Victory at Stalingrad

The Battle That Changed History

Geoffrey Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317868903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Victory at Stalingrad tells the gripping strategic and military story of that battle. The hard-won Soviet victory prevented Hitler from waging the Second World War for another ten years and set the Germans on the road to defeat. The Soviet victory also prevented the Nazis from completing the Final Solution, the wholesale destruction of European Jewry, which began with Hitler's "War of Annihilation" against the Soviets on the Eastern Front.

Geoffrey Roberts places the conflict in the context of the clash between two mighty powers: their world views and their leaders. He presents a great human drama, highlighting the contribution made by political and military leaders on both sides. He shows that the real story of the battle was the Soviets' failure to achieve their greatest ambition: to deliver an immediate, war-winning knockout blow to the Germans.

This provocative reassessment presents new evidence and challenges the myths and legends that surround both the battle and the key personalities who led and planned it.

chapter one

Introduction:

battle of the century

No battle of the Second World War has captured the public imagination as much as the clash between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany at Stalingrad in 1942. For 60 years the story of this battle for the city on the Volga has been told and retold in countless histories, documentaries, novels and films. The source of this eternal fascination is not hard to discern. Stalingrad was an epic battle unmatched by any other in its dimensions, drama and decisiveness.

Contemporary observers of the battle – American and British, German and Russian – had no doubt that they were witnessing the crucial encounter of the Second World War. In August 1942 an editorial in The Times informed its readers that the Germans were making a supreme effort to reach Stalingrad and argued that ‘the main theatre of the war is Russia … It is in Russia that events count most and will most deeply affect the future progress and even the final result of the war’. The front-page headlines of The Times that summer and autumn of 1942 reveal a dramatic story that gripped the world daily:

31 August: ‘No quarter before Stalingrad’

4 September: ‘Germans closing in on Stalingrad’

5 September: ‘Ferocious battle outside Stalingrad’

7 September: ‘Russians holding firm at Stalingrad

10 September: ‘Costly German advance on Stalingrad’

12 September: ‘Stalingrad to be held at all costs

14 September: ‘Stalingrad fights back step by step’

16 September: ‘Assault on Stalingrad intensified’

17 September: ‘Stalingrad beats off many attacks’

18 September: ‘Fighting in the streets of Stalingrad’

21 September: ‘Street-by-street fight for Stalingrad’

28 September: ‘Night and day battle at Stalingrad’

2 October: ‘Attack after attack on Stalingrad’

3 October: ‘Check to the Germans at Stalingrad’

9 October: ‘Stalingrad defenders holding firm’

19 October: ‘Critical battle for Stalingrad’.

When the battle was over Allied opinion was unanimous that the Soviets had not just won a great victory; they had turned back the Axis tide which had reached a high point of conquest and occupation in mid-1942 (see Map 1, p.xviii–xix). In Britain, the press lauded the Soviet victory at Stalingrad as nothing less than the salvation of European civilisation. In the United States a New York Times editorial of 4 February 1943 was grandiloquent but apt:

‘Stalingrad is the scene of the costliest and most stubborn struggle in this war. The battle fought there to its desperate finish may turn out to be among the decisive battles in the long history of war … In the scale of its intensity, its destructiveness and its horror, Stalingrad has no parallel. It engaged the full strength of the two biggest armies in Europe and could fit into no lesser framework than that of a life-and-death conflict which encompasses the earth.’

Faced with many more hard battles to fight, the Soviet spin on Stalingrad was that the great victory had been won by the unbreakable unity and determination of the Russian peoples, their army and, of course, their leader – Joseph Stalin. In Germany, Nazi propagandists presented the lost battle as a heroic but necessary sacrifice, while at the same time doing all they could to cover up the scale of the defeat.

But there was no escaping the significance of the three days of national mourning that followed the German surrender at Stalingrad in February 1943.

The German summer campaign of 1942 was Hitler’s last major strategic offensive, his last real chance of winning the Second World War. At Stalingrad the strategic initiative passed to the Soviets, and they never lost it. The road from Stalingrad did not lead directly to Berlin. There were many more battles and campaigns for the Soviets to fight and win (and sometimes lose). But after Stalingrad the question was when and how the war would be won, not whether it would be won.

Fifty years after its conclusion the great battle had lost none of its allure. In the late 1990s Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad sold half a million copies worldwide, while the battle bestseller of an earlier generation, William Craig’s Enemy at the Gates, inspired a major motion picture about the contest between German and Soviet snipers in the city.

