Enemy at the Gates (13 page)

"Vassili Ivanovich," Yeremenko got to the point. "I asked for you in order to offer you a new position. . . ." Though he had anticipated the new post, Chuikov looked genuinely startled as Yeremenko stared intently at him for a reaction, ". . . the position of commander of the Sixty-second Army. What do you think of that?"

Chuikov responded immediately, "V etom otnoshenii . . ." ("In this respect"), and Yeremenko remembered that Chuikov was fond of using this phrase in conversation, ". . . the appointment, of course, is extremely responsible."

Yeremenko broke in, "The situation of the Army is very tense, and I am happy you realize the heavy load you bear." Chuikov nodded. "I think that, in this respect, I will not let you down."

Satisfied with Chuikov's responses, Yeremenko took him to see Khrushchev, who was quickly convinced that Chuikov meant to stand fast in Stalingrad. The meeting broke up on the implicit understanding that Front Headquarters would not deny Chuikov help when he asked for it. Then the new commander of the Sixtysecond Army left to collect his belongings before the return trip to the west bank of the Volga.

On the same day, Gen. Friedrich von Paulus flew more than five hundred miles west to Vinnitsa in the Ukraine. There he spent hours with Adolf Hitler and discussed his chief concern, the left flank along the Don. Paulus asked the Führer to give him some "corset" units, a reserve for the puppet armies still moving into position. Hitler was most cordial and promised to look into the problem immediately. When he pressed Paulus about Stalingrad, the general told him the city should fall in a matter of days.

That evening Paulus dined with his old friend Franz Halder. Over good wine, they talked of the successful summer steppe campaign, and Paulus repeated his fears about the weakness of the puppet armies on his left flank. Halder told him he intended to keep after Hitler on the subject and the two men parted on an optimistic note.

Meanwhile, the three top men in Soviet military affairs were also in conference. Joseph Stalin, Georgi Zhukov, and Alexander Vasilevsky pored over the critical news coming from the battlefields. They noted that in the Caucasus, German Army Group A was beginning to slow down in its drive for the oil fields. But Stalin, still unsure that he had the strength to contain the enemy there, summed up the problem by saying, "They want to get at the oil of Grozny at any price." Without pause he added, "Well now let's see what Zhukov has to say about Stalingrad."

Zhukov did. not have good news. His northern forces could not break the German corridor from the Don to the Volga. Stalin went to a map and studied his list of reserves in other sectors while Zhukov and Vasilevsky stood to one side and discussed in hushed tones the possibility of an alternative solution, another way out.

Suddenly Stalin snapped, "What other way out?"

Both generals were shocked by his keen hearing. Stalin continued, "Look, you had better get back to the general staff and give some thought to what can be done at Stalingrad and how many reserves we will need to reinforce the Stalingrad group. And don't forget the Caucasus front. We will meet again tomorrow evening at nine."

While Stalin and his brain trust maneuvered in Moscow, Vassili Chuikov came ashore in Stalingrad to assume command of the Sixty-second Army. A rabble ran to meet him. Old men and women, little children crowded around; faces black with grime, they were a pathetic sight. The whimpering children begged for water, and that bothered Chuikov most of all, for he had none to give them.

He drove off to the Tsaritsa Gorge to meet his staff, but the headquarters was empty and he had to ask soldiers in the streets for directions to the new command post. Someone told him it was on Mamaev Hill and, driving there through the wreckage from the bombings and shellings of previous days, he was appalled at the flimsy antitank defenses. From his own experience, Chuikov knew the Germans would roll over them in seconds. He noticed something else: Though it was still summer, every leaf had fallen from the trees.

Reaching the southeastern slope of Mamaev, Chuikov climbed upward and stumbled upon the new headquarters, just a wide trench with a bench of packed earth along one wall and a bed and table on the other side. The roof was made of brush covered only by a foot of dirt.

Two people were in the dugout, a woman telephone operator and Gen. Nikolai Ivanovich Krylov, a heavyset man with a serious face. Since Krylov was arguing heatedly on the phone, Chuikov slipped his identification papers onto the table and waited while Krylov glanced casually at them. When he finished his call, the chief of staff of the Sixty-second Army reached out and shook hands with his new superior.

