Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 282 - The Battle of Stalingrad: Part 4

Episode Date: October 23, 2023

Part 4/5 of the Battle of Stalingrad! Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Pre order some merch: https://llbdmerch.com/products/stalingrad-street-fighting-academy-t-shirt

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 of 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 everybody welcome back to the lines of by donkeys podcast i'm joe and with me trapped in the rubble of the dying city of stalingrad for the

fourth week in a row is nate hello how you doing buddy yeah you know what's really funny dude uh is we have a surprise construction thing having to happen at our rented house where we live we don't own it and so in a way like when you said the the the dying rubble of the city of what i was like oh is he gonna say of south london where i live in my house that's having to be dug up because of some shoddy british construction work uh built on top of a 125 year old sewer pipe that then caused it to fully collapse and block all of the drains of all of our neighbors. Amazing. Yeah, that's my life. Now, in fairness, I'm not getting hit by 155-millimeter shells or the Stalin-Orgel fucking Katyusha rockets. So it could be a lot worse.

Also, I got up this morning and I had some clean water and I made some tea and I made some coffee. And we live in the future. So we have instant nicotine delivery by by the mechanism of vapes. So we are living in a paradise that neither the Soviets nor Nazi soldiers could ever comprehend. I believe in method acting, which is why I am constructing a large rocket to fire in your direction. Well, I mean, in fairness, it wouldn't be the first time that a parabolic rocket trajectory affected south london but all the way from armenia seems like that i mean that's that's the victory of socialism right there the armenian ssr allows you to fucking strike strike at the heart of the

imperial core which is peckham south london for some reason we're developing a space program but only to bomb london yeah exactly to bomb tony blair for giving all of those fucking stupid speeches to these areas yeah uh and also i'm thinking of an idea of we develop a time machine we go back to the time of the battle of stalingrad not to give them like assault rifles or satellite-based communications but only to drop off crates of elf bars yeah I was going to say crate upon crate of elf refillable pods but we can be like hey guys if you actually if you mix your own flavors

with these various sort of like flavor based agents you can actually create I don't know fucking blini flavored vapes or you know she flavored vapes what else would they want tomato and mayonnaise and dflavored vapes. What else would they want? Tomato and mayonnaise and dill-flavored vape.

Dill-flavored vape, absolutely, you know they'd go for that. Yeah. We're going to turn our back for five seconds, turn around, and they're going to be cracking the oil open and drinking it, trying to get drunk. Fermenting with us. No, guys, you can't make wine out of the strawberry-flavored vape juice. It's not actual fruit.

It's not going to be able to ferment. Look, you say that, but this isn't in the script, but there's a part of this, like in the book, Anthony Beaver's Stalingrad, he goes into at length about the things that they drink in order to get fucked up, which is not the first time I've stumbled across this whenever I'm researching the Soviet army. We did virtually an entire episode during the Soviet-Af about how they like spread boot polish onto bread, then toasted the bread and then ate it to get drunk. And in this one, Anthony Beaver points out that there is a period where Soviet

soldiers attempt to make wine out of something for uh like like a not hydraulic fluid but something that they're supposed to put in their vehicle so they don't freeze it's not exactly anti-freeze but it's close enough and like 20 guys die from it like this is this is an ongoing problem in even the post-soviet breakup uh republics states states, countries. I know Russia in particular, like Far East, Russia, Siberia, etc., you'll hear these stories happen where... Because these are areas of the country that are very, very low wage earning compared to... I mean, obviously, Russia's got incredible income disparity. And people in Moscow and the Moscow region make, in some cases, I mean, they make quite good money. Not huge, but there are people in Moscow and the Moscow region make. In some cases, I mean, they make quite good money.

Not huge, but there are people in Russia who earn comparable to, say, some of the Eastern European EU countries. Yeah, they generally don't live in the republics. Yeah. Yeah, and you go out to really far out into Siberia and people earn what people in Syria earned on average pre-war.

It's much's much much poorer and you'll hear these stories about like 50 people hospitalized for drinking like counterfeit vodka that's like yeah like bathtub gin kind of stuff that you know makes people go go blind but also just kills people like often that's the story is that is these people just die in mass because they were buying uh because i mean some of it is that it's cheaper than the vodka with other alcohol that's still pretty cheap but like it's still i mean expensive based on low wages and then some of it also is just like there's a culture of heavy drinking in general and then when you factor in like the just economic distress like no surprise yeah i

hear i hear stories from people all the time uh here a lot of a lot of my friends have lived in russia um a lot of them have you know fled from russia very recently and they told me about a problem which i think i've talked about before uh called pseudo alcohol uh which is it's aftershave and cleaning products but it's sold in a way that it looks like a vodka bottle or like a cognac bottle because they know what people are using it for. Gotcha. Wow.

Yep. Yeah. I used to see this a lot in Alaska because obviously there's just a culture of incredible binge drinking there. I mean, former Russian colony, big surprise. And one of the things that you'll notice is... So in Anchorage, there are like bicycle cycling, walking trails throughout the city.

It's a really kind of amazing system. And they use snow groomer things to clean them up in the wintertime so you can cross country ski on them as well. So it's really amazing. But there's also just kind of like, when I was living there, people would form encampments in some of the woods areas out there because they were accessible. It's harder to get to by car, like the cops wouldn't fuck with them as much and often the thing that you would notice at the sort of aftermath of a of an encampment you know

with the um like fire pit where the fire's been extinguished you just see empty listerine bottles because people drink and if i'm not mistaken listerine and stuff like it's kind of like what they call methylated spirits here in the UK. It's not mouthwash, but for like woodworking and cleaning and stuff. They put an emetic in there. So you will vomit if you drink it. I don't know if they do that for Listerine, but like, you know, some of like industrial alcohols they do.

But in Listerine's case, everyone I know who's ever been like, oh, at my lowest ebb, I fucking drank Listerine. I was like, I immediately threw up like I was gonna die yeah so yeah i remember i got suspended from school one time i mean i've been suspended from school a lot when i was in school uh when i was in high school and middle school but like most of the time i deserve those uh yeah but you know i was smoking a lot of weed back then which is one of the reasons you'd think i would have been suspended for but you know in order this is in middle school because in high school nobody really cared in my high school if you're high because i mean like the department of education at the federal level called us a dropout factory uh but

middle middle school was slightly less grim so i would smoke weed with my friends before i went to school and i had a bottle of like listerine so maybe it was an off brand. I don't know. In my backpack to wash the weed smell off me. So like my teachers wouldn't smell it. Yeah. And I got caught by our school resource officer for non-Americans.

That means the cop that wanders the school and occasionally beats you up using the Listerine. And I wouldn't spit it out because like I know where to spit it out. I would just drink in

my locker um and like he caught me doing that it wasn't because I was trying to get drunk it was because like where the fuck am I gonna spit this in the hallway uh and I was immediately arrested and brought to the principal's office for for drinking alcohol at school and uh suspended for like a week I'm like I'm not trying to drink Listerine to get drunk. I'm already high, guys. See, if you were fighting at the Battle of Stalingrad, this wouldn't be a problem. Speaking of the Battle of Stalingrad,

when we left you last time on Part 3, the Nazi and Soviet armies were shattering one another on the destroyed remains of the city. The Soviets were struggling to hold on to a very thin strip of the Volga riverbank, which was the linchpin of keeping the entire defense of the city intact and functioning. At the end of the last episode, I pointed out how the morale of the common Soviet soldier continued to hold despite everything. I don't need to really go into detail about that again at this point. It's hard to say why exactly. And it's something that people and historians, military historians, military officers, things like that, have really been trying to figure out why.

And nobody's entirely sure. But in my opinion, it's a combination of a lot of things. There's the crushing discipline of the Red Army enforced by the outright murder by the NKVD. enforced by the outright murder by the NKVD. It's estimated they executed around 13,000 soldiers over the course of the battle for virtually anything. You could be shot on the spot for a lot of reasons. The obvious ones are insubordination, not following orders, stuff like that. However, it was really up to the discretion of the local NKVD asshole.

