The Rest Is History - 214. The Battle of Stalingrad

Episode Date: July 25, 2022

Stalingrad: the bloodiest battle of the Second World War. Tom and Dominic are joined by Iain MacGregor to discuss the build up, context and outbreak of the Battle of Stalingrad. A second Stalingrad episode will be released on Thursday to your podcast feed. However, if you are part of The Rest Is History Club, you get the second episode right NOW! Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. Or, if you're listening on the Apple Podcasts app, you can subscribe within the app in just a few clicks. Stalingrad is burned down. I would have to write too much if I wanted to describe it.

Stalingrad is burned down. Stalingrad is in ashes. It is dead. People are in basements. Everything is burned out. The hot walls of the buildings are like the bodies of people who have died in the terrible heat and haven't gone cold yet. Huge buildings, memorials, public gardens, signs cross here. Heaps of wires, a cat sleeping on a windowsill, flowers and grass in flowerpots. A wooden pavilion where they sold fizzy water is standing miraculously intact among thousands of huge stone buildings burned and half destroyed.

It is like Pompeii, seized by disaster on a day when everything was flourishing. The city has died after much suffering and looks like the face of a dead man who was suffering from a lethal disease and finally has found eternal peace. Bombing again. Bombing of the dead city. So that was Vasily Grossman, the great Russian war correspondent and novelist writing in his journal about the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942. And Tom Holland, he compares it to Pompeii. And I guess Stalingrad is a little bit like Pompeii in the sense that it's a sort of byword for disaster. Obviously, man-made, not natural. But it's also one of those words, one of those place names that just carries this electric charge.

So even if you don't know the details of the battle, it sort of represents evil and destruction and horror and bloodshed, probably more than almost any other place on earth except that the thing about pompeii it's buried and so the signs of life are preserved and the fabric of the city is preserved whereas the thing about stalingrad is that it's completely flattened so perhaps a closer analogy if you're looking to ancient history would be carthage after the Romans have captured it or Jerusalem after the Romans have captured it. Stalingrad has become kind of shorthand, hasn't it, for the brutality of modern war. And of course, it's also very much in the new people sorts at the moment because it's the archetype of urban warfare, of modern urban warfare, the idea of fighting house by house, street by street.

And that, of course, is what's going on in Ukraine at the moment. So Putin is massively inspired by the example of the Red Army in the Second World War. But one of the ironies is that it's Mariupol that is, you know, the new Stalingrad. And what does that make the Red Army? Makes them the Nazis. So a good time I think to be doing this topic. Absolutely and listeners may remember that we did a podcast about the Berlin Wall with Ian McGregor who'd written a book about Checkpoint Charlie and we're welcoming Ian back today on a similarly, Ian you specialise in these very bleak and grim subjects clearly. Yes but I'm not a grim and bleak person. I do try to find the light

in these stories. Yes, my background in history and publishing history has predominantly been Eastern Europe, so especially World War I and definitely World War II. So with my publishing head on, I've pretty much published the majority of books on all the major events on the eastern front and in your new book i mean it's it's full of new material but people may be surprised to learn that there's still new stuff to be found about something that's as as written about as starling grad so in what sense is there still stuff to find well it's just trying to drill especially on the obviously on the on the Red Army side, which we'll dig deeper into as we talk. It's making sure that you can actually find original voices that are actually giving you a proper, accurate insight into the fighting, the casualties, the morale, maybe failures in discipline, as well as obviously bravery and who did what to whom and when and who are the real heroes. That's the core of my new book anyway is I knew the story

of what I wanted to say. I didn't want to do a kind of overall strategic narrative of the battle. As you said, that's been done many times. The world doesn't need another book like that. What I wanted to do was what I do in my publishing is I try and find new voices that tell it, give a different angle, give fresh insights and can sometimes, as I hope I've done in this book, overturn accepted tropes and myths about what is arguably the greatest military battle in terms of combatants, damage, casualties, et cetera, et cetera. So that's what it was about. And yeah, I mean, I was lucky and I emphasize lucky to,

