Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 283 - The Battle of Stalingrad: Part 5

Episode Date: October 29, 2023

The conclusion to our Battle of Stalingrad series! Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Last chance to preorder 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 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 lines of my donkeys podcast i am joe with me still trapped in the stalingrad called actually no we shouldn't

say because that makes us nazis uh we closing in on the stalingrad cauldron uh is nate what's up yeah i uh you, I've heard that things are going to be remembered as uniformly positive as regards this battle I've been a part of. I am not uncomfortable at all. Disregard the fact that I,

if you look on the webcam, I look like I've just taken a shower because I have. I haven't showered in months. I'm covered in lice. God knows what I've been eating, but it sucks. And I want to build Soviet communism worldwide, but I'm covered in lice. God knows what I've been eating, but it sucks. And I want to build

Soviet communism worldwide, but I'm going to start by drinking some radiator fluid. That's right. Now you're just appropriating my culture and I don't appreciate it. Before the show, I dove into a local dumpster that hasn't been picked up mysteriously for three weeks, rolled around a bit um it's not really cold it's actually almost 96 degrees fahrenheit currently according to my laptop um which means it's actually probably a little bit hotter than that because i've inside my apartment uh but so instead of freezing to death um i am sweating profusely in my overheated office really funny because the the degree to which this is just...

Everywhere on the planet, or at least in the Northern Hemisphere, and I guess to some extent the Southern Hemisphere because of fucking weird heat shit, is having an incredibly, unbelievably hot summer. But I don't know if what we're experiencing here in the United Kingdom is low end of the mean or abnormally low, but we are genuinely having what feels like a cold summer. We had a nuts heat wave in the very beginning of the summer. That was what inspired me and Cynthia to buy one of those portable roll around, looks like mini fridge air conditioners. And then it's basically been like 64 degrees the entire time, 64 Fahrenheit, like 8, but 17 Celsius. It was like 15 Celsius on Saturday. It was warmer in Edinburgh than it is in London.

So I'm not cold, cold, like frigid, freezing, whatever. But I'm about to get fucking wet and cold riding my bike in the studio after we get this recording done. So in that regard, I do feel as though I'm embodying the spirit of Stalingrad in like a I have a tummy ache and I'm a huge baby kind of way. This summer has been kind of strange. Like climate change in Armenia effectively means it's a little bit drier than usual. Obviously we don't have to worry about any rising ocean tides yet. Yeah.

In the Eurasian pole of inaccessibility or the fuck it is. You got me great. That's, that's more like Western China, but you are definitely in the, the pole of inaccessibility in some ways. I mean... Hey, look at it this way.

In a long enough timeline, I will live in a seafront country. So basically, the destiny of Yerevan is to become Los Angeles. Oh, no. And this is always... This is embodied in like... Really, it's very hot.

And then we get dust storms now. Yeah. Because the Yerevan is kind of in a bowl, right? So when the wind comes through, it just blows all the dust through the city. And it is awful. I remember getting hit by a dust storm in Afghanistan and you could see it coming on the horizon. It just looked fucking biblical, man. Absolutely unreal.

Thankfully, we're not that bad yet. Thankfully, we're not that bad yet thankfully we're not that bad yet like if the ararat valley dries up and all of our agricultural land dies and we're talking dust bowl type situations here and then all life will cease to exist but um not not that bad yet it's just uh incredibly uncomfortable like it doesn't feel like you have sand blasted in your face but if you're like me and you wear contact lenses you're gonna have a bad time um but that why don't you just wear your bc bad time um but that why don't you just wear your bcgs from from basic training why don't you just wear those big ass fucking private pile glasses or whatever gomer pile it's not actual private pile but other pile

yeah they'll protect me from everything to include human attention um it's uh you know it's it's it's uncomfortable uh but it seems to be mostly an august thing for now so we'll see i mean without without buttering you up too much, it's very funny that like you're basically like jacked as hell and extremely good looking, but then imagining you in glasses, it just feels like you're basically going to be like doing nerd dress up. Like you're, this is like the casting director in a Hollywood movie.

It's like, we need to make the hot guy a nerd. So what do we do? Just find an ugly pair of glasses, but change literally nothing. Those are the kind of glasses that I actually wear when I don't have contacts in because they're really uncomfortable when i wear these headphones i have like these effectively like clark kent glasses um because they're the only thing i can find that fits comfortably this is where everybody makes the jokes on my gigantic nose um yeah because my nose is too big for normal glasses not not that, but my nose is very broken,

right where glasses sit. So if I have something that is a little bit too snug, like with the normal eye cups or whatever, it hurts. So these giant librarian glasses are the only thing that's really comfortable. It's extremely fun. Yeah, I, you know,

I have some Warby Parker, some 2010s, mid 2010s, fucking horns, want to be more CNHS glasses. I don't a screen that becomes harder to see because of the harsh overhead lighting you know from 9 a.m to 6 p.m five days a week uh that just has improved the overall like my overall ability to see and maybe i'm just maybe i just don't need to see far anymore doesn't matter but yeah like i don't really i do have glasses because i have astigmatism but like i just don't find that i get like those astigmatism headaches anymore uh which is the most fucked up eyes and i have an astigmatism in both eyes i'm nearsighted and farsighted wow so you basically got like like the closest to actual googly eyes so you you basically you won't be killed by the camaraderie part too because you

can do uh backbreaking labor because you're you're a giant. And I won't because I don't wear my glasses. I can get away with not wearing my glasses anymore. And so maybe they won't suss me out as a huge nerd, but they might also. I don't know. I did work in an ambulance. I might be too close to being a doctor to them. That's true. Yeah. You say you've been corrupted by the state. So I think we both have to resign ourselves to being beaten to death with a chair, but not in the funny way, like the funny meme way with the boat fight from American black Twitter, but rather more like the sad way, which is the Khmer Rouge beats you to death with a chair. We have unfortunately been sentenced to death for being the Pim's Cup

petite bourgeoisie. I've been listening to way too much Trash Future recently. You know what's really funny? I can't remember the origin of the joke, if that was a thing that existed beforehand. But we did a fake debate during COVID where everyone was doing Brendan O'Neill, where the point was like, this house resolves, the chattering classes of this once great nation are at it again. The other one is this house resolves that the chattering classes are not at it again, but every single person had to present the debate like Oxford Union style debate as Brendan O'Neill. I definitely got the most lines of this

Waitrose Wehrmacht. That joke seemed... I can't remember if it was me riffing off something they had done or them riffing off me, but that has just become the new standard that it's always got to be a combination of like a place and some sort of like notionally bougie thing which is funny too because like waitrose waitrose is a worker owned co-op like yeah they are kind of they are kind of like classes being fancy in the same way that john lewis's class is being fancy but like basically

like i want to say private equity bought morrison's and it's just like the the the working class northern grocery store and it's like just running them into the ground so they can collapse the business because the business happens to own all of the property the grocery stores are built on because they're like sweet we can just we can destroy this fucking successful business in order to have access to its real estate so it's like you know at the end of the day what i don't know british people get so hung up about like what are the class implications of like, you know, this brand of Popsicle that I bought? And it's just like, it's like niche reference that very few people will get. But it's like, it's like Mr. Papa 85, the fucking, the TikTok guy, old black dude who

really wants to have sex with Megan Thee Stallion. All I can think of is just being like, man, who gives a fuck? Like, that's, that is just the reaction I have so often to like the things that they get class anxious about so i know we're fifth episode long series this isn't about stalingrad yet we're gonna slowly losing our mind but like dear listeners my fellow negroni naxalites fucking well jesus christ yeah yeah i've been sitting on that for about three minutes. The fucking sangria shining path. Yeah. We are here on Stalagrad part five, the conclusion to our story.

