Enemy at the Gates (40 page)

I write this to you, Klaus, so you don't think that we are griping unnecessarily. What I am telling you is based not only on my personal experience—but also on messages and daily conversations with friends at the front. It is as bad as I say it is. No miracle in the steppe can help us here, only good old Aunt Ju and the He-111 [transport planes] if they come— and come often.

…Otherwise, the mood is and has been good here. A little running scared, but there is still hope amongst enlisted men and officers. "Stand fast—the Führer will get you out!" is the motto. Here at the top, especially on days like this one, looking into an empty barrel, the responsibility lies heavy….

Teddy

Like the sudden rupture of an umbilical cord, the teleprinter link between Gumrak and Novocherkassk was torn asunder as, on the steppe west of the pocket, Soviet armor captured the decimeter relays maintaining the fragile semipersonal contact between Schmidt and Schulz, Paulus and Manstein. The severed connection left Sixth Army with a single thousand-watt transmitter, and several auxiliary sets of lesser strength, to communicate with Army Group Don.

Some German officers inside the pocket looked on the abrupt blackout as an augury of ominous days.

In Moscow, Stalin fumed at the delay in destroying Sixth Army. Though his front commanders continued to relay news of heady triumphs from other sectors of the battlefield, the premier refused to relax.

On December 28, General Vatutin at Soviet Southwest Front Headquarters along the upper Don contacted him with news of an overwhelming victory; "The Italian Eighth Army's right wing had melted away…sixty thousand prisoners and about the same number…killed…their stores have been seized by our forces …the pitiful remains…are not putting up any resistance…."

Stalin absorbed this exhilarating report without much enthusiasm, and immediately pressed Vatutin on the one danger zone in his command region. Around the great German airfield at Tatsinskaya, where Gen. Martin Fiebig had fled the wreckage of his shuttle air force only four days previously, a Russian armored column was temporarily trapped by lead elements of the German panzers rushed from their aborted relief effort at the Mishkova River.

Stalin chose this moment to lecture Vatutin on strategy:

Your first task is to get Badanov, [commander of the encircled Twenty-fourth Tank Corps] out of trouble….You were right in allowing [him] to give up Tatsinskaya in an emergency. We have already given you the Second and Twenty-third Tank Corps to convert Little Saturn into Big Saturn [the drive to Rostov and the Black Sea that Russian general Krupennikov hinted at to his interrogators on December 21]….You should bear in mind that over very long distances tank corps are best launched in pairs rather than alone; otherwise .they risk falling into a situation like Badanov's. Just remember Badanov; don't forget Badanov. Get him out at any cost!

With that final admonition, Stalin left Vatutin to manage his own little war between the Don and Rostov, and went on to his most perplexing situation: Paulus's Sixth Army, whose continued existence tied up seven Russian armies needed elsewhere.

Meeting with his senior generals, the premier came right to his major complaint: "Only one man should direct operations . . . the fact that there are two front commanders [around Stalingrad] is interfering with this."

When everyone at the table agreed, Stalin asked: "Who gets the assignment?"

Marshal Georgi Zhukov remained silent as someone recommended Lieutenant General Rokossovsky.

"Why don't you say anything?" Stalin prodded Zhukov.

"In my opinion, either commander is capable of doing the job. Yeremenko's feelings would be hurt, of course, if you transferred his Stalingrad front to Rokossovsky."

That point was shrugged off by Stalin. "This is not the time to worry about hurt feelings. Telephone Yeremenko and tell him about the decision. . . ."

When Zhukov called Yeremenko and explained the situation to him over a high-security line, the pugnacious general felt his professional world crumbling around him as he heard, "Transfer the Fifty-seventh, Sixty-four and Sixty-second armies from the Stalingrad front to [Rokossovsky's control]…." Yeremenko recovered enough to splutter: "What brought this on?"

Zhukov patiently explained the considerations but sensing the general's outrage and humiliation, he quietly suggested that Yeremenko call back later.

In fifteen minutes, when the phone conversation resumed, Yeremenko had not gotten control of himself. "I can't understand ….Please tell Stalin I want to say here until the enemy is completely destroyed."

