Enemy at the Gates (2 page)

At the small Volgograd Defense Museum near the main railroad station, justifiably proud officials showed me memorabilia of the conflict: the tattered and bullet-riddled greatcoat of a Red Army officer, hundreds of red-white-and-black flags displaying the swastika that had been taken from famous German units, guns, official orders, captured diaries and letters. On all the walls were brightly painted dioramas of battle scenes.

But only at Mamaev Hill, rising from the center of the city, can one begin to understand the enormity of what really happened there. As I walked the 336 feet to its summit, I passed through a forest of sculptured tableaus recalling the Russian triumph: a figure of Gen. Vassili Ivanovich Chuikov, the one man who could be termed "the Savior of Stalingrad"; a woman holding tight to a dying boy; men firing their weapons at enemies trying to drive them into the Volga. At the top of Mamaev, I gazed upward in amazement at a 170-foot high statue of "Mother Russia." A cape flies back from her shoulders, and her right hand brandishes a sword. The face is contorted as she exhorts her countrymen to victory. In a circular rotunda at her feet is a mass grave containing the mortal remains of ten thousand of her sons gathered together from the battlefield; their names have been inscribed on the rotunda's walls. Funereal music sounds constantly in the stillness. From the middle of a concrete slab covering their resting place, a giant carved arm thrusts defiantly upward. In its clenched fist, a gleaming torch pierces the gloom.

From a winding ramp, visitors gaze down onto the tomb. No one speaks. The hush of death follows them out into the brilliant sunlight where Stalingrad seethes with renewed life. The trenches have been filled in. Barbed wire has disappeard from the hillside. All the rusted tanks and guns have been removed. Even German grave markers have been pulled from the earth. Almost every physical scar of that terrible war has been erased. But the mental scars remain and, around the world, men and women who were at Stalingrad in 1942 still flinch at the memories of those awful days.

There is the Stalingrad factory worker whose eyes narrow in hatred as he recalls enemy planes machine-gunning civilians on a crowded Volga pier; a former Soviet officer who speaks haltingly as he describes the terrible cries of his men after they had been ambushed and slaughtered in the fields west of Stalingrad; a Russian émigré in Haifa, Israel, who sobs his grief at the memory of a baby smashed against a wall by drunken German soldiers.

In an opulently furnished home in Rome, an eminent Italian surgeon shudders as he explains the various stages of cannibalism that occurred in the prison camps of Siberia after the battle ended. His wife listens in horrified fascination as the doctor recalls that the most sophisticated cannibals ignored corpses more than a day old. They preferred the warm blood of freshly killed soldiers.

A Russian woman, now the wife of a prominent American musician, has only one searing recollection. Eighteen months after the fighting ended, when her refugee train stopped at Stalingrad, the stench of thousands upon thousands of corpses still lying in the rubble made her want to vomit.

It is the same with the Germans. In a suburb of Hamburg, when a strapping Luftwaffe officer unlocks bitter images of beatings by Soviet prison guards, he suddenly breaks down completely and begs me not to question him further.

In Cologne, a woman who has been waiting twenty-seven years for the return of her husband, reported missing in action, asks me a question. Her eyes glassy with tears, she says: "Do you think I should go to Stalingrad and look for him?" I think of her unbelievable devotion to the memory of a man long since written off as a casualty by government archivists, and can only shake my head numbly and say: "No, I don't think it would help."

She had known what my answer would be. Smiling bravely, she rose and made tea for the two of us.

The catalogue of bitter memories increased in scope as I met with hundreds of men and women who survived the holocaust of Stalingrad. I was deeply upset by what they told me, and I had to remind myself time and again that I had to listen to these tales of horror because the stories were vital to a valid reconstruction of the conflict.

Most appalling was the growing realization, formed by statistics I uncovered, that the battle was the greatest military bloodbath in recorded history. Well over a million men and women died because of Stalingrad, a number far surpassing the previous records of dead at the first battle of the Somme and Verdun in 1916.

The toll breaks down as follows:

Conversations with official Russian sources on a not-for attribution basis (and it must be remembered that the Russians have never officially admitted their losses in World War II) put the loss of Red Army soldiers at Stalingrad at 750,000 killed, wounded, or missing in action.

The Germans lost almost 400,000 men.

The Italians lost more than 130,000 men out of their 200,000-man army.

The Hungarians lost approximately 120,000 men.

The Rumanians also lost approximately 200,000 men around Stalingrad.

As for the civilian population of the city, a prewar census listed more than 500,000 people prior to the outbreak of World War II. This number increased as a flood of refugees poured into the city from other areas of Russia that were in danger of being overrun by the Germans. A portion of Stalingrad's citizens were evacuated prior to the first German attack but 40,000 civilians were known to have died in the first two days of bombing in the city. No one knows how many died on the barricades or in the antitank ditches or in the surrounding steppes. Official records show only one stark fact: after the battle ended, a census found only 1,515 people who had lived in Stalingrad in 1942.

As these grim statistics emerged, I began asking the survivors the most important questions of all: what was the significance of the battle?

In 1944, Gen. Charles de Gaulle visited Stalingrad and walked past the still-uncleared wreckage. Later, at a reception in Moscow, a correspondent asked him his impressions of the scene. "Ah, Stalingrad,
c'est tout de meme un peuple formidable, un tres grand peuple,"
the Free French leader said. The correspondent agreed. "Ah,
oui, les Russes . . ."
de Gaulle interrupted impatiently.
"Mais non, je ne park pas des Russes, je park des Allemands.
Tout de meme, avoir pousse jusque lo."
("That they should have come so far.")

