Enemy at the Gates (9 page)

Most of Stalingrad had been asleep when the Germans crossed the Don. In the tractor works, men and women from the night crew were preparing sixty tanks for final assembly when, at 5:00
A.M.
, someone rushed in with news of the enemy breakthrough. Amid a babble of noise, supervisors called a meeting to organize defense lines around the factory.

To the south, deep inside the Tsaritsa Gorge, Andrei Yeremenko woke up to a barrage of frantic telephone calls from threatened outposts along the German line of march. Surprised at the audacity of the narrow thrust toward the Volga, the general quickly routed sleepy staff officers from beds all over town and ordered breakfast for himself from the bunker's kitchen.

Only five hundred yards away, at Red Square, black loudspeaker boxes crackled to life and advised citizens of the possibility of air raids. Few people paid any attention to the message since the only German air activity in recent days had been made by reconnaissance planes. The City Soviet chairman, Pigalev, broadcast the warning, but did not mention the German tanks now heading for the northern part of the city. He feared the news would sow panic among the population.

Mrs. Vlasa Kliagina did not hear the loudspeakers because she had left home early to drop her infant son, Vovo, at a communal nursery. Then she and her daughter, Nadia, joined a neighborhood volunteer group at the southern suburb of Yelshanka where, at 7:30
A.M
.,
with the temperature climbing into the high nineties, she continued to work on a primitive line of antitank trenches. Mrs. Kliagina had no idea that General Paulus was about to burst into the city from a completely different direction.

Less than two miles from Yelshanka, in the suburb of Dar Goya, an assistant station master, Constantin Viskov, collapsed into bed. He had just finished a grueling twelve-hour tour of duty, shuttling troops, refugees, and supplies through Railroad Station Number One. As Viskov fell into a deep sleep, his wife tiptoed about doing housework.

By 9:30
A.M
.
,
activity in the Tsaritsa Gorge accelerated as hundreds of soldiers passed in and out of the underground bunker's two entrances. Plagued by phone calls, Yeremenko had not yet touched the breakfast on his desk. He was speaking now to the deputy comander of the Eighth Air Force, who relayed shocking news, "The fighter pilots flying reconnaissance have just returned. They said that a heavy battle is going on in the region of Malaya Rossoshka [twenty-five miles northwest of Stalingrad]. Everything is burning on the ground. They saw two columns of approximately one hundred tanks each and, after them, compact columns of trucks and infantry. They're all moving into Stalingrad."

Yeremenko told him to get as many planes as possible into the air.

The phone rang again: this time it was Nikita Khrushchev calling from his downtown apartment. When Yeremenko told him the news the commissar said he would come over as soon as he could. At 11:00
A.M
.,
he was in the bunker, listening intently to Yeremenko's briefing. Shocked at the extent of the German drive, Khrushchev shook his head. "Very unpleasant facts," he said. "What can we do to keep them from Stalingrad?"

Yeremenko told him how he was trying to juggle forces to the northern part of the city and they discussed the problem of finding more reinforcements for the threatened suburbs. Everyone in the room was subdued, fully conscious that this might mean the fall of Stalingrad. They talked in low tones about the impact of such a calamity on the rest of the country. His hands sweating, Yeremenko tried to remain calm in front of his colleagues.

When Major General Korshunov called with a report that the Germans had just burned a huge supply depot out on the steppe, Yeremenko lost his temper. Disgusted by Korshunov's hysterical tone, he shouted, "Carry on with your job. Stop this panic." Then he hung up abruptly.

Two generals walked into the bunker to announce that
a
new pontoon bridge, the only one connecting Stalingrad with the far shore, had just been completed. Yeremenko thanked them for working so hard, then told them to destroy it. The officers stared at each other in astonishment, wondering if Yeremenko suddenly had gone crazy. He repeated his instructions. "Yes, yes, I said to destroy it. And quickly!"

When they still failed to react, he warned them that the bridge must not fall into German hands. The two generals left to carry out this draconian measure.

