Enemy at the Gates

for his own wounded. Bending over the operating table, he carefully put another cork in his mouth to keep his throbbing jaw in place.

Twenty miles southwest of Ottmar Kohler’s dispensary, Sixth Army commander, Friedrich von Paulus, read the radio messages from his three divisions on the steppe and lost his initial exuberance over the “lightning” victory of the previous day. He now faced the chilling prospect of losing one or more of these units unless he could send enough reinforcements and supplies to help them forge that barrier of steel to the Volga. As a precautionary measure, Paulus alerted the Luftwaffe to begin dropping ammunition and food into the most distant of the islands, General Hube’s 16th Panzer hedgehog at the outskirts of Stalingrad. Meanwhile, the general wondered how he was going to take that city in the next twenty-four hours, as Hitler expected him to do.

At dawn, the city of Stalingrad looked as though a giant hurricane had lifted it into the air and smashed it down again in a million pieces. The downtown section was almost flat, with nearly a hundred blocks still engulfed by raging fires. With the waterworks broken, firemen could only try to care for the victims of the holocaust.

On a street beside the black walls of the NKVD prison, a rescue team worked feverishly to extricate a young woman, Nina Detrunina, whose legs had been pinned under tons of masonry. Their job was complicated by the ominous creaking of the prison walls, weakened dangerously by a near miss. While men and women gingerly removed brick after brick, a doctor knelt to give morphine to Nina, who smiled gratefully at her saviors. Not long after the last of the stones had been removed and Nina was taken to a hospital, she died from internal injuries.

In a deep balka, a group of naked adults wandered helplessly through the smoke. Inmates from the insane asylum, they were unable to comprehend the new nightmare in which they existed. On flame-blackened sidewalks, Komsomol boys and girls helped people pick through bodies to find their kin. When anyone recognized a family member, the volunteers acted quickly to ease the shock by embracing the survivor.

One woman did not need their solace. She spent hours turning over the bodies, rejecting them and moving on until she found her infant, who had been mangled by a bomb. The woman stooped, gathered the remains in her arms, and rocked the baby tenderly for some time. As a Komsomol worker edged closer to comfort her, he heard the woman speaking to the dead child. In a scolding tone, she asked: “How am I going to explain this to your father when he comes home from the war?”

Komsomol director Anastasia Modina spent most of her time rounding up hundreds of orphans, most of whom just sat beside the bodies of their parents and stared at the mutilated figures. Some children spoke to the dead, trying to rouse them. Others smoothed the victims’ torn clothing as if to make them all better. Anastasia went to the children, took them by the hand, and led them away to the evacuation shelter at the Volga. Some balked at leaving the bodies of their parents, but she talked to them and they listened while tears ran down their faces. Eventually, most of them reached up to the lady with the soothing voice. But a few steadfastly refused to move from the cadavers. Anastasia left them alone; she had too many others to care for.

At the main ferry, thousands of frightened civilians milled restlessly around the pier while grim-faced NKVD police tried to hold them in check. Many were leaving loved ones behind, either dead in their homes or working as essential personnel in the factories. On the embankment under the cliff, the evacuees scribbled notes and tacked them to trees or the sides of buildings:

Mama, we are all right. Look for us at Beketovka.

Klava.

Don’t worry, Vanya. We have gone to Astrakhan. Come to us.

Yuri.

Out on the Volga, battered tugs and steamers steered carefully around the northern tip of Golodny Island and edged in toward the landing. Docked amid a cacophony of whistles, they heeled over badly from the weight of passengers running up the gangplanks. When the boats cast off and reversed course for the far shore, the departing Stalingraders waved sorrowfully at the retreating shoreline of the city they had once called home.

Overhead, German reconnaissance planes wove back and forth, noting the chaotic scene at the ferry and radioing the information back to their bases at Morosovskaya and Tatsinskaya on the steppe.

A quarter mile west of the central landing on the Volga, Andrei Yeremenko juggled his reserves to contain Gen. Hans Hube’s 16th Panzers in the northern suburbs. When Col. Semyon Gorokhov stepped ashore with his six thousand-man brigade, he thought he was supposed to take them to fight on the southern fringes of the city. Instead, Yeremenko sent him north to the tractor factory to build a line girdling that plant. Another group, marines from the Soviet Far East Fleet, piled into a convoy of automobiles for a breakneck trip past Mamaev Hill to the trenches along the Mokraya Mechetka River, a mile above the tractor works. The marines rode to battle with their rifles sticking out the car windows.

One traveler to the factory complex was Georgi Malenkov, Stalin’s personal watchdog in Yeremenko’s headquarters. If the general was nervous with Malenkov peering over his shoulder, Nikita Khrushchev was more so, for he and Malenkov were bitter rivals in the murderous world of Kremlin politics. Khrushchev knew that he had lost favor with Stalin because of his partial responsibility for the disastrous spring offensive at Kharkov which had resulted in the loss of more than two hundred thousand Red Army troops.{Khrushchev has claimed that he called Stalin’s dacha to ask permission to call off the Soviet offensive, and that Malenkov relayed Stalin’s order to continue the attack.

Marshal Zhukov denies this in his memoirs, charging that, in reality, Khrushchev urged Stalin to ignore warnings of disaster and press the assault.} A master of intrigue himself, he realized that Malenkov would gladly report any of his mistakes to the premier.

Malenkov had gone to the tractor factory, where under a broiling sun, his face flushed and hair hanging in wet strands, he exhorted the plant personnel to hold on until more help arrived. He spoke with great fervor while the pounding guns from the battle around Spartakovka to the north punctuated his sentences.

After Malenkov finished speaking, the workers dispersed to the cavernous shops. Inside one of the rooms, Mikhail Vodolagin had finally brought out the emergency edition of Pravda, 500 singlesheet copies that he rushed out to the population with instructions to pass them on after reading. The main point of Vodolagin’s special issue was to instill a sense of continuity, a feeling that the city was still functioning and would survive. He made an urgent appeal for everyone to stay calm and not to give in to panic. His editorial proclaimed: “We will destroy the enemy at the gates of Stalingrad.”

While the fledgling publisher moved his printing operations further south, to the less-threatened Red October Plant, civilian militia and regular troops rushed past the tractor factory toward the Mokraya Mechetka River where German combat groups were trying to overrun the stubborn Russian amateurs. The only German success had been the capture of the trans-Volga ferry terminus for the railroad to Kazakhstan. Around the approaches to the factories of Stalingrad, they had met constant and bloody rebuffs.

One Russian woman, Olga Kovalova, dominated a section of the defenses protecting the tractor factory. Stalking the line, her head wrapped in a gaily colored kerchief, she screamed invective at militiamen whom she found derelict, clumsy, or incompetent. The men were used to her rough language. Olga had worked with them for twenty years, during which time she had become the first woman steel founder in the Soviet Union. Gruff and earthy, she had earned their respect and devotion.

Her battalion commander, Sazakin, heard Olga badgering the workers and tried to get her out of the dangerous sector. “Olga,” he implored, “this is no place for a woman. Go back where you belong.”

When she failed to respond, he ordered her to leave. Olga turned, fixed him with a malevolent stare and answered: “I’m not going anywhere.”

Sazakin threw up his hands and left her alone. Hours later, he spied a colorful splotch of clothing in a clump