And when we left you last time, the... I'm still laughing about this stupid shit. I'm gonna leave this in, honestly. Normally I would put a marker and say cut this but no it doesn't leave this in this is good so when we left you last time the german sixth army had been trapped in stalingrad cut off from resupply and had their last hopes of a breakout dashed across the steppe as the red army slowly and methodically closed in for a kill the germans

are freezing starving and completely abandoned by their own high command who refuse to accept the reality in which they found themselves and now i should be clear here before we get into this and i think we talked about this last episode i am not talking about the misery of the common german soldier trapped inside soviet encirclement as a form of sympathy fuck them they're nazis but rather because you know we've been listening to this for over four and a half hours at this point we've done all sorts of episodes about horrific nazi war crimes and it could be somewhat relieving uh to hear about the horrors that had been visited upon all of these people because you know everything that they have done since they crossed the border during Operation Barbarossa.

This is the finding out phase of their global fucking around, right? Yes. And the Germans stuck out in the steps in these lines. And remember, when I say the steps, this is the outskirts of Stalingrad proper. That is where the encirclement is still. The Soviet counteroffensive is not quite breached into Stalingrad proper, that is where the encirclement is still. The Soviet counteroffensive has not quite breached into Stalingrad, the city.

They've surrounded the Sixth Army, which at this point is mostly in the city, but also in these surrounding areas. There's still people caught out in the open step. They were burning everything for warmth, but the intense December and then January cold made all this completely pointless.

They slept together, sharing blankets and sleeping bags in a vain attempt to conserve body heat, but it didn't matter. Virtually every single soldier had become inflicted with some level of frostbite, and one soldier wrote home that a rat had eaten two of his toes while he was asleep, and he didn't feel it. All right. I mean, we've talked about superlative levels of human privation on this show, and specifically in this series regarding this particular event, but I don't think I'm so exhausted and cold and frostbitten that I don't notice a rat eating two of my toes in my sleep

might be the superlative example, the worst, the absolute nadir. You tell me. That man's foot is completely dead at that point. And they found a rat that they had yet to eat or turn into gloves to actually eat his toes. Yeah, exactly. The rat was like revenge for my fallen brethren all right

i think these are for all my comrades that you've eaten exactly it's like motherfucker i see those socks you made out of my brothers and sisters well guess what like you took those socks off to get some sleep bye to your toes i am having a feast those gloves looking awful a lot like my friend frank you motherfucker jesus christ all of them are absolutely riddled with lice which is of course made worse because you know they're sharing blankets and stuff and they've become so vitamin deficient they have scurvy their hair and teeth are falling out they're bleeding from their gums and most of them are constantly dazed by various different degrees of hypothermia. Now, for people unaware, hypothermia is obviously when the core temperature of your body drops too low.

And it renders you into a kind of... It's often described as drunk. But it's kind of an understatement for people who have seen people in hypothermia. Obviously, I have as someone who used to work on ambulance. It's more of like a delirium. I've seen people who were cold weather casualties when I was in Alaska and when I was in Korea, nothing too severe, but enough that it was a problem. And yeah, I think, yeah, delirious, sleepy and confused and just generally not with it would be the best way of describing it.

What we experienced more often than not was like, yeah, you'd have that level of just dazed fatigue, but more often it was that you could see the problem. You could see, you know, chill blains. You could see the, you know, like areas in which like once the skin had like this unnatural color, like unnaturally kind of white bluish color to it. And then once you got them into warmth and dryness, it like swelled up like the world's worst sunburn, like a scald almost.

I saw that. But this is such a degree beyond it. Weirdly, my dad got really bad frostbite in Korea during the time that he was patrolling on the DMZ. And back in those days, if you went to the TMC, the troop medical clinic, and got treated for frostbite, they would hit you with an Article 15 for dereliction of duty because you hadn't taken care of your hands. Now, obviously, in those days, in the 70s, you got leather glove shells

and wool glove liners, and they didn't have polypro gloves or waterproof gloves or anything along those lines. So like, well, it's fucking, you know, 33 Fahrenheit and rainy. How do you keep your shit dry when all you've got is stuff that will get wet? So he obviously couldn't go to the TMC and he just sucked it up. And now he basically like has to use medicated hand cream for the rest of his life. And like, otherwise his hands crack and bleed all the time. And he like has lost feeling in his fingers because he got frostbite. Thankfully, he didn't lose his fingers, but he could have.

Really small example. But like, that's a mild case of frostbite like it's confirmed frostbite but mild whereas what these guys were dealing with is the stuff that like in you know uh like mountain warfare school and cold weather i can't remember what the the acronym is for the u.s Army's cold weather training. They will show you black and white or sometimes early color photos of people with fucking nuclear grade frostbite. It's horrific. It looks like a rotting corpse. And that I'm going to presume from what you've described, that's what's going to be the norm here, given these conditions. Virtually everybody, this is hundreds of thousands of people. Frostbite on their faces. People's noses have fallen off.

Their eyes have become frostbite. Like frostbitten. They can't see. Yeah. The way that it's described is that the vast majority of everybody is just shambling corpses. Oh my God, dude. And that's just physically uh like on the outside everyone has lice everyone has typhus everyone has dysentery so many men were getting typhus and like when they when eventually got to the point that they couldn't function anymore you know they're starving they're dehydrated they're frostbitten

they're hypothermic and they have typhus that they would just be thrown out of the bunker to die in the open there was no medical treatment left to give them and there was so little food to go around that men were sneaking out in the middle of night to search dead soviet soldiers for anything they could eat there's reports of cannibalism yeah um and other accounts of like we tried cannibalism but we simply couldn't the bodies were too frozen yeah because like you said i mean they don't have anything to heat stuff with they don't have any fuel they don't have like this is well before the sort of like trusty can of sterno or something along those lines yeah and they need wood and and flint and everything like that and they they've already burned it all. There's nothing left. You have made more cups of Folgers instant coffee

with a jet boil stove than the entire Wehrmacht in all of World War II. You take that, motherfuckers. I just made one. Suck it. Men were also going completely insane. People were running around the trenches, having finally lost their minds and having to be

tackled and restrained by others. Now, once upon a time, men would wound themselves to get off the front line. This is not unique to the Wehrmacht trapped in Stalingrad. It's a common thread through the history of soldiering. However, at this point, there was nowhere for them to go. Yeah. There was no one to replace them. There was no one to take care of them. So if you shot yourself in the foot, they'd be like, that sucks. Stay at your post. People stopped even bothering to mutilate themselves.

