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FROM REDBEARD TO BLUE

The war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was a clash of ideologies, a tussle between empires, and a continuation of the age-old struggle between the European West and the Asiatic East. It was also a collision of two psychopathic personalities. At the nub of the war on the eastern front was the rivalry between the criminally xenophobic person of Adolf Hitler and the morbidly paranoid figure of Joseph Stalin. The battle between them took on a grandiose and fearsome life of its own at Stalingrad in 1942. It became a monster that consumed as many as two million men.

Years before he came to power, Hitler had made plans for a crusade against the barbaric Bolshevik east. It is all set out in his early autobiography Mein Kampf (My Struggle’). Hitler wrote the book in 1924, while serving a prison sentence for attempting a coup in Bavaria. It consisted of a queasy mix of anti-Jewish and anti-Communist rants, self-pitying or self-aggrandizing reminiscences, and dull lectures on German politics. It was an indigestible recipe for a book, and even Hitler’s closest friends and allies admitted in private that they had not been able to finish it.

But for all its ghastliness as a piece of writing, Mein Kampf does express the fullness of its author’s philosophy. And with a true politician’s instinct, Hitler reduces his theories to a series of easy slogans. Among the catchwords is Volk, which means The people’ but contains the quasi-mystical notion that the Germanic peoples represent the peak of humanity’s cultural evolution, and so have a special destiny to rule over lesser nations. Then there is Lebensraum —Tiving space’ — the idea that there was not room enough in Germany for the energetic Germans, that the nation needed to expand. A third slogan is Drang nach Osten — roughly ‘the urge to the east’ — which is the proposition that the natural annexe of Greater Germany lies in the fertile farmland of Poland and the Western Ukraine. Add to all this such martial contentions as ‘the German people owes its existence solely to its determination to fight,’ and you have a programme for robbing the Slavic peoples of their ancestral territory. Once Hitler was at the helm, war with Russia was always going to happen.

Hitler was happier performing to an audience than writing books (even Mein Kampf was dictated to his doggish underling, Rudolf Hess), and in his speeches he occasionally came out with an arresting turn of phrase. In 1936, for example, while addressing a gathering of the Nazi party faithful in Munich, he made this strangely intimate remark:

I follow the path that Providence has ordained with the assurance of a sleepwalker.

That single sentence says a great deal about the man. The path of fate is laid out in advance — so whatever Hitler does on that path is by definition right, and the idea that he might make mistakes becomes a logical impossibility. Meanwhile, the sleeping Hitler sees only his dream, which is both his inspiration and his own creation. There is no question that he is responsible for what he does in his dreaming state, or that those actions might be morally wrong. However nightmarish the sleepwalker’s vision, he has a perfect right to live it out.

THE TWO DICTATORS

Hitler was democratically elected Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. At that time, Joseph Stalin had been master of the Kremlin for some years. It has been pointed out that there are some striking parallels between the lives of Hitler and Stalin. Both had experience of war in their youth — Hitler was a lowly infantryman on the Western Front in World War I; Stalin was a commander in the Russian Civil War. Both men served time in prison for their revolutionary activities in the countries that they came to lead.

Intriguingly, both were from national minorities. Hitler was an Austrian, not a German; Stalin came from the Caucasian province of Georgia, and Georgian was his native language (he spoke Russian with a marked foreign accent all his life).

Once they came to power, both men were tyrants — and both used their great personal power to boost the standing of their respective nations. Stalin, for his part, inaugurated the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union by means of ‘five-year plans’, and in so doing made the USSR into a modern superpower. In February 1931 he said:

Those that lag behind are beaten. We do not want to be beaten. Old Russia was ceaselessly beaten for her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans, she was beaten by Swedish feudal lords, she was beaten by Polish-Lithuanian Pans, she was beaten by Anglo-French capitalists, she was beaten by Japanese barons, she was beaten by all for her backwardness. We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten years. Either we do it or they will crush us.

Stalin was right to link the necessity for modernization to the threat of war, to all the wars that Russia had fought and lost. And his guess that he had a decade to catch up was spot on, as the German invasion was to come ten years and four months after he spoke those words. By then, Stalin had succeeded in dragging the new Soviet state into the 20th century. The first five-year plans effectively put the country’s economy on a war footing, though the war was yet to come. Factory cities were built in the ore-rich regions, and these new cities were populated by enthusiastic young migrants. Entire new industries were planted and took root in Siberia. Medieval farming methods were abolished — the tractor drove out the horse-drawn plough — and agriculture was brought under state control. A modern army and air force were created.

But these changes came at immense cost. When the mass of Russian peasants were herded into large state-run collective farms, they lost their livestock and their right to sell privately. The better-off peasants resisted the process fiercely, and so felt the full force of the Socialist state’s determination to industrialize. Millions of these ‘kulaks’ were liquidated; a famine was engineered in the western Ukraine to break the resistance of the Ukraine people to Soviet rule and to collectivization.

The educated classes — the intelligentsia — were also seen by the new regime as a brake on the process of modernization, as reluctant bystanders to the historic triumph of the working classes. In the Great Terror of the 1930s they were arrested in their hundreds of thousands. The process became a kind of mass psychosis, in which Stalin’s own suspicious and vengeful personality was magnified and let loose on the populace. ‘Enemies of the people’ were deemed to be at work in every factory and office. People denounced their neighbours, and the arrestees, under torture, denounced anyone they could think of, thereby providing a fresh crop of enemies for the secret police — the NKVD — to gather in. Victims of this process were shot or else shipped to the gulag, where they worked as slave labourers on immense industrial projects such as the building of the White Sea Canal.

Disastrously for the conduct of the war that was yet to come, there was a mighty purge of the armed forces in 1937 and 1938. Officers were arrested and eliminated in their thousands. Almost half of the entire officer corps was shot or deported to the camps. Among the victims were many of the highest-ranking soldiers: 60 out of 85 corps commanders, 110 out of 195 divisional commanders, 220 out of 406 brigade commanders. No foreign enemy could have caused such attrition: Stalin had decapitated his own army on the eve of war.

Soon after the purges, a system of‘dual command’ was introduced in the Red Army: every officer, from the highest general to the lowliest lieutenant, was to be shadowed by a ‘commissar’, a politically minded officer who would act as the ideological conscience of the commander. Commissars were first used in the Russian Civil War, when many officers in the Red Army were former Tsarist soldiers — good at their jobs, but not necessarily committed to the Bolshevik cause. The need for political overseers had died away in the 1920s, once the state ideology permeated through the officer corps. So the reintroduction of the commissar system now was a measure of the distrust Stalin felt for his own armed forces.