Still very upset about his telephone conversation, Krylov explained that he had just been speaking with an officer who had moved his own headquarters back to the edge of the Volga without permission. "In other words," Krylov said, "[his] . . . command post is now behind us. It's disgraceful. . . ."

Chuikov agreed and sat down. He needed time to grasp the situation; so, for the moment, he did not intrude on Krylov's activities.

Toward midnight,. the general who had arbitrarily relocated his command post arrived with his deputy. At this point, Chuikov asserted himself as army commander and berated the man, "What would your attitude be as a Soviet general, in command of a military sector, if one of your subordinate commanders and headquarters left the front without your permission? How do you regard your own action?..."

The general and his deputy hung their heads and did not reply. Chuikov kept lashing out at them, accusing them of cowardice. Before dismissing them, he demanded they return to their former position by 4:00
A.M
. Then the outraged Chuikov went back to a study of the tactical maps. The arrows on them pointed to disaster. Less than half a mile away, troops of the German 71st and 295th divisions were about to lunge toward the vital main ferry linking Stalingrad with the far shore.

At 6:30
A.M
. on September 13, the enemy attacked and, with communications among his ground units frequently cut by explosions, Chuikov had great difficulty in maintaining control of the battle. By late afternoon he had "almost completely lost contact with the troops." But the Germans still had not been able to break into the downtown section of Stalingrad.

Exposed to incessant gunfire on Mamaev, and deprived of normal telephone and radio circuits, Chuikov suddenly told everyone in the crowded trench to pack up and leave for the Tsaritsa Gorge bunker, so hastily abandoned in recent days.

Following their orders of the night before, Marshals Vasilevsky and Zhukov were again closeted with Stalin. After shaking hands with them, an unusual thing for the premier to do, Stalin launched into an attack on his Allies, "Tens and hundreds of thousands of Soviet people are giving their lives in the fight against Fascism, and Churchill is haggling over twenty Hurricanes. And those Hurricanes aren't even that good. Our pilots don't like them."

Without pausing, Stalin asked, "Well, what did you come up with? Who's making the report?"

"Either of us," Vasilevsky said. "We are of the same opinion."

Stalin looked at their map and asked, "What have you got here?"

"These are our preliminary notes for a counteroffensive at Stalingrad," Vasilevsky answered.

Zhukov and Vasilevsky then took turns explaining their idea: after breaking through both the German flank defenses a hundred miles northwest of the city along the Don River, and fifty miles south of the city around the Tzatza chain of salt lakes, two Russian pincers would then meet near the town of Kalach. Hopefully they would trap most of Paulus's Sixth Army in the forty-mile-wide land bridge between the Don and Volga.

Stalin objected, "Aren't you extending your striking forces too far?" When the marshals disagreed with him, he said, "We will have to think about this some more and see what our resources are."

While they argued the merits of the bold plan, General Yeremenko called from Yamy on the BODO line and Stalin listened intently to the news that the Germans were entering Stalingrad from the west and south.

When Stalin hung up, he turned to Vasilevsky. "Issue orders immediately to have Rodimtsev's 13th Guards Division cross the Volga and see what else you can send across the river tomorrow."

The three men parted with this warning from the premier. "…We will talk about our plan later. No one except the three of us is to know about it."

On the morning of September 14, the German 71st Division entered downtown Stalingrad on a two-mile-wide front. Captain Gerhard Meunch personally led the 3rd Battalion, 194th Infantry Regiment, as it tried to cross several city blocks and gain the river front. Until now, his men had suffered mostly from the heat or occasional Russian rear guards, and Meunch thought their chances of reaching the Volga before nightfall were excellent.

But once they reached the congested avenues of the city, casualties rose sharply. From third- and fourth-floor windows, snipers riddled the columns, and hidden light artillery blew gaps in the ranks. The Germans found few places to hide, for they always had to force the battle and dig the enemy from the ruins of buildings.

