Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 280 - The Battle of Stalingrad: Part 2

Episode Date: October 8, 2023

The horrors beyond human comprehension continue! Part 2/5 Support the show: 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 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. Thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoy the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Lines Led by Donkeys podcast podcast i am joe and with me today in the content hole is still nate how you doing buddy i'm doing really well before we started recording you and i were

discussing just being tired i'm tired for for good reasons and bad reasons good reasons that like had a really productive creative day of doing stuff with a side project basically when we write music for trash future like skits and intro bits uh but then bad in that i uh have been basically i got a little bit over ambitious about how easy it would be to program a 40 year old frequency modulator synthesizer keyboard um that uses midi and i have solved it but i went on an odyssey of like homebrew windows programs written in the mid 90s that are still available on like internet archive and shit to get something that would work and i finally solved it last night in the dumbest way possible it was literally uh beyond getting the program that worked it was literally turn the computer off

and turn it back on and then connect another midi cable for sending from the machine back to the interface um and i was like oh i solved the problem this is so great ah and then i left and got on my bike and went home and realized i just missed the cutoff for 10 p.m when right now they're doing maintenance on tower bridge the bridge is just closed so i basically got fucking siege tactics on myself and had to ride around to london bridge and back which doesn't seem isn't that far but for people who know london like if you're going to peckham and you're going over tower bridge like it's definitely out of your way to go to london bridge and then back out yeah um so yeah and so and then i got home and i still had to finish some editing for tf so like it's one of those days where it's like i really really enjoy the fact that my life lets me do

creative stuff it has this level of autonomy but then there's other days where it's like, I really, really enjoy the fact that my life lets me do creative stuff. It has this level of autonomy. But then there's other times when it's like, sometimes I think... I'm not saying I want to go back in the military, but sometimes I think a certain degree of that structure, there was a reason why I did well in that. Because I probably, when I was in the army, wouldn't have gone on a fucking odyssey to try to program a Yamaha DX7 at 10 o'clock at night uh so that's that's that's how my life is i'm learning i'm growing and i'm also a fucking idiot um but i'm

ready to talk about stalingrad the uh the a situation far more frustrating and dire than trying to transmit midi to a 40 year old keyboard the the struggles are uh very similar obviously um i finally moved um i had i i had a an apartment for about the last year and um i got a much nicer apartment and i lucked out because i mean yurvan is you know not much different than most other places in the world where rent and cost of living is skyrocketing uh but i was able to find something that didn't completely fuck me over it's much nicer but i did have to move which is one of the least favorite activities i can fucking do i absolutely hate moving the only good part about moving here is i don't know how it is in other places in the world because i've pretty much only

lived here and uh the united states where I had to find my own quarters. Everything else was government assisted and the military and stuff like that. But apartments here come furnished. So thankfully, I just had to move my belongings, which is 99% clothes. I don't actually own that much. I don't own many clothes either. percent clothes like i don't actually own that much i don't own many clothes either uh but i still had to uh like uh there's a there's kind of like our version of uber here is called gg you can just rent a moving truck on it um i'm just laughing thinking it's just

it's gg allen's moving company and uber gg allen shows up do not sit in the front seat yeah they show up and just start throwing literal shit around your apartment, doing heroin as they drive down the road. It was funny because you said about furnished apartments. That is actually pretty common here for shorter term rentals. And because a lot of people who are not earning hella money in this country are constantly having to move because it's pretty standard if you're going to get a lower end of the scale rental for them to only offer six-month terms. And so you find that people are moving every six months. And so even if they had furniture, it would be such a pain in the ass to deal with it. So people like, yeah, it's just IKEA special. We lived in a furnished apartment when we first got here. And then literally the landlord was like, if you sign

a two-year lease with a one-year break clause, I don't give a fuck if you throw all the furniture away when your furniture arrives because you realize he probably spent like 300 pounds on all of it. Yeah, he picked it up off like the curb when someone had thrown it out in the trash or something. Oh, dude, it had obviously been used a bunch before like and I'm really paranoid about having bedbugs after having had them before. And so the first day we got to our apartment in London, literally the day we emigrated to this country, I got in and I was like, fuck, I'm checking these mattresses for bed bugs and i opened i pulled it back and fucking i was like oh my god is it bed bugs fuck you know because dead dried flat bed bug that's the thing you'll find if you've got bed bugs no it's just boogers oh yeah it was disgusting i have

fucking i have one piece of furniture that's the chair that i'm currently sitting in uh and i guess also the swing arm to my microphone that's like premium male living spaces kind of thing right there and like there's something nice about everything being everything being like oh yeah here's your bed like decent couches decent chairs whatever i'm like i'm fine with this also you're you're wearing your because you're backlit from the window on the camera here, you're wearing a tan t-shirt. And when you squint, you can't see the design on it. And you've got a wardrobe that looks like a wall locker behind you. It's just we've got Time Warp Joe's in the barracks doing this podcast, but he's like

35 years old. I just realized that this is like an extra room. And the bed is about the size of a barracks bed. You better make some hospital corners on that thing. Yeah. In order... An inspection there, private. I believe in method podcasting.

So I had to put myself back in the military. And... Yeah. So you're going to rent a fucking barracks block, an old Soviet barracks block, and then I'm going to show up, speak German and just fucking hit my head against it for six months and not get anywhere. And the worst part is my old place, I could kind of have the windows open when i recorded but as nice as it is i'm right next to a green space which is very very nice i live in a very uh walkable part of town i mean yurvan is generally

walkable anyway but there is a child's playground directly up front out of my window so if i open these you will hear the shrieks of tiny kids named armin beating the shit out of each other so open the window in the front, then G.G. Allen's cab is out there and the smell will just fucking get everyone. Opening up the sliding door of their van and pissing out of it. Speaking of G.G.

Allen, we're on Stollengrad Part 2 and I am the king of segues. So when we left you last time, Hitler greenlit the invasion of the Caucasus in order to get to the sweet, sweet oil fields within, as well as securing the southern Volga River, only to change everything

once operations had already begun, splitting his forces, leaving everybody undermanned, undersupplied, and completely confused as to the scope of their operation as it wildly ballooned out of control in every direction without their input.

However, good news is about to come to the commander of the 6th Army, Friedrich Paulus. They were finally being reinforced, which is something he asked for, which I'm sure was a relief to him because Paulus had just gotten his orders that the new ones were not only to secure the Volga, but to capture and occupy the entire city of Stalingrad. You want to know where those reinforcements came from? Probably from the unit on the axis towards the Caucasus oil fields. Worse, I would guess. Oh, okay.

They were the ones protecting his flanks. That is correct. They were the worst soldiers in the entire Axis army, and I do not use that term lightly. Were they Romanians? More than just Romanians. The Romanians were actually the most normal ones of the group. They were referred to what was jokingly called a League of Nations,

and that title was not given to them as a compliment, because remember, it's the 40s. The League of nations is the reasons we're fucking doing this shit in the first place the germans jokingly use it as a term for things that are powerless and weak you know like the league of nations or the united nations or the concept of international criminal courts, all vaporware. Now, this included Romanians, Hungarians, Italians, and Slovaks. The vast majority, higher than any other component of the army in the area, were made up of conscripts who received little to no training before being shoved off to the Eastern Front in order to support Hitler's war effort. At least half of them were functionally illiterate. I was thinking about this. I'm like,

At least half of them were functionally illiterate. I was thinking about this. I'm like, these are probably ethnic Germans and or people who've supported the fascists from these countries. I can't imagine many of them have the degree of military training that the German army would probably expect. That being said, I'm sure if there were any, any orchards of summer fruits, they could fucking make alcohol out of you immediately. So they weren't ethnically German.

So if you were in one of these places and you were ethnically German, you could just immigrate to Germany. And you're given a pretty sweet benefits package, mostly in the form of stolen goods and business fronts that they had taken from Jewish people.

So of course some of these guys did support fascist puppet regimes, no doubt about it, but they still were not like willing soldiers. Oh, okay. Because I just, the reason I just, I read a book years ago,

I guess it's Atom Schalke, I guess you translate it as like swing breathing. And it's basically about, it's kind of a narrative novel about the experience of ethnic Germans being deported out of Romania at the experience of ethnic germans being deported out of romania at the end of the war yes and so i guess in my mind yeah they definitely did in my mind i guess i had imagined that these units would have been made up of like in the same way

that you know they they conscripted a lot of alsatian germans when they annexed alsace and lorraine uh but yeah it also makes sense. It's like America with Puerto Ricans in World War I. Just fucking draft them. We control and draft them all. Yeah, it sucks. And like most conscription drives, they targeted the poorest people first, meaning that most of these guys who, again, were

functionally illiterate, went from working the fields with nothing but a draft animal to suddenly confronting the horrors of modern war within a few weeks. And then, of course, Italians. Enough said. Noted people who are awful at war.

