This was originally an idea of mine for a Cracked.com post, but for some reason it wasn't chosen for publication, partly to do with all its information coming from a history book instead of online sources apparently (God we're getting too reliant on the internet these days aren't we). It's inspired by what might just be my favourite ever book 'Stalingrad' by Antony Beevor. It's an amazing read, I can't recommend it highly enough. The nightmare that was the Battle of Stalingrad, the pivotal turning point of WW2, is a tale not told often enough.
You’ve probably heard of the Battle of Stalingrad, but you may not know that it claimed about ten times as many lives as the Normandy Invasion and was vastly more pivotal in deciding WW2. The fighting between the juggernaut that was the German 6th Army, the largest military formation in the world at the time, aided by the powerful German Luftwaffe against the outnumbered defenders of the Russian 62nd Army in the heart of the city reached a level of brutality perhaps never before witnessed in human history. The Soviet counter-offensive three months later, trapping and eventually annihilating the entire Sixth Army and dealing Hitler his most crushing defeat of the war, has gone down in history as quite possibly the most epic fail of all time. Ever wondered what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? Read on.
#10. Striving for intoxication
The Russian strategy in a nutshell
There may have been times when you’ve felt stressed and wanted nothing more than to get down to the pub and have a few beers after a long, hard day at work, but that’s NOTHING compared to the desperation of the soldiers fighting at Stalingrad. The Vodka ration, theoretically 100 grams a day, was often not delivered and was almost never enough anyway. Soldiers drank antifreeze, industrial and surgical alcohol and basically anything else that might intoxicate them to try and forget the living hell they were fighting in. Many soldiers were poisoned or blinded and some even died afterwards. Tobacco too was heavily valued with most Russian soldiers smoking constantly in battle.
Local civilians attempted to barter with soldiers from both sides with every kind of improvised alcohol imaginable, even a spirit made from milk. This proved quite dangerous for some however; on one occasion the Soviet NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs; i.e. the secret police) sentenced two women to ten years each in the Gulag for trading alcohol and tobacco to soldiers in exchange for parachute silk to make underclothes.
#9. Being in the 13th Guards Rifle Division
Pretty much how sh*t went down.
You may have heard of these guys if you’ve ever seen the film ‘Enemy at the Gates’ or played the Russian campaign in Call of Duty. Both start with a scene of utter epicness where a boatload of soldiers crosses the Volga River into the burning inferno that is Stalingrad, all the while under attack from German Stuka dive bombers and machine guns as a Soviet officer proudly proclaims the superiority of the Red Army over the Germans, saying they ‘can’t even bring us a proper fight’. Of the 10,000 men who began crossing the Volga on September 14th 1942, over half were dead within a few days and only about 300 survived the battle. Many went across with no training or ammunition.
That’s right, these poor f*ckers.
The saddest part though, is that what happened to the 13th Guards was hardly atypical. The average life expectancy of Russian soldiers fighting in Stalingrad often dropped below 24 hours. That’s right, as in your unit has 1000 men one day, and less than 500 the next. Thousands of soldiers died simply crossing the Volga into Stalingrad. One craft received 436 bullet and shell holes after a single crossing and on more than one occasion disembarking troops would land right in the middle of a minefield along the river’s banks, yet still the Russians held on. Makes Band of Brothers and Rambo look pretty goddamn tame doesn’t it?
#8. Kickass, killer women
What? You thought westerners just made sh*t like this up?
We’ve all seen M*A*S*H right? So we know the only role of women in warfare is as buxom nurses hanging out a few miles behind the front lines, assisting the brave male doctors at their leisure and just generally sounding kind and sitting pretty right? End of story?
WRONG. There’s some truth to the conventional wisdom that the western world always used to oppress women while empowering men. But in Soviet Russia, everyone was equally oppressed; meaning women could be sent in to do the dirtiest of work just as easily as men.
YOU FEEL LUCKY PUNK???
Take Zinaida Gavrielova, an eighteen-year-old medical student. What was she busy doing in 1942? If you guessed hanging around some fraternity in Moscow dating boys and fretting over what she should wear to the Prom, then you guessed wrong. She was head of the Russian 62nd Army’s hundred-strong ‘sanitary company’. Their job consisted of crawling forward under heavy fire to rescue wounded soldiers and dragging or carrying them back to the Volga bank to be sent across to field hospitals.
Or take Gulya Koroleva, a twenty year old, who left her baby son home in Moscow to volunteer as a nurse. During the Battle of Stalingrad she was credited with having ‘brought over a hundred wounded soldiers back from the front line and killed fifteen fascists herself’. She was awarded the Order of the Red Banner... posthumously.
