Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 279 - The Battle of Stalingrad: Part 1

Episode Date: October 1, 2023

The story of one of the most horrific battles in all of human history. Part 1/5 Support the show, get the entire series right now: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: David Glantz. Stalingrad I-III Anthony Beevor. Stalingrad. Alexander Hill. The Red Army and the Second World War. Chris Bellamy. Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War.

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast, but I guess you probably already knew that. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at www.patreon.com slash lionsledbydonkeys. Just $5 per month gets you every regular episode early, access to our community discord, a digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, as well as its audio book read by me, The Hooligans of Kandahar, as well as its audiobook read by me, and over five years of bonus content. By supporting the show, you support us and allow us to keep our show as it has always been ad-free. If you want to get access to the entire series now, support us on Patreon at the $5 level. Thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoy the show.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe, level. Thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoy the show. your hands after using the bathroom and not have to walk to the kitchen and use the sink because someone someone who owns a house in london happened to hire the cheapest moron they could find to do renovations and everything is done backwards and stupid to include i don't know how old the tap was but basically the handle broke off and the plastic the best way to describe the plastic was it looked like it would be part of like a you you know, kind of scolding infomercial about what happens when you dump plastic into the ocean and they find it like on the shores of Alaska. So there was no way to repair the little junction there. So I had to get a plumber in. I asked Francis, actually, I was like, is this a thing I can do on my own? He's like, yeah, you could, but like, it's kind of annoying. And if you're pressed for time and you don't want it to

become like a week long adventure, just hire someone. And I was like, I'll do that. So at least it's been solved. I like how whenever we have like a dad question, we default to ask Francis because I've done that a few times as well. He's just done so much DIY, so much more than me. And I've done quite a bit, but he's done way more than me. And so, yeah, and he has in fact replaced the taps in a sink before. I mean, and it's not like I'm scared of turning the water off, but it was a weird setup.

And the plumber went up telling me, he's like, actually, there was a leak in your drain fitting, a small leak, and also it was really rusted. So it probably would have been way more annoying. It's nice when I can both be lazy and also vindicated in my decision. Yeah, I like how we are having similar uh problems uh with water um yesterday i got a message like oh they'll be servicing the gas lines for so you won't have gas for

5 to 20 minutes right and that never works like that here like oh your gas or electricity will be out for you know 10 minutes it means half the day and my gas was out for hours and like i didn't actually pay attention to it because like i cooked dinner like my gas stove worked but my boiler which controls my hot water did not restart itself nor have i ever had to do that and my boiler is all in russian so which is a language i do not speak or read uh so i had to fuck with the buttons and like try to google search shit for hours so i could take a shower and not uh like give myself hypothermia so things are going great i did fix it it took me until about 9 p.m but i did do it um well i mean i was gonna say it seems like a fitting situation that you were like uh i have

a really bad problem that's causing me issues and also it feels as though it would probably be beneficial to speak russian in this moment because we are talking about the battle of stalingrad that That's right. And I wanted to do method acting by giving myself hypothermia. Exactly. No, I didn't even think about that, but you're correct.

Be as cold as possible. You don't speak Russian, but there's Russian all around you on all sides for months. Yep. Story of the life of many people with my last name. You know, what's funny is I know about the battle of

because uh for a variety of reasons but i would say it was it's the influence of two books in my life um the first is a book called enemy at the gates and the title just seemed really cool the movie hadn't been made yet i would have been about 16 i was staying at my grandparents place my grandfather is a was a retired army officer um and he basically the only fiction book he had in his entire house was heart of darkness which tells you a lot about his personality everything was non-fiction about war and military and you know discovery and colonialism and stuff like that um my grandfather was a complicated guy i mean he was a dickhead he was always a dickhead but weirdly the one time when he actually talked to me like it like a person he was interested in was when i

was deployed and he basically said because he was a two-time vietnam vet he basically said you're not gonna like this but from the what you've described to me it sounds like we fought in the same war and i was like oh because he was there as an advisor and then he was there as a battalion commander towards the end of the war and And so, yeah, interesting guy, not a very nice guy. He died in 2020, but he had had a stroke and he was in pretty poor health for about 10 years. So, and like, I mean, he just, I don't think any of my family members would, I mean, they'll always take issue with everything I say, but like in their hearts, I think they know when I say he was kind of an asshole, like, that's just the truth. That's just who he was. But like, you just had to know that as a known

quantity. So anyway, he had this book called Enemy at the Gates. And I was like, being 16 years old, I was like, that's a cool title. And I picked it up and I just basically couldn't put it down. And so I asked if I could borrow it and he said it was fine. So I read it while I was there. We were there for Thanksgiving and then subsequent couple of... Really like a week because I really just blitzed through it. Blitz being the operative term doesn't always go in your favor but you know obviously the uh the movie got made about a year or two later and definitely went and saw it definitely was like i wasn't being annoying in the theater but in my heart i was like there's so much they're not fucking doing right here i'm a nerd i read one book but then i also read uh vastly grossman's life and fate years later when i had finished

graduate school i just i had done a so i did the mfa program in creative writing at um brooklyn college and um i had read a lot of stuff where it sort of made me want to take on books that like people had recommended like not like great books etc but more like stuff that i would be personally interested in that would be like kind of an investment in time uh but it would be worth it as you know someone who wants to write fiction but also just like likes reading it a lot and i read so i read um europe central by william volman and uh life and fate by vasily grossman and so i didn't mention volman because like it's not explicitly about stalingrad but it's about in some ways about the eastern front it's certainly about world war ii and the soviet experience but um life and fate is explicitly about stalingrad and so just knowing what i know from wikipedia deep dives because of

things that were discussed in both um enemy at the gates and life and fate made me very very interested i just realized this just jogged my memory also i decided when i was like seven i was going to read life and fate because my dad had it and was like oh this was a big important book and i made it like one sentence in, literally like one sentence. But I did eventually finish it, you know, 24 years later. That does ring true of Grossman's work. Yeah. Yeah. And genuinely, genuinely, it's such a tremendous book. And it's kind of ironic in a way that many people in the Soviet Union knew this was the case. But I think it wasn't until either the last days of the Soviet Union when Gorbachev was still the general secretary or literally after the collapse of the Soviet Union that they finally published the uncensored final manuscript of that novel because it talks about persecution it talks about persecution of

of ostensible political allies on spurious grounds and about persecution of jews and it just also talks about like the misery of the experience of the average soldier in stalingrad yeah and yeah we'll definitely be talking about that quite a bit and it's a profoundly anti-fascist book but i mean if i remember correctly grossman lost his many members of his family to the einsatzgruppen so it's not surprising it is a profoundly anti-fascist book but it was too frank it was too open about the entirety of the soviet experience while still being a patriotic soviet novel that they couldn't publish it um and so i just feel as though that's i'm bringing all this up just to say in the very beginning that it is a very interesting story because it is absolutely a thing that the soviet

