In episode 14 we will focus on the events in Stalingrad starting from the second week of September 1942.

By the 15th as we heard last week the fighting had intensified as elements of the German 71st and 76th Divisions advancing in a wedge shape towards the central station which it reached by midday. By 3.15 in the afternoon the water works were captured and the Germans had reached the bank of the Volga in the South of the city.

That meant the Russian 62nd Army was now cut off from the 64th.

But as I explained last episode, an NKVD battalion managed to retake the main train station which had changed hands three times by the 16th September.

In the north of the city there rose the strategically important Mamaev Hill and it is here where the most powerful act performed by the Red Army in mid-September was recorded.

The German 295th Infantry Division had fought its way to the far slope of the Mamaev Kurgan and eventually it fell to the Germans.

The struggle became intense for this hill. IT was now completely unrecognisable from the park where lovers had strolled a few weeks before. The whole hillside had been churned and was now full of craters similar to the images of the First World War. Both sides used these as instant trenches as the bitter fighting intensified.

It was on the 15th September that the Russians were to launch an aggressive counter-attack to recapture the Kurgan.

I’ll use the Russian phrase from now on because it makes more sense.

The Kurgan was 300 feet high and from the heights, the Germans spotters could call in air and artillery strikes on ferries carrying Russian soldiers across the Volga, as well as Russian units within the city itself. It was crucial to control this part of Stalingrad.

Unluckily for those called to fight on the Kurgan, it was also open ground with all the advantages held by the Germans.

Episode 13 is full of fire and brimstone as the Sixth Army and Fourth Panzer Army finally arrive in Stalingrad proper. That’s when the fighting becomes more personal with every house and every apartment a stronghold and skirmishes begin to take place inside different rooms of the same house.

By the end of the first week of September 1942 the German Sixth Army had come up to the western limits of the city almost along the whole of its length, while the Fourth Panzer Army were probing the southern limits.

Ditches and barricades proved no lasting barriers to the weight of German pressure, only men and women could hold the Wehrmacht back. The air-attacks had stopped for only a freak building here and there stood untouched among the vast devastation. The great blocks of flats, the fine public buildings were now crazy hollow shells.

Civilians were now sheltering in the basements and some would remain in these gloomy pits until the defeat of the Germans in February 1943.

And it was for this crazy shell of a city that the fiercest of all city-battles of the Second World War was joined. For the Russians, its factories could no longer contribute to the Soviet war-effort, for the Germans it was useless as a shelter.

Even its strategic value either for the Germans or the Russians was now extremely doubtful. For Hitler as we’ll see, it was to become an object of a Führer-prestige obsession. For Stalin it would become the symbol of the ultimate Russian defiance.

For the Germans it would be synonymous with final defeat – for the Russians it was to mark the beginning of final victory.

Last episode I explained how General Golikov was left behind on the West bank of the Volga River joining General Lopatin who commanded what was left of the 62nd Army.

Golikov had begged to be allowed out of Stalingrad but Kruschev who was the political commissar in command along with Yeremenko told him to pull himself together. Lopatin on the other hand was a nervous wreck and hardly an ideal leader of men at this moment.

In episode 12 we hear how the German Sixth Army and Fourth Panzer Army are at the gates of Stalingrad and about to enter the city named after the Soviet Dictator.

The 16th Panzer Division which is part of the Sixth Army has already found its way into the northern suburbs and frantic defence by the Russian Red Army has slowed their advance.

In the south, the Fourth Panzer Army has been held up at times by a fighting retreat by the Russian 62nd and 64th Armies, although there are increasing reports of Russian soldiers surrendering in large numbers. In response, NKVD commissars were told to start executing those caught running away.

It’s the first week of September 1942 and the Autumn rains have already begun to fall, causing the German’s some difficulty. They’re relying on the Luftwaffe who are flying missions in support of ground forces and the overcast conditions are proving to be a real problem.

As the Wehrmacht draws closer to Stalingrad, the number of casualties are beginning to rise on both sides. Civilians are fleeing the city across the Volga while workers in the factories have formed up into battalions and will fight the German army in almost suicidal assaults in the coming weeks.

The nearest parallel to this horrific battle was the mincing machine of Verdun in the First world War. But there are significant differences too. At Verdun the contestants rarely saw each other face to face – being battered to death by high explosives or cut down at long range by machine gun fire. At Stalingrad as we’ll see each separate battle resolved itself into a combat between individuals.