Still, by 2:00
P.M
., the Third Battalion had closed to within a few hundred yards of the main railroad station just off Red Square, and Meunch received orders to seize the ferry landing at the Volga. Despite mounting losses, he was still confident. His men had captured several Russian couriers running through the streets with handwritten messages. Sensing that the Soviet Sixtysecond Army's telephone communications had broken down, and that it was now increasingly dependent on isolated small groups to contain the Germans, Meunch assumed that his depleted battalion could manage the last half mile toward their goal.

Meunch's estimate of enemy problems was amazingly accurate. General Chuikov was in a desperate situation. Back again in the underground bunker at Tsaritsa Gorge, he had just been told that the 13th Guards Division would come to his aid and cross the river that night. But in the meantime, he had to find enough troops to hold the main ferry landing. Without the ferry, the center of Stalingrad was sure to fall.

Around 4:00
P.M
., Chuikov called in Colonel Sarayev, the NKVD garrison commander. General Krylov had already warned Chuikov about Sarayev's attitude: "He considers himself indispensable and does not like carrying out the army's orders."

When Sarayev arrived in the bunker, Chuikov sized up his guest and dealt with him bluntly, "Do you understand that your division has been incorporated into the Sixty-second Army and that you have to accept the authority of the Army Military Council?" When Sarayev grumbled and looked annoyed, Chuikov made the ultimate threat. "Do you want me to telephone the Front Military Council to clarify the position?"

Faced with a reprimand or worse from Yeremenko and Khrushchev, Sarayev caved in and humbly answered, "I am a soldier of the Sixty-second Army."

Chuikov sent him to organize his fifteen hundred militiamen into squads of ten and twenty in strategic buildings in the heart of the city. These "storm groups" were his answer to the German superiority in troops, artillery, and planes—especially planes. Throwing away the Red Army textbook on tactics, he was substituting an idea he had first conceived on the steppe, where he watched enemy
blitzkrieg
tactics against the Sixty-fourth Soviet Army, and became convinced that he could not compete against German firepower. He countered by creating a series of minifortresses, commanding various street intersections. The small storm groups could act as "breakwaters," funneling Nazi panzers into approach roads already registered on by Russian artillery. When the tanks lumbered along these predictable routes, they would face a murderous fire from heavy weapons. With the tanks bogged down, the storm group could then deal with German infantry, exposed behind the flaming armor. And by fighting at such close range, the storm groups also eliminated the threat of the German Luftwaffe. Afraid to bomb their own troops, the Stukas and Ju-88s would be unable to attack the Soviet strong-points.

A mere half mile northeast of Chuikov's bunker, a group of NKVD soldiers braced for the final German thrust to the river. Drawn up in an arc around the main ferry, the sixty soldiers waited for their commander, Colonel Petrakov, to return from a scouting mission along Pensenskaya Street. To figure out where the enemy was trying to break through, Petrakov and two aides walked as far north as the Ninth of January Square. The roar of small-arms fire was rolling over them from a distance, but they had neither seen a German nor heard any close-range shooting. The square was deserted, and Petrakov stood beside an abandoned car to assess his situation.

Submachine-gun bullets suddenly whistled through the car windows, forcing Petrakov to duck for cover. Almost instantly German shells exploded up and down the square and he was knocked unconscious. Rescued by his men, he awoke in a tunnel at the edge of the Volga where he lay under an overcoat and heard that the Germans had rushed for the river and taken a series of buildings near the shore. From the House of Specialists (an apartment house for engineers), from the five-storey State Bank, and from the beer factory, the Germans were hollering: "
Rus, Rus,
Volga
bul-bul!
" ("Russians will drown in the Volga!").

Petrakov staggered to the tunnel entrance and looked out at the river for some sign of the 13th Guards Division. But the time for their crossing was still hours away and he had to keep the Germans from the ferry until then.

When a small Russian boy wandered into the tunnel, the curious Petrakov asked his name. "Kolia," he replied and told the colonel that the enemy had sent him to spy on Russian strength between the House of Specialists and the Volga. Petrakov smiled and asked Kolia to tell him instead about the Germans. Kolia knew exactly who his captors were: the 1st Battalion, 194th Infantry Regiment, 71st Division, commanded by a Captain Ginderling. Protecting Gerhard Meunch's left flank, Ginderling was also trying to sweep to the main ferry before dark.