Hitler’s revival of Germany meanwhile was, one might almost say, spiritual in character. He aimed to change the German people’s idea of itself, and — to the immense detriment of Germany and the peoples of Europe — he succeeded brilliantly. Many Germans of Hitler’s generation were bitter about their country’s defeat in the Great War. They saw the peace terms imposed by the Western Allies at Versailles as a stain on their national honour. Hitler’s impassioned rhetoric seemed to acknowledge those old hurts, but he also had a practical remedy to hand. As soon as Hitler took power, he got down to rebuilding Germany’s armed forces, the Wehrmacht. Rearmament was in direct contravention of the Versailles treaty, but Allied governments turned a blind eye, not wanting to provoke the irascible new leader of Germany. This allowed Hitler to increase the number of men under arms from barely 100,000 to almost four million between 1932 and 1939. At the same time he, like Stalin, devoted resources to the construction of a powerful air force and large numbers of tanks.

There was one man who quickly realized that it was not just the number but also the nature of Hitler’s new soldiers that gave cause for alarm. As early as 1934 Winston Churchill said: ‘Germany is now equipping itself with the technical apparatus of modern war, and at the same time is instilling into the hearts of its youths and manhood the most extreme patriotic, nationalist and militarist conceptions.’ Not just a new generation of footsoldiers, then, but fanatical Nazi stormtroopers — eager for glory and conquest. Churchill’s insight was shrewd, but at this time he was out of government and out of favour. Hardly anyone heeded his warning.

THE ROAD TO WAR

Hitler tested his strength, and his future enemies’ will to resist him, in an incremental series of aggressive foreign-policy adventures. First, he withdrew Germany from the League of Nations and refused to continue paying reparations to the victors of the Great War. In 1935 he wrested the coal-rich Saarland from French control; in 1936 he sent troops into the demilitarized zone west of the Rhine, bringing his army up to the Dutch and Belgian borders. In March 1938 he annexed Austria to Germany. Hitler claimed he was merely bringing ethnic Germans back under the protection of the Reich, and that he was doing so at those peoples’ own request. The same argument justified the takeover of the Sudetenland, German-speaking borderlands of Czechoslovakia, in September 1938.

This gradual expansion was achieved more or less peacefully, with the acquiescence of the Western powers. After the Sudetenland, Hitler declared that he had no more territorial claims in Europe, and many people across Europe breathed a sigh of relief. The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, went to Munich and extracted a promise from the Führer that his appetite was sated, and got him to put his signature to it. Chamberlain came back triumphant from Germany, and waved that flimsy paper above his head. ‘It’s peace in our time’ he announced.

But time was running out. Hitler thought nothing of breaking the undertaking he had signed with Chamberlain, and in 1939 he began to put pressure on Poland to allow a corridor across its territory to the German-speaking city of Danzig on the Baltic coast, and to the little enclave of East Prussia beyond it. The Poles refused to cede any territory to Germany, and so Hitler threatened to take a chunk of Poland by force.

But first he had some business to conclude with Stalin, who for years had been railing against Hitler’s land-greed and the Western powers’ cowardly policy of appeasement. Hitler needed to reassure Stalin that his drive to the east represented no threat to the Soviet Union. The two leaders did not meet in person, but their respective foreign ministers, Joachim Ribbentrop for Germany and Vyacheslav Molotov for Russia, negotiated a non-aggression treaty that was signed in August 1939. This was a stunning event: The sinister news broke upon the world like an explosion,’ wrote Churchill. In the House of Commons Chamberlain said with almost comical understatement that: ‘I do not attempt to conceal from the House that the announcement came to the government as a surprise, and a surprise of a very unpleasant character.’

But the most outrageous and sinister part of the treaty remained secret. Hitler and Stalin had agreed to share out the lands that lay between their two empires. When Hitler invaded Poland from the west, Stalin was to take possession of the eastern half of the country. Stalin would also be free to occupy the three free Baltic states — Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — and in the south he would grab the Romanian-speaking province of Bessarabia (soon to be renamed Moldavia). This cynical division of the spoils made war in Europe not only inevitable, but also imminent.

A week after the pact was sealed, German troops marched into Poland. This provoked Britain, which had no means of helping the Poles, into making an impotent declaration of war. Stalin waited a couple of weeks until the Germans had completed their blitzkrieg campaign, then sent his troops across the western border of the USSR. Within a few days Russian and German troops faced each other along a new frontier running north to south across what had been Polish territory. Poland itself had effectively ceased to exist.

Stalin could now relax. It seemed that the war would play itself out in Western Europe. In 1940 he watched from the Kremlin as Hitler unleashed his shiny new war machine on Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium and France. He observed from a distance the air battle over Britain and the subsequent bombing of British cities. True enough, Stalin took some military precautions in 1941, as reports came in that Germany was planning to break the non-aggression treaty, and he was alarmed and angered by an obvious build-up of German forces on his western borders. But like Chamberlain and other leaders in the 1930s, Stalin did not want to rile Hitler, especially now that the Wehrmacht had been tempered in battle and had all the resources of Europe behind it.

In the middle of June 1941 Stalin received a frantic message from his most reliable foreign spy, saying that the Germans were definitely going to invade in one week’s time. It was a golden piece of intelligence — but Stalin refused to believe it.

BARBAROSSA — ‘REDBEARD’

The German attack on Russia was launched before dawn on the morning of 22 June 1941. It was the largest invasion in the history of warfare. Some four million men smashed through the Soviet defences at three points along the lengthy Russian border. Army Group North struck across the Baltic states towards Leningrad; Army Group Centre headed due east from Warsaw towards Minsk, Smolensk and, beyond them, Moscow; Army Group South, backed up by Hungarian and Romanian forces, punched its way into the Ukraine. This vast onslaught was code-named ‘Barbarossa’ — Redbeard — in honour of Frederick I, the great German king who led the Third Crusade against Saladin in 1189. For Hitler, this was a no less glorious and sanctified undertaking. He was going to rid the world of the heresy of Bolshevism.

