The German Sixth Army was facing Six Russian armies in an attack that took the German’s by surprise as Operation Uranus unfolded in the third week of November 1942.

The Romanians were not as surprised as the Germans because they’d been warning General Paulus and OKW headquarters about signs of the build-up for weeks.

And we know that Luftwaffe General Von Richtfhofen had also reported on the signs but Paulus and Hitler seemed to be of the opinion that whatever it was – the signs of tanks and infantry building up across the Don to the north west of Stalingrad would not be significant.

The Germans had no idea that General Zhukov’s plan was far more audacious than the usual Russian Winter offensive. Zhukov planned to encircle the Sixth Army and trap them inside Stalingrad.

And as we heard last episode, the Don Army Group under Rokossovsky burst through the Romanians while the South West Army Group under Vatutin struck out towards Kalach.

And then on the 20th the Stalingrad Army Group under Yeremenko which had crossed the Volga in small groups, launched the left horn of the Operation and headed North East towards Kalach.

This means that the three Russian Fronts – the north, South West Army group and Stalingrad Army Group had over one million men against a similar number of Germans, Italians and Romanians along with other axis battalions. The Russians now had 900 tanks against the Germans 700 – many of which were unserviceable. Zhukov had gathered 13000 guns against Paulus’ 10 000 and around 1 100 planes against von Richthofen’s 1 200.

This episode is all about the Russian’s fighting back as they launch Operation Uranus.

Remember the Germans have been battering away at the Barrikady and Mamaev Kurgan and still have not managed to chase the 62nd Army off the West bank of the Volga river. The Red Army is clinging onto tiny bits of land, despite General Paulus and the Sixth Army throwing everything they have at the isolated Russian troops.

The Rattenkrieg has shredded the Germans – and back in Berlin Goebbels has just published an editorial which effectively was preparing the population for a possible defeat in Russia.

General Zhukov has been building two powerful armies preparing for a counter-offensive and some German’s are aware that its imminent – such as von Richthofen of the Luftwaffe. But military intelligence has missed the formation of five new armies in the East – and Hitler doesn’t believe the Russians can pull together large forces anymore.

Paulus’ final attack before this counter-offensive began on the 11th November 1942 and was as misguided and hopeless as had been the last winter offensive of Army Group Centre against Moscow twelve months before.

Within 48 hours it had degenerated into a series of violent personal subterranean battles without central direction. Even the much-vaunted Pioneer Engineering battalions failed to make a real dent in the Russian defences. Many small groups of Germans managed to cover the last three hundred yards to the Volga but having arrived there, they found Russians in their rear who appeared from their cleverly camouflaged foxholes and cut them off.

The battalions narrow corridors to retreat were blocked leading to four more days of desperate and ferocious fighting between the combatants in isolated pockets – where they could smell the other at night they were so close.

Prisoners were no longer being taken and soldiers had little hope of personal survival. Filled with alcohol and Benzedrine or speed, a drug which the Germans issued to their troops, these Landsers were bearded, exhausted from no sleep, they had lost all sense of motive and purpose. The only thing that mattered was cutting the throat of their individual enemy lying a few feet away.

By the 18th November the shortage of ammunition and food led to a lull in fighting. That night there was only a small fraction of the usual crackle of small arms and the head numbing thud of the mortars and artillery. Both sides took the opportunity to try and deal with their wounded.

North of Stalingrad, in fact over 100 miles north, a large army was preparing to cross the Don River near Serafimovich (SERA-FIMO-VEECH) and it wasn’t the Germans. And to the south, closer to the city, another army was awaiting orders – they were to launch their attack a day after the northern action and the overall plan was for both armies to meet way behind the Sixth Army at a place called Kalach.

The struggle by the Sixth Army to take the remnants of the Russian 62nd Army clinging onto the banks of the Volga river is about to take another turn with General Paulus ordering a further assault starting the 11th November.

