The Battle for Stalingrad
By William Craig
During the next quarter century, an avalanche of books spewed forth from both Soviet and German presses about Stalingrad. Some were personal narratives, others historical treatises. The Russians wrote proudly of their incredible victory. Frequently, however, they distorted facts in order to conform to political realities. Stalin’s name disappeared from accounts of the battle; so did those of Khrushchev, Malenkov, and Marshal Georgi Zhukov. Thus the Russian side of the story was shrouded by official secrecy.
The telling of the story from the German side suffered a different distortion. Few German authors examined the myriad complexities that led to the loss of Sixth Army at Stalingrad, nor could they, since they were denied access to Russian sources. And the memoirs of the German generals who participated in the battle were filled with controversial statements, personal vilification, and censure. Furthermore, the Germans never gave credit to the Red Army for its dogged defense of Stalingrad and brilliant counterattack that defeated what, until then, had been the finest army in the world.
(Craig 2004, viii-ix)
Most appalling was the growing realization, formed by statistics I uncovered, that the battle was the greatest military bloodbath in recorded history. Well over a million men and women died because of Stalingrad, a number far surpassing the previous records of dead at the first battle of Somme and Verdun in 1916.
The toll breaks down as follows:
Conversations with official Russian sources on a not-for-attribution basis (and it must be remembered that the Russians have never officially admitted their losses in World War II) put the loss of Red Army soldiers at Stalingrad at 750,000 killed, wounded, or missing in action.
The Germans lost almost 400,000 men.
The Italians lost more than 130,000 men out of their 200,-000-man army.
The Hungarians lost approximately 120,000 men.
The Rumanians also lost approximately 200,000 men around Stalingrad.
As for the civilian population of the city, a prewar census listed more than 500,000 people prior to the outbreak of World War II. This number increased as a flood of refugees poured into the city from other areas of Russia that were in danger of being overrun by the Germans. A portion of Stalingrad’s citizens were evacuated prior to the first German attack but 40,000 civilians were known to have died in the first two days of bombing in the city. No one knows how many died on the barricades or in the antitank ditches or in the surrounding steppes. Official records show only one stark fact: after the battle ended, a census found only 1,515 people who had lived in Stalingrad in 1942.
(Craig 2004, xii-xiii)
Parched by the blazing sun of summer, the grassy plain of the steppe country is light brown in hue. From the vicinity of Lugansk in the west of Kazakhstan in the east, the barren tableland stretches more than six hundred miles across southern Russia. Only a few rectangular patches of cultivated farmland, kolkhozi, relieve the desolation and, from them, ribbons of road run straight to the horizon.
Two majestic rivers, running roughly north to south, scour the land. The erratic Don gouges a convulsive path to the city of Rostov on the Sea of Azov. Farther east, the mighty Volga bends more gently on its way to a rendezvous with the Caspian Sea at Astrakhan. Only at one place do the rivers run parallel to each other, and here they are forty miles apart. After that brief attempt at union, they flow relentlessly on their lonely journeys to different destinations, giving but brief respite to the harsh terrain. Otherwise, the suffocating heat of the region cracks the ground and paralyzes life.
It has been that way for centuries on the steppe. But on August 5, 1942, a malevolent presence intruded on the timeless scene. From the west, from the far-off Ukraine, came giant pillars of dust. The whirling clouds advanced fitfully across the prairie, slowing only for short periods before moving on toward the east and the Don River barrier. From a distance they resembled tornadoes, those natural phenomena that plague the open areas of the earth. But these spiraling clouds hid the German Sixth Army, an elite legion dispatched by Adolf Hitler to destroy the Soviet Army and the Communist state led by Joseph Stalin. Its men were supremely confident; during three years of warfare, they had ever suffered defeat.
In Poland, the Sixth Army had made the word blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) a synonym for Nazi omnipotence. At Dunkirk, it helped cripple the British Expeditionary Force, sending the Tommies back to England without rifles or artillery. Chosen to spearhead the cross-channel invasion, the ßixth Army practiced amphibious landings until Hitler lost enthusiasm for the assault and sent it instead to Yugoslavia, which it conquered in a matter of weeks.