Stalin, for his part, was shocked to the core by the treacherous attack. He seems to have had some kind of breakdown, for he disappeared into his apartment and did not emerge for days. In effect, he deserted his post as commander-in-chief. To the dismay and bewilderment of the Soviet people, it was foreign minister Molotov who made the radio announcement on the first day of the invasion, informing them that the country was at war. But within the fortnight Stalin somehow pulled himself together, and emerged from his dark hidey-hole. On 3 July he addressed his people in a radio broadcast. Erskine Caldwell, an American living in Moscow, was up early to hear the speech. This is what he wrote in his diary:

At 6.30 am practically every person in the city was within earshot of a radio, either home set or street loudspeaker. Red Square and the surrounding plazas, usually partially deserted at that hour, were filled with crowds. When Stalin’s speech began, his words resounded from all directions, indicating that amplifiers were carrying the message to every nook and cranny of the city. This was Stalin’s first speech to the people through a microphone since 1938. His intervening ones had been delivered either to government gatherings or for recording machines.

Stalin’s guttural Georgian consonants would have grated on Russian ears had he not been so feared and revered. His tone was flat and his delivery was halting, but his first words were emotional, replete with the paternal condescension of the tsars of old: ‘Comrades, citizens, brothers and sisters, fighting men of our army and navy. I am speaking to you, my friends ...’ He began with a great lie. He said that ‘the enemy’s finest divisions had already been smashed and met their doom on the field of battle’, adding the contradictory admission that ‘the enemy continues to push forward’. Then he summed up the Germans’ war aims as he saw them, or as he wanted his simple people to understand them:

The enemy is cruel and implacable. He is out to seize our lands watered by the sweat of our brow, to seize our grain and oil, secured by the labour of our hands. He is out to restore the rule of the landlords, to restore tsarism, to Germanize our people, to turn them into the slaves of German princes and barons.

All this was true, given a little poetic licence. But everything Stalin had said up to this point was a preamble for his call to arms, his summons to destroy the enemy or, failing that, to destroy everything in his path, to ‘scorch the earth’ of Russia and make life hell for the invader.

In case of a forced retreat, all rolling stock must be evacuated, the enemy must not be left a single engine, a single railway car, a single pound of grain or gallon of fuel.

The collective farmers must drive all their cattle and turn over their grain to the safe keeping of the authorities for transport to the rear. All valuable property, including metals, grain and fuel, that cannot be withdrawn, must be destroyed without fail.

In areas occupied by the enemy, guerrilla units, mounted and on foot, must be formed. Sabotage groups must be organized to combat the enemy, to foment guerrilla warfare everywhere, to blow up bridges and roads, to damage telephone and telegraph lines, to set fire to forests, stores and transport. In occupied regions conditions must be made unbearable for the enemy and his accomplices. They must be hounded and annihilated at every step, and all their measures frustrated.

Caldwell, listening on the street in Moscow, was impressed both by Stalin’s words and by the instant reaction to them.

As an observer, I had the feeling that this announcement immediately brought about the beginning of a new era in Soviet life. The people have heard for the first time since the war began a fighting speech by their leader. As a Russian said to me, you may be sure that from this moment a grapple to the death has begun. From what I have seen during the day in the hotels and on the streets, I would not be surprised if the entire population of Moscow suddenly besieged the military offices for permission to move en masse to the front. A Russian girl told me today, and it is typical of sidewalk conversation, that the winning of this war was now the sole objective of her life. If there is any such thing as so-called total war, this is to be it. The battle of the Russian Steppes will make all previous conflicts seem like rehearsals.

Without doubt, Stalin’s dry rhetoric, along with the very fact of the invasion, had raised the Russian people to heights of righteous fury. The universal popular conviction that this was a sacred war helped the Soviet government’s efforts throughout the long years of conflict that were to come. This patriotic outrage was an intangible factor, but in the end perhaps the decisive one in their eventual victory.

But for now, the Germans were entirely in the ascendant. Harald Henry, a 20-year-old infantryman, crossed into Russian territory on 25 June, in the second wave of the invasion. He was taken aback by the havoc that his comrades had already wrought.

The sight of the line of retreat of their army, wrecked by our tanks and our stukas, is truly awful and shocking. Huge craters left by the stuka bombs all along the edges of the road that had blown even the largest and heaviest of their tanks up in the air and swivelled them round. Their army was taken by surprise, and was finished off by our tanks. And now we’ve been marching for 25 kilometres past images of terrible destruction. About 200 smashed-up, burnt-out tanks turned upside down, guns, lorries, field kitchens, motor-cycles, anti-tank guns, a sea of weapons, helmets, items of equipment of all kinds, pianos and radios, filming vehicles, medical equipment, boxes of munitions and books, grenades, blankets, coats, knapsacks. In among them, corpses already turning black.

Worst of all are the horses, torn to pieces, bloated, their intestines hanging out, their bloody muzzles torn away, gruesomely halfway between slaughtered and rotting, giving off a stench of putrefaction that hangs numbingly over our columns. The worst was a pig that was gnawing away with such relish at one of these dead horses that it made me think I might like a taste of horsemeat too.

Henry could not have imagined that a time would come when German soldiers would be glad of a piece of rotting horsemeat. In these first, hot weeks of the war in the east, everything seemed to be going better than any Landser — German trooper — could have hoped. Their problems were the problems of success: the advance was so swift that the infantry was almost constantly exhausted. They could not go forwards as fast as the Russians were retreating. The day after Stalin’s speech, Henry was well on his way to the city of Mogilev, but suffering from the intense summer heat.

Endless hours of marching ahead, 25 or 30 kilometres past shattered and burnt-out tanks, vehicle after vehicle, passing the skeletons of shot-up and totally scorched villages. The walls that remain rise up black and ghostly, with a few bright orange lilies still flowering in a small garden — quite eerie. The strange smell everywhere, a mixture of fire, sweat and horse corpses that will probably remain with me forever as part of this campaign. The dust shrouds us all. The body is wet all over, wide rivers run down one’s face — not just sweat, but sometimes tears as well, tears of helpless rage, despair and pain, squeezed out of us by the unremitting strain. No one can tell me that a non-infantryman can have the remotest idea of what we are going through here. Imagine the very worst extreme exhaustion that you’ve ever experienced, the burning pain of open, inflamed foot wounds and that’s the condition I was in — not by the end, but at the beginning of a 45-kilometre march.

Others found the going easier, and were exhilarated by the fast pace with its promise of an early victory. Bernhard Ritter, in Army Group South, even found time to get interested in the strange land he had come to conquer.

On the move, 30th July 1941. It’s now nearly six weeks that we’ve been marching and fighting here in Russia, and yet it seems like hardly three to me. That’s probably due to the pace at which we’re racing forward. We’re now a good bit further east of the Dnieper and will probably soon be catching up with the panzers, so that they can then move further ahead. There just don’t seem to be any days off, although our people are in sore need of them after the strenuous fighting that is now behind us at last. But this vast area can probably only be defeated by extreme effort.

