Dan Snow's History Hit - Stalingrad

Episode Date: December 12, 2022

The Battle of Stalingrad was the deadliest battle of the Second World War, and one of the bloodiest in the history of warfare. Infamous for its atrocious conditions and brutal house-to-house fighting, the battle raged for just over 5 months and concluded with an estimated 2 million casualties. Dan is joined by Iain MacGregor, author of the acclaimed book The Lighthouse of Stalingrad, to hear his thrilling account of history's greatest battle and the key moments that shaped its outcome.Produced by Beth Donaldson and edited by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. 80 years ago, this fall and winter, the Battle of Stalingrad was raging in the southern Soviet city on the Volga River. It's probably the largest battle by numbers of people involved and casualties in human history. Millions of men, thousands of tanks, over a million people killed, wounded, brutalized, taken prisoner. It is an astonishing tale. And it's one that Soviets credit with turning the tide in the Second World War. On this podcast, I'm very lucky to have Ian McGregor. He's just

written a really magisterial book on Stalingrad called The Lighthouse of Stalingrad. He came back from a visit to the city, the modern city, obviously called Volgorad, which he visited during lockdown and just before relations between Russia and the West took their dive earlier this year. He's found all sorts of new material. He's added even more colour, texture and detail to this hugely well-known and hugely important battle. So it's great to have him on this, the 80th anniversary, and at a time when once again tanks are rolling across Eastern Europe. We've got a documentary on Stalingrad coming up on History Hit TV, so as ever, make sure you're subscribing to that. Here's Ian McGregor on history's greatest battle.

T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Ian, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me, Dan.

You've written a giant history of Stalingrad. It's absolutely remarkable. You know, you always think, well, it's a battle. Well-known book's been written on it before, but then you've just come out and written such a magnificent new account. I learned so much.

And I've been to the Blooming City. Let's quickly start with the city itself. It was called Stalingrad, and it turned out to be the kind of totemic clash between Hitler and Stalin. Was its name important to the Soviet dictator or to Hitler himself? Yeah, it was important to both. It was much more important to Stalin at the time than it became important to Hitler once his operation for the summer was starting to unravel. And that's what he was left with. He had to capture Stalin's city. But yeah, it was called Tsaritsyn. So it was a typical case of a village that's geographically in a key place

right by the Arterial River, the Volga, which runs for over 2000 kilometers from north of Moscow, all the way down to the Caspian Sea. vital travel link. So you've got all these villages turning into towns and cities as we progress into the 20th century. Found itself at the epicenter of the Russian Civil War. And that's how it had been originally defended by Stalin himself. So what better way once he'd actually taken control of the country, the civic leaders thought, I know, let's call it after Stalin. That'll curry favor, which it did. So by the time of late 20s, going into the 30s, that's when you get all the money pouring in to make this a Soviet kind of satellite city, 15 kilometers long, stretching like a ribbon along the river. In the south, you've got the old part of Tsaritsyn, which was like wooden shacks, two-story houses, mud streets, some cobbled streets as well. Still quite a lot of peasants living there. In the center is where we're going to talk about, you've got this new dynamic cities just sprung up, big, lovely apartment blocks, grand boulevards, tree lines, lovely parks, department stores in southern Russia, unheard of, where you could buy everything

that you could get if you were in Moscow, which they constantly bragged about. And that's where you've got, obviously, the party headquarters and all these specialists and engineers that were now flooding into Stalingrad because they were building in the north of the city, this giant complex of factories, which were part of Stalin's five-year plans, obviously, big industrialization improvements going on in agriculture. So that originally they were going to just build and they were building thousands and thousands of tractors and farming equipment for everything that was going on in the Ukrainian steppe and elsewhere. But obviously as war came, as a lot of factories were across the

