Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 281 - The Battle of Stalingrad: Part 3

Episode Date: October 15, 2023

Part 3 of 5 of our battle of stalingrad series. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys get some merch! https://www.patreon.com/posts/pre-order-your-90833773

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast, that show you're currently listening to right now. If you like what we do here, consider supporting our show on Patreon. Just $5 a month gets you Discord access, every regular episode early, an audio and ebook version of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and 5 plus years of bonus content. You can subscribe now at www.patreon.com slash lines led by donkeys. We also have new Stalingrad street fighting academy merch available for pre-order right now at www.llbdmerch.com. So get yours before we run out. Now back to the show. Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Lions of my Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe. And with me still in the ruins of Stalingrad is Nate.

How are you doing, buddy? Good. I found a little German Stahlhelm. I got a kerosene burner underneath it. I'm going to make some soup. It's probably going to have some potatoes in it. It might have some cabbage if I can find them. Otherwise, it's just going to be hot water. But I'm doing okay. I believe in method acting. So last night, I went to a Russian restaurant in town. There's a lot of Russian food that has made its way into regular Armenian cuisine from the Soviet era, but I've never actually had like russian food and i have to say it was exactly what i mean it was good i i have to i have to preface this with the food was good but i must preface this but not aesthetically pleasing in any way uh no no no no no no it was which like i'm not a food guy so it's like whatever to me like but it was very funny

um that like i'm not a food guy is a very funny line from you taken completely out of context i just eat snow yeah you know i don't i don't like flavors um but like no i'm kidding uh but like it was like the sick of like doctor's sausage which is it just looks like it's just baloney um and it's like a little squiggle of mustard on a piece of black bread. It's good. That's so funny. It's good. I forget exactly what it's called. I don't speak Russian. It vaguely translates to herring under a fur coat.

Herring under a fur coat. It's the fur coat mayonnaise. Of course it's mayonnaise. The best way to explain it to you is it is Midwestwestern food but slavic yeah it was very good but like when i had the first dish comes to the table i couldn't help but laugh i i like dill and i i mean mayonnaise you can just take it like here's the thing they use salt they don't undercook stuff like i remember being in the q course when like the language instructors would bring in like the food of the like the

region or like where they're from and yeah every russian dish had mayonnaise in it but like they were good however i was going to tell you my quick russian russian cuisine story was i went to a russian restaurant with some friends in seoul south korea uh and there's a lot of there is actually a kind of russian area of seoul because there were so many ethnic koreans who have repatriated because obviously they can earn far more money. They're treated very, very poorly. During the Soviet era, they were forcefully deported. Relocated.

So these people are, there's a group of people that they call Joseonjoks who are ethnic Koreans from basically the Russian border area. I take that back. Not the Russian border area, but rather China. Like Yanbian Autonomous Prefecture the russian border area and i take that back not not the russian border but rather china like the like the like yonbyon uh autonomous prefecture and stuff like that and then there are also people called koryo saram who are uh ethnic koreans who were forcibly uh repaid or

um what's the expatriated they were they were deported by stalin because stalin said i don't trust the uh that the japanese occupation of kore Korea will not mean that ethnic Koreans will be infiltrated by Japanese agents. And so I am going to basically ensure that you cannot blend in with any Koreans on the Russian border areas because there will be none. And he moved them all to the Central Asian republics. So many of those people have repatriated through various things for ethnic Koreans to do so. However, in South Korea, they are absolutely an exploited underclass. North Korean refugees... This is my shocked face. Yeah. Joseon Joks, Chinese ethnic Koreans, and Koryo Saram are very, very poorly treated.

However, because of the fact that there are areas of... Because most Koryo Saram are very, very poorly treated. However, because of the fact that there are areas of... Because most Koryo Saram, they are Russian speakers. They may speak Korean, but primarily their first language is Russian. Certainly often the adults, the language they were educated in is Russian. So because those people have established themselves in Seoul, there's also now just like people... Russians working in Korea go there, live there. So it has transcended from Russian-speaking ethnic Koreans to the Russian area of Seoul. It's kind of like Brighton Beach in Brooklyn. It's Jewish immigrants from the Palos settlement to Russian, Soviet Jewish emigres to Russian-speaking people of any background who are moving to New York.

So anyway, I went to this restaurant and this is the interesting story. The reason I'm telling this and wasting your time here is I spoke Korean okay at the time. My buddy who I was with spoke Korean okay. And as one does, he's lived in Korea for like 20 years. Our server spoke Korean okay too. And Russian. She didn't speak English, but she was a white ethnic Russian. So we had to order our meal in Korean together. It was the only common language between us and this blonde haired like literally blonde haired blue eyed white russian girl who was taking orders the only common language we had was uh was korean because she most time the people who came in that restaurant spoke russian and so it was just very it was like it was like the like what if a language school practical exercise just like like a wizard cast a spell and made it real life

um i got some i got some stroganoff though it was good as hell i remember that being really good and pierogies or i can't remember what the russian word is but you know the dumplings i think it roughly translates to meat pie uh because i get them all the time they were so good so yeah like in the spirit i can recall that moment and now we can talk about a an environment in which one was not you know warm and cozy and eating meat pies but rather um getting shelled to fuck non-stop having some dirt with mustard on top you know exactly yeah i was gonna make the joke that i'm boiling water in my stall helm but unfortunately it's full of holes for some reason and it can't hold any soup i wonder why that is van is mine Wien ist mein soup. Ja. Boe is mein soup.

I can't remember German. So we're on Stalingrad part three. And where we left you last time, the German army had all but surrounded the city of Stalingrad, which they had leveled with the heaviest air attack the Luftwaffe would ever conduct during World War II. The city's defenders continued to fight at the outskirts as German forces slowly crept in. However, the Battle of Stalingrad was still not Hitler's priority. That was still the Caucasian Front. And despite the fact that sounds like some weird, I don't know, like indie band, like you could call Mumford and Sons the Caucasian Front. mumford and sons the caucasian front yeah the caucasian front does sound like it's like it sounds like white supremacists who went to college like they took like like white supremacists who

decided they were going to pursue the sort of like wear a tweed jacket and go to like you know the the parties at the new republic that leon weasel tier was just describing richard spencer yeah no i mean yeah i basically in a roundabout way i was like like but this implies that it's an organized group and like they aren't immediately written about fondly by the new yeah another like irony of this is despite like caucasian becoming like shorthand for white people whites like caucasian people weren't considered aryans by the nazis until they had to be because they needed manpower like I kind of understood it that Caucasian was sort of a term that was race-scienced into existence by the Nazis to be the sort of ethnic term for white people, but it's not in any

way applicable. Yeah, I mean, it just means the Caucasus Mountains. Technically, I am in the Caucasus, and the people who come here i don't think they would probably describe georgians zeres and armenians as caucasian as if they know it yeah famously perceived as white chechnyans dagestanis armenians and like there was i there were granted like honorary aryan status by like nazi germany but that was like a political thing. Hitler hated Armenians to the point that there was something in the Wehrmacht

called the Armenian Legion where they recruited Armenian POWs that were captured during the war. They're like, oh, we're going to fight to liberate Armenia from the Soviet Union and we're going to invade Turkey. Not to mention, I think most They're like, oh, we're going to fight to liberate Armenia from the Soviet Union and we're going to invade Turkey. So like a lot.

