Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943 eBook PDF

User Reviews

Matt

Rating: really liked it
"You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders - The most famous of which is 'never get involved in a land war in Asia' - but only slightly less well-known is this: 'Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line'"!
-- Wallace Shawn as Vizzini in The Princess Bride

Never get involved in a land war in Asia. Or the European portion of Russia.

That's good advice.

For whatever reason, though, the lure of Russia - its vast steppes, its vast resources, its vast and bloody history - has proven irresistible, stretching back to early Mongol invasions. The two most famous fools who dared strive for Moscow were Napoleon and Hitler. Napoleon was failed by the logistics of his day and age; the harder he pressed Kutuzov, and the deeper he got into Russia, the longer his supply line became. When he reached his goal, he ran out of food, and turned back in the midst of a cruel winter. On his retreat, Napoleon famously remarked that "from the sublime to the ridiculous is but a single step."

The temptation when dealing with Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, is to compare its failure to that of Napoleon, and chalk it up to Russia's tremendous size and unforgiving winters. Undoubtedly, the winters were rough, and the Germans unprepared, but as Anthony Beevor makes clear in Stalingrad, the fault did not lie in the weather, but in Hitler and the stars.

Operation Barbarossa was a huge gamble, one that many of Hitler's generals (and his generally imbecilic foreign minister Ribbentrop) wanted him to avoid. However, due to Stalin's willful blindness, it almost worked. Indeed, it should have worked. Without Hitler's constant bumbling intervention, it would have worked.

Instead, the Germans attacked Stalingrad and nearly captured it. Then, the Russians surrounded the Germans, and the attackers became the attacked. The Germans at Stalingrad surrendered, and eventually the entire German invasion was turned.

The mistake at issue in Beevor's Stalingrad is that there was ever a battle of Stalingrad in the first place. Specifically, in the second summer of the German invasion, the Nazi armies were poised to sprint to the Caucuses and seize the Soviet oil fields. Hitler intervened and split the German Army Group, sending Group B to Stalingrad, where it was eventually chewed to pieces.

This is all explained in the beginning sections of Stalingrad, which are dedicated to the the planning of Operation Barbarossa, the start of the invasion, the battle for Moscow, and the first Russian winter. I found this to be the weakest part of the book, and it actually made me pause and consider continuing. Not that I didn't appreciate the purpose. I firmly believe that even the most subject-specific history book should provide a little context. In this case, though, the overview was not only cursory, but confusing. Beevor jumps quickly from event to event, battle to battle, using a series of unconnected anecdotes. He tries to cover too much subject matter in too few pages, so there is no room to breath or even reflect on what you're reading. Oh, the Germans executed thousands of Jews at Babi Yar? That's interesting, but we're moving right along.

The situation is not helped by the small number of maps. Beevor expends a lot of ink detailing troop movements. However, without a map showing where that body of soldiers was actually positioned on this earth, it's all a lot of numbers and letters signifying nothing. If you want me to care that the 81st Cavalry Division in the 4th Cavalry Corps crossed the Kalmyk steppe to the southern flank, you will kindly have to show me where the Kalmyk steppe is located. (I'm guessing it's...somewhere to the south).

Once the preliminaries are taken care of, and the focus is placed on General Paulus' fight for Stalingrad, things get better. At the very least, the writing is at times vivid and evocative. Beevor has a novelistic flair for creating memorable images. Take, for instance, this description of Russian troops crossing the Volga to enter Stalingrad:

The crossing was probably most eerie for those in the rowing boats, as the water gently slapped the bow, and the rowlocks creaked in unison. The distant crack of rifle shots and the thump of shell bursts sounded hollow over the expanse of river. Then, German artillery, mortars and any machine-guns close enough to the bank switched their aim. Columns of water were thrown up in midstream, drenching the occupants of the boats. The silver bellies of stunned fish soon glistened on the surface...Some men stared at the water around them to avoid the sight of the far bank, rather like a climber refusing to look down. Others, however, kept glancing ahead to the blazing buildings on the western shore, their steel-helmeted heads instinctively withdrawn into the shoulders...As darkness intensified, the huge flames silhouetted the shells of tall buildings on the bank high above them and cast grotesque shadows. Sparks flew up in the night air...As they approached the shore, they caught the smell of charred buildings and the sickly stench from decaying corpses under the rubble.

