Enemy at the Gates (31 page)

In Moscow, STAVKA was reading Manstein's mind through the Lucy spy ring in Switzerland. Thus, Zhukov and Vasilevsky had mounted Little Saturn as a stopgap measure, which delayed temporarily their more grandiose scheme, Big Saturn, the destruction of the Italian Army and the Germans in the Caucasus.

For his part, Manstein could not wait much longer to make his move. A delay of only a few days might prove fatal to Sixth Army's slim chances, so he speeded up the timetable and put his faith in the tanks assembled around Kotelnikovo. At least the 6th and 23rd Panzer divisions were ready to roll.

In spite of the encirclement, the discipline and organization of Sixth Army remained excellent. On the road network, military police directed heavy traffic and routed stragglers to lost units. The highways were always well plowed. Road signs pointed the way to divisional, corps, and regimental headquarters. Fuel and food depots handled rationed supplies in an organized, crisply efficient manner. Hospitals functioned with a minimum of confusion, despite the increasing number of casualties, approximating fifteen hundred a day. Drugs and bandages were reasonably plentiful.

At Pitomnik Airport, wounded men went out on the Ju-52s and He-111s at a rate of two hundred a day. They left in good order, under the watchful eyes of doctors who prevented malingerers from catching a ride to freedom.

Given the gravity of the situation, Sixth Army was functioning better than some might have expected. But certain signs of decay were becoming evident. On December 9, two soldiers simply fell down and died. They were the first victims of starvation.

By December 11, Paulus knew his superiors had failed him. During the first seventeen days of the airlift, a daily average of only 84.4 tons arrived at Pitomnik, less than twenty percent of what he needed to keep his men alive. Paulus was seething with frustration and when Gen. Martin Fiebig, the director of the Luftwaffe air supply, flew into the pocket to explain his difficulties, the normally polite Paulus heaped abuse on him and excoriated the German High Command.

A genuinely sympathetic Fiebig let him rant, as Paulus told him the airlift was a complete failure. He referred constantly to the promises of adequate supplies and the brutal truth that barely one-sixth that amount had actually arrived:

"With that," Paulus lamented, "my army can neither exist nor fight."

He had only one flickering hope, which he indirectly referred to as he wrote his wife, Coca, "At the moment, I've got a really difficult problem on my hands, but I hope to solve it soon. Then I shall be able to write more frequently…."

Paulus knew that Manstein was about to keep
his
promise, at least, to try to save the Sixth Army.

Chapter Nineteen

From the suburbs of Kotelnikovo, the white-painted tanks and trucks of the 6th Panzer Division fanned out to the northeast and, at 5:15
A.M
. on December 12, raced for Stalingrad. Operation Winter Storm, the attempt to break through to Sixth Army, had begun. "Show it to them; give it to them, boys," cheered tank expert Colonel Hunersdorff from his command vehicle. Watching the tanks' treads churn the snow, he waved his men toward the
Kessel,
seventy-three miles away.

Surprisingly, the Russian resistance was negligible. Bewildered by Manstein's accelerated timetable, their rear guards fell back after offering only token fire. The worst problem facing the Germans was the ice that covered the roads and prevented the panzers from getting ample traction.

In the village of Verkhne-Tsaritsyn, forty-five miles northeast of Kotelnikovo, worried Russian leaders converged to discuss the new German drive. Marshal Vasilevsky presided, and he and Nikita Khrushchev exchanged opinions with other generals about German intentions. Convinced that Soviet forces were not sufficient, Vasilevsky tried to phone Stalin, but could not reach him. Increasingly alarmed by further news of German advances, he asked General Rokossovky to send the Second Guards Army from the Stalingrad front reserve to a line just north of the Mishkova River. Rokossovsky refused, citing his own needs for troops to help throttle Paulus in the pocket.

When Vasilevsky insisted, Rokossovsky held his ground. The two men argued at length and finally, Vasilevsky threatened to phone Stalin directly and placed another call to the Kremlin. But the circuits were busy and it would take hours to get a connection.

Vasilevsky paced nervously through the day while the German relief expedition gathered momentum.