Zhukov suggested he tell Stalin himself, and Yeremenko said he had already tried but was unable to get through Poskrebyshev, Stalin's personal secretary, who had insisted that all such matters were Zhukov's responsibility. On behalf of the shattered Yeremenko, Zhukov called Stalin immediately, but the premier remained adamant about placing Rokossovsky in charge.

Retreating to his private quarters south of Stalingrad, Andrei Yeremenko burst into tears. When Nikita Khrushchev tried to calm him, he was furious: "Comrade . . . you don't understand. You're a civilian. You forget how we thought we were doomed, how Stalin used to ask if we could hold out for three more days. We all thought the Germans would capture Stalingrad, and we would be made scapegoats. Maybe you don't foresee what will happen, but I do: The new Don Front will get all the glory for the Stalingrad victory, and our armies of the Southern Front will be forgotten."

Khrushchev could not console his friend.

The German counterattack against Russian General Badanov's Twenty-fourth Tank Corps had temporarily regained control of Moro and Tazi, the airstrips for the shuttle to Stalingrad. But the triumph proved of little consequence, for bad weather and faulty equipment continued to plague the Luftwaffe. Tonnage into the
Kessel
wavered between eighty and two hundred tons daily. Hundreds of Russian antiaircraft batteries were now emplaced along the flight path, in direct line with the German radio beacon to Pitomnik, and they began to take an awesome toll of the lumbering transports. In just five weeks, nearly three hundred of them were shot down.

Pitomnik Airfield itself mirrored the mounting disaster of Sixth Army. The pulse of the
Kessel,
it lay in the middle of an arterial network of highways that drew a microcosm of despair and hope to its runways and buildings. These roads had been kept clear for weeks by Major Linden's special task force. But even his herculean efforts faltered before the terrible handicaps imposed by the winter storms. As his men worked in blizzards, the brutal winds forced them to wear gas masks to protect their faces from frostbite. When one storm ended, another began. Though snow plows moved up and down the arteries constantly, eventually the acute shortage of fuel slowed their schedule, bringing Major Linden to the brink of despair.

As the New Year approached, the roads to Pitomnik clogged again with drifts. On either side of the highways, soldiers now stuck the legs of hundreds of dead horses into the snow as trail markers for truck drivers.

Col. Lothar Rosenfeld, a former police boxing champion, monitored the field's heartbeat. Riding a small
panje
pony, he maintained rigid discipline over both the air shuttle and the hordes of wounded and couriers seeking passage from the pocket. One of his frequent visitors was Hitler's liaison officer, Maj. Coelestin von Zitzewitz, who had been suspect since the day he arrived from Supreme Headquarters as an observer.

From the beginning, Gen. Arthur Schmidt and some others had held Zitzewitz at arm's length and, shortly after his arrival, Schmidt even interfered with one of his dispatches to East Prussia. Convinced that Zitzewitz was "painting too grim a picture" at that time in early December, Schmidt insisted on altering the message to reflect a more optimistic tone.

Zitzewitz had learned his lesson. From then on, he only sent off reports after Schmidt had gone to bed. Far from being a yesman, the major wrote unvarnished accounts of the debacle he witnessed. He went everywhere: to the front-line foxholes, to hospitals, ammunition dumps, and icy ravines. In the mile long
balkas
at Baburkin, Gorodische, and Dimitrevka, he followed German troops into their dark, clammy bunkers where lack of fuel spawned colds, pneumonia, and an increased weakness to other infections. Improper sanitation in these refuges was also bringing out armies of lice.

Zitzewitz sat among hordes of mice and rats that overran the bunkers and gnawed scraps of food hoarded by Germans in knapsacks and pockets. The rodents were ravenous. He witnessed one case where they even descended on a soldier whose feet were badly frostbitten. While he slept, they chewed off two of his toes.

Above all, Zitzewitz monitored Pitomnik where the wounded crowded into hastily laid-out hospitals and waited for doctors to ease their pain while the Junkers and Heinkels circled and landed or flamed and crashed.

The major spared nothing in his attempt to alert Hitler to the whole truth. But his grim reports had an unanticipated impact at the Wolf's Lair. In discussing them, Reichmarshal Hermann Goering shook his head in disbelief. "It is impossible that any German officer could be responsible for defeatist messages of this sort," he declared. "The only possible explanation is that the enemy has captured his transmitter and has sent them himself."

Thus, Zitzewitz's reports were dismissed as Russian propaganda.