I went to Russia in the winter of 2019 during lockdown, got a special invitation from the director of the Panorama Museum on Volgograd. And I didn't know it at the time but i discovered it when i was there i was there for nine days and when i was sitting in the archive for five days uh all the material that i was reading no no one's looked at since the 1950s and 2019 quite a lot has intervened since 2019 that would make researching in russia quite difficult yeah absolutely so maybe we'll come to that and maybe we'll come to,

because obviously one of the, you talked about the myths and most of the myths have been generated by the Soviet Union and now by Russia. So obviously there is a kind of political sensitivity to them that's perhaps sharper than it might otherwise have been. But first of all, we, so we did an episode with my brother, actually, a couple of months ago on Operation Barbarossa. So people who want the kind of the full background to the Nazi invasion of Russia do listen to that. But Ian, could you just,

just, just give us a quick reminder of how Operation Barbarossa pans out and what then happens after Operation Barbarossa ends that takes us up to Stalingrad? Well, as James has eloquently described, Barbarossa was obviously Hitler's and the German armed forces' great gamble to what they thought would be a quick victory over an enormous opponent of the Red Army. Three army groups, over 3 million Axis forces, predominantly German, obviously, with serious armoured columns, invaded the Soviet Union, going north, centre and south. In a great invasion, the ultimate aim was to destroy the Red Army in that first summer's campaign from June 1941 onwards. As Hitler obviously said and was confident of, he just had to kick the door in of what he perceived to be a rotten Bolshevist edifice and it would collapse. But as the summer months progressed and going in towards the wintertime, their early successes where they're

forging forward hundreds of kilometers with their motorized columns was that they were being met by serious and heavy and fierce and almost suicidal in places Soviet Red Army resistance to where by the time of winter 1941, when they're outside the gates of Moscow, they suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties and hundreds and thousands of destroyed or damaged vehicles, a huge dent in their ability to fight. Magnified by the fact that they hadn't taken into account that Stalin would be able to move mass fresh divisions from the East based in Siberia that were potentially guarding against a future attack by Japan. Once that fear was obviously erased because

the Japanese were obviously going to attack Pearl Harbor and the American fleet, he moved these fresh divisions over and implemented a very surprising for the Germans counterattack, which did drive them back from the by the spring of 1942, they were in a slight predicament. They'd had a serious pushback from the Red Army. The Red Army wasn't destroyed. Hitler had saved the day, I suppose, in the fact that he'd given some backbone to his local commanders who wanted to retreat even further and set up a more workable defensive line. They'd held on into the territory. They were deep inside Russian territory.

They surrounded Leningrad in the north. They were still only about 120 kilometers away from Moscow, the capital. And in the south, they still held vast areas of the Ukraine. So by the spring, it was what do we do next on the German side? But equally, from Stalin's perspective, they were busy really rushing together fresh troops. Millions of Russians were now forming up into fresh armies that were being trained and organized in the East, well out of sight of any kind of German reconnaissance planes. They had no idea that such armies still existed or were coming onto line.

So for Hitler, as a case of, right, I've got the Ukrainian wheat. What do I need now? Especially by the spring of 1942, he's already declared war on the United States. He knows he's into a very long strategic struggle to even maintain what he's got. So he now thinks, I need Caucasian oil. Because all he has is oil from Romania. Romanian oil could keep them supplied to a degree, but to fight what he knew would now be a prolonged war,

Germany was still not committed to a total war industry, unlike the Soviets, obviously. Their factories were literally pell-mell pouring out armaments and materiel to fight this war, whereas Germany hadn't done that just yet. So yes, as you said, they were relying heavily on Romanian oil and they had other theatres to worry about. So they were in North Africa as well. That needed oil to carry on. So there was multiple fronts. There was multiple concerns. And just on that drive for Caucasian oil, in a lot of the sort of historiography,

and almost in what you might call the kind of folk historiography, so in what people vaguely think about the Second World War, Hitler's drive to Stalingrad is seen as this sort of suicidal disaster. But on the face of it, you could say that if you're in that position in spring 1942, I mean, you really do need that oil. And the place to get it is the Caucasus. If you get there, I mean, if it had worked out, it would look like the right decision, wouldn't it? Or do you think it never would have worked out this plan? I would argue the same as James did when he was talking to Barbarossa with you guys. They hadn't got, from the research I've done anyway, they hadn't actually