That's the thing that I always point out because Iraq War, early 2000s era conservative bullshit was always pointing at the french and being like jeez eating surrender monkeys look they can't fight a war they always lose wars and it's like the french actually have done pretty fucking well in terms of their military history uh and quite frankly the reason why they didn't want to go into iraq is because they they they did ultra vietnam

they did vietnam and algeria uh but if you want to find a European army that fucking sucks at fighting all the time, it's the Italians. Yeah, that still really hasn't changed. Though, fun fact, during the US mission to Somalia under the UN banner, the Italian army did fight a battle at

Checkpoint Pasta. Because, of course they did that's how you make them defend it to the last man you have to snap the checkpoint in half to turn them into berserkers yeah you give them the fucking mission brief and the most dangerous

enemy course of action is they put mushrooms in a bowl you snap the spaghetti noodles in half and take away their cocaine and they just turn to berserker gang soldiers now uh they're obviously fascist in all of these countries the italians uh these were actually the worst italian soldiers they had available to them because remember it's several years into barbarossa at this point the prime of of the Italian military had already been absolutely evaporated in Africa because again, they were awful. Even the best soldiers they had were terribly led and awfully

supported. Also, this is 42, correct? Yes. Am I not? Yeah, it's 42. Because 41 is Barbarossa, the winner of getting pushed back, fucking sucks. And then the Germans advance again in the summer of 42 and the furthest extent they get to is Stalingrad. And then this happens. Because I was just thinking, and it's not going to be long from now before the Italians kind of need to just do a little bit of work in Southern Italy and Sicily, because some stuff's going to happen. That happens soon. Yeah. Yeah, very soon. Yeah, yeah. And at that point, it's pretty obvious it's going to happen because in 42, I think also as regards a lot of the Axis countries, things are going to change very soon because the Allied invasion of North Africa begins in 1942 at the same time that the Battle

of Stalingrad is happening. And obviously, it's not an immediate success. Certainly, in the initial days america's just like we've got really great military equipment that just profiles the fuck out of us on mountaintops and everyone gets shot all the time but like forward progress is going to be made and you know it's gonna it's pretty obvious what's going to happen that if the allies advance towards the suez canal they will then subsequently come up you know they're gonna they're gonna go to continental europe somewhere yeah and most i think most, when it comes to things like Torch, especially the Italian empire building efforts that they tried to do in Africa, those were more important to Italy. So their best soldiers were sent there.

So if they weren't dead or captured or wounded they were tied down whereas their component in barbarossa was more of like fuck we have to send hitler troops yep sure yeah that makes sense because yeah libya was like the thing that was libya was important to them as a we're also a colonial power yeah and hungary hungary and uh romania did the same thing they weren't fully on board with like, let's give our military power to Nazi Germany. They held most of their best units on themselves and gave out

these freshly formed units out of conscripts that were slapped together in a few weeks. So, I mean, the Nazis are not exactly getting the best soldiers that were motivated in any way to fight this fucking Stalin. So basically what you're saying is to summarize our,

our kind of tangent here is that Friedrich Paulus is now getting reinforcements of the absolute most fucked Euro vibes units. Yes. Hobbled together with soldiers with basically no military experience or training who don't want to be there. It's like a youth Euro or training who don't want to be there yeah it's it's like uh youth eurovision i don't know um to be fair some of them were children i was gonna say there was this guy there was this guy who had a eurovision it just wasn't a good one that's why germany isn't allowed to win anymore now none of these soldiers wanted to be there obviously

but this was reinforced by their commanders who made sure to make this experience the most miserable one they could. For example, Romanian soldiers were whipped for pretty much any violation of the rules, no matter how small, to the point that the Nazi officers had to tell the Romanians, like, you need to chill out. The Hungarian contingent seemed to also be commanded by absolute psychopaths with soldiers being sentenced to hang for something as simple as showing up to guard shift late I mean not really a morale builder now is it it's not how you'd build what I'd call

spree decor unless you're the guy who really likes whipping other dudes in which case prime duty station yeah and it's like I don't know if you're some dude named mate from fucking skagit sedgid you know do you really give a fuck about hitler's grand ambitions to exterminate the slavs absolutely none of the way you're sort of like uh what's my proximity to being a slav here fuck shit yeah goddamn what's this language we speak it's

definitely not german fuck so It's like those weird incidents in history where the people who have politics like this will just bless a certain group and call them honorary something or other, like how the Japanese in apartheid South Africa were honorary white people. Armenians were considered

honorary Aryans to try to convince Soviet POWs of Armenian background to defect. Same with Indians. Like, none of this shit makes sense. I mean, that's the whole thing with the onion joke in our dumb history about Japanese, you know, Imperial Japan forms alliance with white supremacists in extremely well thought out scheme. But that's a funny joke on its surface. But then actually you dig into it.

It's like, yes, but which of these is the white supremacist? Because, like, which is the the worst which is the most extreme because quite frankly i think the germans would honor rarely accept the japanese suitor than the japanese would if the roles were reversed like jesus christ japanese political and racial ideology was in in many ways more extreme than german whoops all fascists damn weird how that that happens. The Germans didn't make anime. Not yet. No, they didn't, but they will. But also, what I was going to say is that the Germans probably did make weird cartoon erotica about their soldiers giving the business to their enemies the way the Japanese did with the Russians.

That is true. Yeah, we talked about this in the episode but um i got i got to end our russo japanese war series with an in-depth discussion on uh early 1900s hentai because of the thing that you sent me yes we really do run a tight ship on this and you know what we don't have to whip people and fucking hang them for showing up late to a podcast recording the way that the goddamn hungarians and romanians were no we just know each other for fun it's different remember these guys are all supposed to work with the sixth army who were german if you're wondering if the romanians the hungarians the italians and the slovaks all took like a quick two week long german language course before being deployed they did not uh nobody could talk to

them uh some other officers spoke german uh but not many mostly the italian officers could because they're a bit longer of a relationship but because giorgio maroder's great-grandfather was there and he was just like listen guys i got you here i got a funny tyrolean hat i can speak german it's gonna happen they bonded over shitty techno music. Don't call that shitty, all right? There's some shitty techno in the fucking world. There's some terrible Eurodance. Georgia Marauder, Batman's a god.

As for the German troops within the Sixth Army, things are rapidly descending into what you could call a massive pit of disease and sickness. Cases of dysentery and typhus ran wild through the ranks, and virtually everyone had lice in case anybody is unaware the russian summer is bad especially in the caucuses area it's not comfortable i say sitting in my apartment in july with the windows closed let me ask you a question um my impression of that climate is that a lot of people forget that it's incredibly hot in the

summer as well as incredibly cold in the winter. But also, I think the thing that people may not be expecting about it is, well, two things, the humidity and the bugs. Unreal. I can't speak for the Russian side of things. Like the South Volga region. Yeah. For Armenia, not a lot of bugs uh the winters aren't i mean this is coming from someone who grew up in michigan winters aren't that bad um yeah take that for what you will yeah you know but i i think that that's actually a pretty fair comparison because the midwest isn't quite as extreme i think but like i think in terms

of the or rather it's not it doesn't regularly get as extremely cold relative to that part of the world but i think like when you think about a midwest just like air is soup bugs everywhere if you had to sleep outside a lot like you would just fucking be covered in weird bites particularly from carried away by mosquitoes this little red bug that like the name sounds incredibly problematic but you know what i'm talking about for those of you who aren't american the word is chigger and they are it's oh they suck they saw my fucking god yeah we won't derail it with this but basically talking about the conditions of these troops like the fact that they're they're they were famously undersupplied and while their logistics had improved versus the way it was in the initial portion of Barbarossa

this is a constant refrain when you read any source with any like first hand accounts it's just like the fucking filth the grossness like just like you were saying lice you know not able to shower disgusting gross clothes my personal favorite is

what was called a plague of flies that swooped in and began lying eggs in the sores of soldiers yeah and think about the fact that like these are guys on the move and like you're having like they have you know doctrinal stuff about digging slit trenches and the way you do you field hygiene but like at us it doesn't really yeah you dig a slit trench and you bury it the next day or when you're done but like you still have an open pit full of shit and piss in there. Yeah.

