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A phenomenon created by the strong emotions and fantastical experiences war brought upon Russia was a resurgence of religious worship, which Stalin did not seek to suppress. At Easter 1942, Moscow’s overnight curfew was lifted, and Dr Sof’ya Skopina attended the great Orthodox cathedral in Moscow’s Elokhovskaya Square. ‘We arrived at 8 p.m. There was a small queue to bless the kulich [Easter bread] and eggs. An hour later there was such a crowd that one couldn’t turn and no air to breathe. Amid the throng, women screamed, “They’ve crushed me! I’m going to faint!” The atmosphere grew so humid that moisture ran down the columns. Candles passed from one person to another sent smoke curling into spirals. There were many young people (I don’t know why they had come there). Some mums came with their kids, and a lot of military men. There were people even sitting on the cross with the picture of Christ. It was like a football crowd. At 11 p.m. a priest appeared and announced that “Our friends the British are about to arrive.” We could no longer breathe and went outside, where we saw several cars drive up. It was the British [Embassy delegation].’

Army nurse Evdokiya Kalinichenko wrote in May: ‘We’re having a little break, for the first time this month. We’ve made the wounded men comfortable, dried ourselves out, had a wash in a real banya [bath house]. We’ve been on so many roads. All kinds of roads…Mostly country roads, often mud-bound, rutted and degraded by rain, holes, bumps. One’s heart breaks when the vehicle jolts: most of the passengers are gravely wounded, and for some such jolting can be fatal. Now, however, it is so quiet around us that it is hard to believe there is war anywhere on the planet. We wander about in the woods and gather bunches of flowers. The sun shines, the sky is blue. We keep peering upwards by force of habit, but see only passing clouds. We think the Germans have at last been stopped and won’t try to go any further – they’ve learnt their lesson on the approaches to Moscow.’

Kalinichenko hoped too much, too soon. Though the Russians had mass, and could replace their horrific 1941 losses, they still lacked the combat power and logistical support to sustain deep penetrations. The New Year offensive by five fronts or army groups, personally directed by Stalin, petered out even before the spring thaw arrested movement. The Germans held their line south of Leningrad, maintaining the threat to the city; they moved to cut off the Volkhov front and destroy Second Shock Army. Its commander Lt. Gen. Andrey Vlasov was captured, and subsequently raised a Cossack ‘Russian Liberation Army’ for the Nazis.

In the Crimea, the Germans blocked the western exit from the Kerch peninsula, trapping a vast Russian army, then counter-attacked. Between 8 and 19 May, Manstein achieved another triumph, shattering the Crimean front and taking 170,000 prisoners. Seven thousand survivors took refuge in limestone caves until the Germans blasted the entrances with explosives and pumped in gas. Lt. Gen. Gunther Blumentritt, who became a Wehrmacht army commander, wrote of the Russians rather as he might have described wild beasts he could not respect, but grudgingly feared:

Eastern man is very different from his Western counterpart. He has a much greater capacity for enduring hardship, and this passivity induces a high degree of equanimity towards life and death…Eastern man does not possess much initiative; he is accustomed to taking orders, to being led. [The Russians] attach little importance to what they eat or wear. It is surprising how long they can survive on what to a Western man would be a starvation diet…Close contact with nature enables these people to move freely by night or in fog, through woods and across swamps. They are not afraid of the dark, nor of their endless forests, nor of the cold…The Siberian, who is partially or completely Asiatic, is even tougher…The psychological effect of the country on the ordinary German soldier was considerable. He felt small and lost in that endless space…A man who has survived the Russian enemy and the Russian climate has little more to learn about war.

Manstein favoured bypassing the fortress of Sevastopol, but Hitler insisted on its capture. The 1,350-ton 800mm giant siege gun ‘Big Dora’ was brought forward, utilising enormous labour because it could move only on twin railway tracks. Franz Halder dismissed Dora, an example of wasteful Nazi industrial effort on prestige weapons, as ‘an extremely impressive piece of engineering, but quite useless’. Its seven-ton shells and 4,000-strong crew contributed much less to the capture of the city than the dogged efforts of Manstein’s infantry. The defenders were also pounded from the air. A Luftwaffe dive-bomber pilot, Captain Herbert Paber, wrote: ‘One explosion next to another, like poisonous mushrooms, shot up between the rocky hideouts. The whole peninsula was fire and smoke – yet in the end thousands of prisoners were taken even there. One can only stand amazed at such resilience…That is how they defended Sevastopol all along the line…The whole country had to be literally ploughed over with bombs before they yielded a short distance.’

When the city finally fell on 4 July after a siege of 250 days, the NKVD’s units were among those which escaped, after massacring all their prisoners. The dreadful losses in the Crimea were attributed to the incompetence of the Soviet commander, Stalin’s favourite Lev Mekhlis, who rejected pleas for units to be allowed to dig in as a symptom of defeatism. The only redeeming feature of the disaster was that Mekhlis was sacked. Sevastopol cost the Germans 25,000 dead and 50,000 tons of artillery ammunition. The attackers were again impressed by the stubbornness of the resistance.

Meanwhile further north, as the ground dried out after the thaw, on 12 May Gen. Semyon Timoshenko launched a thrust by South-Western Front towards Kharkov, which failed disastrously. Yet again, a German counterattack encircled the Russians, and yet again Stalin refused to permit a retreat, causing the loss of more than a quarter of a million men. The army commander and some of his officers shot themselves rather than accept captivity. The survivors were driven eastwards in rout. One man said, ‘We wept as we retreated. We were running anywhere to get away from Kharkov; some to Stalingrad, others to Vladikavkaz. Where else would we end up – Turkey?’

Hitler’s confidence revived: he dismissed Germany’s losses in the previous year’s fighting, and accepted the view of Colonel Reinhard Gehlen, Eastern Front intelligence chief, that Stalin’s reserves were exhausted. By August, German weapons output would regain full momentum, following a disastrous July 1941 decision, rescinded only in January 1942, to cut arms and ammunition production in anticipation of victory. It was extraordinary that Hitler retained the loyalty and obedience of his officers after the strategic madnesses of the previous campaign and the privations of winter. In the Crimea in January 1942, an embittered German soldier itemised his diet: one hot meal a day – cabbage soup with potatoes in it – half a loaf of bread every second day, some fat, a little cheese and hard honey.