So defeatism or showing not enthusiastic about an operation. Sometimes, depending on who it was, that would be enough. And there was common knowledge what would happen to them should they fall into the hands of the Nazi army. So the idea of I can surrender is gone from their vocabulary generally speaking of course some people still surrendered but the vast majority of people knew if i surrender i will die and remember it's this is not the beginning of the war people know what has happened to civilians that fall into nazi hands they fall into nazi occupation there's a lot of civilians in the city of still so people are kind of the common the city of Stalingrad still. So people are kind of... The common soldier kind of understands like, this is a big battle. If we lose, not only are we all going to die, all these civilians are going to die. And in a long enough

timeline, our families could die. Yeah. And something that I think worth pointing out here as well is that when you think about, okay, the Nazi progress into Russia during Barbarossa is pushed back in the winter of 41 to 42. And then obviously, the Germans regain the offensive and continue to push in Stalingrad is then their furthest extent. So when you think about that for a second, there's territory in what is now the nation of Ukraine, but Belarus as well, that changed hands. So it's absolutely certain that they saw, or at least enough people saw it, it was reported on, what had happened. And like, Roger, we understand the extent to which there's a lot of propagandizing on either side, let's be honest. But at the same time, there's not even necessarily that

much need to exaggerate in the propaganda. And not to mention there's the millions of refugees that have flooded back in and they're bringing with them stories of effectively the apocalypse. Yeah. I mean, Come and See is basically a documentary in this regard. Yeah. And another part that the Red Army did a very fine job displaying, something that the Japanese Imperial Army also had instances of, is a complete lack of care or responsibility for the individual, creating a culture within the ranks. I'm not saying it's

society at large, but within the ranks of the military that your life doesn't matter. Quit complaining. Over time, surrounded by intense, unrelenting brutality of which that no man has ever, or probably will ever see again, the army saw its soldiers as discardable items. So it's no wonder why the men themselves would eventually come to see themselves that way. Even the little things reinforce this. Soldiers from the city didn't get anything new, even if they needed it. Those things are reserved for the reinforcements, the fresh soldiers coming across the Volga. Boots, rifles, and uniforms would eventually have to be replaced somehow, and within the city, that came from dead bodies laying out in the street. If bodies were recovered, which was rare, they'd be stripped naked of anything considered useful and thrown into a

mass grave. This became so commonplace and such a common thing that soldiers knew if they were wounded and they knew it was fatal, they would quickly start stripping themselves down so they didn't stain their uniforms or boots or equipment

with their blood and ruin it for the next man. They had become brutalized to the point of indifference. You know, there's this thing about this that we love to make jokes and we

we often like oscillate between jokes and really kind of just the grim horror of it seeping in but to me it's like part of me is always just like that's so incredibly brave and valorous and also what a fucking waste yeah massive way you know there's like all this valor for what? That's how I feel sometimes when you see this stuff. Yeah. And I make sure to differentiate between Soviet society as much as a uniform society existed within the Soviet Union, and it really didn't. That's kind of a product of Soviet propaganda. If you go out to the Republic, sayorgia armenia azerbaijan the baltics people are generally undercutting soviet authority at every turn they possibly can uh and going about

living their lives preserving their their culture their languages and you know and the best way they can however in the military that is it was almost a like a hive mind of suffering and it's unlike anything i've ever seen before because you see other militaries that go through this break um like yeah that's why i kind of compare them to the imperial japanese army because that was kind of the same and if when you read the very few memoirs written by japanese survivors or their letters they kind of express that you know like they don't care something that's interesting i don't know if you've ever heard of the Soviet author Andrei Platonov, but he wrote a number of novels, short stories about kind of the Soviet project,

and then the war experience to some extent. And there are, one of the things that I find really interesting about it is like a lot of his books are just incredibly surreal. And there's what you're describing, the kind of shared hardship is portrayed. But one of his stories, his longer stories is set in the Central Asian Republic, and this would have been in the 30s. And you realize just how far removed that experience is from the experiences, like what you might consider portrayed of Moscow in the 1930s. This is obviously, it's the world's biggest country. It still is, even though Russia, the geographic area of the Soviet Union has been reduced significantly.

Russia is still the world's largest country. But like you're saying, I think when there's this shared culture in the military and the shared culture of hardship to begin with, and then you're going through this experience that's just so unbelievably brutal. Yeah, it absolutely makes sense. end um about it's not on the same level but i think you can find a similarity in mindset of a guy just told a story about you know he had a situation where um he had some fuck up soldiers who were like they were brought along on a deployment these americans uh despite the fact that they were they were going to get kicked out of the military for like drugs dui that kind of thing but back in those days like you remember this like if they could if they could reasonably justify that you probably could be kept in line under duress, they would still deploy you anyway, and then they just kick you out. So basically, we'll get a deployment out of you.

Hopefully, you don't die or get injured. We'll kick you out after you'll get no veterans benefits. That's the US military in a nutshell. And the story that I heard was from a guy I knew who was a quartermaster officer, but he was stationed at Balad. And obviously, Balad was a huge airbase in Iraq, and there were a lot of combat forces there as well as logistics and support. some of these fuck up soldiers they basically volunteered to be human blood banks and they're like we'll because they were i guess universal donors so positive they were like take as much blood as you need because of this mass mass casualty situation i think take as much as you need take as much as you need and like when one passed out from blood loss the next one volunteered and it's like it was this unbelievable sort of like these were guys with no fucking stake in the fight they knew they were fucked they knew they were going to get kicked out and yet like in that moment it was just like i

said this unbelievable kind of self-sacrifice and valor and once again you ask yourself but why but for what it's so fucking grim when you think about it but you do hear these stories and it's like you see this sort of thing happening like in these situations people will will absolutely like abnegate the self in service of their friends, in service of their comrades. Whether or not these people believed in the Soviet project, it didn't matter. Yeah. And that's one of the things that I really wanted to touch on before we moved on is a lot of people attribute this to brainwashing and propaganda. And propaganda will help at some point, but the common Soviet guy who found

himself getting mobilized or whatever isn't brainwashed. Not in the slightest. It's insanely reductive. And I hate when people ascribe that to anybody because it makes things easier to understand and it also dehumanizes people. also like i like to use the word of ascribe there because that ascribes such incredible power and efficiency to a famously not that efficient system like and i'm not talking about like the fucking like francis fukuyama sort of evaluation of soviet economics after the fact i'm saying like it's a massive country with massive uh disparate everything you ascribing this idea they could just snap their fingers and brainwash generations of people who were born and existed before the Soviet Union just instantaneously. The chairman's going to snap his finger and some farmer from Ichmyatsyn is going to turn

into a murder robot. That's not how the world works. No, exactly. Exactly. It's like a guy from, I don't know, when you think about who these people were, especially the conscripts who were being drafted, who were in this conflict, it's like a guy from, I don't know, when you think about who these people were, especially the conscripts who were being drafted, who were in this conflict. It's like, you know, somebody from, I don't know, like the autonomous republics around fucking Lake Baikal or, you know, South Ossetia or Georgia or Azerbaijan or fucking Armenia or fucking God knows what, like any Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, all these countries, like the idea that you can just erase everything that person's experienced in their life and just be like, no, I'm a Soviet robot now. It's like, they're not the Borg, dude. Yeah. And what's interesting is you see the differentiating aspects of these militaries, because when you compare to how things are going for the Germans and as well as their allies out on the

steppes surrounding Stalingrad that was mostly where the German allies were like the Italians, the Romanians the Hungarians they were falling apart like partisan raids were commonplace mostly targeting their trains like supply

mechanisms and things like that they're also constantly under attack from Stalin's organ rockets. And the Germans are also shelling them on accident. Yeah, there's that. And their morale is in the shits. I mean, a lot of that could be very easily ascribed as like, they don't want to be there. And that can explain a lot of things when it comes to people. But there's also...

The Germans weren't really any better off. They had this structure and the esprit de corps and the history of a military unit. I mean, divorced from ideology, because this is going to break a lot of people's brains here. The common German soldier didn't care about the Third Reich as an ideological concept. They were also conscripted. Yeah, there's all the platitudes that they have to fucking voice and recite and chant along with the same way as any military in any kind of normalizing organization. But we're not forgiving the fucked up shit they did. No, fuck them.