world, they get retooled and they're now making tanks and armor plating for ground attack aircraft, artillery pieces. So it wasn't important for lots of reasons, geographically with the river and the connections there, but also the fact that it was an armament center and it was named after Stalin, perfect place. Hitler thought we have to capture that. It was only meant to be a strategic place where they would capture the river, stop river traffic going up to supply the Red Army further north. And if they had to, they'd surround the city. They were never meant to take the city. It was simply to protect the eastern flank as the bulk of Army Group South was commencing this giant offensive to go down into the Caucasus and capture the oil,

which was the key. That was the key. That was Hitler's big plan for summer of 1932. It didn't work. And they didn't cap, well, they captured some of the oil wells, which was the key. That was the key. That was Hitler's big plan for summer of 1932. It didn't work and they didn't cap, well, they captured some of the oil wells, but not the main ones. And they got bogged down in the Caucasus and gigantic distances involved and logistics running out. So this sixth army under Paulus, or this group under General Paulus,

ends up, Stalingrad becomes the kind of, oh God, we've got to show something for the summer's work. Let's grab onto Stalin's city. And so that begins this, it's always one of these crazy stories, not unlike Verdun perhaps, that this unimaginable bloodletting begins for sort of, it's not really central to anyone's plans at the beginning of the summer. Not at all. I mean, it's the Grand Offensive, which had begun late June, 20th of June, was meant to capture the oil. I mean, obviously, Germany was now in a fight for its life on a global stage.

It declared war on America towards the end of the year previously. So it was a case of we need this oil to keep the war machine going if we're fighting on multiple fronts, which they knew they were going to be. To capture Stalingrad, like I said, was strategically important, but it was just one piece of the plan. It starts unraveling because the Germans found themselves being surprised by the fact that the Red Army this time was fighting, and fighting really hard, where instead of waiting to be surrounded by whatever armoured units are thrusting on their flanks and surrounding them, as it happened in Barbarossa the year before, it was a case of they were being a bit more clever now

and they were slowly retreating, putting up a fight, falling back to the next step, putting up a fight, falling back to the next step. So Paulus' 6th Army, part of Army Group B, so Army Group A was heading down south to the Caucasus, Army Group B was going across to the Volga. They were in a fight too. I mean, it was grinding their way forward.

It's maybe a slight misconception that they just instantly juggernaut their way towards Stalingrad, but they'd lost a lot of troops, a lot of armor, quite a few planes on the way because the Russians were putting up such a fight, but the Germans were still winning. So by the time you get to August 23rd and you've got the Germans in the north of the city at Stalingrad and you've got the famous shots of the tank men looking out over the vast expanse of woods on the eastern side of the Volga in the sunshine. That's when the Luftwaffe struck the city. And that's when Paulus is obviously under orders to quickly take the city, as they had taken many other Soviet cities quite quickly the year before. And they had at the beginning of Operation Blue, they'd taken Rostov and Voronezh very

quickly. They thought Stalingrad might be the same, but this is a much bigger city, much bigger fight. And let's quickly deal with the Luftwaffe, some of the heaviest air raids of all time, it seems, just absolutely destroy the city. And the Luftwaffe commander reports there's no much more point going on with it because every target of any importance has been destroyed. Yeah, I mean, they absolutely flattened it. I mean, it was very similar to obviously things like Hamburg, Dresden, Rotterdam at the beginning of the war, where waves and waves of German bombers and dive bombers, especially, are just picking out targets. And yes, they flattened the city. But one of the things I found when I was over there and doing the research, one of the key things I wanted to find out whether it was true or not was, did these massive civilian

casualties happen? And yes, the city was absolutely jam-packed full of civilians because the city was normally 400,000 people lived there. But by the time the Germans were there, that had doubled because obviously refugees are fleeing eastwards. So it's about double the number that you would have. So when the Germans struck, you get these stories of 40,000 people were killed on the first day, one of the most incredible bombing attacks in one day other than Hiroshima. But when I was looking at the

