Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943

On September 24, Hitler dismissed his army chief of staff, General Franz Halder. The two had been clashing over Hitler’s tendency to interfere in military planning. A series of further office reshuffles followed, part of Hitler’s “Nazification” (145) of the army. In Stalingrad, Soviet losses were roughly double that of the Germans, but the German army was stretched. It had to assault the city and garrison the wide steppe landscape behind it. Paulus’s reserves were running low.

The urban warfare in Stalingrad was unique, centered on assaulting and clearing fortified houses with machine guns, submachine guns, and flamethrowers. German soldiers dubbed it the Rattenkrieg (rat war). Ten-man assault teams dominated combat in the city instead of generals, worrying the German high command. Chuikov, conversely, had planned around fragmenting the large German assault plans by using heavily garrisoned buildings, mined roads, artillery barrages from the east bank of the Volga, and hidden tanks to ambush attacking units. Soviet artillery spotters and snipers would also hide at the top of ruined buildings, using their positions to spot German units and pick off vulnerable targets. He also utilized night attacks, which terrified German soldiers.

Some of Chuikov’s garrisons became cut off as Germans advanced into the city, suffering supply shortages, especially of water. To the Soviet soldiers, alcohol and tobacco rations became essential for coping with the fighting. Some went as far as to drink surgical spirits and industrial alcohol.

Medical aid was not exceptionally important to Soviet command, but units of largely female medical orderlies would crawl forward into the city to retrieve soldiers and bring them across the Volga. Behind the lines, aid was not quick in coming; many died waiting or suffering within poorly equipped hospitals.

On September 25, large-scale German attacks were launched in the hopes they could force Russians out of the city, but these were pre-empted and failed. Further German attacks starting September 29 reduced the remaining pocket of Soviet resistance in northern Stalingrad after 10 days of fighting, and Chuikov began to doubt if he could hold Stalingrad. Simultaneously, the Nazi leaders were worried about the huge casualties they were suffering.

Beevor quotes a Soviet veteran who said that the Russians were ideologically prepared to pay the cost of defending Stalingrad. During the battle, the Soviets enforced strict rules that led to the execution of 13,500 of its own men, often on charges of desertion. Desertions, when they did occur, were mostly from the civilian militia or reinforcements rushed into the city. The authorities were not careful in meting out discipline: Some injured soldiers who went to field hospitals were listed as missing, and then executed when they returned to their units. To deter desertion, the family members of deserters were also punished. Ultimately, combatant and civilian life was treated as dispensable.

The soldiers were better supplied than the civilians trapped in Stalingrad. Over 10,000 civilians remained in the city throughout the battle. They struggled to find food, which had been confiscated, and many were killed by soldiers on either side when they tried to take it. Any Russian civilians suspected of aiding the Germans were killed immediately. The Germans executed thousands of Russians and transported hundreds of thousands to Germany to use as forced labor. Prisoners of war were interrogated by each side to gain information and the Germans would sometimes use captured Russians as human shields in front-line military formations. After the battle, Soviet authorities killed any Russian soldiers found amongst the German troops, considering them traitors.

On September 30, Hitler claimed that the German army would never leave the Volga. German generals realized that they would not be allowed to break off combat: Stalingrad had become a battle of prestige between Hitler and Stalin.

By early October, Stalingrad was turning into a stalemate. The Soviets had fortified crucial buildings that the Germans could not take and they kept up pressure on the German army through continual small-scale counterattacks. When the Sixth Army was able to make progress, they often still had to fight against isolated pockets of resistance which held on tenaciously. However, when Stalin ordered Chuikov to try to reclaim the city, Chuikov disregarded the order as impossible. Crossings on the Volga were increasingly threatened by German guns, and his only chance of surviving the battle was by using his heavy artillery on the Volga’s eastern bank for massive artillery bombardments against assaulting Germans. In the first week of October, as German reinforcements entered the city, German attacks grew heavier, but progress remained slow and costly.

In the second week of October, fighting lulled as the Germans prepared for another attack. Paulus had been ordered to seize the northern part of the city and the Dzerzhinsky Tractor Factory in the north of the city. Chuikov had guessed this move and reinforced the area with soldiers from the center of the city. On October 14, the offensive was launched and managed to capture most of the tractor factory after a fierce armored battle around it. For the next six days, the Germans made progress and cut off elements of the Soviet forces in the north from the rest of the city. Requests to withdraw in this area were denied.