Like in like the world's most bug having ass climate in the summer. I'm looking down at my logistics officer like Urban Sturmfuhrer Gigi Allen. Fuck. Yeah. See, that's a good callback. You're getting, you know, fucking you got that natural comedian instinct right there. Like you said, like the constant movement was uh was a problem hitler demanded that these units constantly advance meaning that they really didn't have

time to set up anything but most importantly when it comes to again the plague of flies um again sick band name uh they couldn't evacuate wounded or dead yeah they just brought them with them so the the flies are just following them okay now that wound did i get obviously but that they kept the corpses they kept the all the casualties they assumed they would eventually be able to stop and rest like because they thought like stalingrad in three days who cares and then they could ship them out they didn't want to bury them in the soviet union of, they would rapidly change their mind as they began, because up until now,

they're not facing that many losses. Their losses are almost entirely dysentery and typhus-based, which will change in this episode, but they don't have that many. And as for wounded, it's mostly the sick, people who get hurt working on you know 1940s era

tanks which had to have been awful as someone who worked on was considered a modern tank and got hurt all the time being in the field in korea and us medevacking a dude because the engine block from a bradley fell on his hand yeah that'll happen and that's that's routine maintenance in a maintenance bay in a fixed location like you're on the move and you know yeah you're like you're saying not necessarily getting the sort of the phil specter wall of sound except it's 155 millimeter artillery shells it's gonna come later but like they are getting fucking strafe they are taking incoming like there is enemy contact and so like yeah you imagine these conditions uh lots and lots of ways to get hurt, lots and lots of ways to just be pulled in every direction at once.

As we often see on the show, it's never a good time to go camping in the middle of the woods with 100,000 of your homies. Well, I mean, you do have to eat. And then when you eat, some stuff happens. And then also when some bullets hit people, sometimes they die. And then when people die, they start smelling bad really fast. Especially the Russian summer. Now, with that, let's see how things are going

with the soviets stalin had previously or the stalingrad defense committee to prepare the city for war in mid-july after it became clear that he was dead wrong about the second german advance on moscow and uh had to change his plans rostov had done had fallen no not that time the other time because i wrote this script months ago and rostov ended done had fallen no not that time the other time because I wrote this script months ago and Rostov ended up in the news again it sure did briefly but it sure did once again seized by Nazis and freed prisoners time is a big dumb circle um and uh the Soviet forces were retreating from the sixth army he would pace in his office back and forth for hours as worse and worse news was delivered to him by, I assume, the guy who drew the shortest draw in the history of

man. Yeah. I feel as though any attempt to parody the degree of sort of like, oh God, the boss is going to be mad at this one is just going to seem like a Z-grade version of the death of stalin which is a thing that i've already expressed my complaints about but like also i think that it's like you want to you want to perfectly understand an asymptote like think about the ability of any kind of joke or fictive reference to capture how fucking paranoid and insane joseph stalin was and what that environment was like if you were like you were especially in 1942 you were both safer by being in the inner circle as the dude who's got to fucking report to stalin and also a million times more at risk like if you're a fucking dude and i don't know like like vladivostok or god knows any of these places you know like uh out in the

russian far east like you're both more at risk and also infinitely safer than the guy who has to come in and read the fucking briefing to to uncle joe and just be like oh by the way we got kicked in the dick 50 times last night yeah like 500 000 people are prisoner again you know shit uh i i call back to an episode i believe tom and i did about the battle of creasy where the bad news had to be delivered by the court jester um they should like joseph stalin should have i mean he did have a court jester eventually and it was nikita khrushchev but uh that is very true khrushchev was really like into fucking being the just like i'm the rude peasant from Ukraine and I'm

gonna say really fucked up shit that gentile Russians are gonna get offended by and I have this feeling that Stalin being like you know he basically had the equivalent of a Cajun accent Soviet Union probably found that funny every Georgia listening is gonna be so bad you called them Cajun

it's gonna be incredible and that listening is going to be so bad you called them Cajun. It's going to be incredible. And that an Armenian is talking about them because they don't like me either. So yeah, the poor Soviet court jester who was tasked with telling Joseph Stalin that the world was ending. Joseph Stalin had finally passed an order to his military commanders

telling those finally okay to order a withdrawal rather than allow their armies to be encircled. The problem was that was, of course, the main German tactic was encirclement, classic pincer movement. And so in order to get away from this, Soviet forces had to continually withdraw, which to again infuriate joseph stalin despite the fact they were following his orders i said you could withdraw not you should i didn't say you should that is that is also once again a very like we're literally doing this to preserve combat power and he's just like why are you why areing? It's like, well, I mean, if you're standing on a beach and a wizard casts a spell that has three tsunamis heading at you, you're not really being a coward by being like,

I think I'm going to get out of the way of those three tsunamis that the wizard sent at me. Stalin would say, actually, no, you need to surf them like the fuck, like Patrick Swayze at the end of Point Break. You sit there and take those waves on the chin for your kolkhoz fuck you exactly uh um now stalin snapped ordering a general into his office he didn't care which one he began to yell and scream and told him quote they have forgotten my stavka directive now for people who do not remember stavka is like the general staff of the military um now the order he is referring to said, quote,

Anybody who removes his insignia during battle and surrender should be regarded as a malicious deserter whose family is to be arrested as the family of the breaker of the oath and the betrayer of the motherland. Such deserters are to be shot on the spot. Those falling into encirclement and prefer to surrender are to be destroyed by other means. Not good. Sounds bad. Now, the most famous order Stalin probably ever published during all of World War II was order number 227, better known as not one step back. It's virtually the same, but somehow worse. It went just a tad further, adding lines like, quote, panic mongers and cowards must be destroyed and declaring any military commander who allowed his forces to abandon any position to be brought up on charges, which would almost certainly end at the barrel of an NKVD pistol. This also established blocking units, which we talked about a long long time ago but so for for people unaware a blocking unit was a detachment of the nkvd or the ministry of internal affairs

unit uh like troops like they had irregular troops and regular troops in the command a lot of militias and shit fell at nkvd but they would stay behind in advance of soldiers, set up machine guns, and quote, encourage them to return to battle. Now, it's often blown out of proportion, specifically like Enemy at the Gates, like the movie, where they would just hose people down with machine gun fire. That did not happen very often, but it did happen. And most likely what they would do is if you attempted to retreat past a blocking unit you'd be arrested put into a penal unit almost to your certain death or immediately executed uh without a trial so pretty much the same thing yeah like the movie is is

overdone a lot of ways but what it's communicating is kind of just like smushing together a lot of the reality into like one or two sort of examples, you know, what kind of kind of representative examples. And what you're saying here is that while it's not necessarily like there's a dude whose job it is to be on the boat and shoot you if you try to swim back over the river, lots of people did, in fact, either get shot for it or, like you said, get put into units whose jobs were basically like human mine clearance packages. Yeah, I mean, it was either summary execution or summary execution with extra steps.

And they executed... Nobody's entirely sure, but it's thought to be several thousand people this way. But the NKVD wasn't exactly taking records in the heat of most things. Now we talked about penal units. These are units ordered on what I said, suicide missions, like literally clearing minefields by running across them. These units became very popular because they did very important missions because they're very important and you didn't really have to worry about losing anybody. Now, these became so popular as detachments to be attached to regular Red Army

units that civilian prisoners were soon transferred over so they could make more of them. Over the course of all of World War II, over half a million people died in what were effectively Soviet kamikaze units. Very few people left these units alive. Yeah. I have irregular units in the Soviet military. And I obviously want to emphasize, I'm not a doctrinal, educated military historian or historian at all. But just in my lifetime reading, being interested in this stuff, when you have figures available for irregular units, especially penal units, but irregular units in general, it's pretty common that you will read figures and it'd be like, this was constituted out of a company of 115 or 125

people and three survived the war. That's just such a common occurrence that you basically expect it anytime you hear about a task organization that's got this like cobbled together irregular unit or some kind of auxiliary i mean it's genuinely that bad yep um and the germans also had penal army uh penal units but they actually were less blood thirsty about it you could leave them and also the penal units the germans had were like the germans really dialed in the sort of like replacement reconstitution thing like they had a system and obviously they had to when you think about how many of their units got totally destroyed in the eastern front where as long as you hadn't tried to throw away your fucking card that you had to keep on your uniform at all times your sort of orders and assignment unit card like you basically got put in a barracks you got reconstituted you got trained up they actually you know refitted

you and put you back out on the line somewhere like but they absolutely there was a sorting structure in every single one of those where they would put people into penal or punishment units and um like those penal units would get significantly more like the Soviet ones as we get closer to 1945. Yeah, yeah. If I understand in the early days, a lot of the things that they were having those guys do was like they were basically Mr. Dig the fighting positions and like be the ones.

