The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution fell on November 7, and Joseph Stalin spoke to his people to tell them that eight million Germans had been killed in the “Great Patriotic War.” Though that figure was inflated by more than six million, another remark he made was more accurate. The premier prophesied, “Soon there will be a holiday in our streets, too.”
But as the Russian people mourned the deaths of millions of relatives in the past seventeen months of war, they saw little reason to anticipate a “holiday.” Hungry and exhausted, only temporarily buoyed by the fact that the Germans had not yet seized the Caucasus and Stalingrad, they dared not dream that anything would ever make them want to laugh and dance again.
In Germany, the nine-year-old Third Reich was also celebrating an anniversary. At the Lowenbräukeller in Munich, workers draped enormous swastika flags across the arches to the main hall. Massive gold eagles hung above the speaker’s rostrum on the flower-banked stage. Officials stomped about, nervously supervising every arrangement for the gala event. They fretted over petty details and harangued everyone with the need for perfection. For Adolf Hitler was the guest of honor, to meet with his old friends and reminisce about the days of the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923.
His special train was rolling through the hilly country of Thuringia. It made slow time. Allied air raids had damaged the tracks, and troop trains frequently slowed its passage. During the evening of November 7, Hitler discussed the day’s major news with several aides in his dining car. Agents had reported from Spain that Allied convoys were steaming past Gibraltar into the Mediterranean. No one knew their destination, but Hitler was fascinated with the bold maneuver. Almost like a disinterested party, he tried to project himself into Allied deliberations.
While dinner was served on exquisite china, the train stopped once more at a siding. A few feet away, a hospital train marked time, and from their tiered cots, wounded soldiers peered into the blazing light of the dining room where Hitler was immersed in conversation. Suddenly he looked up at the awed faces staring in at him. In great anger he ordered the curtains drawn, plunging his wounded warriors back into the darkness of their own bleak world.
All evening long, as his train traveled through the neat fields of Bavaria, Hitler kept fantasizing about the enemy’s plans and concluded that if he were they, he’d occupy Rome immediately. What could stop them? But as he went to bed near dawn, American and British troops were pouring ashore in Morocco and Algeria. Their goal was a junction with Gen. Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth British Army, fresh from its triumph over Rommel at El Alamein in Egypt.
The next day, Hitler ignored the disastrous news and entered the Munich Lowenbräukeller to a throaty animal roar of obeisance. Among his old beer-drinking cronies, who chanted the words to the Nazi party song, “Horst Wessel,” he warmed to the occasion.
Wearing the uniform of the “brownshirts,” a swastika band adorning his left arm, he stood proudly on the platform and accepted the salute: “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!” Then the Führer launched into a rousing speech. He hit out at the British: “They will find out … that the German inventive spirit has not been idle, and they will get an answer [to air raids on Germany] which will take their breaths away.” He scoffed at the landings in Africa: “The enemy moves forward and back, but what matters is the final result, and that you can leave to us.”
When he spoke about Stalingrad, he became almost coquettish: “I wanted to take it—and you know we are modest—we really have it. There are only a very few small places left there. Now the others say: ‘Why don’t you make faster progress?’ Because I don’t want to create a second Verdun … but prefer to do the job with small shock troop units.…”
His cronies rocked the Lowenbräukeller with cheers.
Luftwaffe general Freiherr von Richthofen had been instrumental in getting these “small shock troop units” to Stalingrad. After his outburst against Paulus, he had intervened with General Jeschonnek and persuaded him to influence Hitler to release the elite combat engineers for the final assault. Grasping at any straw, the Führer had readily agreed to their use and had convinced himself that these reinforcements would eliminate all organized Soviet resistance along the Volga shoreline. Thus, while he traveled to meet with his cronies in Munich, the five battalions of “pioneers,” as they were called, packed hurriedly for the journey to Stalingrad.
Near Voronezh, three hundred miles west of the city, cook Wilhelm Giebeler loaded his kitchen equipment onto a train. Around him, troops of the 336th Battalion grumbled loudly about their new assignment while they checked out flamethrowers, machine pistols, and satchel charges of dynamite. Giebeler had heard their griping before, on the eve of every special “dirty job.” But since the pioneers were consummate professionals at street fighting, he had no worries about their morale nor doubt as to their success at the Volga.
