Enemy at the Gates

and shrugged. Smiling warmly at Behr, he told him he would discuss the matter immediately with his advisers.

Convinced that he had done all he could, Behr saluted stiffly and left the room.

Thirteen hundred miles to the east, the Russian ring around Pitomnik tightened as T-34 tanks moved within a quarter mile of the runways. Control-tower operators waved off further transport landings and six Messerschmitt 109 fighters roared off the strip to take refuge at the smaller, ill-equipped Gumrak Airport, a few miles to the east. On landing there, five of the fighters either overshot the runway or crashed into debris. The sixth plane circled hesitantly, then disappeared to the west, far beyond the Kessel. It landed eventually at Schacty and the pilot reported that Pitomnik was no longer under German control.

With Pitomnik overrun, Sixth Army had suffered a mortal wound. The end was almost at hand.

The transmitter at Gumrak relayed news of its final spasms to Army Group Don: “Composure of many troops… is highly commendable. Completely exhausted officers and men who have gone for days almost without food have pulled cannon for 20 kilometers through heavily snowed-in and often roadless steppes. Supply situation catastrophic. In some places troops cannot bring supplies to the front due to lack of fuel.”

Field Marshal Manstein was not surprised. Threatened by Soviet tank raids himself, he had been forced to retreat another fifty miles west to Taganrog, from where he monitored the pulsebeat of his own operations. Along the upper Don, on nearly a two-hundred-mile-wide line from Pavlovsk northwest to Kasternoye, fresh Russian armies had attacked the few Italian divisions that had not been engaged in December, as well as the entire Second Hungarian Army. This latest drive quickly overwhelmed the satellite forces and opened another wide gap in Manstein’s left flank.

By this time the field marshal’s combat groups were practically worn out. Groups Stahel, Fretter-Pico, Mieth, Hollidt had been badly depleted in the constant leap-frogging operations, which had so far managed to keep the Russians away from Rostov. Now, thinning their lines dangerously, they sideslipped again to the west ‘in order to slow the new Russian juggernaut moving south from the Don.

Meanwhile, Gen. Erhard Milch had arrived at Manstein’s Taganrog quarters to supervise Hitler’s renewed attempt to supply Paulus. From airfields all over Europe, the energetic Luftwaffe officer had collected more than a hundred extra planes and rushed them into the shuttle service to the Kessel. But his last-ditch activities on behalf of Sixth Army depended in good part on a hardworking, well-coordinated staff at Gumrak Airfield.

The only field capable of handling heavy traffic, Gumrak was an ugly scar across the pristine snow. A magnet to retreating troops, it drew long lines of trucks and men to it from the west, then spewed them out on the eastern side toward the Volga and Stalingrad. It had become a charnel house, a depository for the dead and dying, who littered the roads and fields around the runways.

Very few of the Germans in the Kessel retained any hope of rescue. Some perked up with the sound of firing to the south and wondered whether Manstein had actually arrived. Others clung to stories of mythical divisions breaking into the Kessel from Kalach to the west. Realists like Emil Metzger ignored such rumors. With all ammunition gone and his guns blown up to deny them to the enemy, the lieutenant had taken his men into the line of march toward Gum rak and the Volga. As he waded through the drifts, his thoughts wandered back to Kaethe in Frankfurt. He tried hard to remember every detail of her face. It seemed certain that he would die on this godforsaken plain without ever getting the chance to hold her again.

As the wind tore at him, Metzger began to toy with the thought of breaking out of the Kessel— all by himself if necessary.

Like Metzger, Gottlieb Slotta was determined to live. He was already at Gumrak, where he hobbled toward a trainload of wounded, parked at a siding. When a Russian plane dove and released a stick of bombs, bricks and other debris landed on Slotta’s head. Shouting, “I’m not going to die like this!” he began running madly toward Stalingrad, five miles away. On both sides of the road, he saw heaps of men who had given up and died. But Slotta had no intention of relinquishing his fragile hold on life that way.

Cpl. Franz Deifel was not sure life was worth fighting for anymore. Until this moment, he had been one of the few Germans inside the Kessel who pursued a relatively normal routine. He still hauled ammunition up the back slopes of Mamaev Hill and though his load was limited to only a few shells, he went up the hill almost every day.

By late January, Russian planes had begun to stalk individual trucks and men, and they finally found Deifel as he drove back to the ammunition dump outside the city. A bomb landed twenty feet away; shrapnel sprayed the vehicle and tore into his legs. He fell out of the cab and crawled into a house, where he pulled off his pants and tried to staunch the flow of blood. Another bomb exploded and the walls fell out, so he ran to a nearby trench, hid until dark, then stole back to the truck. By some miracle the engine started on the first try and heavy shellfire followed him down the road until he stopped at a dispensary.

Ordered on to a hospital, Deifel found it to be a dimly lit bunker. At the entrance, he froze in horror at a pyramid of bodies which blocked the door. Nauseated, he broke away and limped back to his own quarters.

A general withdrawal had been ordered, and Deifel hitched a ride on a truck headed back to Stalingrad. Just as the convoy started up, Russian shells exploded on the lead vehicles and blew them apart. Horns blared and drivers raged at the delay while Deifel wandered down the road. Dazed and frustrated, he sank down heavily on the corpse of a comrade and muttered: “Kiss my ass.” For the first time in his life, he thought of committing suicide.

Behind the utterly depressed corporal, Gumrak Airport had become bedlam. On January 18, two days after Pitomnik had fallen, it was crammed with thousands of wounded from all around the Kessel. Doctors worked eighteen-hour tours of duty treating patients lying on cots, on floors, and outside in the snow. Delirious and pain-wracked soldiers bellowed in torment as medics jabbed needles into arms crawling with gray lice, then stripped the patients for surgery.

Trucks bulging with torn and mutilated men pulled up at the hospitals but when drivers were waved off because of lack of space, they left their cargoes unattended. The temperature fell to twenty degrees below zero and the wounded cried feebly for help. When no one responded, they froze to death within a few yards of the operating table.

At his bunker a mile away, Gen. Friedrich von Paulus filled the airwaves with messages to Manstein: “Airfield at Gumrak usable since the 15th of January, landing ground available for night landings…. Request quickest possible intervention. Gravest danger.”

The Luftwaffe rejected Paulus’s claim about Gumrak. Declaring the field almost totally unfit for use, it insisted that adequate safety measures were needed to insure proper deliveries.

Paulus was furious: “Objections raised by Luftwaffe regarded here as mere excuses…. Landing ground has been substantially extended. Fully competent ground organization with all necessary installations….Commander in chief has directly requested the Fuhrer to intervene….”

The reality of the situation, however, was that neither Paulus nor Schmidt understood that there was an almost total operational breakdown at the airport. The so-called “fully competent ground organization,” which had performed admirably at Pitomnik, was no longer a cohesive group. Though Col. Lothar Rosenfeld now tried to clear Gumrak for an intensive shuttle service, he was working with men exhausted beyond recall.

When a Luftwaffe officer landed in Gumrak on the morning of January 19, he recognized these symptoms immediately. Major Thiel, who had come to the Kessel to reconcile differences between Sixth Army and the Luftwaffe, was appalled at the condition of the runways. The wrecks of thirteen planes littered the landing cross, forcing incoming pilots to touch down within a tight eightyyard radius. Bomb craters pocked the concrete. Newly fallen snow had not yet been cleared.

Thiel descended into the cramped, brightly lit command bunker where he was quickly surrounded by Generals Schmidt, Paulus, Heitz, and other aides, all of whom began to insult him about the Luftwaffe.