And not to mention, like, I think most people would pick that option rather than dying in a POW camp. But he trusted them so little that he put them on garrison duty. And all they did is drink and like invite Jews into the Legion because they quickly realized that like Germans are so fucking stupid. They can't tell the difference between us. Yeah, the race scientists actually really bad at their fucking job and it's interesting to me too because i was pointing this out that like some people um we have a lot of american listeners and like many of them this won't come as a surprise but some of you this might be a new thing to learn is that like one of the things i experienced as an american and i imagine you experienced too living even

further afield in technically europe and like the literal like by some definitions like absolute corner of like like let's be real you are in asia but in terms of the the sort of ethnography you is seen as like the the term i get i see to get thrown as eurasia you are you are you are in the absolute most southeastern corner of europe you know in the sort of like definition of that some people use is that when you look at Caucasian people, if you look at someone that people might know is Habib Nurmagomedov, and he's Dagestani, he's Muslim. If he shaved his beard, like if he was, you know, people in America now in 2023 might perceive this guy as, you know, being like, if he didn't open his mouth like italian or

southern european but the thing you've got to realize is that in europe like in western europe in you know the sort of like like like fully the sun's giving you giving you cancer immediately europe those those guys are not perceived as white at all and like that's talks about the kind of like what you call sort of mutability of whiteness but it's also just really important to remember that like those distinctions because in america whiteness is defined as emphatically not being black like it shifts to suit whoever can form a majority in order to make sure that that black people and people perceived as black are are being oppressed whereas it's just different in europe it's been around for long

before europe has micro climates of racism yes exactly that's and so like this is a huge we're talking about the battle of stalingrad but like it's just important to understand that that uh that so much of the animating philosophies behind both like let's be real both Soviet and Nazi race science because these are factual things that exist there's a very comical Soviet picture of how to determine the various minorities

of the Soviet Union and they all it's like the Georgian Armenian and like Azaria is the same guy with different mustaches yeah different and just like like doing like very very small graphic designer kerning differences on how close their eyebrows are together yeah until the the ultimate bridge is completed and you've come to yerevan exactly it's gonna say like like i you know what if if something is psychologically like like like deep

within the human like the jungian subconscious makes you uncomfortable and feel threatened by a unibrow, do not go to Armenia or Glendale, California. So Hitler was still focused on the Caucasus front, which was going very, very, very badly due to him splitting his forces and taking resources away from them like we talked about. We're now in the beginning of September. And while German forces were advancing into Stalingrad, Hitler spent most of his time yelling at a guy named Field Marshal Wilhelm List, who was supposed to already have been in Chechnya. Hitler's like, why are we not in Grozny yet? But he wasn't even close. Instead, the advance ground to a complete and total halt, as the German army ran out of fuel, Instead, the advance ground to a complete and total halt as the German army ran out of fuel, ammo and all that fun stuff you need to do.

You need to have to do a war. According to eyewitnesses of one particular outburst at list over dinner, Hitler completely lost his shit. He did not understand why his military commanders needed things like fuel and supply lines in order to advance because they were still winning pretty much every battle that they fought. It's like, why don't you simply drive into Grozny? It's like, well, we don't have any fucking gas. And probably, remember, at the height of Hitler's military career, he was a corporal. He was a messenger. He ran letters back and forth. He doesn't have an understanding of military operations. And at one point, he sent Alfred Yodel, the chief of operational staff, to yell at List for his lack of progress. But when Yodel showed up and saw how completely fucked List's supply situation was, he went back and told Hitler that List is actually

right. And instead of listening, Hitler fired him and put himself in direct command for about a month before he realized like, ooh, I'm not so good at this, and then put someone else in the position. You know, everyone, every fucking first lieutenant XO or captain company commander thinks they can run the supply room better than the supply sergeant. Many a man has been broken on the rocks of the army supply system. And that's a much more comprehensive and just easy to navigate control supply system than what existed back then. It's like the meme of the show is like, don't make me tap the sign. And it's just like,

take care of your supply. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Always, always, always less, lest you want to be on the hook for millions of dollars of equipment. You know, I'm reminded of just an anecdote from the William Craig book Enemy at the Gates when he described some of as regards the material conditions of the German advance was that by the time they were even getting to vornege and not even you know to towards the in the volga base and towards the vulgar the vulgar river but not uh not yet encircling and then being encircled at stalingrad their supply system had broken down so badly as regards vehicles that they were they were having to deal with um you know using like purloined French trucks shit that was brought over and like anything they could find for horses horses yeah

like their supply system could not keep up and the roads were so bad they were the supply lines were so dramatically stretched and great for like like you said, seizing the initiative, maintaining the initiative, but not great for when you absolutely need to get people back to refit condition to reconstitute a unit and have them at full strength for their supply complement. Flashback to Friedrich Paulus being a massive Napoleon nerd and not learning any of the lessons of 1812. Yeah, it is really interesting because it's like if it had been some cryptic riddle about a thing you aren't supposed to do when you invade Russia, you could understand like the sort of like the Greek tragedy moment of hubris overtaking you and suddenly being like that, that the epiphany there of like how you have been fucked by fate of like, oh's what they meant when they said this cryptic riddle but it's not cryptic at all it's like hey you probably need to make sure your supply lines aren't stretched also it's cold and big yeah food is important yeah it's like the constant joke that i make about like the art of war it's like nobody needs to read that book it's just like feed your soldiers have more have more people than your enemy perhaps beat them in a battle make your enemy think they are doing something different or that you are doing something different when they when when attack

attack strong when you look weak and it's like yeah i mean i feel like cool but like if you want to really massively poetically interpret that great but i think you can actually take it as literal word it's sort of like uh make your enemy think you're doing the opposite of what you're doing okay cool have more forces than him cool be better trained than him cool yeah yeah it's not something i expect a field marshal to be perusing you know well especially considering how much arcane shit they loved to test each other on in you know like both military academies and then also in their you know command general staff college like good god they were into like doctrinal definitions of shit yep and this is where hitler began to shift like this is where the eastern front fundamentally is given enough rope to hang

itself you see of course at this point of his life hitler's ripped out of his mind just absolutely ripped to the gills on drugs and he's not a military thinker like some people like to frame him as but even he knew they absolutely needed to capture the Caucasus oil fields in order to continue the war, telling several of his military leaders that if they didn't, the war couldn't go on. Now, it's also very clear that he knew this wasn't going to happen anymore. So he changed his mind, deciding if they successfully cut the Volga River off, they could cripple the Soviet war effort. After all, it wasn't like he tossed up his hands and say, I surrender. The Soviets were just not going to murder the living shit out of him in revenge. So he needed something. He believed,

now, suddenly, that if the Nazis capture Stalingrad, the namesake city of the Soviet leader, it'd be such a massive propaganda victory that the Soviet government simply could not survive it. It's completely unrealistic, but you mean it's Hitler. That strikes me as... One of the reasons why that strikes me as being unrealistic is the fact that this presumes that information like that is going to be readily accessible and not controlled. like that is going to be readily accessible and not controlled. And it really underestimates the level of, call it information control, within the Soviet Union. But also, the Nazis were no strangers to propagandizing and lying their tics off to their people, like their own citizens.

So quite frankly- And they would throughout the entire Battle of Stalingrad as well. That's the other anecdote I think I mentioned in one of the first episodes in the william craig book is about like you know cutting to the choir of german soldiers singing still a night or or whatever otanenbaum on the front and they're like oh now we cut live to stalingrad and it's like except everyone in stalingrad is listening to the radio like that's not us singing what the fuck are you talking about like we we now cut live to the the choir of stalingrad just people screaming yeah wow it's a ministry record like it's genuine you call the song der frostbitt We now cut live to the choir of Stalingrad, just people screaming. Yeah. Wow.

It's a ministry record. Like, it's genuine. We call the song Der Frostbind. Yeah. I didn't know you could make synthesizers sound like that. Actually, I do. Because every time I try to program a frequency modulation synthesizer, it just sounds like the ode to Stalingrad.

Like every metal clanging sound you can think of. I feel like, yeah, that's such a callous overestimation. It's very, very... I mean, I know that that's the whole story of the whole saga, is this idea that the thing that has not that much material importance to the actual war takes on this sort of symbolic importance. And thus, it then wasn't that symbolically important to the Soviets at the time. But then because they made it that way, then the Soviets treated it that way. And it's just like Hitler built God's perfect self-licking ice cream cone. A nation, if you will, a large imperial nation survived something as catastrophic as the failures of the defense of the Soviet Union during the opening stages of Barbarossa.

