The Battle of Stalingrad was momentous. Despite the attempt to regain the strategic initiative at Kursk, the Wehrmacht would be in tow for the remainder of the contest. Was it, then, the decisive battle? According to Jonathan Trigg, “A global conflict like World War II is not won or lost in a battle no matter how big it is, but Stalingrad has more numbers to achieve this title than most others.”
Now, this British soldier proposes a review of the battle taking into account two planes that are intermingled: on the one hand, the main lines of Operation Blue (Fall Blau), whose objective was the conquest of oil from the Caucasus, and in which the city on the Volga was listed as a mere appendage. On the other, how not only the German foot soldiers lived it, but also their Italian, Romanian and Hungarian allies, who covered the wings of their deployment. A chapter as necessary as little treated.
The first thing that Trigg highlights is the disproportion between means and objectives. After the failure of Operation Barbarossa, and without having covered losses, Army Group South was entrusted with an objective superior to its forces, with supply lines that were too extensive and, to a large extent, animal-drawn. Already in the first bars it began to lack everything. Not only gasoline, but also water. But, although this is important, what was decisive was the personality of the two great protagonists on the German side: Adolf Hitler and Friedrich Paulus.
By later dividing the offensive into two operations hundreds of kilometers apart, the Caucasus and the Volga, the problems became more acute. In the Führer’s mind, Stalin’s city, not oil, became the goal, and the wrong man was chosen to achieve it: General Friedrich Paulus.
He was a distant and pusillanimous General Staff officer, with almost no combat experience, who, when he arrived before his objective, “estimated that he would have the city in his possession in a couple of days.” It was not so. The Soviet 62nd Army defending the city proved a tough nut to crack, and had an ace up its sleeve: reinforcements from across the river.
In addition, Paulus did not succeed in the tactic to follow. In a clear operational regression, nothing else occurred to him than to accumulate men on the front line and launch one attack after another, which became a Rattenkrieg (war of rats) in which the Germans burned, one after another, their best units and disabling their best weapon: the tanks of the 4th Panzer Army. By the time the Soviets counterattacked and encircled the German 6th Army (Operation Uranus), there was little to do. Paulus closed in on himself and stopped acting, while Hitler sacrificed his already scant air resources in an unfeasible supply operation, until the end came.
This is how Jonathan Trigg tells it with a great capacity for synthesis and a human tone that, through the shocking stories of the protagonists, makes the reader feel that they are really there.
