Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad By William Craig

 Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad

By William Craig

William Craig was born in 1929, in Concord, Massachusetts. His story is perhaps a uniquely American one. He was working as an advertising salesman in 1958 when he appeared on a television quiz show, “Tic Tac Dough”, which worked by having you answer questions to place an X or an O on a tic tac toe board (Hollywood Squares before Hollywood Squares? {Folks welcome our guest editor, former movie critic and current friend Havoc} ). Mr. Craig did incredibly well, earning 42,000$ (this would be around $385,000 today) a record victory at the time. Mr. Craig followed up this victory by displaying some uncommon good sense, using his winnings to pay for additional education. He enrolled at Columbia University and earned an undergraduate and Master's degree in History (My man!). He then turned to writing, his first book being a non-fiction work, The Fall of Japan, released in 1967. A narrative history of the last weeks of Imperial Japan, it was received breathlessly, and announced to be virtually flawless by the New York Times’ book review. Mr. Craig then turned to fiction writing, penning The Tashkent Crisis, a Cold War Thriller where a President who had slashed the military budget to pay for domestic programs is forced to use extreme measures to face off a resurgent Soviet threat. It was published in 1971. Mr. Craig then spent the next 2 years gathering information and writing the subject of today's review: Enemy at the Gates, which was released in 1973. He released his final work, The Strasbourg Legacy, in 1975, a thriller about a CIA agent hunting a secret cadre of Nazi officers committed to bringing about the 4th Reich by having the US and USSR destroy each other. His wife Eleanor Craig, a teacher and therapist, wrote 4 books herself, and together they had 4 children and 8 grandchildren. Mr. Craig would pass away on September 22, 1997, from complications of kidney disease in Norwalk Hospital. Mrs. Craig would pass away on August 7th, 2012, at the age of 83. 

Enemy at the Gates was first published by Readers Digest Press and received a 2nd printing from Penguin Publishing.  Now before I go too deep into the book, I have to address the elephant in the room that is the 2001 film, which did take the title of the book and some various historical elements, but honestly, the film borrows just as much from the fictional novel War of the Rats by David Robbins in 1999. So I would encourage people to consider the film and book here as two very separate entities. 

Now let me get back to the book. Mr. Craig would face a lot of difficulties in gathering source materials. First, he had to track people down, as the survivors of the battle had scattered to 3 different continents (and frankly, there weren’t all that many German survivors of the battle), but track down hundreds of them he did. He also poured through journals, diaries, and letters, many of which are reproduced in full in the book. He was able to access lots of information from Russian soldiers and citizens, including several Soviet generals, such as the personal papers of Marshal of the Soviet Union Andre Yeryomenko and some of the correspondence from Marshal Zhukov, but the realities of the Cold War kept him from accessing any official Soviet archives in any great depth (The Soviets rather assumed that, for most of the Cold War, anyone accessing their wartime archives was either trying to learn how to beat them in a future war, or going to use them to embarrass the government.  One of the few things I’ll give the current Russian regime is their partial reversal of this policy). This is balanced out, I think, by the use of first-hand accounts from Russian soldiers and civilians, but should be kept in mind. Because the surviving Wehrmacht generals and officers were more than happy to give Mr. Craig full and open access to German sources, this has led to some arguments over the events presented in Enemy at the Gates, as a number of historians have argued that these officers used this opportunity to try and deflect blame from themselves to rivals within the German Army, or onto Hitler and other political leaders in the Nazi leadership (Not a hard thing to do.  The argument over whose “fault” Germany’s defeat in WWII belongs to is a complex and active one.  This Historian’s personal opinion is that there is plenty of blame to go around, frankly). While I'm pretty sure that some blame games are being played, and that the generals and other officers are overplaying just how much they tried to resist the strategy that Hitler dictated... frankly, it fits what we know of Nazi political leadership and Hitler's leadership style. We know that Hitler was a micromanager who overestimated his own abilities and rejected facts that didn't fit his preferred worldview. We know he had a tendency to override his generals and officer corps and that he was increasingly erratic, whether it be from illness, drug use, or personal instability. I mean who would be stable on a cocktail of cocaine, amphetamines, testosterone, gun cleaner, and strychnine? (All very true, but what the Generals often forget to mention is that, by and large, they were uniformly in agreement, or at worst, of divided opinion, concerning almost all of his high-level decisions.  They believed, as Hitler did, that the Soviet Union would implode as soon as they hit it.  They believed that the seizure of Stalingrad justified the deployment of the 6th Army, and that they could re-supply or relieve the pocket when it was surrounded.  These were bad decisions, and Hitler does ultimately bear responsibility for them, but I find it hard to accept the protests of officers who believed the exact same thing, now looking back and claiming it was all his idea.{What’s that saying, only Germany would produce a professional general staff willing to fight the entire planet twice and only Germany would produce a professional general staff that doesn’t ask if fighting the entire planet is a good idea twice?})