Then, in the summer of 1941, the Sixth Army began its Russian campaign and completely mastered the enemy. It quickly “liberated” several million square miles of the Ukraine and attained a level of professional excellence unmatched in modern warfare. Increasingly arrogant about their successes on the battlefield, its soldiers reached the conclusion that “Russland ist kaputt.” This conviction was buttressed by propaganda emanating from the Fuhrerhauptquartier (Field Headquarters of the OKW). For with the unleashing in late June 1942 of Operation Blue, the knockout blow, Adolf Hitler had promised his soldiers an end to the war.
(Craig 2004, 3-4)
In his cramped, field gray tent, the commander of the Sixth Army, Col. Gen. Friedrich von Paulus, was rejoicing quietly. A cautious man, who disdained public emotion, he relaxed for a few moments by listening to Beethoven on a gramophone. Music was the best catalyst for his moody, introspective personality. Tall and darkly handsome, the fifty-two-year-old general was the classic example of a German General Staff officer. Apolitical, trained only to do his job in the army, he left diplomacy to the party in power. He thought Adolf Hitler an excellent leader for the German people, a man who had contributed greatly to the development of the state. After watching him evolve the strategies that conquered Poland, France, and most of Europe, Paulus was awed by Hitler’s grasp of the technical aspects of warfare. He considered him a genius.
His wife did not share his beliefs. The former Elena Constance Rosetti-Solescu, Coca to her friends, a descendant of one of Romania’s royal houses, had married Paulus in 1912 and borne him a daughter and twin sons. Both boys now served in the army. She detested the Nazi regime and told her husband he was far too good for the likes of men such as Keitel and the other “lackeys” who surrounded Hitler. When Germany attacked Poland, when vehemently condemned it as an unjust act. Paulus did not argue with her. Content with his role, he merely carried out orders. When, in the fall of 1940, he brought home maps and other memorand related to the planned invasion of Russia, Coca found them and confronted Paulus, saying a war against the Soviet Union was completely unjustified. He tried to avoid discussing the matter with her, but she persisted.
“What will become of us all? Who will survive to the end?” she asked.
Attempting to calm her fears, Paulus had said the war with Russia would be over in about six weeks’ time. She was not appeased. Just as had feared, the new campaign dragged on past the six-week deadline and into the awful winter of 1941 on the Moscow front. Yet despite the setbacks, despite the horrendous losses suffered by the German Army because of the climate and ferocious Russian resistance, Paulus retained one unshakable belief: Hitler was invincible.
In January 1942, when his superior, Field Marshal Reichenau died suddenly, Paulus finally got his life’s desire: command of an army in the field. The two men could not have been more dissimilar. Reichenau, an ardent Nazi, had been coarse in manner and unkempt in appearance. Paulus was impeccable groomed at all times. He even wore gloves in the field because he abhorred dirt; he bathed and changed his uniforms twice a day.
Despite such glaring differences, PAulus had sublimated his retiring manner to the volatile Reichenau. A master of detail, fascinated with figures and grand strategy, he handled the administration of the Sixth Army while Reichenau led charges at the front. In return, Reichenau treated Paulus like a son and always trusted his judgment. The two men agreed on all but one important policy. It marked the great gulf between them in heritage and philosophy.
Reichenau had been a ruthless believer in Hitler’s thesis of racial supremacy and had supported the Fuhrer’s infamous “Commissar Order,” which ordained the killing of all captured Russian political officers without benefit of trial. He even went a step further by introducing within Sixth Army Command what came to be known as the “Severity Order.” It read in part:
…The most important objective of this campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevik system is the complete destruction of its sources of power and extermination of the Asiatic influence in European civilization. … In this eastern theatre, the soldier is not only a man fighting in accordance with the rules of the art of war, but also the ruthless standard bearer of a national conception. … For this reason the soldier must learn fully to appreciate the necessity for the severe but just retribution that must be meted out to the subhuman species of Jewry. …
Reichenau’s insistence on “retribution” had resulted in monstrous crimes. After the front-line troops of Sixth Army divisions passed through towns, a motley collection of homicidal maniacs came in their wake and systematically tried to eliminate the Jewish population.
