Enemy at the Gates

Gorishny, occupied another part of the bomb-pitted eastern slope of Mamaev Hill. But the 95th was so badly mauled that in a matter of days it would be transferred to reserve behind new divisions now digging in at the northern factories.

There, the fresh 39th Guards had thrown up a second line of defense behind the 194th and 308th divisions, responsible for holding the western approaches to the Red October and Barrikady plants. A few miles to the north, around the tractor works, the 112th Division had just been joined by aggressive Gen. Victor Zholudev’s elite 37th Guards, young marines dressed in black striped shirts and berets.

The arrival of the 37th Guards had coincided with the departure of the last civilians still working inside the plant. When the dreaded order from the Military Council finally reached them— “Get out! Go across the river!'—the employees packed their blueprints, records, and tools into trucks. German artillery shells whined into the mile-long industrial complex as the workers walked one last time through the machine shops and assembly lines. Overwhelmed by remorse at having to leave such an integral part of their lives, they cried unashamedly.

Their convoy drove south past the statue of Felix Dzerhezinsky, Stalin’s first secret police chief and, just before the tractor plant passed from view, one foreman pointed out a building near the river and said, “We can start up again there when we come back.” He sounded genuinely optimistic.

Riding down the main road, the workers passed the oil-tank farm on a hillside above the primitive trench headquarters in which Vassili Chuikov sweltered and prepared for the next phase of the German offensive.

The general had just received a letter from his wife, Valentina, living in Kuibyshev almost four hundred miles northeast of Stalingrad. She told her husband she had seen him in a newsreel; she said the children were fine. Her tone was cheerful and relaxed.

But the general knew differently: His aide had learned that Chuikov’s youngest daughter was suffering from acute dysentery and the family was having great difficulty getting food, clothing, and other household necessities. Lacking even soap, they used a mustard preparation to wash themselves. This distressing news only added to Chuikov’s mental burden as he struggled with the daily threat of extinction. The strain was beginning to take its toll. His body was covered with eczema, which left scaly, itchy sores on his skin and forced him to bandage his hands to absorb oozing lesions on his fingers. When doctors suggested that he get some rest on the far shore, Chuikov angrily rejected their advice. With the enemy massing on the outskirts of the factories, he was afraid to leave Stalingrad even for a moment.

Fortunately, new troops were arriving via the new river crossings Chuikov had improvised after losing the downtown ferry landing. Now the Skudri Crossing serviced the area from Rynok down to the tractor works and, to this exposed mooring, boats came at night to avoid the incessant German bombardment that made daylight trips suicidal. The most vital link, however, was Crossing 62, a cluster of moorings behind the Red October and Barrikady plants where the majority of soldiers and materiel debarked under overhanging palisades. This landing site was reasonably safe as long as the Germans failed to seize the nearby factories.

The nightly voyages to Crossings 62 and Skudri were a ghastly shock to soldiers joining the battle. The sight of a city on fire, the deep rumble of thousands of guns, instinctively made them recoil. But Communist party agitators, politrook, were always with them, working with ferocious zeal to calm them down. The politrook led the way to the ferries, to tugs like the twenty-six-year-old Abkhazets; and there they handed out pamphlets entitled “What a Soldier Needs to Know and How to Act in City Fighting.” Usually, the agitators were the first ones on board. Like sheep, the soldiers followed. Then, as the boats slowly moved out into the river, the pout rook unobtrusively took up stations along the rails. To prevent desertions over the side they kept their hands on their pistol holsters.

From their vantage point on Mamaev Hill, the Germans always spotted these boats and called for artillery fire on them. As the shells whistled down, the political officers diverted the soldiers’ attention by reading newspapers loudly, or passing out mail from home. In this way the troops were somewhat distracted. When men were hit, screamed, and died, the politrook worked harder to keep the rest of the group from succumbing to mob fear. Sometimes they failed, and soldiers leaped into the Volga. The politrook emptied their guns into these swimmers.