By any means. Fuck them. We've done a whole episode about the concept of the clean fare box. I'm pretty sure that both you and I have family that suffered because of what they did. But it's one of those things where at the end of the day, like, you are exaggerating the ability of any kind of, yeah, normalizing, homogenizing force within a military to take away autonomy of thought and just sort of individuality in a very brief period of time. And let's just also recall all of the data that you had cited previously in previous episodes of this series about how accelerated, how rushed their basic training was. In many cases, these people were dropped in the

battlefield. A couple of days. Yeah, a couple of days. And they're like, get on a train, fucking here's a uniform. All right, you're a soldier now. It's like, do CQB. Yeah. They were plowing a field a week before. And again, this isn't to wipe away anything the Wehrmacht has done. They're disgusting war criminals. And I think, again, people like to take the easiest way out of that. And they're all dead-eyed, hardcore Nazis, which they didn't have to be. Soldiers will do incredibly horrific things and follow orders to do them, despite the fact they do not believe in what they're doing. You even see that with the horrible degree of war crimes that were committed by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan over the duration of the time that the war took place. In Afghanistan's case,

almost 20 years to the day in Iraq, the full deployment was really from 03 to 11, I mean, the full deployment was really from 03 to 11. But we had combat forces in Iraq. We still do in Iraq and Syria. And those were all volunteers. I mean, you can argue about in some cases, they weren't in the sense that they were people who were stop-lossed, people like those kids I talked about previously who were going to be kicked out but then brought along because they they they were extra bodies things along those lines but they weren't conscripted they weren't ripped off the farm and forced at gunpoint to to be like they weren't confronted with the choice either die at stalingrad or just die here because we'll kill you yep and yeah the people have an incredible incredible power to defer to authority um and that that is that doesn't like forgive them what they're doing, but it does explain their actions more than something as simple as like, they're brainwashed. Absolutely, yeah. No, absolutely.

The morale in the German allies out in the steppe was pretty much as low as it could get, and it kind of started out that way. This was reinforced by not Soviet bombing, but Soviet leaflet drops. The leaflets and multiple language from Italian, Romanian, and Hungarian told them not to die for the Nazi cause. The Germans didn't care about them. They should drop their weapons and walk away

or surrender at the first sign of combat, and they will be treated okay. Now, that ended up being a lie, but many of them i was gonna say like like i agree with the first part but the second part is like oh do you want to learn about this place called the kolema peninsula because you're gonna fucking go there if they made it that far you know when the soviet forces attacked allied positions many units several of whom had actually made their own independent plans to run away at the first end of combat surrendered as

soon as they saw the red army show up others slipped away in the first end of combat, surrendered as soon as they saw the Red Army show up. Others slipped away in the night, deserting and fleeing enemy lines or trying to get their way back home. The Germans' ire at this wasn't really directed at the Hungarians or the Romanians because they saw them as ideological and racially inferior allies. The Italians, however, caught all the hate. Because remember, in the beginning, Italy was supposed to be an equal partner in the Axis. I mean, we all know in reality, they're anything but. But everybody knew that Hitler saw Mussolini as one of his ideological muses in the very beginning. So they were offered a fair amount of leeway,

despite the fact everybody knew the Italian military was, and still is, a massive joke. And what's funny is they were treated with kid gloves. German officers told their peers that the Italians were lazy and they didn't want to work, but to be nice to them, because if you were mean to them, it would hurt their feelings. Just imagine sitting in a meeting with like ss guys like we must be nice to the italians we don't want to hurt our hurt their their poor little feelings yeah i was gonna say this memo famously not received by the ethiopians yeah good uh entire italian battalions surrendered to the soviets without firing a single shot however the romanians seemed to be the most likely to surrender at the first sign of the enemy. Because we've talked

about before, the vast majority of these guys were not volunteers. Almost all of them were conscripts. But even then, when the Nazis made their manpower demands, they ran out of normal people they could conscript. They didn't want to, of course course have this impact anything other than the fringes of romanian society i mean that is what they were scraping up farm workers and shit for a reason so they emptied out their prisons draftering murderers rapists and everything in between and threw them into a uniform so even they're like sure we'll fucking surrender um yeah i mean like famously this has never been repeated anywhere. Yeah, and certainly not within the borders of the Russian Federation. Now, before we jump back into what is happening in Stalingrad, you should note that everything we just talked about, the Nazi allies on the steppe, foreshadowing.

The fighting was still raging within the industrial heart of the city of Stalingrad. The fighting was still raging within the industrial heart of the city of Stalingrad. The factories had all been blown to pieces, churned into little more than piles of rubble and corpses, and much like the rest of the city, it made perfect to hide in and defend. Soldiers dug into the mess to build further bunkers and trenches, and this is because before each German attack, and there were plenty of them, they would constantly bomb the hell out of the factories with air power and artillery. So they turned the ruined factories into dugouts. After the air attacks would lift, the ground forces would come. However, sometimes within the lull of the bombing, as the Soviets knew that the Germans were coming closer, they would then launch their own counterattacks and catch the Germans in the open. And so a life and death fistfight over a pile of dead factories continued unabated. Even with constant artillery support from the other side of the river, the Germans

continued to push the Soviets back closer to the Volga, cutting off the units that remained in the city from the main body on the riverbank, which of course means away from resupply and reinforcement. For people who had been listening to the show for a while, go back a couple of years. We did a show about Pavlov's House, the Battle of Pavlov's House. This is where that takes place. So go listen to that. Come back. I'm not covering it again. I'd also say, once again, Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate. I'm not sure if it's explicitly Pavlov's House, but it is a very long novel. It's sort of like a Tolstoy, Dostoevsky-style length novel, but written in the 20th century. It's almost

uniquely focused on Stalingrad. And there is a description of a comparable thing. I can't quite recall if it's the exact same one, but you'll get some really, really, really good details. Once again, can't recommend it highly enough. It is one of the best works of fiction I've ever read in my life. So if this interests you and you want some of the visceral experience, it's called Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. Strongly recommend it. And if you're one of our maybe non-reading fans, I think it's in the first Call of Duty game. Yeah, exactly. It's like Russian novel and or Call of Duty game. Yeah, exactly.

It's like Russian novel and or Call of Duty game. Somehow you will get the experience. The show comes in and the show has layers like an ogre. Now, this is the only podcast you listen to Battle of Stalingrad and get a Shrek reference. Get a Shrek joke. Yeah, fair enough. Soon, the Germans were so close they could directly fire on the Volga bridgehead with machine guns.

The majority of the crossings would then have to fight going across the river, now under direct fire so the Soviets were like, let's carry them out at night. Now this hardly made them any safer and a riverboat crewman suffered nearly as high as a casualty rate as infantry fighting

inside the city. In order to steel their nerves for these suicidal crossing, virtually every riverboat crew got blind drunk, which I'm sure made their casualty rates just a little bit higher, drunk driving a boat across the war zone. I mean, in a way, the handshake between the Midwest and the Soviet Union just got a little stronger. Yeah. Actually, I talked to someone from the Midwest a couple of days ago, passing through Yurovan, and he told me a story about drunk boating. He wasn't even aware it was illegal. In the Midwest, drunk boating is not illegal. And also, or at least now, but it didn't used to be. And also, it didn't used to be illegal for houses on lakefronts to just drain their sewage right into the lake. So not only did you get drunk boating, you got spicy boating.

Hey, we have to preserve our culture, okay? As to make matters worse, Chuikov was informed in the middle of all of this, his forces would start to be issued less ammunition of every kind. He didn't know at the time, but he assumed that it was because the Stavka, or Soviet General Staff, were planning a counterattack, and they needed to remain in the city acting as bait, and that ammo would be going somewhere else to help him. He didn't know this. He hoped. The one nice thing did happen during this time. Probably the funniest little tidbit of information that would happen within this incredibly depressing series.

