Enemy at the Gates (23 page)

Zeitzler agreed.

The weather, indeed, was getting worse. It had changed dramatically, as it always does on the steppe, which knows only one extreme or the other: light or dark, abundance or famine, cruel heat or numbing cold, life or death—everything or nothing.

Warm weather had lasted through October, then it turned cold overnight. At first, drizzles drenched the plains. Then snow flurries whipped the barren land. The steppe grass turned brown, and wilted. Men caught in the open turned their collars up to ward off the chill. The sky no longer blazed with iridescent hues; it was sullen, gray, menacing. It whispered of winter.

The quartermasters of Sixth Army had learned bitter lessons from the previous year and had already dug into the many
balkas
cutting across the plain. In the sides of these deep ravines, they had stockpiled food and ammunition, and thousands of bunkers had been constructed to shield the soldiers from the icy winds. Determined not to be caught again without proper clothing and other necessities, the quartermasters requisitioned additional reserves from the German pipeline stretching back to Kharkov, nearly four hundred miles away.

Along the railroads leading to Stalingrad, ten depots had laid in stocks for both Sixth Army and the German panzer groups bogged down in the Caucasus. But moving the supplies east was difficult, for Russian partisans had received orders to impede enemy traffic to the Don and Volga. As bridges and track blew up in fiery explosions, the supply line from Kharkov to Stalingrad clogged, cleared, and clogged again.

Fortunately, the warehouses at Chir, a railhead only sixty miles west of Stalingrad bulged with appropriate items and as the first frosts touched the steppe in early November, some units of the Sixth Army received warm clothing. Convoys of trucks trailed back and forth across the steppe, bringing winter gear to German soldiers. Other convoys managed to get through with badly needed replacements for infantry regiments and battalions.

Pvt. Ekkehart Brunnert had boarded a troop train at the town of Boblingen in Germany, waved farewell to his wife, Irene, and watched her out of sight. Surrounded by fourteen comrades, the private quickly adjusted to the camaraderie of soldierly life. The train rolled eastward for endless days and, as it moved through the Ukraine, signs of war multiplied. Brunnert saw burned-out villages and railroad cars reduced to skeletal wrecks. He and his comrades decided to post guards at night, but the partisans never attacked and, weeks after leaving Boblingen, the unit arrived at Chir. There, Brunnert pitched a tent and when he got up in the morning, he saw everything covered with frost. He also saw thousands of Russian refugees headed toward Germany and labor camps. They lay in clusters on flatcars. Most wore rags; some munched sunflower seeds, their only food. In the fields around the tracks other Russians picked through garbage heaps for bits of decaying food. Brunnert was shocked at the sight.

He waited at Chir until he got orders to join a truckload of twenty-four men headed toward the front line. On all sides there was only dreary steppe country. On the eastern horizon, a deep and steady roar made the earth tremble.

To most Sixth Army soldiers, the persistent rumbling on the horizon was their only contact , with the horror on the banks of the Volga. For the more than two hundred thousand men in the rear echelons, the killing was just a peripheral event they viewed in brief agonizing moments: the wounded screaming as they were manhandled out of ambulances, the stained and torn uniforms that piled up in grotesque mounds outside surgeons' tents, the thousands of crosses in regimental graveyards on the desolate prairie.

At Peskavotka Depot, forty miles northwest of Stalingrad, Karl Englehardt distributed equipment and food. He also supervised twenty
Hiwis
(Hilfsfreiwilliger) , or "work volunteers," the name given to Russian defectors. Understandably, Red Army soldiers particularly hated these
Hiwis,
and invariably shot any that they caught. Englehardt, a lean, sallow-faced veteran, had collected the laborers through his kindness to their leader, a peasant named Peter, whom he had found cowering in a schoolhouse. Incredibly filthy and frightened for his life, Peter had turned to Englehardt as a savior when the German gave him a tin of water and some hot soup. From then on Peter worshipped the paymaster.

He brought other Russians in from the steppe and offered their services to Englehardt, who dressed them in German uniforms, fed them the same rations as Wehrmacht soldiers, and paid them for their labor.