Like many of the films and documentaries, much of the attention in the literature has focused on the desperate struggle for the city itself. But Stalingrad is a story of a campaign as well as a city battle. Having failed to conquer Soviet Russia in his Blitzkrieg campaign of 1941, Hitler set out to acquire the means to conduct a long war of attrition on the Eastern Front in summer 1942. Above all, that meant oil: the protection of existing German oil resources in Rumania, the capture of the oil fields of the Caucasus deep in the Soviet south, and the denial of oil supplies to Central and Northern Russia.

Ironically, Stalingrad was not really the main target of Operation Blau (Blue), the German campaign in Southern Russia that began in June 1942 (see Map 3, p.xxi). The Germans advanced on Stalingrad aiming not so much to take the city, as to destroy the Soviet armies in the territory between the great Don and Volga rivers. By August, however, capturing ‘the city of Stalin’ had become the pivot of the German campaign on the Eastern Front. The city’s strategic location on the Volga meant that its capture by the Germans would cut Soviet supplies from the Baku oil fields – by far the most important source of fuel for Stalin’s war machine. Having taken Stalingrad, the plan was to establish a defensive position that would enable the redeployment of German forces to an ongoing campaign in the Caucasus. And since Soviet forces defending the Caucasus would also have been isolated by the capture of Stalingrad, victory in the oil war – the main German goal of the southern campaign – would then be in sight.

In addition to strategy, psychology and symbolism played an important part in the battle and its outcome. Stalingrad’s former name was Tsaritsyn. In 1918–19, during the Russian civil war, the future Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, organised the defence of the city against counter-revolutionary armies seeking to overthrow the Bolshevik regime which had seized power in Russia in 1917. When Stalin succeeded Lenin as the leader of the Soviet Communist Party in the 1920s, the city was renamed in his honour. The capture of Stalingrad by the Germans would have been a severe blow to the Soviet leader’s prestige, as well as denying him access to his oil.

The problem was that Stalingrad did not fall to the Germans. By October 1942 most of the city was in German hands, but a heroic Soviet defence saved the city from complete enemy occupation. Crucially, control of the Volga remained in Soviet hands and Soviet supplies continued to flow across the river to the embattled Red Army defenders of Stalingrad holding out in a few square miles of rubble in what had once had been a city. The aim of Operation Blau had been to draw the Soviet forces into open battle and to destroy them. Instead, the Germans found themselves drawn into a costly, exhausting and ultimately disastrous war of attrition in the ruins of Stalingrad.

Meanwhile, the Soviets had been preparing their counterstroke. In November 1942 the Red Army launched a massive counter-offensive which broke through the German flanks north and south of the city and encircled the German 6^th Army in Stalingrad. In December the Germans attempted to rescue the 6^th Army by a breakthrough operation from out with the Soviet encirclement. When this failed, Hitler fell back on air supply for delivery of essential support and provisions to the trapped 6^th Army. The Luftwaffe flew many thousands of missions but supplies ran far short of the hundreds of tons of food, ammunition and medical supplies required daily by the quarter of a million troops inside the Kessel (or cauldron, as the Germans called the encircled area of their forces in Stalingrad). In January 1943 the Soviets renewed their offensive, this time aiming to liquidate the Kessel. The emaciated, demoralised and disease-ridden defenders of the Kessel were no match for the seven Soviet armies which rapidly reduced the Kol’tso (the ring) as the Soviets called it.

On 31 January the Soviets captured the commander of the 6^th Army, Field Marshal Fredrich Paulus – the highest ranking of the 24 German generals who surrendered at Stalingrad. Two days later the remaining German forces in Stalingrad capitulated.

The loss of the 6^th Army – an elite fighting force of the German army – was catastrophic enough. It was the biggest and most traumatic defeat in German military history and the myth of the invincible Wehrmacht was gone forever. But the overall strategic picture was even worse. By the end of the Stalingrad campaign Germany and its Axis allies on the Eastern Front had suffered casualties of a million and a half dead, wounded and captured. Nearly 50 divisions – almost the whole of five armies – had been lost. In the Caucasus, the German armies beat a rapid retreat north and barely escaped entrapment themselves. In the central sector, in front of Moscow, German Army Group Centre survived a major Soviet offensive launched simultaneously with the one at Stalingrad, but took heavy casualties and the threat of renewed Russian attack remained. In the north the Germans still surrounded Leningrad, as they had done since 1941, but in January 1943 the land blockade was breached and it was only a matter of time before the siege of the Soviet Union’s second city would be completely lifted. By spring 1943 the Germans were outnumbered two to one on the Eastern Front and outgunned many more times over. In the summer the Germans attempted to stabilise their defensive position by launching a great tank offensive at Kursk in the central sector, but this was another battle they lost, and it was one from which their famed Panzer forces never recovered.