Yet even on such fare, the Wehrmacht remained a formidable fighting force. Most of Germany’s generals, in the dark recesses of their souls, knew that they had made their nation and its entire army – it was a myth that only the SS committed atrocities – complicit in crimes against humanity, and especially Russian humanity, such as their enemies would never forgive, even before the Holocaust began. They saw nothing to lose by fighting on, except more millions of lives: it deserves emphasis that a large majority of the war’s victims perished from 1942 onwards. Only victories might induce the Allies to make terms. Hitler’s April directive for the summer operations called for a concentration of effort in the south; the objectives of Operation Blue were to destroy the Red Army’s residual reserves, seize Stalingrad and capture the Caucasian oilfields.

Stalin misjudged German intentions: anticipating a new thrust against Moscow, he concentrated his forces accordingly. Even when the entire Blue plan was laid before him, after being found on the body of a Wehrmacht staff officer killed in an air crash, he dismissed it as disinformation. But Russia’s armies remained much stronger than Hitler realised, with 5.5 million men under arms and rapidly increasing tank and aircraft production. Criminals and some political prisoners were released from the gulag’s labour camps for service – 975,000 of them by the war’s end. Berlin estimated Russia’s 1942 steel output at eight million tons; in reality, it would attain 13.5 million tons.

The first phase of Blue, expected to take three weeks, began on 28 June with an assault towards the Don. Against Stalin’s armies, Hitler deployed 3.5 million Germans and a further million Axis troops – Italians, Romanians, the Spanish ‘Blue’ Division dispatched by Franco as a goodwill gesture – with spectacular initial success. When Pravda correspondent Lazar Brontman arrived in Voronezh, three hundred miles north-west of Stalingrad, at first he found the city relaxed and secure in its remoteness from the enemy. He was amused one evening by the droll spectacle of scores of women in the park dancing with each other in the absence of male partners. Women also policed the city: Brontman observed that they directed traffic more efficiently than men, but used their whistles too much.

Within days, however, the mood darkened dramatically. Further west the Russian line broke, precipitating yet another headlong retreat. German bombers began to pound Voronezh’s streets, ‘ironing the city without meeting resistance’, and prompting a great exodus of fugitives. Profiteers who owned vehicles charged desperate people three, four, five thousand roubles for the privilege of a ride eastwards. One by one, the city’s factories and government offices shut down. When its inhabitants learned that the Germans were only thirty miles away, Brontman wrote that Voronezh was ‘psychologically prepared for surrender’, and indeed the city was overrun a few days later.

The advancing panzers were delayed by rain and mud more than by the Red Army, and in early July reached their initial objectives. Stalin mandated the only authorised Russian strategic retreat of the war: when the Germans continued their advance east beyond Voronezh, they found themselves attacking empty space. Russian forces escaped from an intended envelopment at Millerovo, prompting Hitler to sack Bock for the second time, then splitting his Army Group South into two new commands, A and B, commanded respectively by List and Weichs. But the Führer exulted in the progress of the campaign, which thus far had been a mere armoured victory ride. His infantry were scarcely called upon to fight, and losses were negligible. New swathes of Soviet territory fell into German hands. Through July the panzers swept on southwards towards Rostov, savagely mauling the Russian South Front as its formations sought escape across the Don. Hitler commissioned Friedrich Paulus, a staff officer eager to prove himself as a field commander, to lead Sixth Army in a dash for Stalingrad.

Most of Germany’s generals immediately recognised the folly of this move. The strategic significance of Stalin’s name-city was small, irrelevant to the main objective of clearing the Caucasus and securing its oil. Moreover, Hitler’s eagerness for a symbolic triumph was matched by the determination of Stalin to deny this to him. If Stalingrad fell, the Soviet leader feared a renewed German thrust in the north, against Moscow. He thus determined that the Volga city must be held at all costs, and committed to its defence three armies from his strategic reserve. The stage was set for one of the decisive battles of the war, a collision between the personal wills of the two dictators.

The spirit of many Russians was unbroken, but the catastrophes of spring and summer ate deep into morale. Some people nursed hopes that the Western Allies would relieve their plight. Pavel Kalitov, commissar of a partisan group in Ukraine, wrote on 8 July: ‘We are very happy because England is bombing Romania with such success, and the Americans are going to send a landing force to France.’ Such expectations were precious but spurious. British bombing received much more propaganda attention than its achievements justified, and the Second Front was still almost two years away. Until 1943, arms and food deliveries from the West made only a small contribution to matching enormous Soviet needs and commitments. Whatever Stalin’s people achieved in 1942, they must achieve almost unaided.

It is hard to exaggerate the sufferings of Russian soldiers in the face of the elements and their own leaders’ bungling, as well as the enemy. ‘The night was terribly dark,’ wrote Captain Nikolai Belov, describing his unit’s detrainment behind the front. ‘The whole battalion set off in the wrong direction. We walked in circles all night, 30 km in terrible mud.’ Two weeks on, he recorded: ‘We have only a couple of old rifles for the whole battalion.’ On 10 May, his unit took up positions near a village named Bolshoi Sinkovets: ‘We have had no food for two days. Everyone is starving.’ Two days later, the battalion was issued with forty-one rifles for five hundred men. On 17 May, it ‘speed-marched’ thirty miles, losing forty stragglers who could not keep up. This was unsurprising, since the men had not eaten for two days. Belov wrote: ‘Everyone is frustrated with the commanders – and not without reason.’ Day after day, their ordeal continued. ‘Arrived in Zelyonaya Dubrava, having marched 35 km during the day. It is unbearably hot, we are terribly tired. Again there is nothing to eat. Lots of men are unable to keep up. Sedov is crying. He is quite unable to walk.’ Belov’s men were reduced to grubbing in the fields for rotting potatoes left from the previous year’s harvest. Their first actions against the Germans resulted in murderous losses: on 15 July, he reported his company’s strength reduced to five men.