Judging by my map, we seem to be leaving the impoverished White Russia behind and advancing into a somewhat better country, the villages are larger and situated closer together. The farmers make a reasonable impression. It is gratifying at last to see people that appear to have enough to eat after the pitiful wretches, to see people that are pleasant to look at.

19th August 1941, early. We’re on the march again. This unending eastern land is so vast, it’s quite impossible to try to gauge its extent. As one wave follows another at the beach, here it is always the same following on from the same. It’s still not possible for us to grasp it, the only thing is to rejoice at details, a clump of flowers in an abandoned garden, a meadow, trees. Here the featureless spaces flow endlessly as far as the horizon.

German flyboys had it easier still. The unblooded Soviet Air Force was no match for the battle-hardened Luftwaffe. More than 2,000 Russian planes were destroyed in the air or on the ground in the first week of the invasion. Russian fighter pilots were so naive in their battle tactics that the German field marshal Albert Kesselring was moved to call the war in the air ‘pure infanticide’. German bomber pilots such as Hans August Vowinckel went about their work unopposed. Eight days into the campaign he was bombing the ancient city of Smolensk, well over halfway between the start line and the goal of Moscow.

Smolensk is burning — it’s been a spectacular sight all night long! After a two and a half hour flight we didn’t need to search for our target, as gigantic fires lit up the night from afar as we approached. The colossal searching arms of the searchlights and the bright streaks of the anti-aircraft guns met high above the town — and we had to get through them in order to add our bit to the annihilation.

We flew in a wide arc over this fire dome. Then we set a course right into the centre of it. Inside the plane it was as light as day. The flames below drew one’s gaze with magnetic force, as if they wanted to pull men and machines into them. But the engines kept up an even drone, and the plane continued on an even path. The light of the searchlights entered the plane, without stopping it; the flak fire exploded without hitting us. Our bombs fell and punched out new fires in the town.

But the battle for Smolensk, 250 miles (400km) west of Moscow, was a kind of turning point. When the German ground troops reached the city in July, they encountered strong resistance for almost the first time. Here, where 121 years before the troops of Napoleon’s Grande Armee had paused on their way to Moscow, the Russians found the strength to land the kind of blow that would at least slow the Germans down. ‘At the front events are not developing at all as they had been planned,’ noted Franz Halder, Chief of the General Staff and one of Hitler’s key advisers. Optimistic forecasts that Barbarossa would be over in a month — or two at most — were forgotten or hastily revised.

Nevertheless, Moscow was still in danger. A strong thrust by Army Group Centre could certainly have taken the city in August, and this would have paralysed the entire Russian war effort. The war in the east could still have been won during the summer, as had always been Hitler’s aim. But at this critical moment, Hitler made one of the characteristically rash interventions that so infuriated his commanders. He stripped Army Group Centre of its tanks, sending half north to assist the attack on Leningrad and the other half south to bolster the Ukrainian campaign. The battle-weary German infantry would now have to march on Moscow without the support of armour.

As summer gave way to autumn, German soldiers in the field began to worry that they might be following too closely in Napoleon’s footsteps. They had no greatcoats or warm kit, and were keen to finish with Barbarossa before the long chill nights came. Unfortunately for them, the snows and bitter winds arrived unusually early in 1941. By mid-October Harald Henry, the soldier who had complained so bitterly about marching in the heat, was in the open land before Moscow, suffering from the even more painful ravages of cold.

From a quarter to six until two in the morning, with only a short pause, we were out in a blizzard. It penetrated our coats, our clothing gradually got soaked through, freezing stiff against our bodies. We were feeling unbelievably ill in the stomach and bowel. The cold soon exceeded all bounds. Lice! Frost gripped my pus-infected fingers.

We advanced into the forests, up to our knees in snow that filled our boots. My gloves were so wet I couldn’t bear them any longer. I wrapped a towel round my ravaged hands. It was enough to make you want to bawl. My face was contorted with tears, and I was already in a kind of a trance. I trudged on, my eyes shut, babbling meaningless words, and thinking all this was just happening in a dream. There was shooting, you fell into the snow, staggered on, turned in a circle, stood, waiting for orders. Torment without end.

Now it was nearly dark, we’d got through the forest. Then came the order: everyone to move on forward again. By now it was five o’clock. In the following nine hours we marched about 15 kilometres, the rest of the time we stood. Stood, wet and frozen, hands wrapped, in the open hour after hour. Boots froze solidly to the ground, we were wet through to the skin and stood, stood, stood, waited, marched on a bit, then stood again. I’m shattered in every fibre of my being, but will probably have to carry on when the onward march starts again tomorrow morning.

Lieutenant Willi Thomas was a 27-year-old infantry lieutenant. He too had remained happy and confident while the good weather lasted, but now his mood began to dip with the falling temperature. On 16 October 1941, he wrote a letter home to his girlfriend, Ingrid, and one can sense his soldierly optimism draining away almost sentence by sentence. His first taste of cold and hunger, and his alarm at the prospect of being surrounded, are a tiny presentiment of the horrors that his comrades would endure at Stalingrad the following year.

How can I begin to tell you, there is nothing I can say, began Thomas. My heart is still so full of the cruelty and difficulty of the last days and hours that I need to be holding your hand, so as to free myself of it all in the telling. But I know that just writing it to you will give me peace and strength ...

We broke through a line of steel and concrete bunkers and there we tasted war in all its rigour and pitilessness. Besides much else, that day took a particularly dear comrade of mine. His laugh and his peculiarly rough handshake will remain with me.

Though we were hoping for a little rest after this battle, the forward march went on without a break. A thick blanket of snow had fallen; it was almost as if heaven wanted to cover all trace of the blood and death that were there to be seen on that battlefield. The snow no longer melts, and the frost is growing harder all the time. This is the beginning of the Russian winter. After a good strong march we dug in at last — in one of the few villages that is not burning. But nothing came of the longed-for rest. At two o’clock in the night we received the order to push on eastward.

In the vast open spaces of Russia, neither side knew when or where they might encounter an enemy force. The skirmishing was sometimes more like a naval battle than an infantry advance. The Germans might spot a Russian grouping in the distance and engage it. Or, like a submerging submarine, a Russian column might melt into the landscape before battle could be joined. On this occasion both sides were surprised to find themselves suddenly in the fray:

Before it had even got light, in thick icy fog, we ploughed into the enemy, wrote Thomas. There ensued a battle which was tougher and more brutal than anything I had experienced until now. The acting commander, who was standing in for Oberleutnant B., was not on the spot —so I was leading the battalion almost single-handed.