army was proud of rightfully proud of and yet when you dig into it you start to realize how much of the misery and suffering and horror of it was just basically a kind of like don't care about the consequences this is so symbolic to us we will defend it and similar to the germans like the germans the the the hitler basically made the decision like as i understand it yes the oil in the caucasus is important to, but capturing Stalingrad is a symbolic thing. That will somehow turn to be even dumber than you think. Because as we'll talk about in this episode, Stalingrad was kind of a side quest at the drop of a hat. It was not thought of to be important in in any particular way until suddenly

it was um yeah because it by by by 1942 when they had kind of come back from the the upsets of uh the losses in the winter of 41 42 like that was the furthest extent they got to and the high water mark of the third absolute yeah absolutely and um you know it's if i remember correctly enemy at the gates opens with a sort of quote like a like it's just sort of like a an opening sort of preface and he talks about de gaulle um visiting and just being really taken aback and saying like it's just incredible and and someone asked him like what the defense is and he's like no it's just incredible that they even could make it this far yeah well we're actually going to talk about how the fuck they managed that as well and what's interesting nate is my my knowledge of the battle of stalingrad

also started with enemy at the gates but the movie because i'm a couple years younger than you yeah that makes sense um and the movie sucks it's real bad uh it's not good we watched it for a bonus episode uh quite a few years ago and it still holds a place a very dumb place in my heart um because for all of the faults that it has which are you know innumerable it does have two things the worst sex scene in in movie history and it does frame the the the complete deprivation of the soviet soldier at the time uh and we're gonna go into that quite a lot as well as the germans and i should point out here obviously you can't talk about the battle of stalingrad without talking about the fate of the german soldiers that were fighting as well as the romanian hungarian and

italian soldiers who were there um who most people really only know about the Romanians. Because when you talk about the history of Stalingrad, people often put the blame of the failure on the failure of the Romanian military to hold their flanks. That's completely not true, which we'll get to. But obviously, we're not talking about the misery of the German soldiers because we're trying to elicit sympathy. It's just something that happened and should be talked about. If you ever want to know about the misery of the German soldiers in a way that doesn't romanticize it or have like lost cause clean Wehrmacht shit, actually, weirdly, the best book

I would say to read about it, in my opinion, is literally a memoir by a guy who fought in the Wehrmacht. He was an Alsatian German named Guy Sege and he wrote a book called The Forgotten Soldier. And like, he's still, I mean, I can't imagine this guy was a particular left winger later in life. But if you just read the story, the book from the context of like, this is a guy with basically no connection to Germany outside of like the sort of happenstance of the Franco-Prussian War. And this is what he got put through.

It's like, it's such a misery odyssey. And there are so many details in there about just like absolute unbelievable levels of just like authoritarian discipline cruelty and just like the misery of the circumstances in which they were forced to be in which like they were the nazis so fuck them but at the same time like weirdly that book to me is better because that guy picks and chooses what he wants to talk about but it's not the perspective of someone else being like hey let me tell you all about like actually they were really a majestic military organization even if they were bad which seems to be even people who intentionally

try to distance themselves from that they still can't help but have the admiration for it and it's like to me if a guy's going to talk about it like maybe it's better to hear from somebody who like got their dick blown off basically while in it right versus someone who just thought it was cool yeah and i know that's that's that's simplistic but like anyway you know me i love i love distracting but yeah like and i figured i would i would start off the series because of course we're going to be talking about the misery and suffering on both sides and this is not a both sides podcast this is the first time somebody has listened to us we are not at all fans of the soviet union but we're certainly not fans of the fucking nazis yeah i think i think the

thing that i would say is that joe and i have different politics and like i'm not necessarily someone who writes off everything about the soviet union but i also think to think that revisionism and false nostalgia for something that like on its face failed to provide the thing it wanted to provide is not really helpful if you are like me and you are a leftist and you want to see socialism in our lifetimes something that you can't do is just be like um i'm just gonna like cling to a thing and say well this is as good as it gets because like if that's as good as it gets then shit kind of fucked aren't we yeah and so i would just say in this case uh if i were to give anybody a preface about like our position on here

i think that uh you cannot conceive of 1941 and 1942 you can't conceive of barbarossa and you can't conceive of what eventually wound up to be the the high water market stalingrad without both understanding the consequences of molotov on ribbentrop for people in neighboring countries to the soviet union and also you cannot get there without understanding that stalin had ample warning about what was going to happen oh god yeah and chose not to and chose not to believe it and as a result like at the end of the day we're just trying to come at it to talk about it from the perspective of people who like we're not it's not like oh isn't this cool it's so fucked up but also just like this is a thing that is almost impossible

for the mind to conceive of because it's so massive and yet at the same time so much of it owes to the the foibles and mistakes and idiosyncrasies of literally a handful of dudes. So the Battle of Stalingrad is one of the largest, most deadly, and well-known battles in the history of modern warfare and history in general. Over the course of five months, one week, and three days, the soldiers of the Soviet Union would hold on to a largely unimportant city by their guts, hamstringing the Nazi war machine before eventually throwing them back and turning the tide of the Eastern Front of World War II and the entire war itself. But before we launch into this pretty much month-long series, we need to acknowledge the large amount of sources I used

over the course of research for this unfortunately none of them are the books that we've already talked about so firstly is stalingrad by anthony beaver and i should point out that this is easily the most readable yeah beaver is a fucking don honestly yeah he rules really really good also he's the guy that i mentioned who was like i can't i'll never write about market garden again until all these assholes are dead because they keep want to fucking revise it to say, actually, we did good. Like, yeah, Bevor is an absolute king. And he's very good at writing narrative history.

It's gripping. It's a good book. While David M. Glantz is the opposite of that, he wrote a trilogy about Stalingrad, which measures in the thousands of pages. And it leaves absolutely nothing out. It's incredibly dense nothing out it's incredibly dense but it's also insanely dry um it leaves nothing out at all and i should point out as much as i loved his trilogy i fell asleep more than once at my desk reading it um so be forewarned but that that that is the that is the yin and yang of historical research.

You get guys who can write incredibly gripping narrative history, but of course, they leave some things out to make it more entertaining. And I'm not saying Beaver does that, but his book is, I believe, 400 pages. So it's much more trimmed down while Glance is... It's much more. And I'mance is, it's much more. And I'm not saying that it's a bad thing. I'm just saying they serve two very different purposes. Yeah. And I would say William Craig's Enemy at the Gates is about 450 pages, if I remember correctly.

And also because my grandfather had the original version, it has what feels like for its time, the most metal book cover you've ever seen, which is just a basically cutaway of a black and white photo of all destroyed, fucked up, shattered buildings in Stalingrad. And in the foreground is a statue of little children holding hands in circles around a crocodile. It's like a little like children's statue for a park. But it's just, I don't know something about it. Just at 16, I was just like, this is cool. I want to know what this is.