Soldiers would swear at each other inside different rooms in the same house and across streets. Often they would hear each others breathing in the next room and hear the sound of tinkling of metal as the enemy reloaded their firearms.

Hand-to-hand duels were finished in the dark as smoke and brick dust swirled about, soldiers would kill each other with knives and pickaxes, clubs of rubble and garot others with wire or stab them with twisted steel.

As Alan Clark writes in his great work called Barbarossa, fighting took place in a giant petrified forest of blackened chimney stacks where defenders had little cover in the suburbs as the houses there were built of wood which had burned to the ground in the massive air raids of the 23rd August.

The Luftwaffe had pulverised the city, and as the Germans advanced they would find the Russians would use these uneven iron concrete and stone buildings to great effect. The sewers had become tunnels and the Germans would soon have a name for the type of fighting inside Stalingrad – Rattenkrieg – ratwar.

The German fourth panzer army is attacking Stalingrad from the south, and the Sixth Army has swung to attack from the north west led by the Wehrmacht’s Battering Ram, the 16th Panzer Division.

Russian generals were taken by surprise by this dash from the Don. They were expecting the Germans to approach directly from the west and had built fortifications with that route in mind.

Instead, General Paulus had pulled a fast one and his vanguard arrived at the northern suburbs by the afternoon of 23rd August. That was also the day in which the Luftwaffe had pulverised the city using carpet bombing as the main technique. 40 000 civilians were dead by the day’s end, many caught at Mamaev Hill as we heard last week.

The Germans had broken through to the Volga River on a five mile front in the north. By now the enormous city of around 600 000 and stretching for 30 miles along the Volga was enveloped in flames. Everything around was burning and collapsing. Sorrow and death had entered into thousands of Stalingrad homes as one commentator said.

By midnight of 23rd August the 16th Panzer division on the outskirts of Stalingrad had outrun its support. Twelve miles behind them, the 3rd Motorised Division had halted for the night. 60th Motorised Division was ten miles behind the 3rd – bogged down in the giant traffic jam I mentioned last week. These three were now completely separated from each other like islands on the Russian Steppe. Until these were enjoined by the entire Sixth Army, they were extremely exposed and vulnerable to Soviet counter-attacks.

General Hans Hube who commanded the 16th Panzer Division ordered his tanks to form themselves into a defensive perimeter called a hedgehog with the division’s artillery covering a 360 degree front.

In what was almost a miracle, Russian militia had dug interlocking strongpoints overnight. Some were dressed in their Sunday best and work clothes as they crouched behind their mortars and machine guns and challenged the finest tank army in the world.

Their first target was Combat Group Krumpen who crumpled under their huge artillery bombardment, then unpainted T34s that had literally just been driven off the assembly line charged into battle on 24th catching Hube offguard.

Back at HQ, Paulus received another shock. The 3rd Motorised Brigade had been ambushed while ransacking a Soviet freight train bursting with American Ford Trucks and Willies Jeeps.

They were forced to create a hedgehog defensive position as the Russian 35th Guards Division poured down onto them from the North. The reckless counter attack, suicidal almost, extended the gap between the 3rd and the 60th motorised Divisions still further.

In the south, the Russian 64th Army was causing the German Fourth Panzer army some difficulty and they failed to push through to the Volga which was the initial plan.

Refugees were fleeing the city, crossing over the vast river in barges and small boats while German planes strafed these people. The fire that had started in the oil storage tanks opposite the city centre continued to burn as oil spread across the river engulfing some of these boats.

The troops of the 64 and 62nd armies were deployed in a fighting retreat towards the city. The roads were crowded with refugees. Peasants from collective and state farms were moving – migrating really – the families traveling with their all-important livestock where they could.

Russian general Chuikov was on board a boat traveling from the east bank of the Volga back to the city and was greeting by a scene at one of the main ferry piers which shook him.

This is episode 10 and the marauding Wehrmacht is at Stalingrad’s door – the enemy is at the gates. As we’ll hear, the savage air raids the were a precursor to the main event that symbolised the start of the months of a battle that would change the world.

We’ll also hear the extraordinary story of truly courageous young women just out of high school and what they managed to achieve to the north of the city.

We’ll begin by joining German units and hear individual stories from soldiers who were convinced that within a week they’d be enjoying the delights of the Soviet Union’s model city on the Volga River. Why not? The Russians were facing a stronger and more experienced force and had resorted to arming civilians as a last gasp effort to halt the German juggernaut bearing down on the oil rich caucuses.