We were attacking through a dense thicket. We were making good progress until suddenly we were being shot at from three sides, and were in danger of being boxed in by the Russians, which is the last thing you want. The battle raged backwards and forwards until midday, when the main danger seemed to be over. Until nightfall we lay on the ground — the enemy fifty metres away opposite us — and even then we had a lot to deal with. More and more comrades fell both to the left and the right of me, and I often felt that I was practically alone in the field.

At one point a shot glanced off my helmet, knocking me to one side. I heard corporal Klein, who was lying next to me, shout out: ‘Now our lieutenant is dead too’ But it wasn’t that bad. A metal sliver had just ripped the skin by my left eye.

We were all wet through from rolling around in the snow. There was of course no chance of getting anything to eat. And so the night came — the worst night I have ever spent. It is impossible to describe how frozen cold we were. Once we had seen to our dead and wounded we huddled together in our foxholes and tried to warm up. Around dawn more snow fell, and the frost eased up a little.

Fortunately our wretched situation now came to an end, because the enemy had withdrawn — as they often do when they have received a bloody nose.

Hitler was hoping to deliver more than just a bloody nose. The decisive battle for Moscow, Operation Typhoon, had begun at the start of October. Almost two million German troops were ranged on a 500-mile (800km) front that formed a wide arc around the city. Stalin appointed the 45-year-old Georgy Zhukov to organize the defence of the capital. General Zhukov accomplished the task with panache and efficiency, establishing himself as Stalin’s most useful and gifted commander. Nevertheless, by the end of October the Germans were close enough to the city to see its golden domes, and its nervous population could hear the sounds of battle coming from the west.

In an act of defiance, Stalin staged the traditional military parade through Red Square on Revolution Day, 7 November. The tanks and men that passed by Lenin’s mausoleum, under the Kremlin wall, proceeded straight from the square to the battlefront. The Germans, meanwhile, were planning a decisive offensive, one last attempt to take the city before the year was out. That attack came on 15 November. It rocked the Russian defences, but petered out within a fortnight without penetrating the city. By now the temperature had fallen to 35 degrees below zero: the winter was not just early, it was one of the coldest in memory.

Zhukov’s bold temperament was not content with merely fighting the enemy to a standstill. On 5 December, he launched a counter attack using fresh troops from Siberia. These men, who knew all about coping with cold, struck back hard at the shivering, demoralized Germans, who were stunned to find themselves on the sharp end of a Soviet offensive and could not hold their front line. Half a million German soldiers were killed in this one battle, and within ten days the Wehrmacht had been pushed back more than 100 miles (160km). It was now clear that the threat to Moscow had been removed until spring at least. Operation Barbarossa, the plan to defeat the USSR in a summer, had ended in failure. The war would resume come warmer weather. And the year 1942, the ‘hinge of fate’ as Churchill later called it, would see a different kind of struggle.

THE CHANGING SHAPE OF BLUE

Springtime in Russia is not a pleasant season. A damp and clammy cold replaces the crisp, dry frost of winter. The deep, crusty carpet of old snow melts, new snows fall, and together they turn the bleak countryside into a vast ocean of mire. The heavy topsoil remains saturated for weeks. It stinks of stagnation and sticks like glue. At the high tide of this swampy period, a man can sink into the ground up to his thighs, and the ground will suck the boots off his feet when he is pulled out. Even horses cannot wade through it, and travelling by wheeled vehicles becomes impossible. Russians call this annual flood of mud the rasputitsa — ‘the time of no roads’.

Hitler’s campaign of 1942 could not begin until the rasputitsa had run its course, since the Wehrmacht supply lines depended heavily on columns of trucks. The Germans also made extensive use of ‘panje wagons’, horse-drawn carts of almost medieval appearance that —unlike lorries and half-tracks — rarely broke down on the rutted dirt tracks that passed for roads in Russia.

But much planning was done in Berlin before the next round of the eastern war began. Despite the setbacks of winter, Germany was in a commanding position. The Wehrmacht had occupied a vast swathe of Soviet, territory. Belorussia and the Ukraine — with all their industrial and agricultural resources — were in German hands. Kiev and Kharkov, the USSR’s third and fourth largest cities, were deep inside enemy territory. The three Baltic states, granted to Stalin under the worthless non-aggression pact, were now in Hitler’s domain. Leningrad — the second city of Russia — had spent its first winter under siege. And the front ran for more than 1,000 miles (1,600km) in a wavy line from Lake Ladoga in the north to the Sea of Azov in the south.

There was not strength enough in the Wehrmacht to wage war along this extended front. German strategists all agreed that a single Schwerpunkt — point of maximum attack — must be selected for the campaign. Hitler’s generals, looking at the situation map, felt strongly that the best course of action was to strike a second blow at Moscow with Army Group Centre, the strongest prong of the German trident. Hitler disagreed. His plan was to use Army Group South to drive south-east from the Ukraine towards the oilfields of Maikop on the Black Sea and Grozny in the Caucasus. If he could do this, he would starve the Russians of fuel for their war effort, and so force them into submission. At the same time he could use the oil himself to continue the war in the west. So winning on this front would ipso facto provide the means of winning on the other. This was the kind of bold all-encompassing stroke that Hitler loved. He knew it was a gamble, but inspired rolls of the dice were his forte, the practical proof of his special genius. It was with relish rather than trepidation that he told his officers: ‘Either I get the oil of Maikop and Grozny, or I must put an end to this war.’

The plan to seize Russia’s oil was given the codename Fall Blau —‘Case Blue’. General Ewald von Kleist was the commander of the First Panzer Army, one of the units that was to spearhead the attack.

The capture of Stalingrad was subsidiary to the main aim, said Kleist after the war. It was only of importance as a convenient place, in the bottleneck between the Don and the Volga, where we could block an attack on our flank by Russian forces coming from the east. At the start, Stalingrad was no more than a name on the map to us.

Hitler said that we must capture the oilfields by the autumn, because Germany could not continue the war without them. When I pointed out the risks of leaving such a long flank exposed he said he was going to draw on Romania, Hungary and Italy for troops to cover it. I warned him, and so did others, that it was rash to rely on such troops, but he would not listen. He told me that these troops would only be used to hold the flank along the Don from Voronezh to its southerly bend, and beyond Stalingrad to the Caspian, which, he said, were the easiest sectors to hold.

No one could persuade Hitler that these foreign troops, far from home and lacking a commitment to the grand Nazi design, could turn out to be the Achilles’ heel of the Wehrmacht. The Sleepwalker was too wrapped up in his dreams of conquest to hear other voices.

