II.

The German Assault

On July 23, 1942, German dictator Adolf Hitler ordered General Friedrich Paulus, the commander of the German Sixth Army, to capture Stalingrad, an important industrial and communications center straddling the Volga River. Hitler wanted Stalingrad to serve as a base for a German invasion of the Caucasus region where rich oil reserves could be tapped for the German war effort and denied to the Soviet Union.

The Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, ordered his forces to defend Stalingrad at all costs, demanding that the soldiers of the Red Army take “not a step back.” In late August he called on his two best military professionals—General Zhukov, who had organized a counteroffensive to defend Moscow, the Soviet capital, in December 1941, and the army chief of the General Staff, General Vasilyevsky—to deal with the situation at Stalingrad. They proposed to wear the enemy down by locking German troops into a bloody fight for the city while the Red Army assembled the means for a counterattack.

By September 3 the German forces had pushed the Soviet defenders of Stalingrad back to the west bank of the Volga. The German air force, the Luftwaffe, pounded the city into rubble, but the shattered buildings provided cover for the Soviet defenders. The German panzer tanks were unsuited to this kind of urban warfare and what became a long battle of attrition where progress, as one German general remarked, was measured not by the mile but by the yard.

A series of German assaults on the Soviet forces occupying the west bank resulted in grueling and bitter hand-to-hand fighting in the ruins. By the end of October the Germans were exhausted and short of ammunition, while the Soviet defenders, who had just managed to cling to their positions, were replenished across the Volga with troops, food, ammunition, tanks, and guns.