Joseph Stalin issued Decree 307, which downgraded the importance of political commissars within the ranks of the military, taking them out of a direct supervisional command position. And as soon as this happened, every military officer, NCO, and common soldier immediately began treating them like shit, and the commissars were surprised to learn that everybody hated them. Yeah, see, Joseph Fiennes, you didn't fucking know it, you know, in the very, very strange film version of Enemy at the Gates. You didn't know it all the time because you thought everyone thought you were hot, but guess what? They hated you. They also, then they really, they were entranced by Jude Law's Vasily Zaitsev with those just razor

sharp cheekbones, just blasting the fuck out of German soldiers, but not you, not you and your stupid typewriter. They didn't care. What's it's really funny is like, there's a literally a story in one of the sources that like the, the commissar went to like eat lunch at like the,

the, their chow hall chow tent, probably a hole in the ground and was like offended to see that nobody wanted to sit with them. Like something straight out of some like Soviet mean girl shit. It's fucking incredible. Also, the commissar went to eat lunch.

Sounds like a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This is also when arguably the most famous part of the struggle over Stalingrad became a thing, the cult of the sniper, sometimes known as sniperism. Now this was entirely the product of Soviet propaganda, but it was a thing that was real. I mean,

like newspapers, leaflets, all these things, speeches champion the sniper heroes of the city. And that isn't to take away anything that they did. Vasily Zaitsev was a real man. He really was a shepherd boy from the Urals. And he really did murder nearly 300 men during the Battle of Stalingrad. But they terrified the Germans. And it was a thing for a common soldier to rally around. Because these guys weren't highly trained snipers by any stretch of the imagination. Most of their training was

because they were hunters from the rural areas of the Soviet Union. And they could read these leaflets, see like, wow, we're really killing a lot of fucking Nazis. And a lot of these guys, Zaitsev was not alone by any stretch of the imagination. There was a lot of fucking Nazis. And a lot of these guys, Zaitsev was not alone by any stretch of the imagination. There was a ton of people who killed well over 100 German soldiers within a very short amount of time, who were then put in charge of training programs for regular soldiers to make the core of snipers even larger. So they were a great propaganda tool for both sides and positive and negative. And for the Germans, not only was this idea of every single rock was speaking Russian,

they targeted officers and artillery spotters almost specifically. They only took out regular German soldiers if they couldn't find anybody else. So that wreaked havoc on the German army and torpedoed the morale even further. And as October came to a close, the Germans are struggling to build winter quarters. As it became clear, they were definitely going to be staying in the city a while. Friedrich Paulus of the 6th Army gave elaborate plans for what these quarters might look like. They're like concrete structures to protect the men and vehicles and a sauna room for every unit for men to enjoy and stay warm. Friedrich Paulus unintentionally designed Bin Laden's mountain layer, the infographic. Now I'm just picturing the Saddam Hussein thing,

but Friedrich Paulus is at the bottom. Yeah, this is where we found him. Yeah, exactly. I mean, kind of, but we'll have to wait to get to that point. Now, they also sent away their draft animals out of the city and onto the steppe so they wouldn't have to feed them and hurt their supplies in the city. Now, of course, these animals were functionally

their entire supply system on the ground, and certainly nothing bad would come from this in a few months. Everyone was infested with lice, and doctors noted that within the German ranks, pretty much everyone had endemic dysentery and typhus due to lack of clean water supplies, close quarters to one another, and of course, compounding stress and exhaustion. The doctors couldn't do anything for them. Yeah, and it's not like you could boil water, and it not like you could, you know, do the kinds of basic field hygiene things.

And when you think about this sort of thing is common in military training now, if people aren't enforcing basic hygiene stuff when it's not in a combat situation, you know, and they didn't have some of the advantages that we have in the modern day of things like, you know, really, really quick ways to sterilize things with alcohol with bleach with um iodine tablets you know uh really easily acquirable pallet loadable kinds of like gas fuel things that you could then use to generate heat without putting out a lot of flame and and light stuff along those lines they didn't have any of that so it's like as i've made the joke before it's like some stuff but it was all gone by now yeah and it's like and it's hard it's hard

it's hard to boil soup in your stall helm that's been fucking shot full of holes when the only fuel you can find is like concrete rubble because all the wood's been stolen yeah so like at the end of the day yeah it sucks it just generally like it it's a suck fest and speaking of which they did start building winter quarters but obviously they weren't as nice and elaborate as Friedrich Paulus wanted they're mostly made out of concrete rubble propped up by a little bit of wood that they hadn't burned yet which of course would change so yeah just getting getting scrap wire and cloth to build the devil's Hesco basket they're building a Nazi slum town uh out of the rubble of Stalingrad. By November, the German offensive within the city had finally sputtered and died.

This is from the obvious ballooning casualty rate of men and machines, but also a lack of ammunition and fuel to press on. However, the Soviets continued from their sliver of riverbed, launching counterattacks and constant, unrelenting harassment operations. attacks and constant unrelenting harassment operations. For example, when the Germans got bogged down, they began hanging nets up around their position to stop Soviet stormtroopers from charging in with submachine guns and grenades because it would make the grenades bounce off their positions. So the Soviets simply attach fishing hooks to the grenades. And so when they threw them, it would hang on the nets and blow up over the Germans heads they also weaponized riverboats slapping surplus tank turrets onto them and conducted

riverine drive-bys as rocket artillery constantly bombarded the exhausted Germans this is just boat drive-bys fish hooks on grenades it's one of those things where it's like yeah and it's just interesting too because doctrinally it makes sense

to throw up the camo netting and any kind of screening but at the same time it's like do you think these guys are just going to give up they're like oh guess we can't throw any grenades time to just die I see your doctor and I raise you Yuri from a fishing village exactly yeah exactly it's like at the end of the day

like you know they would have found something they would have done like the sticky bomb thing from saving private riot except they just like boiled down each other's piss until it was literally like some kind of i don't even know if you can do that with piss but you know what i'm saying though find a bodily fluid you can boil down to make a sticky paste with i got some bad news for you nate we both know that fluid is oh no yeah exactly i was just i was just laughing to him like they find every newborn in the the city of Stalingrad and get the baby's first poo and get the fucking meconium. And then they're like, this is the stickiest substance on Earth. Slap that shit.

And the Germans, the last thing you notice, like, oh, God, is that baby shit? And then it explodes. No. I'm just saying. Ingenuity, man. There's no lack of it. I will give him that much. By mid-November, winter finally really hit and the temperature dropped below minus 20.

That's Celsius. The Volga River didn't freeze over, but it did become just absolutely jammed with ice flow. However, this did not stop the Soviets from sending their boats across it constantly, kind of causing like dozens of Titanicanic related like shipwrecks to occur every day as they slam into the ice flow never slowed them down yeah that is kind of drunk driving on hard mode if you're trying to sail a riverboat pilot a riverboat simply close one of your eyes and steer around it it's okay it's okay comrade i am good to drive i promise i'll do this all the time i am the most

sober of us all you've been drinking for 12 hours yes but you've been drinking for 13 i am good to drive listen do you not doubt me listen it's fine i do it all the time at home i can still hit the perfect squat so yeah basically i can imagine yeah it's like it's like the worst version of fucking what is not Pac-Man Frogger crossing the river on a boat under German artillery and potentially being strafed by Stukas. And you've got, you know, many icebergs and you're hammered. It's fine. It takes the shakes away now. But also by mid-November, the Germans attempted what would be their final offensive within the city towards the Lazor chemical factory in the north. Now, it failed entirely and went the way virtually all of the other offensives have gone.

They bled themselves dry, taking the area for a short amount of time, only for a Soviet counterattack to come endlessly and in waves until the Soviets recaptured it. This attack was called off after a single day. and in waves until the Soviets recaptured it. This attack was called off after a single day. This is all despite the fact that the Soviet defenders in the area were down to a fistful of bread per day as a ration and fewer than 30 rounds of ammunition apiece total. In one case, the Soviet NCO was the last man standing in his regimental command post and,

having his hand blown off in the fighting, filled his hat with grenades, sat it down in front of them, and just made it rain hopefully i mean i assume like maybe he's a lefty and lost his right hand or something and just constantly pitched grenades at the coming uh coming german attackers and was pulling the pin out with his teeth uh yes he lost two teeth doing this so basically we have soviet mark mcgrath wait actually mark mark Mark McGrath wasn't a pitcher. I'm an idiot.

Fucking, I can't, I don't know shit about, help me out, Joe. You know something about it. Mark McGrath was the lead singer of Sugar Ray. You're thinking of Mark McGuire. Mark McGuire. No, Soviet Mark McGrath then is literally, he's just fucking shirtless, banging out some catchy tunes with grenades. Yeah, you got to let it go, go, go.