Women served in many different roles in the battle on the Russian side, including as pilots, anti-aircraft gunners and surgeons. Basically any role that wasn’t a frontline infantryman, though the intensity of the fighting often rendered this distinction moot. However the Germans never utilized the ‘fairer sex’ in such a way, with women only working as nurses near the frontlines and only rarely working in German factories even though millions did in Russian factories. The bottom line is that sexism may actually have lost the Nazis WW2.
#7. The NKVD
How do you convince a million Russian peasants to fight and die against hopeless odds in a living hell like Stalingrad? With the Russian secret police of course.
The NKVD was like a second Soviet army, with 54 entire divisions by the end of the war. Their purpose was to maintain discipline, police occupied and rear-areas and basically shoot anyone the Communist party didn’t like, which during the epitome of paranoia that coincided with the fighting at Stalingrad could mean even looking at a superior the wrong way. The NKVD carried out a grand total of 13,500 executions, both summary and judicial, during the five months the fighting raged at Stalingrad. Some heinous crimes meriting execution included-
Retreating without orders
Self-inflicted wounds
Corruption
Desertion or crossing-over to the enemy
Attempting to surrender
Failing to shoot at any comrades trying to desert or surrender
Being in command of any troops which had deserted
With friends like these…
The list of examples is endless. One senior Lieutenant captured by the Germans in August shortly before the Battle of Stalingrad managed to escape his captors and made the arduous journey back to Russian lines, where he was immediately arrested as a ‘deserter’ for having previously surrendered and sent to a remote penal company. Another Lieutenant was shot because two men in his platoon had deserted even though he’d only joined their regiment five days before and barely knew them. A Soviet pilot who bailed out of his burning plane tore up his Communist Party card immediately upon landing because he thought he had come down behind German lines. On his return to base his commissar accused him of cowardice even though Soviet propaganda emphasized that the Germans executed Communists on the spot. A civilian in a training battalion behind the lines was quickly denounced by his fellow recruits for saying that they would ‘freeze and starve when winter came’ and immediately arrested by the NKVD. Soldiers were shot even for stating the obvious to their comrades like ‘Soviet propaganda lies to raise morale in the army’ or for spreading ‘fascists statements’ like saying ‘collective farm workers were like slaves’. Soldiers could even be punished merely for picking up German propaganda leaflets (dropped by air) and using them to role up into cigarettes.
#6. The Feldgendarmerie
Amateurs…
The Nazis had many different military/police/espionage organizations during WW2. Alongside or within the overall German military, the Wehrmacht, you had the Army, the Heer, Germany’s secret police forces, the Gestapo, and the Nazi Party’s personal guard, the Schutzstaffel (or SS) whose armed component was called the Waffen-SS and intelligence agency the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). However the main committer, or failing that facilitator, of war crimes in the Stalingrad area was the German military police, the Feldgendarmerie. Even out here in southern Russia, more than 2,000km from Berlin, Jews from Stalingrad were forced to wear a yellow star on their sleeve and anyone found to be a member of the Communist party was handed over to the SD. The Russians claim that during the Battle of Stalingrad alone some 3,000 civilians were shot by the Germans and 60,000 deported to Germany, mainly as slave labour.
Massacres behind the lines, even of children, were commonplace. Local rarely went undisturbed by the Germans when under their occupation. Farmers were tortured to find out where they’d hidden their grain and if necessary the Germans didn’t think twice of throwing civillians out of their homes to use them as their own quarters, or even dismantling their homes to use as firewood out on the barren steppe.
Later on after the German encirclement Feldgendarmerie units often had to resort to using their sub-machine guns to maintain order as thousands of decrepit German stragglers tried to escape their predicament at the few remaining airfields still held by the 6th Army. After the 6th Army’s surrender, the Feldgendarmerie knew they were in grave danger as they were high priority targets for the Soviet NKVD to capture, and more often than not execute on the spot.
#5. Being a civilian
‘Their goes the neighbourhood’…ok no, that’s just too lame a joke isn’t it?
There’s no doubt that soldiers had a tough time of it in Stalingrad, but their suffering often paled in comparison to the city’s civilian population. In 1942 Stalingrad was home to about 750,000 people, or around the same size as Oklahoma City. While 300,000 civilians were evacuated during the first three weeks of the battle many tens of thousands remained trapped on the west bank of the Volga to struggle amid the fighting for the next five-months. 10,000 of them, including about 1,000 children, survived against all odds to emerge from the ruins when the Germans finally surrendered in February 1943.