set in plan a process to what would they do when they captured these oil fields. The Red Army is not just going to say, there you go, guys, take our oil refineries in Mykop and Grozny. They would obviously destroy them. But there was never a plan in place for specific units. I think there was one battalion at the time, but there was never a large-scale operation to say, once we have these refineries, it will take some time to get them back online, and then even more time to figure out how are we going to get this oil back to where it needs to be

in our occupied territories, whether by land. So if it's going by train, as we've talked about before, the Russian rail gauge was different to the rest of Western Europe. That would have to be changed. You're on a logistic line of over 1,500 miles, if not 2,000 miles. That would be under attack at some point. So how do you get it safely back? If you go by sea, the Black Sea is still not safe for German shipping, as was proven even with trying to get across that short gap of the Mediterranean to feed Rommel's Africa core. That was proving impossible to get them oil supplied.

So it's one thing having the scope to think that's what we need to do. It's very good. But if you haven't got the actual plan in place once your army have conquered the land, then it's a different kettle of fish, really. I mean, what I get from your book is that certainly Hitler's enemies were nervous about this. So people in Britain are saying, oh, my God, he'll seize these oil fields and he'll be able to get the Middle East. He'll be able to invade India or whatever. So they're nervous of it. And I guess that Hitler has three targets, doesn't he? He has Leningrad and the capture of Leningrad would obviously be a great blow. Capture of Moscow, that would be a great blow as well. I mean,

it does seem reasonable to say that even more important than these two great cities is the opportunity to get oil. Because even if they even if the Red Army had blown up the oil fields, surely the Nazis would be able to get them back up and operating fairly quickly. And if they're thinking in terms of, you know, a war that's going to last years and years, then, you know, a few months. Yeah. Well, I was going to say know and also the major fact is they're denying this oil to the red army yeah there's that as well yeah yeah their heavy industry that they pushed which was an amazing feat to do they relocated their their heavy industry to the east of the ural mountains and kept it safe there so that and they they rebuilt their armaments uh infrastructure there uh and that would take some time to come online, which explains the weaknesses in the response to defend the Caucasus

and the road to Stalingrad that summer. But you're right. I mean, I see that the capture of Leningrad, I see, is fairly cosmetic. The capture of Moscow, definitely, that would be a huge propaganda boost. But it makes sense to go south. I don't disagree with that because strategically, that's be a huge propaganda boost. But it makes sense to go south. I don't disagree with that because strategically, that's what you want to do. And they knew that the bulk of whatever Red Army forces Stalin still had, and maybe they did know he must have some fresh forces coming online, they would be protecting the capital.

So if they tried to attack Moscow again, they were in for a huge bloody struggle and they would incur probably the same amount of casualties they had the previous summer in 1941. So it made sense. They had already the bridgeheads they needed in the Ukraine outside of Kursk to have the jump-off points to go east towards the Volga. And once you've secured the flank, then you would push south to take over the Caucasus. And that operation, so it's called Case Blue. So when you look at the chronology, they launched at the end of June 1942.

They sort of charge across the steppes, don't they? I mean, I've read diaries of German officers saying they felt like they're kind of Teutonic Knights or something, or like Crusaders. It's sunny, it's summer, they can get food from the surrounding fields, all's going well. You look at the dates and the progress, I mean, they're capturing city after city. They get Rostov on dawn by the end of July. They they get my cop with this oil fields at the beginning of august and then sort of stalingrad comes into view and stalingrad obviously well there are all kinds of um things to say about why why it's stalingrad why it's because on the face of it, it might seem a sideshow. But Ian, so Stalingrad originates Saritsyn.

Well, it had been around as a settlement since by the time of the Vikings. The Volga is over 3,000 kilometers long, goes from the top of beyond the north of Moscow all the way down, pours out to the Caspian Sea. There's like 500 tributaries and rivers that feed off it as well. So it is, you know, simplistically, it's the Mississippi to Russians, really. It's their great river. And so there were, there's obviously villages that turned into towns that, and then by the 20th century turned into cities stretching along the Volga. What made Saritsyn so vital was rail coming to it. I liken it quite a lot to what happened with the expansion of industry and cities in the Midwest of America,

like Chicago. So as soon as it became obvious logistically and topographically that Saritsyn, it had the river connection, but then they sit down the railway. It's surrounded by the steppe, as you say, where you're growing wheat. It just made sense that that would be one of the main places at that point at the top of the Caucasus that would be a big trading post. You've got other places like Saratov as well, which is a few hundred kilometers away, but that was one of the main places and that's how it grew but it really only exploded in growth uh from population wise as well as industry during the 20th century and obviously that was kick-started by the russian civil war well because i was amazed i was amazed to learn from your book that um star i should probably have known this but i didn't that that stalin had actually been besieged there himself yes and kind of made it during the Civil War and made it into a Red Verdun.