In this manner, nearly one hundred thousand new troops had been ferried into Stalingrad by October; an influx equalling seven full divisions and two brigades. But they were killed so quickly that Chuikov still had only fifty- three thousand troops left who were capable of bearing arms. In less than a month, the Sixtysecond Army had lost more than eighty thousand men, killed, wounded, or missing.

To bring ammunition and food into the city, Chuikov had thrown together auxiliary “roads” to supplement the ferry pipeline. These footbridges, each several hundred yards long, joined Stalingrad to Zaitsevski Island in the middle of the Volga. Two of them were blown apart several times and had to be rebuilt. The southernmost link, formed by joining wooden rafts and barrels with iron bars and steel hawsers, was relatively sturdy, but even so, the footbridge was dangerous. It swayed badly from the force of bombs exploding nearby, frequently toppling soldiers into the river. But across this unusual highway came a steady trickle of men carrying on their backs the bullets, grenades, and shells needed for daily fighting.

Now the Germans switched the focus of their attack from the downtown area of the city to the factories in the north, trying to soften the Russian defenses with nonstop artillery fire. On October 2, German shells blanketed the industrial zone and behind the Red October Plant, the supposedly empty oil tanks blew up with a shattering roar. Flaming fuel rolled swiftly down the hill to the Volga, where it became a ghastly wave. Across the river, onlookers screamed a warning to a large rowboat making for the eastern shore. But it was too far out to turn back and, when the wall of flame reached it, the oars reared up like firewings as the doomed passengers tried to beat out the fire. Through the smoke, spectators saw the sides of the boat blaze from the flaming oil. The boat’s occupants stood up and jumped. Their heads bobbed briefly in the middle of the inferno, and then the flames passed relentlessly over the tragic scene.

The same fires nearly incinerated Chuikov and the entire headquarters staff. Every telephone line burned away and, when Chuikov jumped out of his dugout, he was blinded by the dense smoke.

Chief of Staff Krylov shouted, “Everyone stay where they are. Let’s get to work in the dugouts that are still intact…. Establish contact with the troops by radio.” But when he saw Chuikov, he whispered: “What do you think? Will we be able to stand it?”

“Yes, of course,” Chuikov replied. “But just in case, let’s clean our pistols!”

From across the river, Front Headquarters was afraid the fire had killed everyone in the dugouts. By radio, it kept asking: “Where are you, where are you?”

The answer finally crackled through, “We’re where the most flames and smoke are.”

The Germans were monitoring the conversation and concentrated their fire on the holocaust. Mortar shells killed men in the doorway to Chuikov’s dugout, and he moved quickly, this time up the shore line, closer to the tractor factory, the complex that the Germans were preparing to attack from three sides.

In the midst of preparations by both armies for the final struggle, a sinister personal combat reached its climax in no-man’s-land. The two adversaries knew each other only by reputation. Major Konings had arrived from Germany to duel Vassili Zaitsev.

The Russians first heard of Konings’s presence when a prisoner revealed the major was wandering the front lines, familiarizing himself with the terrain. Upon hearing the news, Col. Nikolai Batyuk, the commander of the 284th Division, called a meeting of his sniper group to brief them on the danger.

“I think that the German supersniper from Berlin will be easy meat for us. Is that right, Zaitsev?”

“That’s right, Comrade colonel,” Zaitsev agreed. But first, he had “to find him, study his habits and methods and… wait the right moment for one, and only one well-aimed shot.”

Zaitsev had no idea how his antagonist worked. He had killed many German sharpshooters, but only after watching their habits for days. In Konings’s case, his camouflage, firing patterns, ruses, all these pieces of the mosaic were missing.

On the other hand, German intelligence had studied Russian leaflets describing Soviet sniper techniques, and Zaitsev’s mannerisms had been bountifully illustrated by Russian propagandists. Major Konings must have absorbed this information; Zaitsev had no idea when he would strike.