The Soviets paid a high price for their victories. The Stalingrad campaign alone cost an estimated 2.5 million casualties. But no-one, either at the time or subsequently, seriously doubted that it was worth it. The Soviet victory at Stalingrad was the turning point in the war on the Eastern Front and the Eastern Front was the main front of the Second World War. More than 80 per cent of all combat during the Second World War took place on the Eastern Front. The Germans suffered in excess of 90 per cent of their total war losses on the Eastern Front: 600 divisions destroyed by the Soviets; ten million dead, wounded, missing or captured. As the war progressed the western Allied contribution to the land war in Europe grew proportionately. Following the D-Day landings of June 1944, the American, British, Canadian and other allies deployed a two million strong force in France against about a million German defenders. However, even in summer 1944 there were still twice as many Germans serving on the Eastern Front, as in western theatres.

The Germans blamed their defeat at Stalingrad on the vagaries of the weather, on the logistical difficulties of operating in the vast expanses of Russia, and, above all, on the seemingly inexhaustible Soviet manpower reserves. After the war, but not at the time, the favourite sport of retired German generals was attacking Hitler for his meddling in military affairs and his tactical and strategic errors in relation to Stalingrad and other campaigns.

Soviet propagandists, on the other hand, depicted Stalingrad as a triumph for the Soviet socialist system. The Soviet Union, they argued, had out-produced, out-fought and out-lasted Nazi Germany. Underlying that victory, they argued, was a superior socialist economic system, a dynamic political and military leadership and, above all, a people united in their determination to resist Nazi invasion, conquest and occupation.

Curiously, an inverse theme may be found in the writings of many anti-communist critics of the Soviet system. Their argument is that the Soviet system did indeed triumph at Stalingrad but only because it was authoritarian, brutal and ruthless, more so even than the Nazi regime. There is some truth in this, but it stretches credibility to believe that such a victory could have been achieved solely on the back of fear, discipline and regimentation. The Soviet regime dispensed plenty of that during the battle of Stalingrad, but it also inspired and organised an unparalleled heroic defence. Similarly, while Hitler and his generals made many critical mistakes, so did Stalin and the Soviets. Overall Soviet resources and reserves were superior to those of the Germans, but at many critical moments in the battle for Stalingrad the Wehrmacht’s front-line forces and firepower were far greater than the Red Army’s. German under-estimation of Soviet strength was a major factor in their defeat at Stalingrad, but there was nothing pre-ordained about the successful mobilisation and deployment of Soviet material superiority – that was a matter of effective politics and economics. The Soviets were able to maintain the morale of their armed forces in the most calamitous circumstances and to sustain a war mobilisation that produced the resources necessary to win the battle and, ultimately, the war. And, for all its ideological and political rigidities, the Soviet system was also able to foster a professional military leadership and officer corps that matched and then surpassed that of the Wehrmacht, the conqueror of continental Europe, most of North Africa and, in 1941–2, a good deal of Russia.

At the pinnacle of the Soviet system stood Stalin. During the war Stalin was Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, Commissar for Defence and Chairman of the GKO (Gosudarstvennyi Komitet Oborony or State Defence Committee), whilst at the same time remaining head of the Communist Party and the government. No other war leader exercised as close and detailed control over all aspects of the war effort as did Stalin.

Unlike Hitler, Stalin has generally had a good press from his military commanders – at least from those who survived his dictatorship. In Soviet military memoirs there is much criticism of Stalin’s failure to anticipate the German invasion in June 1941, a failure that was very costly in the early days of the war, and some complaint about his predilection for offensive rather than defensive action. More common, however, is testimony to his grasp of military strategy and doctrine, his command of the details of operations, the decisiveness and clarity of his decision making, and his willingness to accept professional advice. During the war Stalin was a team player, a leader with unchallengeable power, but one whose leadership fell far short of the over-powering domination and idiosyncrasy of Hitler.

Of course, Stalin was as brutal, ruthless and authoritarian as the system he presided over. He had no compunction about sacrificing huge numbers of lives in order to achieve his goals. His was the authority under which Soviet soldiers were executed for cowardice and desertion during the war, some 13,500 during the battle of Stalingrad alone. As the Germans advanced across Russia, Stalin ordered the execution of tens of thousands of political prisoners, lest they fall into the hands of the enemy. He was ruthless in the application of a ‘scorched earth’ policy as the Red Army retreated across Russia. He showed no hesitation in purging and punishing commanders who failed him. In July 1941 he ordered the execution of the commander of the Soviet Western Front, General Dmitrii Pavlov, blaming him for the initial success of the German invasion of Russia. Several members of Pavlov’s staff perished with him. All of these officers were ‘rehabilitated’ after Stalin’s death in 1953. On the other hand, Stalin was pragmatic enough to release from prison a number of disgraced and purged Red Army commanders, including General Konstantin K. Rokossovsky, who led the final Soviet ...