German soldiers in the streets of Stalingrad, 1942
Considered important because of its supply of oil, the symbolic significance of Stalingrad (Tsaritsyn was renamed as Stalin’s city in 1925) soon outweighed its strategic importance. The Germans started the bombardment of the city on 23 August 1942 and soon after marched in, full of optimism. The Germans, Italians and Romanians fought the Soviets street for street, house for house, sometimes room for room. This, as the Germans called it, was rat warfare, where a strategic stronghold changed sides so many times, people lost count, where the front lines were so close one could throw back a grenade before it exploded, where snipers took their toll on the enemy, and where a soldier’s life expectancy was three days – if lucky.
Gradually, from November 1942, the Germans, commanded by General Friedrich Paulus, were encircled by the Soviets who squeezed them tighter and tighter. Supplies, dropped in by the Luftwaffe, were only a fraction of what was needed. As temperatures dropped to the minus forties, starvation, frostbite, disease and suicide decimated the Germans. Piles of frozen corpses were used as sandbags. Reinforcements, although sent, never came close and Paulus’ troops were too weakened to break out from the Soviet encirclement. A few German planes landed within the city and were able to get troops out amidst scenes of panic, with hundreds of men fighting for the few remaining places while being shot at by the Soviets.
German soldier captured during the Battle of Stalingrad, 1943
Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-E0406-0022-011 / CC-BY-SA
In January 1943 Hitler forbade surrender and promoted Paulus to field marshal on account that no German field marshal had ever surrendered. On 2 February, however, Paulus did. Hitler, 1,000 miles away, was furious. Over a million soldiers on all sides died in the city. Almost 100,000 Axis troops were taken prisoner of war, many later paraded through the streets of Moscow, of whom only 10 per cent returned home after the war. The Germans’ defeat at Stalingrad, more than their failure to take Moscow, was the turning point of the whole war.
The city of Kursk, 320 miles south of Moscow, was captured by the Germans in November 1941 and retaken by the Soviets in February 1943. The German field marshal, Erich von Manstein, wanted to recapture it as early as March 1943 as an immediate morale booster after the humiliations at Moscow and Stalingrad, but Hitler wanted to have a new generation of tanks ready before doing so. Intelligence had forewarned the Soviets of Nazi intentions so that by the time Germany did launch a counter-attack, on 4 July, Kursk was fully fortified and prepared. The Germans’ hope for a blitzkrieg victory, which depended on the element of surprise, evaporated as the Russians held out and engaged the Germans into a war of attrition, which greatly favoured the Soviets. The climax of the battle took place near a village called Prokhorovka on 12 July, when a thousand tanks and a thousand aircraft on each side clashed on a two-mile front, fighting each other to a standstill. The Battle of Kursk dragged on for another month, but with the German lines continuously disrupted by partisan activity and the Russian capacity of putting unending supplies of men and equipment into the fray, the Germans eventually ran out of energy and resources. Hitler, on hearing that the western Allies had landed in Sicily, ordered a withdrawal.