Russian Sacrifice at Stalingrad

German advance (Summer 1942) into Soviet oil-Stalingrad region

February 2, 2013 marks the 70th anniversary of the end, in 1943, of the 200-day Battle of Stalingrad.

More is written by the US and UK about D-Day than about the vastly larger and more costly Battle of Stalingrad. The Cold War and ignorance of English speakers about the non-English speaking world comes into this.

Russia did vastly more against the German Army than the US and UK to beat Germany . 

Russia has a new place in the world community. Look at Russia's National Anthem now:

 The Battle of Stalingrad in Film and History

by Louis Proyect (www.marxmail.org)

(reproduced http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/culture/Battle_of_Stalingrad.htm )

For a previous generation, the Battle of Stalingrad, which began in the summer of 1942 and ended in January 1943, had a similar importance. In this most costly of military engagements, the Nazi army suffered not only its first major defeat, but one that essentially paved the way for the collapse of the Third Reich. The ability of the workers state to defeat the seemingly invincible fascist army lifted the morale of every antifascist and anticapitalist armed movement worldwide, from Mao's Red Army to the French Resistance. Despite the determination of Anglo-American imperialism to pick up where Hitler left off, the mood of resistance continued well into the 1950s as the Soviet Union remained a symbol of working-class power.

German losses at Stalingrad were staggering. Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus's Sixth Army began its campaign with 600,000 soldiers. On Jan. 31, 1943, he disobeyed Hitler and surrendered. On February 2 the last of his remaining 91,000 troops became Soviet prisoners. The Soviets recovered 250,000 German and Romanian corpses in and around Stalingrad and total Axis deaths (Germans, Romanians, Italians, and Hungarians) is estimated at 800,000. Of those taken captive, only 6,000 lived to return to their homeland.

At one key battle for control of (the tractor) factory, there were more casualties than during the entire [German invasion of] France the previous year. Official Russian military historians estimate that 1,100,000 Soviet soldiers lost their lives in the campaign to defend the city, all this in a span of six months.

I first became interested in the Battle of Stalingrad after reading Harrison Salisbury's masterpiece "The 900 Days" which tells the story of the siege of Leningrad. In Salisbury's book, a testimony to the ability of a people to survive the German assault, residual socialist beliefs weigh heavily. Despite all of Stalin's abuses, the ordinary citizens of Leningrad believed that their system was worth fighting and dying for.

The Battle of Stalingrad had a different character since most noncombatants were evacuated across the Volga before the worst fighting began. Therefore, any book on the subject would tend to be focused on the battle itself rather than the texture of everyday life under siege. This is certainly the case with Antony Beevor's "Stalingrad, the Fateful Siege: 1942-1943" that was published. Although Beevor was not sympathetic to the left, his book is a useful introduction to the enormous struggle of the Soviet people.

The battle of Stalingrad has also inspired two sharply contrasting films in recent years that are both available in home video. German director Joseph Vilsmaier's 1993 "Stalingrad" is a powerful antiwar film that focuses on the disintegration of the German army under the combined forces of the Soviet army and the brutal Russian winter. Made in 2001, Jean-Jacques Annaud's "Enemy at the Gates" is much less successful. Although Annaud is French and his film was made in Europe (with the largest budget in the continent's history), "Enemy at the Gates" represents a Hollywoodization of material that would defy such a treatment. Instead of focusing on the massive social forces that made the German defeat possible, Annaud would have us believe that victory revolved around the feats of an individual sniper. Indeed, the film's publicity revolved around the slogan "A single bullet can change history"

Stalingrad's geographical position helps us to understand why Hitler's Sixth Army was doomed. Now called Volgograd, it sits on the Volga River, which runs from north to south, toward the Caspian. It is in the southern steppes, just north of Grozny where the Chechen war recently came to a bloody conclusion. If you transpose its location onto a United States map, Stalingrad would be found at Oklahoma City. As is the case with Oklahoma City, the Russian city might have well been dropped from the sky on a completely flat terrain. But unlike Oklahoma City, Stalingrad has winters like those of central Canada.

Hitler expected the war to be over in a few months. His overweening sense of self-confidence was predicated on the easy victories against reactionary France, and against a Poland suffering from rotten semifeudal class relations. He believed his own propaganda about Bolshevik "untermenschen" who would lack the desire to fight for higher values.

When Vilsmaier's soldiers finally arrive at the outskirts of Stalingrad in the summer of 1942, the sight that awaits them is enough to make them turn around and head back for Germany. Sprawled on the ground in all directions are the bandaged and bloody casualties of the preceding months' fighting, who moan and weep inconsolably. If the Russians are "untermenschen," [sub-human] these soldiers are certainly not "obermenschen."

Stalin had decided to hold the line at the city named after him, no matter the expense. This meant enacting one of the most controversial measures known in modern warfare: all Russian soldiers running away from the fighting would be shot by specially assigned NKVD operatives. If a Russian had a choice between dying from a German bullet and one made in his own country, he would likely opt for the former. While the workers state promised the chance of a better future, merciless discipline was required to hold the line in the here and now so as to make that future possible. A combination of class-consciousness, patriotism and ultra-Spartan discipline helped to forge the Red detachments in Stalingrad into a Nazi-killing machine.