Case Blue was due to begin on 22 June, a year to the day after Barbarossa. But on the 19th a strange incident caused an unexpected delay, and nearly scuppered the entire operation. On that day a staff officer named Major Joachim Reichel took a flight along the front line to check the disposition of the opposing armies. He had foolishly taken with him a briefcase containing the plans for Blau in his sector of the front. But he flew too near to the Russian line and was shot down in no-man’s-land. A German search party was sent out to find the wreckage. They located it without encountering the Russians, but they had been beaten to the finish line: the pilot’s body was there; Reichel and his briefcase were gone. The foolhardy Major Reichel was in fact dead and buried. He had survived the crash, but was killed by the Russians who found him when he refused to surrender. His briefcase with its precious plans was already on its way to Stalin.

The Germans were plunged into a frenzied debate by Reiche’s fatal blunder: should Blau be cancelled now that the Russians had the plans? Could the plan be adapted to take account of this security breach? They need not have worried. As Stalin pored over Reiche’s maps in the Kremlin, his chary mind could not believe that the plane wreck and its booty were anything other than a deliberate deception. Perversely, seeing the evidence of the German intention to strike for oil in the south confirmed his belief that the Germans’ real goal for 1942 was the centre, Moscow. He refused to shore up the line in the south by moving forces away from the capital. That, surely, was what the Germans wanted him to do.

So with Stalin’s unwitting help, Operation Blue got off to a cracking start. On 28 June, the German Second Army and the Fourth Panzer Army poured into the gap between the parallel courses of the rivers Donets and Don. This strike force was supported by the Sixth Army under General Friedrich Paulus, which set out from the more southerly starting point of Kharkov. At first everything seemed to be going according to plan. The Russian is finished,’ said Hitler to General Halder in July, and the normally cautious Halder could not disagree: ‘It certainly looks like it,’ he said.

But precisely because things were going so well, Hitler started meddling with the plan. He decided that the unexpectedly good progress meant that his armies were too generously deployed: if he split them up, he could achieve all the objectives of Blau and more. So Army Group South was divided in two. Group A was to rush to the Caucasus and seize the oilfields of Maikop, then perhaps head on to the jackpot prize of Baku on the Caspian coast, which produced four-fifths of Soviet oil. Army Group B was to destroy the Russian armies west of the Don. These tasks were now to take place simultaneously rather than one after the other. This meant that two Army Groups would function independently rather than support each other: their aggregate fighting strength would consequently be halved. Moreover, Paulus’s Sixth Army, the largest formation in Group B, was stripped of the support of Fourth Panzer — a move very reminiscent of the denuding of Army Group Centre at Moscow the previous summer. The tanks were sent south to join Army Group A. But late in July Hitler reversed that decision and sent the tanks back to the north, because something on the operational charts had caught his eye. Stalingrad, the city that bore the name of his wily adversary, was beginning to look like a personal affront. It was a nasty blot on the map. With a stroke of the pen Hitler decreed that the city would not just be neutralized: it must be occupied, conquered. This now became the primary task of the Sixth Army, which was presently battling its way down to the great south-westerly bend in the River Don.

NOT ONE STEP BACK

Stalin was alive to the threat facing his city even before it began to worm its way into Hitler’s greedy consciousness. Martial law was declared in Stalingrad in the middle of July: from that time the city was under its jurisdiction, and the civilian population was put to work digging trenches and building tank traps on the western approaches to the city.

On 28 July, the Soviet high command, the Stavka, issued Order No. 227, the directive known as ‘Not One Step Back’, which was distributed to every unit in the Russian armed forces and solemnly read out loud to the troops. It reads like a sermon, and its question-and-answer format is the stylistic hallmark of the former seminarian Stalin. His personal signature invested the order with almost scriptural authority. The lesson begins with a reproach from on high.

The people of our country, for all the love and respect that they have for the Red Army, are beginning to feel disappointment in it; they are losing faith in it, and many curse the Red Army for giving our people over to the yoke of the German oppressors while the Army runs away to the east.

Some foolish people at the front comfort themselves by saying that we can always retreat further east, since we have much territory, much land and manpower, and that we will always have more than enough grain. They say this to excuse their shameful conduct at the front. But such talk is lies and falsehood, and only helps our enemies.

After the loss of the Ukraine, Belorussia, the Baltic lands, the Donbass and other regions, we have much less territory, far fewer people, much less grain and metal, fewer factories and industrial plants. To retreat any further would be to ruin ourselves and our Motherland. Every little scrap of land that we give up strengthens our enemy and weakens our defence, our Motherland.

And so the time for retreating is over. Not one step back! — that must now be our watchword.

Can we take the blows of the enemy and push them back to the west? Yes we can, because the factories in the rear are doing excellent work and the front is receiving ever more aircraft, tanks, artillery and mortars.

Is there something we lack? We lack order and discipline. This is our main shortcoming. We must establish the strictest order and iron discipline in our army if we want to rescue the situation and defend the Motherland. Panickers and cowards will be eliminated on the spot. Commanders of companies, battalions, regiments and divisions, along with their commissars and political workers, will be considered traitors to the Motherland if they retreat without orders from above.

The document went on to spell out some practical measures. Any officer or soldier guilty of a disciplinary offence would be sent to a shtrafbat, a penal battalion. These units were used for suicidal tasks such as attacking across minefields. The only way out of such a unit was to be wounded, that is ‘to atone with blood for crimes against the Motherland’. The shtrafbat was, in other words, nearly always a death sentence. Another new kind of unit was instituted by Order No. 227 — the ‘blocking battalion’ or zagradbat. The job of these formations was to linger at the back in any attack, and shoot any soldier who looked as if he was retreating or not advancing fast enough. In the course of the upcoming battle for Stalingrad, thousands of Russian soldiers were summarily executed or shot on the battlefield by other Russians, the unforgiving disciplinarians of the zagradbats.

Stalin’s order certainly put the fear of God into the Red Army and perhaps added some steel to the Russian defence. ‘If this order had been issued at the beginning of June,’ said one Soviet infantryman, ‘then our division would have fought harder in the Ukraine and may not have ended up in the Stalingrad region.’ But Stalin’s cajoling of his army could not stop the enemy advance down the Donets corridor. The Germans had caught the Russians in the crook of the Don and were chewing them up relentlessly. Hans S— was a corporal in the 546th Regiment, 389th Infantry Division. His unit was making headway but he was finding the going tough, as his letters home show.