It was during the battles for the north of Stalingrad that the defense of Pavlov’s House occurred. In this famous 58-day battle over a four-story building, Soviet forces fought under the command of Sergeant Jakob Pavlov and managed to hold the building until the German defeat. After the battle, Chuikov would claim that more Nazis died fighting for this building than in the capture of Paris.

Beevor explores the morale of the Russian soldiers. In their letters home, they focused on three themes: inquiries about the family, reassurances of their health, and their preoccupation with the battle. Though they struggled to express the range of emotions caused by the siege in writing, many linked their battle in the city with the broader need to defend their country and family. One Soviet lieutenant told his wife he could not distinguish between his duty and his wish to defend her. Soldiers latched on to the images of the snipers, who were quickly becoming the heroes of the urban war. Myths spread about larger-than-life figures, especially the famed sniper Zaitsev who was said to outwit the best Germans. Medals were created for the best among them, and a “sniper cult” (205) arose. The most common target for a sniper was not, in fact, other snipers, but artillery spotters or those carrying supplies to the front line. As well as the inspirational snipers, Soviet units were kept in line through the iron fist rule of the police battalions. Executions remained common.

German divisions continued to push into the city, briefly reaching the Volga on October 18. Eventually, the 62nd Army was reduced to owning just a few bridgeheads west of the Volga.

Outside of Stalingrad, German soldiers were primarily concerned with preparing for winter, for which they had yet to receive adequate provisions. Morale varied, greatly depending on if the post was able to arrive.

By the end of October, the German offensive in Stalingrad had petered out due to exhaustion and a lack of ammunition. Also at this time, far to the north of Stalingrad, Soviet raids had penetrated deep into territory held by the Romanian army, revealing the weakness of the German flanks.

In November, the German tactics in Stalingrad changed. They avoided the large formations that Soviet artillery had become proficient at destroying and switched to small teams that could exploit weak spots, but this could not dramatically change the tide. To soothe the fears of slow progress, Hitler claimed in a November 8 speech that he wanted to avoid casualties, so he was not pressing the army to attack. The next day, winter began in Russia, and the Volga started to freeze.

On November 11, the final German assault in Stalingrad began. Newly organized battlegroups attacked the remaining areas of Russian resistance, but still could not evict the 62nd Army. Paulus, under incredible pressure from Hitler to take Stalingrad, converted Panzer crews into infantry units to replenish losses and continued the attack but this only wasted trained tankers. By mid-November, most of the infantry units in the Sixth Army were exceptionally weak, and many German commanders worried that they did not have the troops to fight into spring.

The original idea for Operation Uranus, the planned Soviet counterattack against Army Group B, dated to September 12. That it was given adequate time to be prepared is surprising considering Stalin’s usual impatience. On September 12, in a meeting Stalin had with Zhukov and another general named Vasilevsky, he asked them why earlier Russian offensives had failed. Stalin was told that for an attack to succeed, it needed a full-strength army supported by tanks, artillery, and aviation. The next day, Zhukov and Vasilevsky proposed to Stalin that they tie down the German army in Stalingrad while assembling fresh, hidden armies. These would be used to attack the weak Romanian flanks and encircle the Sixth Army. Stalin was initially doubtful of the idea, but he was eventually convinced. In late September, Zhukov began inspecting the northern flank of the German salient—the bulge in German lines that reached Stalingrad—while Vasilevsky toured the southern flank. They confirmed that the Romanian sectors on both flanks were weak points.

On October 17, all civilians in villages near the planned Soviet assault were evacuated and soldiers hid in their homes to maintain secrecy. The plan was settled on—a simultaneous assault on the Romanian sectors of the northern and southern flanks in the German salient, eventually meeting at Kalach, on the Don. It would occur 100 miles west of Stalingrad so that the mechanized units of the Sixth Army would be unable to react quickly. Zhukov and Vasilevsky employed 60% of the Red Army’s total tanks to ensure success.

German intelligence failed to identify the massive Russian build-up. They believed that the main Soviet effort would occur near Moscow and that the Soviets were incapable of two simultaneous offensives. When Paulus was given reports about mass Russian strength, he merely passed them on, taking no action to prepare for the threat because he had not received Hitler’s orders to do so. Beevor believes that if he had withdrawn his tanks from the city and prepared for a rapid reaction against Soviet forces, the Sixth Army might have been able to save itself.

Bad weather delayed the Soviet attack until November 19. By this time, over a million Russian men had been assembled around Stalingrad. Most were excited at the chance to finally strike back against the Germans. The Sixth Army had no idea of what was coming; the day before Operation Uranus, their daily report read: “Along the whole front, no major changes. Drift-ice on the Volga weaker than on the day before” (236).