Even during this middle section of the book, while the Germans were still on the offensive, I still had problems with the book's coherence. A lot of times, the paragraphs on the page seemed absolute strangers to each other. Also, many paragraphs just left me scratching my head. For instance, one paragraph dealing with the Russian response to deserition stated that "[o:]n a rare occasion...the authorities considered that officers had been overharsh." After giving this statement, Beevor goes on to quote a story about a nineteen year-old lieutenant being executed after two of his men deserted. Huh? The proposition in the paragraph was that sometimes even the Russians realized they were nuts; but instead of supporting this statement, Beevor tells a story that shows just the opposite. This is not to get nit-picky, but as I read, I often had this almost unconscious sensation that something was slightly off.

The final third of the book, though, is quite strong. Once the Germans are on the defensive, battling Russians and the winter, Beevor's narrative really grips you. It's a good book to read while sitting in an armchair on a frigid February day (so you can sympathize, without having to empathize). Along with the details of battle, there are fascinating discussions (is fascinating the right word?) about topics as varied as medical care, starvation, frostbite, and Russian vodka rations (they often went into battle drunk, natch).

Stalingrad is a hard battle to write about. There are big troop movements leading up to the fight in the city. And there are big troop movements that lead to the encirclement of the German Army. However, most of the bitter fighting within the city itself was small unit action. There are certain locations of note - such as the Tractor Factory - but a lot of the descriptions of the fighting are vague and generalized, since they come from the individual soldiers, and they certainly couldn't know what was going on.

Beevor is at his absolute best when he leaves the generalities and finds a specific character or two to follow for a couple of pages. These mini-arcs were engrossing, none more so than Beevor's tale of Smyslov (Russian Army intelligence) and Dyatlenko (of the Russian NKVD). These two men were ordered to give a message to General Paulus. And in the Russian army, orders mean something. After braving German fire, they convince a Nazi sentry to bring them into a bunker (after they are blindfolded with their own parkas). Once in the bunker, they finally convince the German company commander to take the message to his commander. But then the commander comes back and says that he won't deliver the message. When the Russians ask the German to sign a receipt for the message, which they can take to their superiors, the German refuses. This is almost Shakespearean-level farce.

One of the oddities of this book is that I found my rooting interest to be with the Germans. I don't think this is entirely my fault, because there is a distinct anti-Soviet bias in Beevor's telling. While the German atrocities in Russia are briefly recounted at the book's start, the Russian atrocities - against their own troops, no less! - are covered in great detail. Beevor even devotes an entire chapter to explaining how much the Germans loved Christmas, and how they tried to celebrate despite freezing and starving to death. Beevor even compares and contrasts the letters home from the troops. While the German soldiers wrote tenderly about how much they missed hearth and home, Beevor makes clear that the Russian letters were filled with mindless propaganda.

Stalingrad was known as "the fateful city." It was Germany's high water mark. Even as Stalingrad was falling, Rommel was losing in North Africa and America was gearing up to (finally) get in the fight. From that point on, Germany would know nothing but defeat.

In hindsight, we are left to gasp at how close we came to a world dominated by Nazis. Some might find it hard to believe that we escaped through what appears to be luck - luck that Hitler made such a string of foolhardy decisions.

I'd hardly call this luck, though. To me, it was inevitable. Our character is our fate. A Napoleonic dictum says that to gain power, one must be absolutely petty, but to wield power, one must exercise true greatness. It makes perfect sense that a self-aggrandizing, paranoid-delusional sociopath such as Hitler would strive for absolute power and, with a few breaks along the way, eventually achieve it. But it also makes just as much sense that a self-aggrandizing, paranoid-delusional sociopath would be utterly unable to exercise that power, and would make stupid decisions in the unsupported belief that he was always right.

These traits ensured that he'd get as far as Stalingrad and then self-destruct.

Jim

Rating: really liked it
This is a painful book to read, as it shows the horror of the war on both sides. The half-year battle for the streets of Stalingrad was an unremitting horror, with not only two armies, but thousands of civilians jammed into a city that was being bombed into rubble while everyone was starving or dying of thirst. (Apparently this book demonstrated the dangers of trying to substitute snow for water.)

Just when the battle for the streets of Stalingrad appeared to be turning into a stalemate, with General Vassili Chuikov of the Soviet 62nd Army fighting Paulus's German Sixth Army to a virtual draw, Marshal Zhukov initiated an encircling movement that caught the Nazis unaware. Both Hitler and his generals were astonished that the Russians had so many more men, tanks, and planes when it had seemed that there was nothing left on the Russian side but stumbling starvelings. In a trice, it was the Sixth Army that turned into stumbling starvelings sans food, sans ammunition, sans fuel, sans everything.