And is that the reason why, and they hold out heroically and Stalin's a great hero and it's brilliant. And that's why they call it after him. They change it. Obviously, you can't call anything after the Tsars, you know, in communist Russia. But is that why it's specific to him?

It's the city of Stalin. Yeah, I mean, that's why he made his name as a leader of uh or you know one of the leaders in in the elite of the communist party uh i suppose he would rely upon that as some kind of he had the prowess of a general as well i mean he was parachuted in to again put backbone into the city it's's very similar, really. It was surrounded by the white armies that were marauding around the Caucasus, up and down the land, taking out villages and towns and cities. And Saracen was in danger. It changed hands several times. But Stalin was the one who,

I suppose, gave it the backbone to have the final defense, which is what it's famous for in 1920, fought off white occupation and saved it. But obviously, it only changed its name once he'd become leader in 1925. And again, that's a propaganda thing. But it was seen, the key thing is skipping forward a decade, once he was putting into place his five-year plans, Stalingrad then took on another dimension, and it would be seen as a shining example of what the Soviet system and the new economic policies could do by taking this small city and expanding it massively to be a huge industrial centre. So literally, it's a centre for tractor production, isn't it? I mean, I know that sounds like something from a Western stereotype, but that's really what they're doing, turning out thousands upon thousands of tractors. Yeah, backed up and paid for by American money,

investment in the late 20s and early 30s. The main factories where we see most of the fighting, which I'm sure we'll talk about, so the tractor factory, the barricaded weapons factory, and the steelworks, they were all financed by American money. So you've got, I think, about 400,000 people there in approximately by the end of the 1930s. Yeah, I was gonna say, it's about 450,000 lived there, the majority of which worked in the factory district to the north. So by the time of the Germans arriving, what they would have seen is a city that wasn't too deep as it went along to the river.

It was probably in the most dense place. It was probably five kilometers you had to travel through before you get to the Volga. But it was very long. It stretched along the river. It's kind of ribbon development. Yeah, it's about 35 kilometers long, possibly 40. Wow. It's like an enormous snake.

Yes, indeed. Because in the south, you had the old part of the city, which is quite feudal. They're the famous shots you get as the Germans are going through the suburbs. You've got the wooden shacks and two, never usually more than two-story shacks that people lived in. In the center of the city, which again is where you have all the famous fighting house to house, that's where you had the modernisation with the lovely boulevards, parks, shops, apartment blocks for the parties and the elites, theatres, everything.

And then the bulk of the city was the factory district in the north. And probably about 80% of the population were housed there uh in their settlements and again by the time you get into the third and final phase of the fight for stalingrad in the winter that's where the bulk of the the really heavy fighting was done right good so that is that's basically the geography sorted so um i think we should take a little break now uh and when we come back we we will discuss the Germans' motivation for basically starting you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.

Welcome back to The Rest Is History. So, Ian, one of the things I've always wondered, and it probably seems quite a basic question, is why was there a battle at Stalingrad at all? Because the Germans, it's not a prime target for them. They could ignore it, or they could bypass it, or they could just turn south once they've got to the Volga, or once they're approaching the Volga, they could turn south and head into the Caucasus and some people might argue that's kind of what they should have done is it because it's Stalin city and it's Hitler wants the psychological

boost of of taking it or is it because of the industrial production and all that sort of stuff or is it also because because presumably up to this point the Germans haven't lost and so are they still convinced basically that they can do anything they like that they'll always be victorious well that that's the thing tom they hadn't lost but they stalled that that was the key thing so by the time the decisions made to we're going to take stalingrad uh and that's mid to late august uh by then the juggernauts of Case Blue was heavily stalled. They were bogged down by a myriad of things, which we'll take another podcast to talk about.