At midsummer 1942, the Western Allies’ view of Russia’s predicament remained bleak. A British intelligence officer wrote on 15 July: ‘I have the inescapable feeling that much as the Germans may have lost, the Red Army has lost more…Sevastopol was…a fair feat of Soviet arms and demonstrated the enormous power of the Red Army on the defensive – given the right conditions of terrain…[But it] is still not capable of dealing with the Germans in the open terrain of South Russia…On the whole the Germans have most things in their favour…They possess a better fighting machine…How far the Germans will be able to exploit their success will depend on the ability of the Red Army to retain some form of cohesion in retreat until they have gone back behind great natural obstacles or into country more suitable for the defence.’

It is important to view the events of the year in context. In 1941, Russia suffered 27.8 per cent of its total war losses. But in 1942 Kharkov, the Crimea and Kerch peninsula disasters accounted for even larger casualties. When Stalingrad was added, the year as a whole cost Russia 28.9 per cent of its overall casualties in the conflict, 133 per cent of the Red Army’s front-line strength. Posterity knows that Stalin learned vital lessons: he started to delegate military decisions to competent generals, and the worst blunderers were dismissed. The weapons created by Russia’s industrial mobilisation and production beyond the Urals began to reach her armies, increasing their strength while that of the Axis shrank. But none of this was apparent to the world in the summer of 1942. Germany still seemed irresistible on the battlefield, Russia at its last gasp.

Almost all British, and also later American, attempts to collaborate operationally with Stalin’s people foundered on the rocks of their ally’s secretiveness, incompetence, ill-will and paucity of means. The Royal Navy’s requests for the aid of Soviet warships and aircraft to cover British convoys approaching Murmansk and Archangel yielded meagre responses. In August 1942, an RAF Catalina delivered to north-west Russia two SIS agents, whom the Soviets had agreed to parachute into north Norway. Their hosts instead detained the two men incommunicado for two months before dropping them, still in summer clothing, inside Finland rather than Norway, where they were swiftly arrested, tortured and shot. Thereafter, the British recognised that cooperation with the Russians was an exclusively one-way proposition; that the consequences of placing Allied personnel at the mercy of Soviet goodwill were often fatal.

Nonetheless, the Western governments went to extravagant lengths to preserve a semblance of unity. When Gen. Anders, who had suffered in Stalin’s prisons between 1939 and 1941, met Churchill in Cairo in August 1942, he vehemently denounced the Soviet Union: ‘There was, I said, no justice or honour in Russia, and not a single man there whose word could be trusted. Churchill pointed out to me how dangerous such language would be if spoken in public. No good, he said, could come of antagonising the Russians…Churchill closed the talk by saying that he believed Poland would emerge from the war a strong and happy country.’ Anders allowed himself to be persuaded that ‘We Poles were now going home (so we thought) by a different route, a longer one, indeed, but one with fewer hardships.’ The Western Powers exerted themselves to sustain this delusion.

The Germans encountered the first units of the Stalingrad Front on 23 July, some eighty-seven miles west of the city. That night, Hitler made what proved the decisive blunder of the war in the east. He issued a new directive, declaring the objectives of Blue completed. Army Group A was ordered to overrun the Caucasus oilfields 745 miles beyond its existing positions – a longer advance than the German drive from the Siegfried Line to the Channel coast in May 1940. Its formations soon found themselves attempting to sustain a front five hundred miles wide with hopelessly inadequate forces, against stubborn Russian resistance. Meanwhile Army Group B commenced operations designed to close up to a line along the Volga and secure Stalingrad. Manstein was transferred northwards with five infantry divisions and the siege artillery he had used at Sevastopol, to end the tiresome resistance at Leningrad: following a change of policy, Berlin was now impatient to occupy the city. The next news from Sixth Army showed that its progress towards Stalingrad had become sluggish. Hitler, irked, ordered that Fourth Panzer Army should be diverted from the Caucasus to support Paulus. He thus divided his strength in a fashion which rendered each element of his forces too weak to attain its objectives.

But August 1942 was another season of Russian catastrophes. One of Stalin’s favourites, the old Bolshevik warhorse Marshal Semyon Budyonny, presided over a series of shambolic defeats in the northern Caucasus. Sixth Army wrecked Russian forces on the Don east of Kalach, taking 50,000 prisoners; an entire Soviet tank army collapsed, with crews abandoning their vehicles in panic. On 21 August, Paulus launched a dash from the Don to the Volga, blasting a path through the defenders with waves of dive-bombers. In two days, his forces reached the river nine miles north of Stalingrad. The city’s capture seemed imminent, and he dispatched to Hitler a draft of his plans for Sixth Army’s move into winter quarters. Far to the south, on 9 August mountain troops took Maikop, most accessible of the Caucasian oilfields, where Russian demolitions proved so thorough that it was deemed necessary to bring equipment from Germany to drill new wells. Army Group A’s spearheads began pushing east for the Caspian; Seventeenth Army was directed southwards through the mountains towards the Black Sea.

The entire Caucasian advance was hamstrung by Hitler’s orders to divert available fuel and ammunition supplies to Paulus. Among the Nazi hierarchy in Berlin, however, there was another surge of optimism. Rommel was at the gates of Cairo; armaments production was rising; Germany’s Japanese allies had achieved extraordinary triumphs, and the implications of American naval successes at the Coral Sea and Midway were barely comprehended. Dönitz’s U-boats were devastating Atlantic convoys; an Italian submarine commander reported that he had sunk an American battleship, and was decorated by Mussolini for his flight of fantasy. German civilian morale revived.