During the afternoon, Hitler met with his advisors in Rastenburg. Jodi was there. So were Heusinger and Zeitzler, and six lesser aides.

Zeitzler began with a depressing report about the entire eastern front. The condition of the Italian troops defending the flanks was broached. It was agreed that, at best, they were unreliable. As to Stalingrad, the Führer agreed with Zeitzler that it was a precarious situation, but he still categorically refused to order a retreat. He felt that to do so would jeopardize "the whole meaning of the campaign" of the previous summer.

On this note, General Jodl launched a discussion of the dangers posed by the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa and the defeat of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel at El Alamein. As Jodl spoke, Hitler interrupted several times to make biting remarks about men and armies. Regarding Rommel, he declared: "He has always got to spar around with all kinds of miserable elements out there. If you do that for two years, eventually your nerves go to pieces….That's the Reichsmarshal's [Goering's] impression, too. He says that Rommel has completely lost his nerve."

Going on, Hitler voiced his concern about the Italian armies in Africa and Russia, "I didn't sleep last night; that's the feeling of uncertainty. Once a unit has started to flee, the bonds of law and order quickly disappear unless an iron discipline prevails. . . . We succeed with the Germans, but not with the Italians. We won't succeed with the Italians, anywhere."

The conference went on until 3:00
P.M.
, adjourning after a briefing on the air supply program for Stalingrad. The figures were impressive as to number of flights attempted per day. But the statistics hid the fact that while planes were taking off for the city, their loads were not reaching troops inside the
Kessel.
Continuing bad weather forced planes to abort missions; Russian fighters had begun harassing the airlanes, and antiaircraft batteries were being reinforced. As a result, the steppe was becoming a highway of broken aircraft—a graveyard of planes.

By now Sixth Army headquarters was aware that Manstein was coming. Buoyed up, nervous, Paulus and Schmidt waited through the day for progress reports of Operation Winter Storm. They were hopeful, but each knew that time was robbing Sixth Army of its strength to break loose and meet its saviors.

That day's Sixth Army War Diary reflected the precipitate decline inside the
Kessel:

December 12, 1942, 5:45
P.M
.

Rations decreased since November 26. Another ration decrease on December 8 as a result of which the fighting power of the troops has been weakened. At the present time, only one-third of the normal rations. Losses here and there because of exhaustion.

That night, Marshal Vasilevsky finally reached Stalin to explain developments of past hours. He told the premier that the Germans had already reached the southern bank of the Aksai River, and he wanted permission to detach the Second Guards Army from the Stalingrad front and move it at all possible speed to a blocking position in front of the German panzers.

Stalin's immediate reaction was violent. He refused to go along with the proposal and assailed Vasilevsky for trying to pry troops loose from Rokossovsky without first checking with STAVKA in Moscow. Stalin warned him that he was holding him personally responsible.

In return, Vasilevsky was incensed, for he knew it was his duty to maintain the security of both fronts. His anger served no purpose. Stalin told him his request would be discussed that night at the Defense Committee meeting and rudely hung up.

At 5:00
A.M
. the next morning, Stalin called back. He now agreed fully with Vasilevsky's plan; the Second Guards Army was alerted for a forced march.

The decision came none too soon. At 8:00
A.M.
on December 13, bleary-eyed German tank crews crossed the Aksai River on a rickety bridge. Now only the frozen Mishkova River remained as a natural barrier to the
Kessel
around Stalingrad.

Desperate to keep abreast of the relief force's progress at Gumrak Airfield, Paulus ordered ten radio operators to monitor every wavelength for messages from the oncoming panzers. But Russian technicians constantly foiled their efforts by jamming channels and broadcasting false information.

While Paulus lingered in this limbo, he also had to contend with pressures on every sector of the
Kessel.
In the ruins of Stalingrad, the Soviet Sixty-second Army denied its own weaknesses and harassed the Germans from the tractor factory to the Tsaritsa Gorge. These aggressive tactics were totally consistent with Chuikov's military philosophy. The combative general knew of no other way to wage war.

From her home in Kuibyshev, Chuikov's wife had written recently and reminded him of that trait.

