Enemy at the Gates

Continuing bad weather forced planes to abort missions; Russian fighters had begun harassing the airlanes, and antiaircraft batteries were being reinforced. As a result, the steppe was becoming a highway of broken aircraft—a graveyard of planes.

By now Sixth Army headquarters was aware that Manstein was coming. Buoyed up, nervous, Paulus and Schmidt waited through the day for progress reports of Operation Winter Storm. They were hopeful, but each knew that time was robbing Sixth Army of its strength to break loose and meet its saviors.

That day’s Sixth Army War Diary reflected the precipitate decline inside the Kessel:

December 12, 1942, 5:45 P.M.

Rations decreased since November 26. Another ration decrease on December 8 as a result of which the fighting power of the troops has been weakened. At the present time, only one-third of the normal rations. Losses here and there because of exhaustion.

That night, Marshal Vasilevsky finally reached Stalin to explain developments of past hours. He told the premier that the Germans had already reached the southern bank of the Aksai River, and he wanted permission to detach the Second Guards Army from the Stalingrad front and move it at all possible speed to a blocking position in front of the German panzers.

Stalin’s immediate reaction was violent. He refused to go along with the proposal and assailed Vasilevsky for trying to pry troops loose from Rokossovsky without first checking with STAVKA in Moscow. Stalin warned him that he was holding him personally responsible.

In return, Vasilevsky was incensed, for he knew it was his duty to maintain the security of both fronts. His anger served no purpose. Stalin told him his request would be discussed that night at the Defense Committee meeting and rudely hung up.

At 5:00 A.M. the next morning, Stalin called back. He now agreed fully with Vasilevsky’s plan; the Second Guards Army was alerted for a forced march.

The decision came none too soon. At 8:00 A.M. on December 13, bleary-eyed German tank crews crossed the Aksai River on a rickety bridge. Now only the frozen Mishkova River remained as a natural barrier to the Kessel around Stalingrad.

Desperate to keep abreast of the relief force’s progress at Gumrak Airfield, Paulus ordered ten radio operators to monitor every wavelength for messages from the oncoming panzers. But Russian technicians constantly foiled their efforts by jamming channels and broadcasting false information.

While Paulus lingered in this limbo, he also had to contend with pressures on every sector of the Kessel. In the ruins of Stalingrad, the Soviet Sixty-second Army denied its own weaknesses and harassed the Germans from the tractor factory to the Tsaritsa Gorge. These aggressive tactics were totally consistent with Chuikov’s military philosophy. The combative general knew of no other way to wage war.

From her home in Kuibyshev, Chuikov’s wife had written recently and reminded him of that trait.

My dear Vassili:

I at times imagine you have entered into single combat with Hitler. I know you for twenty years. I know your strengths….It’s hard to imagine that someone like Adolf could get the better of you. This could not happen. One old lady, a neighbor, meets me every morning and says: “I pray to God for Vassili Ivanovich….”

Though beset by supply problems, and disgusted with the front command for not sending enough ammunition, Chuikov continued to mount small attacks against the increasingly weary Germans. One of his storm groups concentrated on the potato cellar that Lt. Wilhelm Kreiser had held since late October. While his exhausted men slept at their guns, the Russians crawled up, then drove them outside, back to the system of trenches that Kreiser had thoughtfully prepared for just such an emergency.

Kreiser rallied his men to counterattack, but he forgot to keep low. From a nearby cottage, a Russian machine gunner put one bullet in his left shoulder, another through his arm. The lieutenant went down into the snow. Still conscious, he gave command of the company to another lieutenant and then staggered off to the rear. In minutes, his successor followed him there with a bullet through his own arm.

Kreiser radioed for reinforcements, then led a group of wounded to an aid station, where a doctor jabbed him with morphine and put him on a sled. Towed further to the rear by a Hiwi laborer, the drowsy Kreiser fell asleep and rolled off into the road. When the loyal Hiwi came back and dragged him from a snowbank, the grateful lieutenant mumbled his thanks and fell unconscious.

In the days to come, Kreiser would be one of the fortunate men flown out of the Kessel. That night, another Soviet storm group crossed the German lines. Faulty Soviet intelligence reports had pinpointed General Paulus’s command bunker within the city limits and the blond sniper, Tania Chemova, and three other Russians had been sent to kill him.

Carefully picking their way past mountains of rubble, the execution squad looked for German sentries outlined against the snow. Tania was trying to control her temper because the girl ahead of her blundered frequently and made too much noise. “That cow,” Tania thought as she looked at the plump figure that increasingly annoyed her.

The “cow” stumbled and a fiery explosion smashed Tania to the pavement. Unconscious, she bled into the gutter from a gaping wound in her stomach. Moments later, Vassili Zaitsey hurried to her side and tenderly lifted her limp form.

Zaitsev struggled back to his lines, to a cellar hospital where doctors worked desperately to staunch the flow of blood from Tania’s wounds. For hours they despaired of saving her, but by morning she rallied and the surgeons made plans to transport her across the Volga for a major operation.

After Tania regained consciousness, her first questions were about what had happened to her patrol. Told that the woman ahead of her had stepped on a mine but survived with only superficial injuries, she listened to the details with mixed emotions. Her vendetta with the Germans was ended; she had “broken eighty sticks” in her three months of war. But the image of that “damned cow” kept intruding on her thoughts and made her furious.

On the morning of December 14, the German 6th Panzer Division charged ahead toward the Kessel and ran directly into Russian reinforcements of almost three hundred tanks. One platoon of panzers was chased by forty Russian T-34s, and an armored battery which went to their rescue came over a low rise to find the Russian tanks barely a thousand meters away. Painted white “just like the Germans,” with black numbers on the turrets, they were surrounded by a large knot of soldiers.

For a moment, Lt. Horst Scheibert wondered whether he had stumbled on elements of the German 23rd Panzer Division that was providing support for 6th Division’s drive to the pocket. Everything looked so German, then he noticed that the gun barrels seemed more stubby, and the turrets had no domes.

Still hesitant and nervous, he moved his force closer. At six hundred meters, he had not made up his mind to shoot. He trembled as the distance closed rapidly.

Suddenly the soldiers ahead jumped for their own tanks and Scheibert only had time to scream, “Achtung!” into the radio before two Russian tanks came at him.

Scheibert hollered again, “Fire! Russians!” But the enemy got off the first shots. At only three hundred meters, they missed completely.

German gunners were more acurate. The first two Russian tanks blew up violently, and “the rest was child’s play.” Reloading with tremendous speed, the Germans slamed shells through the confused enemy formation. Thirty-two curling black pillars of smoke marked the total destruction of one of the Soviet tank columns outside Verkhne-Kumski.

But other Russian armored groups still controlled the town. The Germans could not yet break through toward the Mishkova River.