Every morning there's a German with their head blown off because I hit them with a grenade. Now, with the Germans trapped in the coming winter, having no ability to finish off the conquest of the city, we've set the stage for the killing blow of the Soviet counterattack, which had come to be called Operation Uranus. Make your jokes. Yeah, Roger.

Probably not as funny in German, understood, or in Russian. Or maybe it is. I don't know enough Russian to know, and I refuse to learn. The operation had been in planning since mid-September. After a previous failed counterattack that forced Stalin to finally ask Zhukov what he would need to make the next one actually work. So Zhukov told him, I need a full army, all the tanks we can get, all the artillery you can get, and backed by the biggest air wing the Soviet Red Air Force has ever put together. Zhukov considered an attack on the German flank,

the flank manned by allies, but mainly the Romanians, to be the only solution even worth considering. And Stalin finally agreed. He let Zhukov do whatever he wanted and gave him everything he needed. Of course, strict secrecy was involved in all of this. Only Stalin, Zhukov, and one other man, Alexander Vasilevsky, not the goaltender for the Tampa Bay Lightning, were allowed to know the details. However, they were helped in this by a little fact that Hitler, and by extension, all of his functionaries in the army, still refused to accept that the Soviets had the men and material that would be needed for such an operation. Despite everything that has happened, they still believe the Soviets were on their last leg. This is despite the fact that Soviet industry had completely recovered from the initial shock of the invasion due to their, like we talked about, unrelenting practice of evacuating factories away from the front line, reestablishing them, and hitting the industry go brr button. They were pumping out two times more tanks and planes than Germany was per month, a fact that Hitler was actually informed of, but refused to accept, saying it was impossible. Yeah, you know what's funny about that

too is that also one of the downsides of invading a huge country and then also being the invader and not the person being invaded is that their supply lines, as extended as they might be from evacuations, are still far easier than yours getting all your stuff from your industry in Germany. Yeah. Not only that, but the Soviet factories had all been re-established at this point. They're functioning. And the Lend-Lease pipeline is still churning out everything the Soviets need. Yeah, I was going to say, that's another good one too, is the fact that Lend-Lease... And if I'm not mistaken, with Lend-Lease during this period, a lot of stuff was coming in through places like the port of vladivostok which like is you know on

the pacific which is not gonna be affected at this point i mean i don't know if i imagine the japanese are also making it dangerous and shit but at the same time like it's just a different situation than trying to get material in if you're german from western Europe to here, to the Volga River, the Volga Basin. And it was dangerous. There's also the North Atlantic approach as well. But that is why FDR kept laughing, hitting the big Liberty ship button repeatedly. Yeah. At the end of the day... If you look at the ship output of the United States compared to literally everyone else during the entire war, it looks comparable

to looking at American military spending today compared to everybody else. It's insane. That's the funny thing too, is that let's be perfectly honest here, the US was so absolutely dead set on isolationism until Pearl Harbor in so many ways. And quite frankly, even if Pearl Harbor had happened, I mean, I don't like counterfactuals, but the sentiment at the time was such that if Hitler hadn't declared war on America, I don't know if it would have taken longer for America to go to war. It's really hard to think that it would have taken some other kind of attack on an American colony in the Pacific or something. And Japan fucked up and the world's been paying for it ever since yeah yeah i mean i mean but it's just to me it's just one of these things where it's like yes they destroyed a significant chunk of america's pacific fleet but as you said the

ship build ship button they've got the fucking infinity money code on that and all of america's industrial capacity is untouched throughout the entire war it's like they did strike an American target and kill a lot of American military and civilians and destroy a lot of material in the Central Pacific. Yeah. But like. And then they, you know, the Japanese fucked up so bad. Sherman tanks were fighting with Russian crewmen at Stalingrad. Yeah, exactly. And it's like and once again, also that this testament there, too that's like, what they were able to accomplish by doing lend lease. Also, it's like, that is still a very long trip for American material to get. And yet, like, they weren't able to intercept it. It's like, good job, guys. Like, you, you basically could have fought this entire battle. It would have sucked without also like, oh, by the way, like world's biggest hornet's nest got hit by a rock.

But y'all motherfuckers had to throw that rock. Now everybody has a Zippo and a can of spam and shit. Yeah, exactly. But you could have been using that newspaper to roll your own cigarettes with just fucking ditch weed. Instead, you're having to burn that newspaper to ward off the hornets that are trying to kill you. Zhukov knew that the Germans were underestimating him, so he let them do it.

He picked commanders that he knew were into the kind of fast-paced mechanized combat that not only did he like and Stalin didn't like, but would be needed to turn back the Stalingrad flanks. He chose Konstantin Raskovsky and Nikolai Vatutin. Interestingly, Raskovsky had previously been purged and arrested by the NKVD as a spy because he believed in tanks as the future of warfare over horses.

He was very nearly executed by firing squad twice while in prison and had his fingers broken and his fingernails ripped off. And he was only released and rehabilitated due to the Soviets fucking up the Winter War so badly they realized we might need some officers who know what they're doing. So that's how we started from the top to the bottom now we're here again it genuinely it's one

of those things you're like basically these guys it might be anything from was an actual white Russian you know pro imperial guy or pro Trotsky guy all or pro-trotsky guy, all the way down to like,

this guy didn't like the same Buster Keaton movies as Joseph Stalin. And it's like they all wound up basically facing down the barrel of a gun in like the Lubyanka or a Gulag somewhere very far away. It's like the disparity there. And what are you in prison for?

Oh, I helped with the American, French, and Japanese invasion of Siberia. What are you in for? I like tanks. Yeah. What are you in prison for? Stalin didn't like my interpretation of Marx. Oh, Karl Marx? No, the Marx Brothers. It's good to know everyone's on some ass like, how would have you ended up in a Soviet gulag? I know that as a tank guy, that's why. Joe really likes being a loader too much. Gotta put him against the wall. We are not all together convinced there is such thing as a red-headed Jew. So we have sent Mr. Bethe. He is now in Gulag. Back to Operation Uranus. Thousands of civilians had been drafted into what is effectively a construction army to repair and replace roads, bridges, and railroads that Zhukov would need to move his massive new army to the front line. As for the plan itself, it was actually quite simple, all things considered. Launch an assault over 100 miles west of the city, so far to the rear that the main German 6th Army

would not be able to come to the aid of the flanks, specifically the Romanians. Then another strike would hit Karl Strecker's 11th Army Corps with the goal of the two attacks smashing through and meeting up, completing the encirclement of the 6th Army within Stalingrad. And

that might sound familiar from our Tannenberg series that we did, Nate. Strecker fought at Tannenberg. Oh, wow. Yeah, perfect irony. Well, he understands some farsh as well as anybody. We're getting out of some farsh season and we're getting into winter hell. Yeah, frozen swamp ass.

That's just fear pee, freezing to your taint. Yeah, frozen swamp ass. That's just fear pee freezing to your taint. Yeah, fair enough. In order to do this, Zhukov would have to deploy over 1 million men, 13,000 pieces of artillery, 1,500 planes, and over 60% of the entire tank force of the whole Red Army. To hide this massive movement of men, material, and machines, the Soviets constructed multiple false trench lines, bridgeheads, and other defensive works that make the Germans think that they were digging in rather than planning an offensive. And because this attack would come across the open steppe, they only moved men and machines into position at night. Now, what is kind of wild is the Germans did figure out that there is a massive Soviet troop movement and the possible threat of encirclement became very real. However, Paulus in response to this was to just

send reports back to Germany about what was happening and do nothing else. He was, after all, a complete and total Hitler yes man, which this belief that the Soviets can't do this was good enough for Paulus that it could be impossible. And independent thinking was not a quality that Hitler liked in his military leaders.