Anyone with an understanding of military problems must agree with de Gaulle. That the Germans had been able to cross more than a thousand miles of southern Russia to reach the banks of the Volga River was an incredible achievement. That the Russians held them at Stalingrad, when almost every Allied strategist thought the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse, is equally extraordinary.

Battered for more than a year by the Nazi juggernaut, most soldiers in the Soviet Army had become convinced the Germans were unbeatable. Thousands of them streamed into enemy lines to ask for succor. Thousands more bolted from the front lines and ran away. In unoccupied Russia, the civilian population fell victim to the same despair. With millions dead or under German control, with food, clothing, and shelter in increasingly short supply, the majority of the Russian people had begun to doubt their leadership and their armies. The surprising victory over the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad changed that negative attitude. Psychologically buoyed by this magnificent triumph against the "Nazi supermen," both civilians and military braced for the grueling tasks ahead. And though the ultimate destruction of the Third Reich would prove to be a long and costly struggle, the Russians never again doubted they would win. After Stalingrad, they moved resolutely westward, straight to Berlin, and the legacy of their arduous passage into the heartland of Germany remains with us to this day. For the Soviet Union, the path to its present role as a superpower began at the Volga River, where, as Winston Churchill described it, "the hinge of fate had turned. . . ."

For the Germans, Stalingrad was the single most traumatic event of the war. Never before had one of their elite armies succumbed in the field. Never before had so many soldiers vanished without trace in the vast wilderness of an alien country. Stalingrad was a mind-paralyzing calamity to a nation that believed it was the master race. A creeping pessimism began to invade the minds of those who had chanted
"Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!"
at Hitler's rallies, and the myth of the Führer's genius slowly dissolved under the impact of the reality of Stalingrad. In furtive conversations, men once too timid to move against the regime began to make concrete plans to overthrow it. Stalingrad was the beginning of the end for the Third Reich.

After spending four years intensively researching the battle of Stalingrad from both sides of no-man's-land, I found that the mosaic of the story changed with the passing days—as does all history. The brilliant German offensive to the Volga paled in relation to the inspired defense of Stalingrad by the Russians. Beyond that, most gripping of all, was the gradual moral and physical disintegration of the German soldiers as they realized they were doomed. In their struggle to cope with the unthinkable, lies the ultimate drama of the event.

Brutality, sadism, and cowardice are undeniably prominent in the story. Jealousy, overriding ambition, and callousness to human suffering occur with shocking frequency. Man aspires to greatness, but all too often his hopes are submerged by the primitive instinct to survive at any cost. What happens is not pleasant reading. No book that deals with widespread slaughter can be. At Stalingrad we are witnesses to monumental human tragedy.

William Craig

Westport, Connecticut

November 8, 1972

Chapter One

Parched by the blazing sun of summer, the grassy plain of the steppe country is light brown in hue. From the vicinity of Lugansk in the west to Kazakhstan in the east, the barren tableland stretches more than six hundred miles across southern Russia. Only a few rectangular patches of cultivated farmland,
kolkhozi,
relieve the desolation and, from them, ribbons of road run straight to the horizon.

Two majestic rivers, running roughly north to south, scour the land. The erratic Don gouges a convulsive path to the city of Rostoy on the Sea of Azov. Farther east, the mighty Volga bends more gently on its way to a rendezvous with the Caspian Sea at Astrakhan. Only at one place do the rivers run parallel to each other, and here they are forty miles apart. After that brief attempt at union, they flow relentlessly on their lonely journeys to different destinations, giving but brief respite to the harsh terrain. Otherwise, the suffocating heat of the region cracks the ground and paralyzes life.

It has been that way for centuries on the steppe. But on August
5,
1942, a malevolent presence intruded on the timeless scene. From the west, from the far-off Ukraine, came giant pillars of dust. The whirling clouds advanced fitfully across the prairie, slowing only for short periods before moving on toward the east and the Don River barrier. From a distance they resembled tornadoes, those natural phenomena that plague the open areas of the earth. But these spiraling clouds hid the German Sixth Army, an elite legion dispatched by Adolf Hitler to destroy the Soviet Army and the Communist state led by Joseph Stalin. Its men were supremely confident; during three years of warfare, they had never suffered defeat.

In Poland, the Sixth Army had made the word
blitzkrieg
("lightning war") a synonym for Nazi omnipotence. At Dunkirk, it helped cripple the British Expeditionary Force, sending the Tommies back to England without rifles or artillery. Chosen to spearhead the cross-channel invasion, the Sixth Army practiced amphibious landings until Hitler lost enthusiasm for the assault and sent it instead to Yugoslavia, which it conquered in a matter of weeks.

Then, in the summer of 1941, the Sixth Army began its Russian campaign and completely mastered the enemy. It quickly "liberated" several million square miles of the Ukraine and attained a level of professional excellence unmatched in modern warfare. Increasingly arrogant about their successes on the battlefield, its soldiers reached the conclusion that
"Russland ist kaputt."
This conviction was buttressed by propaganda emanating from the Führerhauptquartier (Field Headquarters of the OKW). For with the unleashing in late June 1942 of Operation Blue, the knockout blow, Adolf Hitler had promised his soldiers an end to the war.