Did they need a victory then? Yes, it was purely last gasp's chance to retrieve something of what was a failed offensive, and Hitler knew that. But Hitler doesn't think it's failed, does he? He still thinks that victory is absolutely within their grasp. Oh, I think by mid-August to late-August, the feeling was in his headquarters that they're not making the headway they thought

they would do towards Maikop and Grozny. Even though they've made a tremendous, I mean, they've covered hundreds of miles, again, as they did in a year earlier, but they've just got an incredibly unrealistic timetable. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, the phases, those four to five phases of what they do on specific times, whether capturing key transport connections like Rostov or Voronezh or getting to Grozny or Mykop, heading east to get past the Don Bridge, head towards the Volga. It was all done on a strict timetable.

And a bit like Barbarossa, they'd launched it a little bit too late because they were preoccupied with clearing up the Crimea as well. And once they'd done that and they'd secured their flank on the western side, then it was time to go. But yeah, it had run into problems that Barbarossa ran into, as in logistical problems, lack of fuel. There was many times as the panzers, as you were saying about the panzers heading south and heading east through the steppe, there was plenty of times they had to actually stand in the road and wait for resupply.

If it hadn't been for the Luftwaffe, I mean, the Luftwaffe going down south into the Caucasus, the Luftwaffe was supplying 200 million tons of fuel just to keep them going because there was no logistical connection. The railheads weren't working and the trucks are backed up behind the panzer columns. Well, Ian, in the last episode, Dominic disgraced himself by scoffing at the very idea that trucks could be interesting. I don't doubt that they're important i just question whether they're interesting well they are well they're interesting to the degree that essentially it's not just about our men is it it's about the chains of supply it's always about the chains it's always about the chains of trucks and and the different gauges and all that kind of stuff which i know that dominic is absolutely fascinated by you're talking about

gauges let me squash you right then let's talk about some human beings so we're talking about the sixth army uh in that's the the german sixth army and the commander um who's sort of gone down in history as this sort of terrible failure loser yeah it's a great loser which may be a little bit harsh is um friedrich paulus so he's not meant to be the commander is he because reichenau who i's not meant to be the commander, is he? Because Reichenau, who I think was meant to be the commander, has died. I can't remember how he's died. Is it von Reichenau? Yeah.

Yes. He has a stroke, doesn't he? He comes in for a run and has a stroke. It's a warning against going for too many runs. Yeah. He's a jogging martyr. But was he a more effective commander than Paulus? So might things have been different had he not had his stroke? Yeah. He was much more well he was i mean it's chalk and cheese he was a much more effective

combat commander frontline combat commander he's your man yeah i'd want him every single sunday uh whereas paulus was a very very effective planner and staff operator and that's where he'd made his reputation he's he'd never really been where he hadn't been a combat leader he'd never led anything uh more than a division uh and he'd been he'd been in that he'd he'd been one of the heads of the group that war-gamed Barbarossa before Barbarossa actually commenced in June 41. Was that the war game where they said this is going to be hopeless we haven't got hope exactly they got told to go away and come up with a new plan exactly right so so does he think that there's no hope of capturing stalingrad i mean is he a pessimist about this or what's he thinking well he he's not going to go against uh the order but do we know what what he is thinking when so so he comes he's at the head of the sixth army

they arrive at stalingrad this massive great kind of ribbon development along the Volga. Is it his decision to go in? Is it Hitler's decision? If it's Hitler's, is Paulus thinking this is terrible, we're going to lose? Or does he think, yeah, we're going to storm this because we're the Germans? What's the state of his opinion? And what's the morale of the 6th Army generally? Well, the key thing to remember is it wasn't a waltz for them. Yes, they'd had massive early successes in the summer, but the Russians, as they did the previous year where they were fighting for every inch of ground, they were retreating in a uniformed way. And obviously, especially in the Caucasus, implementing a scorched earth policy, leaving nothing for the Germans. Hitler, by 23rd of July, Hitler was feeling super confident because they couldn't find these huge forces he suspected were out there that they wanted to, as usual, encircle and destroy. He's thinking, well, the Red Army's finished. It's on the brink of collapse. I know what I can do. I can now split Army Group South into two subunits.