Hitler said the Soviets couldn't launch a counterattack. Therefore, Paulus agreed and prepared nothing for it. As early November rolled around for the Romanians, the main target of the coming attack, they began to tell the German counterparts, there's a whole lot of fucking communists out there uh the problem was they kept telling that they kept telling the germans that had to become within the next 24 hours due to how much movement there was but then it didn't come and then it didn't come again and then it didn't come again so the germans already think that the romanians are complete shit at their jobs then just began to think that they were scared shitless and making things up the romanians who cried wolf yeah and then all the romanian commanders left their men

took all of the supplies and retired to winter quarters far away from them like i even i don't want to be around you guys i mean to be fair most of them are prisoners and shit but like yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna go i'm gonna go over to the sauna bye right so you know not exactly exemplary lead from the front kind of shit here now is it i expect better from my romanian nazi proxies i'll tell you that much when the german air force finally did report on massive troop movements hitler finally or the romanians and the germ Germans on the outskirts of Stalingrad to be reinforced. When people told him, Mr. Hitler, we do not have the manpower to do that, you know, on account of this whole Stalingrad thing, he just refused to accept that troops would have to be pulled from somewhere else, specifically the Caucasus front.

They're on Griff Rummanieren, isn't it? He's famously going to react very well. somewhere else, specifically the Caucasus front. They're on Griff Rummanieren Isn't er folgt. He's famously going to react very well. There's this whole thing about how Hitler reacts very well to this. And, you know, so he just didn't do anything? Like, you know, mein fuhrer, we need to pull troops away from the bullshit Caucasus front. He's like, huh,

no, figure it out. Voran befehl. So, like, most of the German tanks didn't work anymore. Now, of course, a lot of these are combat losses, but the vast majority of them simply didn't have fuel. This forced the German tank crews to let their tanks sit, not running, in the bitter winter cold. Now, I can tell you in modern tanks, you cannot do that.

And in the 1940s, using tanks designed in the 1930s, you you cannot do that and in the 1940s using tanks designed in the 1930s you absolutely cannot do that they will simply break down and seize up however my personal favorite reason for their tanks networking is mice moving into them and chewing on electrical wires i was gonna guess that you had like entire crews dying from carbon monoxide poisoning but then i guess there's also mice yeah the mice who apparently work for the soviet union fuck they've even they've even managed to brainwash the mice stalin's just too powerful squeak squeak squeak squeak translation tovarish we must go into the tanks and eat these wires stewart little leading like champion of the mice people.

Yeah, exactly. It's just the little mouse puppets from the fucking Muppet Christmas Carol being like, defend Rodina. The Soviet forces

moved in for the attack and they too were eaten alive by winter. Mobilizing so many men meant that some corners were cut. As soon as snow and freezing rain pounded the soldiers

left completely unprotected out in the open many of whom had not been given winter clothing boots hats or gloves began to freeze to death and die of frostbite possibly by the thousands before the soviet attack even began again this is novemberously, the coldest month of the year. The worst time in the Northern Hemisphere. At 7.20am on November 19th, the Soviet artillery barrage opened up, signaling the start of Operation Uranus, pounding the Romanians with...

The Romanians are getting pounded by Uranus. I'm sorry. I saw it too, and I was like, is he going to go for it? I i saw it too and i was like is he gonna go for it purpose is he gonna go for it yeah right but roger yeah yep yep yep yeah there's a massive pounding of uranus that just devastates the romanians thousands of guns all open fire on them all winter storms swirled around, curtaining everything in fog and reducing visibility down to a few feet in front of their faces. This not only surprised the Romanians and

the Germans, but also the operations surprised the Soviets inside Stalingrad, who, in the means of secrecy, had not been told of anything. After an hour of bombardment, the Soviet attack launched itself at the Romanian line and immediately ran into some problems.

For example, they had sent out sappers to disable minefields and mark them in front of the Romanian lines before the artillery bombardment. But then the bombardment hit and completely blew apart all of the paths that the Soviet sappers had laid out and cut through. And they didn't blow up mines. We learned in World War I that actually doesn't work very well. soviet sappers had laid out and cut through and like they didn't blow up mines you know we were we learned in world war one that actually doesn't work very well mines tend to not be destroyed by artillery but kind of flung in every direction around and relocated yeah exactly like it's basically it's like uh it's like hitting randomize on fucking starting a new game of minesweeper yeah and that's kind of what happened, because rather than postpone something or something, the Soviets came up with a new plan.

Sappers, get on the front of the tanks and go. I mean, you laugh, but that was actually mine clearance for the US Army in Italy. It was guy on the front of a Jeep with a fucking 1911. Shoot.45 caliber rounds at any mines you think you see. 45 caliber rounds at any mines you think you see that's kind of what's happening here but that's a soviet sapper sitting on the front slope of a tank charging towards romanian lines and then having to jump off and diffuse the mine in front of the tank before either a he gets blown up or b or ran over by the tank he was just riding in i mean if they're good at anything it's speed running like pick the thing they're speedrunning.

It might be a good thing, it might be a bad thing, but you cannot criticize their ability to speedrun. And then, if things weren't getting kind of metal enough, after the tanks blew through, then came the cavalry. Soviet cavalrymen, mounted on horseback, dual-wielding submachine guns charged at the romanian lines you're fucking kidding this is this is like this is this is this is something that is

spray painted on the side of a fucking tour van in the 80s exactly like this is this is this is a movie that chuck norris was like, okay, it's not really realistic, but I'm sure people will find it fun. So for people who don't understand from the description Joe's just given you, remember if you've ever seen stuff depicting the time, the Soviet submachine guns looked a lot like what we would call a Tommy gun. They had a drum magazine. So imagine a guy on horseback with a drum magazine submachine gun that's just basically a uh it looks like like a short barreled rifle with a drum mag in each hand firing so basically like like action hero style you using using his powerful ass to stay seated on the horse while fucking firing

rounds from with either hand with submachine guns in either hand just laying waste laying scunion as fucking the joes would say this is not the only time these guys are gonna come up in this episode this is so oh my god that's so funny this is that's genuinely like great job on the reveal there dude like because honestly there's so many things here where i'm just like i i'm taken by surprise but this is this is unreal this is like like like like like because let's call about 25 percent of my fucking dna the concept of the cossacks on horseback is always a bad thing but like you have to admit this is this is cool in context this is the most metal metal thing that is going to occur during this entire episode um by far it's it's hard to beat dual-wielding submachine cavalrymen. And as someone who

literally has spurs for my time being in a cavalry unit, not even a foot away from me, I am jealous. I never got to charge an enemy line dual-wielding guns on horseback. I just settle for a lame-ass tank. Like, could you do, like, a fucking holodeck experience from Star Trek where

I get to do just this and then not have to do the whole, like, lice-crawling-up-your-ass whole experience from Star Trek where I get to do just this and then not have to do the whole like like lice crawling up your asshole. And I mean, I'm sure that a lot of these guys died when they're attacking the lines a bit like the Romanians broke the Romanians broke pretty quickly. I assume terrified at their like

the Cossack like paralyzed nightmare fuel coming at it. Fuck it. They created like Al Capone's centaurs. This is some Warhammer 40k shit. The only thing missing is a tank the shape of a church or something. We have

desirers working on this. However, we are not comfortable with religious imagery. So we have shaped it as a giant apartment block. Yes, it is shaped like church that we have detonated in service of Soviet atheists. Now, the line

crashed. They completely fell apart. They're getting blown apart in every different direction. So the Romanes begin to flee. In response, Paulus does nothing. He allows the flanks to fight on completely on their own without any orders. But the main threat to the Soviets at this point wasn't actually the Germans or the Romanians.

It was the weather. Blinding fog and storms meant that not only could the Germans not see, and of course, the Luftwaffe couldn't come to their aid, but neither could the Soviets. Their tank crews couldn't see where they were going. They got lost. They crashed off of roads into valleys and ridges. They ran over entire platoons of soldiers. Yeah, they didn't have GPS, obviously.