August 7th. For the last two days we’ve been positioned here, first we were supposed to attack, then that was called off, and at about 8 o’clock another regiment at the ready behind us attacked. Just a word about where we are. Two days ago we reached this immense plain. Not a village, not a bush, not a tree anywhere, and the worst thing, no water. On the other hand, not a cloud in the sky, and the hot rays of the sun are beating down mercilessly on our foxholes. As a result of our rapid advance and the thinly populated area (we’re in the Don bend) rations are very limited. We Landsers ended up getting half a slice of bread a day. The last two days we haven’t had any at all, just three-quarters of a billycan of soup from the kitchen once a day. But worst of all is coping with thirst in the August heat. We watch for the field kitchen a hundred times a day and wait from hour to hour to see whether there’s any coffee coming to wet our tongues. The tarpaulin does provide some shade, but all the same it’s terribly hot under it, as it has to be pitched so low to prevent the enemy seeing it.

The paucity of Russian villages was a real problem. Marauding the local population was the Sixth Army’s main means of feeding itself. This is why the corporal was complaining to his wife about having to go hungry.

August 8th, Saturday. I’m going to carry on with yesterday’s letter now. We were pulled back three kilometres and got our water bottles filled. There we heard that the previous night the Russians forced their way into the village behind us and went wild. But they were pinned down and were finished off to the last man. These bastards — a whole unit of them — happened to find a position where the Landsers on guard duty had fallen asleep.

We stayed lying in a small hollow till twelve o’clock and then followed the unit that had been attacked earlier. Unbearable heat, and by six o’clock we’d reached our destination. Now we’re positioned in an abandoned field of oats that would probably take a hundred days to harvest. We immediately came under heavy fire. Everyone’s so thirsty, we can hardly get our holes dug. But it’s got to be done, even though the ground is rock hard from the unending heat... We are tense, waiting to find out if they’re advancing in our direction. From what we’ve been told by deserters, the Russians have very good forces and have no intention of letting themselves be beaten.

August 13th. We took part in two attacks on the great Don bend. For once our unit was in reserve, which was very lucky for us, as there were many deaths. So we have a unit in our regiment which is left with 28 riflemen. As we passed by the graves in the battle area, we had to thank God that things went as they did for us, even though all leave is cancelled. For the past few days we’ve been getting plenty to eat again. What’s more, the post arrived.

The intensity of the fighting was beginning to give Hans intimations of mortality. That, and the sweet melancholy of a letter from home, put him in a maudlin frame of mind.

Now, my dear wife, there’s something I must tell you, in case it should come about and it is the will of divine Providence that I shouldn’t return home, you have done everything for me that you could. I don’t want this sentence to upset you or make you cry, my dear wife, when one is stuck here in the thick of things, as our regiment is, you have to reckon with everything, even though we and you don’t want it to happen.

With his next letter, Hans sent some of the propaganda leaflets that the Russians were producing to try to demoralize the Germans. At this stage, before the Russians had taken many prisoners who were willing to help them with the text, the quality of the German in the leaflets was often poor. This naturally amused the Germans and made them think their enemy was inferior and stupid — the very opposite of the intended effect. In any case it was the Germans who were taking all the prisoners at this stage, and a pretty sorry lot they were in the eyes of their captors.

20th August, Thursday. I’m sending you a few leaflets along with this letter to show you what these bastards are up to —they must be really desperate. They seem to think that we Landsers should give ourselves up and change sides. We would rather not have to catch so many of them: all they do is grumble about Stalin. Yesterday one of these Russkies had the cheek to ask me for cigarettes. You should have seen the look on his face when I reached for my pistol. The nerve of these fellows is really too much at times, so that one of them occasionally gets a kick up the arse ...

Don’t show these leaflets to anyone!

22nd August. Yesterday our unit was badly hit. Two comrades from my group were killed in action, and my good friend Zap was shot in the lung. You’ve no idea how we all feel, especially as the unit is about to go on the attack again early this morning. We’re very tense. The Russians defend themselves fiercely. Now there’s talk of our being pulled out, and that this was the regiment’s last attack. I only hope so, since we’re war-weary. Now let’s see how things carry on and hope for the best...

We’ve just learned that our commander also got severely wounded. Such a smart, able officer, what a shame. Our sarge, who’s always been so courageous, is very depressed. Now here’s our commander wounded, it’s just beyond description. He’s saying that if the unit does attack there won’t be many men left.

Though Hans S—’s regiment had been badly mauled, the Sixth Army as a whole was rampant. They were battling two Russian armies: the 64th and the 62nd. Both were in full flight. The 64th Army had withdrawn across the river late in July and blown up the bridge behind them. Alexander Utvenko, a Ukrainian colonel with the 33rd Guards Division, had taken part in that battling retreat across terrain as dry as desert, and he had struggled to manage it in good order. Progress was impeded by the many natural ravines, deep cracks in the baked crust of the steppe, called balkas in the local Russian dialect.

When I took command of the division, it was already on the defensive, said Utvenko. On the 23rd of July the Germans had launched a massive attack with several divisions across a 22-kilometre stretch of our front. On our right flank, their tanks had broken through, and the division on our left flank had fallen back. I bent the flanks to form a circular defence. I deployed the mobile reserve in the defence: 17 tanks with machinegunners. On the 24th of July communications with the army were lost. They were restored on the 27th of July, only to be severed for good on the 6th of August.

The divisions to the right and left of us had moved out across the Don. I stood my ground, both because I had been ordered to, and because I saw my division as a strong point that our troops could make use of to take the offensive. I had one German division completely pinned down, and another two partially. We would soon have been overrun if we hadn’t dug in below head height. We were running out of munitions and provisions. The wounded were sent to the rear by night, on carts and camels. Right from the outset, we were short of food. We started boiling and eating wheat.

By the 9th there was nothing left to eat at all.

That evening Utvenko received an order over the radio to cross the Don rather than be annihilated where he stood. He now commanded 3,000 or so stragglers from the battles in the Donets corridor. Only about one in 20 of them were to survive the retreat to Stalingrad.

The Germans sustained heavy losses, too. In just one sector, we threw 513 German corpses into a balka. We had counter-attacked and held our ground, leaving a lot of dead Germans deep in our defence, and you couldn’t breathe for the stench of them.

We moved across the balkas in two columns. We broke through on a narrow front, losing around 300 men. During the night and morning, the Germans deployed an infantry regiment to the east, closing the ring around us once again. On the 11th, at four o’clock in the morning, the battle resumed. We were bombed, and attacked by tanks.

