Defending the capital. The siege of Stalingrad

Defending the capital

Meanwhile the Germans advanced as far as Moscow, reaching the outskirts by early December 1941. Hundreds of young recruits were preparing to defend the capital. But none could imagine that before going to battle they would march on Red Square in front of Joseph Stalin and top Communist Party officials. Against the advice of his generals, with the Germans pushing on, Stalin held a military parade in Red Square on November 7 to mark the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The parade was kept secret until the last moment. That day the Soviet air force managed the unimaginable – not a single bomb was dropped on the capital. The troops left Red Square to head straight to the frontline. The parade had a tremendous impact on morale in Moscow and throughout the Soviet Union, becoming the turning point of the war. The capital never surrendered and for the first time the Germans were thrown back.

The siege of Stalingrad

Slowly, the industrialisation of the 1930s, driven by the USSR’s vast resources and workforce, started paying off. The tide turned in February 1943, when the Germans suffered a devastating defeat in the battle of Stalingrad. One of the most brutal standoffs in human history, it had begun the previous year, in the summer of 1942.

A major industrial centre on the Volga River in southern Russia, Stalingrad (now Volgograd), was a coveted prize in itself. Control over it opened the way to the vital Caucasus oil fields. The city’s very name drove Hitler’s obsession with it. Seizing Stalingrad – “Stalin’s City” – would deal a disastrous blow to Soviet morale, something Stalin couldn’t afford. His order to the troops was: “Not One Step Back”.

The horror of Stalingrad lasted for 199 days, costing an estimated 1.5 million lives from both sides. The besieged city quickly turned into a meat grinder. The Soviet losses were so great that, at times, the life expectancy of a newly arrived soldier was less than a day. Battles raged for every street, house, basement and staircase. Areas captured by the Wehrmacht troops by day, were re-taken by the Soviet army at night. The Germans dubbed this type of war Rattenkrieg – “rat war”, bitterly joking about seizing the kitchen but still fighting for the living-room.

One building that the Germans failed to take was the so-called “Pavlov’s House”. In September 1942, a Soviet platoon led by Yakov Pavlov turned an apartment block in the city centre into an impenetrable fortress. Penned in and surrounded by Nazis, a little more than a dozen men rebuffed assault after assault. They held out for two months, until they were relieved by counter-attacking Soviet forces.

Another Stalingrad legend was sniper Vasily Zaitsev. During the battles in and around the city, he picked off more than 200 German soldiers. The Soviet press lost no time in spreading the news of his exceptional shooting skills. The story goes that the Germans decided to send a super-sniper of their own to kill him. After a dramatic cat-and-mouse game, lasting several days, Zaitsev finally outwitted his adversary. Although it doesn’t seem to be supported by either German or Soviet archives, the tale of the duel inspired the novel “War of the Rats” by David L. Robbins and a Hollywood epic “Enemy at the Gates”.

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