So they resorted to suicide. Mass suicide. We honestly have no confirmed numbers of how many German soldiers killed themselves, but it's thought to be thousands. have no confirmed numbers of how many German soldiers killed themselves, but it's thought to be thousands. That was something that Guy Segay talks about in that book, The Forgotten Soldier, which I do not recall him describing being at Stalingrad. But he was in one of the relief efforts, I believe, that failed, one of the ones he was talking about. Either that or he was in the Caucasus Front during the winter. And he was just describing this being a regular occurrence that you'd be pulling guard duty at night and then you would

hear a rifle shot off the column. And it was just somebody had walked out and shot themselves. Or worse, people would go crazy and they'd be like, I'm going to abscond. I'm going to run away. And it's like, bro, you'd better hope the partisans find you and kill you because otherwise you're just going to freeze to death or get eaten by animals. There's nothing out there for you. And that level of open air claustrophobia is very different than Stalingrad. But that level of despair and misery, like I said, I mean, this is not meant to empathize with the Wehrmacht.

But when you think about the human conditions everyone was experiencing, it's just such utter misery. It's hard to find... No, I should say it's hard to find a military example of this kind of misery. The only thing that we've covered, I think, that comes close is the remains of Napoleon's Grand Army as they retreat. But even that, they were more organized. And I think it's because they had less sustained pressure the entire time. I don't really like to compare the two because they're two very different stories. But the abject misery, terror, all these other things, it's the only thing I could find that's even remotely comparable. At this point, entire divisions consisted of a

dozen men. And just in case you're not like a doctrine head, a division, at least in the US military, is typically about 10,000 soldiers. That's what its manning strength is supposed to be. And the German system was different. The Soviet system was different. But that's a pretty good understanding. If you think of it like a battalion is typically between 500 and 750. A brigade is typically between, let's say, 4,000 and 6,000. A regiment could also be around the same size. And a division is about... I actually have that wrong. A brigade is probably more like 3,000. But a division is typically around 10,000 men. And that's everyone. Leadership, actual combat soldiers, sustainers, etc.

actual combat soldiers, sustainers, etc. And so a 10,000 man unit being a dozen people, we're starting to count a lot of fucking zeros after the decimal point here in order to get what percentage of man strength they are. There isn't many

German formations left that haven't suffered 80-90% casualties. And at this point, Paulus understood that they were this point polis understood they were doomed everybody understood that they were doomed other than hitler when someone suggested that hitler should hand over supreme command of the sixth army something he's held this entire time to not to not because you like you know you're mind fewer, but to save face when they were inevitably destroyed. Hitler had them brought up on charges of defeatism and pessimism. Instead, Hitler spent all of his

time planning another breakout attempt, which would be called Operation Dietrich, which would really only exist in his very, very stupid mind. And he does seem to have eventually come around to understand how hopeless everything was by mid-January. He lavished hundreds of people trapped in the encirclement with awards, including Paulus. He gave him oak leaves to add to his Knight's Cross he already had. And then the Knight's Cross had very different levels, and he just kept adding things to Paulus' over time. And then the Soviet killing blow came. This is known as Operation Koltso. And it began on January 10th with a massive bombardment of 7,000 different

pieces of artillery from field guns to rocket launchers for hours, pounding German positions across the steppe on the outskirts of the city of Stalingrad. Then came the waves of Soviet infantry, so emboldened and so sure that this is the death of the Sixth Army, they were carrying red banners. Yeah, I mean, when they start showing up with the decorative fucking drill and ceremony banners...

You know you're in for a bad time. You're kind of fucked, yeah. It's like they don't want to deal with the extra duty detail to fucking clean the guidons unless they actually think this is kind of the moment where the photo op is going to happen. So, yeah, I would say you're probably pretty fucked.

Yeah. And I mean, in the last episode when Operation Uranus was going on and finishing, the Soviets were guilty of underestimating the Germans in several occasions. But they were right in this case. The plight of the German defenders was absolutely pathetic. Their hands were so damaged and swollen with frostbite, they could hardly manage to use their guns. Their fingers couldn't fit in the trigger wells anymore

to the point that they had to start cutting them off. Not the fingers, the trigger wells, so they could reach them. So basically everyone's got Prince Charles fingers by this point. Yeah, yeah. They all have been inflicted with those royal sausage fingers. reach them so basically everyone's got prince charles fingers by this point yeah yeah uh they had they all have been inflicted with as those royal sausage fingers i know i'm supposed to say king charles i don't fucking care like yes i'm a citizen of this country this is it's stupid no i

will not respect him you know fuck off whatever it should be mandatory to disrespect him yeah shouts out to irish tom who almost got my me beaten up at an arcade fire concert that we got into because my friends in the band because it was the night the queen died and when uh the lead singer said something about the queen being dead in some sort of semi-respectful way tom just very irishly yelled fuck the quayne and then i laughed very americally and everyone got mad at me they're like i remember uh I remember I was here of course when I found Out that the queen died so nobody really cares but A British friend

That I have here who you've met I was dancing around him Playing that song Lizzy's In a box over and over and over again And it made him very upset Yeah I mean they get really really weepy eyed about This stuff and it's just like I'm sorry but like At the end of the day,

you're always up a certain creek as an American because you can invite the comparisons that in many ways the quality of life in America is worse. And it's all kids now get shot in scos and all that fucking shit. But at the end of the day, it's like y'all got a family of magic Germans and you worship them like gods. It's really embarrassing. I'm sorry.

Yeah, at least the people in the fictional warhammer 40k world have magic and stuff like you have no reason to believe you guys are just on like the fucking like like post-doctoral version of believing in the tooth fairy i'm sorry but like it's just no i i'll never ever respect. And weirdly, like as an aside, as I digress, I'll just say that seeing the way you people were always kind queen died, seeing the degree of the disconnect between how the state wanted to do a mandatory blackout on mourning on everything. And most people were just like, they weren't into it, but they were sort of keeping up appearances and no one pushed back against how fucking ridiculous it all was. And that to me just felt like, oh yeah, this is just the mentality. This is how it's going to be. The Brits are the Brits. You know, this is why they've

never had... The last revolution they had was just like an even shittier guy who was a Puritan who at least hated the king, but was also a dickhead. You know, it's like, and that was in the, what, 17th century. So anyway, very different system, very different country. We're talking about the Eastern Front. We're talking about the point at which the Eastern Front becomes the absolutely going westward front. And... Speaking of dying Germans.