I could believe like, no, if we take the city, it's still going to collapse. It's almost like you can't prosecute a war effectively if you see your enemies as subhuman because you can only underestimate them there was so much resentment to the point that like there's we'll talk about it later but like there was a significant degree of what the people the germans called hilfstwillinger like uh or heebies uh yep so they're gonna come up soviet citizens who volunteer hilfstwillinger literally means like like like volunteer helper or volunteer, to volunteer and fight for the Nazis. You see a lot of this amongst in occupied countries on the Eastern Front, from the Baltics, from the Ukrainian SSR, from Poland.

You see people who want to help the Nazis, whether it's to prosecute the war or prosecute the Holocaust. And there are lots of people motivated either by the same politics, a sense of sort of... Sometimes just plain old nationalism and independence. Yeah, exactly. Nationalism in countries that have basically been absorbed by the Soviet Union, or even pre-Soviet Union got sort of fucking arbitrary bordered out of existence, people who were seeing it as pragmatism or people who, yeah, had such incredible grievances against the occupation that they

became willing to fight against it. I've told this story before, but I knew a guy, I'm not going to mention his name because he was a terrible army officer, but his dad was a very, very decorated Estonian, Korean and Vietnam War veteran. And I one time looked up his name because he was a member of parliament. His dad was a member of parliament in Estonia and saw a photo of him giving a commemoration, like a Veterans Day for Estonian veterans, commemoration day speech in front of a monument. And the monument featured a carving on stone of a guy in a Stahlhelm holding an SS submachine gun because it was a monument to Estonian

veterans of the Waffen SS. Now, I don't know if that guy was a far right politician. That's the thing is that he might not have been. But at the end of the day, like, you know, there's a lot of stuff it makes made the the the the the content of jokes not everybody who who volunteered to fight for the nazis was an ardent nazi but like they still fought for the fucking nazis so they can suck my dick and at the end of the day there was so much the point i'm getting to there was so much resentment

there was so much willingness because of like the fuck-ups and the oppression and all this stuff but they also were so like the what the nazis did was so unequivocally eliminationist and brutal that like they also engendered so many people who might otherwise have been willing to accept occupation to be like no i'll literally fucking human claim on myself to kill even one of you like they they made it once again the idiotic you know misapprehension of your enemies. They created a far more vicious resistance, partisan resistance,

and determination on the part of Soviet conscripts. It doesn't matter. We're about to get into some crazy-ass shit that conscripts do. And so, like I said, I know long, long, long dovetailing thing that I'm saying here, but that's the point here is that it all comes back

to what you said previously, that ideology of being unable to see your enemy as anything but just sort of like worm like yep yeah it's never gonna work out now like at this point it really does seem like um he was desperately trying to grasp onto whatever good news that he was told and despite what we all know what was eventually going to happen, spoiler alert in case you don't know how the series ends, the advance towards Stalingrad was still going well. The Nazis had even run into their first batch of American tanks, which were, of course, part of the Lenz-Lies program given to the Soviet Union. And they

were early Shermans, and they kind of sucked. The Soviets themselves didn't like the Shermans. They were too tall. They were too under armored. They had a small gun. And apparently their transmission really sucked. But none of this slowed the Soviets down. They continued to launch massive counterattacks in any way possible. Now, these all virtually ended in failure, but it never slowed them down. They're like, oh, that one didn't work.

Let's do another one. Now, the city's command was in the Tsaritsa Gorge at the time, but it had to be moved across the Volga because it had been bombed so badly that the tunnels under the Tsaritsa Gorge had turned into death traps. It was remarked that the air quality in the tunnel had become so bad that Khrushchev, who was the main political officer for the Stalingrad Command, couldn't even light a cigarette because there wasn't enough oxygen. That is when General Chuikov was called into Khrushchev's new command area on the other side of the Volga River and

officially promoted to be the head of the army inside Stalingrad itself. When asked how he interpreted Stalin's orders in regards to the defense of the city, Chuikov answered simply, quote, we will defend the city or die in the attempt. After that, he took a ferry back into Stalingrad under fire to take command of the 62nd Army and then got lost. Now, remember, the city has been pretty much flattened with bombing and all the roads and signs are blown up. He did eventually find his command post by simply asking soldiers where it was. And there he met his political commissar, a Ukrainian man named Kuzma Gurov, who by all accounts was as psychotic and violent as Chuikov, a match made in heaven. Now, this ended up being a good dynamic because another very important part

of the defense of Stalingrad was the NKVD. Now, the NKVD, led by Beria, was insistent that they never listen to the army. So they immediately posted two NKVD units at every single crossing of the Volga with orders to shoot soldiers who tried to run away from the city. However, that didn't help things as shit rapidly collapsed within army units that weren't running. For example, one sergeant murdered his company commander, stole a tank, and then drove it towards the German lines just to surrender, which was really close to a solid dude's rock moment. But then he surrendered to the Nazis. I mean, look, I understand if you make a decision like that, where you're like, I'm being led by insane losers assholes maniacs i'm gonna

die either way i'm gonna take the thing that potentially means i don't die but also like and people do that in any situation it's just more like let's be honest here there are people on this planet groups etc for whom that's probably not a good idea uh it's like surrendering to isis it's not gonna end yeah it's surrendering to like the golden horde it's probably not gonna work out for you i understand why people do it uh you know thankfully i've never been in that situation for sergey but i'm built different exactly yeah it didn't it didn't work out for every single male resident of kazan in like the fucking 1300s. But who knows? Maybe they've changed.

That implies that the Germans are the Mongols, which is funny because the Germans would talk about the Soviets being the Mongols, etc, etc. Yeah. Yeah. The Asiatic horde is the word that they would use. Yeah. Racism. It's bad.

Now, at this point, the 62nd Army had been beaten to hell and back, down to only 20,000 soldiers and only like 60 tanks, but most of which were broken down and only able to be used as pillboxes. Chuikov had no idea where most of his army was throughout the city. And despite all the work that the Defense Committee had done, pretty much all of the defensive works that were built before the battle within the city actually started were destroyed in the bombing. That is when the first true German ground assault on the city began on September 13th, 1942, kind of officially starting the Battle of Stalingrad at 5 a.m. The German left flank went towards the Mamev Kurgan, which is the tallest hill in the city called Hill 102. which is the tallest hill in the city called Hill 102.

Now, today, it's home of the Motherland Calls Memorial, which probably everybody has seen. It's like a Valkyrie on the hilltop. This is where the 62nd Army and Chuikov were headquartered. The right flank headed towards the main railway station and the central Volga landing point. All of this occurred under a huge amount of airstrikes conducted by Stuka dive bombers. Field telephone lines, already relayed about 10 times, were cut again by the airstrikes. Each time they did, linemen were sent out to fix them, running out

to their almost certain death. They wouldn't even wait until the bombardment ended to send out another lineman. So many linemen were killed that Chuukov simply ran out. He had to resort to runners, who also rarely returned from their mission. Germans advanced from the west and the north. Despite an insanely fierce defense, it did not take long for the German 71st Infantry Division to advance into the city center, right near the Tsaritsa Gorge bunker. When word got back to Moscow, Zhukov was put on a plane and sent flying towards the city within the hour. It was about now that the Germans were learning a terrible lesson. They had absolutely smashed the city to ruins, which made it perfect for defenders

and hell on earth for attackers. The roads had been annihilated, forcing their tanks and trucks to advance at a crawl, making them easy target for Soviet defenders, who were hiding inside the burned-out guts of the countless dead buildings and indistinct pile of rubble that now made up the city of Stalingrad. The Germans did continue to advance, but paid for it every single step of the way. Or, as Chuikov put it, quote, time is blood. Chuikov learned very quickly that the Germans hated two things, close quarters combat and nighttime. So he took advantage of both of those things, ordering soldiers to hold their fire until the Germans were so close that they're at the ends of their barrels and they could no longer call in airstrikes and artillery. They also conducted

