He had also noticed something else, something more disturbing. Chunks of ice, “sludge,” had started to drift by on the Volga. The appearance of these floes triggered an alarm bell at Sixtysecond Army Headquarters. Until the ice stopped moving and formed a solid bridge to the far shore, supply boats could not navigate through the rampaging floes. Such a situation could be disastrous for the Russians in Stalingrad.
The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution fell on November 7, and Joseph Stalin spoke to his people to tell them that eight million Germans had been killed in the “Great Patriotic War.” Though that figure was inflated by more than six million, another remark he made was more accurate. The premier prophesied, “Soon there will be a holiday in our streets, too.”
But as the Russian people mourned the deaths of millions of relatives in the past seventeen months of war, they saw little reason to anticipate a “holiday.” Hungry and exhausted, only temporarily buoyed by the fact that the Germans had not yet seized the Caucasus and Stalingrad, they dared not dream that anything would ever make them want to laugh and dance again.
In Germany, the nine-year-old Third Reich was also celebrating an anniversary. At the Lowenbraukeller in Munich, workers draped enormous swastika flags across the arches to the main hall. Massive gold eagles hung above the speaker’s rostrum on the flowerbanked stage. Officials stomped about, nervously supervising every arrangement for the gala event. They fretted over petty details and harangued everyone with the need for perfection. For Adolf Hitler was the guest of honor, to meet with his old friends and reminisce about the days of the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923.
His special train was rolling through the hilly country of Thuringia. It made slow time. Allied air raids had damaged the tracks, and troop trains frequently slowed its passage. During the evening of Noyember 7, Hitler discussed the day’s major news with several aides in his dining car. Agents had reported from Spain that Allied convoys were steaming past Gibraltar into the Mediterranean. No one knew their destination, but Hitler was fascinated with the bold maneuver. Almost like a disinterested party, he tried to project himself into Allied deliberations.
While dinner was served on exquisite china, the train stopped once more at a siding. A few feet away, a hospital train marked time, and from their tiered cots, wounded soldiers peered into the blazing light of the dining room where Hitler was immersed in conversation. Suddenly he looked up at the awed faces staring in at him. In great anger he ordered the curtains drawn, plunging his wounded warriors back into the darkness of their own bleak world.
All evening long, as his train traveled through the neat fields of Bavaria, Hitler kept fantasizing about the enemy’s plans and concluded that if he were they, he’d occupy Rome immediately. What could stop them? But as he went to bed near dawn, American and British troops were pouring ashore in Morocco and Algeria. Their goal was a junction with Gen. Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth British Army, fresh from its triumph over Rommel at El Alamein in Egypt.
The next day, Hitler ignored the disastrous news and entered the Munich Lowenbraukeller to a throaty animal roar of obeisance. Among his old beer-drinking cronies, who chanted the words to the Nazi party song, “
Wearing the uniform of the “brownshirts,” a swastika band adorning his left arm, he stood proudly on the platform and accepted the salute: “
When he spoke about Stalingrad, he became almost coquettish: “I wanted to take it—and you know we are modest—we really have it. There are only a very few small places left there. Now the others say: ‘Why don’t you make faster progress?’ Because I don’t want to create a second Verdun… but prefer to do the job with small shock troop units…”
His cronies rocked the Lowenbraukeller with cheers.
Luftwaffe general Freiherr von Richthofen had been instrumental in getting these “small shock troop units” to Stalingrad. After his outburst against Paulus, he had intervened with General Jeschonnek and persuaded him to influence Hitler to release the elite combat engineers for the final assault. Grasping at any straw, the Fuhrer had readily agreed to their use and had convinced himself that these reinforcements would eliminate all organized Soviet resistance along the Volga shoreline. Thus, while he traveled to meet with his cronies in Munich, the five battalions of “pioneers,” as they were called, packed hurriedly for the journey to Stalingrad.
Near Voronezh, three hundred miles west of the city, cook Wilhelm Giebeler loaded his kitchen equipment onto a train. Around him, troops of the 336th Battalion grumbled loudly about their new assignment while they checked out flamethrowers, machine pistols, and satchel charges of dynamite. Giebeler had heard their griping before, on the eve of every special “dirty job.” But since the pioneers were consummate professionals at street fighting, he had no worries about their morale nor doubt as to their success at the Volga.
When the 336th reached Stalingrad, Maj. Josef Linden was there to greet them. Put in charge of the operation by pioneer chief, Col. Herbert SeIle, Linden had reported to Point X on November 7, at 0900 hours. Point X was just across the street from the Barrikady and, once there, the major scouted the terrain between the factory and the Volga. Never before had he seen so ghastly a setting for battle. “Loosely hanging corrugated steel panels which creaked eerily in the wind…a perfect mess of iron parts, gun barrels, T-beams, huge craters…cellars turned into strongpoints…over all a never-ceasing crescendo of noise from all types of guns and bombs.”
Inside the Barrikady itself, Maj. Eugen Rettenmaier, recently back from a two-week furlough in Germany, checked his four companies and found only thirty-seven men left out of four hundred. To his questions about missing individuals, he got the same answers over and over: killed, wounded, presumed dead.
Within hours, one six-hundred-man battalion of the pioneers came under Rettenmaier’s wing. The other four battalions spread out along the main line of resistance and prepared for a coordinated assault on the area behind the Barrikady to the Volga.
Major Rettenmaier listened intently to their extraordinary briefing. Two Russian strongpoints had to be taken: one, the Chemist’s Shop on the left side of a row of partially completed houses; the other, the Commissar’s House or “Red House,” several hundred yards west of the Chemist’s Shop and somewhat nearer the Volga bank. The Red House, a clumsy brick fortress, dominated the gently sloping terrain.
The pioneers asked questions about the buildings and the cliff along the river. They were brisk, businesslike, but when Rettenmaier and others tried to explain that the Russians in Stalingrad fought a different kind of war, that they hid in cellars and used the sewer systems to good advantage, the pioneers said they had seen the worst already, in places like Voronezh. They were prepared for such tactics.
After midnight on November 9, the combat groups assembled in the machine shops of the Barrikady. Straining under the burden of satchel charges, shovels, grenades, and bandoliers of bullets, they shuffled through the gloom to their starting points.
In several large rooms at the eastern end of the factory, they waited for the signal to burst out onto open ground. Some men smoked furtively. Sgt. Ernst Wohlfahrt was a tense spectator. A virtual prisoner inside the Barrikady for weeks, he did not envy the pioneers their job. He himself had spent days hiding behind brick walls, afraid to raise his head. The Russians had never let him feel secure and he was pessimistic about the coming battle, despite the pioneers’ cocky self-assurance.
Then a shattering explosion engulfed an adjacent room. Screams welled up and Wohlfahrt rushed in to find eighteen pioneers dead from a Russian booby trap. The survivors were suddenly subdued, fearful.
At 3:30 A.M., German artillery fire passed over and down onto Russian lines, bringing their counterfire. When the German fire lifted, the pioneers moved onto open ground, lit by eerie flashes of gunfire. Watching them go across the cratered moonscape, Major Rettenmaier silently wished them Godspeed.