But when you think about it, in those days, people were trained very, very hard on map navigation. If I remember correctly, you have compasses in these devices that can at least give you your bearing. But the problem is that it doesn't matter if you've got your bearing if like the freaked out 20 year old fucking driver of the other tank doesn't or something's broken and it's like you said it's just when no one knows what's going on doing what is it uh fucking table 12 is no fun particularly not when no one can see anything and And it's, you know, also insanely cold, and you're starving. Yeah, and, like, we talked about this during

our Battle of Kursk series, but one of the fallbacks that Soviet tank crews had was, like, when in doubt, follow the other tank in front of you. So, like, entire platoons of tanks would just plummet off of a valley, like Disney's version of lemurs. or lemmings

not lemming yeah we're gonna pause and we're gonna play the uh the the the honorary anthem of the soviet tank columns and soviet tank doctrine of the battle of stalingrad when a tank crashed it was just left behind uh because they're like fuck it we can't stop keep going and the west side of the events much of the same happened with the Soviets blasting through the German defenses, meeting little resistance. The one movement that was made on the sides of the Germans only helped the Soviets. The Germans didn't believe or couldn't conceive that the Soviets were attempting to encircle them, and specifically the 6th Army at Stalingrad.

So rather than block the Eastern or Western approach, stop the encirclement, put up a defense, they moved reinforcements out of the Soviets' way to protect the southern flank of the Sixth Army, effectively just opening a pathway for the Soviets to encircle them that much easier. It wasn't for an entire 17 hours after the Soviet operation began that any kind of order went to the German soldiers in Stalingrad, which was move in towards the south and cover your rear. And all operations within Stalingrad were to be put on hold. Other units would have to wait days to get orders. And Chuikov, inside Stalingrad, still having largely no idea what was going on outside of it, knew that something had to be happening. So he ordered large-scale attacks within the city

to paralyze the Germans and stop them from moving. While this was happening, the German flanks were disintegrating and the Romanians were surrendering about as fast as they could. The Soviets, thirsty with revenge, didn't take a lot of POWs. Others that weren't executed outright were sent marching towards the rear of the Soviet army, again, in the middle of a driving winter storm, freezing to death along the way. German soldiers are being pulled back towards Stalingrad and found themselves unsupported, running through the frozen open steppe, and suddenly under attack by sword and submachine gun-wielding cavalrymen. Again. open step and suddenly under attack by sword and submachine gun wielding cavalry men again i mean once again the the you know fucking lucky luciano centaurs of the soviet army just laying waste

what if an italian man was also soviet i mean uh you can imagine that any any italian communists who went to the so Soviet Union and didn't get immediately fucking sent to the hotel you get killed at by Joseph Stalin might actually have been there doing their part. The NKVD sitting you down like, so we heard you, Chexnuts, cook it to pizza. So this is really important. All nationalism has to be abandoned in service of the soviet project so we're about to break some pasta it's very important how you react next you don't really

like that like there's somebody just putting a mackerel right behind this guy's head it's like all right it's on the count of three just fucking grabbing some god i don't know some spaghetti noodles just ready to crack them in half. Just like, does he flinch? Does he do a thing? The Germans had to leave everything behind in order to get to what they considered safety, including their vehicles, whether they were broke down out of fuel or assaulted by the mice brigades. So they forced Soviet POWs to become their pack animals, many of whom were so weak from not being fed and left out in the elements that they just died. And the ones that refused or physically couldn't were left behind to die in the cold. Meanwhile, within the city itself, now dubbed by Hitler as Fortress

Stalingrad, German forces repositioned themselves to go along with their new reality. However, in order to do this, they had to torch their own supply stores. Now, of course, this is a bad idea in the future, as we will soon see, but in the immediate, it was also a bad idea. Because when they saw these towering infernos popping up along the city, the Soviets knew something was going on and where they were. So they immediately rushed out and ambushed them as they were trying to get away from their old positions, torching everything and going to the new ones. By November 22nd, the two Soviet armies finally met up, encircling the German 6th Army and, of course, celebrating by getting blind drunk out on the steppe.

You're about to see the introduction to a word that's very important to remember anytime you want to learn about Stalingrad. It is a German word. Their Kessel. Kessel means cauldron. Yep. And they're about to find themselves in one. Typically, cauldrons get boiled and they fucking make soup in them. These guys probably wish they had some soup. Turns out they're the soup. Or the heat for soup.

Yeah, exactly. It's like a soup cauldron is a bad thing when you are the soup and that is what's going to happen. The Germans like to call it the cauldron and also the fortress without a roof what would that be like festung on a dock or something like that i don't really know exactly like god damn that sucks oh bad one so what was hitler doing as this went on well nothing he just insisted that polis and the 6th Army stay in place and absorb the men who had made it into the city from the flanks

to his command. When Paulus was forced to move his command post at the town of Kalach, which is something of a barnacle on the outskirts of Stalingrad, like a suburb, he moved it just six miles outside of the Stalingrad city limits.

What I consider Stalingrad city limits. And, you know, what I consider like Stalingrad is, it also involves most of its suburbs. It's easier to explain it that way. He's in Stalingrad for all intents and purposes. Hitler was furious that he had moved his command post without asking him, without asking, why did you move this command post? It's like, oh, because, you know, the Soviets retook Kalach. Yeah, there's that.

I mean, I could notionally have my command post behind Soviet lines. This might cause some issues, mind you. But, I mean, it is doable. And it's like, historians will note, it did in fact become doable and then was done. And it's like, historians will note, it did in fact become doable and then was done. Now encircled, the plan came to simply resupply the army by air until the winter broke. This is kind of a famous story of how badly this would get fucked up. This is despite the fact that Martin Fiebig, the Air Force general who was going to be put in charge of this, pointed out the entire Luftwaffe as a whole

did not have enough transport aircraft to make this situation possible. And despite pretty much everyone, minus Paulus, because he didn't really know much of anything, knowing that an air resupply mission would never work, they'd actually tried this at a much smaller scale earlier on the battle,

and it was a complete clusterfuck. But Hitler insisted that it would, so it became the plan. In a somewhat darkly hilarious episode of all this, head of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Goering, told his commanders that they would need to drop 500 tons of supplies per day on the 6th Army in order to keep them alive and fighting. His commanders told him, look, the best we can do is half of that and the funniest part of it is paulus had actually requested 700 tons a day so garing had already cut you know 200 tons of it away and was told that we can't do that we could do maybe 250 maybe and then i mean think

about what that entails too i don't know know what the transport aircraft they would be using to airdrop this stuff, what its carrying capacity would be. But like, you know... Not a whole lot. They don't exactly have a lot of heavy transport or bombers. And so you're thinking about this, like, one presumes you could probably get, you know, in around... I'm going to estimate in and around 5 to 10 tons, maybe. And I mean, I'm really spitballing. But just think about what that feels.

They also have an airfield. So these are going to be landing. They're not full airdrop yet. Gotcha. So this isn't the best case scenario. In a best case scenario where none of your aircraft are shot down, where every single one of them

can make a safe landing. Like, think about that. If 250 tons, if we just spitball and say they could do 10 tons, I think that's generous. I don't even know. That still implies 25 aircraft being able to do a circuit each day with no loss. I mean, well, fuck me, dude. I hope so. Because that's what? Doing 24-hour operations, that's more than one per hour. And you probably't do 25 hour operate 24 hour operations because they didn't have night vision back then i can't imagine the landing fields or any of the shit is marked with lights because it would immediately be bombed so how much light do they have in that part of the world the northern hemisphere in fucking november

i'm gonna guess because britain is not that far london and that area are not that further apart you're probably looking at like eight nine hours so that implies three to five successful landings per hour and nothing's getting shot down if stuff's getting shot down it's not completely fucking the airfield and forcing it to be cleared weather isn't completely scrapping landings because like if it's too bad you literally can't land or you'll just die will yep yeah one assumes if they're having like ice fog amidst the fucking centaur attack, you imagine it's not great to do an instruments only landing with no night vision. And even kind of funnier than all of this.

