399. Stalin: Hitler’s Downfall At Stalingrad (Part 5)

Empire: World History

This episode features historian Antony Beevor discussing his definitive work on the Battle of $Stalingrad. The discussion covers the transit

Key takeaways

• Hitler's obsession with Stalingrad was driven by its symbolic name and as an 'ersatz victory' after failing to secure Caucasus oil.
• The Luftwaffe bombing on August 23, 1942, caused unprecedented civilian casualties, making it one of the deadliest aerial raids before Hiroshima.

Main topics

• Battle of Stalingrad
• World War II turning points

Notable quotes

Stalingrad is the hinge on the Second World War turns.

Conclusion

The episode provides a profound look at how extreme human suffering an

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:00) This episode is brought to you by our friend Plaud, the world's number one AI note-taker brand. Now, when it comes to research, we all have our own methods, sitting for hours in the archive, reading the secondary works, capturing every detail, grilling top scholars. But often we have to lose material in order to remain engaged when doing an interview. We've all been there, sitting there with our notes, missing half the vital bits of conversation, and that no longer needed. happen ever again, because now you just put Plaud on your collar and bingo, it records everything you say and transcribes it into sensible action points that you can refer to afterwards. I only picked up Plaud a few weeks ago and already it's changing the way that I work. With OnePress, the device transcribes those real conversations and turns them into clear actions. It Speaker 2 (0:52) also has a brilliant feature called Ask Plaud. which calls Speaker 5 (0:54) up details of hazy, long-gone conversations in seconds. Empire listeners can go to uk.plaud.ai forward slash empire. That's uk.plaud.ai forward slash empire. And use the promo code empire to get 10 % off any Plaud device. Speaker 1 (1:25) Stalingrad, one of the most brutal battles of all time. By its close, over a million soldiers would lie dead in the rubble of a ruined city. But what was the real reason that Stalingrad was chosen to host this clash of military titans? And how does Putin use this battle to his advantage today? What's he counting on us not to talk about? To guide us through this monumental moment in history, we're joined by none other than the great Sir Anthony Beaver, author of Stalingrad, a book that has redefined the way we view the battle in the West. Anthony, a very warm welcome to Empire. Thank Speaker 2 (2:03) you very much. Speaker 1 (2:04) Now, last time, in the last episode, we left Stalin and he had his back to the Volga. The terror that he had unleashed on his people had... gutted his own officer corps. Hitler's invasion had come within sight of the Kremlin towers. And in the summer of 1942, he issues the order that become the iron law of everything else that comes next, not one step backwards. And the place where that order would be tested. past the breaking point of most armies is Stalingrad, a long industrial city strung out for more than 20 miles along the west bank of the Volga, renamed from Tsaritsyn, which you'll remember from one of our previous episodes, was a place there Stalin made his name in the Civil War, however you want to take that. But by the time this battle is over, more than a million people will be dead, an entire German army will have marched into captivity, and almost none... of it will ever march out again. So historians argue a great deal about what happened and how it happened, but most of them agree Stalingrad is the hinge on which the Second World War turns. Almost everything before that is Germany advancing, almost everything after it is Germany falling back. Speaker 5 (3:21) And for our younger listeners who perhaps don't know Sir Anthony's name or his book, For my generation of historians, Stalingrad not only changed the way that we looked at Stalingrad, indeed, we looked at the Second World War and how much of it was fought in Russia rather than the version we'd been fed as children, where the Battle of Britain and D-Day were the key moments of the war. But it also changed the way that history was written. And I should say, just before we go any further, that when I first started writing history books, I went to Sir Anthony and learnt his famous system of card indexes, which I still use to this day. He Speaker 1 (4:05) doesn't use it, but we use it. Have Speaker 2 (4:07) you given them up now? Well, Speaker 1 (4:09) I Speaker 2 (4:09) don't anymore, no, really. Very sweet of you to say so. Speaker 1 (4:12) Anthony, there is one school of thought that suggests that Hitler becomes obsessed with Stalingrad because it bears the name Stalin. I mean, how much do you think that carries any water? Speaker 2 (4:24) Well, there is an element of truth, yes, indeed, because in a way it became an ersatz victory, a replacement for his failure to capture the oil fields in the Caucasus. And that is why... Beria, Stalin's chief of secret police, started to refer to Stalingrad as a battle of rams, i.e. two rams crashing together. One Stalin, the other was Hitler. And it was very much the significance of the name of Stalingrad. Speaker 5 (4:55) So to remind everyone where we've got to in the story, the Germans reach the Volga. on the 23rd of August 1942, and the Battle of Stalingrad opens not with infantry in the streets, but with the sky full of aircraft. That afternoon, Luftflotte No. 4, one of the primary divisions of the German Luftwaffe, generally assigned as the cream of the East European Air Force, including the highest scoring fighter unit of all time, begins the heaviest bombing raid on the entire... eastern front. Wave after wave, close to a thousand sorties in a single day. Oil tanks along the river are hit, the burning oil spreads out along the surface of the Volga itself so the river seems to catch fire, and by the time the raids cease, the figure