Hitler forbade Paulus to surrender. It was his fervent wish that the whole army commit suicide so that they could go down as heroes. They didn't: tens of thousands surrendered. But Hitler and Goebbels tried to buffalo the German people into thinking that the whole army was wiped out.

In the battle between Hitler and Stalin, it appeared that the Russian was the more reasonable. Hitler had no notion whatsoever of supplying a large army that was thousands of miles from its base in Central Europe. He just thought that his armies could supply themselves by living off the newly occupied territories. That worked to a certain extent, but how does an army make its tanks and cannon work without replacement equipment? And what about ammunition? As the Eastern Front collapsed toward the Volga, the Russians were closer to their base of supply in the Urals and around Moscow, while the Germans were dangerously stretched.

Antony Beevor has written an excellent history which should be required reading for those who think that D-Day was what broke the back of the Nazi war machine. The Wehrmacht units on the Ostfront would have paid to serve against the Americans and the British, instead of dying by the millions on the pitiless steppes of Russia.

Stefania Dzhanamova

Rating: really liked it
Antony Beevor's book is a compelling, meticulously researched study of the Battle of Stalingrad.

The first time the German people heard of the city of Stalingrad as a military objective was only two weeks before Hitler, who had never wanted his troops to become involved in street-fighting in Moscow or Leningrad, became determined to sieze this city "at any price." As Beevor explains, the events on the Caucasus Front, supposedly the Führer's main priority, played a major role in his decision. On 7 September, a day when Heider noted "satisfying progress at Stalingrad", Hitler displayed his exasperation at the failure to advance in the Caucasus. He refused to accept that Field Marshal List didn't have enough troops for the task.
After the triumphs in Poland, Scandinavia, and France, Beevor explains, Hitler was often ready to despise "mundane requirements", such as fuel supplies and manpower shortages, "as if he were above the normal material constraints of war." When General Alfred Jodl, having just returned from a visit to List's headquarters, pointed out to the Führer that List had only followed his orders, Hitler screamed, "That's a lie!" and stormed out. Beevor argues that this outburst had brought the Führer "to a sort of psychological frontier.": General Warlimont was so shocked by Hitler's "long stare of burning hate" that he thought "he has realized that his fatal gamble is over, that Soviet Russia is not going to be beaten in this second attempt."

According to Beevor, Hitler probably did sense the truth, but he still couldn't accept it. The Volga was cut and Stalingrad's war industries destroyed – both the goals defined in Operation Blue (the main Nazi offensive in southern Russia). Yet, he now desired to capture the city named after Stalin, as though this in itself would achieve the subjugation of the enemy by other means. "The dangerous dreamer had turned to symbolic victory for compensation," writes Beevor.

As he shows, one or two spectacular successes sustained the illusion that Stalingrad "would be the crucible in which to prove the superiority of German might." On the north front, Russians sent in Lend-Lease American tanks, which with their thin protection, proved easier to knock out. The Soviet crews complained, "The tanks are no good. The valves go to pieces, the engine overheats and the transmission is no use." This is the reason why Count von Strachwitz, the commander of the 16th Panzer Division, destroyed more than a hundred of them, thus achieving the needed "spectacular victory."
However, although Soviet attacks at this point were appallingly wasteful and incompetent, there could be no doubt about the determination to defend Stalingrad at any cost. It was a resolve that more than matched the determination of the invader. "The hour of courage has struck on the clock..." quotes Beevor Anna Akhmatova's poem. As he also reveals, since the fall of Rostov, any means of igniting resistance had become permissible: on September 8, a picture in Stalingrad Front newspaper showed "a frightened girl with her limbs bound. 'What if your beloved girl is tied up like this by fascists?' said the caption. 'First they'll rape her insolently, then throw her under a tank. Advance warrior. Shoot the enemy. Your duty is to prevent the violator from raping your girl.'"
So, although when the first phase of the German onslaught began on September 13, the Germans made progress into the western edge of the city, capturing the small airfield and some barracks, the fighting proved to be much harder than they'd expected. Many privately realized that they might well be spending the winter in Stalingrad, mentions Beevor.