When you say Army Group South, I don't really know what they are. How many people are they? Well, Army Group South was the force that had been put together by Hitler at the start of the summer campaigning that was going to implement Case Blue. It's one and a half million men. So what proportion of that is of the entire army on the Eastern Front? Is that about half of it? Yeah, I'd say just under half. And he'd stripped various units along the whole length of the line,

north to centre, to reinforce south for this offensive. And that's not just men, but that's aircraft and armour. So they were giving the bulk of everything. They tied down the Russians in the centre. And obviously they're still surrounding Leningrad, so the Russians are still busy trying to make sure they can try and free the city there. But everything was orientated for this. But by 23rd of July, weeks into Case Blue being underway, they're believing at Hitler's headquarters that success is on the brink, that they could do this because it seems that there is no Red Army to capture because they're collapsing. So flushed with this overconfidence, he then decides, I'm going to split the offensive

in two. Army Group A will now push on down to the Caucasus and capture Grozny and Mykov. And simultaneously, and that's the key thing, instead of consecutively, as we talked about, they should do it phase by phase sensibly. said, simultaneously, Army Group B will push east and secure the Volga, stop river traffic. At the time, it wasn't said that they would need to capture the city. It was literally just to occupy the high grounds and the riverbanks around the city and just stop traffic. But doing that, that's where, to get back to my point about it wasn't an easy ride, by the time this was underway, that's when Paulus and the 6th Army, an Army Group B that he belonged to, started to really, really meet fierce resistance,

suicidal resistance, like they had the summer before, where the Russians were now determined to not yield any more ground because stalingrad's behind them and ian that's partly because stalin has issued an order not one step back so the russians i mean they literally can't they may get shot if they if they step back so that's order 227 and that's 28th of july uh and that was uh funnily enough, it wasn't ever put out by any of the Soviet media or the Red Army media. What it was done was printed out on pamphlets and it was read out to the troops, officers and troops. And predominantly it was aimed more at the officer class because it was saying that you guys need to show more backbone and we are not retreating any further and any key installations will be held

to the last man. And to back that up, he then instigated what's now famous as these blocking detachments. There weren't a lot of units, roughly a division of 15,000 to 20,000 men. You'd probably have 500 military police acting as their blocking detachments. But what they did do was situate themselves in key transport areas and make sure they're checking troops. Where are you going? What are you doing? And then the penal battalions. And they had been around the previous year, again, but they'd been created on the hoof during the days of Barbarossa when it was panic. Whereas in the summer of 42 and order 227, it was more systematic. So it was specifically planned that we will create these penal battalions. And again, they were predominantly staffed by

NCOs and officers because they were the ones that were deemed to be lacking this moral fibre and backbone to actually put up a fight. So Ian, basically the Red Army know that they've got to make a stand in Stalingrad. They have no choice. Just to nail this down, why did the Germans go into Stalingrad? Are they sucked in? Are they going in there because Hitler's told them to? Are they going in there because they think it will be a walkover? Why the germans go into the city by the time they reach there in late august early september they are under orders now to take the city and again hitler's been uh is famous for saying that the whole male population would be exterminated because obviously it's called stalingrad it's a nest of bolshevism so that that's very roman exactly it's very carthage, isn't it? And the city would be leveled. So by then it was definitely,

we are going into the city. You're right in terms of, yes, they were sucked in. But again, they were thinking that this is going to be the same as the fighting that they had the previous year in Kiev. That summer they take in Voronezh and Rostov as in there it would be a fight a bitter fight but they they take the city in the week the bank of the river was covered in dead fish mixed with human heads arms and legs all lying on the beach they were the remains of people who had been being evacuated across the Volga when they were bombed and Ian the German attack begins with this horrendous bombing. And you say that it's it kind of the casualties are on such a high scale that only Hiroshima exceeds them. Yeah. Which is kind of mind blowing.

Well, again, that gets back to my very first point about trying to dig deep enough to see if it's actually true. I'm not I'm not disputing that thousands were killed so from august 23rd onwards that's where the Luftwaffe are operating ahead of the advancing uh armor of of paulus's sixth army and the infantry bringing up the rear and it's a terror bombing campaign as as has been seen in Western Europe. So Rotterdam, that kind of thing, where they're literally blitzing the city. Indiscriminate bombing of civilians. And it was wave after wave of unmolested Luftwaffe bombers and dive bombers, especially, that had free reign across the city. The Soviet Air Force had pretty much been shot out to the sky during that advance that summer.