And so like, that's the aesthetic. That's kind of the aesthetic we're going to be going on. Yeah. Shattered everything. that's the aesthetic that's kind of the aesthetic we're going to be going on yeah shattered everything and in the remnants of a city basically built in you know as part of the initial five-year plans like all of this sort of that early period of the soviet union and um and then renamed it's now it's now volga grad but renamed for stalin at the time before stalin before stalin greta zaritsyn uh for for the czars yeah yeah fucking volgograd cannot

get a goddamn break the volga river endlessly disrespected yep um and from all the people i know who have been to russia volgograd kind of sucks as they told me so i'll take their word for it who's from voronezh who's which is not that far if i remember correctly maybe it's super far and my geography is awful in the story yeah but But it's very funny because he told me once that he went home because he moved to America when he was a little kid and he went home

when he was probably 12 or 13 or rather he went back to Russia because home is America and he was just like, but does this place suck and smell like shit? Yeah. So it's just like,

I imagine that's kind of weird. I've also heard that about Voronezh. Now, I thought the best way to start this series is a quote by prominent Russian poet Fedor Toichev. Quote, Russia cannot be known by the mind, nor measured by the common mile. Her status is unique. Without kind, Russia can only be believed in.

You know, like the tooth fairy. Of course, as always, the Battle of Stalingrad did not happen in a vacuum or out of nowhere. So we have to chart how and why exactly it turned into the monster of human suffering that it eventually would. For starters, I'd really like to say that we went back and did a very good background of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union during our Battle of Kursk series. So I'm trying not to tread over that same stuff again. And we've eventually both kind of agreed we're going to do a Operation Barbarossa series in general to cover it overall. So I'm going to try to not repeat myself or go too far into the weeds on Barbarossa to get to the road to Stalingrad. So bear with me.

To make a very long story short, Stalin believed the idea of a Nazi invasion was bullshit despite an overwhelming amount of evidence that his agents at the NKVD had found, including a Russian to German phrasebook that had been issued out to German soldiers. He thought the entire thing was disinformation cooked up by Winston Churchill in order to start a war between the Nazis and the Soviet Union. Turned out he was pretty goddamn

wrong. An invasion started on Sunday, June 22, 1941, which, at the time of recording is yesterday um yeah this won't be coming out for a while but yeah and one of the opening salvos of the surprise attack in barbarossa was to significantly damage aircraft and airfields oh yeah within range therefore making it extremely difficult for them to have anything approaching air superiority uh in the opening phases uh all of this basically like if i remember correctly and correct me joe if you know this detail or not stalin forbade them to even take defensive

postures and relocate aircraft into bomb-proof hangars yeah that is true um and the soviet union largely didn't have many bomb proof hangars at the time because stalin generally believed that the idea of an invasion was considered unthinkable um i mean it was an invasion so large that hitler declared that the world would hold its breath and then the entire thing would take four weeks um i heard this thing about distance on the map and then scale and geography and muddy roads and supply lines and this dude named napoleon there's all this stuff but you know what i also hit myself in the face with a brick yeah uh unfortunately napoleon does come up uh if you'd like to know more about napoleon's invasion of Russia, we did a series about that as well. One of the invading Nazi forces went south into the Soviet Union, driving between the Pripyat

Marshes and the Carpathian Mountains. The south happened to be where the best Soviet defenses would be put up in the beginning under the command of a guy named General Kuroppanos, who was a Ukrainian veteran of the First World War, the Russian Civil War, and the Winter War in Finland. Eventually, every other place the Soviet army was badly deployed, horribly equipped, and incompetently led. And that's to say nothing of the Red Air Force, which we already touched on, because it was left to die on the airfields. They began to rush so many people through pilot training, a squadron officer said, quote, our pilots feel like they're corpses already when they take off. So things are bad. The reason why Kurpanos did so well is he just didn't listen to Stalin. He

disregarded orders and dug in for a classic defense in depth strategy. Though no matter how much better he was than most others, he's still badly outnumbered and horribly supplied as the Soviet logistic system at this point boiled down to a guy that got promoted through political connections telling you to go fuck yourself when you asked for food. Though his army was given the massive and cartoonishly large KV tank, it was so big, the Nazis called it the Russian Colossus, eight feet tall and weighing 45 tons. Its armor was so thick that to kill it, it had to be hit directly from a German 88 flat cannon.

Yeah, he didn't have enough of them, of course. Kiripano was held as much as he could, but he was savaged by the advancing Nazi forces, succeeding in largely only slowing them down, which is still more successful than most Red Army formations were doing at the time. The German 6th Army, under the command then

of Field Marshal von Rickenau, was forced to shrink their advance to fight more effectively, all while being harassed by Soviet forces that were hiding in the swamps. Pissed, the Field Marshal ordered all POWs to be executed as partisans, even though they weren't, so Kiripanos returned the favor with German POWs. This will become something of a trend for people who are not unaware of how the Eastern Front looked. German POWs. This will become something of a trend for people who are not unaware of how the Eastern Front looked. Despite the Germans thinking the Soviets were subhuman, which they did, mostly the Slavic members of the Soviet Union, though not everybody in the Soviet Union was Slavic, they were shocked at how hard they were fighting back. They still believed Soviet commanders to

be awful, and at this stage they largely were. But they found that the individual Soviet soldier simply would not surrender when Western soldiers in the same situation would have readily done so. German General Halder wrote, quote, everywhere the Russians fight to the last man, they capitulate only occasionally. And I should add a me note here, because I think I've talked about this before. If something says Russian rather than Soviet, it's because it's a direct quote from someone. The Soviet Union was not Russian. It was a majority ethnically Russian, but saying the Russians and the Soviets were the same thing and the Russians were fighting the Nazis on the Eastern Front is

incredibly reductive. It's plain wrong. And it actually buys into current Russian propaganda, which eliminates the sacrifice of the common Soviet man and woman who were not Russian. And that's not what I'm trying to do. It's the Germans equated the Soviets to Russians as well. So most of their direct quotes say Russian rather than Soviet or Russian rather than whatever ethnic group they were a member of. I use Soviet because it's not reductive and it's true. Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, although I'm sure you can find plenty of clickbait articles about the business strategies of famed Russian leader, Yosef Zyugashvili, also known as Joseph Stalin. And if you know anything about the region, Zyugashvili that's right also known as joseph stalin and if you know anything about the region uh jugashvili is extremely not an ethnic russian surname he's georgian and georgian venti barrier and he's exactly and stalin if i remember correctly in a detail i

read up in a book about the battle of moscow the defense of moscow in 1941 um stalin gave a heroic speech about everyone in moscow should defend the city etc and many of the political commissars were slightly concerned they're like i'm sorry but his georgian accent is just funny people are going to laugh yeah he actually hired he had a speech coach for a long time to try to get rid of his accent so he could sound more russian and never succeeded um look i'm not trying to play into racist stereotypes amongst the former soviet republics it's just more along the lines like Joe's point is absolutely correct here that there is a kind of reductionism. And so we are trying to avoid that, even if like it's such a common shorthand that like you could probably count on one hand the contemporary or post-war sources up until relatively recently that don't do it. But that's just the nature of it.

