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Younger readers might be forgiven for thinking that Enemy at the Gates is merely a novelisation of the 2001 film of the same name. But the movie – directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and starring Jude Law – in fact takes its title from William Craig’s groundbreaking 1973 history of Stalingrad, the first Western history to make extensive use of Russian sources. At this battle, Craig wrote in the prologue, ‘we are witnesses to monumental human tragedy’.
The genesis of Enemy at the Gates is an unlikely one. Craig was an insurance salesman until he won a huge cash prize on a television game show in 1958. He used the money to take both an undergraduate and a master’s degree in history at Columbia University. Having followed the Russian campaign in World War II as a child, he was determined to uncover the true story of the epic battle of Stalingrad – a story, as he explains, that had hitherto only been told from the viewpoint of one side or the other. For the Germans, this meant cover-ups, both of war crimes and their own blunders; for the Russians, the narrative shifted as key political and military players, such as Marshal Zhukov, fell in and out of favour.
The work Craig set himself was remarkable in his day. To quote his own words:
I had to do what no one had done before – study the official records of both the Russian and the Axis forces engaged in the conflict, visit the battlefield and walk the ground for which so many men had died, locate survivors of the battle – Russians, Germans, Romanians, Hungarians – and get their eye-witness accounts, their diaries, photographs, and letters. It was not an easy task.
The result is a combination of academic rigour and a vivid, gripping narrative centred around the experiences of ordinary soldiers and non-combatants – the same qualities that characterise Antony Beevor’s acclaimed 1998 account of the same battle. At the time, reviewers of Beevor’s book referenced Enemy at the Gates as the other go-to source for the general reader.
Craig maintains a sure grasp of the sweeping moves and countermoves of the different armies, and the massive logistical challenges faced by both sides. Using his first-hand sources he also catalogues a series of horrors that still have the power to shock. Men are shot, blown apart, incinerated, frozen, and starved. Children are hanged, prisoners butchered, ambulance planes fall out of the sky, hospitals burn, and cannibals stalk the prison-camp barracks.
Of course, the fact that Craig personally interviewed hundreds of survivors of the battle by no means implies that everything they said was true. A case in point is that of Tania Chernova, the female sniper who, in the 2001 film, was the lover of Jude Law’s character Vassili Zaitsev. Craig’s epilogue describes his interview thus:
More than a quarter century after her vendetta against the enemy, the greying sniper still refers to the Germans that she killed as ‘sticks’ that she broke. For many years after the war she believed that Vassili Zaitsev, her lover, was dead. Only in 1969 did she learn that he had recovered and married someone else. The news stunned her for she still loved him.
It seems likely that it was Craig himself who relayed this news, as he had very recently interviewed Zaitsev. Yet Beevor maintains that there were no female snipers at Stalingrad and that Chernova was a ‘fantasist’. He debunks, too, the story of the duel with German sniper instructor Major König (played by Ed Harris in the film). The Germans have no record of such a person ever having existed.
In fairness, it has been claimed that Beevor himself comes adrift in stating that Sergeant Pavlov, the defender of Stalingrad’s famous ‘Pavlov’s House’, became a monk after the war – when in fact, he remained a dedicated Communist, and it was another Pavlov from the battle who turned to monastic life. More than anything, all of this perhaps serves to illustrate the pitfalls of recalling a conflict involving millions of men, countless casualties, and two belligerents that were both heavily influenced by ideologically driven propaganda. Craig did sit down with both Zaitsev and Chernova, and the former in particular had little need to embellish his record, having a well-supported history of shooting 40 Germans before Stalingrad and at least 200 during the battle itself.
Craig is at his most convincing when he triangulates evidence from multiple sources, official and personal. For example, his account of Christmas Day 1942 in the war-torn city starts with a description of a German doctor creating a poignant tableau of the Virgin and Child in his bunker, which rapidly becomes transformed into a dressing station as Russian shells slam into the position. The narrative then moves to the increasingly desperate signals sent out of Stalingrad: ‘We cannot manage with an air supply of 120 tons daily. Measures must therefore be taken to increase our supply rapidly or else you might as well forget about the 6th Army right away.’ Craig then cross-references this with the entry from the surviving 6th Army War Diary: ‘Forty-eight hours without food supplies. Food and fuel near their end… the strength of the men is rapidly decreasing because of the biting cold… we hope for food soon.’
The humanity and compassion of Craig’s account embraces, of course, the Russians, whose suffering was played out on an epic scale. The slaughter of conscripts crossing the Volga is described by one soldier, Alexei Petrov, who confirms the stories of NKVD agents gunning down their own men who flinched from going forward.
Using first-hand sources Craig catalogues a series of horrors that still have the power to shock.
The miserable existence of civilians trapped west of the Volga is vividly described in multiple accounts, like that of 11-year-old Natasha Kornilov, who scrounged for food waste from German field kitchens, and comforted her disabled mother with lullabies and prayers. Most pitiful of all is the story of Sacha Filipov, who at just 15 relayed precious information to the Russian army while working as a cobbler for the Germans. He was eventually hanged for his ‘crimes’ along with two other children, in front of his parents.
Enemy at the Gates is in many ways a groundbreaking book. With his combination of wide documentary research, first-hand interviews, and sheer legwork (in walking much of the battlefield), Craig did a lot to establish the standards we now expect of good historians of modern conflict. And, of course, he wrote of events that were part of his childhood and still relatively recent when he did his research, as one of his many interviews poignantly illustrates:
In Cologne, a woman who has been waiting 27 years for the return of her husband, reported missing in action, asks me a question. Her eyes glassy with tears, she says: ‘Do you think I should go to Stalingrad and look for him?’ I… can only shake my head numbly and say, ‘No, I don’t think it would help.’ Smiling bravely, she rose and made tea for the two of us.
William Craig
Born: 1929
Died: 22 September 1997
Nationality: American
Born and raised in Concord, Massachusetts, William Craig was always fascinated by military history. His first book, The Fall of Japan (1968), documented the final weeks of the Pacific Theatre during World War II. Craig used the Cold War as the setting for his first novel, The Tashkent Crisis, three years later – but it is Enemy at the Gates (1973), his non fiction account of the Battle of Stalingrad, for which he is best remembered today. Cornelius Ryan, author of The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far, both of which were also turned into Hollywood films, described it as ‘an unforgettable and haunting reading experience’.
