Enemy at the Gates (17 page)

The same held true for Dr. Herbert Rentsch, an immaculately groomed veterinarian who had just returned after being married in Dresden. Now in charge of all animals in the 94th Division, Rentsch went out each day to inspect his herd of twelve hundred horses, forty oxen and six camels. While he arranged to send four hundred of the horses off to the Ukraine for a rest, he requisitioned enough feed from the newly captured grain elevator in the southern sector of Stalingrad to take care of the rest of his charges.

On his daily tours of the grazing grounds, forty-five miles northwest of the city and well within German lines, Rentsch always rode his own horse, Lore. At these times, he found it easy to forget the distant sounds of war. When he gave Lore her head and she cantered across the flat plain, the doctor was at peace with the world.

Lt. Emil Metzger was in a euphoric mood. While his smoothly efficient crew fired on targets reported to them by spotter planes over Stalingrad, the lieutenant savored a letter from Kaethe, who had finally forgiven him for not coming home in August. She did not tell him that the letter explaining his delay had not reached her until after she spent hours waiting at the train station. Nor did she tell him how she had gone home that day, pounded the table in frustration and screamed: "To hell with him!" Instead, she congratulated him for being so selfless in letting a friend take his place in the furlough rotation.

Emil read her letter over and over, imagining the reunion they would have when the war was over. Still confident that Stalingrad would fall soon, he blithely ignored any conversations among fellow officers about the weak German left flank.

That weak left flank was being discussed in Moscow. On September 28, Joseph Stalin sat once more with the co-planners in Operation Uranus, Georgi Zhukov and Alexander Vasilevsky.

Stalin was relaxed, courteous, and attentive. The premier was particularly interested in the personalities of the generals commanding the various armies. He mentioned General Gordov. Both Zhukov and Vasilevsky agreed that while he was efficient, the man seemed unable to get along with his staff. Stalin suggested a change and Zhukov recommended Konstantin Konstantinovich Rokossovsky, an officer who had barely survived Stalin's purges and wore a set of stainless steel false teeth as a reminder of his imprisonment and torture by the NKVD. Stalin endorsed the promotion wholeheartedly and also agreed to changing the names of several sectors. The Stalingrad Front became the Don Front; the Southeastern Front reverted to the Stalingrad Front. Both alterations were made to conform more readily to the geography of the region.

After further discussion of Operation Uranus, Stalin told Zhukov, "You had better fly back and do everything necessary to wear down the enemy…"

Before leaving, both Vasilevsky and Zhukov signed a map showing the plan for the counteroffensive. Stalin added the word, "Approved." Then he wrote his own signature.

Chapter Eleven

While Stalin was placing his personal endorsement on the plan to destroy the Sixth Army, Adolf Hitler left Vinnitsa to fly home. As the throbbing engines of his Ju-52 transport carried him across the Ukraine and then Poland, the Führer withdrew from his aides in sullen contemplation of the disastrous summer in southern Russia. His
blitzkrieg
on the steppe was foundering in the streets of Stalingrad. His thrust into the oil fields of the Caucasus was equally bogged down in the mountain foothills. But in Berlin he continued to deny these harsh realities and, on September 30, he launched into a plaintive defense of his accomplishments. Speaking at a Winter Relief Rally in the Sportspalast, he told his audience, "When Mr. Eden or some other nincompoop declares that they have a belief, we cannot talk with them, as their idea of belief seems to be different from ours….They believe that Dunkirk was one of the greatest victories in the world's history…."

Silhouetted by banks of spotlights, Hitler continued:

What have we to offer? If we advance 1,000 kilometers, it is nothing. It is a veritable failure….If we could cross the Don, thrust to the Volga, attack Stalingrad—and it will be taken, you may be sure of that—then it is nothing. It is nothing if we advance to the Caucasus, occupy the Ukraine and the Donetz basin…

We had three objectives: (1) To take away the last great Russian wheat territory. (2) To take away the last district of coking coal. (3) To approach the oil district, paralyze it, and at least cut it off. Our offensive then went on to the enemy's great transport artery, the Volga and Stalingrad. You may rest assured that once there, no one will push us out of that spot....