Yeah, doing the way, because if you think about how on the move they were like, their job was basically to be like, the regular unit is pulling cover for you while you're digging an emplacement kind of stuff yeah like and that would change as things get more desperate but you know unlike by the end of it like from geese's book like fucking it's so much summary execution in the german military uh like there was gangs of ss guys like roving berlin uh executing a Volksturm guys for like not exactly knowing how to fight because it's like an old retiree or whatever,

or like literal children. But you know, the, the penal units also like kind of represent a fundamental difference when it comes to the structure usage and leadership styles of the German and Soviet militaries. And it's not that the Germans were necessarily better when it comes to the structure usage and leadership styles of the german and soviet militaries and it's not that the germans were necessarily better when it come when it comes to military doctrine big underline um i'm they had more of again in 1942 because things are rapidly going to change they were more more worried about rest rehabilitation and

other things like that. So if you got wounded, you got better medical care. If you were... Again, unless it was a major crime, you would be summary executed because these are Nazis we're talking about. But if you disregard an order, showed up drunk on duty or whatever, you do effectively what most normal militaries did at the time, which was manual labor for a couple of weeks. And then you get put in a different unit. Whereas the Soviet one was like, go run through that minefield. Yeah. But also something that I would point out too, is that we're going to contrast this pretty heavily, I think, as you talk about what happens in this movement towards towards stalingrad but for better or worse the soviets

did not struggle anywhere near as much when it came to the sheer level of determination like the kind of esprit de corps isn't the right word but like kind of violence of action from their troops now some of this is obviously because it's fucking, they are so incredibly coerced. But some of it also is like, think about just the mentality, take away all of the doctrinal stuff and even like the sort of difference in cultures. Who do you think is going to fight harder? A Slovak who's been press ganged or a dude from this country who's getting invaded, particularly when they start to push, when they pushed back and start to see what the Germans

did to occupied Ukraine and to the occupied parts of the Soviet Union. Who do you think is going to fight harder? And not to mention, by 1942, because the way the Soviet conscription system worked, we talked about this during our Soviet-Afghan war series, the vast majority of the military is actually not made

up of ethnic Russians. It's made up of people on the outer satellite republics of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Russia, as well as other Soviet Socialist Republics. So they have met refugees running from the German advance. So they know what the Germans are doing. It's no secret. Yeah, Moldovans, Belarusians, Ukrainians. Especially Belarusians yeah yeah and

it's it's it's it's unreal and so i i think that like uh it's interesting because we as westerners we as people who didn't experience this people you know much much younger you hear what the units were like in the soviet military and you're like that's insane why would anyone but it's like it wasn't so simple like it was it was unbelievably harsh but also there was absolutely incentive because like it became pretty obvious what what was going to happen if the germans won and also as you described earlier it's not as if some of these other component units for the axis were necessarily that different they just it wasn't like the NKVD assassinating you. It was Helmut von Habsburg shooting you. Yeah. And you'd have to sit through some kind of trial process first. That was already

determined. Now, the NKVD special departments were set up to make all of these things possible. So far as they planted spies within Red Army units and reported anybody who could be said anything that could be understood to be defeatist or cowardly. Furthermore, Stalin also kept changing commanders as the Germans advanced, blaming them for every failure that popped up rather than himself, who was the supreme commander. At one point, he called one commander to fire him and told him to call a different commander to let him know that he had been promoted. Despite the reforms that were desperately trying to take hold, the old Stalinist military purges prior to the Winter War could still be felt. That is to say,

nothing of the massive losses in leadership, namely small unit leaders that the army had suffered since the beginning of Operation Barbarossa. Most of these soldiers were being thrown into the frontline, had seen less than 12 days of training, and the Red Army doctrine at the time was effectively learn on the job. Can we pause for a second to talk about that? Because to me, I want to point out, we hear this a lot about the lack of training. And I think the thing that I feel like if you're not, if you haven't been in this kind of, even not explicitly military, even if you've been involved in things like a theater production or marching band or bugle corps, anything that involves a combination of people

having to work together, certain things that must be done a certain way, certain places you have to position your body, things along those lines. And then just more importantly, the kind of instinctive reactions like training even when you think about what we did like our one station unit training was 14 weeks long um i think it was for it's it's i know it's changed a lot mine was about four months four months okay yeah and and it's like for for me for officer training it was uh it was like a a three-week orientation and then like a three and a half or four month basic course and then a ranger school optional but not voluntary

two and a half months and even when i then got to a unit like i just didn't have the instinctive response in a lot of the ways we train as people who've been doing it for fucking ever so like 12 days even if you're drilling all fucking day long, there's a point at which it's like getting a tattoo. There's a point at which your skin just cannot fucking accept any more ink that day. And it's important to know that they weren't really shooting their rifles at all during training because they had an ammunition shortage. And I mean, and here's the thing I point out too, this isn't a thing that was just confined to these. Like I remember reading about uh there's

a book called they marched into sunlight um about the vietnam war pretty good book uh i definitely recommend it uh i think it's david moranis wrote it and one of the points he made is that when in the situation where an american unit of first infantry or first id got am massively ambushed by a by a north vietnamese unit a ton of the casualties were fucking american soldiers uh draftees conscripts killing themselves they knew they were surrounded and they fucking shot themselves with their m16s it's like and these are guys who had way more regimented training like but that's the level of panic so i'm just thinking about this it's also common during the soviet afghan war as well common the drumming that's the thing i'm referring back to that book

the forgotten soldier that's one of the things he said was like in the winter in 1941 like it was pretty common that they'd be woken up in the middle of the night by hearing a gunshot because someone had just shot themselves oh yeah we'll be talking about that one later and so what i'm trying to say though is it like just from this context like to be a fucking cherry private in a modern military you still have to do a lot of training and like 12 day i mean we think about 12 days of active duty training like in 12 days deep like you're not even really done with fucking uh drill in ceremony with 30th you're not done with 30th ag you're not done with fucking the medical in processing yet like nowadays and i realize it's different and also realize like the expectations of a fucking you know e0 in one of

these militaries was was was perhaps less but there's still a lot of like soldiering field craft stuff you learn and god knows you don't want to learn that shit because it's an instinctive reaction to learn to duck when you're getting shot at unless it's so fucking close that it's obvious most of the time when you're getting shot you're like is this happening yeah the fuck like it's just not you it's not like movies it's not like my first that was my first reaction i was like my first check to get fucking mortared i was just like i said thunder and then i got really close i'm like oh fuck but like i should have gotten down the first one you know what i mean like the only time that i can say it was very very obvious but i like came so close to a bullet almost hitting me they're like oh fuck get down but

like other than that normally it's just like i'm turning my head you can't see me on an audio i'm just like is it really bullets is it a really loud bug like that's it i mean and it's a soviet union the sovereign south volga fucking maybe it is a really loud bug yeah but that's my tangent i guess the point i'm making here is that like this is such an unbelievable degree of you are not prepared in one of the most high intensity high intensity conflicts like the most of this war that is like a fucking high watermark for this given the era like genuinely i got some bad news for you when it comes to training nate now oh buddy i'm sure i'm fucking sure because of the insane amount of pressure coming down from them from the very top of the

stavka lack of experience lack of training and most soviet officers simply resorted to throwing their men out to their certain death because that was expected of them. In one example, several units from the officer's cadet corps were ordered directly into battle without any combat training and before they'd been issued weapons. One of the cadets told their commander from the NKVD, like, we don't have guns. The NKVD officer who was blind drunk at the time told him quote just get on with it they all died listen that's some fucking counter-revolutionary defeatism for you to point out the lack of guns fucking the fucking spirit of will will make a gun appear in your hand i'm mixing up fucking shit honestly like i can't even do a good riff on like the sort of doctrinal shit that would do this in terms of like I'm sucking chest, sucking chest wound.

Yeah, not when you when you walk into battle with literally no weapons. It kind of sucks being a dialectical materialist because like normally like a fucking peasant from Moldova will be like, oh, God will give me a gun. But like you've been fucking drilled since birth that that shit's not fucking real. And all that we've got is the material. All right. All we've got is the imminent. a gun but like you've been fucking drilled since birth that that shit's not fucking real and all that we've got is the material all right all we've got is the imminent and like well you better hope someone fucking drops a gun you better hope you get a loot box man thank god i have prestige level three as i'm sitting there waiting for the box to drop down yeah exactly it's yeah yeah so socialist realism painting describing how you respawn if you get shot.

