Enemy at the Gates Read Online Free PDF

trying to conquer homesickness.
    When the news came of the birth of his first daughter, Capone got permission for a month's leave. With a last joke and a smile, the happy doctor waved goodbye to his friends and left the line of march for a reunion in Salerno. He hoped to be back in time for the finish of the "walkover" campaign.
    In the meantime, his comrades plunged doggedly ahead, dragging their antiquated cannon and rifles, singing songs of Sorrento and the sunlight. On their hats they wore bright green-and-red cockades; in their hearts they longed for home.

Chapter Two
     
     
    Deep in a Ukrainian pine forest, outside the town of Vinnitsa and five hundred miles west of the German troops near the Don—on the same morning that Friedrich von Paulus wrote glowingly of the future to a friend—Adolf Hitler climbed the steps of a log cabin and swept into a starkly furnished conference room. Seating himself on an iron chair at the head of a map table with his back to a window, he listened carefully to the latest intelligence reports as they were explained by his chief of staff, the bespectacled, trimly mustachioed, Gen. Franz Halder.
    The meticulous Halder had no love for the man he served. He acted deferentially toward his Führer and accepted frequent tirades with the calm of one resigned to his fate. Before and during the war, Halder had schemed with other officers to overthrow Hitler and replace him with a monarchy. The dissident group was too timid and vacillating to initiate the coup, however, and watched passively as the German Army scored triumph after triumph under Hitler's almost mystical leadership. By the summer of 1942, Halder was a captive in thrall to a despot.
    For weeks, though, he had reminded Hitler that the signs of Russian disintegration were illusory, that the enemy was not "kaputt." Halder believed that the campaign in the previous winter had bled Germany white. The equivalent of eighty divisions, nearly eight hundred thousand men, were buried beneath the soil of Russia. Despite carefully doctored tables of strength, the majority of the German divisions were 50 percent under strength. And while more than a million besieged Russian civilians had starved to death during the nightmarish winter of 1941, Leningrad still clung to life. Moscow also remained as the nerve center of the Soviet state. Of more significance, the oil fields in the Caucasus pumped life-giving petroleum products to the Soviet war machine.
    As a result, Hitler had become obsessed with the importance of petroleum products to a mechanized state, and he had devised Operation Blue expressly to strangle Russia's oil production and, thereby, her potential to wage modern war. To promote the offensive, he had flown to Poltava on June 1, and, surrounded by deputies such as Paulus, he put on a brilliant oratorical display that mesmerized everyone. Predictably, the generals failed to make any rebuttal to his proposal, which completely ignored German shortages in manpower and equipment and concentrated only on the abysmal state of the Red Army.
    Thus, Operation Blue had begun when the Fourth Panzer Army struck on June 28, due east toward the rail junction of Voronezh. Two days later, Paulus's Sixth Army followed suit, covering the Fourth Army's right flank and engaging Russian forces pulling back in disorder. Almost immediately, the Fourth Army ran into difficulties. Originally, Hitler planned to bypass Voronezh in hopes of trapping the Soviet armies on the open plains. But when German armor easily penetrated the outskirts and commanders radioed for permission to seize the rest of the city, Hitler vacillated, leaving the decision to Army Group B's commander, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock. Amazed at being given a choice, Bock hesitated briefly, then sent two tank divisions into Voronezh.
    The Russians had rushed in reinforcements, quickly pinning the Germans down in savage street fighting, and soldiers in the Fourth Army soon referred to Voronezh as a