Stalingrad

In June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union in an offensive called Barbarossa, advancing hundreds of miles in just a few weeks. The advance stalled on the outskirts of Moscow the following winter, when the cold and Soviet resistance halted what was supposed to be a quick victory.

In the summer of 1942, Hitler tried to reverse the failure with a new offensive, code-named Case Blue, aimed at the oil fields of the Caucasus. Midway through the plan, he split his forces in two: one headed for the oil, while the other moved to protect the flank in the direction of a city on the banks of the Volga River.

This split scattered German troops across an enormous stretch of steppe, with supply lines growing longer and more vulnerable. It was in this context of overreach that the German 6th Army was ordered to take the city that gives this summary its name.

To defend such a stretched-out advance, the German command placed Romanian, Hungarian and Italian troops on the sides of the line, less well equipped and with fewer armored vehicles than the German divisions. This choice, made because there were no spare German soldiers, would weigh heavily in the months to come.

From a purely military standpoint, the city did not need to be conquered street by street: it was enough to isolate its factories and cut the traffic on the river. But it carried Stalin's name, and that changed the calculation on both sides.

For Beevor, it was this symbolic weight, taking the city that bore the Soviet leader's name, that turned a secondary objective into a national priority. Hitler wanted a propaganda victory; Stalin could not allow a defeat that carried his own name.

The result was an entire army committed to winning a city yard by yard that, strategically, was worth far less than the blood spent on it. The obsession with the symbol outweighed cold military calculation.

In September 1942, General Friedrich Paulus and his 6th Army entered the city with the confidence of men who had already crushed other Soviet defenses that summer. Within days, much of the urban center was under German control.

The illusion of a quick victory did not last. A few hundred yards from the Volga, the German advance stalled against a Soviet defense that refused to fall back, even when surrounded, even when outnumbered along much of the line.

It was the start of a phase of the war very different from the blitzkrieg the Germans had mastered: tanks and artillery lost their value among ruins, rubble and basements, where the distance between two trenches was sometimes no more than a wall.