actual casualty lists for all the districts in the city, when I was sitting in the city archives two years ago, the most I could find was just over 1,800. So I'm not saying it didn't happen. I'm just looking at official records and that's what I could find. So obviously a lot of people did die. I mean, 1,800 is still a big number, but I don't think it's near the 40,000. And that was just one of the things I found. I thought, okay, this is telling me a different story. After that heavy air assault, German forces move in and discover a very different landscape to the one that they'd be used to dashing across on the open steppe. It's a very long city. So it's not something like maybe it's a couple of miles wide and then it might be a couple of miles deep,

like most big towns and cities were. So you know you've got enough forces to either surround it and bypass it and then capture it later. Or you can take it, as like I said, they've done with Rostov and Voronezh, which were big cities too. But with Stalingrad, because it's over 15 kilometers long, it's only probably about a mile to a mile and a half deep in places. Then you're onto the River Volga. It's a different proposition. So you've got a very, very long line that you'll need enough troops and tanks

and aircraft to actually break through the Russian lines. So what the Germans did was, there's obviously classic tactics of piercing the line in a couple of places with superior firepower, superior troops, breaking through the line, taking the Russians by surprise and driving to the Volga. driving to the Volga. And again, some of the German testimonies that I've read, especially some of the commanders as well, they just had this belief that if they got to the Volga, that's it, they'll capture the city, they'll beat the Red Army, they'll be in full retreat, and possibly the offensive will succeed and the war might be over. That's how they fooled themselves. But it wasn't the case, because yes, they destroyed well over% to 90% of the city in the bombing raids, but they created the perfect ambush tactics for defending what's left of a defending army, which was Chuikov's 62nd Army in the center and Shumilov's 64th Army in the south of the city.

It's perfect ambush territory, like I said. Enemy can't see you. You're surviving in the sewers, in bunkers. A lot of the modern city in the center were built with reinforced concrete cellars, which are perfect. They're the things that weren't destroyed. So the houses above the ground were all shattered. There's a few ruins that we know you see these famous photographs of. But a lot of the Russians were in these, what were and turned into perfect little mini fortresses. And that's what the Germans had to take, building by building, street by street, and obviously, as we talk about room by room as well.

You mentioned some of the new sources that you discovered. Tell me about that one that you and I were DMing about on Twitter. Extraordinary new German source, a battle group commander, regimental commander. Tell me about him. Colonel Friedrich Fritz Roska, and he was a regimental commander of infantry regiment 194 of the 71st division of Paulus's 6th Army. And that was one of the key frontline divisions that had fought its way since Barbarossa. And obviously, it'd been in the campaign in France in 1940. Normally, they'd be about 14,000 strong, like many divisions. By the time they got to Stalingrad, they suffered a lot,

and they're probably down to about 65% strength. And Roscoe was a new guy. He turned up because they were taking losses of combat officers on the front line. And he volunteered to go to Stalingrad. He thought, that's where I want to be. Because by a quirk of fate, he'd actually taught a lot of the officers in the 71st Division at a military tactics school in Dresden. So he felt, well, I'll go with these guys. I know some of them. I know their divisional commander. So he's instantly given command of this regiment. And he was the one that led this shock attack with what was left of his regiment. He amalgamated three battalions into two because that's all he had left. And they were the first Germans to get en masse as a unit to the

Volga, which caused consternation in Moscow with Stalin and jubilation, obviously, in Hitler's headquarters. And I found Roska's papers, which are incredible for a historian. It's almost like the hairs on the back of your neck go up when you open the package. And I'd been dealing with his son, Roska's last surviving son, a guy called Uwe, who is about 82 now, but he was one of five children. And they'd kept their father's papers since he returned from, he survived the battle, obviously, and he survived 12 years in captivity. He was just at the very tip of the spirit of general. The excitement about the papers are he's an eyewitness to the whole battle. He's one of

the first units in the city. He's in the heart of the fighting for house to house, room by room, everything else. He then survives the encirclement. He's leading his troops in the encirclement. So it's over five months of combat. He was severely injured, wouldn't leave his troops, stayed there. He's actually the major eyewitness that's been missing in history for the last 80 years that saw the surrender with Paulus and was actually pretty much in charge of the surrender with Paulus. Yes, Paulus makes his last headquarters. People may have seen those pictures or have a sense of those last few hours because he was the last coherent unit of the German army at that point. Yeah, because they stayed where they were. The pieces of the heart of the city that Rosca's division had won, by the time we're halfway