As we know, Hitler had split Army Group South and sent the First Panzer Army off South Eastwards towards the Black Sea coast and the oil producing region in a move which had baffled the Soviets. It had baffled his own Generals although they quickly forgot their misgivings about splitting Army Group South.

On the 21st August 1942 infantry companies under General von Seyderlitz’s LI Corps crossed the Don River at dawn using inflatable boats. They established a bridgehead at the village of Luchinsky.

More Germans paddled furiously over the Volga, while downriver at Vertyachy an entire battalion crossed the river in around a hour. Pioneer units went to work building pontoon bridges to take the panzers and other vehicles of General von Wietersheim’s XIV Panzer Corps across.

The Don meanders about here, after flowing almost directly South East, it suddenly turns and flows westerly towards the Black Sea instead of continuing onwards to the Caspian Sea.

IT’s at that point where there’s a land bridge between the Don and the Volga. In a few thousand years they’ll probably weather their way towards each other and lead to the formation of a large marshland.

But here we are in 1942 with the Germans crossing what they called The Stream. Some of the members of the Sixth Army had already decided that the mysterious Don was a place of beauty and would be setting up their farms there after the War.

Most of course, would be dead within six months. But let’s not jump the gun.

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.

This week we’ll join the citizens of Stalingrad as they feverishly prepare for what look like an inevitable attack as the Sixth Army under General Paulus heads towards the Don River.

The obvious approach would see the attack come across the land bridge between the Don and Volga Rivers.

And by mid-July 1942 the German intention had become a certainty. The Fourth Panzer Army had crossed the Don and reached the heights of Kotelnikovo and its spearhead, instead of turning south to protect the flank of the First Panzer Army heading towards the caucuses to the south east, was pointing north and obviously coming up towards Stalingrad.

That wasn’t all. German activity in the great bend of the Don River seemed to indicate the probability of a drive being made across the river and that could only mean one thing – a full attack on Stalingrad instead of a glancing blow.

In Moscow, Stalin and the STAVKA had been issuing orders for a few weeks and now their briefings increased when it came to the southern Front. He had fixated on the German’s attacking Moscow in force once more and had delayed some decisions in the south. Now that it was clear what was going to happen, the preparations escalated.

The tragedy of war had always menaced this region. In 1237 the Golden Horde of the Great Khan had crossed the Volga at this perfect fording point and ravaged the area between the Volga and Don rivers.

From there the Khan swept west into European Russia and were stopped just short of Vienna and the Polish border. During the 13th an 14th Centuries Russian armies marched eastward through the same region – it was a border post from which Moscow attacked the Mongols. Then in 1589 a trading centre was established called Tsaritsyn.

The legendary Cossack leader Stenka Razin took the city in 1670 and held it during a bloody siege. One hundred years later another Cossack named Yemelyan Pugachev decided to challenge Catherine the Great by storming Tsaritsyn but she defeated him and then cut off his head for good measure.

In 1875 a French company built a large steel mill in the city and its population expanded to one hundred thousand. It became a wild west town – or should I say wild east town similar to the growth of American cities. Ramshackle houses followed the river and there were four hundred saloons and brothels which catered for the new settler’s needs.

It was a tough hard-living town – a bit like the myriad of frontier towns that emerged in the American West.

During the Russian Revolution after 1917 the fighting here in the civil war was extremely bitter. As we heard previously, a little-known leader called Joseph Stalin held off three Generals of the White Army for weeks.

But he was eventually driven out of the city and Stalin regrouped his forces on the Steppe before falling on the White Army flanks and defeating the White Army forces. To honour their liberator, the residents renamed the city Stalingrad. The city was then completely redesigned as a model Soviet project and it became a manufacturing centre, exporting vehicles, chemicals, tractors, guns, textiles and lumber to all parts of the Soviet Union.

This episode we’re starting the week-to-week coverage of the battle and it’s the end of July 1942.

As we’ve heard, Hitler had split his Southern Army in two sending the Fourth Panzers to the Black Sea to secure the coast while the 6th Army continued onwards towards the Don River.

Hitler had ignored General Halder’s protestations about the buildup of Soviet troops to the East of these units – at least a million men were now based across the Volga River and in the Caucuses. The Soviets were also producing at least 500 tanks a month which was almost the same number Germany’s massive manufacturing sector was churning out – and Hitler didn’t believe that either.

He also thought the Russians were close to collapse. They weren’t.