Someone please make that. Now, if the officer corps cadet guys weren't bad enough in other places, they just didn't have anyone. So sailors from the Soviet Navy were told to get the fuck off their boats, their infantry now. Now, these were not Marines, which did fight commonly on the ground for the Soviet Union during World War II. These were just sailors with their regular naval officers remaining in charge and they were told to run into battle

most of these guys died too you must have been so galling to be in the same uniform as alexei romanov when you get shot by the germans oh yeah you beat me to it because most of these guys did not change other like sailing whites they were they're like naval whites yeah it's like it's like your job is like this arcane fucking naval rank of like you know senior boat boatsman's third mate not tire and they're like all right go fuck it set up a firing position a human wave of the good humor man sprinting towards the german line god damn it and uh yeah so you can see how taking initiative when like attacks were badly planned or you thought they were stupid was against the rules. Meanwhile, in Stalingrad, the defense committee had gone into overdrive.

They were turning the city into a literal fortress, which is no easy feat because it was not naturally defensible. only an exposed front to defend, but across this river on the other side, which is where all of the supplies would be coming from during the entire Battle of Stalingrad, and there was no way they could secure it. I think

that's bad. I think there's some doctrinal stuff about that being bad. Yeah, it's not a good time, especially if you happen to be a logistics soldier. Now, they mobilized their entire population, all men and women between the ages of 16 and 55, which is around 200,000 people. They were put into what was called the workers columns under the command of the local district party leader. Soon, they were all digging anti-tank ditches while soldiers and civilians planted massive minefields and explosives wherever they could.

Others built earthworks around fuel storage tanks. This work was often done by school children under the supervision of their own teachers. Anti-aircraft weapons were put in wherever they fit, though they hadn't actually got ammo for them. And this manning of the anti-aircraft batteries generally fell to the women of the city, but they couldn't train. They've never used them before, and they have no ammunition yet. Once again, I think whether it's Yeomany or Clausewitz or Sun Tzu,

there's probably a little aphorism about how that's bad. One of the, like a picture of Sun, like the painting or poster of Sun Tzu that you'd see on like the Instagram grind set type guy. But it's like, why don't you have ammo? He's shrugging. And I was also thinking about your previous description. And it's like, well, good news is you're in a military that's famously tolerant of you as a logistics person, quartermaster being

like, hey, we can't get supplies. They'll definitely be like, oh, yeah, yeah. No worries there, buddy. If you have supplies, they'll be like, damn, how'd you do that? Now, the committee began to pump out decrees one after another. These include things like giving all grain to the army, mandatory reporting of family members who said anything cowardly or defeatist, and a mandatory sentence of 10 years in prison of anyone of age who failed to enlist in the army. Because you see, they didn't conscript. They simply had laws that put you in prison if you didn't enlist. I don't know how those are different, but they're different. Now, most importantly, deserter laws, like if you shirked your duty to the military, almost certainly ends with the NKVD shooting you behind the ear, were extended to the civilian population of Stalingrad. Out of all this war hammer ass brutality rose a guy named Vasily Chuikov, soon to be named commander of the defense of Stalingrad. He is the most Soviet commander of the war. He was born to a peasant family, number eight of 12 kids in the south side of Moscow. He

fought in the Russian Civil War, and then when World War II kicked off, he had the best assignment you could possibly have as a Red Army officer. He wasn't in the fucking soviet union so he missed all the the additional chaos this meant he escaped all the insanity of the opening stages of operation barbarossa and thus when he showed back up he had a flawless reputation to joseph stalin he was also known for being a incredibly violent drunk at all times to his own subordinates and his family. See, I keep crossing my fingers that you're going to tell me about a guy. I'm like, oh, and yeah, he just happened to kind of be a teetotaler and wasn't a fucking weird, brutal authoritarian. I was like, no.

Zhukov's coming. Don't worry. He's as normal as they come when it comes to hero of the Soviet Union slash field marshals. Well, yeah, it's just field marshals, you know? Well, yeah, it's just, I mean, I know that, yeah, I won't derail it. But yeah, it is like, oh, here comes this person. Like, maybe they're going to do some good. It's like, oh, by the way, this guy like drank a pallet of rubbing alcohol every day and really liked beating people with a strap.

And that's the thing that sticks out to me is for his own peers to know that he drank too much and hit his wife too many times in the Soviet military of the 40s means that it was real bad. It's kind of like my little, my saying about, I talk about this online, that whenever you see some viral right-wing campaign

about like this American soldier was unjustly imprisoned by the libs for killing a fucking terrorist downrange and it's like he shot an unarmed person who was detained. And it's like as i've said before if the u.s military convicted you and sent you to prison in afghanistan or iraq for something that you did you're the most guilty you've ever been in your life no one's been more guilty because they would find any fucking excuse you know mitigating circumstance plausible deniability to say oh this was a

misunderstanding maybe they'd hit you with fucking ucmj but they would not send you to leavenworth unless you did unless they were so fucking sick of your shit that you did this being called a drunk by the soviet uh military it's like being called a bit a bit of a boozer and and a fucking violent person with their spouse in the so Soviet military in the 1940s, as you said, you really had to be fucking swinging for the fences. And I'm sorry for using a fucking slightly violent

metaphor there. That wasn't intentional. I'm sorry. You leave that in, Tom, because you can basically say that's what it sounds like when someone almost nails a take in the studio and then you hear the slightly off-micro comment like, oh, motherfucker, you piece of shit. That's how it is with us sometimes. We're just riffing. At that point, Chuikov was commander of the half-strength 64th Army, which was deployed to the Don River area to stop the German advance. Chuikov's first taste of combat against the Germans was complete chaos.

His army was stationed in the rear, and when an army at the front got smashed, a rumor began to spread that the 64th was about to be surrounded, causing a fuller strike despite not having any actual Germans in front of them. His soldiers tried to flee across a nearby pontoon bridge, just in time for a wave of Stuka dive bombers to see the human traffic jam and bomb the living piss out of them, killing most of his staff officers. In the area of the defense of the Don, Soviet soldiers are so badly low on weapons and ammo, they launch night raids against the German positions just to capture guns and bullets. Rather than submit themselves to a military tribunal when their units retreated, several commanders simply shot themselves in order to speed up the process. All this isn't to say that the Soviet defense wasn't inflicting pain on the Germans because

it was. They quickly learned that they could only attack at night in order to escape the Luftwaffe, and afterwards counterattacks happened every single night. Despite rapidly advancing, Soviet soldiers still stood their ground, largely fighting to the death. German casualties are rapidly mounting, and if anyone remembers back to our episode about drug use in the German military during World War II, it's important to remember that every single German soldier is ripped to their fucking minds on meth. I'm on legal meth right now because it's the thing I take for brain problems. And I can only imagine if you were taking the uncut stuff. It was a pill called Pervitin. There's so many opportunities.

Just the fact that Perv is the first syllable. I'm just saying. It's Germans. Geez. Yeah. And they would take it for, I believe, two weeks straight, if I remember correctly. But pilots had it less because then you just probably just crash into a city or something. But amphetamine psychosis is a real thing.

And it was very common within the Wehrmacht and the SSs in fairness it was also very common in the u.s military but actually it wasn't amphetamine psychosis it was anti-malarial psychosis because the the drug they got for uh anti-malarial was a drug called adabrin which has a whole condition about it makes you go insane oh my phone is ringing who's on it robert bale's attorney oh yeah exactly his unit like they're they're fucking they just really really screwed shit up at s1 and they managed to somehow make sure the soldiers were given stocks of 1941 vintage anti-malarial drugs and not just when that happened not just the one that you what was the two like there was the the one you took every day that gave you a sunburn and made you

made you throw up if you had took an empty stomach and then there was one you took every week that completely destroyed your brain and gave you the worst dreams on earth the daily was doxycycline which is just which is a broad spectrum antibiotic yeah and then the the the um the one that you took every week i really cannot remember the name that was before my time i have no idea but i i me too but i just heard all the stories about it and yeah awful so yep this is but the germans look i'm just saying fucking they're more meth than man at this point. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Well, you know what? Which is good because you don't have to feed them so much. And I was going to say, when you want to use German military recruits for all those incredibly, let's just say, not completely below service homoerotic artwork, like, you know, the meth keeps twink death from happening. Either the meth or Soviet artillery keeps twink death from happening. Actual death happens. This brings a whole new meaning to PNP.

