It's the first two weeks of August 1942 where the German Sixth and Fourth Panzer armies are closing in on the city with Joseph Stalin’s name.

We will also visit some of the other battles taking place in early August across Russia and further afield to provide some additional awareness about why certain decisions were being taken. It was a world war after all and despite our focus on Stalingrad, we can’t lose sight of the bigger picture across the globe.

Last week we spent some time with the citizens as they began building defensive systems like trenches and street barricades which accelerated through July 1942.

The irony in the coming battle was the German’s were going to do a far better job for the Russians using their bombers. Blowing up entire suburbs with bombs means lots of rubble in which to hide your snipers for example. It also makes it impossible for tanks to be effective.

Sometimes brute force fails when it comes to warfare and this is one of those times. It sounds counter intuitive doesn’t it?

And yet Clausewitz warned about this in his tome On War.

So did Sun Tzu. Do not destroy the entire landscape and your enemy cities or you will not be able to rule effectively afterwards. Hitler believed in ethnic cleansing with the Slavs to be replaced by the Aryans and so didn’t care about this ancient truth. As the Mongols, the Romans and others found over the centuries, the more you destroy, the harder it is to govern if you really want to be around for the long term.

In addition, Hitler’s visceral hatred of Slavs and Russians blinded him and his officers like von Richthofen to the fact that the more brutal you are, the harder your enemy fights because its death by glory or death by the murderous invader.

By trying to bludgeon London and Britain into submission for example, the Luftwaffe actually shot itself in the foot – it increased the motivation of the average Brit to fight.

By bludgeoning Stalingrad, the German’s did the same.

So by the first week of August 1942 the biggest threat to Stalingrad was not the Sixth Army, it was Hoth’s Fourth Panzer army. His Scouts were already within twenty miles of Stalingrad as he approached from the south west and Hoth was banking on being the first Germans in the City.

It was a kind of game for this general, nicknamed Papa Hoth and loved by his men.

The Fourth Panzer Army turned north-east from Tsimlyanskiy and Remontnaya on 1 August and two days later they’d captured loaded Soviet troops trains near KoteInikovo. More about this moment in a while.

That put the main 4th Panzer’s within sixty miles of Stalingrad.

Even the latest intelligence reports which showed that Yeremenko’s cleverly designed traps in the ravines and hills to the west of the city had slowed his units didn’t overly worry Hoth much.