Speaking of Germans who have died, and the implications thereof, as you're describing, sausage fingers from frostbite. Oh, oh god that's so fucked up I can imagine they're just like falling off when they try to like clear a jam in their weapon or something

I lost a sausage is what I just said they're trying to feed a belt of ammunition into like their like MG one of them and they just don't feel that their hands are going in with it yeah it's like when you basically people all trying to fix it fix a jam in the you know fucking in the feed tray

and it winds up just being like firing people's sausage fingers like they're belt fed ammunition why is your mg42 not working uh fritz's fingers caught the feed tray again. Yeah, he tried to fix it by taking off his rat gloves, and his fingers just all fell off. It came off with the glove. The German line was collapsing all over within days, and this isn't to say that the Germans didn't muster some level of resistance. They were able to throw off more than a few attacks. However, the problem was, as soon as they did, they'd run out of resistance, they were able to throw off more than a few attacks. However,

the problem was as soon as they did, they'd run out of ammo and the next Soviet attack would punch right through them. And Soviet commanders figured this out quite quickly. So when one attack failed, they just threw another group of people directly at where they just failed, knowing the Germans would eventually break because their dwindling stock of resources would fail them. And the Soviet commanders made little attempt to reduce the losses of their own men. In the snow-covered steppe, they even lacked white camouflage suits, making their normal tan-slash-gray-slash-brown uniforms, depending on where they came from, they stuck out like a sore thumb or a prospecting finger. Though with almost no ammunition left for their anti-tank guns, there was nothing

the Germans could do to hold off the Soviet tanks. And somewhere in the middle of this, Ernst Speer, the brother of Albert Speer, the Nazi minister of armaments and war production, was killed. Not that that's important, but fuck him. That was an interesting tidbit. Nobody's actually sure

what happened to him. He's just like, well,bit. Nobody's actually sure what happened to him. He's just like, well, we lost Ernst. He's somewhere up there. Yeah, I mean, I do think that one of the things that I'll just say is that the degree to which we'll find out about this when Joe wraps up, but if you were at Stalingrad, unless you got really lucky as a German,

like evacuated for some reason before things fell apart you either didn't come home or you came home in the 1950s oh yeah we're gonna talk about that um I will say it's it's preferable to just get shot yeah you are so fucked like you are as fucked as anyone has ever been in in all of military history at this point and if you're a heavey if you're a Hilfsvilling like a you know former soviet citizen who's volunteered to fight you are ultra fucked yeah to quote war daddy from the movie uh fury they're gonna kill you real bad yeah like like let's just like we talked about speed running everything like uh get ready for a summary execution speed run because that's about what's going to fucking happen while all this is going on many german forces pulled back and put on

hellish defenses but again there's only so much they could do they couldn't dig in because the ground was frozen solid so instead they hid behind snow banks piles of rubble and barricades made out out of their own dead comrades who are frozen solid. So once again, they've created a Kurgan. Yeah, we have a corpse wall. Corpse lasagna part two, the frozen edition. This is the one you bought from the grocery store

frozen food section. We've seen the summer Olympics version of the corpse mound. Now we have the winter Olympics version. Fuck. God. Yeah, and it's like, i'm sure i mean i guess a frozen flesh probably stops you know shrapnel and small arms fire to some degree it's better than nothing myth buster we need to reunite the myth busters and get them on this yeah exactly it's like build us the corpse lasagna and freeze it so we can figure out yeah we're looking for a kind of german jenga

if you will god damn it now by the 12th of january the sixth army was virtually completely out of ammunition but they still managed to fight on in several places a lot of this is with captured soviet weapons because there was plenty of them lying around and since they were now almost entirely out of fuel, as the Germans pulled back to protect their flanks, consolidate their defenses from the surging Soviet attack, they had to leave behind virtually all of their vehicles and wounded. In some cases, trucks full of wounded German soldiers ran out of fuel while being transported to new defensive positions, only for their drivers to simply bail out and run away,

leaving all of the men in the back to freeze to death, if they were lucky. Some of them survived until Soviet soldiers found them, and they went out real bad. The last functioning airstrip was held by the Germans at Potomac, while the encirclement slowly closed in, and the Germans realized we gotta get the fuck out. The last flight out of the dying German airfield, military police had to be called in to open fire on soldiers who swarmed the planes, knowing that it was their last chance to get out alive. There was another airstrip at a town called Guggenreich, but it no longer worked because the ground control radios were broken, and the technicians that were supposed to fix them were all dead. They died of frostbite or hypothermia.

And while there are systems nowadays for controlling an airfield without radio communication, they're pretty rudimentary. And I don't think they existed at the time because when you think about how old military aviation was at the time. Pretty young. And also, a lot of this revolves around the ability to do some kind of marking system. I mean, that's what you need specifically for dropping stuff, but also for landing. There's something you'd call a ground mark release system or reference system. Oh boy, we're going to talk about the dropping. Here's the problem.

Like I said, you can't mark anything at night because then it's a target you can't mark stuff in the day because visibility is so poor because of the weather so like without radios uh honestly like if you are a really really good pilot and your shit is on really well, and you are navigating correctly based on speed and the reference points for your approach, and you're in communication with the people on the ground, this kind of instruments landing, especially with the equipment of the day, is possible, but extremely difficult. But you take... That's in the best case situation where nobody's trying to murder you. Yes. And you also factor that in. So, you know, this is one of those things

where I'm reminded it's not a very good book, but there is a French novel called Les Bienveillants. It translates to The Kindly Ones. It's written by an American-French guy. And it's a strange, strange book. And the French loved it. It was not very well received outside of France because it's basically about sort of like

the fake memoir of a Nazi who fights at Stalingrad and is kind of like a BDSM freak. And in general, it's a very French book. It won the Prix Goncourt, which is like the French National Book Award slash Pulitzer Prize slash Man Booker Prize. but it was critically panned you know elsewhere and I think because of the fact that like it's just it's a very strange book with a very strange sort of sympathy and I don't even think this guy is a Nazi it's just a weird book but there's a scene there he's describing a similar

thing that you're describing and where people are if I remember correctly like rushing a plane they don't get on the plane takes off is immediately shot down and crashes kills everyone on board and fucks up the airstrip and it's just like oh great well shit you know it's like those are your odds get on the plane that takes off and then crashes and you die or die i i would rather settle for the plane crashes it's painless at least i get to be like

for a second like hell yeah fucking rock hard sucks be you. I'm getting out of Stalingrad. And then the first happiness you felt in four months. I'll be real with you. When I was leaving Afghanistan, I was flying from Sharana in Paktika province to Bagram on a CH-47. When they flew over this one particular area, they fired off chaff, but they didn't announce to anybody they were doing that. So I was looking out the porthole because where I was sitting on this aircraft, my literal

flight out of the area I was deployed to after 13 months in country. And all I see is just fucking sparks going everywhere. And I was like, God damn it, man. Are you for fucking are you for fucking real? And then the same kind of thing happened when I was getting out of the army. March 31st because April 1st was my get out of the army day there was cross border fire from the North

