Enemy at the Gates

man will say: “I don’t give a shit about anything,” and will freeze to death or be captured. The men have the desire to hold fast and it is incomprehensible how they have held so far…. Heating is a very big problem. Everything has to be fetched from Stalingrad, but there is no gas available for that. In other words, the cat eats its own tail all around…. It may have been decided in view of the situation to give us up, which is not unthinkable—although it is hard to fathom the consequences. If so, I will live a few days more with Eichlepp [a fellow aide], thanks to your excellent chocolate!…

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 Fuhrer 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