And the Soviet Union did that as well to themselves. I mean, one of Stalin's political ideologies outside of Stalinism was Russian chauvinism. It was a Russian nationalist state, and the Soviet Union was deeply, deeply racist, which is why, for instance, one of the heroes... Vasily Grossman. Yeah. An example that I believe we talked about during the Battle of Kursk is Ivan Bagramian, who is a hero of the Soviet Union and national hero here in Armenia.

His first name was that Ivan as Hovhannes. They made him change his first name to try to sound more Russian. That happened constantly. And that is not just something that happened under Stalin. to try to sound more Russian. That happened constantly. And that is not just something that happened under Stalin. It's kind of something that occurred through the entire history of the Soviet Union. And it's something we probably shouldn't ignore.

But that's why I use the term Soviet, in case anybody's wondering. Now, it quickly became apparent that this war is going to be catastrophic, so much so that Stalin quickly changes messaging to the public. Rather than hiding what was happening, though he did, course still hide many of the catastrophic details, so it didn't sound like an apocalypse, he appealed to the public telling them that they were caught in a patriotic struggle of life and death over Mother Russia and Mother Soviet Union. a struggle of life and death. By mid-July, they'd already lost 2 million men, 3,000 tanks, and over 6,000 aircraft. A massive percentage of the officer corps were gone, whether they be captured, dead, or wounded. And most of the captured, you could just count them as dead.

Stalin reverted back to Russian nationalism, hearkening back to the 1812 Napoleonic invasion of the Russian Empire, championing the heroes of the war and invoking the names of historical Russians that almost certainly find themselves purged in the current Soviet Union, like Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy, and Mikhail Kutuzov. He even named awards after like Kutuzov as well. Volunteers flooded recruitment centers to the point that they outnumbered conscripts for a period of time. The Red Army was so slow to change despite the ongoing attempts at reform that many of these volunteers, around 4 million in only a few weeks, ended up in militia formations under the command of the NKVD. These formations barely received training, many did not get guns, and were thrown into the meat

grinder to do whatever they could to slow down the German advance with the press of their own bodies. Command at the front was complete chaos, officers didn't or couldn't control their men, bodies. Command at the front was complete chaos. Officers didn't or couldn't control their men. Looting and deserting was commonplace and widespread, as was the NKVD gunning down terrified civilians turned into temporary soldiers as they ran for their lives away from thousands of Nazi tanks. Within a few months, four entire divisions of these militias were completely wiped out. As July wore on, there was the disaster that was the first battle of Smolensk, which nearly destroyed an entire Soviet army and 300,000 POWs were taken. Soviet divisions were thrown into battle as soon as they were formed. Most never returned, all just to slow down the

Germans in some kind of capacity. And in this case, they're fighting Field Marshal von Bock's tank divisions. Though credit where credit is due, it did work, though it is telling that the measure of success here is by simply forcing tanks to slow down via human bodies under their tracks. The Uman Pocket collapsed in August, assaulted by Field Marshal von Rundstedt's army that had since been reinforced with Romanian and Hungarian forces. Tens of thousands more casualties, along with hundreds of thousands more POWs were taken as Nazi forces stormed through Ukraine and towards Kiev. In command of the capitals, Marshal Semyon Buny and Nikita Khrushchev as his chief commissar. Now, everybody is aware who Khrushchev is. Though his importance in the coming battle

of Stalingrad is mostly imaginary. It was built up when he started becoming a political monster, but Bugnani is an absolute fucking madman. And I really wish there was enough meat to his story to make it an episode on his own because he's a champion of cavalry warfare to the point that he purposely sabotaged the large scale introduction of tanks in the Red Army. He was also a massive supporter of Stalin's purges until one day the purge came for him. Instead of submitting himself to almost certain death at the hands of the NKVD, he got in a fucking Mexican standoff with NKVD agents,

holding them at gunpoint with one hand while he called Stalin personally on a phone with his other and told him to call his fucking boys off. He did. And then everybody seemed to forget about it. There's a time when I hear these stories where you're like, did Stalin just respect dudes that would do this?

Like, if you did the thing that you were taught to do as a Soviet citizen, which is sort of like, you know, what's the right word here? Kind of acquiesce to the greater good than like you just got taken to the Lubyanka and shot. But if you were like motherfucker like I will ride in there on horseback and hit you with

a Cossack sword that he was just like well I think this guy's pretty good at his job and you know Stalin as much as he wanted the purges and he was a infamous like micromanager that was mostly overseen by Beria who was an absolute psychopath

Stalin would often override barriers insanity uh when it came to who he was killing and doing other things that i won't mention it's bad don't look up baria if you want to not you know hurt your brain he's an he's one of the legitimately one most evil men to ever walk the earth. Something about Leventry Beria that is worth mentioning is that I believe in the 90s either the British embassy or one of its outbuildings

as part of the complex was housed in a building that had at one point been one of Leventry Beria's homes in Moscow. And while having plumbing works done on the building site they unintentionally exhumed the bodies of murdered young women because they were barriers victims i won't also go into detail because we could talk about it for a very long time um i will just say this much armando yannucci's film The Death of Stalin is to me a very

smug British liberal take on the Soviet Union it's a very funny movie and it's very entertaining but like it's not good history it's atrocious history it's very very condescending and just like which is just might as well be a synonym for British however it's depiction in terms of

the way it describes what Beria did in terms of like his crimes, not too far off the mark. It makes up a lot of shit. Most of the big plot points in that film didn't happen. But Beria's individual crimes, oh boy, they all happened. They all fucking happened. And it's grim. Stalin had to basically give explicit instructions to protect his own daughter from Beria, his own teenage daughter.

Like basically he was like... explicit instructions to protect his own daughter from barrier his own teenage daughter like like basically he's like yeah because there's seen like around barrier and he was like never go near him again without guards exactly and that's that's literally joseph stalin anyway yeah i'm sorry joe i i do i just feel so i have to you know weigh in with my point but yeah exactly um and as much as much as i agree as how bad history that movie is and it is uh best depiction of georgie uh of uh georgie zhukov ever put the film 100 yeah yeah yeah it was extremely funny and and and and having him speaking with his northern accent in that film is also extremely funny there are aspects of that film i'm like this is so

fucking good but there are also aspects of this film i'm sort of like ah yes this is this is history as retold by smug british liberals who are of a certain age yes roger i feel like it's a lot like uh the great on hulu uh where it it's meant to be entertaining rather than historical um in some ways and i mean the great is obviously much much different because it's nowhere even remotely close to history. But that's how I like to see it. But I'm also, you know, I don't. I try to enjoy things and then see how critical I can be of them.