constant raids against them as soon as the sun went down. However, when daytime rolled around, the hard work of the Soviet defenders was again undone by constant airstrikes, facilitating the constant advance of German forces. The Germans were advancing so quickly that people began to question if rushing reinforcements across the Volga was even worth it, or if by the time they got there, the west side of the Volga would be under German control. In the south, German forces captured the main rail station, but immediately found themselves under constant, unrelenting counterattack. NKVD forces, reinforced with local militias, attacked in waves within minutes. In two hours

of fighting in the morning, the station had changed hands three times before its rubble was eventually secured by the NKVD by the afternoon. And Chuikov did finally get reinforcements on the 14th of September in the form of the 13th Guards Rifle Division under the command of a guy named Alexander Rodasimov. As you can tell from the name, the 13th Guards Rifle Division, because the Soviets love to do stuff like that, like guards was a title given to units that had shown themselves in combat to be a solid unit. So this is a good, strong unit commanded by Rodasimov, who was a very seasoned commander himself, and he'd fought on the side of the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War

under the name Pablito. I don't know why that's important. Pablito. But it's very funny. So yeah, we got General Pablito in the house. He was already a hero of the Soviet Union and would be named so a second time by the end of the battle. Unlike most Soviet leaders we talked about who ruled through a combination of fear and violence, Rodasimov's troops generally

loved and respected him. Some of his soldiers liked him so much that if they got promoted, they would be transferred to a different unit to fill another slot. They would purposefully turn down promotion so they could stay under his command. This seems like a rare thing in the Soviet army in 1942. Yeah, very rare. Yeah. Yeah. Chuikov ran smack dab into the political battle going on between the army and the NKVD. The NKVD effectively acted as the personal army of Beria, who was effectively bulletproof. Nobody could touch him. We talked about this before, how much of a terrible person he was. But most importantly to this situation, he refused to allow the NKVD to fall under the command of the army.

On more than one occasion, he threatened to murder his own commanders and the army commanders who attempted to do so. NKVD forces in the city were under the command named Colonel Sariev. I can't really find much about him, but he was ordered to go along with Rodasimov's troops and then fall under his command. His workers, militias, and NKVD regular forces were ordered to go out and hold up in several surrounding buildings and defend them until the last man, while others were ordered to cut off the Nazi advance towards the river. Sariev refused to follow these orders unless Beria himself approved them. So Chuikov threatened to call Stalin personally and then turn him over to

his army commissar, which, you know, Gurov, who is very liberal in his application of a pistol to the back of your head. That kind of guy. He was going to be turned over to the Commissar Gurov for refusing to follow orders, which at the time was an immediate execution. Sorry, I've decided this is worth it to listen to Chuikov.

This happened all the time in pretty much the entire Battle of Stalingrad where the NKVD and the army constantly bickered and fought. Now the 13th Guards Rifles Division did not have an easy way into the city. They were only about 10,000 men strong, though 1,000 of them were not issued weapons. Most of them had only been issued with a fistful of bread and some sausages before being loaded into anything that floated from the other side of the river and then kicked off towards the city. Now, at this point, the river had been turned into a floating charnel house. It was full of burning ships and

floating corpses from constant Stuka attacks. And just because the river was being bombed relentlessly did not mean the Soviets slowed down their constant riverine convoys to supply the city. They just kept going like, well, we lost half of them to bombing, send them again. The Germans on the other side of the river spotted them coming. And despite it being nighttime, the burning city fully lit up the river as clear as day, and they opened fire. Several of the ferries were blown out of the water, but the survivors kept going. The soldiers bailed out of the ferries as soon as they could, sprinting up the river's steep, muddy banks and directly into the German positions. The Germans who had just gotten to those positions had not had time to build anything you consider defenses. Some of the Soviets had rifles, but no ammo. Others had

shovels, and others had ammo, but no rifle. Others simply had bayonets. They crashed down into the Germans, and everything devolved into savage hand-to-hand combat. One unit assaulted a local brick mill on the river shore and cleared it by beating the Germans inside to death with rifle butts and bare hands. The fighting was beyond brutal as the Germans tried desperately to hold on to the riverbank. Over the course of the night, the Soviets slowly forced the enemy back and by the morning had been secured. The riverbank, and therefore any Soviet hopes to hold on to the city, had been saved, and riverbank, and therefore any Soviet hopes to hold onto the city, had been saved, and soon more reinforcements could be ferried into the city. However, the 13 guards' rifles had been decimated. In 24 hours, 30% of their unit was dead.

By the end of the Battle of Stalingrad, of the original 10,000 men who crossed the Volga River, 300 would survive. That's the thing, right? Is that you can look at this and say, okay, this is an incredible amount of grit, determination, violence of action, resolve, unwillingness to yield. But also, in these kinds of situations where you have German units, exhausted though they might be and under supplies that might be, that are armed, that are cohesive, and you are fighting against them with axe handles and shovels and any rock you can find in the brick factory, you're going to take a fuckload of casualties. Now, given this situation, you know, they will repel them, most likely. They will not lose. This won't be for nothing. But like,

you're going to lose so many people. And it's like, this is one of the things that I've encountered a lot, you know, both, you know, kind of assessing things in military history is so often you hear these incidents of such extreme valor and bravery, but you also think, man, you shouldn't have had to have done that. That's a failure of your leadership that you don't have what you need. That's the subtitle to military history. Man, you really shouldn't have had to do that. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And it's just... A lot of the things that helps us, like Rodas semof rode over with them like he was alongside his men which is crazy and they had nowhere to retreat it's like we're either

going to push them back off the riverbank or we're going to die we can't retreat back across the vault like we literally just like we don't have the logistics to do that without becoming such incredible sitting ducks for everything they can throw at us that like basically will will will reconstitute our unit from 5% manning if we do that. That's just... Yeah. 19 out of 20 people are going to die. We've got to fight them off. So in a way, 30% is way better than what they would have experienced if they had tried to cut and run. Yeah. It would have been way worse. And now, as heroic as this victory is, it wasn't anything serious for the Germans. After all, they still held the city center and they held the entrance to the 62nd Army's headquarters under direct fire at this point.

Chuikov was forced to relocate his headquarters for the second time already. And the real battle for the Germans and the Soviets was over the Kurgan, the highest point in the city, because it's obviously priceless for artillery spotting. the highest point in the city because it's obviously priceless for artillery spotting. And most importantly for the Germans, if they controlled that point, they could shut down the Volga River with fire. The Germans and the Soviets fought over the Kurgan tooth and nail, and the hill had been shelled so severely within only a few days that it had been rendered into a moonscape. The craters from the shelling then acted as positions for attackers or defenders, depending on which they were at any given time. The Soviet defense collapsed into chaos with German infantry charging their artillery batteries only for artillerymen to fire at them in point blank range.

Direct fire with the goddamn artillery. Jesus Christ. And then failing that, they ran out and beat them to death with hammers, shovels and knives. Yeah, like the tamp or whatever it is that you use to stuff the artillery round into the fucking into the breach they're just like ah just gonna hit you it might have a soft tip i don't give a shit you're like dude i was thinking about the two because it's getting beaten to death with a giant q-tip exactly getting beaten to death with a lanyard like just fucking ripping the shit out of you know i was thinking about it that also occurred and like it's very funny to make this brief note a kirgan is like a

a burial mound like a bronze age or likehistoric, in some cases, very early human settlement burial mound. So in a way, they're fighting over a hill of Bronze Age corpses. They're just adding to it. Exactly, like dislodging Ötzi the Iceman because you fired a 155 directly into it. The UAE builds fake islands to create more land the soviets like we need more bodies on the hill listen we're gonna it's very important we control this corpse pile and we will fucking defend it to the last new corpse and like when the germans finally did take the hilltop they were immediately thrown off by newly arriving groups of soviet uh reinforcements who were just

like had no battle plan other than like get up the fucking hill. Literally, we had the corpse road, now we have the big corpse pile. Corpse mountain. Corpse hillock. We finally have the Everest of our podcast. Relatively low lying fucking elevation that just happens to be higher than everything around

it in a river basin. This went on for days. The Germans took the hill, were thrown off, were reinforced and attacked again. However, each German attack was worse and worse because their skyrocketing casualty rate amongst their junior officers and NCOs. German military doctrine said that they should lead from the front. And Soviets quickly learned that. And not only were they murdered through the various means that people were dying at the time, but Soviet snipers began hunting them like they were game as they attack, like, that's a sergeant, that's a lieutenant, shoot that one, shoot that one. Several infantry divisions ended up being commanded by lieutenants because they're the only people left alive.