Divided into four Einsatzgruppen (special extermination squads) across Russia, they numbered approximately three thousand sadists, who had been recruited mostly from the ranks of Himmler’s police forces, the Schutzstaffeln, or SS (Elite Guard) and Sicherheitsdienst, or SD (Security Service). Others wandered in from punishment battalions and psychiatric hospitals. At a training center in Saxony they had been taught to use the rifle and machine pistol and told explicitly what to do with them in the Soviet Union. Dressed in black uniforms, they traveled by truck convoy, and terrified villagers soon referred to them as the “Black Crows.”
(Craig 2004, 9-11)
The Italians had sent their best units into the Soviet Union. Proud military names such as the Julia, Bersaglieri, Cosseria, Torino, Alpini, graced the shoulder patches of troops struggling through the enervating heat. Their fathers had fought along the Piave and Isonzo rivers against the Austirans during World War I, and Ernest Hemingway immortalized their battles in A Farewell to Arms.
Some of the Italian soldiers questioned the reasons they were fighting for the Nazi cause. At a railroad siding in Warsaw, twenty-one-year-old Lt. Veniero Marsan had seen its harsh realities for the first time. From a train window, he watched a long line of civilians passing by. Apathetic, forlorn, each wore the yellow Star of David. Then Marsan saw the cruel-faced guards with guns, cocked and ready to fire. A chill rippled along his slime and, long after his train had rocked on into Russia, he brooded about what he had witnessed.
(Craig 2004, 15)
By his action, Hitler had weakened each army group and left them vulnerable to Soviet counterstrokes. The move also caused consternation within German Army Headquarters. Halder could not believe the Fuhrer would commit such a blunder. Stunned, he went to his quarters and poured his agonized feelings into his diary: “… The chronic tendency to underrate enemy capabilities is gradually assuming grotesque proportions. … Serious work is becoming impossible here. This so-called leadership is characterized by a pathological reacting to the impressions of the moment. …”
When Hitler pivoted an entire army across another’s path, he had defied the military maxim that any interference with the delicate internal functions of a massed body of troops frequently leads to chaos. And on the steppe roads of Russia, the Sixth Army stopped dead while swarms of vehicles and men from the Fourth Panzer Army cut left to right across its line of advance. Enormous traffic jams developed. Tanks of one army mingled with those of the other; supply trucks got lost in a maze of contradictory signposts and directions handed out by irate military policemen. Worse, the Fourth Army took the bulk of the oil and gasoline meant to fuel both armies.
(Craig 2004, 19-20)
While Hitler spoke of triumph, the streets of Moscow were totally dark. But behind drawn curtains in his Kremlin office, the premier of all the Russias, Joseph Stalin, was following his normal work schedule, which began in late afternoon and ended near dawn. The lynx-eyed Stalin had pursued this timetable for ears. And from these sessions had come orders that brought terror to his people and subversion to nations around the world.
He was a tyrant who once had studied for the priesthood, a revolutionary who robbed banks to support the Bolshevist cause, a glutton, and a near drunkard. Upon the death of Lenin, he assumed total control of the Soviet Union. Those who served him endured his rages in silence; those who crossed him died violently.
Stalin never forgot or forgave. He once told a Russian writer that Ivan the Terrible had not been ruthless enough because he left too many enemies alive. Stalin did not make the same error. Nearly twenty years after he broke with Leon Trotsky, one of his agents penetrated the exiled dissenter’s security screen in Mexico and drove an alpenstock through his skull. From Stalin’s office, emissaries emerged to slay thousands of Red Army officers in the 1937-1938 purges. It was on his orders that more than ten million kulaks, farmers and landowners who balked at turning over their properties to the new Communist state, were killed. And it was from this apartment that the directive went out to sign the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact in August 1939, which Stalin believed gave him time to prepare for the inevitable war with Germany.
In this decision, Stalin had trusted an equally cynical dictator, even when spies like Richard Sorge and a man called Lucy told him the exact date Germany proposed to attack the Soviet Union. Branding the information provided by these agents as part of a British plot to draw Russia into war, Stalin put his faith in Hitler’s word.
It had been a colossal blunder. The Nazi invasion brought the Soviet Union to the brink of disaster and Stalin went into shock. Ten days passed before he rallied enough to resume command of his shattered armies and it was none too soon. By October 1941, Hitler had swallowed most of European Russia. In December, now only seven miles from Moscow, German scouts trained their binoculars on the turrets of the Kremlin. But the Russians held and the crisis eased.