Which is also why we haven't watched like Death of Stalin for the show, because there's only so many times we can say like, oh, this didn't actually happen. You know. so many times we can say like oh this didn't actually happen um you know um now despite being cool as fuck uh bignani was not good at his job he's actually infancy a terrible commander in the second world war uh and he had been put in place to oversee the massive evacuation of industrial machinery to the east out of ukraine um kiev was quickly surrounded because stalin refused to listen to georgii Zhukov, and by September, the city had fallen and cost the Soviets nearly 1 million casualties. Though at the same time, it was clear that the Soviets were getting the shit kicked out of them,

Barbarossa wasn't going to end well for the Germans either. Much like the episode of The Simpsons where Homer just gets punched in the face until his opponent gets tired, the Nazi logistical system began to falter as they ran to the hell that was the Soviet frontier and its complete lack of infrastructure of anything, really. The Nazis are often portrayed as a mechanized army, but they weren't. The vast majority of the invasion force was infantry divisions, and they were forced to march over 40 miles per day carrying 55 pounds of gear in the horrible heat of the soviet summer and if you happen to be one of the soldiers and say like a vehicle like a tank crewman you're the backbone of the blitzkrieg your life still sucked just in different ways i cannot fully explain to you how much of a bitch it is to keep a tank

running in the mud and dust as a former tank crewman myself, but it eats machines alive. And these tanks were designed in the 30s. So magnify that by, you know, however many percent. It didn't take long for all of these problems to start making the German commanders argue amongst one another, which is actually something Hitler encouraged by leveraging their personal beefs, which in some cases went back to World War I. Army Command Group Center was ordered to halt while its tanks were sent further north to support the attack on Leningrad, another series we'll do sometime in the future, while Panzer Group Guderian was sent south. This is because while Hitler didn't actually want to attack Moscow, despite how important it was for literally every reason imaginable. Though, as we talked about in our Kursk series, Hitler was prone to randomly

changing his mind at the last second without consulting anybody. So in September, he did just that, launching Operation Typhoon, the advance on the Soviet capital, which was still over 200 miles away from where Army Group Center was told to halt. Now, this is where Friedrich Paulus comes into our story for the first time. He was one of the chief planners for Barbarossa, and he will become much more important to the overall story of Stalingrad here. He pointed out that, guys, we're getting kind of close to winter. Maybe we shouldn't go to Moscow. He was probably told to shut the fuck up, and all discussions about winter warfare were promptly forbidden by Adolf Hitler.

And we all know how that one ends. The German attack on Moscow fails so hard that more German soldiers are taken up by frostbite than combat wounds. And much like 1812, which is exactly what Hitler had worried about, frozen, dying soldiers were retreating from Moscow into a blinding snowstorm and temperatures as low as minus 40 degrees celsius at that point basically it's minus degrees 40 fahrenheit too you get you get cold enough that celsius and fahrenheit basically converge i've actually been in temperatures that cold in alaska it fucking sucks and i wasn't out outside for very long because wouldn't you know the army actually cancels training pt etc when it's that cold but if you're in the vermont and you're fucking you know on the eastern front in the winter of 1941 42 sadly you can't do indoor pt and uh they do

resupply these guys today is going to march uh about 20 miles through the snowstorm uh with a thin cotton uniform on your back also just fyi we've decided to get some folks out here for some extra motivation uh they're going to be shooting 155 millimeter artillery rounds at you they're live yeah if you hear them screaming fritz fashies they're too close you might want to speed up a little just a little you know what stragglers we do we do have a straggler collection point it's called a gulag so i was going to say too that they do they change things up to some degree during this campaign and resupply their soldiers by air dropping munitions uh warm uniforms things along those lines of winter weather gear etc but

obviously this is this is more of a let's take a disaster and stop it from becoming a complete and final disaster for us um this is all stuff that could have been prevented but uh uh hubris we're you know uh rears its head as it so often does um and yeah so by by basically the winter of 41 into 42 uh the german advance is stalled and in many cases reversed starts to get pushed back quite a bit and it's not until the spring fighting season the the warm weather comes back in 42 that they're able to go back on the offensive for what will be the final time. Yeah. And meanwhile, Army Group South, which had been fighting towards the Caucasus, had been turned back due to the Nazi flank being exploited by Soviet forces under the command of General Temeshenko. And mostly because he crashed into the Allied Hungarian troops. We'll talk more about the Nazi Allied troops later on and why the Soviets kind

of knew that's where they should attack. Now, this pissed off Hitler even more as the seizure of the Caucasian oil fields was not only a big part of Barbarossa, but a massive part of his overall war plan in general. Gerd von Rundstedt was fired for ordering withdrawal after the battle and replaced by Rickenau, the 6th Army commander, who had explicit orders to stop the withdrawal, though he didn't. Now, Hitler flew down to visit him, and Rickenau pointed out that he's now in command of an army group and the 6th Army, and he couldn't do both at the same time. Hitler agreed and appointed Rickenau's former chief of staff, Friedrich Paulus,

as the 6th Army commander, the first and last field command that Paulus would ever hold. Now, this is a pretty big promotion for him, as he had never actually even commanded a division at this point, let alone an entire army. Now that Rickenau's out of the story we should actually kind of explain what happens to him what happens to him next not because it's important but it's funny and we're not gonna have a lot of moments to be funny during the next several weeks now rick and i was known to go for a run every morning no matter what the weather was like all while half naked one day while this, it was below 20 out,

and he collapsed and had a heart attack, but that didn't kill him. What did is when he was loaded into a plane for medical treatment, and then the plane crashed. Now, this is very funny because Rick and I are like all Nazi commanders. This is a fucking monster,

and it's nice that someone goes out in such a dumb way as running half naked in minus 20 degree weather in a plane crash. That's, yeah, a bit intense. But yeah, I feel as though this is going to be

one of the milder examples by the time we get done with this. Oh, God, yeah. I can say with full confidence he's not going to be the last German leader to die in a very stupid way but he is the first

in this story as for Paulus his life and what would become of it would have been much different if in 1909 when he tried to join the imperial German navy he was refused so he joined the army a year later instead. He was such a little fancy lad

during his early years in the army that his fellow officers called him Der Lord. After World War I, Paulus joined the Free Corps and became a hardcore Nazi. Though he did eventually end up in the actual Nazi army after the takeover and found his home not in battlefield command, but in the staff officer corps.

So because we should probably just give a quick summary of the Freikorps was just it's basically a volunteer group, not Nazi volunteer group of primarily World War One veterans who are a fascist street gang enforcer gang. dang uh they are the military paramilitary wing of the uh the german fascist movement like during the weimar republic um famously rosa luxembourg was killed by them um but uh for someone to volunteer to be in the fight call is a bad well it's bad it tells you where their head was at in yeah he's often yeah he's oftentimes painted not as like a Nazi, but kind of like an incompetent officer being driven to be incompetent by Adolf Hitler. That is mostly post-war whitewashing on the Soviets' behalf, actually, for reasons we will talk about in our last episode is what happens to Friedrich Paulus. He was absolutely a Nazi. He saw it as a way to further his career. And he did believe in their ideology.