Koreans on enough to sound some alarms and get in the news and stuff and I just remember thinking to myself like man this is where they start playing the sad music in the fucking movie I hate this shit so much whatever the American version of Swan Lake is starts playing on

AVN or whatever it's called. Yeah, the North Koreans are like that redheaded piece of shit thinks he's getting away scot-free. We're going to get his ass. Soon after all of this, large elements of the German army began surrendering for the first time. Now, some of this is obvious desperation, but it was also because the Soviets had begun dropping leaflets on them as well, promising them good treatment if they tossed down their rifles and gave up. Several battalions took them up on the offer. In other places, officers and men went to their unit doctors asking if they had any poison so they could kill themselves before the Russians showed up because they were out of ammo and they

couldn't shoot themselves. The wounded and dying overflowed every single field hospital with little hope of recovery or even rudimentary medical treatment. They were left out in the elements to die. It was thought to be easier that way. Now, what is interesting at this time is the German army managed to function the best at the front line where the metal was meeting the meat. They were ragged, starving and dying, but they were largely held together by a core of mostly competent NCOs and surviving junior officers the best they could. Instead, what was happening was the 6th Army was dying from the rear forward. Quartermasters, military police, and everyone else behind the

front lines rapidly lost control of the situation. The military police were chased out of more than one place in the rear as people, starving soldiers, starving soldiers who are armed heard rumors that there's food nearby and they're just holding out on them. Quartermaster offices are ransacked, all sorts of shit. Paulus had effectively lost control of all the things that made an army work, even in the worst of times, which these were certainly in. Soon, parts of his command staff were plotting ways to get away from the Soviets. For a lot of reasons that should be obvious, they thought they would be better off dead, and falling into the Soviets' hands was worse than death.

All of the moving parts that made fighting a battle at the front line were failing, and rapidly. Most of these plots completely failed but one did work uh a colonel and his staff left everyone behind and managed to escape to the south on a pair of homemade skis okay neat gonna cross country ski out of the situation did they get back to friendly lines yes they made it all the way to the Caucasus front. Holy shit. I mean, once again, fucking Nazis, but that's nuts, man. That's not close. Yeah, they made it hundreds of miles away.

If you've ever read the novel 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, probably the best part of the book, in my opinion, is the last segment. And it's basically all of the book has been setting you up to learn the true story about this guy who's sort of like a European Thomas Pynchon sort of shadowy literary figure. And he's drafted and fights in the Eastern Front and then gets wounded and he gets put in a convalescent hospital. hospital is just forgotten about because it's in this village they just it's something they just set up kind of rudimentary and because they're completely weathered and snowed in like no one can get to them like they can't get orders they can't get comms they no one can get in or out and uh this guy winds up finding the memoirs of a very famous soviet science fiction author's uh ghostwriter and they've clearly been burnt tried to be burned in the in the fireplace and he reads them and sort of reads this guy's completely insane to me that sort of fictive universe of the the soviet science fiction author is it's just so

unbelievably brilliant it's like the part of the book i was like jesus fucking christ i didn't realize you could do this in fiction i don't know if i recommend that book it's like a thousand pages a lot of it you're, why am I reading this? But that part's... So it's Infinite Jest. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's better than Infinite Jest. I've read Infinite Jest, and I actually like it, but a third, two thirds of that book could have been cut

without much being lost. But what I'm... I'm bringing this up because it's just the degree to which, like, it's a fiction novel by a Chilean guy who was living in Spain when he wrote it, just the degree to which like the it's a fiction novel by a chilean guy who was living in spain when he wrote it but the degree to which they lost control of everything that line just evaporated the like you said the sixth army is gone like that's not an implausible story and i reckon that like the idea of somebody surviving the war because they were in like a

field hospital that got forgotten about and snowed in is just as plausible as guys fucking you know ski away on whatever the fuck is on her majesty secret service kind of shit or like the opening scene of view to a kill like and they get away like and they actually make it like that to me is just as implausible and it turns out it's true so yeah i mean it's just that's the stuff that really kind of gets my brain churning is just thinking about like the sheer scale and like what it felt like to be a very small echelon like a very very small unit and be as part of a thing in a larger military operation and then what we did was like was basically like the entirety of the war in afghanistan was basically like 120th of the scale of stalingrad yeah yeah like madness and absolute madness imagine you're

watching everything collapsing around you and your colonel comes up to you like i have an idea and he just holds up some like skis made out of human bones or something i spent a couple of years in switzerland uh i learned how to do some shit now paulus you know i'm not gonna how do i put this not to say anything nice about polis because he's an idiot and a nazi but it seems that he never once thought about abandoning his men in his command for his own safety that is the nicest thing i could say about him he seemed to be like well i'm stuck here with everyone else and this just feels like like the traumatic brain injury version of fucking thermopoly like just being resigned we haven't actually gotten to the tbi yet that's coming being resigned to the idea that you're just like oh well fuck we're gonna die all right i guess we're gonna

die guys that's the sacrifice we have to make for fascism uh you know what thousand year right etc etc we gotta do our part and it's like and then there's like a million soldiers under your command who are like well i I actually had thought I wasn't gonna die uh sir this is this is a little little bit of change of plans here like it looks like our future in this thousand year Reich is gonna end looks down at his watch anytime now

yeah we got about three or four minutes remaining for our personal thousand year Reich yeah now he Paulus did ask for permission for the last units that they could muster to look vaguely like a military unit to break out to the south and hope to link up with surviving armies out in the Caucasus and try to catch up with the guys skiing away. But it was denied. Slowly, the last of the German line was pushed back into the city, while others retreated deeper into the city itself. for permission to surrender per se but he asked like permission to handle things like quote at his discretion and hitler took that as he was considering surrendering which he was uh polis was pretty openly accepting like if we don't surrender we're all gonna fucking die uh and he asked for the discretion to handle things as he saw fit and And Hitler took that as like, can I surrender? Which was true.

Hitler did figure that out. I mean, Paulus is not a, like a deeply academic or doctrinal guy. Remember, he's not a seasoned field commander. Hitler knows him very well, which is why he got the job in the first place.