When the 336th reached Stalingrad, Maj. Josef Linden was there to greet them. Put in charge of the operation by pioneer chief, Col. Herbert Selle, Linden had reported to Point X on November 7, at 0900 hours. Point X was just across the street from the Barrikady and, once there, the major scouted the terrain between the factory and the Volga. Never before had he seen so ghastly a setting for battle. “Loosely hanging corrugated steel panels which creaked eerily in the wind … a perfect mess of iron parts, gun barrels, T-beams, huge craters … cellars turned into strongpoints … over all a never-ceasing crescendo of noise from all types of guns and bombs.”
Inside the Barrikady itself, Maj. Eugen Rettenmaier, recently back from a two-week furlough in Germany, checked his four companies and found only thirty-seven men left out of four hundred. To his questions about missing individuals, he got the same answers over and over: killed, wounded, presumed dead.
Within hours, one six-hundred-man battalion of the pioneers came under Rettenmaier’s wing. The other four battalions spread out along the main line of resistance and prepared for a coordinated assault on the area behind the Barrikady to the Volga.
Major Rettenmaier listened intently to their extraordinary briefing. Two Russian strongpoints had to be taken: one, the Chemist’s Shop on the left side of a row of partially completed houses; the other, the Commissar’s House or “Red House,” several hundred yards west of the Chemist’s Shop and somewhat nearer the Volga bank. The Red House, a clumsy brick fortress, dominated the gently sloping terrain.
The pioneers asked questions about the buildings and the cliff along the river. They were brisk, businesslike, but when Rettenmaier and others tried to explain that the Russians in Stalingrad fought a different kind of war, that they hid in cellars and used the sewer systems to good advantage, the pioneers said they had seen the worst already, in places like Voronezh. They were prepared for such tactics.
After midnight on November 9, the combat groups assembled in the machine shops of the Barrikady. Straining under the burden of satchel charges, shovels, grenades, and bandoliers of bullets, they shuffled through the gloom to their starting points.
In several large rooms at the eastern end of the factory, they waited for the signal to burst out onto open ground. Some men smoked furtively. Sgt. Ernst Wohlfahrt was a tense spectator. A virtual prisoner inside the Barrikady for weeks, he did not envy the pioneers their job. He himself had spent days hiding behind brick walls, afraid to raise his head. The Russians had never let him feel secure and he was pessimistic about the coming battle, despite the pioneers’ cocky self-assurance.
Then a shattering explosion engulfed an adjacent room. Screams welled up and Wohlfahrt rushed in to find eighteen pioneers dead from a Russian booby trap. The survivors were suddenly subdued, fearful.
At 3:30 A.M., German artillery fire passed over and down onto Russian lines, bringing their counterfire. When the German fire lifted, the pioneers moved onto open ground, lit by eerie flashes of gunfire. Watching them go across the cratered moonscape, Major Rettenmaier silently wished them Godspeed.
The Chemist’s Shop fell without trouble. But at the Commissar’s House, the engineers had walked into a trap. Every opening had been sealed up by debris, and from tiny peepholes, the Russians shot with deadly accuracy. Further south, Regiment 576 quickly reached the Volga, but again the Russians held on, stealing into caves and cracks, and the engineers rolled grenades down at them. The explosives bounced harmlessly by the openings and on into the Volga.
The next morning, when pioneers of the 50th Battalion finally broke into the Commissar’s House, the Russians ran into the cellars. In a frenzy, the Germans tore up the floor, threw in cans of gasoline, and ignited them. Then they lowered satchel charges and detonated them. Smoke cartridges were laid down to blind anyone surviving the blasts and flames. From the outside, the house seeped smoke. Detonations shook the ground as the cellar broke apart under the blast, and a messenger ran across the field to tell Major Rettenmaier that the Commissar’s House was in German hands.
But on the edge of the Volga, the engineers who had reached the shore line the day before discovered they had won a Pyrrhic victory. Of the group on the riverbank, only one man was not wounded. A large patrol went out to give aid, and within three hours it was reduced to three men.
Col. Herbert Selle had been fully confident that his pioneers could take the last bits of contested soil in Stalingrad. Within days, however, he knew the truth. The five battalions, numbering nearly three thousand men, had lost a third of their forces. Selle gave orders to collect the remnants of the battalions and form them into one effective combat group for further attacks.
In a letter to his family he acknowledged the tragic waste: “There will be many tears in Germany.… Happy is he who is not responsible for these unwarranted sacrifices.” For Selle, Stalingrad was no longer worth the price. He felt the battle had degenerated into a personal struggle between the egos of Stalin and Hitler.
