The city was burning from end to end, bombs exploding and bodies lying in the streets. One Red Army soldier who reached Stalingrad in 1942 described it as a meat grinder, a place of constant noise, screaming, and the smell of the dead. By the time the German Sixth Army arrived, the question was not whether the city would fall, but what it would mean for the war itself. If the Germans crossed the Volga, they would drive on to the Caucasus and seize the oil fields, and the Soviet Union would be cut off from its vital resources.
Stalingrad had to hold at all costs. The German offensive had already carried the Wehrmacht deep into Soviet territory. After the fighting in Kiev, the Germans regrouped, and by 1942 a whole army of roughly 250,000 men was ordered to take Stalingrad. The Soviets moved to defend the city, sending infantry forward while artillery units followed.
Many of the soldiers arriving in Stalingrad were young and inexperienced. One artilleryman had never ridden a horse before the campaign, yet by the time he reached the city he rode well. When his unit arrived, there was an eerie quiet, because the Germans had not yet entered the city. He admitted he was scared.
Another soldier joined the army straight from the school bench and had no idea what he was in for. The bombing began soon after. Explosions came practically every few feet, turning the city to dust. Everything was burning, and only ruined buildings remained.
Nearly all civilians had fled, and the bodies of the dead lay unrecovered in the streets. The noise was constant, day and night, the sound of shooting, crying, and screaming. A German soldier recalled that he was within fifteen miles of Stalingrad, and the orders were clear: regardless of cost, the city must be captured. When the fighting finally reached the streets, the Germans initially had some success in their sector.
The division that broke through on September 14 pushed all the way to the Volga. But the Soviets held their ground, and the Germans found themselves attacking dozens of times each day. Tanks came in waves, the trenches shook, and a man could not lift his head without seeing a German close by. One young soldier remembered the terror of his first combat, the moment it all became real.
He was certain that no one his age was fearless, that everyone was afraid, no matter how invincible they felt. The wounded poured into the hospitals. A nurse remembered the smell of dried blood that followed her everywhere. In triage, she worked as convoys of wounded arrived, often as many as five hundred in a single day during heavy battles.
She remembered one patient with a chest wound who cried out for air, but the medical staff had no tools to save him, and he died. On the front lines, one artilleryman said he felt he belonged there, that he got used to the danger. His horse trembled under shellfire and he would hug its neck, stroking it and telling it to be steady. By the end of September, Hitler announced that the fall of Stalingrad was only a matter of days.
But the Soviet army commander saw that his forces risked being surrounded and destroyed. He told his division commander that when the main force pulled back to the Volga, one division would have to hold the front against two entire German armies. It was then that Stalin issued his order known as Not One Step Back. The Red Army created punishment units armed with machine guns, and if soldiers retreated, they were fired on by their own men.
Stalin had commanded that the city bearing his name must not fall, and Hitler had decreed that no German soldier ever retreats. The two dictators had turned the city into a battlefield where neither side could give ground. By the end of October, snow covered the ruins. The Germans controlled about three-quarters of the city, while the Soviets held the last quarter.
The Germans tried to force a surrender, but the street fighting continued. What the Germans had expected to take in a few days turned into a brutal house-to-house war. Every house, every floor, had to be fought over. For the Germans, the fighting was unbearable, and they admitted the Russians were superior in that kind of combat.
The Russians held out longer, did not give up quickly, and did not surrender in a hurry. For each soldier, the question became a simple one: are you going to die, or am I? The Soviet officer in charge of the operation was Georgy Zhukov, a serious strategist who planned to encircle the German armies. His plan called for three fronts to push in from separate directions, surround the enemy, and destroy them.
In November, two simultaneous attacks were launched, one from the north and one from the south. The German armies besieging Stalingrad suddenly found themselves threatened with encirclement. The Soviet artillery hammered the enemy positions for a full hour, using about 3,500 artillery pieces across all three fronts, firing without a break while the air force bombed from above. They fought their way through, closed the circle, and trapped the Germans inside the pocket.
The German soldiers inside the encirclement now faced the grinding reality of a surrounded army in winter. The temperature fell to twenty, twenty-five, sometimes thirty degrees below zero. One German officer watched his divisional commander, broken by the coming defeat, take a weapon and fire at the Russians until he was shot in the head and died instantly. Other officers, seeing the end approaching, drank schnapps and shot themselves.