Only the technocrats who knew the economic and industrial secrets of the Reich were undeluded. The manpower situation remained desperate, and Germany was increasing aircraft output by sustaining production of obsolescent types. General Halder wrote in his diary on 23 July: ‘The chronic tendency to underrate enemy capabilities is gradually assuming grotesque proportions.’ In September, German difficulties mounted swiftly. Troops in the southern mountains encountered snowstorms, and repeated changes of objective wreaked havoc with operations. Again and again, German advances were delayed or halted by lack of fuel – First Panzer Army found itself immobilised for three weeks, conceding a precious breathing-space to Stalin’s commanders. Almost all available Luftwaffe support was diverted to Stalingrad, heedless of the cost to operations elsewhere. On 12 September, the first German troops entered the city.

Along the length of the front, Russian soldiers and civilians alike understood little of the Germans’ huge difficulties, seeing only the miseries imposed upon their own people by battlefield failure, slaughter and starvation. On 23 October Commissar Pavel Kalitov wrote in dismay from Logovo, on receiving the order for yet another retreat: ‘The civilians are howling. Everything is to be evacuated. Everywhere there is weeping, tears, grief. Just think of it: winter is about to begin, they must go out into the cold with their little ones…Where are they to go? Our units are falling back. The Germans are exploiting a weak point in our line. Our newspapers often use such phrases as: “under pressure of superior enemy forces”. But what about us? Why are we unable to mass such “superior forces”? What is wrong? The past sixteen months have taught us many lessons. It is so hard to abandon settlements…More victims, more bloody torture, more curses levelled at us. [The peasants say]: “That’s what they are like, our protectors.”’

An old woman spoke scathingly to Vasily Grossman about her country’s rulers: ‘These fools have allowed [the enemy] to reach the heart of the country, the Volga. They’ve given them half of Russia.’ From the Kremlin came new slogans: ‘Not a step back…The only extenuating circumstance is death.’ Stalin, facing disaster with half the European Soviet Union in German hands, made an appointment with reality which proved critical. In September he named Zhukov as the nation’s Deputy Supreme Commander, then dispatched him to oversee the defence of Stalingrad, and prepare a major counter-offensive. He recognised the need to subordinate ideology to military necessity: the prohibited word ‘officer’ was restored to the Red Army, and unit commanders were liberated from their subordination to commissars; henceforward, promotions would be determined by competence. The value of medals as incentives was acknowledged: by 1945 the Red Army had issued eleven million, against the US Army’s 1.4 million.

Stalin, profiting from experience as Hitler would not, delegated operational control of the battlefield, though his supreme authority was never in doubt. Such drastic steps were indispensable, to remedy the Red Army’s lamentable summer performance. ‘We have to learn and learn,’ wrote Commissar Pavel Kalitov on 4 September 1942. ‘For a start, we must stop being so careless.’ Nikolai Belov gloomily described an inspection by a senior officer of the army battle training staff: ‘Results deplorable. The Youssefs’ – the Red Army’s derisive term for men from Kazakhstan – ‘cannot turn left or right. What a terrible lot – complete mutton-heads. If we are given more Kazakhs we can consider ourselves doomed.’ But the Red Army was indeed learning, however painfully, and was receiving formidable reinforcements of men, tanks and aircraft.

In the autumn and winter of 1942, the grey, charmless industrial city of Stalingrad became the scene of some of the most terrible fighting of the war. On Sunday, 23 August, the Germans heralded their assault with an air raid by six hundred aircraft: 40,000 civilians are said to have died in the first fourteen hours, almost as many as perished in the entire 1940–41 blitz on Britain. Thereafter, the Luftwaffe struck relentlessly. ‘We ploughed over the blazing fields of the Stalingrad battlefield all day long,’ wrote Stuka pilot Herbert Pabst. ‘It is incomprehensible to me how people can continue to live in that hell, but the Russians are firmly established in the wreckage, in ravines, cellars, and in a chaos of twisted steel skeletons of the factories.’ Paulus launched his first major ground attack on 13 September, and thereafter the struggle was waged amid a landscape of ruins. General Vasily Chuikov, commanding 62nd Army, wrote: ‘The streets of the city are dead. There is not a single green twig on the trees; everything has perished in the flames.’

The concrete masses of the city’s transport hubs and industrial plants were swiftly reduced to rubble. Each became a scene of slaughter, their unlovely names etched into the legend of Russia’s Great Patriotic War: the grain elevator beside Number Two station, the freight station, Number One station, Lazur chemical plant, Red October metal works, Dzerzhinsky tractor factory and Barricades gun foundry. In the first phase of the battle, the Russians held a perimeter thirty miles by eighteen, which shrank rapidly. At Stalin’s insistence three infantry armies were thrown into a counter-attack against the northern flank – and beaten back. The Germans, in their turn, launched repeated efforts to capture two landmarks: Point 102, a Tatar mound that rose some 350 feet above the city, and the Volga crossing point just beyond Red Square, through which reinforcements and supplies reached the city and casualties were evacuated. On some nights, as many as two or three thousand Russian wounded were ferried in darkness across the mile of ice-floed water to the eastern bank.

Each boat that took out casualties brought in men and ammunition. Reinforcements were herded aboard ferries to run the gauntlet of the crossing under Luftwaffe attack – sometimes in daylight, such were the exigencies of the siege. Aleksandr Gordeev, a naval machine-gunner, watching pityingly as soldiers clung to the deck rails rather than obey orders to descend into the hold: ‘The officers made them move down by kicking them, NCOs were swearing and shouting. Baida [his petty officer] and two big sailors were grabbing men who resisted and pushing them down the ladder. Crates of shells, bullets and rations were brought aboard. Looking at the stack of ammunition boxes five steps from our Maxim gun, I could imagine what would happen if they were hit.’ Soon afterwards, he watched another ferry carrying casualties sunk by Stukas. ‘The wounded, more than a hundred of them, were sitting or lying in the cabins while fugitives clambered up from the hold. There was a general, continuous howling sound that swelled above the bomb explosions.’