In Stalingrad, "that spot" as Hitler referred to it in his speech, a few battered Russian units still managed to stymie German efforts to drive them into the Volga. In the central part of the city, Rodimtsev's 13th Guards held a tiny sliver of land along the Volga from Pensenskaya Street north to the Krutoy Gully. At some points, their salient was only two hundred yards deep.

Searching for elbow room; the 42nd Regiment's commander, Colonel Yelin, had picked out two buildings on Lenin Square that might be used for strongpoints. One was a badly damaged apartment house facing Solechnaya Street. The other building was sound. A second lieutenant named Zabolotnov took a squad to the undamaged one on the right and occupied it. The new post was labeled "Zabolotnov's House" immediately, but he died within twenty-four hours. His men maintained the position.

As for the damaged building facing Solechnaya Street, Sgt. Jacob Pavlov and three other men crawled across a courtyard, threw grenades into first-floor windows, and helped each other inside, while the few Germans not killed by the blasts scrambled away across the square. In the basement, the squat, constantly smiling Pavlov discovered a small group of Russians, both military and civilians. Some were badly wounded, and Pavlov sent a runner to report that he had taken the house, but the messenger was forced back inside when the Germans counterattacked. He finally got through the next night, September 29, taking some wounded with him, and 13th Guards Division Headquarters sent more men to help Pavlov. The twenty men quickly organized their new home. They broke down a wall between two cellars, posted mortars and machine guns at key windows, and began to snipe at the enemy. Four more soldiers arrived, the final reinforcements from headquarters. During the breaks in the shooting, the small band of men—drawn by chance from all regions of the Soviet Union, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, the Ukraine—tried to make the best of a tense situation. They found an old phonograph and one record, whose melody no one recognized. But they played it continually and it soon began to wear out.

Outside the apartment house, German tanks constantly probed for a weak spot. But "Pavlov's House" was a natural roadblock, commanding a wide field of fire and denying the enemy access to the Volga bank, only 250 yards away. Instead of bringing in planes or artillery to smash the obstacle, the Germans unaccountably continued to attack it head on and suffered the consequences.

North of Krutoy Gully, Col. Nikolai Batyuk's 284th Siberian Division clung to the southern and eastern slopes of Mamaev Hill, although the Germans held the crest and poured shells down on the zigzag network of Russian trenches. Batyuk lost three hundred soldiers on September 28 alone, but his men held their thin line and refused to allow the enemy to sweep past them to the Lazur Chemical Plant and then on to the Volga.

Lt. Pyotr Deriabin had been stationed at the yellow brick Lazur plant for a short time and from his gun position on the grounds, frequently scanned the summit of Mamaev and the two green water tanks from which the Germans watched both him and river traffic to the east. Each time he did so, Deriabin felt the Germans were looking down his throat. And they were, for his mortar batteries came under such continuous attack that regimental headquarters ordered him to pull back to the tennis racquet-shaped railroad track circling the plant. There, in a series of caves in the embankment, the lieutenant paused to write to his only brother, fighting somewhere near Voronezh. He did not know that he had been killed during the summer.

He also wrote to his girl friend back in Siberia. Desperate to tell her where he was, he enclosed clippings from the Red Army newspaper,
Red Star,
telling of the "glorious" struggle in Stalingrad. He always added: "Hello, I'm still alive." She got every letter, but from each one censors had removed the clippings.

Although Deriabin's guns had to be moved from the premises, the Lazur Chemical Plant remained in Soviet hands. In one section of the block-long building, Russian instructors now conducted an intensive course in sharpshooting. Against the wall of a long room, they painted helmets, observation slits, and outlines of human torsos. At the other end, they stood over trainees and coached them on sniper techniques. All day long, the plant echoed to rifle fire from within as the recruits practiced shooting at the targets. Those who graduated from this impromptu school went immediately to the edge of no-man's-land where they began to take a fearful toll of the enemy.