Panzer in play, baby. Oh, fuck's sake. How do you fucking know about that? You're like the straightest man on the planet. How the fuck do you know about that? I'm well read. Come at me. the planet how the fuck do you know about that i'm well read come at me um now the the red air force specifically a regiment of night fighters we've spoken about

before uh finally moved in as well though they had no airfields to work from so they had to take off and land from a watermelon field that was still actively being harvested by local villagers the germans continue to advance at a much slower pace, which again made Hitler furious and he changed his plan once again. Now the 4th Panzer Army, which had been taken away and sent towards the Caucasus, would be sent back again to help the 6th Army. Of course, the amount of fuel he wasted by doing so wasn't talked about because it would require pointing a finger at Adolf Hitler's face and saying that you're wrong. Slowly, the Soviet defense of the Don collapsed in early August as an encirclement of eight Soviet divisions, which included all of the artillery west of the Don River, was completed.

When some retreating Soviets tried to make their way through the woods, the Germans simply let them on fire. The destruction of the defenses was so complete that many units were completely annihilated. For example, out of one rifle division, which is 13,000 men, only 100 were accounted for when the operation was over. The fighting towards the Don had been brutal, but German soldiers were beginning to relax now that it was over. Both Paulus and Hitler assumed that this battle had finished the Soviets in the area. Hitler assumed that this battle had finished the Soviets in the area. One German soldier wrote, quote, the only consolation is that soon we will have peace and quiet in Stalingrad.

Little tidbit from Enemy at the Gates, the book, but there was actually a point where in the winter of 1943, the Nazi radios were like, here, we're going to broadcast live of choruses of german army soldiers of wehrmacht soldiers singing you know still enough or other christmas carols and like here they are live from stalingrad and the guys in stalingrad were who absolutely not singing got that radio broadcast and they were just like wait what the fuck uh uh guys uh i i can't sing i haven't eaten in three days and my my insides have frostbite yeah and it's like yeah me too i'm gonna get together in a big choir and sing.

That is definitely not the world's biggest fucking neon sign saying Soviet artillery and or snipers, please destroy me. Please blow my dick into a million pieces. By the end of August, German soldiers under the command of Walter von Seidlitz-Kirchbach established a position on the other side of the Don River, sending his men across in inflatable dinghies. Seidlitz is an interesting guy, a Prussian noble. After World War I, he stayed a professional officer in the Weimar Army before the rise of the Nazis. And then when the Nazis took over, he stayed.

And where a lot of people in his position would have been purged, he wasn't and then he was eventually captured and became a Soviet collaborator. Jeez. I mean, flexible. You gotta play all the sides, that way you never lose. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Despite all of the fighting to get this far,

crossing the Don and building the bridges they would need to get their tanks across is pretty easy with the Germans nicknaming the operation the Quiet Don. The bridges only took a day to finish and soon nazi vehicles are crossing that is when the red air force finally showed up and bombed the living piss out of them soviet katusha rocket batteries nicknamed stalin's oregon which is 100 a dick reference i don't care also open fire on them but now the thing about stalin's oregon is that a tendency to fire blindly with no spotters uh so he's kind of firing rockets wildly off into

the distance that i was gonna say if that's a dick joke then that really starts to get like a very extended kind of visual metaphor um Do with it what you please, man. Fair enough. The next day, on August 23rd, is when the bombing of Stalingrad would begin by the Luftwaffe's 4th Air Fleet under the command of Wolfram von Richthofen. Now, if that name sounds familiar, yeah, he was the cousin of the famed Red Baron. Wolfram was a hardcore Nazi, joined Luftwaffe as soon as it was reformed and serving in the Condor Legion supporting the fascists during the Spanish Civil War and was personally responsible for the bombing of Guernica.

He's a bastard. Really bad, yeah. I mean, also, yeah, good callback too in the sense that, let's just bear in mind that what we're talking about is actually towards the tail end when you think about the actual timeline of how long Europe was basically... that um you know what we're talking about is actually towards the towards the tail end when you think about the actual timeline of how long you know europe was basically getting crushed

under fascism like what was taking place and violence that was happening you know throughout that the area like yeah it's it's just grim and it's grim and then once again it's like you know sometimes like i i know i swing very very hard back and forth between the jokes and this but it's like you realize it's kind of there's the only people that i really feel sympathy or empathy for in this are the people who are press ganged into stuff and like i guess my experience is such that i just like i don't necessarily like i it feels like everyone once you get to like the decision point level like above sort of like guy trying to defend a position who has no fucking choice in the matter it just genuinely there's everyone's a piece of shit.

Huge piece of shit. Well, if it makes you feel any better, Wolfram suffered from a 20-year-long bout of dysentery. So while all of this is going on, he is absolutely shitting his pants and being miserable. And he died of a brain tumor before the end of the war. It's just very, I mean, you would have thought he would have died from shitting himself to death,

but instead it was something else. Yeah, he died of a brain tumor before the Allies could turn him into a wind chime. But yeah, he was shitting his pants the whole time. At one point during the bombing of Stalingrad, he jumps in a plane and takes part in it himself. He's just a fucking asshole. I would not want to be the person

having to fucking QAQC that cockpit afterwards. Can you just get the fucking pressure washer? It's like when you have to do a barrel roll, shit just sprays everywhere. It's like when a dude drinks the MRE milkshake and then he's up in the turret and you're just like, oh no, fuck. As people went

about their normal day in Stalingrad, loudspeakers began to blare, warning them of an incoming air raid. The problem was the defense committee had been running warnings for days and weeks up until that point, warnings that they did not bother to tell people if they were drills or not. So by the time the Luftwaffe finally did appear over the city, people just ignored the sirens, thinking it was another warning from the defense committee. thinking it was another warning from the defense committee. Starting at around 3 p.m., the Luftwaffe flew thousands of sorties over the city, dropping thousands of tons of firebombs. They had no real specific target.

Their target was the entire city itself, and it was attacked indiscriminately. Many houses were still made out of wood, and the firebombs created a massive firestorm, forming its own weather patterns over the southwestern side of the city. Buildings made out of concrete remained standing, but had burned so hot that the insides had caught on fire on the other side of the concrete, gutting them and killing everybody inside. Then the petroleum fuel reserve tanks were hit and exploded, making the fire even worse. The burning oil flowed over the Volga River, setting the river on fire.

The city's main water supply, hospital, communications network, and electrical grid were all bombed. A smoke cloud, compared to that of a volcano erupting, blanketed the city and climbed 3,000 meters into the air above. The bombings continued for days, completely leveling the city, reducing it to little more than a pile of smoking ruins and corpses. Like I said, Wolfram himself once jumped into a plane to observe for funsies. Nobody's entirely sure how many people were killed because of what's about to happen next in the city, but their thought is at least 40,000 people died. Now, this brings us to a very important question. 40,000 people died. Now, this brings us to a very important question. If the Soviet government knew that Stalingrad was about to become a war zone, why were there still so many civilians there in the first place? One part of this is the only practical explanation. The city had a lot of

factories, many of which stayed operational before, during, and after the bombings, even with the buildings themselves being hit. So at least it made sense for them, in the grand scheme of the war effort, to want factory workers to remain there, working for as long as they could. However, that doesn't account for the hundreds of thousands of civilians who quickly became trapped in what would become known as history's most well-known charnel house. For starters, all of the boats that could make it from one side of the river to the other to ferry civilians across had been commandeered by the NKVD. But even if they hadn't been, they were not allowed to leave. Stalin forbade anything that would, in his words, so panic.

By evacuating civilians, it would do just that, according to him, and spread fear to the surrounding area that they were being abandoned by the Red Army. I also think it's really important to note that Stalingrad is named after Stalin. They renamed Volgograd in honor of Stalin. It was Tsaritsyn before then. Yeah, me and fucking being great on Soviet history. One niche dumb thing, talk about a Soviet synthesizer, I'd be like, hell yeah know about this huge swath of important thing i forget it but one thing i point out too there's just from from having read about this is that the soviets by this point were fucking great at dismantling a factory

all the way down to like individual bathroom tiles basically yeah and taking it somewhere last episode thousands of factories taking it basically to the east of the urals but in this case there's this important symbolism for the germans comes to a point where it's like it's like a fucking you know kind of like self-licking ice cream cone it's like it's a problem because it's a fucking bad idea and we're doing now it's important to say, we don't care. We will not let this city get taken the way that other cities, we had to basically evacuate them

and move everything of military and economic value out. And they had this stupid idea that if they left the civilians in place, it would make the soldiers fight harder. Yeah, sorry. Yeah every any anybody who's yeah no bad just bad won't even we've been going for a while i won't derail it but yeah and so these orders ensure because like they had weeks to evacuate everybody and factories as well

which they could have done but But instead, the vast majority of the civilian population was trapped in the city as the bombs rained down from the sky. Now, as Stalingrad is being bombed around the clock, the Nazi army continued to advance, largely unopposed. Around the town of Gumrock, they ran into a gun line of repurposed 37 millimeter anti-air guns manned by teenage girls who had barely undergone any training due to lack of ammo. Now, you're probably thinking, oh, so the Germans ran right over them.