The struggle became especially intense for the Mamaev Kurgan. If the Germans took it, they could control the Volga, so they counterattacked again and again for days. Yet, General Rodimtsev's troops managed to hold on to the Kurgan, and the German 295th Infantry Division was "fought to a standstill." "Their losses were so heavy," describes Beevor, "that companies were merged. Officer casualties were particularly high, largely due to Russian snipers. After less than two weeks in the line, a company in Colonel Korfes's regiment of the 295th Infantry Division was on the its third commander, a young lieutenant."

Gradually, German soldiers, "red-eyed with exhaustion from the hard fighting, and mourning more comrades than they ever imagined", were losing their victorious mood. Hitler's frustrations over the lack of success in the Caucasus and at Stalingrad, meanwhile, reached its zenith when he dismissed General Haider, the chief of the Army General Staff. This dismissal, Beevor asserts, marked the tragic end of the general staff as an independent planning body. In addition, Hitler had said that with the Sixth Army "he could storm the heavens", yet Stalingrad still did not fall...

According to Beevor, the fighting in Stalingrad was remarkable because it represented a whole new form of warfare, concentrated "in the ruins of civillian life." The waste of war – shell cases, burnt-out tanks, and grenade boxes – was mixed with the wreckages of family homes. Soviet writer Vasily Grossman depicted "fighting in the brick-strewn, half-demolished rooms and corridors of apartment blocks, where there might stoll be a vase on the table, or a boy's homework open on the table." German infantrymen hated house-to-house combat, narrates Beevor. They found it "psychologically disorientating." During the last phases of the September battles, both sides had struggled to capture a warehouse on the Volga bank. At one point, it was "like a layered cake with Germans on the top floor, Russians below them, and more Germans underneath them." Often the enemy was unrecognizable, "with every uniform impregnated by the same dun-coloured dust."

On top of that, German generals did not even imagine what awaited their divisions inside the ruined city. As Beevor explains, since they lost their Blitzkrieg priorities, they were in many ways thrown back to WWI techniques. For instance, the Sixth Army had to respond to Soviet tactics with "storm-wedges" introduced in 1918: "assault groups of ten men armed with a machine-gun, light mortar and flame-throwers for clearing bunkers, cellars, sewers."
Thus, Antony Beevor shows that the fighting in Stalingrad was extremely terrifying. It possessed "savage intimacy," which horrified German generals, who felt they were rapidly losing control over events. "The enemy is invisible," wrote General Strecker to a friend. "Ambushes out of basements, wall remnants, hidden bunkers, and factory ruins produce heavy casualties among our troops."
Much of the fighting now consisted not of major attacks, but of relentless little conflicts, and the war turned into "stationary annihilation." German troops believed that they had been lured into a trap.

Antony Beevor's brilliant work succeeds in showing the experience of troops on both sides. The author draws upon a wide range of material, from Russian archives to war diaries, personal accounts, letters, and NKVD interrogations of German POWs. He creates a no-holds-bared account not only of the battle itself, with its logistics, strategies, and reality, but also of extraordinary events such as disertion of Soviet soldiers, incompetence, self-inflicted wounds, and drunkenness. For example, he reveals the shocking fact that the Soviet authorities executed around 13,500 of their own soldiers at Stalingrad, a demonstration of the brutal coercion used against diserters by the NKVD.
Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege is a very well written history of the ideologically important battle. My only complaint is that it's awfully short of maps. Otherwise, I highly recommend it to all WWII buffs.

Vuk Prlainović

Rating: really liked it
It's not a bad book, but as a proclaimed "historical analysis" I can hardly give it more than one star. Reasons include:
- Heavy anti-Soviet bias. The author tries very hard to hammer in the notion of every Red Army soldier being a drunken lout. "Slavic peasant" phrasing is uncomfortably common, and it makes you question the author's intentions.
- Use of individual anecdotes to portray behaviors depicted in those anecdotes as common and regular.
- Unfounded claims, the most jarring of which being 13,500 Soviet soldiers supposedly executed by the NKVD during the course of the battle. Documented sources put the number of NKVD detainees at 1,218 men, of which only 21 were executed, the rest returning back to the front.
- The 'totalitarianism fallacy' of equating socialism and fascism.
And more.

Don't read unless you want to work your criticism muscles.

notgettingenough

Rating: really liked it
So, I'm watching a movie in German about the siege of Stalingrad last night while I'm knitting and my first thought was 'but I won't have a clue what is going on' and my second is 'fair enough....why should I have an unfair advantage over the poor fuckers who were there in the thick of it.' Just because I'm watching the movie, it shouldn't give me an edge.