Enemy at the Gates is divided into 2 parts, each with 15 chapters. The first part is concerned with the German attack on Stalingrad and the background of the assault, beginning in the summer of 1942, as well as the planning for a second offensive into the Soviet Union. The winter offensive by Army Group Center had failed to take Moscow, but German confidence was still high, and many still believed that the German Army was all but invincible (and not just Germans were of this opinion). The Blitzkrieg into Southern Russia did not do much to counter that belief as the Sixth and Fourth Panzer Army ran rampant across the steppes. At first, the campaign had more limited objectives of simply wrecking Stalingrad's ability to operate as an industrial center and block the traffic of the Volga river. However, by July 1942 Hitler dreamed bigger (as was his wont), and decided to pick up his gambling dice once again (as was also his wont). He would attempt to take both Stalingrad and Baku, cutting off the supplies of oil and fuel to the USSR, and the southern route of land lease supplies (bear in mind, Stalingrad and Baku are more than 650 miles from one another.  This is like ordering an army you have sent to besiege New York City go ahead and capture Atlanta while they’re at it). Of course, changing your goals in the middle of the campaign is not a simple thing and Hitler compounded this by splitting up his units and redirecting them mid-lunge. This caused a massive traffic jam on the steppes as divisions had to cross one another's path, often meaning stopping, reorienting themselves, and then moving sometimes through another division trying to do the same thing (It is not a trivial thing to re-route a division, let alone an army.  Not for nothing is Patton’s greatest achievement often regarded as him turning the entire Third Army northwards in 36 hours to slam into the southern flank of the Bulge during the second Ardennes offensive). Mr. Craig shows this through the eyes of German troops on the ground caught up in a giant snarl for reasons they didn't understand. Meanwhile, Hitler signed the death warrant of Stalingrad by sending forth the Luftwaffe to reduce it. Here we get a view through the eyes of Russian civilians as their homes are engulfed in firestorms caused by German bombs. Their children are blown apart and their families drowned as German fighter bombers strafed riverboats intent on evacuating unarmed civilians from the battle zone. It was bluntly, mass murder committed from the air (Neither the first nor last case of this in the war, though one of the worst). Nor would the mass murder stop, as brave men and women volunteered for wretchedly under-armed civilian militia groups to fight the Nazi War Machine. That said, in the bombed-out rubble of a once-great city, something the world thought impossible happened, the Red Army and the civilians supporting it brought the Germans to a stop short of their goal. The Red Army adopted a strategy of turning buildings into strong points manned by small units that the Germans would have to dig out one by one. This ground the Blitzkrieg to a halt amidst the bombed ruins it had created short of the Volga river (The irony that this strategy was only really possible because of the Luftwaffe reducing the entire city to ruins was not lost on the Russians). Here the book turns to the sheer lethality of street fighting, as both sides would send in formations of thousands of men only to have hundreds survive their first day (The Germans called this style of warfare “Rattenkrieg”, or ‘rat-warfare’.  It was an apt description). Meanwhile, the Russian civilians who couldn't escape would either have to live as German captives, Red Army Auxiliaries, or huddle hidden like rats in their holes in an increasingly mad world. Part I ends with the misery of a Russian winter closing in on defender and invader alike (supposedly the temperature dropped as low as -42 Fahrenheit during the day), and in Moscow, plans are drawn up for a new operation that will turn the tables on the Germans, Operation Uranus. 

Part II opens with Operation Uranus, the great attack on the flanks of the German Army, which was held by a group of Axis allies, Romanians, Italians, and Hungarians mainly. They were under-equipped, under-trained, and badly led for the most part, and the Red Army scented weakness (correctly.  Romanian troops’ letters home read like prayers to a merciful God to get them out of there before they are killed/captured by the superhuman Russians). Under the assault of the Red Army, the Axis troops broke and ran, and again using interviews, Mr. Craig gives us first-hand accounts from the ground, mainly from Italians and Romanians. There are several Russian accounts here too. This assault cut off the Germans in Stalingrad, but the book makes it painfully clear that there was more than enough time to withdraw them and prevent their encirclement by the Red Army, however, basically everyone is unanimous in blaming Hitler. I'm suspicious of how every German officer seems to claim they personally protested this and knew it was a disaster but let it pass (I’m far more than suspicious.  While the officers inside the pocket definitely were of the position that they should break out, almost the entire Wehrmacht General Staff was not.  General Model went on at length about how the retreating troops might be caught in the snowfields and run down like cattle.  Admittedly, pulling out of Stalingrad was not going to be a pleasant or cheap operation, but it was absolutely doable if they had committed themselves to it.  Neither Hitler, nor the Generals did.). Hitler however decided he wasn't going to let Stalingrad go, and in doing so condemned hundreds of thousands of young men, who had been carefully brought to believe that he would never fail them, to their deaths (sounds not unlike another group of people who put their trust in a right-wing demagogue more recently, fortunately with less-lethal consequences). As the trap slams shut and the Germans find themselves surrounded, the book takes us through how the Russians turned the tables on their tormentors. Again using first-hand accounts, Mr. Craig gives us tales of heroism, some of them with darkly tragic endings, like Sasha Filippov, a young lad of barely 17 who went to work as a cobbler for the Germans so that he could spy on them for the Red Army. He walked into German officer clubs and headquarters to repair shoes and boots, his ears strained for every drop of intelligence and even stole documents right off the desks of unit commanders to smuggle out inside German boots. After months of wildly successful activity, Sasha was found out and hanged on December 23rd, 1942 in front of his own mother.