My dear Vassili:

I at times imagine you have entered into single combat with Hitler. I know you for twenty years. I know your strengths….It's hard to imagine that someone like Adolf could get the better of you. This could not happen. One old lady, a neighbor, meets me every morning and says: "I pray to God for Vassili Ivanovich…."

Though beset by supply problems, and disgusted with the front command for not sending enough ammunition, Chuikov continued to mount small attacks against the increasingly weary Germans. One of his storm groups concentrated on the potato cellar that Lt. Wilhelm Kreiser had held since late October. While his exhausted men slept at their guns, the Russians crawled up, then drove them outside, back to the system of trenches that Kreiser had thoughtfully prepared for just such an emergency.

Kreiser rallied his men to counterattack, but he forgot to keep low. From a nearby cottage, a Russian machine gunner put one bullet in his left shoulder, another through his arm. The lieutenant went down into the snow. Still conscious, he gave command of the company to another lieutenant and then staggered off to the rear. In minutes, his successor followed him there with a bullet through his own arm.

Kreiser radioed for reinforcements, then led a group of wounded to an
aid
station, where a doctor jabbed him with morphine and put him on a sled. Towed further to the rear by a
Hiwi
laborer, the drowsy Kreiser fell asleep and rolled off into the road. When the loyal
Hiwi
came back and dragged him from a snowbank, the grateful lieutenant mumbled his thanks and fell unconscious.

In the days to come, Kreiser would be one of the fortunate men flown out of the
Kessel.
That night, another Soviet storm group crossed the German lines. Faulty Soviet intelligence reports had pinpointed General Paulus's command bunker within the city limits and the blond sniper, Tania Chemova, and three other Russians had been sent to kill him.

Carefully picking their way past mountains of rubble, the execution squad looked for German sentries outlined against the snow. Tania was trying to control her temper because the girl ahead of her blundered frequently and made too much noise. "That cow," Tania thought as she looked at the plump figure that increasingly annoyed her.

The "cow" stumbled and a fiery explosion smashed Tania to the pavement. Unconscious, she bled into the gutter from a gaping wound in her stomach. Moments later, Vassili Zaitsey hurried to her side and tenderly lifted her limp form.

Zaitsev struggled back to his lines, to a cellar hospital where doctors worked desperately to staunch the flow of blood from Tania's wounds. For hours they despaired of saving her, but by morning she rallied and the surgeons made plans to transport her across the Volga for a major operation.

After Tania regained consciousness, her first questions were about what had happened to her patrol. Told that the woman ahead of her had stepped on a mine but survived with only superficial injuries, she listened to the details with mixed emotions. Her vendetta with the Germans was ended; she had "broken eighty sticks" in her three months of war. But the image of that "damned cow" kept intruding on her thoughts and made her furious.

On the morning of December 14, the German 6th Panzer Division charged ahead toward the
Kessel
and ran directly into Russian reinforcements of almost three hundred tanks. One platoon of panzers was chased by forty Russian T-34s, and an armored battery which went to their rescue came over a low rise to find the Russian tanks barely a thousand meters away. Painted white "just like the Germans," with black numbers on the turrets, they were surrounded by a large knot of soldiers.

For a moment, Lt. Horst Scheibert wondered whether he had stumbled on elements of the German 23rd Panzer Division that was providing support for 6th Division's drive to the pocket. Everything looked so German, then he noticed that the gun barrels seemed more stubby, and the turrets had no domes.

Still hesitant and nervous, he moved his force closer. At six hundred meters, he had not made up his mind to shoot. He trembled as the distance closed rapidly.

Suddenly the soldiers ahead jumped for their own tanks and Scheibert only had time to scream,
"Achtung!"
into the radio before two Russian tanks came at him.

Scheibert hollered again, "Fire! Russians!" But the enemy got off the first shots. At only three hundred meters, they missed completely.

German gunners were more acurate. The first two Russian tanks blew up violently, and "the rest was child's play." Reloading with tremendous speed, the Germans slamed shells through the confused enemy formation. Thirty-two curling black pillars of smoke marked the total destruction of one of the Soviet tank columns outside Verkhne-Kumski.