Stragglers from the Italian Eighth Army could have assured Hermann Goering that Zitzewitz's chronicles of despair were totally authentic. They were still plodding through knee-deep snow toward far-off prison camps.

Lt. Felice Bracci had continued marching in a northerly direc
Enemy
tion, across the silvery ice of the upper Don River that he once hoped to ford as a conqueror. Now he was sure it was a bewitched stream, never to succumb to an invader's boots. For several agonizing days, Bracci had kept his mind and body functioning as the "long black snake" of captives passed numerous villages where Russian women unaccountably smiled and threw crusts of bread and frozen potatoes into his outstretched hands.

Some Russians exchanged food for wedding rings, clothing or blankets. When Bracci offered a piece of adhesive tape from a roll he had saved, a villager thrust a large piece of black bread at him in payment. Bracci wolfed it down in seconds.

On December 28, Russian guards stopped the Italians at a huge barracks near a railroad station. Jammed into the dark building with hundreds of other prisoners, Bracci spent the next three days clinging to sanity. Some of his friends had contracted gangrene from frostbite and screamed without letup. Italian doctors amputated the worst limbs with homemade knives and the moans of the patients, operated on without anesthesia, drove everyone to despair.

Surrounded by bedlam, by prayers for God's mercy, Bracci and his comrades scrounged bits of wood and lit small fires in a corner of the room. The tiny blazes nourished them somewhat while the Russians subjected them to a propaganda campaign.

Two Soviet officers, one a woman, came into the barracks, and speaking fluent Italian, they asked why Bracci and his friends had come to wage war on Russia and whether the soldiers were really Fascists. The Russians told the captives that Mussolini and Hitler were finished and ended their harangue with the lie that King Victor Emmanuel had died recently of a broken heart. The woman then took out scraps of paper and pencils and asked the prisoners to write messages back to loved ones in Italy. Taking a pencil in his numbed fingers, Bracci wrote: "I am alive . . . I am well…." He had no hope that his words would ever arrive in Rome.

The propaganda barrage continued into the next day, when all the Italian officers were lined up to hear a speech from a bespectacled civilian speaking from atop a car. In flawless Italian, the man cursed the Fascist government and warned his listeners that it was extremely unlikely they would ever leave Russia alive. The cold, he claimed, would "mow them down."

Shivering in formation, Bracci wondered whether the speaker would mention starvation as a factor contributing to his imminent death, but the expatriate Italian did not. When he finished, the prisoners had to parade past a cameraman, who filmed their misery for some unknown audience.

On New Year's Eve, Bracci tried to forget his plight. Lying on the frozen barracks floor, he listened as Colonel Rosati took his comrades on a gourmet visit of Rome's best restuarants: the elegant "Zi," the Bersagliera, and on to the dining room atop the Tarpeian rock.

When the colonel recited the meal he would order in each establishment, his audience groaned. "Thursday, gnocchi," Rosati savored the words and men chewed endlessly on nothing. Spittle formed in their mouths; their stomachs churned. Someone told Rosati to shut up, but the protestor was shouted down by others desperate to hold off reality. "Saturday . . . tripe," the colonel went on and added mellow white wines to the menu.

Outside the barracks, a roaring wind blew gusts of snow through the paneless windows onto the huddled "diners." Ignoring the chill, they listened raptly: "Monday…cannelloni, in cream sauce…."

At 10:00
P.M
. on December 31, Russian artillery around the
Kessel
exploded in a frenzied acknowledgement of the holiday. Because they knew Soviet gunners were operating on Moscow time, two hours ahead of German clocks, Sixth Army troops had prepared for the deluge. Hunkered down in their holes, they rode out the fifteen-minute salvo welcoming in a year of promised glory for Soviet Russia.

Inside Stalingrad, the expectations of Russian troops ran high. The ice bridge across the Volga was the main reason for their attitude. From Acktuba and Krasnaya Sloboda, hundreds of trucks now crossed the river daily, bringing white camouflage suits to replace tattered gray brown uniforms. In the middle of the river, traffic masters waved food convoys to depots set up under the cliff. Cases of American
canned
goods began to litter foxholes strung along the defense line from Tsaritsa to the tractor works. Ammunition piled up to the point where Russian gunners now fired antitank shells at lone German soldiers.