through the battle, even before the Operation Uranus, where the Russians counterattack, the 71st Division was almost stood down. It was in a quiet area now because they'd won almost all of that part of the city. So they were making, as most soldiers would do as winter's coming, they're making their own headquarters and billets for their men and everything else. their own headquarters and billets for their men and everything else. And so that was the area that a lot of troops flocked to once the Russian counterattack was in full swing. They knew that, oh, there's a unit here that's still intact, is still fighting really well. Let's all get back to there. And we should say before we leave him behind, he was in captivity for how long after the battle? Almost 12 years. And he was right the way through the Russian archipelago,

Siberia, all the way down to the Caucasus. One of the last Germans to return after the war. Yeah, came back in 55 and put all his personal papers together in this briefcase that I was sent. And then sadly hung himself Christmas Day, 1956. And the family still don't know why, but as you and I would imagine, what he went through probably had survivor's guilt, PTSD, a whole mixture of mental health problems, I would

imagine. Just an astonishing, astonishing story. The battle, the famous expression, Rat and Krieg, sort of rat warfare. You're in sewers, they're fighting room to room, they're breaking through walls and ceilings, and there is no such thing as a front line. It's a meat grinder. The Soviets have their headquarters in a particularly capacious, at one point, according to your book. The book is about two opposing divisions. So against Roska's division,

the 71st was Alexander Radintsev's famous 13th Guards Rifle Division. And once Roska has captured and got to the Volga embankment in the heart of the city and captured some major strategically important buildings like the main railway station, that kind of thing. One of the freshest divisions that's on its way to the eastern bank of the Volga is sent straight

in and that's Radunsev's 13th Guards. And they've been through the meat grinder as well over the past 18 months. They had a lot of new recruits they had to bed in. But unlike the movie, which we all know, Enemy at the Gates, and Jude Law's in this 13th Guards, where they're sent across with virtually no weapons and chopped out by their own men. Obviously, that didn't happen. It's nonsense. Radim said men had to wait quite a few hours until the supplies arrived. So they went over very heavily armed with the famous PPSH submachine guns, some artillery and grenades, because they knew what they were going to go into. And they launched this almost suicidal, Saving Private Ryan style

assault during the night, took Rosca's units by surprise, as well as some other neighboring units, and just pushed them back through the city. And as we all know, the Germans are excellent at counterattacking. And that's what happened, obviously, in the hours and days going forward. And that's where you get the Ratten Creek. So from September 14th is when that began, where you're fighting for your very life for houses, rooms, and sewers. And that's what I try and capture, because that was the whole point of going to the Russian archives to try and find the testimonies of the men that had fought against Roska's unit. And you describe some of those Rodmintsev units had effectively 100% casualties. Roughly about 10,000 in his division that went over.

And I mean, the attrition rates, the ratio is something ridiculous. You had 24 hours of life expectancy when you went into the cauldron of Stalingrad if you're a Russian soldier. In the first few months of the battles, the Germans had such superiority in artillery and air support, specifically air support. The Germans ruled the skies over the city. The 13th Guards of the original 10,000 that went over, there was probably about just over 200 original members left by the end of the battle. But then the 71st Division, when I checked their records, Roscoe was in charge of, and like I said,

it's well over 9,000 men that went into the city. There was 187 left on active duty by the day of the surrender. You're listening to Dan Snow's History here. We're talking about Stalingrad. More after this. Gone Medieval is History Hit's podcast dedicated to the greatest millennium in human history. I'm Dr Kat Jarman, a Viking Age bioarchaeologist and author. And I'm Matt Lewis, a medievalist and writer.