They achieved this despite receiving practically no help from the Soviet government, which allocated every resource available to the Red Army. Many survived by performing meagre tasks for both armies, from shining boots to scouting out enemy positions. During breaks in the fighting women could be seen emerging from their hiding places to cut the meat off dead horses before the rats and homeless dogs got to them. Children were often the most successful scavenges because of their small size, but the Germans did not hesitate to shoot them if they were caught stealing army ration tins.
Civilian’s dwellings during the battle were often airless and buried deep underground. The Tsaritsa Gorge in southern Stalingrad for instance, forged by the river Tsaritsa which flowed down into the Volga, was home to thousands of civilians and soldiers for months who dug enormous underground cave systems into it’s sides to hide from the fighting. Others survived in the cellars of ruins and even in sewers. Disease, the cold and starvation slowly killed thousands, especially in the battle’s later stages. Civilians who fled from the city and made the arduous trek across the steppe often found little shelter for many days. The remnants of families huddled together at night by roadsides, babies died in their mother’s arms because of the cold, snow and bitter winds.
#4. Being captured
Only if you were lucky would you end up in Azkaban
Clearly the Germans and Russians at Stalingrad had never heard of the Geneva Convention. Despite enticing many Russians to surrender with promises of adequate food, shelter and maybe even a ticket home for Russians who had lived in the occupied territories, the Germans offered little sympathy to their prisoners. Prison camps behind the German lines were usually little more than a barbed wire enclosure out on the open steppe. Food supplies were meagre and often of such bad quality the Germans wouldn’t even eat them. Later on after the German encirclement such pitiful deliveries stopped entirely and after three months without food or shelter of the 3,500 Russian prisoners who had been trapped within the Kessel with the 6th Army only 20 had survived, and that had been by resorting to cannibalism.
But if you thought the Russians, with their nice, gentle, smiling, socialist ways were any better, then you could not be more wrong. Let’s not forget that the enemy soldiers they were locking up had just spent the past two years busily murdering, pillaging and raping their homeland, would you have shown any mercy to such monsters?
Of the 290,000 German soldiers surrounded within the Kessel in November barely 90,000 survived to surrender in February and only 5,000 eventually lived to see their homes again. Conditions within Russian camps, many of them in the Arctic climate of remote Siberia, were horrifying, and the Germans sometimes found themselves the ones resorting to cannibalism. Many remained in Russia until 1955.
#3. Surviving the winter
Think you’ve heard about all the horrors of the Russian Winter? Baby we’re just getting started. Stalingrad in January averaged –10 degrees at night and –4 in the day, as in half the time the temperature will be colder than that, with some nights plummeting down past –30. Meat and food froze into barely edible blocks that had to be sawed open because it was too hard to use knives. By October ice drifts were grating against each other down the Volga River and by December it had frozen over entirely. Many Russian reinforcements were crushed by incoming ice floes or drowned in the freezing river before they even had a chance to be machine gunned down or bombed by the Germans. There was eventually no fuel left to melt snow for washing or shaving. A bath and clean underwear were as distant a dream as a proper meal. Soldier’s minds went blank because the chilling of their blood slowed down mental activity. Walking wounded and sick made their own way to the rear through the snow. Many stopped to rest and never rose again. Attempts to supply the beleaguered Sixth army by air were hampered by the weather as much as enemy action. Icing was a constant problem. Heavy snowfalls paralysed airfields until planes could be dug out of snowdrifts, which often proved next to impossible for the exhausted and starving German troops. Soldiers sheltered in their bunkers as much from the cold as enemy artillery. On the German side especially conditions grew more and more primitive –
‘There they sit like hairy savages in stone-age caves, devouring horseflesh in the smoke and gloom, amidst the ruins of a beautiful city that they have destroyed’
Stalingrad, frozen over...
#2. The German surrender
Ever since the Germans had advanced upon Stalingrad in August, Stalin and his generals had been planning a massive counter-offensive. Hitler believed that Russia’s armies were finished, mainly due to the fact that some ten million Russians had been killed, wounded or captured in the last 18 months of fighting.
That’s this many times a thousand Russians.
However, by November 1942 the three million Axis troops fighting on the Eastern front were still facing five million Russians. The Soviet counter-offensive around Stalingrad aimed to break through to the north and south of the city, surround the German Sixth army and kick it in the rear and was called, very cleverly, Operation Uranus. Stalingrad had become the bait in one of the largest traps in history.
Where the hell is this guy when you need him?
On 19th November 1942 the trap was sprung, and within four days just over a million Russian troops had surrounded 300,000 German and Romanian troops in a pocket 40km across with the urban area of Stalingrad marking it’s eastern edge. The hunters had very abruptly become the hunted.