They would get stronger. So these civilians are sitting ducks? They are. Well, the city had been swollen by double its size by the time the Germans actually arrived. So this city of 450,000 was well over 800,000 by the time of the bombings. There hadn't been that much planning

to have any air raid shelters built. For the previous two months, once Case Blue was underway and there was a fear of they could push to the Volga and Stalingrad, the civic leaders had turfed out the population to build these concentric circles of defensive rings that went out at least 50 to 60 to 70 kilometres outside of the city and stretched for hundreds of miles and had gun emplacements and everything else.

And they had spent no time on developing any kind of air shelters that were strong enough to withstand this kind of bombing. There were some buildings and there would be later used for the house-to-house fighting that had cellars that were reinforced with concrete, but you can't get 800,000 civilians in those kinds of places. There weren't enough of them. And Stalin had forbidden civilians to leave Stalingrad,'t he yes because he wanted the the army the the retreating 62nd army and 64th army that had been out in the steppe trying to prevent Paulus reaching the city were now the the remnants of them and whatever artillery and

tanks they had left were now ensconced in the city waiting for the final onslaught it was deemed that they'd fight for a live city better than they would for a dead one yeah so let's move through the the narrative a bit so the the bombing starts on the 23rd of august um two horrendous days of just just absolute kind of carpet bombing and quite quickly the german troops reached the outskirts and then the 3rd of september so that's what about 10 days later and then about a week after that the first sixth army units reach the volga river and split yeah the so at that point you would think well the kind of game is up the the battle is lost on the 12th of september there's an interesting moment because that's the point at which um the 62nd army soviet army gets a new commander vasily chuikov who's and and his story is the one

that you start your book with with his funeral because he really is the preeminent hero of stalingrad isn't he do you want to tell us a little bit about who he is yeah so he's uh died in the war communist uh he'd fought in the uh the r Civil War. He's one of several children. He was born and raised in a village outside of Moscow. At age of 18, during the Russian Civil War, he commanded his own horseback regiment at 18. He won several battles during, as Anthony Beevor says in his new book, a very, very bloody civil war. And he survived that as well. And then he joined full time into the Red Army itself and went through the various ranks, more training. He'd been a very good linguist, spoke fluent Chinese as well.

So he was a military attaché to China in the 1930s. And I suppose you could say he was lucky. He wasn't in charge of any formation on the Western European Russian side when Barbarossa struck. So he was one of the ones that Stalin and the Stavka, his military command, turned to parachute in to take over a command by the spring of 1942. And he's kind of a hard man, isn't he? Ruthless, Chuikov. But of his time.

I mean, he's a committed communist of that era, so he wouldn't think twice. And there are reports, recorded reports of him shooting officers he deemed not to be doing their duty. Well, that would put them on their guard. Point blank in the head in front of the troops. That's like our podcast producer. That's his um

so so is it true cough who comes up with the idea for the kind of is for sort of that they'll defend it house to house they're up close isn't it yeah up close sort of these incredibly intimate kind of almost individual um sort of gunfights rather rather than mass sort of pitched battles in the city streets it's going to be room to room it's kind of floor to floor all that stuff at the beginning when he took over the command he was under orders from uh yeromenko who was his overall commander he was in charge of operations throughout the city and out to the east and nikita khrushchev who was the political commissar there who was over watching everything on stalin's behalf and his his job description was you'll you'll defend the city or die in the attempt and he repeated that mantra and they said great you you understand your orders uh and off he went and

yes i mean it he put the backbone into the army he clung on to what was a remorseless advance into the city by the German troops with their way paved by just incredibly violent and powerful aerial assaults. And as I said before, this was unmolested. They had uncontested skies. They could pick and choose when and where they were going to dive bomb or carpet bomb. And they had to put up with this. And then once the Germans were moving in, they then had their artillery. And before fresh troops could come online, what was he to do?

What was his only option? And the thing is, yes, I'm now living and fighting in a destroyed city. Perfect ambush material. Because, Ian, isn't that, I mean, that is the great, almost discovery, isn't it? People hadn't really realised this before, that actually a city that's been flattened by aerial bombardment, you don't just have to surrender it, it actually provides a perfect place with which to resist an incoming army. And that's obviously something that people since the Second World War have absolutely understood. But is it Stalingrad that first kind of puts that to the test, that these are the first people really to discover this?