So yeah, he's, he's Paulus nepotism, baby. Can't fucking stand it. His parents' names are blue on Wikipedia. Piece of shit. And Stalingrad

meanwhile had turned into a complete hell on earth for the Germans in a new way. The German ranks were full of tens of thousands of wounded, pretty much all left to die or wander around the city on their own. Casualties among the NCOs and officers at the junior level had grown

to such a level that nobody was trying to keep anybody in line anymore. That one peg that was left stapling everything together failed. The German 6th Army was reduced to little more than a horde of miserable dying people who happened to just be wearing the same uniform. Groups of Germans did stage ambushes on the Soviets, but not for any tactical purpose. They're trying to find food. That was it. Huge crowds of men had lost their minds, either from accumulated battle stress, mad starvation, hypothermia, and they were running around the city ranting and raving.

Many of them had stripped naked in their delirium, which is a pretty big hint that they had hypothermia. Nobody even bothered to stop them anymore. While all this was going on, the Luftwaffe was still trying to drop supplies, most of which missed, since the soldiers had long since lost the reflective panels that they would need to show the pilots where they were.

Any kind of unit designator no longer mattered. Battalion, regiment, division, they'd all been functionally destroyed. Any kind of organization was gone. Nothing remained of the 6th Army in any kind of organizational capacity. And since they were out of anti-tank ammo, the Soviet Army just rolled forward. They sent their T-34s in first with infantry behind them. And the Germans, either delirious, out of ammo, unable to stage

any kind of organized resistance, were literally just run over by tanks. At one point, a bomb fell directly on top of Paulus's command staff bunker, knocking him unconscious, hence the TVI, which paired nicely with the nervous breakdown and dysentery he was also going through at the time.

It seemed whenever Paulus was looking for one of his generals to talk to, he'd find out, like, someone would tell him, like, oh, they killed themselves. Oh, they killed themselves. Oh, he's dead too. They were dropping every minute, and it was becoming so commonplace, he couldn't keep track of who was in command of

what anymore, and he pretty much stopped passing orders. On January 26th, the Operation Koltso Soviet soldiers finally made contact with Chuikov's 62nd Army, which had been fighting over the ruins of Stalingrad alone for the last five months. With that meetup, the German 6th Army had been cut in half. Paulus and most of his surviving senior officers were in the south, and General Strecker were in the north around the ruins of the tractor factories. Most of the soldiers who could had run south, trying desperately to get into Paulus' section since they figured he wasn't the commander, their best hope of survival lay with him. Paulus, at this point, had moved his command headquarters

into the basement of a department store. Because remember last episode I said, you know, it's kind of like the Saddam bunker meme? It's like that, but Paulus is in a Soviet version of Sears. Then, Paulus was promoted to field marshal. Now, this was a ploy. Paulus immediately saw through this bullshit and Hitler knew what he was doing.

Basically like no fucking field marshal has ever surrendered, right? Like that's the point. Right. Generals surrender all the time, but no German field marshal had ever surrendered. And Paulus thought of this as Hitler is telling me to kill myself.

I hate being gaslighted by fucking hitler hitler has like he saw trades he's hitler kind of problematic uh that like paula saw through this pretty much immediately and he hated it he told one man later quote i had no intention of shooting myself for this bohemian corporal and he was like ideologically against what were called honorable suicides he had passed orders at this point like do not kill yourself we will fight to the last suicide is like a dishonorable way out despite the fact everyone ignored this other officers like general von seedlets were had told his subordinate officers i leave this decision up to you,

whatever way you want to take out of this. Soldiers were taking things under their own hands. They don't have poison from the doctors. They don't have ammo. So they literally walked out into the middle of the streets where they knew the Soviets were and begged them to kill them. Jesus Christ. By the end of January,

the center of Stalingrad had been secured by the Red Army. And just to be safe, every basement was cleared with flamethrowers and hand grenades to snuff out any German stragglers that may have been left behind. And they were. There's also civilians hiding in those basements because there's been civilians in the city the entire time. Not long after, the Soviets had breached the department store where Paulus's command was, stopping at the top of the stairs of the basement when a German walked up with a white flag and told them that Field Marshal Paulus wanted to surrender. General Schmidt then sat down and began hashing out the details of his surrender with a Soviet lieutenant named Fedor Ilchenko, while Paulus stayed in the basement, just kind of like sitting with his arms folded, distraught, concussed, having a nervous breakdown and shitting his pants from dysentery. There was also the idea that he didn't want to surrender to a lowly general. He was a field marshal, after all.

Two hours later, General Ivan Laskin, along with several news cameras and press crews, appeared to accept Paulus' official surrender, and he was stuffed into a Soviet staff car and whisked away. The Battle of Stalingrad finally came to an end on February 2nd, 1943. Now, at this point, the soldiers of the Red Army began ordering any German soldiers who could walk to come out into the street, throw their weapons down, and become POWs. The wounded, who were ordered to be left behind, were all killed. In one case, an entire field hospital was set on fire with a flamethrower, with possibly hundreds of wounded men still inside.

The NKVDs scoured the ranks for anybody in the SS, the Panzer Corps, or the military police, who were all immediately executed. Though the real prizes were the heves the soviet citizens who had switched sides yep all of them were killed on the spot which you know none of that surprises me no you know the as actually the the ss military police i get i'm kind of surprised they went after tank crewman i also was kind of surprised at them killing killing all the wounded that to me i mean i guess knowing anything about the history of the conflict, it's not a huge surprise, but you would feel as though like they have so unequivocally won that I'm a little bit surprised, I suppose. But then again, also knowing what I know about the Eastern Front, World War II in general, I'm not surprised.

that feels more like the kind of action that you would see take place like the kind of atrocity that would happen you know in like a very quick change of hands kind of situation where the front is moving which like right in fairness this is happening but also like they are they are so cut off and so fucked that like in a way they don't really have any need to it's just revenge that's what it seems like the the the massacre of the wounded seems to be more of an orgy of violence type scenario rather than something that was expressly ordered. But nothing was done to stop it. Yeah, it doesn't surprise me. Which, again, it's the Eastern Front. It doesn't surprise me.