most often given for civilian dead is around 40,000. If it holds, it makes the 23rd of August the deadliest day of aerial bombing anywhere before Hiroshima. Speaker 1 (5:55) Anthony, one of the reasons that civilian casualty number is so horrendously high is that civilians were forbidden to leave Stalingrad. Can you tell us why they weren't allowed out? Speaker 2 (6:07) Well, tens of thousands had fled into the city from the west, from all over the area, the Don's Steppe and so forth. And as a result, not only were there sort of too many to evacuate, but also Stalin believed and passed the order to the NKVD who were manning the crossing sites and the ferries to prevent the civilians from crossing over to the east bank. This was partly because he felt that the troops would fight better if there were civilians there and it would make them defend the city. Because at this stage, the Germans had not actually reached the city. They were still outside. But in fact, of course, it meant that... far more were killed than would have been the case otherwise. Speaker 1 (6:56) Was there also the thought process, Anthony, that he wanted the factories running till the last possible minute, that actually he couldn't afford to let people run away? Speaker 2 (7:06) Well, the factories were important because, of course, one of them was actually producing tanks, T-34 tanks. I mean, some of them were being rolled out and even simply... being manned by factory workers, not even by soldiers. And they were actually, they didn't have any gun sights, and they were just looking down the barrel to fire at the enemy. We Speaker 5 (7:26) should say, Anthony, that which we have said is that Stalingrad is a major center of Soviet industry, that one of the reasons, not just the name, that Hitler wants to capture it is it is so important for the war effort. Speaker 2 (7:37) Yes, but one has to remember, actually, it was not a prime objective. The whole idea was not to capture Stalingrad, but actually... to use it as they advanced down into the Caucasus to seize the oil fields. The original plan was they were just going to bombard it or bomb it, no more than that. And it only actually then became a real target when it was obvious that they were going to fail in their objective of capturing the oil fields. And this is why it became, if you like, the ersatz replacement for victory in the Caucasus. It was going to be a symbolic victory, really, over Stalin himself because it bore Stalin's name. Speaker 1 (8:17) Yeah, I mean, and these are two men who are, you know, egotistical enough for this to matter more than anything. Anthony, one thing that the aerial bombardment does is it sort of makes it almost impossible to capture the city because if you've left a braille... you know, landscape, a pockmarked landscape. It's not the best place to, you know, drive your tanks into if you're Hitler's forces. Speaker 2 (8:39) You're absolutely right. It's a mistake which, in fact, was made on numerous occasions in the Second World War. But this was one of the most outstanding examples. If you smash a city to pieces, the rubble itself not only blocks the street. but actually provides the best defensive positions imaginable. The Russians, the Soviets then used the rubble to bury anti-tank guns, to conceal tanks even within the rubble. And this made it a formidable position to attack for the Germans. And what happens next? Speaker 5 (9:15) has very few parallels. The tidy German method of armour, artillery and aircraft all working together with perfect synchronicity stops working and the fighting shrinks. It moves indoors. It goes from room to room, cellar to cellar, even down into the sewers. And the Germans give it a name that sticks, Rattenkrieg, the war of rats. Tell us about that. Speaker 2 (9:38) It was a vicious... terrible battle. As you say, fighting in the sewers, fighting in the rubble, fighting from room to room. The whole place, one has to remember, was literally a cloud of dust of smashed masonry. Each side, they were almost unrecognizable because all of their uniforms were impregnated with the same sort of dumb colored dust. The fighting took place with really many vicious little baffles. It was Tchouikov, the commander of the 62nd Army. called the Stalingrad Academy of Street Fighting. And they had these little groups of, say, eight men using sharpened spades, knives, flamethrowers. It was totally unlike any form of fighting. And the Germans were thrown. They were disorientated, partly because it was taking place on different dimensions, but also because it actually lost all of their advantages, whether it was in... momentum of attack in terms of mechanized attack. Their tanks couldn't operate in the same way. And as a result, it was almost like a return to the First World War. Speaker 1 (10:57) This is the thing that Putin often draws on. It's the enormous courage. of a force that has so little. Actually, these are beleaguered men who had very, very little. Hugging the enemy, I think that's an absolutely fascinating tactic. Tell us a little bit about that because that is part of the courage that Putin draws on in the mythology of his new Russia. Speaker 2 (11:20) Well, General Trikov, the commander in Stalingrad, realized that their real disadvantage was, of course, German air superiority. especially during the day. And so that's why he ordered his troops to dig their trenches within 50 meters of the German positions, knowing that that would make it much more difficult for the Luftwaffe to attack Soviet positions. And because they would be much more likely, just as likely to hit German troops as a Soviet. So that was one aspect of it. But the real point was also to keep attacking at night as well, because that would exhaust the Germans. I mean, during the month of September alone, September 1942 alone, the 6th Army at Stalingrad fired off 25 million shots and rounds of ammunition, purely because in many cases at night, they were terrified, thinking