These teen girls fucked their shit up. Now, despite only being trained and the limited amount of training that they had with these guns as anti-aircraft pieces, they are now using them against infantry and tanks which they had zero training how to do so

they didn't know how to spot or aim these things at ground targets they just I fucked it and then winged it and it worked I mean of course they lost eventually but the girls fought to the death like slowing the Germans down for hours

and days and like when the Germans burst through their line and came up, they're like, oh man, we're getting dusted by teen girls. I still can't remember all the doctrinal terms and shit about concentration, mass, fucking all that stuff, unity of effort. I don't remember what the list is. It's all out of my brain now. It's been too long. But I do remember audacity and violence of action. And I say, regardless of what the Soviets fucking lacked, like they typically could bring audacity and violence of action. That was one thing that their logistic system did not fail on was massive titanium sized

balls. Yeah. And it's just one of these things where once again, it's like, you know, who will win? You know, a guy who was violently pulled from his life of making slivovitz and you know coveting his neighbor's donkey or person whose homeland is being overrun by this this absolute like horde that has demonstrated that if they capture where you are they will just fucking extirpate everything yeah some like who Who will win? The so-called Aryan master race or- Or one teeny tiny ninth grade class from People's Technical High School 357.

Yeah. Take your time off from gymnasium to hurl 37 millimeter shells at your face. And then when the Germans bust through the lines, the girls stayed where they were. If their position wasn't completely overran, they stayed put and fought as they were surrounded and the germans just tried to like keep driving straight they would just start shooting at the rear of their tanks with their anti-tank guns and in a lot of situations this devolved into hand-to-hand combat again with teen girls i'm just imagining like i know that it wasn't the same you know but operational terms and graphics they have to design one of sort of like like like Soviet teen girl commandos and it's just like fucking like doctrine, like bypass, bypass, go fucking around, get away. By the end of the day, the German soldiers had reached the north of Stalingrad, seeing the Volga for the first time.

This left the defenders of Stalingrad completely shocked as they've been fighting to the southwest for so long they didn't expect for Paulus to get around them to the north. At this point Stalingrad command was in an underground bunker and the surprise that the assault was so complete that when an officer came in and told like reported to the commander of the defense that they had just completed a pontoon bridge across the Volga river he was immediately ordered to destroy it as soon as he was finished. Just like fuck okay walks back out like bad news boys tear it all down years ago when i was in my first orientation course they called basic officer leadership course uh it was just like a orientation for officers from all branches just like here's how you fucking load basically it was like we don't want the jessica lynch thing to happen again so like we had to make sure quartermaster

officers and fucking hospital people know how to do a convoy and fucking convoy live fire and like read a map perhaps read a map firefight you qualify with a with an m4 with an m68 optic um but our barracks was right next to the ranger indoctrination program barracks which is basically where they send ranger privates before they are accepted into ranger regiment after they've graduated from airborne school and they just haze the living dog shit out of them the whole fucking time seems productive we do pt and they'd be on their pt field just getting the shit smoked out of them for hours and one night we came back from night fire and i i remember this to the day i die i was watching a gaggle of of hope a hopeful ranger

privates carrying wall lockers out down the stairs from their barracks to recreate the barracks on their fucking drill pad I had to do that in one station unit training and just like getting screamed at by Ranger NCOs and it feels like being in the Soviet Army had some of that in common like build upon Toon Bridge now take it down what the fuck is wrong with you private move

move go Ranger go like just that except in Russian I continue to refuse to learn Russian, so I can't help you. Word finally made it back to Stalin about the situation, and he forbade any withdrawal of machinery, as they'd previously done. Factories were not going to be pulled out. That was also when he passed an order that Stalingrad, his namesake city, was to be held until the end, no matter what.

Posters were hung up around what remained of the city, announcing that the city was under siege, and quote, we shall never surrender the city of our birth, let us barricade every street, let us transform each district, block by block, each building into an impregnable fortress. Anyone not working in the factory, man or or woman or child in a lot of cases was mobilized into nkvd militia units called special brigades and due to a shortage of weapons at best about 50 of them got a gun i presume this is the origin of the one man gets the rifle one man gets the clip the ammunition i can't remember the verbatim when the man holding the rifle blah blah that comes specifically from a soldier's memoir um and he like he was a regular soldier in the red army

and he said that happened to him when he was serving in stalingrad so i mean this happened a lot as far as like having specific orders like hey you don't have a gun wait until sergey in front of you gets clapped and arm yourself like i don't he didn't make it sound like that's what happened there was no guy with a bullhorn yelling at the guy with those certainly going off of enemy at the gates with that specific color hat. He was NKVD.

But it was implied. There's plenty of weapons laying on the ground. And it was very common for Soviet soldiers to steal German weapons as well because it's like they use different ammo, but there's plenty of that laying around too.

No shortage of dead people in the city. As German soldiers pushed into the city's outskirts, they ran to the stout defense of the local technical university students. Listen, man, if the high school school girls platoon was any indication fucking you you you absolutely had better you better have your full combat load you'd better have a fucking qrf plan like there's one thing that i've learned the last people on earth i want to fight is like soviet college students apparently they're like do you have any idea what shit we have to go back to in the classroom we'd much rather go do this at least in this one if someone like when you're just getting hazed to the literal

end of your life you know you can't fight back because then they're breaking the rules but here you can haze the germans back and you know because you know uh you know physical training or pt and sports preparedness and everything was a pretty normal part of every soviet curriculum they were at least in shape yeah if not a little hungry since everything got bombed the other day but whatever um exactly it's like you're sending in your infiltration force and you forgot you you you're coming up against like the for the forward element of like you know just laughing drama club yeah the three the the yeah the the you know the uh the 399th revolutionary judo high school fuck god damn it you're just describing like a new anime or something at this point i know right i absolutely yeah 100 um now these students have been building

trenches up until the point that german tanks were actively shooting at them. Committed by their college professors and reinforced with a commissar who daylated as a tractor mechanic. Now, for people who aren't aware, a commissar is a political officer that has military authority. He has no military training. And this guy is a tractor mechanic. They roved in packs, setting up ambushes for German columns as they approached and throwing landmines directly into the path of German tanks. When I was in the Green Beret course, when we were doing basically Robin Sage augmentation to help out the trainees, we were basically put in the service of this crazy redneck guy whose land they were letting them train on and use his backyard church as the command center as their talk. And he would come out. He was in a rascal scooter. So we would

not only... Is that a technical? Yeah. The cadre would let him basically use us. And so we had to dig a ditch for a drainage pipe for him. And literally, we had to... One of the tasks when you were press ganged in his service was to carry his rascal scooter onto the grass so he could inspect... He was in it to inspect your work and digging and that to me is the first thing that came to mind when you're like your commissar is a tractor mechanic like he probably was more mobile than that guy i will say though that like he was pretty he was real north carolina redneck and he definitely was a hard task master on the work but he liked our

work and so he basically said to his wife i'm going to say the translation first hey could you please go and uh to his wife go get get down to bojangles and get these these guys some food you know for the hard work they did but this is what he actually said woman oh yeah i didn't get them boy i went in bow box remember this the day i die i've forgotten a lot of shit's probably more important in my life but i will remember that and that is the north carolina redneck version of your commissar as a tractor mechanic then the the North Carolina political officer. But they probably got some shit done, unless they got completely overrun, because that also happens. Now, there's something of an apocryphal story that does have its basis in fact, and that is the famous Soviet Stalingrad tractor factory turned tank factory that pumped out T-34s.

This is a legendary story that has been blown wildly out of proportion, but is actually true. The saying is, or the story goes, that this tractor factory was turned into churn out T-34s, at which point they would then immediately drive out directly into combat. That didn't happen because that's insane. The factory would just get blown up and stop working. However, what is true is that a factory that was far enough away from the front line as far as the front line existed in Stalingrad, it continued functioning virtually the entire battle. They would slap T-34s together. And because they were so worried about the factory being bombed and put out of commission, they were rushed off the assembly line before gun sights were even installed.

Sometimes they didn't even wait for tank crews to show up and take them. The workers from the factory would drive them into the city towards the tank units and then work as soldiers. units and then work as soldiers and because there was no gun sights the tank's loader would have to drop the breach look through the cannon and tell the gunner how to aim and then load the gun the cannon and tell him to fire look i've heard of using things that aren't meant to be direct fire weapons as direct fire weapons but i've never heard of a direct fire weapon basically being turned into like a fucking potato cannon. You see, they're filling the back of the breach up with hairspray, like hitting the little flint, trying to get it to go.

