stalingrad.

But thirteen hundred miles west of the emerging tragedy, in his Alpine
Berghof,
Hitler had a different view of the situation. Upon receiving Paulus's suggestion that Sixth Army withdraw to the southwest, he responded quickly with a sharp command to hold fast.

Radio message Number 1352

TOP SECRET                                                    Army Group B

Urgent!                                                                21 November 42, 1525 hrs.

TO:
HQ Sixth Army

Führer Order:

Sixth Army will hold positions despite threat of temporary encirclement….Keep railroad line open as long as possible. Special orders regarding air supply will follow!

The implications of the order were stunning to consider. And while Paulus and Schmidt pondered the message, a phone call came in from Lt. Gen. Martin Fiebig, commander of the Eighth Air Corps. The generals discussed the latest events and Fiebig referred to the bridge at Kalach. Schmidt said he saw no immediate danger there and added, "The commander in chief is thinking of forming a hedgehog defense."

"And how do you propose to keep the army supplied?" asked Fiebig.

"That will have to be done from the air."

Fiebig was astonished. "A whole army? It's quite impossible! I advise you not to be so optimistic."

Fiebig hung up and immediately called his chief, General Richthofen, who then phoned Albert Jeschonnek, Goering's deputy, and raged at him: "You've got to stop it! In the filthy weather we have here there's not a hope of supplying an Army of 250,000 men from the air. It's stark staring madness!..."

On the night of November 21, the vanguard of the 16th Panzer Division, which had left the outskirts of Stalingrad two days earlier, arrived on the Don to act as a covering force for units fleeing out of the great loop of the Don. But the division arrived too late to do more than hold a few bridges open for Rumanian and German stragglers. At the bridge he held, Lt. Eberhard von Loebbecke commanded the rear guard as a Russian tank appeared on the roadway. Loebbecke, who had lost his left arm to a French machine gunner in 1939, was standing upright before the T-34, which fired one round at him. The shell ticked his empty sleeve and exploded some yards behind him. Knocked down by the explosion, the lieutenant rose almost immediately to direct return fire. In their open turret, the Soviet crew stared in amazement at the man who had apparently lost his arm to the shell and yet bounced up off the ground without any discomfort. While they hesitated, a German antitank gun put a round into the T-34, and it blew up in front of Loebbecke's eyes.

That night, relentless winds moaning over the steppe turned snow drifts into miniature mountain ranges on the flat prairie. The temperature fell below zero and the skies promised more snow. For thousands of square miles, west and east of the Don River, the land seemed lifeless.

But the steppe teemed with desperate men, skulking across the fields in small groups. Rumanian and German, they ran on frozen feet, propelled only by a common urge to survive. They fled through the night seeking food, shelter, and the protection of friendly guns.

Other men roamed the fields with different goals in mind. Lt. Col. Grigor Fillipov led the men of the Soviet 14th Motor Artillery Brigade away from the main body of Soviet troops moving down from the Don, and struck for the town of Kalach. Fillipov had no maps. He had only five tanks, supported by several trucks carrying infantry. His drivers turned on every light and sped through the darkness. Beside the road, hundreds of enemy soldiers waved to the "friendly" tankers, who ignored them and pushed on.

At 6:00
A.M
. on November 22, Fillipov spied an old man, a Russian civilian, pulling a peasant cart, with two German soldiers walking beside him. The colonel issued whispered instructions and his men shot the Germans dead, then clambered down from the T-34s to talk to their terrified countryman.

"Uncle Vanya, which way to the bridge?" they asked. When he heard them speak his native tongue, the old man stopped trembling, climbed into the first tank and Fillipov waved his combat group on to the east.

In Kalach, the German garrison lived in a state of uneasy expectation. Refugees had been passing through for the past thirty-six hours, and the boom of heavy guns from the northwest sounded closer each hour. But no one in the garrison knew how badly the situation had deteriorated.

At Colonel Mikosch's Engineer Training School on the hill at the eastern edge of town, pioneers had begun another regular workday, practicing the skills of street fighting, demolition expertise, and weaponry, both German and Russian. Several captured Russian tanks were being used by pupils for firing demonstrations at the range on the west side of the Don. Each day, the tanks trundled across the bridge, up the steep west bank, and onto the steppe for gunnery lessons.

On this morning, a German Propaganda Company correspondent, Heinz Schroter, had come to film the scene. When the tanks crossed the bridge and went past him up the hill, he photographed them and then, shortly afterward, Schroter heard the usual sounds of cannon fire from the gunnery range.

At Sentry Post Number 3, a sergeant named Wiedemann dozed near his .88-millimeter antiaircraft gun. Behind him in a hut, the crew of eight slept. Wiedemann, too, had watched the tanks go by, counting them off as they roared up the slope and disappeared.

The garrison returned to a routine schedule. The snow had stopped and voices rang loudly in the clear air. Laughter echoed as soldiers threw snowballs at each other. When the tanks suddenly reappeared, the indifferent Sergeant Wiedemann watched them speed past. As the third machine rumbled onto the bridge a machine gun suddenly chattered. The tanks kept going on to the east bank where they quickly separated and turned off on either side.

Grabbing his binoculars Wiedemann screamed, "Those damn tanks are Russian!" and pounded on a piece of metal to alert his crew, which burst out of the hut. Two tanks had not yet crossed the bridge. The .88-millimeter gun fired at a three-hundred-yard range, and the T-34s ignited. The second in line teetered for a moment, then somersaulted directly onto the frozen surface of the Don below.

When the first tanks went over, cameraman Schroter had been even closer to the bridge. A lieutenant suddenly ran past him, yelling unintelligibly, and Schroter thought he had gone berserk. The officer was waving a pistol until a machine gun stuttered and he pitched to the ground.

Schröter grabbed his equipment and ran. So did most of the Germans in the immediate vicinity. In the underbrush on the east bank, Col. Grigor Fillipov radioed frantically back to the Soviet 26th Armored Brigade for help. He had won the bridge by sheer luck but he expected the Germans to react viciously.

While Colonel Fillipov dug in at Kalach, the phone rang in General Schmidt's office at Chir, fifteen miles to the south. It was Luftwaffe commander Martin Fiebig calling, and he again warned about the folly of an airlift, "Both the weather and the enemy are completely incalculable factors. . . ." But the conversation was interrupted by a group of German generals, who suddenly swept into the headquarters.

"Papa" Hoth had arrived from Businovka, where the southern flank had totally evaporated. At a loss to give a clear picture of the nightmare, Hoth listened intently while Schmidt and an old friend and school classmate, Gen. Wolfgang Pickert, debated a solution. Mimicking a former professor's manner, Schmidt said, "Pickert, decision with brief statement of reasons!"