Stalin regained his equilibrium and learned from past mistakes. When the spies who had warned him about Hitler’s plans for invasion continued to send a torrent of vital information to Moscow, he paid closer attention. Operating out of Paris was Leonard Trepper, called the “Big Chief,” who ran a spy network known to German secret police as the “Red Orchestra,” because of its nightly radio chorus across Europe. Trepper, a Polish jew, had been planted in France before the war. There he cultivated an influential circle of German businessmen and military leaders from whom he extracted masses of information. Hounded by German radio sleuths, who tracked his transmitters with special directional equipment, Trepper still survived. But his time was growing short.
(Craig 2004, 22-23)
In the Tsaritsa Gorge, Andrei Yeremenko agonized over the obvious buildup going on in Paulus’s sector. Intelligence showed that the Germans were planning another classic pincer movement with Sixth Army acting as the left arm and Hoth’s Fourth Panzers as the right. And though he had been able to stall Hoth temporarily in the hills around Abganerovo, Yeremenko knew he had too few reserves available to cope with such a combined attack.
On the political front, at least, he had scored an impressive victory. A new-found friend, Commissar Nikita Sergeyevich Khruchchev, had proven a reliable ally in recent days as Yeremenko argued about the dual command problem with STAVKA on the BODO line, the direct telephone link to the Kremlin. Khrushchev was Stalin’s political emissary to the military council in the Tsaritsa command post, and he had backed Yeremenko fully in his campaign to realign divisions of authority. Finally, on August 13, Stalin had given Yeremmnko supreme responsibility for both fronts and demoted the irascible General Gordov.1
(Craig 2004, 47-48)
Khrushchev knew that he had lost favor with Stalin because of his partial responsibility for the disastrous spring offensive at Kharkov which had resulted in the loss of more than two hundred thousand Red Army troops.2 A master of intrigue himself, he realized that Malenkov would gladly report any of his mistakes to the premier.
Malenkov had gone to the tractor factory, where under a broiling sun, his face flushed and hair hanging in we strands, he exhorted the plant personnel to hold on until more help arrived. He spoke with great fervor while the pounding guns from the battle around Spartakovka to the north punctuated his sentences.
After Malenkov finished speaking, the workers dispersed to the cavernous shops. Inside one of the rooms, Mikhail Vodolagin had finally brought out the emergency edition of Pravda, 500 single-sheet copies that he rushed out to the population with instructions to pass them on after reading. The main point of Vodolagin’s special issue was to instill a sense of continuity, a feeling that the city was still functioning and would survive. He made an urgent appeal for everyone to stay calm and not to give in to panic. His editorial proclaimed: “We will destroy the enemy at the gates of Stalingrad.”
(Craig 2004, 69-70)
During the afternoon of September 23, another contingent from the 284th Division set out from the far shore barges. Twenty-year-old Tania Chernova found space at the edge of a barge and sat down with her knees against her chest for the grim ride. Some of the 150 soldiers on board pleaded with the perky blond to move into the middle of the group and share some vodka. But she tossed her head in reply and stayed where she was.
Tania had not wanted to be a soldier. As a child she had worn ballet slippers and practiced pirouettes; later, she had studied medicine. But when the Germans invaded Russia, Tania forgot her dreams of becoming a doctor, and embarked on a relentless war against the enemy, whom she always referred to as “sticks” tha tone broke because she refused to think of them as human beings.
(Craig 2004, 107)
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.
(Craig 2004, 122-123)
In the midst of preparations by both armies for the final struggle, a sinister personal combat reached its climax in no-man’s-land. The two adversaries knew each other only by reputation. Major Konings had arrived from Germany to duel Vassili Zaitsev.
The Russians first heard of Konings’s presence when a prisoner revealed the major was wandering the front lines, familiarizing himself with the terrain. Upon hearing the news, Col. Nikolai Batyuk, the commander of the 284th Division, called a meeting of his sniper group to brief them on the danger.
“I think that the German supersniper from Berlin will be easy meat for us. Is that right, Zaitsev?”
“That’s right, Comrade colonel,” Zaitsev agreed. But first, he had “to find him, study his habits and methods and … wait the right moment for one, and only one well-aimed shot.”
Zaitsev had no idea how his antagonist worked. He had killed many German sharpshooters, but only after watching their habits for days. In Konings’s case, his camouflage, firing patterns, ruses, all these pieces of the mosaic were missing.