Yeah, in a mass form, yes. I mean, it's the first time that there's actual official orders of this is how we're going to defend what territory we're clinging on to. So they were only 300, 400 metres away from the Volga to their backs. The bulk of the city, especially in the center and the south, south had been captured. In the center, they were almost pushed into the river. They were clinging on.

And as you say, if you've got a well-armed defensive unit, primarily with machine guns and submachine guns, the very famous PPSH-40 submachine gun, they use that like confetti for the Soviet troops there. It's hard to advance against that. Yes, you'll have aerial and artillery bombardments to pave your way. But as I said before, a lot of the buildings in the center of the city and in the north, the factory district, they had a lot of reinforced concrete bunkers uh or cellars i should say that they turned into bunkers and some of these famous buildings and one of which we'll talk about

uh that survived uh they're obviously bombed out but they could still be turned into mini fortresses so like in mario pole yeah exactly and so by about mid-september i suppose the two sides of it's not quite a stalemate i suppose suppose, but they are fighting now hand to hand. It's clear that the Germans aren't just going to sweep to the Volga and basically push the Russians into the river, partly because the Russians are, they're ferried men across the Volga, haven't they? So most famously, Major General Rodintsev,

you have an amazing sort of set piece in your book about him, his men, his guards unit, kind of going across and basically getting a kind of foothold. So even at that stage, do you think Paulus and the 6th Army commanders are thinking, oh, this hasn't worked out as we thought, this is going to be really, really tough? Or do they still think, you know, give it a couple of weeks, we will finish the job?

Well, no, definitely on the ground, regimental officers, divisional officers, and even as far up as Paulus himself talking to various reporters that might drop into his HQ, were openly questioning how much could they suffer, how many casualties could they take in this, what was turning into a bit of a meat grinder, where they were losing whole units in one operation in a day, and how tenacious the Soviet defence were. And as you say, even though they could bomb the Volga

with artillery and aerial assaults, the Russians were still managing to keep alive the supply routes that were trickling through across from the eastern shore, where a lot of their landing platforms were camouflaged, or if they were destroyed, they were rebuilt overnight, and they were sending them across and like you said with redemptive again what was happening were now the russian uh stalin in moscow with his commanders knew that the main thrust of hitler's summer campaign was clearly now the south they slowly started to move the the armies and divisions that had been coalesced around moscow to move down south and these were coming in echelon down to the south. So they could only be put in piecemeal as they arrived. And that's what happened with Radimtsev's 13th Guards Rifle Division. He was just one of many divisions that were fed into the maelstrom as they literally arrived. I mean, within 24 hours of them landing or finishing their forced march to the banks,

they were rearmed uh the various stories that you see with jude law the jude laws in the 13th guards i was just thinking about that the film enemy at the gates when it begins they arrive at the volga and there's this incredible set piece where they're you know and they have nothing yeah and then that and that's exactly how it happened is it they you just arrive arrive by train or whatever, or by truck, and you'd just be thrown across the river. Off you go into the meat grinder. Yeah, but obviously there was method in their madness.

They're putting them into the weak points where they know the Germans are about to break through, and it's just the case. And Zhukov was very much like this. He wasn't a delicate, or you could call an artistic, innovative combat commander. Very sledgehammer. Was it he who said, well, there's no scope for Napoleonic? Absolutely.

You know, you just go in there and you stand and you shoot. Yeah. And in some ways, later historians, especially over the last 10 to 15 years, have been more critical of his performance, as in it was very unsophisticated and he literally just wanted to bleed the Germans dry. And he did that. Time is blood. That's his famous quote. And time also means that it's starting to get colder. Yep.

So it's starting to snow. It's starting to freeze. The Germans don't have the right coats. They don't have the right shoes. Tom's always anxious about footwear freeze. The Germans don't have the right coats. They don't have the right shoes. Tom's always anxious about footwear. Yeah, they don't have the right shoes, but the Russians do. So winter is coming

and this seems the perfect place to take a break. So in the next episode, Ian will be joining us again and we will look at, let's look at Pavlov and his house, because that's a key part of the story that we haven't touched on yet. And winter comes and the end of the battle and its enduring significance. So thank you to Ian and we will see you all next time for more Stalingrad.

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