Stalingrad was a city the Germans had not intended to take and shielded by Russians who had not anticipated to defend. I am haunted by the contents of this book. In order to write Enemy at the Gates 1973 , a documentary account of the Battle of Stalingrad, Craig travelled to three continents and interviewed hundreds of military and civilian survivors. It expanded outward, then broke into hundreds of pieces. With the Soviet snipers taking an increasing toll on the German forces, German Major is deployed to Stalingrad to kill Vasily and thus crush Soviet morale. Pred sam kraj je uporno zabranjivao cak i predaju svojih skoro 200,000 vojnika, tvrdeci da svaki sat nastavka borbe opkoljene armije, pomaze u celokupnoj nemackoj strategiji na istocnom frontu. Zaitsev and Tania were even sent on a mission to kill Paulus at his 6th army headquarters but he was not there.
Hitler later countermanded this disastrous order and redirected 4th Panzer Army to attack northeast towards Stalingrad but stripped it of key Panzer divisions. Craig has caught and drawn in all its animalistic elements. Konings and Zaitsev eventually found themselves stalking each other and only one was going to survive. Do you believe that this item violates a copyright? The book lays out all the strategy, tactics, and brings the battle and its aftermath home to the general reader with passages on individual soldiers and medical personnel on each side and civilians. As Paulus was dealing with all this Hitler remained steadfast that no retreat was forthcoming, his orders were to hold to the last man.
Goring promised to sustain Stalingrad by air. If you are of Russian heritage or German heritage, you will be spellbound. But what I both sadly and angrily take away from this is the sheer monstrous insanity of the worship, the deification, of orders to kill. In this book, Craig has made some choices with which I vehemently disagree. Crossing the river to urban entrenched defenses, the inflexible, overconfident German tactics are reminiscent of the Union advance at Fredericksburg, with tenacious and merciless defenders employing heavy armaments at homicidal proximity and with hideous affect.
From the babble of voices, he judged it sufficient to hold him in check. There was no way out anymore. Although it is an interesting book it was so difficult for me to get through this book. That may be true but the Germans would find out that the gulag โ the cornerstone of Soviet Communism - is almost as efficient a killing machine as the German concentration camps. Much of the bibliography is probably out of date. Despite frequent intelligence reports that the Roussians were amassing troops for a counteroffensive and that the Romanian armies were poorly equipped and stressed thin on a very long front, Von Paulus preferred to concentrate all his efforts on the town itself. The book is well written and includes photographs.
The book is considered one of the best written about the siege of Stalingrad. The siege of Stalingrad lasted 5 months, one week, and three days. I can mention certain individuals: the courageous German, Dr. As a side note, the movie of the same name starring Jude Law is loosely adapted from this book, focusing mainly on Vasilli Zaitsev, Tania Chernova and the cat and mouse with Major Konings. Retrieved 16 December 2016 โ via Newspapers. The Luftwaffe had already bombed the city into ruins. The third morning, Zaitsev had a new visitor, a political agitator named Danilov, who came along to witness the contest.
Somehow, it resembles more with the book by , which is a fictionalized account of the duel between two sharpshooters in the warzone of Stalingrad. Changar realized he had cut the fuse too short and he worried about the error until the next day, when he went back to examine his handiwork. It marks the spot in history when the Russian Army stopped retreating from the relentless German invasion which was started in June 1941, and when the utter, catastrophic defeat of the Germans gave the Russians and their allies in the United States and Great Britain a huge morale boost. The results of this campaign effectively marked the beginning of a long decline for Nazi Germany. Finally, Paulus, the commander, surrendered and the Germans suffered terrible privations as prisoners.
Enemy at the Gates is a narrative full of eye witness accounts that makes the battle of Stalingrad come to life. Take a city such as Pittsburgh with its steel mills, factories, office buildings, houses and apartments, bring it under intensive aerial bombing and sustained ground attack by armored, motorized and infantry divisions, feverishly transform those same massive factories into fortresses and frenziedly convert each block, house, apartment, room, basement and street corner into separate strong points and, finally, throw in more than a million men to fight for five months amidst this stupefying devastation. The unending noise, the flaming and bloodstained Volga, the litter of limbs and the endless hacking and stabbing are readily comprehensible in human terms, but it is those spectral operational maps and the ghostly signals which have the clammy chill of death about them. The hubris, the folly, the fear, the downright meanness persists. It became a New York Times bestseller and was also the inspiration for the 2001 film of the same name, starring Joseph Fiennes and Jude Law.
This book shows in historical detail the sights and sounds of a siege that stands with other great sieges such as Dien Bien Phu and Khe Sahn. The Soviets get pushed back almost all the way to the Volga and barely hang on. And the mighty Russian Winter also played a huge role in the German defeat. She was motivated to join the war as a means to avenge her grandparents who were murdered by the invading Germans. Craig tells the story by following soldiers on both sides of the conflict and some Soviet civilians. Hersch Gurewicz, an unlucky grunt who gets injured and blown to pieces time and time again, yet refuses to give up and returns to the frontline after each lengthy hospital stay. As expected, he failed miserably.
The resulting mosaic is epic in scope, and the human tragedy that unfolds is awesome. Barely settled in a workshop, Dragan took stock of his supplies and realized he had no food, little ammunition, and no water. Although forty years old, the book still has value. Stalingrad took place in 1942-43, and D-Day was still over a year in the future. I liked how their individual histories are traced through the book.