New units were rushed into the battle as fast as they arrived. Sixty-Second Army’s commander Gen. Vasily Chuikov said, ‘Time is blood.’ Detonations of bombs and shells, the crackle of small arms and the thud of mortars seldom ceased, day or night. Chuikov remarked later of Stalingrad, ‘Approaching this place, soldiers used to say: “We are entering hell.” And after spending one or two days here, they said: “No, this isn’t hell, this is ten times worse than hell.”…A young woman soldier said: “I had been imagining what war was like – everything on fire, children crying, cats running about, and when we got to Stalingrad it turned out to be really like that, only more terrible.”’ She had joined the service with a group of friends from her home town of Tobolsk in Siberia. Most were posted to the embattled city, and few left it alive.

The battle was fought in conditions that enabled Russian soldiers to display their foremost skill, as close-quarter fighters. There was no scope for sweeping panzer advances or imaginative flanking manoeuvres. Each day, German soldiers, guns and tanks merely sought to batter a path to the Volga yard by yard, through mounds of fallen masonry in which Russians huddled, cursed, starved, froze, fought and died. A letter was taken from the body of a dead defender, written by his small son: ‘I miss you very much. Please come and visit, I so want to see you, if only for one hour. My tears pour as I write this. Daddy, please come and see us.’

Chuikov expressed to Vasily Grossman his sense of oppression: ‘There’s firing and thunder all around. You send off a liaison officer to find out what’s happening, and he gets killed. That’s when you shake all over with tension…The most terrible times were when you sat there like an idiot, and the battle boiled around you, but there was nothing you could do.’ On 2 October, Chuikov’s headquarters were engulfed by a torrent of blazing oil from nearby storage tanks which burst after being hit by German bombs. Forty of his staff died as a pillar of smoke and flame rose hundreds of feet into the sky. The tractor plant was the scene of nightmare clashes as filthy, exhausted and half-starved defenders strove to repulse German tanks crashing through the rubble. At one moment the Soviet bridgehead on the west bank of the Volga shrank to a depth of a mere hundred yards.

The Russians fought with a desperation reinforced, as always, by compulsion. The price of unauthorised retreat was death. Vasily Grossman wrote: ‘On those anxiety-filled days, when the thunder of fighting could be heard in the suburbs of Stalingrad, when at night one could see rockets launched high above, and pale blue rays of searchlights roamed the sky, when the first trucks disfigured by shrapnel, carrying the casualties and baggage of retreating headquarters, appeared in the streets of the city, when front-page articles announced the mortal danger for the country, fear found its way into a lot of hearts, and many eyes looked across the Volga.’ Grossman meant, of course, that men yearned for escape eastwards from the cauldron. Those who made such attempts paid the price: some 13,500 soldiers were executed at Stalingrad for alleged cowardice or desertion, and many more were killed out of hand. In a typical report of 23 September, Beria reported that during the preceding twenty-four hours his NKVD ‘blocking detachments’ had detained 659 people: seven ‘cowards’ and one ‘enemy of the people’ were shot in front of their units. A further twenty-four were still held, including one ‘spy’, three ‘betrayers of the motherland’, eight ‘cowards’ and eight ‘enemies of the people’.

Paulus launched repeated attacks, but again and again his forces proved just too weak to break through. There was no scope for subtlety, merely a hundred daily death-grapples between Germans and Russians who shared identical privations. Chuikov deployed his forces as close as possible to the enemy line, to frustrate Luftwaffe strafing. Bombardment had wrecked the city, but as the Allies would discover, ruins create formidable tank obstacles, and are more easily defended than open streets and intact buildings. Almost every soldier was always hungry, always cold. Snipers and mortars rendered careless movement fatal; many men died collecting ammunition or queuing at field kitchens. So did women. Chuikov paid unstinting tribute to their contribution as signallers, nurses, clerks, air defence spotters.

The icy wind burnt faces deep red. Each day brought its own local crisis, while by night the Russians shifted across the river just sufficient reinforcements to sustain their precarious perimeter. Moscow sentimentalised many episodes for propaganda purposes, such as the story of a marine named Panaiko whose Molotov cocktail ignited, transforming him into a human pillar of flame. The doomed man stumbled towards a German tank, where he dashed a second Molotov against the engine grille, engulfing both tank and hero in fire. If some such tales were apocryphal, many were not. ‘Courage is infectious here, just as cowardice is infectious in other places,’ wrote Vasily Grossman, and he was right. Stalin’s orders were simple and readily understood: the city must be held to the last man and woman.

It was Hitler’s ill-fortune that the battle perfectly suited the elemental spirit of the Red Army. A panzergrenadier officer wrote: ‘We have fought for fifteen days for a single house, with mortars, machine-guns, grenades and bayonets. The front is a corridor between burnt-out rooms…The street is no longer measured in metres, but in corpses. Stalingrad is no longer a town. By day it is an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames. And when night arrives – one of those scorching, howling, bleeding nights – the dogs plunge into the Volga and swim desperately for the other bank. The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them. Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure.’

It is important to recognise that, while Chuikov’s battle was critical, elsewhere along hundreds of miles of front fighting continued unabated through the autumn and winter, killing more people than perished at Stalingrad. ‘Hello, my dear Marusya and daughter Tanya!’ partisan commissar Pavel Kalitov wrote home from Ukraine. ‘This is to tell you that so far I am alive and in good health. We are still in the same place, i.e., the upper reaches of the river Shelon. We are experiencing hard fighting right now. The Germans have sent against us tanks, aircraft, artillery and mortars. Our partisans are fighting like lions. Vasya Bukov killed fifteen Germans with a rifle on 7 June. It is very hard to deal with them because they have the firepower. We are entirely dependent on local people for supplies, and they are really very good here. The Germans are many and we are few, that’s why we don’t sleep more than 2–3 hours a day. Yesterday I went to the banya [bath house] after the battle, and remembered how in peacetime one could sip a little glass of vodka after the banya and have a proper rest, and go fishing at weekends. How is your sister Shura feeling now? Has she put on a little weight now that you are feeding her after her experience of starvation in Leningrad?’ He concluded optimistically, ‘The fascists aren’t fighting as well this year as they did last.’