This followed the German High Command’s realization that they had to do something urgently to beef up Paulus’ exposed flanks. The German’s had formed a salient or wedge as they pushed towards Stalingrad and it was ripe for the plucking.

The 48th Panzer Corps had been based 50 miles south west of the ominous bridgeheads at Kletskaya and Serafimovich on the Don River when it’s commander Lieutenant General Ferdinand Heim received orders to move up to the threatened sector.

That was to the North East and the unit duly clanked onto the road. But only a few miles after starting out major problems emerged and it involved mice.

The column had ground to a halt and some of the tanks actually caught fire. In others, their engines were misfiring and many then failed to run at all. Mechanics swarmed over the vehicles and discovered that field mice had nested inside the vehicles and gnawed away at the insulation covering the electrical systems.

It was days later that they limped on the way again eventually the 48th arrived at its new quarters. But it was virtually crippled. Out of 104 tanks in the 22nd Panzer Division for example, only 42 were ready for combat.

And no-one notified the high command or Hitler – he would have had a fit. So on the 11th with their flank bolstered, the Germans attacked.

I began just before dawn led by newly organized battle groups from the 71st, 79th, 100th, 295th, 305th and 389th infantry divisions, reinforced with four fresh pioneer of specialist engineers.

They were aiming to dislodge the pockets of resistance or as the German’s put it – the rectangles.

And above, Freihrer von Richthofen’s Luftwaffe prepared the way. The general had lost almost all patience with what he regarded as army conventionality – or in another word – slowness.

He had complained repeatedly about the artillery failing to fire and the infantry not making use of bombing attacks. It was easy for him to say, his men were all hundreds of feet above Stalingrad – hardly feeling the pain of the most dramatic battle in history.

The Russians had a big plan of their own, Operation Uranus.

Stalin thought it was a bad plan initially – but soon realized that a large scale gamble was far better than piecemeal offensives. They’d tried the latter repeatedly and it had failed repeatedly.

And of course, his great military advantage over Adolf Hitler was his lack of ideological shame. He was not embarrassed in the slightest to reinstate the military thinking of the 30’s he’d had Soviet officers executed for even suggesting some of the methods he was now signing off.

General Paulus’ Sixth Army has been stymied in its quest to drive the Red Army out of the city – his last attack which began in mid-October has stalled.

He’s running low on both men and ammunition. The meat grinder that is Stalingrad has caused a 60% casualty rate in some German divisions – sometimes higher. There are few reinforcements.

But that’s not true of the Russians who are building up two forces. One to the north of Stalingrad near the Don River, and the other south of the city.

It doesn’t take much to realise what the Soviets are going to do. German and Romanian intelligence has picked up on the troop movements but General Paulus and Adolf Hitler appear largely unconcerned.

Then came the news on the 2nd November that the British had defeated Rommel at el Alamein in north Africa. A few days later came the Anglo-American landing in French north Africa news of which reached Adolf Hitler just before he was to address his party comrades at the Munich Beer Cellar.

That was where the Reich was launched in a failed putsh or coup attempt that started on November 8th 1923. It ended with Hitler thrown into prison.

Now almost twenty years later Hitler was heading back to the Beer hall where he would deliver one of his most tone-deaf speeches in the midst of Stalingrad death and destruction. The speech of course was broadcast to the Sixth Army divisions hiding behind rubble and now facing a terrible winter.

Word of the defeat at el Alamein as well as the American landings in Algeria shocked the German public. They had been fed copious amounts of propaganda about how swimmingly the war was going – to learn that the beloved Rommel had been outwitted by Field Marshal Montgomery caused a sudden shudder to ripple through the citizens of the Reich.

Propaganda and its consquences by themselves rarely win wars – or political battles. Eventually the truth descends upon those who lie and cheat, eventually the people of the nation realise the folly of fatally flawed leadership.

Back at General Chuikov’s headquarters hewn out of the Volga bank, officers of the 62nd army were discussing a strange reality. Why had the Germans not supported their flanks? Both south and north of the city the German’s were facing hundreds of miles of extended front with a dangerously exposed Sixth Army wedge which had formed from the Don to the West and into Stalingrad.

