Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad

by William Craig

When Combat Group Krumpen staggered under their hail of shells, the Russians even opened a counterattack, sending unpainted T-34 tanks straight from the factory assembly lines at the Germans.

As the surgeon concentrated on an operation, a soldier yelled into the operating room, “The Russians have broken through!” Kohler kept working and, when he finished, went to the door to see several Soviet tanks squashing German vehicles only a hundred yards away. The sight brought a roar from his throat. Spitting out the cork, he screamed, “Load the wounded!” At that instant, concealed German antiaircraft guns fired ear-splitting salvos directly at the enemy tanks, which blew up, and scattered flaming fuel and bodies across the ground.

Rooted to the doorway, Kohler noticed a German sergeant and his six-man squad walking unconcernedly around the corner of the hospital. Trailing their guns in the dirt, the soldiers came up to him and the sergeant asked, “What the hell’s going on around here?” In reply, the astonished Kohler asked his own question, “What the hell are you going to do about it?” The sergeant shrugged in indifference, and begged to be allowed to rest. When Kohler looked into the man’s eyes, he held his temper, for it was clear to him the soldier had just undergone a harrowing experience. In the midst of the earthshaking shelling, he ordered food and rum for his guests. They stretched out against a wall and watched the battle escalate. Hundreds of Russian troops were marching toward them across a grassy field. Their arms linked together, they were singing songs in loud harmony. When the sergeant stopped eating he wiped his hands on his uniform and told Kohler he was ready for orders. The doctor suggested that the squad do a little fighting and asked the name of the sergeant’s commanding officer. “Captain Holland,” he said, adding in a hollow voice that Holland’s head had just been shot off by a Russian tank.

Giving the officer his glasses, he pointed to the enemy infantry. The man swore in delight, handed back the binoculars, raced to his car and sped off toward an artillery command post. Kohler fixed his attention on the marching soldiers, whose songs drifted toward him on the balmy summer breeze. As the doctor stared in horrified fascination, geysers of earth suddenly blossomed among them and jagged holes appeared where men had been moments before. Kohler watched as the steppe grass turned red and the singing was replaced by the shrieks of the dying.

One woman did not need their solace. She spent hours turning over the bodies, rejecting them and moving on until she found her infant, who had been mangled by a bomb. The woman stooped, gathered the remains in her arms, and rocked the baby tenderly for some time. As a Komsomol worker edged closer to comfort her, he heard the woman speaking to the dead child. In a scolding tone, she asked: “How am I going to explain this to your father when he comes home from the war?”

Few Russian soldiers believed the Germans could be stopped short of the Volga. Defeatism infected the conversations of both headquarters staffs and enlisted men. The Germans themselves were amazed at the torrent of prisoners coming into their lines. OKW in East Prussia received a cable from Sixth Army stating that the battle value of enemy soldiers was judged to be very poor: “Many deserters, some even coming in … with their tanks.”

Gone were the lightning ten-mile advances. Now Hoth settled for only a mile or two each day. When the panzers bogged down in narrow streets, Russian soldiers doused them with Molotov cocktails. From windows, enemy snipers picked off whole squads of unwary foot soldiers. Artillery, once used to decimate unseen targets miles away, was now employed to rip out the guts of buildings just fifty yards in front of stalled German divisions.

At his nearly deserted bunker in the Tsaritsa Gorge, General Lopatin tried valiantly to rally his dispirited soldiers. But the Sixty-second Army he commanded existed in name only. Having been badly battered west of the Don, its survivors had straggled into Stalingrad to seek refuge, not combat. Its front extended from the tractor factory to the grain elevator and it was ill-prepared to withstand the full weight of the oncoming Germans. An armored brigade possessed just one tank. An infantry brigade counted exactly 666 soldiers, of whom only 200 were qualified riflemen. A regiment which should have mustered 3000 troops listed 100. The division next to it, normally 10,000 strong, had a total of 1500. On the southern fringe of the city, the once great 35th Guards Division carried 250 infantry on its rolls.