Afterwards, explaining this to my mother, she asked, so did you get it? And I'm like 'nope, but neither did they.' Bunches of people being confused in the snow and doing horrible things to each other.

This I greatly regret: I have a friend, Josek, who was in that siege as one of many idealistic Polish volunteers who made the incredible trip there, survived despite getting TB, and was given a loaf of bread to set him on his way back to Poland - if you ask me it's more than a one loaf walk, but anyway. His story is as amazing as you'd expect and a few years ago I decided to start interviewing him properly in order to tell it. And then, in that way life is fucking unfair to people who deserve better he fell over and died.

Josek was tiny, so small and frail that a strong breeze was his natural enemy. He died falling over on a trip to the bathroom - that doesn't surprise me - but to have survived some of the worst of all the history of the world first and then die that way is ridiculous. Still. He would have shrugged, if he could. He would have said that's life.

Creighton

Rating: really liked it
Lately I have been on a reading binge of books focused on the Eastern Front and the Second World War. I recently ordered David Glantz’s complete set of books on the battle of Stalingrad, but because I felt this book would be a good stepping stone before I started reading his in-depth series, I began reading it. I have never read any other books by Anthony Beevor, but now that I have, I really like his style of writing and will be reading his other works in the future. Beevors writings offered me a great baseline of understanding about the situation and I came from this book with facts that left an imprint on me. I have no doubt Stalingrad and failure of the Fall Blau (operation blue) was the turning point where the Red Army went from a stumbling colossus to a mighty goliath. Zhukov, Vasilevskiy, and Chuikov emerged out of this conflict as heroes of the Soviet Union, and it was this successful campaign that swayed Stalin into allowing Red Army commanders more freedom, (putting commissars into subordinate roles) and allowing them to use deep battle operations.
In this book we get to read about the living conditions of German soldiers during Stalingrad, those who become prisoners, and what happened to Red Army prisoners. You read about the HiWis (look them up if you don’t know about them) and the select group who fought until the end for the Sixth army. You read a story about how in certain soviet prisoner of war camps, Romanian prisoners of war would beat the life out of German Prisoners of war, because of how they felt anger at the fact they were brought into this ordeal. You read about how German soldiers prayed to get back home, and thought of Germany as a world away. You read about the sniper ace, Vasily Zaitsev, and how snipers were trending in this battle. We see so many acts of inhumanity, but we read some stories of some rare humane treatment in this book. You read about General Paulus’s nervous tic, or about how Operation Uranus, the plan that encircled the Sixth army, came into being. You hear about the stories of typhus, dysentery, diphtheria outbreaks, and you shudder at the idea of being a soldier in a trench, being put through the most hellish conditions. Some soldiers were optimistic about Hitler’s declarations about how he would relieve the army at Stalingrad but pray to be taken away via Pitomnik airfield. I found my brain visualizing the German soldiers in their defenses, tired, hungry, cold, and I just couldn’t help but feel like they were betrayed. I couldn’t help but picture what life must’ve been for the Russians and how after seeing their dead comrades shown no mercy by the Germans, they were praying for revenge. In the book when the Germans did surrender, I remember reading one Russian soldier say that Berlin would look like Stalingrad when the war was over with, and that turned out to be true. Overall, this book was pleasing, and I would recommend it to anyone who is thinking about reading it.

E. G.

Rating: really liked it
List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Preface to the New Edition
Preface

--Stalingrad

Appendix A: German and Soviet Orders of Battle, 19 November 1942
Appendix B: The Statistical Debate: Sixth Army Strength in the Kessel
References
Source Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

'Aussie Rick'

Rating: really liked it

This is an excellent account of the battle of Stalingrad, I'd place it next to 'Enemy at the Gates'. The author gives you an overview of the military situation on the Eastern Front prior to the German Offensive towards Stalingrad on the Volga. The author tells the story of this terrible battle through the accounts of those soldiers who endured this inferno and survived as well as using letters and diaries of those who didn't! This is a story of the fighting, not of the strategy and tactics behind the Armies. It's a good account of the battle and well worth the time to read. You'll feel for those common soldiers, both German & their Allies and the Russians. A great book.