All of this happened under a curtain of never-ending artillery fire and Stuka attacks, which, due to close quarters, smashed both sides equally. This is something that I recall from reading about this too. As I understand it, is that the Germans were exceptionally well-trained in their infantry small unit tactics, but they really did not provide for the sort of like take the initiative you know uh improvised adapt and overcome kind of shit that the arm the u.s army is loves to pat itself on the back about having like one of the things that was later on in the western front there was an observation of the germans was that like the americans sucked ass fighting the germans at first but they if something didn't work they changed until it worked whereas the germans were like we have found the you know the mathematically perfect way to do this

and this is how you will do it i'm exaggerating but not too much and so when when everything is dictated you know doctrinally that this is how orders are given and how it's done and and the soviets just go fucking like you know teamress classic crossbow sniper on every single guy that's got any leadership authority. Like that. This is not a unit structure. This is not a fucking a tactical approach that allows for the kind of improvisation you're going to need in those situations. Like what did our algorithm account for Gunther getting his head canoed by a Soviet sniper? This is such a stupid fucking aside.

for Gunther getting his head canoed by a Soviet sniper. This is such a stupid fucking aside, but in the old, old days, because I'm almost 39 years old playing fucking Team Fortress Classic on LAN cables, I just remember being really good at being the crossbow sniper and nothing made me happier than every time I would zap my brother with it

because the headshot would instantly kill the other person. It's just hearing him like, see like fuck through the wall because it just happened over and over again. I was like, I imagine that fucking sound of of like the joy of ruining my brother's fucking afternoon it's just like amplified times a trillion it's how these like the soviet anti-lieutenant brigades were fucking functioning like all respect to the anti-lieutenant brigades you know the main problem look the main problem with the wehrmacht is they did not jump up and down while advancing.

Yeah, I mean, I was going to say, now I'm just laughing. Anti-Captain Axion. That's basically like, yeah, the Soviet sniper special teams and also like every fucking private and specialist on extra duty. I will go ahead and enlist in this new brigade. The battle over the Kurgan was not the only horrible struggle happening within the city. The next site for this is an infamous battle was a large concrete grain silo on the bank of the Volga. The grain silo had almost entirely been cut off by the advance of Hermann Hoth's panzer units. Inside was a collection of 50 men, a combination of regular soldiers

and a group of Marines from the Soviet Navy. They'd armed themselves with a few Maxim machine guns and anti-tank rifles to augment their rifles. When the German tanks

came forward, the Germans were like, these guys cannot possibly fight us. They demand the men within the silos surrender. So the Marines answered by firing a useless anti-tank

ground off the turret of a german tank and yelled in german for them to fuck off the germans began bombarding them with artillery and tank fire but they refused to budge the grain silo then caught fire smoke flooded the building so thick that the men couldn't see or breathe they barely had any ammo food or, and no hope of resupply. When the Germans launched their attack, the Soviet soldiers quickly learned they didn't have enough water to fill the water-cooled Maxim machine guns. So in between fighting off Germans, soldiers and Marines had to take turns filling the Maxim's water jacket with their own piss so they could keep shooting it.

I knew it. I fucking knew it. Improvise, adapt, and overcome. Soviets don't have a problem with that own piss so they could keep shooting it. I knew it. I fucking knew it. Improvise, adapt, overcome. So many times I have a problem with that. Just fill it with piss, baby. Look, in the military history, most problems can be solved with the proper application of the fighting men's urine. Listen, just fill it with piss.

Maybe it'll work. Artillery, mortars, machine guns. You know, the Humvee is overheated. Piss on it. Your soldiers aren't listening to orders. Piss on it. Listen, man, you already smell worse than piss. So it's not even... Nobody's even going to bother. No one cares.

Over the course of the next two days, they fought off 10 German assaults. Eventually, when the Nazis broke through, the defenders found themselves out of ammo, and the few survivors slipped out of the grain silo in the middle of the night. Battles like this are happening all over the city. Groups of Soviet soldiers were sent out in the middle of the night to garrison a building, fortify it as best as they could, and fight until the death or until they ran out of their meager supplies. Everywhere the Germans advanced, they ran into thousands of Soviet Alamos. You know, this is the thing I was going to point out that uh when you are

dealing doctrinally as i recall with an effective sniper in a combat situation as the u.s army taught us basically unless completely unavoidable you're supposed to go around because like real anti sniper action if it's an effective position is like at a bare fucking minimum in like a combat you know exigency is a platoon operation but really it's a company operation and it's like great go around but you if literally everywhere you go anywhere you go around it is another one of these like just the sheer volume of resources being expended resources you don't have. And even if it's small degrees of attrition, losing people in these engagements, multiplied

times infinity, you are going to attrit so badly you become combat ineffective. Every single place, every time you step around a corner, your captain gets his head turned into mist and he's here, Sukha Bly like oh god damn it's like it's like it's embarrassing enough that we're we're sacrificing fucking you know heroic volumes of combat power to defend corpse pile you know ancient corpse pile with new corpses on top like now it's basically like corpse lasagna if you will it's basically becoming like it's like yeah the heroic defenders who perish at the battle of like you know stalingrad like yeah stalingrad manhole company's sewer position number 15 like you you lost lost his arm and leg and eye in the battle for like public toilet number 31 like it's just this is unreal man

yeah it's like it's like um every school every factory every random apartment block like every single one was like no we're gonna we're gonna turn this into the worst fucking week of your life this is tenacious defense like this is genuinely like they are defending it's not suicidal defense but it's making it as unpleasant as possible for these guys to advance like this is yeah the battle of stongred quite unpleasant who would have thought like fucking this is basically like you have for i don't know if there's a better word either you call it radicalized or activated a kind of defense that is going to make everything fucking shit and and as we discover as we go on the more they decided they had to hit everything the more like the more they press the more you know tenacious they made that defense and at the

end of the day their backyard is next door you are what a thousand miles from what you'd call true friendly lines in the sense that like in the occupied uh eastern was sort of you know i can't remember what the name they used for those the regions uh that these you know anything you did for a resupply was being hit with partisan attacks like they are really very far from true friendly lines like everything is trying to kill you everything everything speaks various different accented forms of russian and it all wants you to die the polish author richard kapuscinski talked about visiting uh a mine in siberia i think this would have been in the 80s or maybe early, early 90s. It was right around

the collapse of the Soviet Union or right before it. The place is called Vorkuta. And he talks about the misery of the mines in the winter and the housing in the winter and everything, but then also the misery of it in the summer. And there's this line because Kapuscinski was a very, and was a poet, but a very, very poetic writer in his war correspondence. And one of the things he said is that in Siberia, you get the sensation that nature sees mankind as a pestilence it wants to rid itself of as soon as possible. Yeah, we just call that Ohio in the US. Everything is just alive and trying to eat you and kill you. And it's like,

that ohio in the u.s that everything is just alive and trying to eat you and kill you and it's like good job guys you've created siberian summer with artillery rounds and axe handles on the vulgar river as a friend of the show milo edwards once put it russians and soviet and people from the former soviet union could get through a lot of things by just shrugging saying peace debts a side note but this was a thing that i realized i appreciated milo's explanation of pizdets is this a very very versatile word when they were playing um like intercepted recordings of some of the this guys from russian units in ukraine complaining about some of the dumb shit they're being like being strung out put out in these positions like you're just gonna get fucking killed they're gonna hit you with everything and he's just like

yeah it's fucked up man you go out there like a hundred percent you're gonna get killed like everywhere you go you're getting shot at or blown up to his debts and it's just like i knew exactly what you mean now uh warehouses apartments department stores and in one case a nail factory were turned into meat grinders for days at a time one up in one apartment building a battalion of soviet soldiers fought on for days, turning the entire area around the building into a killing field. By the end, only six members of the battalion survived and got off the back. For non-military listeners, it varies between countries and so on. But in the regimental system, a battalion is typically, let's say, around 500 to 700 people.