I would also say really quickly that the thing about it is with incompetent Nazis and crazy Nazis and stuff like that is, you know, people try to grade it on a curve because when you get into like crazy Nazis, you have people like Rudolf Hess, who literally was like, I think I can personally negotiate

and end to the war with England and just bring this plane to england and then got arrested and held in prison lost his fucking mind yeah um but yeah i i think uh yeah um paulus is somebody who you're going to you have to explain away a lot in a kind of like romanticized sort of like but he was in this you know he was he was one of these figures in this pivotal struggle but like i don't really think my personal take is that uh someone who identified with the street warfare version of proto-nazism is probably a nazi ideologically and that's not going to change no of course not and he we'll get to it in our last episode

when we talked about what happens to friedrich paulus but he was a man that just didn't want to die uh now he uh he like i said he ended up in the staff officer corps because i cannot stress this enough he was a massive nerd despite never graduating from university one of his hobbies was drawing scale maps of napoleon's campaign in russia which is kind of ironic in retrospect i was going to compose a song for you really fast to the tune of uh kisses uh i want to rock and roll all night he goes how did that work out for you he thrived in that setting and nate you're an officer you probably know the guy who's a really good staff officer and not a good leader um uh yeah i mean look man um someone could say takes one to know one but i have seen a lot and i've seen i've seen guys who can do both i've seen guys can do one or the other

and oftentimes the military is such that uh the notion of the American military's notion of, well, everyone needs to have a fair shake at company command so that they can fucking be assessed by their board means that guys who you know should only ever be PowerPoint jockeys become commanders. And it tends to not end well. We talked about this during our Fall of Singapore series, where if you're in the army and you find your niche of doing the jobs

that other people don't like, like paperwork and administration, you'll still advance. And that's what happened with Paulus. He was such a good chief of staff that battlefield commanders argued over who would get him because they knew that he would handle all the shit that he didn't want to do. And they do it really well. He was something of a Nazi yes man, never really pushing back or dissenting. And when he heard a bad idea and when he did, he could kind of a nazi yes man never really pushing back or dissenting and when he heard a bad idea and when he did he could kind of be diplomatic about it not because he wanted to change it or anything he just knew the danger that came with being the guy that told hitler like

mein fuhrer this idea sucks um he was very good at doing like the compliment sandwich so like he would give a compliment about the plan a slight criticism and then another compliment so like whenever yeah my mind fuel the uh your watercolors are extremely good and definitely true to life in terms of proportions also uh i feel as though we are going to be encircled by entire groups of armies and slaughtered um also your dog looking great yeah um he was very diplomatic at when he chose to dissent which as he was promoted those dissensions disappeared because it's often wrote that he realized his entire career he had thanks to hitler which is 100 true and he knew like he knew where his food came from he wasn't going to

bite the hand that fed him and uh that's why hitler did not think twice about promoting him, despite the fact he had no field command experience immediately from being someone's chief of staff to being an army commander. By spring of 1942, the German army had lasted through the worst winter of their lives, at least so far, and had been largely rearmed and reinforced, even if the things they were being rearmed and reinforced with were not exactly what they needed. For example, one unit got a full command of 18 tanks for the first time in months, only to learn that the models that they were sent were so badly out of date, they actually couldn't contend with Soviet tanks. In March, General Franz Halder, who had survived

the war and become one of the main architects of the clean Wehrmacht myth, gave Hitler the plans that Hitler had ordered him to work on. The plans were to once again invade the Caucasus and, most importantly to our story, invade southern Russia towards the Volga River. Now, for some reason, Hitler still believed that the German army had complete superiority in every way of the Red Army, which it did in a lot of ways, but that gap was closing rapidly as the Soviet Union reformed and rearmed themselves, as well as, you know, the Lenz-Lies program, which opened a massive pipeline of every kind of logistical need that the Soviets had. Part of Hitler's belief meant that he didn't see the need to stage any reserves for the coming operation. A good reason for that was after the failure of the previous winter, Hitler had fired and in many cases charged with crimes many of the commanders who had been involved.

Meaning there wasn't exactly a lot of wiggle room open to point out how bad of an idea this whole thing was. People were like, I really don't feel like getting court-martialed and sent to the people's court or whatever. So I'm going to smile and nod. Hitler also believed the Soviets were running out of all things manpower, which if you listen to any of his commanders who had just returned from the Eastern Front, they would have pointed out that, yeah, the Soviet army is short of a lot of things, but men was not one of them. it's kind of a funny thing to even consider that that was their honest opinion or their you know diluted but still honestly held opinion because as we conceive of the second world war as people born long after it ended the eternal refrain is just basically like there's no problem the soviet army couldn't solve by just like zerg rushing 50 dudes like it's just endless endless amounts of people no matter

their age sex military capability experience does not matter just every person getting involved and like they also wound up losing i mean if america the soviet union lost like 30 million people in the war that may be an exaggeration but it was it was a they are they are the largest uh soviet casualties were the largest by by a literal order of magnitude it is it is so unfathomably large so yeah i mean it was also a much different kind of war um it's it's hard to compare the eastern front to the western front because while the western front in a lot of cases was still being fought as like a war of gentlemen the eastern front was being fought as a complete war of annihilation so it's it's hard to compare the two but the realities of the two are much different leading to why the soviet casualties were so insanely high

mostly because pows weren't taken generally civilians were not occupied. They were annihilated. It was catastrophic. Now, during the stage of planning, which went on through June, Hitler nor anybody else even mentioned Stalingrad. Everyone's focus is on the oil fields, with Stalingrad only coming up as a side dimension to secure part of the Volga River and then to destroy the factories there to limit Soviet war capacity. However, it was not an important part of anybody's plan yet. They didn't even want to secure the city. They just run through it, blow up shit they wanted to blow up, and keep going. This became known as Operation Blue,

and the main character for the Nazis and for our series was the 6th Army and Friedrich Paulus. They were ordered to move towards Stalingrad and secure the offensive's northeastern flank while the 1st Panzer Army went for the Caucasian oil fields. The entire plan was thought to be so simple, so easy, that Hitler said that once Sevastopol had fallen, he was going to send Erich von Manstein's group to the Caucasus, into the Middle East, and then conduct an invasion of India. Just that easy. Now, afterwards, the entire staff of the 6th Army went and attended the Kharkov Ballet,

where the Nazis forced the dancers to stay and work unpaid. They watched Swan Lake, if anybody was curious. I don't know why that's important. I just find it weird. One of the things you always find very funny about any kind of like minute by minute re you know narration of uh the germans the nazis and their activities during the war is a thing like what you just described they'd be like we're about to kick off the battle but uh we're gonna watch swan lake but it could also be like they got together and watched steamboat willie and it's just like you never know which one it's gonna be for some reason that reminds me of uh that scene

from uh saving private ryan where the ss guy is digging his own grave like steamboat willie yeah exactly yeah betty boop what a dish yeah exactly rival yeah exactly yeah the movie about why uh it's uh you're a pussy until you murder a fuck that goddamn stupid movie fuck uh or the the beginning where they're storming the trench lines and the guys walk up and have their hands raised and they're speaking telling them, like, don't shoot, don't shoot. And they shoot them.

