Degtev, Dmitry Battle of Stalingrad

The Beginning of the End for Hitler in the East

The Battle of Stalingrad was the bloodiest battle of the Second World War. An estimated two million peopleboth soldiers and civiliansfell victim to a brutal struggle that dragged on for more than five months. Due to Stalingrad's strategic location on the Volga River in southern Russia, the maxim held true: whoever controlled the city also controlled access to the oil fields of the Caucasus. Without this oil, German failure on all fronts was ultimately inevitable. The Battle of Stalingrad was, therefore, arguably the most significant engagement of the entire war. Nevertheless, the author argues that both Hitler and Stalin lost sight of the campaign's actual objectives; the capture of Stalingrad became, instead, an end in itself. In the original plan for "Operation Blue," Stalingrad had not even been designated as a distinct objective. However, when the defenders of Stalingrad unexpectedly blocked the Germans' path, the city moved to the very center of German efforts. Hitler and his generals were naively convinced that, once Stalingrad was captured, victory in the war would be a foregone conclusion. Stalin and his generals, for their part, reasoned that since the Wehrmachtregardless of the losses it had sufferedwas fighting so tenaciously for the city's ruins, the Germans must evidently place a higher value on its strategic importance than they did themselves; consequently, they were determined to hold the city at any cost. In reality, however, the strategic importance of Stalingrad was vastly overestimated. The scale of the German operation to conquer the Caucasus was immense; the theater of operations spanned 1,500 kilometersa distance roughly equivalent to the distance between Berlin and Moscow. This necessitated establishing march routes for Panzer and infantry divisions through terrain that was virtually desert-like, containing almost no railway lines or paved roads. The troops' basic needswhether for fuel, ammunition, rations, or even waterwere completely disregarded. At the same time, the unrealistic plan for the conquest of the Caucasus made no provision for any alternatives should the main operation faila failure that was, from the very outset, inevitable. On the Soviet sideintimidated and demoralized by the military catastrophes at Kerch and Kharkov, in which entire armies had been taken prisonerStalin ordered the Red Army to retreat to the Volga; a retreat that quickly devolved into a panicked rout. Yet the Soviet leader then abruptly changed his mind and issued the famous order: "Not a step back!" While historians argue that this order spurred Soviet troops to resist and bolstered discipline, it actually led to an increase in the number of defectors and collaborators. This study of the Battle of Stalingrad is a vivid chronicle of the fightingnarrated from two perspectives and written by a Russian historian who drew upon extensive material previously unpublished in the West. It details the operations of all branches of the armed forcesarmor, artillery, infantry, and the air forceas well as, for the first time, the significant contribution of the Russian river flotilla.