On the other hand, German intelligence had studied Russian leaflets describing Soviet sniper techniques, and Zaitsev’s mannerisms had been bountifully illustrated by Russian propagandists. Major Konings must have absorbed this information; Zaitsev had no idea when he would strike.
For several days, Russian marksmen searched the ruins of Stalingrad through their field glasses. They came to Zaitsev with strategies, novel and fresh, but the grim Siberian rejected their advice. He had to wait until Konings made the first move.
During this period nothing unusual occurred. Then, in rapid succession, two Soviet snipers fell victim to single rifle shots. To Zaitsev it was obvious that Major Konings had announced the beginning of their personal duel. So the Russian went looking for his foe.
He crawled to the edge of no-man’s land between Mamaev Hill and the Red October Plant and surveyed the chosen field of battle. Studying the enemy lines through binoculars, he saw no irregularity: The terrain was familiar, with trenches and bunkers in the same patterns he had memorized in past weeks.
Throughout the afternoon, Zaitsev and a friend, Nikolai Kulikov, lay behind cover, running the glasses back and forth, back and forth, searching for a clue. In the midst of the constant daily bombardment, they ignored the big war and looked for just one man.
As the sun began to set, a helmet bobbed unevenly along a German trench. Zaitsev thought of shooting, but his instincts warned him it might be a ruse, that Konings had a partner out to trap him. Exasperated, Kulikov asked: “Where can he be hiding?” But Konings had not offered a single clue as to his own position. When darkness came, the two Russians crept back to their own bunker, where they argued for a long time about the German’s strategy.
Before dawn, the snipers went back to their hole at the edge of no-man’s-land and studied the battlefield again; Konings remained silent. Marveling at the German’s patience, Zaitsev began to admire his adversary’s professional skill. Fascinated with the intensity of the drama, Kulikov talked animatedly while the sun rose to the meridian and then set behind Mamaev. As another night came suddenly, the combatants went back through their own lines to get some sleep.
The third morning, Zaitsev had a new visitor, a political agitator named Danilov, who came along to witness the contest. At first light, the heavy guns began their normal barrage and while shells whistled over their heads, the Russians eyed the landscape for a telltale presence.
Danilov suddenly raised himself up, shouting: “There he is. I’ll point him out to you.” Konings shot him in the shoulder. As stretcher-bearers took Danilov to the hospital, Vassili Zaitsev stayed very low.
When he put his glasses back on the battlefield, he concentrated on the sector in front of him. On the left was a disabled tank, to the right a pillbox. He ignored the tank because he felt no experienced sniper would use such an exposed target. And the firing slit in the pillbox had been sealed up.
Zaitsev’s glasses continued to roam. They passed over a sheet of iron and a pile of bricks lying between the tank and the pillbox. The glasses moved on, and then came back to this odd combination. For minutes Zaitsev lingered over the metal. Trying to read Konings’s thoughts, he decided the innocuous rubble was a perfect hiding place.
To test his theory, Zaitsev hung a glove on the end of a piece of wood and slowly raised it about the parapet. A rifle cracked and he pulled the glove down hurriedly. The bullet had bored a hole straight through the cloth from the front. Zaitsev had been correct; Konings was under the sheet of iron.
His friend Nikolai Kulikov agreed. “There’s our viper,” he whispered.
The Russians backed out of their trench to find another position. Anxious to put the German sniper in a maximum amount of blinding sunlight, they followed the irregularly curving front line until they found a spot where the afternoon sun would be at their backs.
The next morning they were settled into their new nest. To their left, to the east, the Volga ferries again struggled through enemy mortar fire. To the southeast, under the piece of iron sheeting, lurked their antagonist, and Kulikov fired a blind shot to arouse the German’s curiosity. Then the Russians sat back contentedly. Aware that the sun would reflect on their scopes, they waited patiently for it to go down behind them. By late afternoon, now wrapped in shade, they had Konings at a disadvantage. Zaitsev focused his telescopic sight on the Germans hiding place.
A piece of glass suddenly glinted at the edge of the sheet. Zaitsev motioned to Kulikov, who slowly raised his helmet over the top of the parapet. Konings fired once and Kulikov rose, screaming convincingly. Sensing triumph, the German lifted his head slightly to see his victim. Vassili Zaitsev shot him between the eyes. Konings’s head snapped back and his rifle dropped from his hands. Until the sun went down, the telescopic sight glittered and gleamed. At dusk, it winked out.
