CWL---Off Topic: Classic Literature on Stalingrad

Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad, William Craig, Readers Digest Press, 462pp, 1973.

Craig's 1973 book is a fine non-fiction account of the Stalingrad Campaign. It's title was taken for use by the producers of the 2001 Paramount Pictures film staring: Joseph Fiennes, Jude Law, Ed Harris, Rachel Weisz, Bob Hoskins and Ron Perlman. The book contains the story of Vaselli Zaitsev and Tania Chernova, Russian snipers and a duel with a master German sniper. Craig cautions that the duel may have the the creation of the Communist war propaganda bureaucracy, but the essential facts of Zaitsev and Chernova are available in documents and interviews. Craig's discussion covers about 20 pages throughout the book.


Craig's Enemy at the Gates was republished by Penguin Press in 2000 with cover artwork from the film. The film was probably from David L. Robbins 1999 novel War of the Rats. Robbins' plot is generally the same as the movie but the movie carries the name of Craig's non-fiction book.

Craig's Enemy At the Gates is a fine history that strength of which is the reliance upon interviews with the survivors of the campaign. Russians, Germans, Italians, and Romanians were interviewed. Craig's book contains startling stories from the front line soldiers to those at headquarters. Amazing accounts of cannibalism, burning wounded prisoners in their hospitals and the floor-to-floor fighting of the campaign unique. Headquarters' strategy and battlefield tactics are presented in the words of the participants. There is no doubt that Hitler carries the blame for not breaking von Paulus' army out of the kesseland that Goering the diaster of not keeping the German army supplied.

David L. Robbins' War of the Rats, 392 pages
Bantam hardcover edition, 1999 handles admirably the dual tasks of storytelling and staying close to history. Those who read historical fiction will be well satisfied by Robbins' character driven sharpshooter's dual in Stalingrad. Tania Chernova in Craig's history is truly a remarkable character who begins the campaign as one person and by the end of it is some else. Her episode of crawling through Stalingrad's public sewers to reach the Russian line shows her capacity to endure. Indeed of the two others that start the trek with her, one suffocates in the sewer lines. Robbins reinforces the Chernova's true story with enough reliance on his imagination to create a strong character who is not a stereotype of a woman among men at war. There is a striking similarity between the novel and the film. CWL is not sure if the film and the novel were started at the same year, 1998. Both did use Craig's Enemy at the Gates as a source document. For a good introduction to Stalingrad look for Voices from Stalingrad by John Bastable which CWL covered March 1 2009.

Off Topic---Stalingrad, Soldiers' Voices, and Oral History

Voices from Stalingrad: Unique First-Hand Accounts from World War II's Cruellest Battle, Jonathan Bastable, David and Charles Publishing, subject index, contributors index, chronology, glossary, illustrations, maps, 304 pp., 2006, $24.99.

If CWL had to rank the earth's battles in order of ferocity and casualties, Stalingrad would be among the top three. The Siege of Stalingrad is among the very bloodiest battles in all of history. Combined casualties are estimated to be above 1.5 million. Brutality toward military causalities and disregard toward civilian casualties was a characteristic of both sides. The Nazi offensive against the Soviets began in June 1941; in June of 1942 the German offensive to take Stalingrad began. The campaign lasted from June 28 1942 to February 2 1943. The battle toward the city, then inside the city, and the Soviet counter-offensive which trapped and destroyed and captured remnants of the German 6th Army with European auxiliaries was the first large-scale German defeat of World War II.

Jonathan Bastable's Voices from Stalingrad is a compelling work. The campaign' history told by the battlefront soldiers is difficult to put down. On nearly every page, Bastable offers several paragraphs of a direct quote from a soldier, prisoner, and casualty. He tightly brings the words of the soldiers together with a chronological narrative, photographs and maps. His own text is never extraneous to the voices of the soldiers but firmly and succinctly builds the context for the soldiers narratives. A Soviet rifleman brings down a plan that is 300meters overhead. German soldiers die at night from no obvious cause; autopsies reveal that 20 year olds had the hearts of 80 old men, such was the starvation and fatigue of the armies. Rats are rampant and gnaw on corpses; horse meat is the only meat for soldiers. The war on the Volga River is treacherous: snipers, ice flows, and artillery interrupt Russian support to the beleaguered city in which cannibalism is not unheard of.

From house to house, factory to factory, and street to street, Bastable offers a chorus of voices that describe a 200 day battle in which the distance between life and death is the distance which can be covered by the toss of a hand grenade.