General Paulus’ Sixth Army has fought its way right up to the edge of the Volga River.

Russian positions had been reduced to a few pockets of stone, seldom more than three hundred yards deep bordering on the right bank of the Volga. The Krasny Oktyabr or October plant as its also known had fallen to the Germans who had paved every foot of the factory floor with their dead.

The Barrikady plant was half lost, the Germans were at one end of the foundry facing the Russian machine guns in the now extinguished ovens at the other. The defenders of the Tractor Factory had been broken into three groups by constant German attacks.

These islands of resistance were now almost impossible to dislodge as the German’s discovered.

The Sixth Army is exhausted. Alan Clark in his book on Barbarossa points out that they were as raddled and spent as had been Douglas Haig’s divisions at Passchendaele exactly a quarter of a century before during the First world war.

You’d have to say there was an implacable madness that had seized all parties in this conflict. The Russians in the city were fighting to the death as there was no-where to go east of Stalingrad. It was all open steppe and losing this city was not just symbolic. They would have been pushed all the way to caucuses – at least that’s what many Russians soldiers believed.

But Stalin and his generals were cooking up a nasty surprise for the Germans. That would follow within a few weeks.

If the Wehrmacht’s Army Group B had the strength, the correct course would have been to strike at Voronezh up the Don River and lever the Don Front away from close to Stalingrad. The German left flank was in a particularly weak condition and striking further north would have caused the Russians to move reinforcements closer to Voronezh which was also closer to Moscow.

But hindsight is always an inexact science isn’t it? The Wehrmacht was desperately extended on a front which had almost doubled in length since the start of the Summer campaign. The Russians meanwhile were building their forces and it was at this point that they had the stronger army.

It was in this dangerous position that the weaker armies, the Sixth and the Fourth Panzer, continued to rely on initiative rather than pure-blooded military strategy. Once the German momentum was lost, they were on extremely perilous ground. There were two clear future strategies as the cold of winter descended on the southern steppe.

First would have been an orderly withdrawal to defensive positions and tightening of the front. There were obvious places to do this – the Chiur River and the Mius River.

The Second was pretty much part of German ideology. Continue attacking because whomever was last standing, won the battle. Stalingrad had turned into Verdun or Passchendaele .

A terrible battle had been waged inside the Red October plant since the big push began by the German Sixth Army on the 14th October.

The Tractor Factory and the Barrikady plant were the centres of carnage which has become part of the mystique of Stalingrad where men were fighting for each workshop and canteen, each small room, each bombed out building.

It was worse than hand-to-hand, it was tooth and nail.

And in some cases, literally as men tore at each other with blunt instruments like bits of rebar, chunks of rubble, and even their teeth.

At the three main factories north of Mamaev Hill the Germans threw themselves into the fight day after day, trying the crush the Russians.

By October 20th they had seized all the tractor plant’s shops and broken into the mammoth breastworks of the Barrikady. Further south they also occupied the western end of the Red October Plant.

General Chuikov who commanded the Russian 62nd Army had moved his headquarters on the 17th October, three days after the start of the major offensive ordered by Hitler.

As we heard last episode, that was fortunate for Chuikov because his former trench come bunker was overrun by the Germans.

Chuikov ended up in his new HQ on the river bank level with Mamaev Kurgan. He would remain there until the relief of the city the following February.

Despite the fact that General Paulus had seen his forces bolstered by specialist units of engineers and police battalions experienced in street fighting, the Russians remained the masters of fighting inside buildings – room by room. They had developed killing zones around houses and squares which were heavily mined and covered by intersecting machine gun crossfire.

Chuikov was a specialist himself and described some the techniques.

“Experience taught us …” he said “.. get close to the enemies positions, move on all fours making use of craters and ruins dig your trenches by night, camouflage them by day, make you build-up for the attack stealthy, without any noise, carry your tommy-gun on your shoulder, take ten to twelve grenades. Timing and purpose will then be on your side..”