Nevertheless, the pioneers had dealt the Russians a stunning blow. Col. Ivan Ilyich Lyudnikov’s 138th Division had been trapped on the shore and held a shrinking pie-shaped slice of land only four hundred yards wide and one hundred yards deep. In front of it lay the dead of the 118th Regiment, which had met the pioneers on the open ground and in the rows of partially destroyed houses. Only six of its 250 soldiers escaped to refuge inside the wedge. Lyudnikov’s forces now numbered only several hundred men and women capable of resistance, and he radioed Sixty-second Army Headquarters for help.
In Moscow, the Russian General Staff pursued its strategy. Overjoyed that the Germans continued to rivet their attention on the ruins near the Volga bank, STAVKA speeded up the movements of men and supplies to the flanks.
It also called on its espionage networks for new information:
November 11, 1942
To Dora: [Lucy Network in Switzerland]
Where are the rear defense locations of the Germans on the southwest of Stalingrad and along the Don? Are defense positions being built on sectors Stalingrad-Kletskaya and Stalingrad-Kalach? Their characteristics?…
The Director
Thus the Russians collected almost every scrap of intelligence they needed. Some of it came from personal observations by the mastermind, Georgi Zhukov, who cabled Stalin his impressions from the front:
Number 4657
November 11, 1942
I have just spent two days with Yeremenko. I … examined enemy positions facing the 51st and 57th Armies … I gave instructions for further reconnaissance and work on the operations plan on the basis of information obtained … it is urgent that the 51st and 57th Armies be provided with warm outfits and ammunition no later than November 14.
Konstantinov
[Zhukov’s code name]
Finally the German High Command made a move to guard its flanks. The 48th Panzer Corps, stationed more than fifty miles southwest of the ominous Russian bridgeheads at Kletskaya and Serafimovich on the Don, received priority orders to move up to the threatened sector.
Led by Lt. Gen. Ferdinand Heim, a close friend and former aide to Paulus, the 48th clanked onto the roads and headed northeast. But only a few miles after starting out, the column ground to a halt when several tanks caught fire. In others, motors kept misfiring and finally refused to run at all. Harried mechanics swarmed over the machines and quickly found the answer. During the weeks of inactivity behind the lines, field mice had nested inside the vehicles and eaten away insulation covering the electrical systems. Days behind schedule, the 48th Corps finally limped into its new quarters. It was almost totally crippled. Out of one hundred four tanks in the 22nd Panzer Division, only forty-two were ready for combat.
No one notified Hitler about the status of his reserves.
General Richthofen was doing what he could to harass the Soviet buildup. He sent his planes to the Kletskaya and Serafimovich bridgehead areas to hit rail lines and troop concentrations. But the Russians kept coming across the thinly frozen Don on pontoon bridges, some of them laid a foot beneath the river’s surface to hide them from accurate artillery fire and dive-bombers.
Discouraged and frustrated, Richthofen confided his fears to his diary:
November 12. The Russians are resolutely carrying on with their preparations for an offensive against the Rumanians.… Their reserves have now been concentrated. When, I wonder, will the attack come?… Guns are beginning to make their appearance in artillery emplacements. I can only hope that the Russians won’t tear too many big holes in the line!
On their narrow wedge of land on the Volga, the 138th Red Army Division kept in touch by radio with army headquarters further down the river. Colonel Lyudnikov talked openly, without code. Neither Chuikov nor he mentioned the other’s name. Chuikov promised help but had no idea where to find it.
Lyudnikov understood his superior’s predicament. He had only to look behind him at the moving ice pack coming downstream to realize that Chuikov himself was in trouble. Boats could not navigate through the floes; all footbridges had been torn away; supplies were being cut back drastically.
Burrowed into the sides of the ravine where Lyudnikov’s remnants held on, four men, known to their comrades as the Rolik group, challenged the German pioneers. When the Germans hung over the steep embankment and let down satchel charges of dynamite, the Rolik men snipped the wires dangling in front of them and the explosives dropped into the Volga. The group shot back at the Nazis as Lyudnikov’s men listened intently to the sounds of the struggle. When Rolik was quiet “everyone trembled.” When the shooting resumed, shouts were heard: “Rolik’s firing! Rolik’s firing!” The word passed from trench to trench and buoyed the Russians immensely.
On November 14, Chuikov reported to Front Headquarters: “No ships arrived at all. Deliveries of supplies have fallen through for three days running. Reinforcements have not been ferried across, and our units are feeling an acute shortage of ammunition and rations.… The drifting ice has completely cut communications with the left bank.”