What was stalingrad like

The sugar in the clay kept her alive, but not her little brother who died of hunger and cold. The Sixth Army had pushed through the southern Soviet Union at breathtaking speed, heading for the Caucasus where there was oil, and also for Stalingrad, near the mouth of the strategic River Volga.

There it was that the Red Army made its stand, clinging on to ever-narrower strips of the west bank of the river. The order from Stalin was "No surrender". The order from Hitler was "No retreat". The exact figure for how many soldiers died in Stalingrad is hard to estimate, but it is probably close to a million. The fighting was at incredibly close quarters in the ruins of a once-mighty industrial city. Big guns, tanks, and aircraft were all used against the men standing their ground in the rubble.

The German troops got bogged down in the street fighting as winter closed in. The Soviet troops secretly massed to the East and the North. Then, in a classic pincer movement, they cut off the Sixth Army from its supply lines. Slowly the mighty force that had taken Paris starved and froze to defeat. In Konstanin Duvanov was a soldier of He had retreated all the way from Ukraine with the Red Army back to his home city, Stalingrad.

One of his most vivid memories of the almost unrecognisable city was also the burning Volga. They were the remains of people who were being evacuated across the Volga, when they were bombed.

Konstantin Duvanov fought on in Stalingrad until the end of the battle. By chance he was in the city's Red Square guarding a captured German communications vehicle when - on 31 January - Paulus surrendered in the basement of the Univermag department store, and was led out to a Red Army car. Who was conducting the interviews and why? The interviews were conducted by historians from Moscow who responded to the German invasion in with a plan to document the Soviet war effort in its totality, and from the ground up.

From to , they interviewed close to 5, people — most of them soldiers, but also partisans, civilians who worked in the war economy or fought in the underground, and Soviet citizens who had survived Nazi occupation.

These historians hoped that the published interviews would mobilize readers for the war. They also wanted to create an archival record for posterity. I was struck by how they made this decision as early as fall , when the Soviet Union seemed to be teetering under the German assault. But the historians drew confidence from history, notably the War of , when the Russian people had been able to defeat a technologically superior invader.

Why did Stalingrad become important to the Nazis and the Soviets in ? In what way was it a battle that changed world history? When the Germans resumed their offensive, in spring , their strategic target was the oil fields of the Caucasus.

It was largely because of its symbolic charge that the battle for Stalingrad turned into a decisive showdown between the two regimes. What was the role of world media before and during this battle? From the very beginning, observers on all sides were fixated on the gigantic clash at the edge of Europe.

The global media reports pushed both sides onward. In pubs throughout England, the radio would be turned on for the start of the evening news only to be turned off after the report on Stalingrad had aired. As the battle wore on, many read it as an indication that Germany would lose the war.

The violence and the horror during the fighting for Stalingrad were ferocious. What were the conditions that made the violence and the loss of life so immense? Both regimes mobilized to the utmost to conquer or defend the city. Before entering Stalingrad with troops and tanks, the Germans began with a two-week long carpet-bombing campaign that burned and razed much of the cityscape and took 40, lives. Contemporary observers, German as well as Soviet, agreed that the Red Army troops at Stalingrad fought with enormous fervor.

They only differed in their interpretations of this resistance. What role did Bolshevism play in the fighting? What are your main findings? Communist ideology had an enormous mobilizing power during the war; this is one of the core arguments of my book and it challenges how other scholars have understood the Soviet war effort. The prevailing notion in scholarship is that Stalin was politically bankrupt when the war began — duped by the Germans, on the defensive, and deeply unpopular.

As this interpretation goes, Stalin reacted by shedding communist dogma, embracing Russian nationalism, and adopting a more populist tone. While some of these things indeed happened, they did not signal an abdication of communist rule, quite to the contrary.

My book shows in great detail how Red Army soldiers were inducted into the Communist Party. How did this happen on the ground? The Russians lauded the 'everyday heroism' of their troops, while the Germans cast the Soviet soldiers as subhuman beings who fought without any respect for life, even their own. German casualties were estimated at four hundred thousand men with ninety-one thousand prisoners.

Soviet casualties were estimated at over , Historians have remarked that Stalingrad was the turning point of the fighting on the Eastern Front as it was the first public and large-scale loss suffered by the Germans in that theater of the war.

It also demonstrated high-intensity urban combat at its most violent and brutal under the most challenging of weather conditions. There are many lessons that can be taken from the battle. However, any appreciation of those lessons must be tempered by the caveat that some of them may not be applicable to present-day militaries. For example, Stalingrad took place in a theater with a large number of army groups with a total of a million soldiers involved on each side; modern armies are unlikely to fight with these numbers.

Thus, the analysis on the lessons learned for Stalingrad will focus on those that can be applied to the present environment. Strategically, Stalingrad illustrates that the reasons a nation would engage in high-intensity combat in dense urban terrain against a peer adversary may not be rational. The city was not a decisive piece of terrain for either side, but political reasons came to the fore: Hitler wanted to take the city named after his rival, Stalin; Stalin wanted to ensure that his namesake city did not fall.

Arguably the battle was fought more for pride than for rational military or national objectives. Operational reach is a function of intelligence, protection, sustainment, endurance, and combat power relative to enemy forces. The ability to resupply an army can become more important than tactical capabilities. In high-intensity urban operations a higher number of resources will be needed: four times the amount of ammunition required in non-urban environments and up to three times the amount of consumables such as rations and water are the norm.

Once German forces could no longer be resupplied, they were defeated. Due to the scale, duration, and intensity of the battle, Stalingrad offers enough tactical lessons to fill entire books. The importance of combined arms in urban operations was clearly one of the most important lessons demonstrated.

Commanders like Chuikov and Zhukov who planned the counteroffensive began to receive praise, as did civilians and workers who had contributed to the remarkable victory. Few Germans dared write of the Ostfront in the first decade afterwards, tainted as it was with sickening war crimes against the Soviet people. It was recently serialised on BBC Radio 4. Following the era of glasnost openness associated with Mikhail Gorbachev, objective historians such as Antony Beevor Stalingrad, and Christopher Bellamy Absolute War, were able to study Soviet archives that had been sealed since , and are again harder to access under the Putin regime.

In recent decades, the estimated figure of 20 million Soviet war dead has been revised upwards, with some historians arguing for a total as high as 27 million. We will never know for sure. One of the few historians active in researching the subject was John Erickson, whose Road to Stalingrad and Road to Berlin sold extremely well. It was Beevor and Bellamy who brought the scale of Barbarossa and Stalingrad to a wider audience, through their mix of private accounts and official papers.

However, for political reasons, we in the west have never wanted to acknowledge the sacrifices the Soviets made. Sign in. Back to Main menu Virtual events Masterclasses. The battered city of Stalingrad undergoes artillery fire during its siege by German forces in and Map illustration by Martin Sanders.

German POWs, Stalingrad, Of the almost , taken prisoner, only 5, ever returned to Germany. A Katyusha rocket launcher during the battle for Berlin, April