Near the mouth of the Tsaritsa Gorge, boredom and the noontime humidity had brought out dozens of swimmers like Lt. Viktor Nekrassov who, with a friend, dove into the sun-streaked water and floated lazily in the current. Launches and steamers struggled past and Nekrassov swam in their wake, listening contentedly to the guttural rumble of their diesel engines. When he tired, Nekrassov climbed from the water onto a pile of logs, where he stretched out to soak up the sun.

With his eyes screwed up tight to shut out the brilliant light, he tried to imagine how the Volga compared with the Dnieper at his home in Kiev. The lieutenant decided that his river had been peaceful, a joyous place for children, and that the Volga was totally different, filled as it was now with clamorous boat traffic. Another thing bothered Nekrassov. Few bathers in Stalingrad smiled these days.

As he dozed on into the afternoon, Nekrassov thought more and more about the Germans on the steppe and he wondered what would happen to Stalingrad when the enemy finally reached the Volga. He could see himself crouching in the scrub grass on the far shore while German shells blasted up huge fountains of water.

Fifteen miles north of Nekrassov's lumber pile, the nightmare he envisioned had already begun.

Machinist Lev Dylo had just met his first Germans. He tried to run, but was thrown to the ground and manhandled. One soldier snatched his watch. Others prodded him to his feet and marched him across a field. Dylo waited until he saw a deep ravine, then plunged into it and escaped. The Germans did not shoot.

Dylo ran two miles to the tractor works and burst in on his superiors.

"They're here. Hurry!" he shouted, but the factory supervisors had already been alerted. The first battalions of workers' militia, some wearing uniforms but most in civilian clothes, were marching out to man barricades along the Mokraya Mechetka River.

In factory courtyards up and down the main north-south highway in Stalingrad, political commissars and foremen processed thousands of workers for duty. They told each group, "Whoever can bear arms and whoever can shoot, write your names down." Those who signed got a white armband, a rifle, and a bandolier of ammunition before they moved off in platoons to the riverbank. Workers not selected went to the settlement houses to alert relatives of those who had gone into the lines.

Pyotr Nerozia hurried home from one of these meetings at the Red October Plant to say good-bye to his family which was being evacuated that afternoon across the Volga. He arrived too late and found only a note saying that his wife and children had already left for Uralsk. Though relieved that they had gotten off safely, Pyotr felt a sudden loneliness. The stillness of the house bothered him and he left for a walk. Near the aviation school, he stopped in a field, picked up a watermelon, then turned and went back home. In the kitchen he started to fry two eggs.

When another air raid alert sounded, Nerozia turned off the stove, left the two eggs in the pan, and went to the battalion headquarters of his workers' fighting detachment.

The air raid siren that Nerozia reacted to was just another in the series of false alarms that Stalingrad residents had endured during the day. By late afternoon, the center of the city had lapsed into apathy. Incredibly enough, despite the presence of Yeremenko's nerve center in the Tsaritsa Gorge and the unusual military traffic on roads leading north to the factory area, most people in the downtown part of the city remained completely ignorant of the crisis.

Lt. Viktor Nekrassov had finally gotten up from his comfortable log heap and, with his friend, wandered over to the main library at the river's edge. In the quiet and cozy reading room, he sprawled into a wicker chair and begn to thumb through a magazine containing short articles on Peru. At a long table, two young boys laughed out loud at a book of drawings about Baron Munchhausen. On the wall, a big clock struck each quarter hour. After a while, Nekrassov and his frend got up and left.

Loudspeakers were spewing yet another warning across squares, intersections, and side streets. The voice minced no words: "Attention. Attention. Citizens, we have an air raid! We have an air raid!"

As if to underscore that it was not just another drill, antiaircraft guns around Red Square banged loudly in frenzied cadence. Small black puffs marched across the clear blue sky; auto mobiles quickly screeched to a halt. Tramcars let off passengers who stood mute for a moment, shaded their eyes and looked into the sun to gauge the danger point.

Then they saw them, the lead groups of more than six hundred German planes, coming from beyond the Don. Like strings of gulls, flying in perfect V's, the Stukas and Ju-88s droned over the sun-drenched city and tipped over into their dives. Their bombs fell into the crowded downtown residential area and, because of the long drought, flames spread like wildfire. In seconds, Stalingrad was ablaze.