Sergei, it is not working! Put more hairspray! I wish we had better hairspray in this country. Meanwhile, Red Army units were packed into trains and rushed to Stalingrad without any real orders, getting off the train and not knowing which army or command they fell under and no knowledge of

where to go or how strong the Germans were. In one situation, a Red Army rifle division found themselves getting off the train and were immediately attacked by Stuka dive bombers, and a bomb slammed directly into the train car carrying their field hospital section, killing all of their doctors and nurses. As the air attack continued, men just began deserting. A commander finally managed to get his division together and immediately announced he was enacting the Roman punishment of decimation, which, look, this has come up so many times on the show, it's weird to happen so often. For people who are unaware, decimation is when you kill one out of every 10th man. Now, the key to Roman decimation was, is you pulled lots and the other nine would have to turn and kill the 10th.

Ah, in the Soviet army, well, at least this division, because this is never a actual doctrine of the Red Army. This man decided to install it and then personally walked down his entire division and shot every 10th man. I feel like drawing on a different source now. I've uncovered the secret like military tactician memoirs of Cesare Borgia. And it just says, as regards to this situation, sounds bad. Now, I should point out that this was not the general German offensive yet. This was just the vanguard.

They had punched a narrow corridor into the very, very outskirts of the city. The true Battle of Stalingrad hadn't begun yet, and all of this was already happening. Though as desperate as this was, it only slowed the German northern advance into the city slightly. Unfortunately for the Soviets, the Germans also captured an important railway, which was full of American Lenz-Lies material that had not yet been unloaded. So you also ended up getting pictures of Germans ripping around Stalingrad

in Jeeps and stuff. General Motors right there, supporting the war effort, shit. German tanks also began shelling the Volga crossing, sinking dozens of river transports, some of which were carrying supplies, but others were carrying refugees as Stalin had finally relented and led old women and children to evacuate the city, but only them. Now, speaking of this narrow corridor controlled by the German vanguard, they were in a bad place, kind of stranded and only controlling

a few mile wide strip. So they had to have their supplies airdropped to them, and they all missed, landing behind Soviet lines. When one of Paulus' subordinates pointed out that they should pull back until the rest of the 6th Army showed up, Paulus immediately fired him. Now you might consider that entire passage foreshadowing, because you should.

Yeah. Once again, sounds bad. Paulus, his army, and the vanguard were all waiting for the 4th Panzer Army coming from the south, which found themselves bogged down in a fight to the death with teenage militia girls

and penal units around Lake Sarpa. Another danger came in from the Luftwaffe. The Germans had been advancing so quickly that the pilots could not keep up with where they all were, leading to more than one kind of a wave of Stuka dive bombers bombing the hell out of their own men. This wasn't helped by the fact that the German pilots, like the German ground forces, were all on meth.

With all of the... That'll make aiming hard, seeing triple. Aim for the one in the middle, Gustav. With all of this going on, Georgy Zhukov finally arrived in Stalingrad, having just been appointed the deputy supreme commander. Stalin had been ordering constant counterattacks against the approaching German forces, and Zhukov asked to be stopped as the forces were badly armed and trained, and he saw this all as a waste of manpower. At first, Stalin agreed, but then changed his mind as August turned to September, and as German forces secured their foothold on

the outskirts of the city. Zhukov once again had to talk him down, and he got him to hit the pause on the Cuban wave attacks for about two days. As the noose was closed around the city, and the true battle was about to begin, Stalingrad only had 40,000 defenders, facing down both the 6th Army, numbering at least 300,000, and the 4th Panzer Army, numbering 250,000, as well as 1,000 tanks. A German soldier wrote a letter home to his family saying, quote, Stalingrad will fall in the next few days. And that is where we'll pick up next time. Yeah, listen, I appreciate the discipline with which you've gone through to like try to address the whole scope of this and it's just nuts because these these would be fantastical anecdotes like like the sort of storytelling climax of an insane battle already and we've just scratched the

surface of it so i know we're in for some fun but yeah can i just say as your co-host but as an admirer as well this is this is great so far man uh and this is this is intense it's like sometimes i think the riffing and the joking is also just sort of a a means of kind of letting your brain process it because it's otherwise so unimaginably horrific and just massive in scale i agree it's one of the problems i ran into when i was writing the kursk series uh i think it was over a year ago now uh was how to do the two things how to do it justice and fully express the actual scale like the the kind of scale that we will just never see again in our modern history um and it was one of the

things that i always kind of wanted to do curse i've wanted to stalling grad since day one of the show but i was always like i can't like it was always the like the this the the scale of it all made me always kind of backpedal and talk myself out of it but i finally decided now is the time and i managed to keep it to five parts. You know, it's funny because I was thinking about, you know, years ago, you did an episode about Project 100,000. And I was thinking about this and I was like, sometimes I wonder if maybe like the culmination of so much of the things that we do would be to do an episode about the Vietnam War.

And then I was like, that's a whole fucking series. That's a whole show. That's years. Like, if you actually want to look at this thing something like that in its totality that's a that's a project that's a phd thesis that's a phd thesis plus a fucking tenure track position plus a lifetime of research and you're just scratching the surface like i admire it because i sometimes don't know if i even have the brain power to fucking like really like i struggle even just to comprehend when i look at it like and i'm trained on those things with you know operational terms and graphics and like representations but just to conceive of the scale when you have like you know you know army group movements and things like that

and that understanding where when you read this stuff when you try to like conceive of it where individual positions are and like these crucial things happening but like they might be happening at the battalion level or the brigade level where there's 150 brigades. You know what I mean? And having been in a brigade seeming so massive when you're a soldier in a squad, on a buddy team, in a platoon. Not to mention, you have to be able to do this without showing any visual aids. Yeah. Yeah, man. It's like maybe there's sometimes like Lions Led by Donkeys, a military history podcast with slides. It's a challenge.

So I think, I mean, obviously I'm biased, but I think you're doing a great job and I'm learning a lot, even though this is something I've been interested in. But also, yeah, man, it's just so massive. And I just, I guess for me, I've read, I think I've talked about this previously. Obviously, I read the book Enemy at the Gates when I was 16. But I'd say having read Guy Sajay's Forgotten Soldier about his experience in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Having read the novel Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, mostly about the Battle of Stalingrad. Having read William Vollman's Europe Central. Having read Jonathan Littell's uh lady enviant i'm always taken aback because so much of this

stuff that i'm describing is fiction but it seems the authors did a ton of research and they always come up with some of these really macabre and intense kind of anecdotes individual situations to represent it but then you talk about this stuff and it's just so much more and you realize that like there's so much more and it's unknowable but like what you can do is kind of explain it and find representative examples and hopefully like that gets the point across it's like yep great time great way to end the podcast this episode fucking on a timely fashion is be like let's let's get into like the philosophy of human communication and history but i love doing a podcast for an hour and a half.

And then at the end, I'm like, let's just dive right in. Let's just dive right the fuck in. But no, man, I'm fascinated and I'm excited to learn more. And you'll notice on camera, sometimes I just kind of sit back and I'm like, Jesus, fuck, God. So I'm excited and maybe also a little bit dreading of what, uh, what comes next. Um, I,

I can say the line that from here on out, it gets significantly worse with every episode. So I hope you heard that's the thing that happens on this show. Unfortunately. Yeah. Uh, Nate, thank you so much for joining me here in Stalingrad part two,

everybody. You should join us next week on part three, Nate plug your shows. Hi, I, I am the cohost of what a Hell of a Way to Die, a podcast about why you shouldn't join the military and also about gardening and being a dad. I also produce Trash Future and I produce Kill James Bond. Trash Future is a show about why

the technology, the tech industry is bad, but also funny in a bad way. Kill James Bond is a movie podcast hosted by three incredibly funny trans people and it's a great great great movie podcast very different than most movie podcasts but also extremely funny so hopefully if you find any of my jokes you haven't you know gotten a comically oversized gun and shot your phone because out of rage from the kind of jokes I make on this show

if you like it there's more out there shooting your phone with the Shinzo Abe contraption exactly and everybody uh this is the only show that i host but if you like it consider supporting us on patreon you get years worth of bonus content we're doing a hooligans of kandahar audiobook that everybody's asked for for years you can get that on there you get access to our discord tons of other stuff premium shows like the history of armen Armenia and our sharp show where we watch

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