Bryan--The Bee’s Knees's Reviews > Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad

William Craig's account of the battle for Stalingrad is overwhelmingly taken from interviews and accounts, diaries and letters, and official memorandum. Thus, while the movements of troops and of strategic planning is described so that the reader has an overall picture of the theater, it is the human element that gives the book its structure. Vignette after vignette unrolls as Craig follows the German Sixth Army across the steppes to Stalingrad, and how their initial enthusiasm turns to surprise at the city's defense, and finally to despair in the last days; and at the same time details the grim determination of Stalingrad's defenders, to the eventual counterattack by the Soviet forces and encirclement of their enemy, to the celebration of victory. All of it is recorded as it was witnessed, from the generals to the privates, cooks, doctors and quartermasters.

Turning more or less to a random page, the reader finds a brief account of the Russian experience in the middle of September:

In Stalingrad's main railroad station, west of Red Square, Lt. Anton Dragan's company was enduring ferocious bombing that blew down the walls and buckled the iron girders. When the Germans surrounded him on three sides, Dragan took his men across the street to another building, the nail factory, from which he commanded a good view of the intersection leading east to the Volga.

Barely settled in a workshop, Dragan took stock of his supplies and realized he had no food, little ammunition, and no water. In a frantic search for something to quench their thirst, the Russians fired machine guns into drain pipes to see if any liquid remained. There was not a drop.

Or this, from the last days in January:

At the Schnellhefter Block across from the tractor plant, Dr. Ottmar Kohler had run out of morphine. Wallowing in filth and blood, he operated under flickering lights and in incredible cold. Outside the building, lines of soldiers crowded the entrance, looking for a place to sleep. An officer went to the door and begged them to go away because there was no room, but they said they would wait until morning.

At sunrise, the visitors were still there, huddled together against the below-zero temperature. During the night they had all died from exposure.

These short, staccato bursts from the eyewitness accounts are buttressed by Craig's survey of the larger movements, to allow for a coherency that the eyewitnesses alone can't convey. Together, they make for a extremely readable and engrossing account--to the extent that in the middle of the book, when Field Marshal Manstein was making his doomed effort to relieve General Paulus' beleaguered Sixth Army, Craig was able to make it read as if the outcome were still in doubt, and I felt myself almost on tenterhooks as I read about events that happened seventy-five years ago.

This is a very humanist rendering of the battle--it may not suit all readers, especially those who would rather divest their history of emotion. On the other hand, I thought it made the events more immediate. But Craig is not sensational here--goodness knows that there were enough carnage and atrocity and utter despicableness at Stalingrad to fill any amount of books--but one has the sense that he is actually rather restrained. That does not prevent him from detailing the most horrible events; still, I never had the sense that he exploited them to add dash to his rendering.

Craig finished his book in 1972, and though I can't put my finger on it just yet, it seems to me that historiography of this period is different than that of today. Reading works by some other prominent historians working in this time (Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August, The Zimmerman Telegram; William Manchester, American Caesar, The Arms of Krupp) I notice a similarity in their tone, or perhaps in their overall effect. These accounts seem generally even-handed in their reporting, where all the actors are given room to display their humanity, even if it's their inhumanity we remember them best for. I find the popular historians of this time (and I haven't read Cornelius Ryan or William Toland, but I wonder if they might not be similar as well) very absorbing; I feel I have a very good grasp of events when I set the book down. I had actually misjudged Craig's book--I expected something superficial, something 'light'. It was not graphic, but I would not call it 'light' either.

It will be interesting to read Antony Beevor's account of the battle, when I get to it, and compare that with Craig. The only other book by Beevor that I've read is The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 which I liked, but on reflection, seems very dry compared with what I read here. On the other hand, I think perhaps it was more thorough, so it might not be a question of which is the better account, but rather that they may both have strong and weak points. If, for some reason though, I was never able to get to Beevor's book (and I'm not really ready to jump into another account of Stalingrad immediately) I think I've been well served by Craig. And if Beevor's account is a bit dry--though more precise--then Craig's book would make an excellent introduction to the topic, and perhaps make the broad strokes clear before further study.

ETA: Readers coming to Enemy at the Gates looking for the story of Vasily Zaytsev (Zaitsev in Craig's book) as portrayed in the film of the same name are likely going to be disappointed. That story is told in a dozen pages, and while the film, I think, still hits some high marks for its chilling look at the battle, it is also adapted to deliver a narrative that just isn't present in the book. Furthermore, Antony Beevor claims to have discovered that the duel between German supersniper Major Erwin König and Zaytsev was "a clever figment of Soviet propaganda," (https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018...)-- not that that should take anything away from Zaytsev's actual accomplishments. His 'duel' may have been fictionalized, but his 225 kills between November and December of 1942 were not.