Steve

Rating: really liked it
As with Mr. Beevor’s The Fall of Berlin 1945, Stalingrad is an excellent book, well written and researched. I have three primary thoughts:

First, to synthesize the standard American narrative of the Second World War’s European Theatre, it was the United States who broke the back of Nazi Germany, rescuing, yet again, the French (and others) from the Germans. It was the United States who provided substantial material support to Russia, significantly enhancing their ability to defeat Germany. While some of this narrative aligns with the historical record, it appears that it was Russia who turned the tide of Germany’s efforts with a monumental human sacrifice and that momentous turn occurred at Stalingrad. Further, Russians bore something like 60-80% of the overall allied burden in the Second World War, a thought that seems far from the minds of my fellow citizens today.

Second, Hitler and Stalin appeared as undeclared contestants in an evil brutality challenge, with the result being a tie. How do we process the overwhelming inhumanities that occurred during the years of that war, Stalingrad in particular? Perhaps we now have some consciousness for the absolute boundaries of the miseries we all are capable of inflicting on fellow humans given the right conditions? Yet typing those words feels wholly insufficient, even a mockery, given the collective amount of suffering so many endured for so long.

Third, I would like to believe that the world has moved past the horrors Mr. Beevor described. Unfortunately, we have not. Recent events in Yemen and Burma, among others, remind us that collectively we appear ignorant of the past, that somehow it is our nature to render appalling harm, regardless of what history has taught us. Additionally, the popular acceptance for the nationalistic demagoguery and propaganda used by political leaders today, though often of a milder caliber than that used by Stalin and Hitler, suggests a disregard for the lessons of history, maybe even an unwillingness to study history in the first place. Humanism indeed has its obstacles.

Jim

Rating: really liked it
British historian Antony Beefor has written a complete and objective history of the titanic Battle of Stalingrad during WWII. He certainly did his research, drawing upon the once secret Russian archives as well as German records. The result is very readable, a narrative that moves along swiftly, so that at times I couldn't put it down. And we know the ending--the Soviet Army's defeat and destruction of the German Sixth Army in the city of Stalingrad in Russia. I would argue that it was not only the turning point of the Eastern Front, but of the entire war. In the previous year (1941), the Germans had been stopped before Moscow and they had to struggle to survive the brutal Russian winter. In the summer of 1942, the German blitzkrieg of panzers (tanks) and Stuka dive bombers drove across Russia to reach the mighty Volga River--and Stalingrad, the city named for the Soviet dictator on the west side of the river. By fighting in the city, street by street, block by block, and even house by house, the Germans threw away their great advantage of mobility. The Soviet troops dug into the rubble of the bombed-out city and fought desperately for time. Stalin wanted to hold the Germans within the city while building reserves to mount a counter-offensive in the winter. That happened with Operation Uranus in November, as Soviet forces broke through the allied Romanian armies on the German flank--and trapped the 6th Army within the city that it had been fighting so hard to conquer. Then began a nightmarish ordeal as the Germans suffered from frostbite, disease, and even starvation during a siege that finally ended at the end of January, 1943. 91,ooo prisoners were taken including 22 German generals and that included Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, the commander. But even more than the horrendous losses, it was the psychological impact on Hitler and Germany that made Stalingrad the war's turning point. Victory was no longer assured and, in fact, Germany would need to fight for its life. Beevor gives us a lot of images and scenes that leave a lasting impression. Here is one scene-"These defeated remnants of the Sixth Army.....shivering in their inadequate greatcoats....were herded into long columns of march. A group of survivors from the 297th Infantry Division was confronted by a Russian officer, who pointed at the ruins around and yelled at them: "That's how Berlin is going to look." (pg. 387)

Sarah

Rating: really liked it
This book was more from the 6th Army/German perspective, which wasn’t what I was expecting. But seeing as my background on this event comes more from the Russian perspective, so it was an interesting read. This book covers a lot of ground, starting with Operation Barbarossa (well, really even a little bit before that) and follows through some prison camps that extended into the 1950s! There is a part in this book that describes a German officer who gets flown out of the 6th Army encirclement (late in the battle) describing the desperate situation to Hitler. This officer realizes as he is describing events how out of touch Hitler is, he thinks that Hitler can only think of flags and maps and not people and reality. Which looking back is pretty obvious, but I wonder why other people didn’t just stop the maddness. How crazy do you have to be to send your fellow countrymen to their certain deaths. But how much crazier do you have to be really to just stand by while that happens? The Russian losses are incredible, but to their tiny bit of credit, they were invaded and spent all they could defending. What they did after was indefensible, but here in the early parts of the war I can cut them a little slack. This is a pretty dense and often hard to read book (not technically, but on an emotional level) and would only recommend to history buffs.