Yeah, and they just kill them. People who are from the Baltics, I believe it was the Baltics, point out that they weren't speaking German. Yeah, I can't remember because I haven't watched that film in so long. They're saying, like, please don't shoot, we're not German. Something to that nature, yeah. They're like, oh i've lost for supper oh i should also point out that they were czech uh those those two guys

were were were czech uh and that's what they were saying is like we don't shoot we're not german um but my one comment on same prep ryan is there's one scene in that movie that's good literally one scene in that movie that's good it's the fucking scene with uh we got the wrong ryan also we tell the wrong guy also the fucking crash glider because they they bolted plates on and didn't tell the pilot that to me is like that's the most resonates with my experience in combat scene the rest of that movie is just like it's it's it's it's a small world after all the disneyland ride except fucking for the western i also really like the scene where they're all sitting in the farmhouse and ryan is telling the story about how his brother was trying to fuck this girl from back home and and then all of their brothers came in and uh uh

interrupted it for two reasons that is absolutely that you'd get a story that you'd catch a bunch of soldiers talking about and to matt damon made a like ad-lib that entire thing on the spot. It was fucking great. Fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. That's 100% a story that you hear a group of soldiers telling. Yes, that is true. Now, first, Paulus' 6th Army would have to take part in two smaller offensives across the Donets River so they could secure bridges they needed to move men and material across. This all went according to plan, though the Nazis were slowed down by minefields on either

side of the road, so they had to stick to this one small path. So a traffic jam was formed as massive amounts of men and vehicles navigated this one road that had been cleared of mines. So of course, this is when the Soviets began shelling them. The road was immediately destroyed. Horses panicked from the shelling and ran in every direction. Some turned and trampled their own men, and while others ran off into the minefields, being blown into pieces in seconds.

Now, some of these horses were carrying wagons full of ammunition, which caused an even bigger explosion, spreading burning debris and horse flesh everywhere as they caused a chain reaction of exploding horses down the road. Are we still in the Taiping Rebellion? Gotta love this sudden horse-based apocalypse that comes up every now and again.

Now, despite all of this, the 6th Army and the 1st Panzer Army secured the start lines for Operation Blue on Time, which was scheduled to start on June 28th, and it did. With that, we have to talk about exactly what the Soviets saw during this entire thing. In short, they didn't. Not the Red Army commanders, mind you. They understood reality, but Joseph Stalin. Stalin refused to accept that any German offensive was going to go anywhere other than back toward Moscow. This is despite the fact that every officer around him knew that, and knew that it made much more tactical and practical sense for the next German drive to be towards the Volga and the oil fields because as Zhukov put it, that's what he would have done. The Soviets also had a wealth

of intelligence literally fall into their lap on accident. A week before Operation Blue was supposed to start, a German operations officer named Major Reichel had boarded a plane to visit a frontline unit. It turned out that he ignored all German operational security procedures and carried with him an entire detailed plan for Operation Blue. So of course, his plane was shot down and the papers were captured. This was not a secret. Hitler knew. And he even ordered Reichel's superior commanders to be brought up on charges for giving one fucking guy the entire plan to hold but uh when soviets translated the plans and delivered them to stalin he immediately dismissed them as fakes despite the obvious continued troop

build-up that was occurring in the general area that the plan had outlined and this is a true build-up that his commanders had warned him about when When one commander, Philip Golikov, told Stalin, I'm pretty sure these plans are legit. Stalin literally balled up the plans in front of him, chucked them at Golikov's head, and told him to fuck off. I mean, that's one way of going about it. Rather than prepare for the coming German operation, Stalin insisted that the attack was going to be toward Moscow and has ordered his army to prepare for that instead. So, of course, as soon as the offensive started, everything went to shit for the Red Army

as Stalin refused to reinforce the areas targeted by it. The commanders in the area desperately called Stalin to allow reserves to move in, but by the time he finally agreed, it was too late. As you know, the Soviet Union is fucking huge. It takes time to get people into position. Not to mention, huge swaths of the Red Army at this point still lack the basic ability

to communicate with one another due to complete and utter radio infrastructure failure. When Paulus's army crossed the Donetsk on June 30th, the Red Army facing him had managed to get their shit together as the other push had begun two days beforehand, giving them time to adjust. However, this is when the massive casualties of the Red Army, the year before, really began to show the multi-layered effects of a war of attrition. The Soviets had dug in with T-34 tanks, and had very well camouflaged them to the point that German close air support in the form of Stuka dive bombers, which are normally very good at killing tanks, simply couldn't see them. Despite being dug in well-hidden,

having every advantage you'd want a tank crew to have, the Soviet soldiers on the other side of the Donetsk lacked one very important thing, experience and leadership. The German crews, battered but still largely in shape and in many cases with inferior tanks to the T-34, battered but still largely in shape and in many cases with inferior tanks to the T-34, simply drove around them. They outmaneuvered the Soviet crews who had a casualty-inflicted brain drain. They lacked commanders who could or would react on the fly and take initiative. Most Soviet crews remained in their dug-in position, never attempting to move as the Germans worked their way around them. Once again, though, the Soviets didn't retreat. Their main forces and lines would shatter, and small groups of them would remain

after the German forces surged forward. In many cases, the Germans found them when the Soviets opened fire on them. The Soviets would then fake their death and wait for German soldiers to get off of their vehicles to search their body before rolling over and shooting at them again. The German advance was going so well, staff officers thought it must have been a trap, owing to the capture of their operational plans, but it wasn't. There was just chaos on the Soviet side, and that chaos was absolute. Staff officers and generals couldn't talk to their forward units, and in many cases, had no idea where they actually were. Several generals jumped in biplanes to go out looking for them, only to be shot down by the

German Air Force. At any point you're jumping in a biplane to try to find your forward army units, you're going to have a bad fucking time. However, despite all of this insanity, Stalin did relent on one very important point that before this was a reason for very high Soviet casualties.

He would allow army commanders to order a withdrawal, rather than force them to get caught in an encirclement and fight to the death, which is what the Soviet military had been doing so far. So for once, Soviet army formations were saved from what was probably going to be another apocalyptic level defeat. Soviets decided the city of Voronezh

would have to be defended to the last man due to it being a communications hub, as well as protecting the flank of the southwestern front, which was still under the command of Temeshenko. However, ironically, this went badly because despite it being a communications hub, communications were so bad that the intentions of the Stavka, or the Red Army Command, didn't get to them on time, and German tanks quickly just drove into the city center and took it before anybody could react, though Hitler fucked this up pretty good. Rather than leaving

the entire force there to finish the captured city and secure it, he pulled everybody out, instead leaving simply one Panzer Corps under the command of General Hermann Hoth to finish the job. Lacking the ability to rapidly secure the city with the amount of men he had, the entire thing devolved to vicious street fighting and the German attack on the city ground to a halt. Because when I think of street fighting or urban warfare in general, I want to put tanks in there. This, however, changed the Red Army's defensive strategy in a way that would paint the picture for the story going forward, as well as kill like a million Nazis. They would concentrate defenses around cities, not random lines on a map. The Stavka also officially created the Stalingrad Front on July 12th, though this part is kind of

funny. The fighting wasn't near Stalingrad and nobody dared talk about it aloud, about the possibility that the Red Army could be pushed back that far for fear of being snatched up by the NKVD on charges of defeatism, which is a crime punishable by death right now. However, people began to talk about how this area might be where the main battle would eventually be fought. Even the NKVD admitted it without actually saying it. They took direct control over river traffic across the Volga

River, as well as centralized control of the NKVD militias in the area, and then reinforced them with five regiments from other NKVD areas. This defensive reorganization left the land in front of the Germans wide open. German tank divisions became so full of themselves, they raced ahead and not even bothering to think of the fact they're leaving behind their supply system, their artillery, and even their infantry support in the dust. And this is steppe. This is steppe land. This is nothing but flat. So they could really gun it across this open expanse.