Furthermore, the Soviet Union had something that Germany sorely lacked: sheer numbers. Vast numbers of inexperienced youth were drafted into action, with very little training. This led to enormous casualties in face of the better-trained and equipped Wehrmacht. Even schoolchildren were mustered into action. In chapter seven, "Not One Step Backwards," Beevor writes:

Younger schoolchildren, meanwhile, were put to work building earth walls round the petroleum-storage tanks on the banks of the Volga. Supervised by teachers, they carried the earth on wooden stretchers. A German aircraft suddenly appeared. The girls did not know where to hide, and the explosion from a bomb buried two fourteen-year-old girls. When their classmates dug them out, they found that one of them, Nina Grebennikova, was paralysed with a broken back. Her shocked and weeping friends cleaned off the wooden stretcher, and carried her on it to a Stalingrad hospital, next to where the Tsaritsa gorge opens on to the Volga.

In early autumn the fighting had concentrated in the rubble strewn streets of downtown Stalingrad.

Hitler had vowed not to allow another "Verdun" to take place, referring to the most famous and costly trench warfare episode in WWI, but this is exactly what the Battle of Stalingrad turned into. Instead of trenches, Soviet soldiers and their Nazi counterparts fought from behind shattered buildings, often no more than fifty feet apart.

Such action is dramatized in a vivid fashion in a lengthy scene in the middle of Vilsmaier's film. The Germans are huddled in one bombed out factory building and the Soviets face them off in another. Between them is a courtyard strewn with the bodies of the already dead and dying. As the German officers order their troops to attack the Soviet stronghold, each successive wave of attackers is mowed down by Soviet fire. Unfortunately, the film fails to portray the heroism of the Soviet defenders who were vastly outnumbered. This flows logically from an esthetic/political decision to show the horror of the war only from the German point of view.

For the Soviet perspective, we have to turn to Beevor:

While the bitter struggle for the Mamaev Kurgan [a park] continued, an equally ferocious battle developed for the huge concrete grain silo down by the river. The rapid advance of Hoth’s XLVIII Panzer Corps had virtually cut off this natural fortress. The defenders from the 35th Guards Division cheered and joked when reinforcements from a marine infantry platoon commanded by Lieutenant Andrey Khozyanov reached them during the night of 17 September. They had two old Maxim machine-guns and two of the long Russian anti-tank rifles, which they used to fire at a German tank when an officer and an interpreter appeared under a flag of truce to ask them to surrender. German artillery then ranged on to the vast structure preparing the ground for the Saxon 94th Infantry Division, whose insignia were the crossed swords of Meissen porcelain.

The fifty-odd defenders fought off ten assaults on 18 September. Knowing that they could not expect resupply, they conserved their ammunition, rations and water carefully. The conditions in which they continued to fight over the next two days were terrible. They were choked with dust and smoke, even the grain in the elevator had caught fire, and they soon had almost nothing left to drink. They were also short of water to fill the barrel jackets of the Maxim machine-guns. (Presumably the marines resorted to their own urine for the purpose, as was so often the practice in the First World War, but Soviet accounts avoid such details.)

All their grenades and anti-tank projectiles had been expended by the time more German tanks arrived to finish them off on 20 September. Both Maxims were put out of action. The defenders, unable to see inside the elevator for smoke and dust, communicated by shouting to each other through parched throats. When the Germans broke in, they fired at sounds, not at objects. That night, with only a handful of ammunition left, the survivors broke out. The wounded had to be left behind. Although a fierce fight, it was hardly an impressive victory for the Germans, yet Paulus chose the huge grain silo as the symbol of Stalingrad in the arm badge he was having designed at army headquarters to commemorate the victory.

While urban trench warfare proceeded through the end of 1942, the Soviet Union was operating munitions factories twenty-four hours a day in the Eastern part of the country not yet under Nazi control, as it drafted a huge new army to dislodge the invaders. The stubborn fighting in Stalingrad prevented the Nazis from moving eastward. After the new Soviet forces were assembled, a top-secret decision was made to surround Paulus's Sixth Army from the north and the south. This counter-attack coincided with the full brunt of the Russian winter for which the German army had no contingency plans.

Russian counterattack (Operation Uranus, November 1942 on) to trap German 6th Army at Stalingrad. Click to Enlarge.

Not only were the Nazis short of food, ammunition and water, they lacked winter combat gear. Since Hitler had gambled that the fighting would be long over prior to the onset of winter, his ill-equipped soldiers began to suffer frostbite and worse. To survive, many removed the underclothing of dead Soviet soldiers or wrapped rags around their shoes.

Save me a fragment of violent foam

save me a rifle, save a plow for me

and let them place it at my grave

with a red ear of grain from your soil,

that it be known, if there be any doubt,

that I died loving you and you loved me,

and if I did not fight in your waist

I leave in your honor this dark grenade,

this song of love for Stalingrad.

Final stanza of Pablo Neruda's "New Song to Stalingrad" The Battle of Stalingrad in Film and History

Russian children honour the memory of the millions of Russian soldiers who died for them.

Pete