Remember, he said he told his commanders, we need 500. They tell him we can do 250. Maybe. Paula says they need 700. He's not getting any of those numbers. So Garing shrugs tells hitler we can do 600 a day okay now one key thing is left out of this which shouldn't surprise anybody uh when since garing was obviously just ignoring reality at no point did anybody calculate for bad

weather which there's plenty of nobody calculated for their limited transport planes that they had or maintenance because one presumes also that like you're gonna have to have just just logistics officer brain here in in the background thinking about this kind of stuff and obviously i didn't do anything like on this order but you're gonna have to have the planes in flight you're gonna have to have the planes prepping the supplies are gonna have to be staged you're gonna have to have redundancy for uh for maintenance so can you like what i don't know what the flight like the the flight path is going to be like how far back they have to fly from to get this stuff there but like it's just you would think i mean to my eyes whatever the total number of aircraft that you're going to have doing these circuits, you're going to need to have at least half as many on standby, if not just one-to-one doubles

for every single aircraft. So if you had 25 aircraft, you actually need 50, that kind of a thing. And it's like, I don't know. I'm really spitballing and I haven't read the stuff you've read on this. But that to me with one airfield and any weather closures or fucking you know problems with shit getting shot down and blocking the airfield any damage any air attack from the enemy like messing that up doesn't really sound like you're gonna hit your target on that and using your metric of if you need if you have 25 aircraft you need 50 they didn't even have 25 oh my fucking god like wow dude now meanwhile in stalingrad there's something of a minor revolt within the ranks of the german leadership virtually

every officer was telling polis we need to plan a breakout we need to get the fuck away from stalingrad before the soviets that encircled us can dig in now this would be in direct violation of hitler's orders, so Paulus refused to even consider it. Of course, there's an obvious debate of would that have even worked? Now, most historians, and I err on the side of their arguments, when they say that the Sixth Army was so badly mauled, there's 0% chance they're going to pull it off. But that isn't the reason why Paulus refused. He just didn't want to piss off Hitler. So with the Germans sitting tight, the Soviets began their plan to finally kill the 6th Army once and for all. By December, the Soviets were launching attacks to cut the 6th Army in half. Now fighting defensively, the Germans found themselves well and truly fucked.

The various panzer units lost half of their tanks, most of which are hardly even to be used at this point due to dwindling ammunition and fuel and the mice. Many of the tank crewmen were dismounted, given rifles, and told to join the line. Though at this point, it was the Soviets' turn to underestimate the enemy. They believed that the 6th Army was already largely defeated, and they barely bothered to coordinate their artillery and infantry attacks so the Germans were able to hold on. As soon as it began, the air supply mission was a complete and total failure soon rations within the german army were cut in half and for those who are unaware you actually need to eat significantly more food in the winter than

any other time of the year especially if you happen to be a soldier yeah now this was cut this ration cut was calculated so it's like this will let us survive until mid to late December. With the understanding that after that, they would have to start foraging and eating whatever they could get their hands on. Giraffe animals, which they barely had any. There's a lot of mice.

Y'all want to eat some mice? That's right. Weather continued to be so bad that the German Air Force just couldn't fly transport missions and when they were able to, many of them couldn't land. They could hardly meet half of the hundreds of flights per day that would have been required to keep the army just barely surviving. So when they couldn't land, they resorted to airdropping. Most of the time, anti-aircraft fire and bad weather meant that their supplies were dropped so far off target they landed within Soviet lines. Bad things are going.

By the end of December, Germans are freezing to death and starving. It's forced them to kill every living animal they could get their hands on. Rats and stray dogs, mostly. Yeah. Their entire supply column, right? You mentioned that. And also, didn't you say that they'd moved a lot of the pack animals out of the city? Yep.

They were out on the steppe, so they don't even have those the few horses they still had were the first things to be eaten because i was considered more acceptable but then they worked their way down to rats and stray dogs but they would eat the little amount of meat that was on these animals because remember these the rats and stray dogs have been eaten good with all the yeah and the mice are like waigu beef if you fed them fucking wires and fucking wire jacketing. Yeah, exactly. And then they did something that we've kind of sort of talked about before in a roundabout way.

They would use the fur from these rats and dogs to sew into gloves, coats, boots, and hats. So you've got like a German soldier who has like a rat fur hat. And you don't know if this shit is tanned in any way. So it's just like so just got like you got like a german soldier who's like a rat for a hat and you know this shit is tanned in any way so it's just like they deglove the dog and just slide the dog's skin over

their head uh this is like slowly but surely transforming into like the fucking inside the fucking kurgan mound scene from the fucking from the 13th warrior yeah it's it's some grip shit like what so what kind of shoes are you wearing oh it's 10 different rats on each one of my toes actually I was gonna say I got the rat Balenciagas look at fly as hell oh god is that coat from Massimo Duty? No, it's dog. Now, their positions were so tenuous and dialed in by Soviet guns that nobody dared to leave their trenches, dugouts, or bunkers. So they began shooting into shovels and then throwing it over the top into the distance. Now, if you're a new listener to the show and have not yet been regaled by the various ways this can cause a horrific spread of disease, it does. I mean, infections and disease were already endemic in

the German army at this point, but this caused them to spread even worse than before. Now, meanwhile, after the end of Operation Uranus, the Soviet supply lines were open enough that all the Soviet soldiers, at least outside the city, got all of their winter clothing and vodka that they could ever wish for. Most German soldiers were unaware of how bleak their situation actually was, as they'd been told that Hitler would do anything possible to rescue them and continue their conquest of the Soviet Union. And that attempt finally came in mid-December in the form of Operation Winter Storm, as Erich von Manstein launched a panzer attack towards the southwest of Stalingrad, but it failed entirely. It was for multiple reasons. Now, almost all of them were the fault of Hitler,

because he continued to insist that he needed to micromanage everything. Manstein's original plan required many more tanks than he actually had, and he requested nearby units to reinforce him, which Hitler refused. So he required Paulus and the 6th Army to launch a simultaneous breakout in the same direction to force the Soviets to defend both sides of the breakout location. Hitler again refused because he wasn't trying to break Paulus out of Stalingrad. He was simply trying to break the encirclement so they could continue the battle. And when Manstein launched the attack,

because of course he launched the attack anyway, he told Paulus, fuck Hitler, you need to help me or you're going to die. Paulus refused to disobey Hitler's orders. So he simply sat there as Manstein's forces slammed themselves against the Soviets, burning through their limited supplies until the attack was called off just before Christmas. In the end, the only thing it accomplished was ensuring that any outside german forces were now too weak to help polis whatsoever and with that the noose had finally began to tighten around the sixth army for the final stages of the battle of stalingrad and that is where we'll pick up next time with the conclusion of our series and the end of the Sixth Army. Jesus Christ, man.

It's just, yeah. So much of this is just like the odds were against them in so many ways to begin with. But Hitler did not exactly improve that. Yeah, he was just machine gunning himself in the foot at a continuous basis yeah he was the one soviet cavalryman who managed to nd both of his submachine guns into himself into both him so his horse and himself and his own dick and balls i was i was about to say you know there is one cavalryman who accidentally shot his own horse in the back of the head, like Red Dead Redemption 2. No, absolutely.

Look, man, anytime you've got, let's call it a non-standard fucking practice like this, there's going to be some dumb mistakes. Like we can never know for certain. I can't imagine even people who like their entire, you know, body of research as military historians was looking at the Battle of Stalingrad because those people exist. It is a thing that that studied in that degree like we might not ever know if there's a source if there's anything that

can confirm that a dude indeed his submachine guns into his horse and fell off his now dead horse but like our brains have seen how stuff happens in the military in real life and we all know in our hearts that it's true.

Our brains can conceive of it and our hearts want to believe in it. Nate, thank you so much for joining me here on part four of our Battle of Stalingrad series. Where can people find all of your other work? I would say please check out What a Hell of a Way to Die, a podcast about why you shouldn't join the military that's also now pivoting towards a podcast about being a dad and gardening and household advice and what it's like to just sort of try to age and not be a dumbass. I also am the producer and co-host of Trash Future, a podcast about the tech industry and why it's bad, but also why it's incredibly funny when you actually look at it in detail. I also am the producer of Kill James Bond,

a film critique podcast by three incredibly funny trans people. Their names are Alice Caldwell Kelly, Abigail Thorne, and Devin. It's extremely funny. I always laugh at it a lot, and I think you will too. If you enjoy my jokes, why not listen to a podcast with people who are better at making those kinds of jokes than I am? And thank you so much for joining us. If you like what we do here, consider supporting us on Patreon. You get every episode early, sometimes an entire series. You get Discord access,

five plus years of bonus content and all sorts of other stuff. And leave us a review on wherever you listen to podcasts. And until next time, grab both of your submachine guns, get on your horse and find your nearest Romanian. And just hope that your rat coat

keeps you warm.