Conditions in Leningrad progressively eased, though Russia’s second city remained under bombardment. Its inhabitants were still desperately hungry, but most received just sufficient food to sustain life. In March 1942, the authorities launched a campaign to clear the streets of snow, debris and rubble, in which hundreds of thousands of citizens participated. In April, a new commander was appointed, Lt. Gen. Leonid Govorov. Though a taciturn man, the forty-five-year-old gunner was intelligent, cultured and humane. The NKVD reported from Leningrad during the summer: ‘In connection with the improvement in the food situation in June, the death rate went down by a third…The number of incidents of use of human flesh in food supply decreased. Whereas 236 people were arrested for this crime in May, in June it was just 56.’

Yet for soldiers on the line in the north, horror remained a constant. Nikolai Nikulin noted in his diary on 18 August that some cooks and NCOs were all that was left of his own division. He complained that the morning issue of porridge was often laced with shrapnel, and he was tormented by thirst: ‘During the night I crawled twice to a shell crater for water. It was as thick and brown as coffee, and smelt of explosives and something else. In the morning, I saw a black crooked hand protruding from that crater. My tunic and trousers are as stiff as cardboard with mud and blood, the knees and elbows holed by crawling on them. I have thrown away my helmet – not many people wear them here; one normally shits into a helmet, then throws it out of the trench. The corpse near me stinks unbearably; there are so many of them around, old and new. Some turn black as they dry, and lie in all sorts of postures. Here and there in the trench one sees body parts trampled into the mud – a flattened face, a hand, all as brown as the soil. We walk on them.’

At the end of August, the Germans suddenly abandoned their strategy of containment, and launched a major offensive to take Leningrad. When this failed, the Russians countered with their own attack, which achieved dramatic gains. Some cultural life revived in the city: there were art exhibitions, concerts, and a performance of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony in the Philharmonic Hall. The people of Leningrad now had sufficient faith in their own survival to turn their minds to the plight of their fellow sufferers in Stalingrad. Vera Inber wrote: ‘It shows in the expression on people’s faces, in the trams, on the streets: all the time we feel for Stalingrad…Now everything will be decided at Stalingrad – the whole fate of the war.’

Through the winter of 1942, Leningrad continued to be bombed and shelled. One barrage began during a theatre performance: partway through the second act of the premiere of a comedy about the Baltic Fleet, The Wide Wide Sea, an actor appeared in front of the curtain and demanded of the audience, ‘What shall we do, comrades? Take shelter or continue?’ There was thunderous applause and cries of ‘Continue!’ On 12 January 1943, Govorov was ready to launch a new offensive to break the blockade. Zhukov revisited the city, and set his own stamp on operations. As usual indifferent to casualties, he demanded caustically, ‘Who are these cowards of yours who don’t want to fight?’ On 16 January, the key position of Shlisselburg was recaptured, and two days later it was formally announced that the blockade was broken. In the city, its famous poet Olga Bergholz wrote, ‘This happiness, the happiness of liberated Leningrad, we will never forget. The cursed circle is broken.’ On 3 March another citizen, Igor Chaiko, wrote, ‘A thought is forming in fiery letters in my mind: I can overcome anything…Spring is a symbol of life. The Germans are shelling us again, but the menace is shrinking in the sunlight.’

Cats, almost of all which had been eaten, suddenly became useful again, to dispel a plague of rats: an entire trainload of feline warriors was dispatched to the city. German shelling, now inspired by mere malice rather than military purpose, continued throughout 1943 – July witnessed the worst bombardment of the siege. Only in January 1944 did the Red Army launch the assault that finally pushed back the Germans beyond artillery range of the city. But Leningrad’s fate was decided in the spring of 1942, when it became plain that its surviving inhabitants could be fed. It was officially stated that 632,253 people died in the course of the siege, but the true figure is assumed to be at least a million. Soviet propaganda suppressed reporting of much that happened during the city’s agony. When Olga Bergholz visited Moscow to broadcast at the end of 1942, she was warned to say nothing about the siege’s horrors: ‘They said that the Leningraders are heroes, but they don’t know what that heroism consists of. They didn’t know that we starved, they didn’t know that people were dying of hunger.’

Strategically, the northern struggle was much less important than the battle for Stalingrad. Nonetheless, Leningrad’s experience was at least as significant in showing why the Soviet Union prevailed in the Second World War. It is unthinkable that British people would have eaten each other rather than surrender London or Birmingham – or would have been obliged by their generals and politicians to hold out at such a cost. Compulsion was a key element in Leningrad’s survival, as in that of Stalin’s nation. If the city’s inhabitants had been offered an exchange of surrender for food in February 1942, they assuredly would have given up. But in the Soviet Union no such choice was available, and those who attempted to make it were shot. Both Hitler and Stalin displayed obsessive stubbornness about Leningrad. That of Stalin was finally rewarded, amid a mountain of corpses. A people who could endure such things displayed qualities the Western Allies lacked, which were indispensable to the destruction of Nazism. In the auction of cruelty and sacrifice, the Soviet dictator proved the higher bidder.

Even as the defenders of Leningrad were experiencing a fragile revival of life and hope, further east and south the Stavka launched its strategic counterstrokes. Operation Mars, which began on 25 November 1942, is almost forgotten, because it failed. Some 667,000 men and 1,900 tanks attempted an envelopment of the German Ninth Army which cost 100,000 Russian lives, and was repulsed. A battle that elsewhere in the world would have been deemed immense was scarcely noticed amid the eastern slaughter. Some men found any alternative preferable to fighting on. ‘Just as I lay down to rest before breakfast,’ wrote Captain Nikolai Belov, ‘a runner came from the Commissar, summoning me to HQ. It turned out that soldier Sharonov had shot himself. What a scoundrel! He left the drill parade pleading sickness and ran into me on the way to his quarters, all doubled up. I ordered him to stay in my dugout under guard, but finding it momentarily empty he took the opportunity to shoot himself.’