In a light infantry unit, it's probably going to be slightly fewer. In a heavy infantry unit, it'll be more just because there's so many people. And this is, I only understand it really from the US Army. But so imagine- It's similar in the Soviet military at the time. 700 people and very, like you said, what, six people were left? A dozen? Yep.

Yeah. Six. So six. So basically, that is a, let's see if nate can do do math on a thursday afternoon that's a 99 casualty rate and not actually like like oh he infected toenail like casualty like dead casualty like luck and like like added to the corpse lasagna casualty yeah when when they would abandon a position they could only like take the wounded that they could take everybody else was left behind to like well well, enjoy fighting to the death. Bye.

You know, oops. Shit. Pizdets. Pizdets. The main rail station had fallen to the Germans but was completely unusable due to the massive damage it sustained during the fighting. It changed hands 15 times in less than a week and was reduced to nothing but ruins and corpses. They were also

pressing a closer attack on the central landing area on the Volga, where the Soviets landed pretty much all of their ferry trips, supplies, manpower, vehicles, everything across the Volga. It was through these that everything came into the city. And the Nazis could shoot at them or whatever, but the Soviets could still land them on the bank. Cutting this off would mean the death of the city, and the Soviets could still land them on the bank. Cutting this off would mean the death of the city and the Soviets knew it. Chuikov kept landing reinforcements in the area to throw the Germans back no matter what, but the Germans held and eventually the Nazis managed to cut the entire city of Stalingrad in half. With the city cut in two, the Nazis focused on, we're going to clear

this half first, and they focused on the South, which rapidly collapsed. The Southern part of the city was largely defended by workers, militias, and led by the NKVD. But there were some regular army units and Navy units amongst them. Commanders and commissars kind of saw how hopeless the situation was, truly cut off. The Volga pipeline could not reach them down there. And they would pretend like, I got a commissar meeting, and then they would abandon their men and try to cross the Volga. When soldiers figured out that they weren't coming back,

they broke from their positions and ran to the banks of the Volga themselves and began slapping together rafts out of everything they could find just to get to the safety of the other side. One man made it across by riding a tree trunk. The lowest officer on the totem pole freaked out when he saw what was going on. And rather than try to control it, tell Chuikov what was happening, be honest, he sent reports to the 62nd Army headquarters over the radio

saying that everything was going just great. When Chuikov finally did learn about the realities of the southern part of Stalingrad, he had that officer executed for lying. Sucks to suck? Yeah. I guess. I mean, yeesh. Yeah. Bad situation all around. I don't think honesty would be the best policy in this situation either, but I think that guy was getting clapped either way get like george washington can't tell a lie fucking you know brownie points if you want to call mix the metaphors for fucking me like i'll sir let me

let me give you an accurate representation of what's happening here i mean uh yeah and i'm not gonna give you an rv would never like it's like god is you i'm sure you dealt with this all the time you do a shit like yep uh yep successful patrol no significant acts and it's like because you guys didn't leave the wire didn't actually go on patrol like 100% everybody loves a ghost patrol that's what they are but it's like one of these things where yeah you're fucked either way but like

I do think that even in the kind of apotheosis of being unreasonable that's the Soviet military doctrine your commander probably wants to know that it's turned into fucking water world across the river.

Yeah. The Germans were now being ground to a nub by the Soviet defenders and Chuikov knew it. He ordered their front line should never be more than 50 yards away from the Nazis, therefore rendering their artillery

and air support useless and forcing the Germans to fight them in close quarters. Within a week, the German soldiers who thought they had already secured the entire city found themselves burying thousands of their comrades. Soviet snipers waited for them around every corner, and any

large group of German soldiers was immediately targeted by artillery from all the artillery that was normally on the other side of the river. They could just make it rain. And constant nighttime raids meant that anybody who didn't get clapped by the first two things hadn't slept for days. The same went for their own pilots. Stuka pilots are flying nonstop to the point of delirium, and their methed out tweaking

brains can no longer figure out where the German positions were, even though they had giant cross symbols to show like, hey, friendlies here. So when Germans started hearing Stuka dive bombers overhead, it stopped being comforting because like, ah, they're going to fucking bomb us again.

It's important to bear in mind, if I'm not misremembering, the Stukas have a whistle thing, kind of like the whistle goes fucking whistle tip a chair siren i don't remember if it's on the wings or somewhere but it makes this shrieking howling sound when they dive so like you fucking hear them coming and it was meant to scare you but like that was like like joe was saying it's meant to be reassuring but if if in the days before night vision and infrared beacons, you know, given that we

still often got fucking shot by our own people in the days before, it was just like, God, I hope that dude guesses well. That is not reassuring. And here comes like Helmut, who's been flying nonstop for three weeks. He's more meth than man at this point. It's like this man is more like Pervitin than pilot. Yeah, exactly. It's like this man is more like Pervitin than Pilot.

Juergen basically could get post the best UK r tank tracks, the shriek of the Stalin organ, the clatter of submachine guns, and all of the time one feels the heat of the burning city on their back. Well, I mean, I guess I hope that things got better for Second Lieutenant Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Yeah, I hope he did not suffer for long and by that i mean dies like hey i'll write my next entry once i have breck and then it stops mid-syllable yeah be home by christmas as like a katusa katusha rocket impales him against the burned out supermarket do we have time to talk about the stalin organ because i feel like that's a thing that we we i don't know if we've talked about in uh in detail we talked about a little bit but they had this because of the sound it made they

had this uh this name for it you know in the way that like this is a thing that you find very often in any kind of military engagement like when there's a particular piece of equipment that be you know is used and it's familiar like the soldiers will give it a a nickname like a uh you know kind of colloquialism for it and it's like it sounds i don't know like kind of it's weird it sounds both like goofy and also very heavy metal too like there's something very strange about it it sounds very very cool like oh man it's like because it sounds like the shrieking of pipe organs but the way they call it stalin's organ it just sounds like it's yeah i don't know i Like, oh man, it's like, because it sounds like the shrieking of pipe organs, but the way they call it Stalin's organ, it just sounds like it's a dick joke.

Yeah, I don't know. I can't recall because it's Stalin in German, but I can't remember if, because my German is just not that good enough to whether or not organ, organ specifically means like a church organ only, or if it has the kind of like the synonym, meaning the way that we had,

like you said, like Stalin's dick. I don't know. Look, inside of you, there are two wolves. One plays the organ and one makes jokes about Joseph Stalin's penis. But also, if that's actually the double entendre there and it's Stalin's dick, does that imply that Stalin's organ is a piano and every key is a dick? We must go further. Meanwhile, despite them being in hell reports being sent up back to

berlin made everything sound great at one point they outrightly said that they had captured stalingrad see once again it's like the man forgets to like yeah you know he see he forgets to fucking report that it's like you know the the the the beach park at fucking santa claus land and now these guys are like oh we literally achieved our objective please don't inquire any further this is just like the golden age of putting passing up bullshit reports isn't it it was ran in um der stürmer that like you know we had captured stalingrad and of course like soviet intelligence agents were getting copies of it and like sending them back to the soviet union and like the report of this was sent to stalin who like led to a lot of confusion like did stalingrad fucking fall did we miss something

yeah i think the combination of fog of war and stalin's paranoia and all this stuff it's like this this is both like like ultra dewey defeats truman but then also it's basically the metaphor extends to if harry truman is like wait what the fuck did dewey beat me shit yeah i apologize uh tovarish stalin but uh we probably should not trust something called checks the paper der schirmer yeah exactly it's just like it's like like his aid having to explain like like i had to explain to my mom one time that you can't trust everything on facebook but it's joseph often often for good reason the line nick mullen but had the fucking the thing about like oh you're you're so unwilling to read you know to consider other sources you say you want