Concussions blew down most of the houses on Gogol and Pushkin streets. Outside a cinema, a woman was decapitated as she ran along the sidewalk. The city waterworks building collapsed from a direct hit. The telephone exchange fell in on itself; all regular phone communications blinked out. The screams of trapped operators came up through a jumble of broken switchboards and control panels.

At Stalingrad
Pravda,
on the northern side of Red Square, bombs smashed the outer walls and brought survivors streaming out to seek safety in a nearby cellar. In the meantime, the loudspeakers on Red Square tonelessly asked people to shoulder arms and fight the invader.

On Medevditskaya Street, every house burned briskly. When firemen arrived, they saw a hysterical woman running down the middle of the road, while clutching a baby tightly to her breast. One of the men jumped out, grabbed her and pushed her down into a trench. A bomb went off, killing the man as he tried to get down beside her.

On Permskaya Street, Mrs. Konstantin Karmanova returned home after seeing her two older sons march off with their factory unit. As she and her sixteen-year-old son Genn turned into the street, they saw the whole block burned out except for their own home, a one-storey brick dwelling. Mrs. Karmanova ran inside to save what she could. She grabbed a bundle of papers left by her husband when he went off to war: some of them dated back to 1918 when he fought as a Bolshevik for Tsaritsyn. Rushing into the backyard, she dug a hole and buried the documents and some silver heirlooms. Around her, houses continued to burn.

In Dar Goya, railroad man Constantin Viskov woke from his drugged sleep to hear bombs crumping down near the train station. As he jumped out of bed, his wife handed him a package of food and kissed him good-bye. Viskov raced away through smoke and fire toward the terminal.

The first bombs fell as Pyotr Nerozia unlocked the safe at battalion headquarters. His superior, a woman named Denisova, rushed in and told him to send guns to the tractor factory. After issuing orders for their transfer, Nerozia reminded himself to go home and pick up some food.

Outside the headquarters, the city shook in agony. Smoke pouring through the windows choked him, and suddenly he was thirsty. Comrade Denisova grabbed at his arm and pointed to the main hospital, which collapsed while they watched. Running over to help the patients, they shepherded a group on to the nearby children's clinic. But it caught fire immediately and the invalids inside were roasted to death.

Nerozia then went off to assemble a workers' detachment at the Factory Krasny Zastava. It was a mass of flames. He moved on to the City Soviet at Red Square, but it, too, had flared and broken under a string of bombs. He ran ahead to the Metro, a cavernous underground air-raid shelter, now crammed with screaming and suffocating people. Nerozia balked at going into this hellhole and, remembering the food at home, circled back to his own street where his house was still standing.

Going to the bedroom he found his parrot squawking for attention as it hopped frantically about its cage. Taking the trembling bird in his hands, he held it at the window and released it into gray clouds of smoke. The parrot flew off and flitted nervously from tree to tree.

Nerozia watched his pet for a moment, then ran back to the kitchen and filled a bedsheet with farina, wheat grain, dried bread, and a bottle of vodka. When he finished he gazed wistfully at the stove where his two fried eggs lay under a coverlet of fallen plaster. With a final shrug, he hoisted the sack of rations onto his shoulder and left his house for the last time.

At 7:00
P.M
.,
during the height of the bombing, the City Soviet leaders managed to function from an improvised network of cellars. They sent out orders to continue publication of
Pravda
and Mikhail Vodolagin, a thick-lipped, bespectacled member of the Central Committee, hurried over to
Pravda
headquarters on Red Square and found the entire building a shambles. A few hundred yards away, he stumbled on the newspaper staff, cowering in a basement and too stunned to work.

Vodolagin commandeered a car and went north toward the tractor factory, which he knew had a printing press. The trip normally took twenty minutes, but with German planes overhead and bodies and debris clogging the main road, the passage was torturous. To Vodolagin's right, liquid fire from ruptured oil tanks passed down the slope and spilled into the Volga. To his left, the lower slopes of Mamaev Hill were covered with the bodies of picnickers.

After two harrowing hours, Vodolagin arrived at the nearly deserted tractor works. He found his printing press, collared a militiaman who said he knew how to set type and, as plaster fell from the ceiling, he started to bring out a special issue of
Pravda.