Fortunately for Stalin, Zhukov and the Allied cause in the Second World War, the other great Soviet operation of the winter, Uranus, was vastly more successful than Mars. The Germans lacked strength adequately to man their enormous front. There was a three-hundred-mile gap between Second Army at Voronezh on the upper Don, and Fourth and Sixth Panzer Armies south-eastwards at Stalingrad. Short of manpower, von Weichs, the army group commander, deployed Hungarian, Italian and Romanian formations to cover the flanks of Sixth Army. German intelligence failed to identify powerful Soviet forces massing against the Romanians. On 19 November Zhukov opened his offensive, hurling six armies against the northern Axis perimeter, followed by a thrust westward next day by the Stalingrad Front south of the city.

The Russians Encircle Hitler’s Sixth Army

A German anti-tank gunner, Henry Metelmann, was supporting the Romanians when the Russian offensive struck. ‘The whole place trembled, bits of earth fell on us and the noise was deafening. We were sleep-drunk, and kept bumping into each other, mixing up our boots, uniforms and other equipment, and shouting out loudly to relieve our tension. We went out from one bedlam into another, an inferno of noise and explosions…Everything was in utter turmoil and I heard much shouting and crying from the Romanian forward line…Then we heard the heavy clanging of tracks. Someone further along quite unnecessarily shouted: “They are coming!” And then we saw the first of them, crawling out of the greyness.’ The Russian armour rolled over Metelmann’s gun, all of its crew save himself, and two Romanian armies, whose soldiers surrendered in tens of thousands. Many were shot down, while survivors in their distinctive white hats were transported downriver by barge to prison camps. A Russian sailor, gazing upon a crowd of POWs staring listlessly at the ice floes, observed that the captives had been eager to glimpse the Volga: ‘Well, they’ve seen the Volga now.’ Romania paid dearly for its adherence to the Axis, suffering 600,000 casualties in the course of the eastern campaigns.

On 16 December the river froze, and the ice quickly became thick enough to bear trucks and guns. In the ruins of Stalingrad, fighting ebbed – the critical battles were now taking place south and westwards. Five days later, Soviet tanks completed a perfect double envelopment behind Paulus’s Sixth Army: Zhukov’s spearheads met east of the Don crossing at Kalach. Many times in the course of the war the Russians achieved such encirclements. Many times also, the Germans broke out of them. What was different here was that Hitler rejected the pleas of Sixth Army’s commander for such a retreat. Paulus was ordered to continue his assault on Stalingrad, while Manstein began an attack from the west, to restore contact with Sixth Army. By the 23rd, his spearheads had battered a passage to within thirty miles of Stalingrad. Then they stuck. The field marshal urged Paulus to defy Hitler and break out to join him, as was still feasible. He refused, condemning 200,000 men to death or captivity. Manstein’s forces were spent, and he ordered a general retreat.

Along the entire German front in the east, the approach of Christmas prompted a surge of sentimentality. Every Sunday afternoon, most men within reach of a radio listened to the request programme Wunschkonzert für die Wehrmacht, broadcast from Berlin to provide a link between soldiers and families at home. Relentlessly patriotic, it highlighted such numbers as ‘Glocken der Heimat’ (‘Bells of the Homeland’) and ‘Panzer rollen in Afrika vor’ (‘Panzers Roll in Africa’). Soldiers loved to hear Zarah Leander sing ‘Ich weiss es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n’, a special favourite of German civilians: ‘I know, one day a miracle will happen/And then a thousand fairy tales will come true/I know that a love cannot die/That is so great and wonderful.’

Many Germans, especially the young, were gripped by a paranoia no less real for being rooted in Nazi fantasies. Luftwaffe pilot Heinz Knoke succumbed to emotion on Christmas Eve, listening to ‘Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht’ – ‘Silent Night’: ‘This is the most beautiful of all German carols. Even the British, the French and the Americans are singing it tonight. Do they know that it is a German song? And do they fully appreciate its true significance? Why do people all over the world hate us Germans, and yet still sing German songs, play music by such German composers as Beethoven and Bach, and recite the works of the great German poets? Why?’ Paratrooper Martin Poppel wrote in the same spirit from Russia:

Our thoughts and conversations turn towards home, to our loved ones, our Führer and our Fatherland. We’re not afraid to cry as we stand to remember our Führer and our fallen comrades. It’s like an oath binding us together, making us grit our teeth and carry on until victory…At home, they’ll be sitting under the Christmas tree as well. I can see my brave old Daddy, see him stand and drink with reddened eyes to the soldiers. And my courageous mother, she’ll certainly be crying a bit, and my little sister too. But one day there’ll be another New Year when we can all be together, happily reunited after a victorious end to the mass slaughter of the nations. That superior spirit which moves the young people must lead us to victory: there is no alternative.

The sentiments of these young men, cogs in a war machine that had wreaked untold misery, reflected the triumph of Goebbels’ educational and propaganda machine, and the tragedy of Europe to which it contributed so much. That Christmas of 1942 in Russia, millions of German soldiers approached a rendezvous with the collapse of their leader’s insane ambitions that would hasten many to their graves.

Goering professed the Luftwaffe’s ability to supply the German forces isolated in the Stalingrad pocket – though the most rudimentary calculation showed that such airlift capacity was lacking. Through December, as ammunition and rations dwindled, Paulus’s men lost ground, men, tanks, and soon hope. On 16 January 1943, a Wehrmacht officer at Stalingrad wrote in a valedictory letter to his wife: ‘The implacable struggle continues. God helps the brave! Whatever Providence may ordain, we ask for one thing, for strength to hold on! Let it be said of us one day that the German army fought at Stalingrad as soldiers never before in the world have fought. To pass this spirit on to our children is the task of mothers.’ To most of those trapped in Paulus’s pocket, however, such heroic sentiments represented flatulence.