These are revenge killings. Yes. And Stalingrad, as a city, had been wiped from the earth itself. And Stalingrad, as a city, had been wiped from the earth itself. It had been turned into an urban cemetery with the remains of hundreds of thousands approaching millions of people buried inside, trapped under the ruins of the buildings that once lined its streets. The process of cleaning it all up has never ended. Even today, in the city which is known as Volgograd, whenever construction workers lay the foundation of a new building, they will find at least one human skeleton. Yeah. Because of this, we really have no idea how many people died fighting over the rubble

that had once been called Stalin City. Nearly 1 million Axis soldiers from all nations and branches were killed or wounded during the operation, both inside and outside the city. Over 100,000 were captured after the battle, and we'll talk about their fate in a few minutes. The Soviet cost was astronomical. 1.2 million Soviet soldiers were killed or wounded over the five months, one week, and three days of fighting. Almost every single Soviet POW taken during that timeframe died in captivity. So add several tens or hundreds of thousands to that number. Now, we can't talk about the POWs of this battle without talking about what happened to the Germans who survived temporarily and entered Soviet captivity. Around 200,000 plus men were put to work within the city

itself, digging up the corpses that were buried underneath the destroyed city. The vast majority of these men would die, either from the ailments, the forced work, on their already malnourished and diseased bodies, unexploded ordnance and mines that are left behind, or just plain old murder from their guards. Many of those taken alive by the Soviets were already dead on their feet. Other than random executions and forced labor, many men simply dropped dead. Some were so weak that they died while listening to mandatory political classes given by German communists who had joined the sides of the Soviets. Others died on truck rides and forced marches. Another reason for the casual levels of mass death within the ranks of German POWs was simply logistics, namely the lack of them.

The Soviets didn't care much for POWs, and a lot of them very little, which was commonplace for Soviet prisoners within the German POW system as well, as well as mass execution and death camps. For example, no food or shelter was pushed forward with the Soviet armies for POWs, even though they knew that the German surrender was close at hand. And remember, at the time, it's not like the USSR was exactly a land of abundance. Not to mention, so many of them were so sick and riddled with gangrene that the Soviet doctors that were put forward to care for them couldn't do anything for them. By spring of 1943, half of the POWs taken were dead in one way or another. As for the newly minted Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, he became an anti-Nazi champion of the Communist Party before testifying against his former peers at Nuremberg. He also made public statements to the families of the soldiers that had once been under his command, telling them that the POWs are being well taken care of by the Soviet Union

and would soon be returned to them. He eventually moved to East Germany in the 1950s, after he was released from prison, of course, working as the chief of the East German Military History Research Institute. So about those POWs. Paulus was very, very wrong, and he knew it. They were only returned to West Germany in 1956, over 10 years after the end of the war. And even then, only 6,000 men returned, making them virtually the only German survivors of the Battle of Stalingrad. The significance of this battle cannot be adequately or easily explained. Obviously, saying Stalingrad. The significance of this battle cannot be adequately or easily explained. Obviously, saying Stalingrad, or it was their Stalingrad, alone has gone down in history for meaning a decisive, grueling battle that irreversibly breaks the back of an enemy. In the context of World War II, it meant the death of the Nazi Empire. It was the turning point the

Germans could never come back from. An entire army, the 6th Army, had been destroyed. All of the actual usable elements of the rest of the German allies had been destroyed within the Soviet Union, Finland notwithstanding. Germany, from here on out in the east, would be on the retreat, and the Red Army was the one with the initiative, something that they would not give up until they took Berlin a few years later. It was not only a massive loss for the German military, but for Germany. During the entire battle, the Germans had first championed their victory, and then when things turned bad, they did all they could to hide the news and their defeat from the German people. But eventually, they couldn't hide it anymore. News of their catastrophic defeat did finally trickle home, destroying morale to a level that, like the military itself, could never recover from. The opposite was true of the Soviets. After years of horrific defeats

and fighting off their back foot, the Soviets had crushed their enemy, swelling their army with the sense of pride and morale that they never previously had, and creating a mythos that survives to this day. It sparked a saying, which had become common, quote, you cannot stop an army, which has done Stalingrad. And this turned out to be true, as the Soviet Red Army began what would become their unceasing march to the West to take the Nazi capital of Berlin.

The end. Yeah, man. I mean, we've had some good fucking jokes in this one, but it's just, it's, you know, while you were talking out of curiosity, I got on Google image search and looked up for like file photos, stock photos, et cetera, that were taken from the air at the end of the battle of Stalingrad. And I mean, it's just, I encourage people who are curious to just do that. Just Stalingrad aerial photograph, 1943. You'll see what Joe is describing in words there,

like completely utterly devastated. Larger buildings, the facades might remain, smaller buildings, nothing but rubble. Just grid upon grid square of rubble. The whole city was destroyed. Yeah, it was a moonscape. I'm a little bit hesitant to make the comparison, but I think that it's fair to say that a person could be forgiven if they were looking and they didn't know any of the geographic landmarks. They could look at a photo of Stalingrad after the battle and a photo of Hiroshima and not know which is which. It's genuinely that level of devastation. And yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where looking back on it, you have this just impossible situation created by hubris

and stupidity, and then also by valor and resolve. And it's one of those things where you think it's so intensely bad, it's so horrific and so large that comprehending it is a real challenge. That was one of the biggest problems I had going into the series. And it was one of the reasons that I didn't cover it for over five years. It's incredibly hard to put the Eastern Front and something like Stalingrad, or before this, we did Kursk, in a way that you can understand the magnitude of it. Because even now, I'm not saying that I'm not proud of the series. I don't know if I did that effectively. It's hard to do. I would argue it's pretty much impossible. Even reading these thousands of pages I did for research, nothing will truly grasp the massive order of magnitude

of destruction, human misery, violence, valor, heroism, defeat at the highest level. I don't know if there is one medium that can effectively do all those things. I'll say, to paraphrase the author of the book I was describing previously, Roberto Bolaño, he said once that thinking of short stories versus novels, that a story is a house and can be very comfortable, and a novel is like a skyscraper. A lot of people can build a house that's very pleasant, but to build an actual skyscraper, you've got to be really good. And I feel the same way about this, the way you've described it. This is not a thing that you want to start.

You don't want your first job as an architect to be building a fucking skyscraper. It took you a while to figure out how to go about researching something like this in order to do it justice, to attempt to do it justice. And like you said, in literary studies, there can oftentimes be... We love some wanky fucking terminology and and you know uh one thing that you'll find you know talking about in uh in novel theory and in things in comparative literature is talking about the sort of like representations of reality as asymptotes like the idea math mathematics that like as something gets closer and closer to a

point it then its trajectory changes and it can get incredibly close to something but never quite touch it. And that's how I feel. I think I may have used that term before in this series, but that's how I feel about this, is that no matter what we're doing, it's always going to be glancing in some way.

We can't nail it on because even for people who were there, I think they wouldn't have the comprehension of the scale until after the fact, of the they wouldn't have the comprehension of the scale until after the fact, the ramifications certainly until after the fact. And the one person defending a house or a fucking corpse lasagna isn't necessarily going to understand even ever the degree to which this was so pivotal. And we, with the benefit of hindsight, can look at this stuff.

