The building had fallen down, but in the basement, the six survivors called each other’s names. Buried alive, the air going fast, their only hope was to dig their way out. Their wounds aching, and their teeth caked with accumulated dust and grime, they kept clawing at the rubble. Suddenly a cool breeze hit them and they saw stars in the autumn sky.
Dragan sent a man out to reconnoiter. He returned in an hour with the news that Germans were all around, so the men cautiously left the house one by one. To their left they heard the vicious rolling gunfire on Mamaev and saw the fireworks of tracer bullets. The smell of cordite was heavy. But on Komsomolskaya Street it was relatively quiet. The Germans owned the Volga there.
When patrols nearly stumbled upon them, Dragan’s group came back to the ruins. They waited again, until the moon was obscured, then, silhouetted by flames from railroad cars and houses, they edged closer to the river. Another patrol passed in front of them. When one German lingered by a truck, Dragan sent a man to kill him. The Russian buried a knife in him, put on the German’s greatcoat, and approached another patrolling soldier, whom he also knifed. Suddenly the way to the river was open. The Russians scurried across the railway line and fell to the ground at the edge of the Volga. Their lips cracking from the cold water, they drank and drank.
Above them, the Germans discovered the dead bodies. While the Russians feverishly constructed a small raft from logs and sticks, the Germans fired at random toward the river. Dragan and his men finally pushed off into the current and drifted downstream. Just before dawn their raft bumped ashore on Sarpinsky Island where Russian artillerymen found them, hollow-eyed, in rags, but alive. Dragan ate his first food in three days—fish, soup, and bread—then reported the presence of the six men of his First Battalion. The rest lay dead around Red Square.
On that square, bodies sprawled grotesquely across the grass and sidewalks. Crimson puddles marked where they fell. Other trails of blood etched crazy patterns on the streets, showing where men had dragged themselves to cover.
The Univermag was desolate, smashed: Window manikins had tumbled in awkward positions; bullets stitched paths up and down their lifeless forms. Inside, Russians and Germans huddled in death along the aisles. The store had become a morgue.
The Pravda building had collapsed in the bombings of August 23. The City Soviet, the Red Army Club, and the Gorki Theater were now vacant, ugly from blackened holes and gaping windows. On side streets, merchants’ stores had been flattened. Rotted tomatoes and watermelon pulp splashed over the sidewalks. Fragments of bodies mixed with the vegetables. Flies swarmed over the remains.
In what once had been a fashionable restaurant just east of the mouth of Tsaritsa Gorge, Russian doctors and nurses struggled to evacuate the wounded. More than seven hundred victims had gone out the day before by boat, a motley collection of vessels that were barely seaworthy and which landed under the fire from the German 71st Division. Now nearly six hundred more victims were being carried to the shoreline.
The Germans crept closer. Their machine guns sprayed a withering fire into the masses huddled at the dock. Russian soldiers formed a defense line and held the Nazis off until the last patients crawled feebly on board. When the Germans finally broke into the restaurant, they vomited from the stench of ether and blood and of those who had died and lay unburied.
At last the main ferry had been taken. Except for isolated pockets of resistance, the German Sixth Army held the Volga shoreline for several miles north and south of the Tsaritsa Gorge. Only the factory district in northern Stalingrad remained to be conquered.
At Vinnitsa, this good news failed to stir Adolf Hitler, who sulked bitterly in his log cabin. For more than two weeks after his explosive argument with General Jodi, the Führer had refused to socialize with the men who served him. Enraged by the “insubordination” within his staff, disgusted with the lack of progress in the Caucasus and along the Volga, on September 24 he met with Franz Halder and fired him. In an icy voice, Hitler told the general that they both needed a rest, that their nerves had frayed to the point where neither could help the other. Halder bowed out gracefully and went to his quarters to pack. But before departing, he wrote a short note to his friend and pupil, Friedrich von Paulus, out on the steppe:
24 September 1942
….A line to tell you that today I have resigned my appointment. Let me thank you, my dear Paulus, for your loyalty and friendship and wish you further success as the leader you have proved yourself to be.