.

“two of you get into the house together ..” Chuikov continued in his memoirs “.. be lightly dressed without a knapsack and the grenade bare, go in grenade first, you go after, the whole house, again always with a grenade first and you after..”

It's the middle of October 1942 and the Sixth Army just cannot take Stalingrad as the Russians hold onto the West Bank of the Volga despite being outnumbered and outgunned.

The most critical assault of the entire battle had just been joined – and that was the German attack which began at dawn on the 14th October.

For the next three days it represented the point at which had the German’s succeeded, Stalingrad would have fallen immediately and the course of the war may have been different.

While historians don’t believe Germany would have ultimately been victorious, what this period did was reinforce the belief amongst rank and file Russians that they could overcome the Nazis.

The official version of the period 14–17 October is that Stalingrad’s defence remained resolute in the face of devastating enemy pressure.

Chuikov himself is at pains to say that, despite the terrible fighting and the proximity of the Germans to his HQ, ‘we had no thought of withdrawing’. That’s not entirely true as we will hear.

For personal and political reasons this became the accepted truth. Yet the reality – as on the earlier critical day of 14 September – was far darker. And it’s by peering more closely into this darkness can we make sense out of the Rattenkrieg – the rat war.

Five German divisions, three infantry and two Panzer, 300 tanks with mighty air support, moved off in one great wall of steel and fire to overrun the factory districts, to break through to the Volga in strength and to blot out the Soviet 62nd Army once and for all.

‘These three days were utterly exceptional – even by Stalingrad’s standards’, said Russian Captain Mereshenko.

‘Only on 17 October did things get back to normal.’

Normal meant hundreds dying every day, not thousands.

By mid-morning on the 14th a blanket of smoke hung over Stalingrad that was so thick visibility had been cut to a few hundred yards. Stukas flew over in packs bombing relentlessly. At 11.30am two hundred German tanks broke through Russian defences around the all important Tractor Works.

General Erwin Janaecke’s 398th Infantry Division burst into the mile-long labyrinth of workshops that made up the Tractor Factory. The scenes inside this building almost defied description. The works became a charnel house.

This is episode 17 and we’re into the second week of October 1942 where the Sixth Army continues to batter the Russian 62nd Army on the banks of the Volga. Russian soldiers are grimly hanging on to their slither of land. To the south, the German 4th Panzer army has been hammering away trying to push the Russians across the mighty river but things are not going swimmingly.

Last episode we heard how General Paulus as growing more strained as each day passed and Stalingrad refused to fall. Inside the city, General Chuikov who led the 62nd Army had stiffened his men’s resolve to fight after panic at times.

“In the blazing city..” he said afterwards “we did not suffer cowards. We had no room for them..”

IT was only by the 8th October that the political department in Stalingrad wrote a report for Stalin back in Moscow saying “the defeatist mood is almost eliminated and the number of treasonous incidents is getting lower…”

It was revealed later that 13 500 Russian soldiers were executed in Stalingrad over the period of the battle which would extend until February 1943.

Civilians were now being evacuated in huge numbers – including the 5th October. A day earlier Colonel Groscurth of the Sixth Army had written “will Stalingrad turn into a second Verdun?”.

The first world war battle that chewed up a million French and German soldiers was an historic attempt at using men as mincemeat in an attempt to overcome the enemy. That was the German plan. Verdun was one of the reasons why the reparations demanded at the Treaty of Versailles by the French were so onerous – and of course led directly to the installation of the Nazi’s who played on German citizen’s belief they’d been unfairly dealt with after the First World War.

This is episode 16 which deals with the fighting in the city in the last week of September and first week of October 1942.

Remember last episode we covered the ongoing battles around the Nail Factory, Mamaev Hill and the Grain elevator. The 62nd Army had experienced panic in the last week of September as the German divisions pushed hard against the Volga River bank, cutting off parts of the army.