We can see all of the historical and academic research, all of the kind of fact gathering that's taken place to paint a picture for us, but it's still a picture we have to imagine in our minds. We don't know what Stalingrad looked like. We don't know what it smelled like. We can't know. And so all we can do is try to conceive of it in the best way possible. And I think like, yeah, this is the show where we make a lot of dick jokes as well as try to wrestle with really heavy subjects. And I feel like to me, I think you've done a really good job. I think this has been very, very entertainingly paced and narrated. But there are times when I'm sort of like, I know my job is I should be

interjecting. I should be adding commentary. And instead, I'm just like fuck me like just right scale of writing a writing a podcast about the battle of stongrad is like building a skyscraper and blowing it up yeah exactly it's like you you've you've basically built a you've built a skyscraper out of lots and lots of burj dubais and then you're like okay build us the world's biggest airplane in 9-11 it. I mean, a long enough timeline that Burj Dubai will just do that to itself. Just 9-11 itself. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, hubris. Now, Nate, we do a thing on the show called Question from the Legion.

In case you're wondering, maybe you're new to the show, why we haven't been doing them this whole time, we save those for the end of a series rather than doing them after every single one. And today's question comes to us from the Discord. So if you'd like to ask us a question, donate to the show, get access to the Discord, ask us a question on there or do it through Patreon or attach it to a Katusha rocket

and fire it towards one of our locations, preferably London. We have enough incoming coming over our borders. Fair enough. And today's question is, it's actually kind of a palate cleanser, a place you'd like to visit sometime in the future. I've never been to Portugal.

My dad... It's really nice. I like it a lot. You've been there. You really enjoyed it. My dad spent some time there. My mom and dad did. My wife's family is of Cape Verdean

and Portuguese ancestry, and she's never been either. And so I was hoping that someday, when our lives settle down a little bit, that we and our daughter can visit Portugal and Cape Verde and just sort of get a chance to enjoy it. Get some francesinas, get the fucking cheese sandwich where they make a tomato sauce out of beer

and dump it all over the sandwich so you get a big wet sandwich, a soup soup sandwich if you will i i am excited for that and obviously cape verd is a absolutely beautiful place so i'm excited to get a chance to visit so i say that's what it is for me um for me i've traveled quite a bit um i but i've never been to either south america or southeast asia and I would really like to go to either one, any particular place really. I'd really like to go to Thailand or Vietnam. Yeah. I've been to Thailand for work when I was in the army. I did part of a training exercise there in Hua Hin and got to see a little bit of the country, but I would love to go back.

I would also love to go to Vietnam. Obviously a bit of a family history with Vietnam, but I would also love to go to Vietnam. Obviously, a bit of a family history with Vietnam, but I would really love to see it. I've been to Argentina. Strongly recommend it. I wish I had seen other places in South America, but Argentina is economically always very fucked and it's a really sad situation, but absolutely beautiful country and insanely good food. So, strongly recommend. And for an asterisk, because i am who i am i'd also really like to go to cambodia and visit toll sling um and the killing fields like i talked about years ago and we covered that i've always wanted to see those things like um you know as an an academic venture but also you know government aside i've heard cambodia is also very yeah i've and i think by saying government aside means i can no longer travel to cambodia yeah yeah i mean i can't imagine that people are if i if i ever go to vietnam i'm just

gonna be like i'm a plucky american millennial tourist with zero connection to what america did here as opposed to like you know my my grandfather was there twice as an army officer uh i would love to see it though and i think of all the cuisines I've ever encountered in my life, I think Vietnamese is the one that interests me the most in terms of just the sheer variety, which I mean, Thai is a close second, I'm not going to lie.

But I would love to, I would really love to go. And really quickly before we end, I won't plug my shows today because everyone knows who my shows are, I think at this point. But I will say,

I'm just going to make off the top of my head a list of the books that I cited in case any of these are of interest to you that are dealing with Stalingrad in one way or the other. Obviously, William Craig's book, Enemy at the Gates, is a popular history and it's not really an academic history, but I do think it's a good primer. And there's better books out there, but that's the one I started with and that's

the one that kind of caught my attention. I'd say William Vollman's Europe Central, Roberto Bolaño's 2666, Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones. And if there's any others I missed, DM me. I think you know. I would also. And if there's any others I missed, DM me. I think you know. I would also say the books of Andrei Platonov, particularly The Foundation Pit and Soul, which is a collection of short stories. I would say there's a story by Andrei Platonov called The Return that's probably the best sort of veteran homecoming story I've ever read in my life. It's in one of the short story collections that was put out by the New York Review of Books sort of like in their publishing house.

And yeah, any other ones that you can think of that I may have mentioned, if you can't recall the name or title, whatever, DM me at the Twitter account, ping me on Discord, we'll find out and I'll get you those titles. And if you're interested in the bibliography that I used, I talked about them a little bit in part one. And as always, you can find them in our show notes encourage you to read them they're very entertaining uh especially if you want to learn more because obviously i couldn't put everything in and i forgot the one other book guise is the forgotten soldier because i forgot the forgotten soldier he was also in the veramark so you know what take that one with a fucking grain of salt but he did wind up becoming like a not right wing french uh bondesine cartoonist so like hey I guess he did okay for himself there's a lot worse ways you could

wind up as an ex-Vermont soldier like dying in a fucking door I mean better worse who's the judge fair enough anyway that has been the battle of Stalingrad Nate thank you so much for joining me

for the last five weeks the longest series you've ever done. And now I have to think of something to break that record. And I don't know what it's going to be yet. It's been really fun, man. This has been great. You've done an incredible job, I think. I'm not just saying that as your co-host with a financial stake in this show. I'm also saying that as your friend, admirer, listener. And yeah, this has been great. I think the fans will agree. I hope they'll agree. Sorry if you didn't like my presence. Deal with it. this has been great. I think the fans will agree. I hope they'll agree. Sorry if you didn't like my presence, deal with it. But Joe is doing, I think, extremely good work. So I hope you support the show by listening to some of the other incredible bits of research he has done via Patreon, where $5 a month gets you a ton of access to every bonus episode he's

ever done all the way back to 2018. So you want some history content, you want some fun joke content, you want some bad audio content. Sorry, I wasn't very good at my job at the beginning. Go find it. It's there. Hey, that makes two of us. We've gotten better. We have. That's called growth. We are slowly but surely developing the skills necessary to build the skyscraper made out of Burj Dubai's that will then do 9-11 on it's gonna happen a second podcaster has hit the Burj Dubai

I have now banned from the UAE which I'm fine with what a fucking loss that would be jeez damn yeah damn where else am I gonna be able to go to a giant mall and see the worst exactly where else can I go to a slave state and encounter the worst Brits ever? I'm thinking

America. I think that might be it. That's fair enough. Alright, man. Everybody, thank you so much for listening and until next time. I have no cutesy way to end this. Tan your rat gloves. Tan your rat socks. They'll last

longer that way. you won't get King Charles fingers hopefully justice for our rat martyrs their memories will live on forever