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Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. The fighting grinds on. Hitler is forced to commit more and more that pioneer battalions in the north of the city are very struck by to try and capture

the big factories in the north. Germans making advances, but measured in yards and in thousands of casualties. At what stage do the Soviets realise that they have an opportunity outside the city for counterattacking? Zhukov and Vasilevsky,

who are the two key senior strategic commanders that were with Stalin up in Moscow, and were his kind of firemen in terms of how they were going to hold fronts. And Zhukov had been the hero outside the gates of Moscow the year before and led the counterattack. And he'd also helped with the defense of Leningrad when it was surrounded at the beginning of the war. They had actually discussed with Stalin when he had the news that, oh my God, there's a German division that's broken its way through our defenses and got to the river. So back in September 13th, 14th, that's when they started murmuring the idea of, because they could look at the map and see that this Army Group B is massively overextended by over a thousand000 kilometers, all the way along,

punching this hole into their lines. And they knew that if they could hold them at Stalingrad, draw them in, draw in a lot of their strength, they would have to weaken their flanks to guard huge amounts of territory to the north and to the south of the city. I mean, we're not talking 20, 30 kilometers. We're talking hundreds of kilometers. I mean, that's why it was called the Stalingrad Front. It was hundreds of kilometers long, north and south. They knew there was an opportunity there. They could see it themselves. And the more they were relying the Germans on their Axis partners, who for the first time were with them on this grand offensive. They hadn't been the year before, but they were now. So you've got Hungarian, primarily Romanian troops, and some Italians that didn't have

the discipline. More importantly, they didn't have the mobile artillery that you would need to try and take on T-34 tanks coming at you in the mist, the winter mist, which is what happens. And that led to the crunch. And so Paulus wasn't stupid. He knew his troops were being drawn into this battle in the city, and he knew that his flanks would be weak. And he'd asked three, four, five times, can we withdraw and set up a stronger line? But he was always refused because Hitler had to have this city. And by the time of the counterattack, they had 95% of the city. They'd almost got it. There was literally slithers

of territory that Chuukov's 62nd Army was holding onto that barely were in some places 150 meters in depth before you're in the river. And I love when you mention the fact that Chuikov thought something weird was going on because he was being given troops, but just enough troops, just enough to hold these little fragments of the west bank of the river. And he thought something must be going on because why aren't they just rushing huge amounts of reinforcements? And he thought something must be going on because why aren't they just rushing huge amounts of reinforcements? And the Soviets were sending their reinforcements to the great open steps to the north and south of the approaches to the city. And did so almost unnoticed. Unnoticed to hit, man, obviously. They were getting reports through this buildup.

You can't hide that many men. It's well over a million men, well over a thousand tanks to the north and to the south. And surprisingly, thousands of Cossacks on horseback as well would be going in once the tanks had gone through. But Hitler and his acolytes simply would not believe that they were capable of bringing online so many fresh troops. They just didn't think they had it in them. With the amount of casualties that the Russians had suffered over 18 months of fighting, they killed over 3 million Russian troops and they captured over 3 million Russian troops. You must think, well, we must be breaking the back of them sooner or later. But I think Stalin had at least, I think, 13 million were called up to the colors after Barbarossa. I mean, it's just insane. And obviously, he'd moved the

bulk of the factories that were making, churning just insane. And obviously he'd moved the bulk of the factories that were making, churning out all these armaments had been moved east of the Urals. And so it was by the time you've got to Uranus on November the 19th, that's where all these fresh troops and more fresh tanks are coming online. They've been saving them because Chukov had to hold on, like you were just saying, he was getting a trickle through just enough to hold on. It always seems to be in the nick of time an artillery bombardment would save, decimate a German advance that was just about to get to the river, or another division suddenly got over there and was fed into, as you said, the meat grinder, and they were decimated.

I could have written several books on just one division, Soviet division, that came across the river and within days, gone. That happened dozens of times. And that's why you've got such huge casualties. Chukov's famous utterance was, time is blood. He lives by that. He commanded by that. It's quite an unsubtle commander. Just very much kind of, on you go, boys.