Evan

Rating: really liked it
Did you read the one about THE END OF THE WORLD but the name, ANTONY BEEVOR, was above the title and in as-big or bigger type? Antony Beevor is such a brand I think Penguin Books should just go full bore and give him an official logo in lightning-bolt font like some hair band of the '80s.

My rating of four stars is essentially meaningless. Three stars seems too severe but five seems too generous. Should you read it? Yes, but not as your first book on Stalingrad. Go to William Craig's Enemy at the Gates for that, then ease into ostensibly more detailed accounts like Beevor's. Beevor is for historians, but Craig and the like are for readers who enjoy a smoother narrative flow and sense of awe and context. Craig had access to hundreds of living witnesses to Stalingrad and still-living official sources, something Beevor did not, and the sense of on-the ground humanity is more vivid in Craig.

The impressions from a few hastily jotted notes:

The meh:

- Beevor starts with way too much context on Operation Barbarossa, unlike Craig who gets right down to Stalingrad itself. Context is fine but there are plenty of better books on Barbarossa to read first.

-Beevor quotes Russian writer Vassily Grossman so much I felt like I should be reading Grossman's accounts of the war instead.

-Beevor seems to please a lot of readers but, based on this, he's not the storyteller that John Toland and some others are. The narrative was often clausey and clunky.

The yeah:

-Lots of detail not in other Stalingrad books. Again, I feel this book is a gap-filler rather than a starter tome, but fine as that.

-Lots of detail about life on the perimeters of the Kessel front, as opposed to so much on the battle in the city itself, so this is both a good and a bad thing.

-Vivid portraits of Hell-on-Earth suffering on the ground. Some critics of Beevor apparently call him a "war porn" writer, which I think is absurd. War is obscene, so talking/writing about it in any true way is going to necessitate obscene detail. When it come to frostbite, lice, cannibalism, amputation and more horrors, Beevor delivers.

I found it interesting that men who'd essentially created their own self-Holocaust in the hopeless trap they'd made for themselves at Stalingrad couldn't even get their last letters home. Many of the planes carrying them crashed and scattered their final words to the winds and elements, or into the hands of Russians who used them for propaganda. Sad, pathetic and banal a touch, and Beevor related such things quite well.

Stalingrad is the extreme example of fake news: a collective fortress mentality in thrall to a callous leader who would throw anyone -- particularly his followers -- under the bus, existing miserably in an-ever tightening zone of unreality where the only possible conclusion is self-delusion morphing into self-suffering, madness and death.

kr/eg '19

Stephen

Rating: really liked it
Stunning account of perseverance, deprivation and stupidity surrounding one of the most pivotal battles of WW II. In the summer of 1942 German axis forces descended on the small city of Stalingrad, Russia, pollution 400,000. The city was of no real significance other than it carried Joesph Stalin's name. Germany thought it would be an easy win for their propaganda machine. It proved otherwise. Over the next 9 months, the Axis threw roughly 1 MM well armed expertly trained soldiers, supported by the famed Luftwaffe, at the city. Russia countered with over 1 MM poorly trained, poorly armed, mostly forcibly drafted farm boys as cannon fodder. Toward the end, many Russian soldiers were not even issued weapons. They were told to pair up and pick up the weapon of a comrade when the comrade was killed. The Luftwaffe mercilessly bombed and cannons shelled city for months. The sSoldiers prowled the streets engaging close quarters fighting and sniping. They turned the city to rubble. Both armies were decimated. An estimated 850,000 Axis soldiers were killed or wounded. Over 1 MM Russians were killed or wounded. Germany lost and retreated in its first major defeat of WW II.

Beevor's account is highly readable, well researched and astounding. It is considered one of the seminal works on the battle and deservedly so.

As a companion piece, I recommend the movie Enemy at the Gates starring Jude Law and Ed Harris. Law plays Vassili Zaitsev who became a Hero of Russia for killing 225 Axis soldiers including 11 opposing snipers during the battle. Harris plays a fictional German sniper. While they are pitted against each other in a fanciful cat-and-mouse Hollywood contest, the visuals--the devastation of the city and deprivation of citizens unable to escape--bring Beevor's account to life.

One of my favorite historical reads. Highly recommended.