Rations did not arrive, and even horses starved. One soldier watched his horse die from hunger, and the men cut it up, boiled it, and ate the meat. As the Soviets advanced, a German lieutenant was hit by cluster munitions and thrown onto his back. He saw the snow turn bright red with his blood, the bright red of lung blood.
His master sergeant put a pistol in his hand and told him that the Russians could reach the bunker within half an hour, and that they could not take him with them. It was a considerate offer, a chance to shoot himself. But that night a plane was departing, and the master sergeant threw the young lieutenant over his shoulder and got him onto it. That was how he escaped the cauldron.
By February 2, 1943, the German command surrendered. When the announcement came that the fighting at Stalingrad was over, the Soviet soldiers emerged from cover to see destroyed tanks and cannons everywhere. Isolated machine guns still fired here and there, as Germans who remained were hiding behind vehicles and being finished off. The Soviet soldiers felt no pity.
Stalingrad was free, and the Battle of Stalingrad became the turning point of the war. The Red Army pushed on, all the way to Berlin. When it was all over, the Soviet officers gathered and drank, singing and celebrating that they had won, that they had kept their legs and arms, that they were alive. But when the war finally ended, there was joy and no joy at the same time.
The survivors went to the graves where they had buried their comrades, broke branches of blooming lilacs, and laid them on the graves. Those men had not lived to see victory, dying only days or hours before the end. Years later, the veterans still could not escape what they had seen. One could not watch war films where a soldier pointed a gun at another man’s face.
He would turn it off. He still closed his eyes and saw pictures. He insisted that no number of films could ever come close to describing war. Unless you experienced it, you did not know it.
The same brutal realities marked the western front. On June 6, 1944, Canadian soldiers landed on the beaches of Normandy. The noise was overwhelming, with battleships firing, artillery on barges firing over their heads, and German shells striking the landing craft. Men floated dead in the water.
One soldier, petrified when the ramp dropped, had to be shouted at by his corporal before he could move. He jumped off into the water and ran into machine-gun fire. He remembered the sand moving in front of him where bullets were hitting. A comrade was hit and lay calling for help, but the unit could not stop, because stopping would cost more men.
The soldier described it as a hard decision to leave him there. The company of about 120 men was nearly wiped out on the beach, with only about forty left standing. The Canadian objective was to clear out a gun emplacement, and there was no place to hold prisoners, so they were disposed of. The Canadians pushed inland, reaching further than any other Allied formation on D-Day.
By the night of June 6, this brigade of Western Canadians was the only one to take all of its objectives, but that left them dangerously exposed ahead of the rest of the invasion force. The Germans attempted to cut them off and push them back into the sea. The opposing force included the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend, a formation of young, fanatical Germans who had been indoctrinated since childhood and believed themselves invincible. Many of them were battle-hardened veterans from the eastern front.
In the village of Bretteville, a tank commander turned a corner in his Sherman and found five Panthers coming straight at him. A 17-pounder from another troop knocked out all five. The infantry of the Regina Rifles, known as the Farmer Johns, held their ground. These men are never going to give up, the veteran said, and they were determined not to be defeated or die trying.
The German counterattacks were heavy. The tank commander was hit when shellfire struck his turret, killing his gunner and loader. He lost his leg. A stretcher bearer remembered a young soldier who was hit and spoke his last three words, I want my mom, over and over until the noise of the shelling drowned him out.
After dark, the stretcher bearer buried him. Another soldier remembered waking to a mess of bodies and body parts, and a little girl walking down a road with a baby carriage, covered in blood, out of it, unresponsive. The Regina Rifles held Bretteville, and the beachhead was secured. The veterans felt hatred afterward, because they had lost many good friends.
Worse, some of their captured men were taken to an abbey at Ardenne Abbey, marched out into a field, and shot. A survivor who escaped into a grainfield recalled the machine guns opening fire on prisoners of war. The Germans murdered fifty-eight Canadian prisoners in those massacres. One young soldier who seemed likely to die survived, and years later, a hospital patient saw the little fellow walking bent over across a square, going home the next day.
The Normandy beachhead was secure, and the Germans were not going to push the Allies back into the sea, but Hitler would not yield the rest of Normandy or France without a fight. The Allies would give him that fight, and they would win it.