Go for it. We just got to stop the juggernaut. And you mentioned Operation Uranus there, or Uranus, or whatever we're calling the planet these days. It begins on the 19th of November, 1942, so 80 years ago this November, which is hugely resonant, isn't it? And the Soviets fall, I mean, both in the north and the south. Yeah, it's over 24 hours. So November 19th, just after seven o'clock in the morning, the Northern Front, so that's guarded by the Romanian Third Army, they crash into them. And that's along a 320 kilometer front, shows you how many troops that were using the Russians. And then in the south a day later, it was the Romanian Fourth Army that got it in the neck. And that's along a 200 kilometer front. And they were going to soften them up with huge artillery.

the 200 kilometer front and they were going to soften them up with huge artillery and then the tanks go in and like i was saying you're talking well over a thousand tanks completely took them by surprise both romanian armies just don't have the defenses they put up a good fight but it only lasted hours and then they haven't got the mobile artillery to take on these armored formations coming through so when they do break through they're going to encircle the 6th Army at a strategic transport hub 50 kilometres behind Stalingrad called Kalach. And that's what they did. And that's where you get these famous scenes that were recreated by Soviet propaganda months later after the battle

where you've got those formations joining together in the snow. Very Cecil B. DeMille, but that's what happened. And then obviously, Paulus' Sixth Army's trapped in a very big Kessel, which then over the coming weeks is just ground down until they have to just rely on being in the city, what's left of the city. Kessel being the name given to that kind of cauldron that they were in, surrounded on all sides and taking heat. There was an attempt by the Germans to break in from the West. Hitler denied the 6th Army Impulse the chance to break out towards them, hoping instead that Göring could fly enough supplies by aircraft,

and that just all goes terribly wrong. Hitler, he was thinking maybe we can pull them out, and he changed his mind within hours because famously Göring and Göring's senior commanders had said it's possible. We can, because they'd done it before. They'd supplied, they'd saved, I think it was the 9th Army the year before when the Russians had made their winter counterattack in 1941. They surrounded various big German formations, one of which was a big unit of the 9th Army. The flying in of supplies had worked and they kept them alive, kept them going, and then they broke out and they were rescued. But this is a much bigger deal.

It's a lot more troops. It's well over 300,000 troops that are trapped there. I mean, they didn't have enough aircraft. The Soviet Air Force was a lot stronger by then. And obviously, you've got the winter conditions as well. the encircling Soviet forces are grinding down the German perimeter, which was shrinking and shrinking and shrinking until they start bombarding and then capturing some of the key airports that the Germans needed. So it was really never an option. And as you said, yeah, Winter Storm by Erich von Manstein was going to be the relief force. But again,

he didn't have sufficient troops. I think he had in the end, he had three divisions. But he didn't know how many reinforced Russian-Soviet formations he was going to be up against as he's trying to smash his way through 60 kilometers to the city. Almost gets there, the troops trapped in the city. And I say this because it's in Roska's diary in his letters home that he could hear firing in the distance because he was standing on one of the surviving ruins in the city where he was based. And he could hear it in was based. And he could

hear it in the distance. And he's thinking, help is coming. Once the Soviets knew that the Kessel was intact, they then had an outer line established with even more fresh troops. And they were the ones that were going to meet Manstein's rescue effort and blunt that literally within a matter of a couple of weeks. And then again, the Germans had to retire because that relief column was going to get surrounded and they couldn't have two disasters. And Hitler pointed to his chief of staff. He pointed to Stalingrad on the big map and said,

it's taken so much effort and expended so many lives and material to get there. If we leave there, we are never getting back there. And that's hubris on an enormous scale. What can you do? He's a madman. And then you, through these amazing accounts, you chart the end of the Stalingrad Pocket, just the grim, slow, vice-like grip of a million Soviets pushing in from all sides. Yeah, there's three very large armies coming in all directions, heavy armor, Yeah, there's three very large armies coming in all directions, heavy armor, et cetera, et cetera.