freedom of speech and keep an open mind and you won't trust this article from racism.com like like literally like free internet racism.com doesn't get more racism.com and it's in its print like printing press days than fucking der stürmer yeah i mean to be fair before he started der stürmer i think julius straker had a a newspaper called like anti-semitism weekly or something like that that's what you're saying a guy i know online who's a swiss historian it was like it was like the it was like literally called like the anti-semitism bulletin or something like that there's a guy i know who's a french historian his name is laise farah uh he does a video show it's great uh mostly about the history of religion but it's all in french uh he was doing research on

this and he said he posted this that he had found in a source he was reading. Basically, this is a description, records from a guy's office who was a wealthy French businessman when Algeria was just a department of France. And he identified between these records something like 98 different anti-Semitic periodicals and weeklies. And they were all like, they're called anti-Semitism monthly, anti-Jew weekly. There were so many of them this was like the the drive was there and like the very end of the uh 19th of the yeah the 19th century christ

and uh like this not only went for the military but the german press the press which was obviously just a propaganda arm of the nazi state was so optimistic about the battle of Stalingrad that even Joseph Goebbels had to be like, you guys need to calm down. I just like stop. Imagine pumping out so much pro Nazi propaganda that Joseph Goebbels like guys, you need to pump the brakes. I just,

yeah, that is a very funny thing to envision. Isn't it just, yeah. Like the extent to which you're just like, Hey, the man literally charged with doing fucking brain control on people is just like um hey we might have some fallout when people kind of learn that we bullshit at this one

there might be some problems are you guys sure is this just like hey we got we called it early but we called it right and it's like i regret to inform you no hey gerbils gets off the phone he's like you know i was just talking to my correspondent and stalingrad this is what he had to say just hits a button and just hear oh god that's like fucking scary organ sounds from the stalin or Yeah. Everything's on fire. Soon people were asking Paulus why the fuck he hadn't won yet. After all, people said the Sixth Army was not the largest formation in the entire German military. How come he wasn't winning with it? And Paulus began to have a nervous breakdown and he developed a facial tick, which you'd have for the rest of his life.

Yeah. Not only... I'm not saying like, oh, poor Paulus, but it's very funny that he was being harassed by Hitler so bad he developed a facial tick. I mean, it's one of those things where it's like people in incredibly stressful situations will have these... I don't know what the actual physical thing is, but we'll have a stress response where they'll go gray overnight or, you know, like they'll develop a gray patch on their hair. Like this is, I mean, I think some of this is apocryphal, but like I do also think there have been instances of this where people having really,

really dramatic changes because of just intense stress and stress hormones and all this stuff. And to me, I'm just sort of like, I feel like if there's a place where you're going to have a stress-induced facial tick that's permanent, Stalingrad seems like a pretty valid explanation, like a pretty valid reason for why that developed. It's like i i have a little bit of a nervous habit of always aggressively checking my blind spot because i accidentally cut a dude off and then he walked out of his truck with a gun uh when i lived in alaska uh but that's not stalingrad that's like that's like that's like the best day you could have in Stalingrad was a redneck threatened you with a gun. Out of the wreckage of like Gastronome No. 6

comes like Billy Bob from Arkansas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In Alaska for some reason, but still with Arkansas plates, yeah. Now, not only was Paulus' soldiers being savage inside the city, it's not like the German and Allied forces surrounded it were being left alone.

Outside of Stalingrad is effectively featureless flat steppe, and had turned into something akin to World War I, with trench systems and constant Soviet counterattacks flooding across the open terrain and battering the German and Romanian positions with the weight of their bodies. It was also getting colder and raining constantly, churning everything into a mud that we have talked about before on the show called Rasputitsa or roadlessness, because it just churns everything into a slurry. Though sitting in a trench as it filled up to your knees with rain and you get trench foot was a much better life than what was going inside the city itself. Probably the only time in history that being stuck in a trench was a preferable alternative. In the city, German and Soviet forces crept around in small teams,

ambushing one another over something as meaningless as an apartment kitchen. The close quarters, room-to-room fighting, broke down all military training and doctrine, as neither side had ever planned or trained for urban combat. Soldiers struggled to the death down hallways and over bedrooms, and hour-long fights would occur that would split the control of a single house. In one case, while fighting over a brick warehouse for days, the first floor was controlled by the Soviets, the Germans controlled the next floor, and the Soviets controlled the floor over that, resulting in a layer cake of violence. The German soldiers fighting in these close quarters under piles of rubble and even throughout the sewer system, armed with axes, guns, and knives and flamethrowers, nicknamed it Rottenkrieg or the Rat War. I hate it when a rotten krieg breaks out.

This turned out was a kind of war that the Soviets excelled at. Now, this is not a credit to the Soviet military. It's a credit to the common Soviet soldier because their small unit commanders were terrible and none of them had any training to speak of on the topic. Independently, they learned how to become masters of camouflage while soldiers from the rural areas of the Soviet Union taught their comrades how to stalk, track, and hunt down Nazi soldiers in the rubble like they were hunting back home. Others, gangsters and hood rats from the city, taught their comrades how to fight and kill with close quarters weapons like knives. They jokingly called this the Stalingrad Academy of Street Fighting.

Teams of six or eight men would sneak out at night, arms with knives or sharpened shovels, so they could murder Germans silently. And I should point out here that the Soviet soldiers, being soldiers and also being Soviets, were drunk as hell. And I would say this is for a good reason. They are given a daily vodka ration of 100 grams. But this kind of combat drives men insane. And hitting the bottle kept that at bay. Not to mention, there's one thing when it comes to shooting someone. You can have a detachment from that. But they were murdering each other with axes and shovels. It steeled their nerves

before they went out at night to commit these horrible acts of violence in intimately close quarters. So outside of their daily ration, they began drinking antiseptic, industrial ethanol and antifreeze, which was passed through the filter of a gas mask first. Yeah, a lot of dudes went blind or died. I was thinking about this because I don't know if you're, it's a good and bad movie, but based on a very, very, very good book.

The James Jones novel, The Thin Red Line, is basically a fictionalized account of his experience on the Battle of Guadalcanal. And one of the details in there that I presume was pulled from real life because so much of his war writing, and he wrote two excellent war novels. You should absolutely check out. One is famous. It's called From Here to Eternity.

And the other one is called The Thin Red Line. In The Thin Red Line, one of the points he made is that similarly with american soldiers on guadalcanal what they discovered is that if you uh got the field kitchen to leave you the syrup from uh from cherries like like canned cherries that they had in the field kitchen you could or fruit cocktail you could ferment it and make make alcohol and that was what they were doing too because they were doing close quarters combat in the fucking jungle against the japanese and it was also hell on earth and so this doesn't surprise me at all it's just also that what you're describing the soviets in general and particularly in their military obviously had enough of a culture of like hard alcohol consumption that they were getting

because i'm trying to do off the top of my head like 100 grams grams and milliliters are basically the same so 100 uh 100 grams of vodka a day is effectively equivalent to what like one third of a can of coke worth of vodka yeah um so what's that about and that's that's not gonna dent a russian that's a three and a half four ounces of uh of liquor so like uh what's a shot to one and a half ounce so that's like yeah so that's like two and a half maybe three shots of vodka so like yeah like you're saying yeah you gotta get that gotta get on that good shit on that fucking ethanol uh yeah and I mean, we did an entire episode in our Soviet-Afghan war series about how Soviet soldiers