The battle went on until midday. I myself reloaded my Mauser five times. Some commanders blew their own brains out. We lost maybe a thousand men. But one soldier took a leaflet out of his pocket and started walking towards the Germans. Galya, our interpreter at division headquarters, shouted ‘Look, that rat’s surrendering!’ And she shot him with her Mauser.

Tanks were shooting at us point-blank. I was firing from the last gun. The gun ran out of shells, six gun crews were knocked out. The Germans ran up to the gun, and I jumped from the precipice to a marsh about nine metres below.

A shell hit me in the legs, completely covering me with mud. The Germans were sitting up on the precipice, and I could hear them talking as I drifted in and out of consciousness. When it was dark, I and two other soldiers crawled out up to the next precipice, where we found another four men, and then more, until there were twenty of us. We sat out the day in a field of sunflowers.

Hidden among the flowers, Utvenko recalled another tight spot he had been in during the previous year’s fighting. The memory of it made him believe that he could get out of this predicament too.

We had broken out of encirclement in 1941, too. That autumn, I swam across the river Ugra, breaking the crust of ice as I swam. The shards of ice were as sharp as needles, but I had to make it, I had to make it... and I made it! But that was a picnic compared to the encirclement of this summer, when every drop of water had to be fought for. We were throwing grenades just to capture the German soldiers’ water bottles.

I never took off my soldier’s tunic. I escaped from the encirclement still wearing my insignia. If you’re going to die, you should die in your uniform. To have a colonel’s uniform but die in civvies would be miserable, shameful! If it weren’t for Soviet power, I’d be nothing but a farm-labourer.

So we ended up with 120 armed men. We swam across the Don. Eight men drowned. By night, we mustered. I had a temperature of nearly 104. My new aide-de-camp, Vasya Khudobkin, was an obstetrician by training: he should have been caring for women, but he ended up treating men.

But he killed more Germans than he cured our lads. He swam over the Don with his machinegun. After we crossed the Don, I assembled 600 armed men, and from the 16th to the 25th of August we held the line near Alexeyevka. At the end of it all, there were 160 men left in my division.

I haven’t yet lived for myself, everything has been for the cause. Until the war, I didn’t know what kind of a man I was. But now all I have left is to fight. No one will ever write to me ‘Look after yourself!’ All I can think about is that I want to die in Kiev.

The Russian 62nd and 64th Armies crowded into the isthmus between the Don and the Volga. Individual units and single soldiers drifted towards Stalingrad as the Germans massed on the far bank of the Don behind them. Alexander Fatyushenkov was one of the soldiers who had been chased across the river.

The heights on the right bank of the Don commanded a view of the entire region, and artillery and mortar batteries poured a sea of fire down onto our regiments, which were out in the open. The fascists were completely hidden in the woodland along the bank of the Don. The river was close by, but to quench our thirst we had to drink out of a bog. This bog was filled, everywhere you looked, with dead bodies of soldiers. It was hard to clear them away, because there were minefields all around too.

The Russians hit back with a new weapon, which the soldiers had christened katyusha — little Kate’. This was a battery of rockets that were fired simultaneously from a metal rack mounted on the back of a truck. On launch they flew into the air with a terrifying whooshing noise and a sheet of flame. A loaded rack vaguely resembled the pipes of a church organ — hence the German nickname for these weapons: Stalinorgeln — ’stalin’s organs’. Mikhail Alexeyev, a Russian infantryman with the 29th Rifle Division near Abganerovo, remembers his first encounter with their awesome music, before dawn on 20 August.

I had heard about the katyushas, but never seen them in action. And so when I heard that hideous screech and hiss coming from somewhere behind me I couldn’t help hunching down into my shoulders. I guessed what the noise meant, so I looked round and saw a majestic and awe-inspiring spectacle. It was as if some kind of steppeland whales had come swimming out of the dark, lined up in a row, and then let loose fountains of fire all at the same time. Then we saw something no less terrifying ahead of us: a line of flaming tornadoes, a good half a kilometre wide.

It seemed that the village of Abganerovo itself was hopping around in some kind of mad, demented dance. That was the rockets exploding.

By this time the Germans had already crossed the Don down to the south-west, beyond the great left-hand bend. The Fourth Panzer Army was wheeling round near Kotelnikovo to attack Stalingrad from below. Russian units in the Kalmuck steppe south of the city were doing their best to block the Germans’ progress. Among them was the 10th NKVD Division, the police garrison of Stalingrad. Their normal duties in the totalitarian state were to maintain order among the civilian population.

Alexandra Batova was a nurse attached to these troops. She already had experience of battle, as she had been a student in Minsk the previous June. While she was sitting in a lecture hall, taking her final medical exam, the bombs started to fall on the city around her. Now she was in the small town of Aksai, 50 miles (80km) south of Stalingrad, with a team of female nurses. And the German bombers were above her once again.

Medical staff — surgeons, dressers and orderlies — worked side by side with military personnel. When the bombing abated towards evening they would go to the aid of wounded civilians. I remember the enemy’s terrible bombardment of the villages of Aksai and Abganerovo. The enemy bombed and strafed with such ferocity that it was difficult to lift your head. Nevertheless Raisa Shestakova (the youngest member of the battalion at the time), Klava Shipovalova and Sasha Zhidok fearlessly bandaged the wounded where they lay on the battlefield, even when shrapnel was flying like hail.

I remember an occasion when I was told there were wounded civilians inside the school in Aksai. Raisa Shestakova and I went out to help. Watching Raisa bandage the injured women and children, it was obvious that her attentions were giving them new hope. Raisa and I worked through the night. Every last wounded civilian was given the help they needed. The following morning, our battalion had to fall back temporarily towards Abganerovo. When we returned to Aksai the next day, we were greeted by a terrible sight: the Germans had taken savage reprisals against the wounded civilians whom Raisa and I had tended during the night. They had all been shot — except for the Komsomol and Party members, who had been hung from trees in front of the school. That is a sight I will never forget.

So the stage was set for the battle of Stalingrad. To the south, the Panzers were poised to pierce the underbelly of the city like a lance. In the west, the Germans were in full possession of the sharp Don bend, where it points like an arrow towards Stalingrad.

It so happens that this right-angle turn in the flow of the Don is mirrored by a similar dogleg in the flow of the Volga, so on a map the separate courses of the two rivers form an hourglass shape. Here, and only here, the Don and the Volga are a mere 40 miles (65km) apart. On 22 August, when the vanguard of the 16th Panzer Division crossed the slow-flowing Don at Kalach, the tankmen knew that they were just one hard day’s drive away from the goal.