Any village found around the way that was not previously destroyed in the other fighting was torn to shreds by Nazi soldiers. Anything that could be eaten or drank was stolen, civilians were massacred wholesale, and the ones who weren't were left to die in the resulting famine caused by the advancing army. Then, the Germans began to run out of fuel. This, like most things, caused Hitler to get really pissed off beyond belief and change his plans at the last second without consulting anyone. The key part of Operation Blue was securing the Volga and cutting off Temeshenko's troops, which were now withdrawing. Only then would they attack on the Caucasus oil fields start, bringing the two forces together once the first objective had been captured. Now, Hitler decided that both parts of this plan would have to be launched concurrently, Now, Hitler decided that both parts of this plan would have to be launched concurrently, so they could take the oil fields faster and then route that fuel back to the tanks.

However, this would require them to split their forces into a two-stage their rapid advance, they just bit their lip knowing how fucking stupid it was. Hitler split the forces, cutting the army group south in half, sending one part to the one lone dissenter in the group, he was fired, and all of the previous delays were blamed on him, and not Hitler changing his mind and moving units around like he was playing a video game. Now that he was changing shit randomly, he didn't stop. He took soldiers away from the push towards the Volga, while simultaneously massively expanding the scope of their operation. Now for the first time, Hitler ordered Paulus' army to take, secure, and occupy the city of Stalingrad. Hitler still didn't think this was a big deal and thought the city to be a pushover, so his orders continued. After Paulus took Stalingrad, he was then to move down the river and seize Ostracon on the Caspian,

while Field Marshal Wilhelm List was ordered to take the entire eastern seaboard of the Black Sea. Everyone outside of Paulus who had become a diehard Hitler sycophant after having Hitler's lavishing with praise and rewards at the time thought this plan was nuts. Wilhelm List actually wrote in his diary, quote, the constant underestimation of enemy potential is gradually taking on a grotesque form and becoming dangerous. And that is what we'll pick up next time on Stalingrad part two. All right.

All right. You know, it's really interesting. I just make this note is that, you know, just to make sure I was understanding things correctly, I wanted to check my own work because the German word or phrase for the Battle of Stalingrad is Schlacht von Stalingrad. And so the thing about it is, is that just Battle of Stalingrad? Okay, got it.

But Schlachten as a verb in German also means to slaughter. And so I was like, wait, is that what they call it? Fuck. But I realized it was just me forgetting the correct word, Schlachten, to slaughter.

And like, I know like Schlechterei would be like a mass slaughter and stuff like that. But the words are just similar and similar roots, et cetera. But they did end up both being true. They did, in fact, both wind up being true. And one thing I would also say too that you can find very interesting is that there's a word that will be cited a lot in sources.

Even if they're in English, they'll often use the German term, which they say der Kessel, which literally means the cauldron, because that is what they get hemmed up into that's often referred to as kessel uh throughout uh pretty much both uh all four of the sources that i use they called it they called stalingrad the castle or the fortress without a roof yep it's the cauldron and uh it's a metaphor that you will understand in more detail as time goes on.

That's right. So, Nate, thank you so much for joining me on Stalingrad Part 1. This will be your longest series since you've joined the show as a co-host. How are you feeling so far? This is really informative and interesting because I think I have big gaps in my kind of like timeline understanding at the granular level of the Eastern Front. You know, from like, let's say I've read a book. I've read the book Barbarossa, but I don't necessarily know a ton about the lead up. And I remember William Craig's book, but I appreciate you giving me the sort of details of like the shit already starting to get confusing and weird and wrong as stuff goes on as this offensive takes place with the Sixth Army, you know, into in 1942. And so getting that background context is really helpful. Having just talked about Singapore, there are some elements of where you think the Japanese would probably have exploited this opportunity in a way that in some ways the Germans are sort of like, wait, what are you actually doing? But who knows? You know what I mean?

Like a lot of this stuff is just it's individual decisions by the leaders not having any correspondence to facts on the ground. Sometimes it works in their favor and sometimes it goes very horribly. i feel as though we are about to get the latter oh god yeah i mean i know we are but you know what i mean like in terms of the details i'm going to learn i can only imagine yeah it's uh part two is where things are you're gonna see a lot of what's going on within stalingrad in the soviet union um it's going to get... What's interesting is both sides are deeply confused about what the fuck is about to unfold, which is unique, I think, when it comes to... We've talked about the Battle of Kursk, which was designed from the very beginning to be an absolute meat grinder. Whereas in Stalingrad, it really seemed like in the beginning, of course, uh, that

neither side had any idea what the fuck they were about to start, uh, which is interesting. Normally that's not how, um, that kind of thing unfolds. Uh, but we will get there. Um, Nate, thank you so much for joining me again. Uh, use this opportunity to plug the various shows you are a part of. So aside from this show, I also produce Trash Future, a podcast about

why the tech industry is great and you should let it do everything. You should let it AI automate all of your medical care. I produce a show called Kill James Bond, which is a movie review podcast by three extremely funny trans people.

There are Alice Caldwell Kelly, Abigail Thorne, and Devin, and you should check that out. I just recently guested on that show to talk about the film Rambo 3, and I learned the factoid that the original director who was supposed to direct Rambo is Russell Mulcahy, who, if you are not familiar with 1980s music videos, directed the video for Hungry Like the Wolf and Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart, and was fired by rambo rather fired by sylvester stallone when he saw his casting decisions because the initial decision was to

film the film the film in israel and play the villains uh russell mulcahy who's a very gay man get a cast basically the most beautiful israeli russian twinks he could find and rambo was sort of like i was calling Stallone Rambo. I was like, no, I don't think people are going to buy this. And they fired him. So what I'm saying is Sylvester Stallone denied us gay Rambo. And that is an absolute travesty. Also, Hell of a Way.

It's a podcast about why you shouldn't join the military. I'm one of the co-hosts. Thank you. And thank you everybody for listening to this podcast. If you like what we do here, consider supporting us on Patreon. You get episodes like this, sometimes entire series before everybody else. And for $5, you can get literally everything from Discord access, store discounts, and five plus years of bonus content that we've been making.

That's right. And until next time uh i don't know don't uh don't do anything we just talked about on the show if you are a model train dweeb who likes drawing plans just become a warhammer 40k guy don't join the fry core that's right and we'll see you guys next time bye