Friedrich Breining went out with his unit to search abandoned dwellings for extra food, firewood, and anything else of value. When they came to a wrecked house, Breining went up,to the front door and pushed it open. On the floor lay a woman, and beside her a child, a little girl. Both bodies had partially decomposed, but Breining could tell that the mother had once been quite pretty. Neither corpse bore any visible marks.

Other soldiers asked him what was wrong and the former schoolteacher pointed wordlessly to the gruesome sight on the floor. No one made a move to enter. Breining closed the door softly and left.

Veterinarian Herbert Rentsch was making plans to send another four hundred horses back to the Ukraine for rest. He had also begun substituting small Russian horses,
panjes,
for the big Belgian draft animals. Rentsch knew the native
panjes
would work better in the approaching winter.

The doctor still found time to canter his own horse, Lore, over the steppe. The mare was sleek and well groomed and Rentsch rode her every day. He found the exercise exhilarating.

Fifty miles northwest of Stalingrad, Sgt. Gottlieb Slotta returned to the 113th Division after confinement in a hospital. Weeks before, when he had spotted Russian tanks bearing down on his gun battery, he had screamed a warning to his friends. But one of them laughed derisively and yelled back: "Slotta, whenever the Russians shoot, you're afraid."

With the T-34 tanks chasing him, Slotta had run toward his comrades to urge them to take cover. The Russian shells got there first and Slotta saw his companions blown apart. Sobbing bitterly, he fell to the ground and went into shock. Unable to speak, he was taken to the rear, where he spent weeks trying to forget that nightmarish day when no one listened to him. In time, he was returned to his job as an artillery observer and now, as the chill Arctic winds tugged at him, Slotta resumed his watch for more Russian tanks.

Emil Metzger also worried about Russian tanks. Despite the lieutenant's disdain for rumors, he had begun to pay close attention to the pilots of the artillery spotter planes, who spoke to him each day. These veteran reconnaissance men told him that they had seen hundreds of Russian T-34 tanks moving along roads above the river toward the area of Kletskaya, seventy miles northwest. The aviators' genuine alarm about the enemy buildup caused Metzger to temper his optimism about a quick end to the battle and a trip home to Kaethe.

To maintain morale, Sixth Army had established a precise schedule for furloughs of twenty days, with two extra days for travel contingencies. Pvt. Franz Deifel had just finished a trip to Stuttgart, revisiting the Porsche plant where he had been a master upholsterer. His former supervisor told him that papers had already been filed to release him from the army for civilian employment. Richer by two hundred Reich marks given him by fellow workers at the factory, the elated Deifel passed through Kharkov and headed toward Chir at the Don.

Capt. Gerhard Meunch was also returning to the front. During the short visit with his wife, he had tried to forget the slaughter around the U-shaped house in the center of Stalingrad. But it was impossible, and just before leaving home, Meunch told his wife he had an insurance policy for her in case he failed to return this time from the Volga.

Under forty feet of solid earth, Gen. Vassili Chuikov still maintained his precarious hold on ten percent of Stalingrad. Behind him
,
ice floes made the Volga impassable and Chuikov was happy he had requisitioned twelve tons of chocolate for just such an emergency. If the Volga failed to freeze over soon, he figured a ration of half a bar a day for each man could mean their holding out two weeks longer.

While his army tried to ride out the crisis caused by the cutting of the regular supply lines, the soldiers of Batyuk's 284th Division around Mamaev Hill witnessed an extraordinary miniwar over some of those supplies. Every Russian soldier received a daily ration of one hundred grams of vodka. Most waited for it eagerly; only a few refused it. But Senior Lt. Ivan Bezditko, "Ivan the Terrible" to his men, had an incredible taste for vodka and found a way to keep a plentiful supply on hand. When troops from his mortar battalion died, Ivan reported them "present and accounted for," and pirated their daily vodka rations. In a short time, the thirsty officer amassed many gallons, which he carefully stored in his own dugout.

In a warehouse at the Volga shore, a supply officer, Major Malygin, checked his records and noticed that Bezditko's unit had borne up extremely well under weeks of bombardment. Suspicious, Malygin pursued the matter and discovered that the mortar section had actually suffered heavy casualties. He called Bezditko, told him he had exposed his petty scheme, and was going to report him to Front Headquarters. Then he added, "Your vodka ration is being canceled."