But reinforcements from Siberia had been rushed across the Volga River into Stalingrad and arrived in the nick of time, bolstering the defenders.

Another famous soldier had also arrived in the city in mid-September, and that was Sergeant Jacob Pavlov.

He’d jumped off the lorry which had brought him and his companions to within six miles of Stalingrad on the East Bank of the Volga. Sergeant Pavlov was part of the unit reinforing Major-General Alexander Rodimtsev’s much depleted 13th Guards Division which was concentrated around the Lazur Chemical Factory – an area known as the ‘tennis racket’ due to a rail track that ran around the area which was shaped exactly like a tennis racket.

Pavlov was a short broad-shouldered man with penetrating grey eyes that surprised journalists who interviewed him after the war as they exuded warmth, rather than the thousand yard stare usually associated with veterans.

He became known as the House Owner and ended the war with the Golden Star of the Hero of the Soviet Union. That’s double ironic because Pavlov never owned property his entire life.

But he was a hero.

The clue to his remarkable story is why he was dubbed with this nickname – and indeed his story stands out in the annals of all those told about Stalingrad. Pavlov was born in a village not far from the source of the Volga River far to the north in the province of Leningrad.

He’d faced Hitler’s forces in Poland in the early days of Operation Barbarossa – particularly those of Field Marshal von Bocks’ central group. Since June 1941 he’d experienced nothing but fighting retreats. Now he was facing Hitler’s Nazi war machine at a place marking their most eastern advance which was a further irony considering what he was going to do.

There would be no more retreating for Sergeant Pavlov. I’ll come back to his story through this series.

This episode is about a grain elevator while Adolf Hitler loses his patience once more and fires General Halder.

I had the fortune to study American Landscape History at Harvard University with one of the most incredible thinkers of modern times – Professor John Stilgoe.

He would present his two hour lectures using hundreds of slides – and one of his fascinating topics was grain elevators. Only countries with food surplus have grain elevators for storage and since then, I’ve kept a sharp eye on the hundreds in my home country of South Africa.

In Stalingrad, the grain elevator was actually the main motif planned for German badges to be issued to the 6th Army upon its fall by its leader, General Paulus.

Ah yes, history had other ideas.

Elevators are built out of reinforced concrete and in the case of Stalingrad, the elevators survived some of the most intense bombings and shelling of any building in history.

Last week I covered the assaults on Mamaev Hill or Kurgan as its known, a site of Tartar graves and rebuilt after the Revolution of 1917 into a park where lovers would gather. IT was also the most bloody few acres of the Stalingrad conflict. It’s 300 foot heights meant whomever controlled this hill, controlled the view of the Mighty Volga River.

So after the Red Army finally seized control in mid-September, it was more difficult for the Germans to range their artillery and hit the ferries and other craft crossing the Volga. Of course, with material and men being shipped across, mainly at night, it was crucial to try to stop the Russians from resupplying the 62nd and 64th Armies which had been pushed back against the Volga in two areas by the German 6th and 4th Panzer Armies.

The fighting on the 14, 15th and 16th September had been brutal, but was just the start of a huge escalation across Stalingrad. In Moscow, US embassy diplomats were reporting that the city was finished and on the evening of the 16th an aide walked into Joseph Stalin’s office and placed a transcription down on his desk.

It was the text of an intercepted radio message from Berlin which said

“Stalingrad has been taken by brilliant German forces. Russia has been cut into two parts, north and south, and will soon collapse in her death throes”.

Stalin got up and stood at his window then ordered the aide to put him through to the STAVKA. He then dictated a message for Kruschev and Yeremenko on the West bank of the Volga outside Stalingrad.

“Is it true Stalingrad has been captured by the Germans?” he asked “Give a straight and truthful answer…”

Little did Stalin know that the scrappy general Rodimtsev who I described last week had arrived in the nick of time with the 295 Division and pushed the Germans back from the Volga and the central station.