And again, what Rosca's diary and his, because he actually wrote a mini memoir, about 15,000 words. And there's a lot of his diary has gone into that. And it's incredible, actually, because he talks about how he goes on these midnight walks just on his own in the freezing winter. And there's ice flows going down the Volga. And that's where his troops are. And they're well dug in. And like I was saying, that's why stragglers are coming into the city because they can get into his lines that are quite secure at the time. But he's going down there alone as a commander does and just checking out where are the Russians? Will they come over from the Eastern Volga to attack me directly? And he's wondering what's going to happen. What is going to

happen? I keep sending companies of men from my division off to the outer reaches of our Kessel, and I never see them again because they just get completely smashed. And that's how his own division was being bled, and that's why they were down to so few men by the end too. So he captures all that very eloquently in his memoir. He certainly does. And in the end, as we discussed earlier,

General Paulus is made into a field marshal. Hitler hopes he's going to shoot himself because no field marshal has ever been taken by the enemy. The last kernel of organised German resistance is around those big, well-built, heavily fortified buildings that the Germans have got. I always think it's amazing. The thing about Stalingrad is that their furthest point of advance,

basically when they do get to the river, becomes their last holdout as well. Exactly. Well, because you've got to remember, as you were saying earlier, Chukov is still in the city. Once he realises, oh, we've got flank attacks, we've got fresh troops, he's still being ordered, we're going to send you over a trickle of reinforcements. You've still got to keep the pressure up and maintain some kind of offensive against the Germans trapped in the city, which is what he did. Rosker recounts how his own divisional commander, Alexander von Hartmann, takes the kind of Prussian officers' noble way out and just stands above the parapet and just starts taking potshots at the Russians hiding in the ruins across no man's land,

knowing that obviously a Russian sniper is going to take him out, which is exactly what happened. And he was with a party of about five other senior officers and three of them died the same way. So Paulus instantly promotes Rosca. So Rosca is now in charge of what's left of the division. And famously, Paulus is in the divisional headquarters, which is the Univermag department store, which is where those famous photos come from of the final surrender. And Poulos is using Roscoe as a confidant, tells him about his fears. Hindsight's a great thing, isn't it? But he tells Roscoe about he was never in favor of this offensive. He was never in favor of Barbarossa. He knew it wouldn't work

because he was one of the major planners. But they also share quite personal moments as well. I'm not trying to make this into their heroes. I think, as I've said in many talks, especially when I'm talking at colleges, I don't feel any sympathy for them being there, but you wouldn't be human if you didn't think, well, this is quite an emotive situation they're in. But the son, which I think is a perfect story

and it's full circle, the son who gave me the personal papers, who's the only one left alive from Roska's family, he was actually born the day before the German surrender at Stalingrad. And one of the last radio messages that comes through to the 6th Army in Stalingrad, Paulus gives the telegram in a dark corridor in the cellar of the Univermag to Roska to say, oh, by the way, you've had a son. Congratulations. And Roska recounts that and says, I had to go into my own quarters and just have a bit of a cry because I just, you know, I'm not going to see him.

So that to me is quite an emotive subject. I did feel for him because, you know, I'm a father, so you'd be in a machine if you didn't feel sorry for something like that. And those corridors were full of wounded Germans from different units, just some of the most terrible places in history that you could ever find yourself. Yeah, I mean, literally thousands upon thousands of Axis troops as well. There's a lot of Hungarians and Romanians, especially that has fallen back into the city. They're lying where they fell. There's no latrines because they're just going to get mortared or shelled if they go out into the open. There's no medical equipment, it's all run

out. So there's tens of thousands lying in these sewers and bombed out shelters, just waiting to die in the freezing cold. smacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. That's the end of the Battle of Stalingrad. You begin your book with the importance of that battle on later Soviet and Russian generations.