were very creative in their ways of getting boozed up. And that was not a new thing. Culturally, it's still that way within the Russian military. And unfortunately, within Soviet, post-Soviet cultures, heavy drinking.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Whereas the US now punishes it but people still do it as francis has recounted in his uh stories of making basically what gatorade pruno prison hooch wine in iraq it's in like fucking water cans i mean i definitely i definitely got my hands on alcohol in afghanistan for sure i was a boy scout there was a weed plant growing outside of my window and i never i never touched I didn't touch anything, but I'm sure my soldiers did. And you know what? They can tell me now if they want to. So shouts out. I'm sure you guys were either up to the gills in alcohol or more likely hash. So it is what it is. The infantry were not the only ones turning

into urban warfare ninjas. Anti-aircraft guns were hidden in cellars. Tanks were concealed in piles of rubble. Anti-tank guns are hidden in cellars. Tanks were concealed in piles of rubble. Anti-tank guns are hidden in sewers. The entire city had been turned into an ad hoc death trap. This is aided by Chuikov, who quickly learned what his soldiers were good at and let them do it. After a while, the Germans would do their best to avoid all those fortified block houses and Soviet Alamos that they would create. So Chuikov arranged the city in such a way that he would create specific paths that the Germans would have to take in order to get around them. These paths would be lined by Soviet soldiers, creating a miles-long complex ambush with anti-tank guns, machine guns, mines, and entire buried T-34 tanks, which would then funnel the Nazis directly

towards the blockhouses they were trying to avoid in the first place. Chuikov also came to the conclusion that, in these kind of battles, the most important weapons his soldiers could have were submachine guns, a sniper rifle, and a fuckload of grenades, and he ordered everyone to be equipped that way. Entire teams of submachine gunners were created in groups of eight and sent out into the street to raise hell against German forces, who were still mostly armed with bolt-action rifles. That is the meat of the fighting and killing in Stalingrad, not major offenses or attacks or counterattacks. It was the constant small rat wars fought between 100 or so soldiers at a time at most.

fought between 100 or so soldiers at a time at most. Of course, the kind of fighting didn't lend itself to large-scale assaults, but also because on either side, the second a troop buildup was sighted, it got smashed with artillery or air power. Since artillery couldn't be used on the front lines due to how close everybody was, the amount of fire that could be directed at these targets was always enough to obliterate them. However, that didn't stop Paulus from planning large-scale offensives in the north. Winter was coming, it was getting cold, and he needed to win something, so he aimed for the industrial heart of the city. That took the form of a salient that jutted out westward from the Volga River and was made up of the now infamous Red October Metalworks,

the Barrikady Weapons Factory, and the Stalingrad Tractor factory. The fighting immediately turned chaotic as it had always been. This time, civilians are trapped in the middle. Now, in Soviet times, it was very common for workers to have apartments near or even attached to the factories that they worked in. And because these factories are all very important, none of them had been evacuated due to their jobs. So in the confusion of the fighting, they ran for their lives and were cut down by both sides. Despite the Soviets fighting tooth and nail, the Germans still took a little bit more ground at a time due to just crushing air superiority.

The Soviets lost so many boats trying to get across the river for resupply runs and evacuate the wounded, they just couldn't do either of those things. And their anti-aircraft guns were firing so much just trying to keep the Stukas and other planes at bay, they burned out their barrels. The few units that did successfully make the cross-river trip were immediately sent into completely destroyed factory areas to bolster their defense. Then the Germans bombed the reserve oil tank near the river, which the Soviets had actually thought was empty. And it wasn't. And since they thought it was empty, it only thought to double check it.

Chuikov set his command cell up right next to it. And it turned out it wasn't empty at all. Burning fuel poured out in every direction. And somehow this didn't destroy the command team, but did surround them and set the river on fire for a second time. When someone asked the command team over the radio their location, they literally just responded, quote, we are where all the fire is. It's like handshake with fucking the Cuyahoga River in 1974 and the Volga River in 1942. The Germans kept pressing towards the river and Chuikov struggled to hold on to little more than a thin strip of it. This was the entire lifeline of the Soviet defense. If they lost access to the river, they were done for.

Hence why the saying, quote, for the defenders of Stalingrad, there is no ground on the other side of the Volga, became something of a motto for the 62nd Army. Chuikov knew his men were being destroyed, and though they were causing a huge amount of damage to the Germans as well, he knew that he needed that to stay open to continue destroying them. Not only were the German casualties piling up, but their morale was plummeting. Even as they won, slowly crawling their way through the city block by block, to them, it didn't feel like they were defeating anybody. Soviet soldiers continued to attack them with near suicidal zeal, and in more than one case, literally suicide bombing a German tank without a second thought. Oftentimes, and especially nowadays, these soldiers are framed as steadfast Russian defenders of the motherland, but they weren't. Despite how propaganda and media likes to turn the great patriotic war into, you know, dogmatic shit show that it is today, and especially the Eastern Front and the Soviet Union as well, the vast majority of soldiers from the 62nd Army were not Russian. They were Central Asian and Caucasian, and they were treated like absolute shit by the racist Russian officers,

Chuikov included. But they fought to certain death anyway. And as Chuikov put it, quote, in the blazing city, we don't suffer cowards. We don't have time or room for them. And that is where we'll pick up next time on Stalingrad part four. Two more parts to go. This is brilliant, dude. Like, all right. All right. All right. I know I'm not supposed to... Look, I'm reacting to the content. I'm reacting to all this stuff, adding where I can. But I'm just going to say in the rare moment where I do this, Joe, dude, this is great. This is riveting. Honestly, man. I feel like I'm just like, wow, I finally get it. I've read a lot of books about this stuff. I've read whether it's actual histories or fiction but like now i'm kind of getting it in a way i wasn't before i genuinely mean that because i'm just like oh why is is it talked about like this like it's because it literally was like make it

impossible to engage with blitzkrieg basically make it so they've got a fucking fight for everything and then just kill the shit out of them wherever you can like i get why it has this vaunted status as like the worst thing in you know in military engagements like on the eastern front i i get it now and jesus i mean it's like you all like you know sine wave between like wow that's fucking ridiculous funny and wow that's ridiculous horrible yeah it's like and i believe it was part two where you had uh a one-handed had a soldier get his hand blown off and and so he just like filled his pockets up with grenades and was throwing his throwing grenades one-handed like out of the out of the door of his company headquarters.

It's unreal, man. It's unreal. Yeah. So, I mean, wow. And it only gets colder and worse. That's the Eastern Front promise. And that's the promise of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I could use some cold.

According to my computer, it is currently 96 degrees Fahrenheit in my office. Yeah, I could use some cold as it according to my computer is currently 96 degrees Fahrenheit in my office. Yeah, I could use some not cold because it's basically... Normally, you have British summer, but what we've got right now is British every other time of year, and we're just getting it in late July. So, roger that. Nate, thank you so much for coming on here for part three. You'll be back for part four. But until then, where else can everybody find you? So obviously, I'm co-host of this show.

So you should subscribe to the Patreon and get some of the bonus episodes even from before I was co-host because we got lots and lots of bonus content going way, way back to 2018. I also am the co-host of What a Hell of a Way to Die, a podcast about why you shouldn't join the military and now recently about being a dad. I am the producer and co-host of Trash Future, a podcast about the tech industry being bad and ridiculous and stupid, but also about Britain and just general sort of zero interest rate loan VC funded scamming. And I am the producer of Kill James Bond, a podcast about movies by three incredibly funny trans people. Their names are Alice Caldwell Kelly, Abigail Thorne, and Devin. And they are great.

They are really, really funny. I always laugh producing and editing that show. And you should check it out if you like movies. And if you dislike James Bond, because that was the premise, but then they were like, well, we have other movies we could watch. So all those shows have free episodes

either every week or every other week. All those shows have Patreons with tons of bonus content. So check those out. And if you're interested in hearing my voice or encountering my work as an editor. And until next time, Joe, I guess that's your line, but I'm thinking to myself, be prepared to whip up a corpse lasagna from scratch. The noodles are the most important part.

Got to get the texture right. This is the only show that I host so thank you for listening if you like what we do here consider supporting us on Patreon and if you like things that I create consider checking out my books you can find them anywhere you find books and until

next time enjoy your corpse lasagna it's hot and fresh