Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad

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When I was a child I discovered an exciting fantasy world in the pages of history books. At seven I marched to the walls of Jerusalem beside the Crusaders; at nine, I memorized Alfred Lord Tennyson’s glorious paean to the immortal men of the Light Brigade as they charged at Balaklava. Two years later, uprooted from familiar surroundings when my family moved to another city, I discovered a kindred spirit in the lonely figure of Napoleon Bonaparte as he languished in exile on Saint Helena Island.

The bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, added a new dimension to my interest in historical figures and events. My own relatives were plunged into the global conflict, and I followed their exploits with a daily diary of World War II. As the self-ordained Boswell to the Allied forces I neglected my Latin declensions to record the ominous details about Wake, Guam, Bataan, and Corregidor. On entering the eighth grade in the fall of 1942, I became an amateur cartographer, drawing meticulous maps of places like Guadalcanal and New Guinea—even a city called Stalingrad, deep inside Russia. Because of my passionate interest in Napoleon, because I knew of the rout of his Grand Armee on the vast snow-covered plains of czarist Russia, I quickly developed an interest in the German attempt to conquer the Soviet Union. It occurred to me that the same fate might await the Nazi panzers as they moved resolutely into the heartland of the USSR.

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