The supply officer had gone too far. Bezditko screamed, "If I don't get it, you'll get it."

Malygin hung up on him, relayed news of the crime to headquarters and shut off Ivan's liquor rations.

Enraged, Bezditko contacted the firing point for his .122-millimeter batteries, issued a precise set of coordinates, and gave the order to shoot. Three rounds dropped squarely on top of Malygin's warehouse at the riverbank, and out of the smoke and debris tottered the shaken major. Behind him hundreds of bottles of vodka had broken and spilled onto the floor. Malygin staggered to a phone and asked for headquarters. His anger rising, he shouted out what he knew to be true: Ivan the Terrible had gotten him.

The voice on the other end was patient but unsympathetic, "Next time give him his vodka. He just got the Order of the Red Star, so give it to him."

The incredulous Malygin stormed back to his warehouse and stood helplessly in the midst of the shattered rows of spirits. Within hours, Lieutenant Bezditko's liquor ration resumed and Malygin never again interfered with Ivan the Terrible's larceny.

The story went round the trenches and brought chuckles from most Russians. To them, the quest for liquor was a serious pursuit, one which sometimes assumed even more disastrous proportions. Only recently, soldiers of the 284th Division lines had found several cisterns filled with alcohol. After draining them, the Russians found one more cistern brimming with more spirits. Again they drank the well dry, but this time it was wood alcohol. Four men died and countless others went blind.

The tragedy failed to daunt the appetite of the other troops, some of whom began drinking cologne to ease the terror of living under the brow of Mamaev Hill.

Other 284th Division troops found diversion with two Russian women who had set up light housekeeping on the battlefield. The only entrance to their cellar was through a door that had to be lifted up from the ground. Beneath was a room, twelve by twelve feet square, lit by a kerosene lamp. A mattress lay on the floor with fifteen or twenty pillows ranged about it. One of the girls, a thirty-year-old brunette, had managed to find bright red lipstick, which she wore all the time. The younger one, a blonde, seemed pale and sickly.

The girls had an old gramophone in the corner and several records. The one they played for visiting soldiers was an Argentine tango and everyone who came to the cellar learned it by heart. Some soldiers found the women offensive. One was heard to say: "Those bitches are just waiting for the Germans to arrive." But in the meantime, the girls played their Argentinian tango and entertained lines of men, who ignored shells and bullets to spend a few minutes with them.

Just a mile west of the cellar bordello, two other Russian women fought to stay alive. Natasha Kornilov and her crippled mother had been trapped in their backyard storehouse behind German lines for nearly seven weeks. Every morning the eleven-year-old girl scrounged garbage from German field kitchens. Every night she combed her mother's hair and sang lullabies to her.

Natasha's cheeks were sunken in from hunger. Her eyes bulged, and she moved slowly, heavily. But she always smiled at her mother, who lay on the concrete floor and prayed for deliverance. Mercifully, the German soldiers left the Kornilovs alone. That was the only reprieve granted the starving women.

In Dar Goya, two miles south of the Kornilov's grim hovel, another Russian youth, fifteen-year-old Sacha Fillipov, continued his dual life. Going from office to office, barracks to barracks, the young master cobbler mended hundreds of pairs of German boots. He also stole documents from officers' desks and carried them through the lines to Russian intelligence officers. Otherwise, in the hours he was not working, Sacha played hopscotch in the streets. The Germans never connected the frail boy's presence with grenade explosions that blew down soldiers' billets.

Several nights a week Sacha left home to report enemy troop movements. He always returned safely, and went to bed without giving his parents any details. Though they knew he worked for the Red Army, the Fillipovs never pressed their son for information.

One night he rushed home to warn them to get out of the house by dawn. They followed his instructions and in the morning, Russian artillery shells rained down on a German staff headquarters only a few doors away. Sacha had given his superiors the exact coordinates.

In the Beketovka Bulge, five miles south of Stalingrad, a dramatic buildup of Soviet troops and equipment had been completed. These were the southern strike armies requisitioned by Zhukov for Operation Uranus, and a small percentage of the troops had come from the holocaust in Stalingrad.