Some battles are won by manoeuvre. Stalingrad was won by refusing to let go. For five months two armies fed themselves into the ruins of one city on the Volga, until the attacker was surrounded by the defender and the entire war in the East swung the other way. It is remembered as the bloodiest battle in human history.
Case Blue
In the summer of 1942 Germany drove south and east, aiming for the oil of the Caucasus and the great river that carried it. In the way stood Stalingrad, an industrial city strung along the west bank of the Volga, and a city that carried Stalin's own name. Taking it became a matter of prestige as much as strategy. The German 6th Army under Friedrich Paulus reached the outskirts in August and pounded the city to rubble from the air.
A war of rooms and staircases
The rubble was a trap. In the open, German tanks and aircraft ruled; inside a shattered city they were half blind. The fighting broke down into what the soldiers called Rattenkrieg, the war of the rats, fought room by room, floor by floor, sewer by sewer. A single grain elevator, a railway station, an apartment block held by a handful of men known as Pavlov's House, each became a battlefield of its own, changing hands again and again.
The 62nd Army holds the bank
General Vasily Chuikov, commanding the Soviet 62nd Army, ordered his men to “hug” the enemy, to stay so close that German artillery and bombers could not fire without hitting their own. Reinforcements and ammunition crossed the Volga by night on ferries under constant fire; the wounded went back the same way. The defenders were pressed into a thin strip along the water, but that strip never broke.
Operation Uranus
While the world watched the city, the Soviet command prepared something larger. On 19 November 1942 they launched Operation Uranus, striking not at the strong German centre but at the weaker Romanian armies guarding its flanks. Within four days the two pincers met west of the city. Paulus and his 6th Army, some 250,000 men, were sealed inside a pocket, the besiegers now besieged.
The cauldron
Hitler forbade any breakout and promised to supply the pocket by air, a promise the Luftwaffe could not keep. A relief attack stalled in the snow. Through a Russian winter the trapped army starved, froze and ran out of ammunition. On 2 February 1943 the last of it surrendered. Around 91,000 men marched into captivity, and Paulus became the first German field marshal ever taken prisoner.
The hinge of the war
Estimates of the total casualties, soldiers and civilians, run to nearly two million. After Stalingrad the German army in the East was never again able to mount a war-winning offensive; from here the front rolled slowly but steadily back toward Berlin. It is the moment the Second World War in Europe turned, and it turned in a single ruined city that would not fall.