You can never have imagined when you set out on this project that you'd be witnessing the return of large-scale armoured warfare in eastern Ukraine, exactly where they were fighting 80 years ago. What's the importance of that battle now, do you think, for Russians? Well, it's always been important. I mean, as we all know now, but with Putin, he came to power on almost a ticket, didn't really tell the West when he was doing it, but he came on a ticket of I'm going to rebuild Russia, Russian strength. He feels very, and has felt very angry since he's been in power of what happened to Russia and the Soviet Union after the Cold War. And that's always been his raison d'etre is to rebuild that. And he's a student of history,

he's definitely a student of the Great Patriotic War. And his own father was seriously wounded defending Leningrad. His elder brother was killed in action in the Second World War. So like millions and millions of other Russians, it means a hell of a lot to them. And one of the pillars of that is Stalingrad, because to all Russians, the greatest victory, I mean, you can talk about Barbarossa and that failing, you can talk about the greatest tank battle after Stalingrad, which is Kursk in the summer of 43. But to Russians, their biggest victory is Stalingrad because it's just so many boxes are ticked there.

It's the first time this enormous German juggernaut that had been successful throughout the whole of the Second World War up until then was finally stopped. And unlike their counter-offensive the winter before where the Germans hadn't been destroyed, they were destroyed. And it was Stalin's city. And it was a case of a lot of propaganda because the whole of Russia, I'd argue the whole of

the world, because I've looked at a lot of press archives in America, Australia, Canada, India, and obviously the UK, daily news reports all the time, all the way through the summer of 42, all the way through to the Russian victory at the end of January 43. Headline newspapers, Daily Mail, Los Angeles Herald, you name it. They're talking about Stalingrad. The whole world was thinking, can they break the back of the Germans at Stalingrad? And they did. So yeah, Putin's got that.

And it's funny though, because I'm still in contact with a lot of local historians in Volgograd who were very, very welcoming to me two years ago. So I traveled there in lockdown, got a special invite. This new generation that are our age are now in charge of the Volgograd Museum. And they were very keen, I'm not naming names, but they were very keen that the real stories should be told. Things like Lend-Lease. So there were some Lend-Lease equipment that the Red Army used in Stalingrad. But as one of the directors there said to me, they were never allowed to talk about it. They weren't allowed to have it in documents. They certainly, even though they got

the vehicles there, they weren't allowed to have them in the museum. Whereas now he's saying this is the kind of thing we want. Arguably, that's not going to happen in the current situation. But it's that kind of thing. And so these local historians took me out for dinner and said, we're so happy you've come down here because not many people come to the Volgograd archives. They'd rather go to the Ministry of Defense archives in Podolsk, which are fantastic, but Putin's limited access to those now and probably for good. So I felt very fortunate and privileged to go to those now, and probably for good. So I felt very fortunate and privileged to go to the archives, felt very fortunate to meet these guys who I'm still in contact with. And I might add all of them, bar one, are completely against

what's going on in the Ukraine. And one of the things I try and talk to students about when I'm giving my talks on this subject and the book is they've got to remember that it's not just Russian soldiers that fought at Stalingrad. All the ethnic groups were represented, but one of the biggest ethnic groups was Ukrainian. So of an army that suffered, gosh, what, 7 million dead during the war, at least 7 million, I think 1.9 of them were Ukrainian. And that's more casualties than the UK, France, and the USA combined. The general, and I didn't know this until I went there, the general who took Paulus's surrender at the beginning and delivered him to the Soviet headquarters was Ukrainian. He's from the Crimea. And his story would make an amazing book because again, he ended up going through the usual

quite bloody kind of reprisals from people from the Politburo that he'd hacked off because he wouldn't sign off letters saying, oh yeah, they were at Stalingrad. Because everyone wanted to say that I was at Stalingrad, like famously Khrushchev. And this guy Laskin, a major general, he refused to sign off a few Politburo members' testimonies. And so they got their own back. And within six months of taking a surrender at Stalingrad, he was thrown in an NKVD prison, and he was there until Stalin died. Just incredible. Lost the chew over there. Ian McGregor, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. That was amazing. The book is called? The Lighthouse of Stalingrad. The Lighthouse of Stalingrad.

Goodbye, everybody. It's great. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. you