Mike

Rating: really liked it
My first Beevor, it was outstanding. I will be coming back for more. Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942-1943 gets 5 Stars for the epic battle history presented here. What Beevor conveys better than others is the sheer brutality of the eastern front and the Stalingrad battle. While millions die, Beevor brings the tragedy down to the individual level. Atrocity is matched by atrocity until you mourn the death of each side while seeing each side having justification. The Nazis started it but the Soviets paid them back with interest.

Beevor takes the first 100 pages to give an account of the war in the east up to arriving at the outskirts of Stalingrad. Excellent and succinct. As the Sixth Army arrives at the suburbs of Stalingrad, the Germans feel like they will win shortly while the Russians despair at ever mounting losses. Yet in a few months everything will be turned around. The Germans get a taste of the desperation of the defense:

Fight like a girl (view spoiler)

The Luftwaffe helps to subdue the defenders…or do they? The “house warmings”, as the Stuka attacks were known, only made the city tougher to fight in for the Germans whose army was made for swift, blitzkrieg battles…not urban bloodbaths. The Soviets turn every factory and substantial building into a strongpoint. What good are Panzers in an urban battle? Not much.

Because of the ever present advantage of Luftwaffe support, the Soviets become night fighters. They are good at it. The Germans are harassed on the ground and in the air at night. I was not aware of the Soviet U-2 biplanes dropping bombs at night but they were very successful at keeping the Germans from any rest.

Beevor presents the attitudes of each side as the battle evolves. It was truly a battle between two ruthless socialist societies for domination. The fanaticism of the young Nazis raised to worship Hitler against the patriotic fervor somehow rekindled in the Russians is discussed. Yes, the Soviet Special Brigades posted just behind the front lines to execute any who retreat and the NKVD squads roaming the rear for deserters and escapees account for some of the reasons why the Soviets held out. But there was something more, some patriotic motivation that resulted in such a tenacious defense.

After Operation Uranus succeeds in trapping the Sixth Army, the Soviets confidence is boosted tremendously. The commander Zhukov tells it like it is:

Zhukov was characteristically to the point when he described the encirclement of the Sixth Army as ‘a tremendous education for victory for our troops’. Grossman was also right when he wrote: “The morale of the soldiers has never been so high’. (Interestingly, neither of these observations exactly confirmed the official Soviet propaganda line that ‘the morale of an army depends on the socially just and progressive order of the society it defends’.)

Communist or socialist, the individual means nothing compared to the state. That is why the Soviets could send so many to die without giving them training, arms or tactics to succeed. And why the Sixth Army was consigned to die on the Volga. How about this guy as a leader?

Hitler: “What is Life, Life is the Nation. The individual must die…” remarks upon learning Field Marshal Paulus did not commit suicide as demanded.

Permanent addition to the WWII shelf.

Anthony Taylor

Rating: really liked it
Impossible to Dislike

This book has been on my mind for 20 years, since I was a school boy and my history teacher had a poster of it on his wall. The reason I’d never turned to it was because I was initially more interested in periods earlier than the 20th Century. However, as I’ve ventured down the rabbit hole of consuming history, it become unavoidable if one wants to learn from the lessons of history to avoid todays mistakes.

This book is my first by Sir Antony Beevor and I can say it did not disappoint. Beevor has stated as the son of a writer he grew up writing fiction however turned to military history and when beginning his research in the Russian Military Archives he was almost pushed into the biography of the battle of Stalingrad. The book flows like a novel, it is fast paced, interesting and easy to understand. I have recapped what the book told me and I am able to conclude that I know when and how it started, what the German plans were, who was in charge, who fought there, how the battle panned out, how the Red Army held on, why they won, how they won and the huge impact of this for the influence of the outcome of the war and the expanse of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe.

The book has an excellent combination of ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ story telling. Grand strategy is merged with the stories and suffering of individuals. The horrors of history and the pity of war.

If I was the criticise this book, I would say that it was a slow starter, hard to understand or imagine the scale of the battle and I felt I missed the house to house combat in the earlier stages of the battle. However, I am happy to revisit this and cover it again. Beevor would have taken a lot to fall here, as the subject matter is almost writes itself, being so fascinating. He does an excellent job putting it down on paper in a logic and coherent form.

One can only draw parallels with the 1812 invasion and the unimaginable suffering of both armies in the cold so far away from home. The majority never to see their families and loved ones ever again. With that there is a subtle study of human nature here and what people will do to survive when their backs are against the cliff edge. I cannot wait to read another Beevor and will definitely revisiting this book.

Detail

Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943

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