It's here I should note that while Mr. Craig avoids being explicit, he is rather blunt and open about the barbarity of war and the brutality that the Nazis and the Russians inflicted on each other (As well he should be.  It is not possible to adequately do justice to the Battle of Stalingrad in a PG-13 manner). This can be hard to read, as given his use of first-hand accounts he's humanized the victims of the brutality even if they are Nazi soldiers. I can see some people protesting this and I can certainly understand why. Consider that the Nazis invaded the USSR, a state that was in many ways aiding Nazi Germany (supply trains of grain and oil passed from the USSR into Nazi Germany up to the very day of the invasion), without provocation, and conducted themselves with such savagery and madness that they have rightfully become the standard that evil behavior can be judged against. It's hard to want to see them as anything but monsters, but those crimes were done by human beings who at their core were not that much different than you or I, and if we forget that we open the door to repeating their crimes (Amen.  Thinking that we’re too civilized or intelligent to possibly do such evil things is one of the surest ways to guarantee that we will). As for the Red Army, I find it hard to judge men who are fighting invaders who have murdered their families, burnt their homes, and enslaved their neighbors. Did the Red Army commit crimes against POWs and in Eastern Europe? Yes, absolutely, but these men too were human, and they had been pushed hard (to say the least). Mr. Craig shows us that by taking us to the viewpoint of young Russian soldiers, who are fighting without any knowledge of if their parents, siblings, wives, or children have survived the German invasion (and many who know that they did not.  At the height of their conquests, the Germans occupied territory that had been home to a full third of the Soviet Union’s pre-war population.  To say that they behaved badly in those areas is like saying that Jupiter is “a bit” larger than a penny.  Most soldiers from those areas assumed that their entire families had been starved, shot, or gassed to death.  And a great many were correct in this assumption). So I would warn you in advance that some parts of this book make for difficult reading, especially since it's all true, and it's often told to us by men who survived it. 

Mr. Craig's work, as difficult as some parts are to read, preserved the first-hand impressions, memories, and accounts of men and women who lived through some of the most grueling and brutal parts of the greatest war in history. Stalingrad as a battle could easily be considered one of the greatest battles of that war in and of itself (Unquestionably so, if not the greatest battle of all time.  Two million men died in the course of that battle, amidst scenes of violence, barbarity, and courage as would render most men mad.{Given some of the accounts I have to wonder if some did go mad}). The battle where the back of the Nazi War Machine was broken and the Germans would make no great advances ever again. (After the war, the Soviets liked to point out that before Stalingrad, the Germans had never lost a major battle, and after Stalingrad, they never won one). By using first-hand accounts along with documents such as letters, cables, and more, Mr. Craig puts a human face on the war, both the brualizers and the brutalized, and maybe forces us to ask just how we would measure up in such a situation (a question I’ve asked myself more than once, and that I hope dearly I am never in a position to find out {I also hope you and our readers never find yourselves in a ruin of a city full of people who want you dead}). That said, I do think we should be careful in accepting some accounts at face value which Mr. Craig often seems to do. A lot of the remarks from upper-level German officers stink of ass-covering and deflection. There's also the fact that a number of Soviet officers had axes to grind, Marshal Yeryomenko, for example as he was passed over for final command, after putting in grueling months, fighting off the relentless German offensive (Supposedly, when Stalin was told that Yeryomenko was going to be upset at the new command arrangement, he responded that “We are not High School Girls” {My experience is officers as a group are as touchy about their dignity as any schoolgirl.  I mean, I watched a Lt chase a Pvt down for over a block to collect a salute once}). This is the danger of just passing on primary sources without any additional consideration because those sources have their own agendas, narratives, and goals to push. Anyone reading this book should remember that and keep that in mind. The book could have also used a list of each person and their nationality and position, as there were points where you could get some survivors confused, and having something to reference would have helped immensely. That said, this book does provide an excellent on-the-ground view of the battle while providing enough of an overview of the campaign to provide context as to what happened. I'm giving Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad by William Craig a B+ and a recommendation for anyone who is really curious as to the battle and the worm's eye view, as it were. (And as a Historian who has made the Battle of Stalingrad a matter of personal study, may I also recommend Anthony Beevor’s excellent Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, for a slightly more academic view of the battle as a whole).

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