On the 28th July 1942 Hitler was celebrating the capture of Rostov in the South and his southern Army’s rapid drive towards the Don River where the Soviet army faced annihilation.

If the German army made it west of the Don River, they would then be able to challenge Soviet troops on the Volga and in Moscow, Joseph Stalin was aware what that would mean. The Germans would cut his country in two and seize the all-important Black Sea ports feeding material into Moscow.

In other theatres there was even more bad news. A large allied shipping convoy with the code name PQ-17 on its way to Russia had been destroyed in the Barents Sea.

In his office in the Kremlin, Stalin was pacing back and forth listening to the latest report on the war presented by General Vasilevsky. It was full of the words retreat, withdrawal, surrender.

Apparently this is where Stalin blurted

“They’ve forgotten my Stavka order!” which he had issued in August 1941.

“That was anyone who removed their insignia during battle and surrendered would be regarded as a malicious deserter who’s family would be arrested.”

The deserters would be shot dead on the spot.

“They’ve forgotten it!” he yelled. “Write a new one along the same lines.” He ordered Vasilevsky.

The General had a few hours to redraft the order and then report back to Stalin who was seething now convinced that some of his own army had lost their nerve and needed severe disciplining.

This week the Germans launch Operation Blue where Army Group South is supposed to head towards the Caucuses to secure the all-important oil.

We heard last week how Adolf Hitler was under the false impression that seizing the oil would also damage Russia’s fighting capability – but little did he know that the Soviet Union had vast resources in other regions as I explained.

The Upper Volga and Kama area in the Urals and in the northern region of Ukhta also produced oil as well as a narrow belt east of the Caspian sea across the whole south of the Soviet Union. Hitler did not understand this – he was fixated on Baku.

In 1942 there were few oil pipelines in use. The main pipeline which ran 1200 miles from Baku to the Black Sea port of Batum had been in existence since the First World War, and other shorter lengths ran from Grozny to Tuapse on the Black Sea as well as Armavir to Rostov and Trudovuya.

Hitler had decided on three parallel thrusts to be made all West to East. The first and most northerly would be an armoured attack from the area near Kursk towards the Don River and Voronezh. The tanks would then turn south east after taking the city and move down the west bank of the Don rolling up the enemy.

Simultaneously, a second parallel thrust would be made from the area of Kharkov striking at the concentrated Soviet Army forces on the Don, and a third parallel thrust was to be made from lower Don region to join up with the other two German forces in the area of Stalingrad.

The city with Stalin’s name was mentioned at this point for the first time. The capture of the city was not part of the strategic aim, although it was important.

As we’ll see, both Halder and von Bock were to oppose Hitler later when he became obsessed by overrunning the city. By the Spring of 1942 it had already become apparent that German resources could not cope with a full-scale offensive on the whole length of the Russian front – from Leningrad in the north to Sebastopol in the South.

The campaign in the Caucuses had significant economic considerations. There were coal and iron in the Donetz Basin, oil in the Caucuses and the Volga. Hitler had many other things to worry about in Western Europe. The shock of his attacks in 1939 had worn off and by Autumn 1941 occupied peoples in Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg as well as France were beginning to recover.

This episode we’ll join the 6th Army as it began to move inexorably towards the city that bore the name of the Soviet Union’s President and which be the grave for almost two million people.

But first, we need to take a closer look at General Paulus who was to lead the army to its doom.

Unlike other commanders such as Rommel, Guderian, Hoth and Halder, Paulus possessed what historian Anthony Beevor calls an exaggerated respect for the chain of command. He was an oddity in many ways, spending long nights bent over maps with coffee and cigarettes at hand.

His hobby was drawing scale-maps of Napoleon’s campaign in Russia – something which you’d think would have given him some knowledge about the mistakes the Germans’ should avoid making. Apparently it did not.

He first made his name as his Chief of Staff starting in 1939 in a relationship that appeared odd to outsiders. Reichenau almost looked the part of a thug, thick set and tough whereas Paulus was tall and very much the officer and a gentleman.

With his advanced map reading skills, Paulus was part of the group of Generals who planned Operation Barbarossa and was eventually nominated by Reichenau to take over the control of the 6th Army which he did on New Years day 1942. We heard about that in the last podcast.

One of the most memorable events of this battle was the role played by an all-women battalion which the Germans described as a bandit battalion led by a redhead. A senior NCO writing later said

“The fighting methods of these female beasts showed itself in treacherous and dangerous ways. They lie concealed in heaps of straw, and shoot us in the back when we pass by..”