(Craig 2004, 128-131)
At the perimeter of the pocket they raised a 120-foot high antenna beacon that linked Gumrak with Novocherkassk by means of a radiotelephone combined with an ultra shortwave decimeter set that could not be monitored by the enemy. Constantly shelled and repaired, the beacon transmitted messages to relay stations installed in German-occupied territory. But one by one the relays fell to Russian tank columns. The radiotelephone link failed, and only a teleprinter remained to record the words produced by the decimeter machine. As the time arrived for Manstein and Paulus to make a final agonizing appraisal of their options, the chattering keys of the teleprinter became their only contact.
If the two men had been able to hear each other’s voices, certain intonations or inflections might have helped resolve the crisis. But as the situation stood, Major Eismann reported to Manstein that he did not believe Paulus would break out under prevailing conditions, and Manstein could sympathize with Paulus’s reasoning. However, Manstein was beginning to wonder whether or not General Schmidt was exerting undue influence on Paulus’s decision not to try a breakout without a proper quantity of fuel. To the field marshal, positive action was necessary within hours. Haggling over gasoline supplies was a luxury Sixth Army could not afford, especially since Manstein was being pressured to do something, anything, to save his own left wing.3
Unable to communicate the emotions of the moment, Paulus stood beside the teleprinter machine in the operation bunker at Gumrak shortly after midnight on December 19, and waited for its impersonal clickety-clack keyboard to begin moving.
(Craig 2004, 253-254)
On his way to a church service, Quartermaster Karl Binder had seen mounds of unburied bodies lining the road. Shocked by this breakdown of army organization, he brooded about it for hours until he wrote a letter to his family. Now filled with a sense of foreboding about his own fate, Binder sought to prepare his wife and children for the worst:
Christmas 1942
… During the past weeks all of us have begun to think about the end of everything. The insignificance of everyday life pales against this, and we have never been more grateful for the Christmas Gospel than in these hours of hardship. Deep in one’s heart one lives with the idea of Christmas, the meaning of Christmas. It is a feast of love, salvation and pity on mankind. We have nothing else here but the thought of Christmas. It must and will tide us over grievous hours. …. However hard it may be, we shall do our utmost to master fate and try everything in our power to defeat the subhumanity that is wildly attacking us. Nothing can shake our belief in victory, for we must win, if Germany wants to live. …
I have not received any mail from you for some time … there is a terrible longing for some dear words from home at Christmas, but there are more important things at present. We are men who know how to bear everything. The main thing is that you and the children are all right. Don’t worry about me; nothing can happen to me any longer. Today I have made my peace with God. …
I give you all my love and a thousand kisses – I love you to my last breath.
Yours,
Karl
(Craig 2004, 293-294)
References
Craig, William. 2004. Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad. N.p.: Konecky & Konecky.
ISBN 978-1-56852-368-2
- During this period, Stalin was entertaining British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had flown to Moscow with depressing news: the Allies would not be able to launch a cross-channel invasion in 1942. On hearing this, Stalin was furious, but he was mollified somewhat when Churchill, accompanied by Averell Harriman, disclosed plans for the invasion of North Africa (Operation Torch), which was scheduled for that coming November.
↩︎ - Khrushchev has claimed that he called Stalin’s dacha to ask permission to call off the Soviet offensive, and that Malenkov relayed Stalin’s order to continue the attack.
Marshal Zhukov denies this in his memoirs, charging that, in reality, Khruschev urged Stalin to ignore warnings of disaster and press the assault.
↩︎ - The Eismann mission caused controversy among the German leaders. Field Marshal Manstein said that Eismann’s report of the conference convinced him that Paulus and Schmidt did not intend to break out under existing conditions. Arthur Schmidt has dismissed this conclusion by pointing out that he and Paulus merely outlined the tremendous problems they faced without adequate air supply. Further, Schmidt believes that Manstein used the remarks of the “lowly” major to justify his own subsequent actions. Friedrich von Paulus never referred publicly to the Eismann visit, thereby creating the impression that he did not attach any particular importance to it. No stenographic record of the conference exists.
↩︎
Benjamin’s Book Joural 
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