As always,
Halder
Paulus received Halder’s letter just as his soldiers raised a huge swastika over the pockmarked entrance to the Univermag Department store in the central part of the city.
But Paulus had no desire to celebrate, for he had just learned the staggering cost of the six weeks’ passage from the Don to the banks of the Volga: more than seventy-seven hundred German soldiers dead; thirty-one thousand wounded. Ten percent of the Sixth Army had been lost. Moreover, he knew the worst battle had not yet been joined. North of the ferry landing, north of heavily contested Mamaev Hill, lay the key to the city—the factories. There, the Sixth Army faced the ultimate challenge. And Paulus was running out of men and ammunition.
Returning to his isolated quarters at Golubinka on the high western bank of the Don, he listened to his gramophone and tried to quell his dysentery. A tic on his cheek had become almost uncontrollable.
Paulus sent another urgent cable to Army Group B; “Rifle strength in the city failing more rapidly than reinforcements. Unless decline halted, the battle will stretch on.”
Some of Paulus’s men shared his increasing gloom. One of them was Lt. Hans Oettl, who had become a forward observer on the front lines a few miles north of the tractor plant. Each day Oettl looked through his field glasses, and pinpointed Russian positions. His batteries fired barrages of shells over his head, down onto the enemy. It had gone on like this for weeks, and nothing had shaken the Russians loose. Opposite him, Russian militiamen had been replaced by seasoned troops ferried across the Volga at night. For Oettl there was a sharp awareness that the war was not ending as abruptly as he had hoped. He had also come to realize that the young officers in his division were woefully inadequate. Though many wore the Order of the Ritter Kreuz on their breast, few if any had ever received training in the art of street fighting. They were dying at an alarming rate.
During lulls in the fighting, Oettl rested in his bunker and worried about the future. Outside, his red-ribboned goat, Maedi, grazed contentedly, oblivious to the gunfire that never seemed to stop.
At Vertaichy, out on the steppe, Deputy Chief Quartermaster Karl Binder plunged into his new job, supplying the men of the 305th Division from the Lake Constance region of southern Germany. Well-fed, gregarious, a veteran of the German Army since the days of the Freikorps before Hitler, Binder immediately noticed the poor morale of the units in the northernmost sector held by Sixth Army. They were unwashed, discouraged, and begging for decent rations.
When Binder inquired into the reasons for their condition, he was told the enemy constantly harassed them, never giving them a chance to rest. Russian artillery dropped hundreds of shells into the German lines; Russian divisions mounted brief, small infantry attacks. Although the Russians failed to gain ground, they inflicted a mounting toll of casualties.
Binder took hold of his new job swiftly. Within days, the experienced scrounger found sausages and beer, pumpernickel, even wine for his men. In the officers’ quarters, he learned more about the battle on the steppe. One of the staff, Lieutenant Colonel Codre, warned, “Stalingrad will still give the Germans the shock of their lives, because the Russians are far from beaten.” Codre went on, “A nagging worry for us is the supply line back to the Ukraine. The Sixth Army requires 750 tons a day to survive, and all of it comes over a single track to the railhead at Chir.” Sobered by these comments, Karl Binder began to worry more about that tenuous lifeline to the rear.
In the meantime, he wrote faith
fully to his wife back in Stuttgart. He asked for his children and assured everyone that the campaign was going well. But he never mentioned Codre’s pessimistic prophecy.
Capt. Gerhard Meunch was still in the same U-shaped building he had occupied on the night of September 14, just two hundred meters from the Volga. Ever since then, with less than fifty men left in his battalion, he had tried again and again to reach the riverbank. But the Russians always drove him back, and at one point, some of Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards even came after him. While Meunch held the ground floor, the Russians blew a hole in the cellar and climbed in. The Germans rushed up some artillery to help the besieged captain and, after he and his men escaped by ladder, the guns smashed in the bottom of the buildings and knocked down another nearby home. Ten Russians crawled out of the wreckage and surrendered to Meunch, who went back inside what was left of the U-shaped structure to await relief.