Already Russian newspapers had made the name Vassili Zaitsev famous. In but ten days' time he had killed nearly forty Germans, and correspondents gloatingly wrote of his amazing ability to destroy his enemies with a single bullet. It was a skill he had learned while shooting deer in the forests around Elininski, his home in the Ural Mountain foothills. A shepherd in the summers, Zaitsev, at the age of fifteen, went off to technical school in Magnitogorsk. Later, he served as a bookkeeper in the Soviet Far East Fleet. On September 20, 1942, the broad-faced Zaitsev came to Stalingrad with the 284th Division. Now he was a national hero, and as his fame spread across no-man's-land, the Germans took an inordinate interest in him. They called a Major Konings out from Berlin to kill him.

Unaware of the German plan, Zaitsev continued his one-man war and began to teach thirty other Russians his specialty. Blond Tania Chernova was one of his students. They also became lovers. Tania relished her new life. Undaunted by her ordeal on the Volga and in the sewer pipe, she had become a professional soldier, living in foxholes, drinking vodka, eating with a spoon she kept in her boot. She slept curled up beside strangers; she bathed in pails of water. She also learned how to take cover in the front lines, how to track the enemy through the telescopic sight and, most portantly, how to wait for hours before firing a single shot that killed.

During her training as a sniper, she went out on a special mission ordered by 284th Division Headquarters after captured prisoners had pinpointed a German headquarters located in a building between the Stalingradski Flying School and the Red October Plant. Tania and five men were assigned to dynamite it.

Late at night they passed through Russian outposts and crawled into enemy territory. When they heard an occasional voice, or flares burst overhead, they froze. An hour later, they found their target in a half-destroyed apartment house with one entire wall missing.

The patrol tiptoed up an intact stairwell while Tania brought up the rear. When the Russians reached the second-floor landing, the five men disappeared around the corner but a noise distracted her. She whirled to see a German soldier emerging from behind a post.
"Hünde hoch,"
he grunted, waving a pistol in her face. Immediately lashing out with her boot, she caught the German in the groin. He doubled over, his pistol bouncing off the stairs and into the street. Tania grabbed his helmeted head and cracked his face into her knee. In desperation he savagely bit her left thumb.

She knocked him down and twisted his right arm under his body. Pressing deep into his throat with both hands, she held on while he thrashed about violently. His helmet fell off and suddenly Tania noticed her victim had bright red hair. She leaned harder on his windpipe. When he gurgled horribly, one of her patrol came back downstairs and whispered, "Tania, are you all right? Where are you?"

Seeing her plight, the other Russian pushed her away and smashed the red-haired man in the head with his rifle butt.

Tania got up from the corpse and ran to the floor above, where the dynamite was already in place. The sergeant ordered, "You do it," and she lit the fuse. Forgetting all caution, the Russians pounded down the stairs. The noise they made alerted the Germans, who fired at the shadowy figures emerging from the building.

Racing back toward their own lines, the demolition team heard a shattering explosion and the German headquarters behind them blew apart in an orange ball of fire.,

On the right flank of Tania's position, the 95th Division, under the leadership of bald-headed Col. V. A. Gorishny, occupied another part of the bomb-pitted eastern slope of Mamaev Hill. But the 95th was so badly mauled that in a matter of days it would be transferred to reserve behind new divisions now digging in at the northern factories.

There, the fresh 39th Guards had thrown up a second line of defense behind the 194th and 308th divisions, responsible for holding the western approaches to the Red October and Barrikady plants. A few miles to the north, around the tractor works, the 112th Division had just been joined by aggressive Gen. Victor Zholudev's elite 37th Guards, young marines dressed in black striped shirts and berets.

The arrival of the 37th Guards had coincided with the departure of the last civilians still working inside the plant. When the dreaded order from the Military Council finally reached them— "Get out! Go across the river!"—the employees packed their blueprints, records, and tools into trucks. German artillery shells whined into the mile-long industrial complex as the workers walked one last time through the machine shops and assembly lines. Overwhelmed by remorse at having to leave such an integral part of their lives, they cried unashamedly.

Their convoy drove south past the statue of Felix Dzerhezinsky, Stalin's first secret police chief and, just before the tractor plant passed from view, one foreman pointed out a building near the river and said, "We can start up again there when we come back." He sounded genuinely optimistic.