For sheer brutality and attrition, few battles in World War Two come close to the horrific carnage that was the Battle of Stalingrad. Originally called Tsaritsyn, the city was renamed in honor of Joseph Stalin in 1925 in recognition of the city’s defense against the White Russians during the 1918-1920 Civil War.
Stalingrad is situated on the western side of the Volga River which strategically makes it a valuable target for an invading enemy thanks to the rail and river shipping hubs, a fact that was not lost on the German high command. Hitler ordered the capture of the city for two main reasons; first, having Stalingrad in German hands would secure the river link to the Caspian sea and Northern Russia and secondly, it would secure the flank of the advancing German armies on their way to the oil rich city of Baku, which would shut off the fuel supply for the entire Red Army. Added to this was the fact that the city bore the name of the leader of the Soviet Union made the capture of Stalingrad a powerful propaganda tool as well.
Hitler, in typical fashion, ignored the advice of his generals and ordered the main army group to be split in two. Army Group South was split into two groups……A and B. Group A was ordered to continuing advancing towards the oil rich Caucasus while Group B was ordered to turn east towards the Volga and Stalingrad itself. This gave the Soviets enough time to bash together a defense force for the city. In fact, the entire city’s grain supply, cattle and rolling stock was moved across the Volga and out of the way of the advancing Germans. This led Stalingrad to be short of food even before the battle started. The Soviets ordered that anyone strong enough to hold a rifle be rushed to the city to aid in its defense. As much as the Germans were determined to capture Stalingrad, the Soviets were determined to defend it.
The battle began on July 17th 1942 with an attack by the German Luftwaffe on the ships and transport barges on the Volga. This rendered the Volga unusable for Soviet shipping. Next, came the heavy bombardment which reduced over 90% of the city to ruins. However, this proved to be a double edged sword as Soviet troops occupied the ruins and very effectively used this to their advantage, particularly when it came to the Russian snipers who hid in the rubble and picked off unlucky German troops by the thousands. One sniper, Vasily Zaytsev, was credited with over 255 kills and was made a hero during the battle despite the fact that two women snipers, Lyudmile Pavlichenko and Nina Lobkovskaya actually scored more kills with 309 and 308 Germans, respectively.
As is typical in most wars, the civilian population suffered horribly during the battle. Thousands of civilians trapped in the city were not allowed to leave under direct orders of Stalin and were put to work digging trenches and other fortifications.
By the beginning of September, the Soviet Air Force had been defeated by the Luftwaffe, so the Germans enjoyed air superiority over the ruined city. It was around this time that the Soviet forces developed a tactic known as “hugging”……that is, keeping the front lines physically close to the enemy so that the Germans were forced into fighting without close air support or artillery out of fear of hitting their own men. The Soviets also took urban fighting to a new level. Bombed out buildings became mini-fortresses bristling with firepower that the Germans could only conquer in horrendous house to house and even room to room fighting. The Germans called this new type of warfare, “rattenkrieg”, or “rat war” which even extended into the sewers under Stalingrad. The German army suddenly found itself at a huge disadvantage with this new type of urban warfare which rendered their traditional tactics of infantry supported armored assaults ineffective in the rubble strewn streets of the ruined city. All front lines disappeared as the fighting raged in the ruins of the buildings and debris clogged streets. The feared German tanks, the finest in the world at the time, simply became bogged down in the massive heaps of rubble and ceased to be an effective tool of war. The battle of Stalingrad became a torturous, nightmarish cauldron of the worst kind of warfare and it was about to get a whole lot worse.
By November, the Soviet Air Force had been reconstituted and was now able to go head to head with the Luftwaffe; however it suffered crippling losses and was ordered to fly at night only. Conditions on the ground got considerably worse for the Soviets. The Germans now controlled over 90% of Stalingrad and most of the waterfront. Ice prevented re-supply by the river, but still the defenders hung on. It was during this time that the now famous battles in the Red October Steel Factory and the Dzerzhinsky Tractor Factory took place.
As winter descended upon Stalingrad, a new misery soon became apparent; the weather. The Germans were simply not prepared to fight in such frigid cold. The Soviet soldier, by contrast, was much better equipped for cold weather fighting. His uniform made from thick, padded cotton could withstand the below zero temperatures much better than his German counterpart. Historians have recently discovered that the Soviet weapons still continued to work in the arctic-like cold thanks to the lubricating grease being mixed with gasoline which kept the grease from solidifying. The Germans, who did not use this trick, suffered serious stoppages in their weapons as the lube would simply freeze up in the intense cold.
It was around this time that the German command began to get worried about their weakening flanks around the city. Most of the troops in the supporting flanks were Italians, Hungarians and Romanians who were not as well quipped or trained as the German soldiers were and thus were vulnerable to attack. Further complicating this dire situation was the fact that Hitler was so focused on the city on Stalingrad itself, he refused to strengthen these flanks which would pave the way for a disaster for the entire 6th Army Group B. That disaster came in the form of Operation Uranus, the Soviet offensive to encircle Stalingrad itself and cut off Army Group B from any reinforcements. This offensive was timed to coincide with the crippling winter weather which meant that the Luftwaffe would have an extremely difficult time resupplying the cut off German ground forces. As the German soldiers slowly starved inside the encircled city, Hitler refused to allow them to surrender.
Conditions inside Stalingrad deteriorated quickly. The tables were now turned on the Germans as it was there turn to suffer the deprivations that they had inflicted upon the Soviets. With the failed “air bridge”, the Luftwaffe was unable to supply food, medicine and ammunition, never mind the much needed cold weather clothing. Soldiers often froze to death on sentry duty with their corpses still standing upright.
On February 2nd, 1943 German general Friedrich Paulus surrendered the remaining 91,000 exhausted, starving German soldiers which included over 3,000 Romanians. In addition, over 22 high ranking generals were also captured, much to the delight of the Soviet propaganda machine. In all, over 1.1 million Russian soldiers and civilians were killed, wounded or simply vanished in the fighting for Stalingrad, the Germans lost over 840,000. Of the 91,000 prisoners taken, only about 5,000 ever made it home to Germany, the rest dying in labor camps of typhus, malnutrition and mistreatment. The fighting for Stalingrad saw the destruction of an entire German army group in some of the appalling conditions of the entire Second World War. For the Germans, it was a defeat that they would never recover from and it marked the end of the high water mark of the 3rd Reich on the Eastern Front. From now on, they would be an army in retreat which would culminate in the Battle for Berlin in April of 1945.
In 1961, Nikita Kruchev, himself at Stalingrad as a political commissar, ordered that the name of the city be changed to Volgrad as part of the Soviet Union’s de-Stalinization policy. The battlefield today is much changed thanks to the heavy rebuilding post war. However in the stepps outside the city, it’s still possible to see evidence of the fighting. Until recently, there were vast fields filled with bleaching bones of both German and Soviet soldiers that went unburied after the fighting ended. Souvenir hunters dug for relics which were sold to collectors worldwide but now that practice is largely frowned upon and new laws have been enacted as to the protection of human remains and war graves. Up on the Mamayev Kurgan, the hill overlooking the city, is the famed Mother Motherland, a colossal statue that rises 160 feet above the blood soaked ground as a memorial to all citizens of the Motherland who were lost during the battle.