At Sixth Army Headquarters in Golubinka, Col. Günter von Below paused to say good-bye to his friends before going to Kharkov for treatment of an acute case of jaundice. He was depressed by the cost of taking downtown Stalingrad. But as a trained intelligence officer, he was even more concerned with the overall strategic position of Sixth Army on the steppe. When he mentioned the exposed left flank to Arthur Schmidt, the chief of staff agreed with him that it was a “festering boil,” and confided that both he and Paulus worried about it constantly. Leaving headquarters a short time later, Below was still convinced that Stalingrad could be taken. But since no one had been able to reassure him about the vulnerable flank, he wondered what would happen to Sixth Army should the Russians decide to counterattack in great strength.
Along that critical left flank, outside the Don River town of Akimovski, Gen. Carl Rodenburg was as anxious as Below about Russian intentions. In fact, the monocled veteran was terribly alarmed. His 76th Division had suffered such heavy casualties in fighting off persistent Russian probes that he had begun promoting wholesale lots from the noncommissioned ranks to compensate for officers killed in action. Every week, as he went to the division cemetery to pay homage to the dead, Rodenburg became increasingly pessimistic about the chances for victory at Stalingrad.
Other German soldiers were still relatively untouched by the battle. Pvt. Josef Metzler had come across the Don south of the Kalach bridge. A radio operator in an antiaircraft battery of the 29th Motorized Division, Metzler had found the summer quiet. He saw few Russians and had time to forage freely; once he even caught a pig that he and his comrades slaughtered and ate. When Metzler saw his first “slant eyes,” the Kalmuks who welcomed the invaders openly, he was sure the Russians were finished. He had the feeling that he was already in Asia and that nothing could stop the German advance. Born in Furth, near Nüremberg, the private was a man of strict scruples and Christian ideals. He always comported himself correctly; never once had he picked up clothing or other belongings from a fallen soldier, either German or Russian. To Metzler, that was obscene and almost sacrilegious. During September, promoted to private first class, he stayed on the outskirts of Stalingrad while his battery fired into the shattered city.
A former schoolteacher, Lt. Friedrich Breining went to the Volga as a sightseer, to look at the famous waterway. Commandeering a car, he drove through the safe zone afforded by the 16th Panzer Division’s bridgehead and stared down at the half-mile-wide waterway. He had expected the Volga to be like his own Rhine, with steep banks on both sides as between Mainz and Coblenz. But it was entirely different, and Breining came away from it disappointed.
On the way back to his unit, he dawdled, eating watermelon from the fields and enjoying the shade of some trees which he thought to be poplars. Late in the day, he arrived at the Tartar Wall, an ancient earthworks, ten feet high, which ran for about fifteen miles along the steppe. Once the wall had protected Russian settlers from invading Mongols. Now it simply gave added cover to the German tanks and men burrowed into the ground around it. Breining went into his trench beside it and sunbathed in the lovely, autumn weather. For the lieutenant, life was reasonably pleasant. His unit had suffered few casualties during the summer and few of his comrades anticipated any significant fighting during the fall.
For Pvt. Wilhelm Alter, the whole campaign was boring. A tailor in the 389th Division, he and a friend, shoemaker Emil Gehres, lived in a ravine west of Gumrak Airfield. At 4:00 A.M. each day, they got up, washed, ate breakfast, then went to work, mending clothes and repairing shoes for the combat troops. At 4:00 P.M., they stopped working, washed again, and went to supper. The 1 food was invariably good. Alter particularly liked the goulash.
A happy-go-lucky man who smiled easily, the tailor found the war an annoyance, an interruption from wife and home. The dull rumble of shelling in Stalingrad barely intruded on his thoughts.
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 founder
ing 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.
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