The situation at Stalingrad after the encirclement of the German 6th Army
Conditions within the Stalingrad pocket, which the Germans called the ‘Kessel’ (Cauldron), quickly went from bad to worse. As terrible as the earlier fighting in Stalingrad had been the Germans had until now been at least fairly adequately supplied with food, water, fuel and ammunition. What's more, the weather was growing ever worse as winter approached.
Out on the frozen steppes of southern Russia every imaginable horror faced the beleaguered German troops. As winter came the ground became too hard for the weakened Germans to dig trenches or dugouts, causing thousands to eventually die of exposure to the cold. Food supplies were running dangerously low by December. Even when food was delivered many soldiers quickly died from over-eating, akin to concentration camp survivors.
As clean clothes became as elusive as a hot meal lice spread to nearly every member of the Sixth Army. Epidemics of Typhus, Dysentery and a dozen other diseases swept through the German ranks. Frostbite was widespread, yet soldiers whose feet had merely swollen and turned blue soon did not merit more than basic medical attention and were immediately sent back to the frontline. Only when their extremities had become black and gangrenous were they amputated and their evacuation by plane became a possibility.
The Luftwaffe promised to supply the 6th Army by air, but less than a quarter of the required supplies landed between the Army’s encirclement in late-November and its final collapse and surrender at the start of February. Soldiers reported their frostbitten toes being gnawed off by rats while they fitfully slept between Russian artillery bombardments. Frequent Russian attacks became increasingly dangerous as ammunition supplies ran low. A scene of utter chaos pervaded at Pitomnik airfield, the only major airstrip within the Kessel. Thousands of critically wounded were packed in rows along its edges waiting to be evacuated while the burnt-out husks of dozens of destroyed aircraft and thousands of stacked corpses lay nearby. So desperate was the need for fuel to burn fires for heat that the signpost at the airfield’s edge was removed to be burnt as fuel and replaced with the gruesome sight of a horse’s leg stuck in a mound of snow with the sign re-attached to it’s top.
By January the German’s had been so weakened by starvation, the cold, disease and exhaustion that officers behind the lines had largely given up on playing chess or reading because of the concentration such tasks required. Battle stress eventually sent many soldiers insane, men raved wildly in their frozen dugouts and some lay their howling or wept helplessly. Others had to be forcefully restrained by their comrades. All the while Soviet propaganda broadcasts could be heard emanating from across No-Man’s-Land and Soviet attacks, air-raids and artillery bombardments grew ever more deadly by the day.
The German’s supply situation became more and more critical…Actually you know what? This is just getting depressing and distasteful; it’s like making fun of holocaust survivors…let’s move on.
The final blow began on January 10th 1943 when the Russians began their final assault to crush the Kessel and the 150,000 men it still contained. By January 23rd the last German airfield had been taken. The remains of the 6th Army retreated towards the ruins of Stalingrad at the Eastern end of the Kessel. The spectacle of defeat grew more terrible the closer retreating soldiers came to the city-
‘As far as the eye can see lie soldiers crushed by tanks, hopelessly moaning wounded, frozen corpes, vehicles abandoned through lack of fuel, blow-up guns and miscellaneous equipment…’
By the end of January the commander of the 6th Army Field Marshall Friedrich Paulus, who had previously stated ‘I have no intention of shooting myself for this Bohemian Corporal’ (Hitler) decided to let himself be captured rather than commit suicide. On February 2nd 1943 the bulk of the remaining Germans in Stalingrad surrendered. 90,000 were taken prisoner, yet only 5,000 would live to see Germany again, and only after years of nightmarish captivity.
Surely nothing could be worse than this nightmare?
#1. ‘Child traitors’
Civilians in Stalingrad didn’t just have the Germans and the elements to worry about; running afoul of the Soviet side was tragically all too easy. In their desperation for food many civilians begged the Germans for help, who occasionally obliged. As many simple tasks in Stalingrad were dangerous because of Soviet snipers, German soldiers sometimes promised young Russian boys and girls a crust of bread in return for something as simple as refilling their water bottles down by the Volga. When the Soviets realized what was happening they shot children on such missions without mercy. This was not just a local anomaly but official Soviet policy. Stalin had ordered the previous year not long after the initial German invasion that Red Army troops were to kill any civilians obeying German orders, even if under duress. Even when the Germans forced civilians to drag back German corpses from No-Man’s-Land to be reburied the Russians opened fire regardless. Both sides showed absolutely no mercy at Stalingrad.