On 12 January, four Russian fronts struck at Army Group Don, north of Stalingrad, driving back the Axis forces in disarray. The Pasubio Division, part of the Italian Eighth Army in the Don pocket, found itself struggling westwards. Without fuel, the hapless troops were obliged to ditch heavy weapons and take to their feet. ‘Vehicles complete with loads were being abandoned along the road,’ wrote artillery Lieutenant Eugenio Corti. ‘It broke my heart to see them. How much effort and expense that equipment must have cost Italy!’ If exhausted men sought to snatch rides on German vehicles, they were thrown off with yells and curses.

Corti made ineffectual efforts to preserve discipline in his unit. ‘But how can you expect people who are unused to being well-ordered in normal civilian life to become orderly…simply because they find themselves in uniform? As enemy fire rained down, the rabble quickened its stumbling pace. I now witnessed one of the most wretched scenes of the whole retreat: Italians killing Italians…We had ceased to be an army; I was no longer with soldiers but with creatures incapable of controlling themselves, obedient to a single animal instinct: self-preservation.’ He cursed his own softness, in failing to shoot a man who defied orders that only the wounded should ride on the few sledges. ‘Countless instances of weakness like mine accounted for the confusion in which we found ourselves…A German soldier in our midst was beside himself with contempt. I had to admit he was right…we were dealing with undisciplined, bewildered men.’

At a dressing station, ‘the wounded were lying atop one another. When one of the few orderlies tending them appeared with a little water, to the groaning was added the cries of those he inadvertently trod upon. Outside, straw had been laid on the snow, on which several hundred men were lying…it must have been –15 or –20 degrees. The dead lay mingled with the wounded. One doctor did the rounds: he himself had been twice wounded by shell splinters while performing amputations with a cutthroat razor.’

Whichever of the warring armies held the ascendant, Russian sufferings persisted. In a peasant hut, Corti came upon a stricken family. ‘I was greeted by the corpse of a gigantic old man with a long whiteish beard lying in a pool of blood…Cowering against a wall, terror-stricken, were three or four women and five or six children – Russians, thin, delicate, waxen-faced. A soldier was calmly eating cooked potatoes…How warm it was in that house! I urged the women and children to do their eating before more soldiers arrived and gobbled the lot.’ Axis troops were often bemused and impressed by the stoicism of the Russians, who seemed to them victims of communism rather than enemies. Even after the alien invaders had brought untold misery upon their country, simple country-folk sometimes displayed a human sympathy for afflicted and suffering Axis soldiers which moved them. Corti wrote: ‘During halts on those marches many of our compatriots were rescued from frostbite by the selfless, maternal care of poor women.’

Throughout that terrible retreat, Hitler’s allies cursed the Luftwaffe, which dropped supplies only to German units. Corti wrote: ‘We watched those aircraft avidly: we found their form and colour repugnant and alien, like the uniforms of German soldiers…If only the familiar outline of some Italian plane had come into sight! If only the slightest thing had been dropped for us, but nothing came!’ Italians’ misery was compounded by censorship at home which kept their families in ignorance of those perishing in the snow: ‘Back in the distant patria nobody knew of their sacrifice. We of the army in Russia lived out our tragedy while the radio and newspapers went on about other things altogether. It was as if the entire nation had forgotten us.’

Corti recoiled from the spectacle of Germans massacring Russian prisoners, though he knew that the Red Army often did likewise to its own captives. ‘It was extremely painful – for we were civilised men – to be caught up in that savage clash between barbarians.’ He was torn between disgust at the Germans’ ruthlessness, ‘which at times disqualified them in my eyes from membership of the human family’, and grudging respect for their strength of will. He deplored their contempt for other races. He heard of their officers shooting men too badly wounded to move, of rapes and murders, of sledges loaded with Italian wounded hijacked by the Wehrmacht. But he was also awed by the manner in which German soldiers instinctively performed their duties, even without an officer or NCO to give orders. ‘I…asked myself…what would have become of us without the Germans. I was reluctantly forced to admit that alone, we Italians would have ended up in enemy hands…I…thanked heaven that they were with us there in the column…Without a shadow of a doubt, as soldiers they have no equal.’

Again and again, German tanks and Stukas drove back pursuing Russian armour, enabling the retreating columns to struggle on, amid murderous Soviet mortaring. One Italian soldier’s testicles were sliced away by a shell splinter. Thrusting them in his pocket, the man bound the wound with string and trudged onward. Next day at a dressing station, he lowered his trousers; fumbling in his pocket, according to Eugenio Corti’s account, he proffered to a doctor ‘in the palm of his hand the blackish testicles mixed with biscuit crumbs, asking whether they could be sewn back on’. Corti survived to reach the railhead at Yasinovataya, and thence travelled through Poland to Germany. A hospital train at last bore him home to his beloved Italy. At the end of 1942 an Italian general asserted that 99 per cent of his fellow countrymen not merely expected to lose the war, but now fervently hoped to do so as swiftly as possible.

In January 1943, the German line in the east suffered a succession of crippling blows. On the 12th, in the far north, the Russians launched an attack which, at the end of five days’ fighting, opened a corridor along the shore of Lake Ladoga that broke the siege of Leningrad. A simultaneous assault further south recaptured Voronezh and wrecked the Hungarian formations of Hitler’s armies. In late January, Soviet forces closed on Rostov, threatening German forces in the Caucasus, which were soon confined to a bridgehead at Taman, just east of the Crimea. On 31 January, Paulus surrendered the remains of Sixth Army at Stalingrad. Zhukov became the first wartime Soviet commander to receive a marshal’s baton, soon joined by Vasilevsky and Stalin himself. On 8 February the Russians entered Kursk, and a week later Rostov; they took Kharkov on the 16th.

Stalingrad transformed the morale of the Red Army. A soldier named Ageev wrote home: ‘I’m in an exceptional mood. If you only knew, then you’d be just as happy as I am. Imagine it – the Fritzes are running away from us!’ Vasily Grossman was disgusted by what he perceived as the gross egoism of Chuikov and other commanders, vying with each other to claim credit for the Red Army’s victories: ‘There’s no modesty. “I did it, I, I, I, I, I …” They speak about other commanders without any respect, recounting some ridiculous gossip.’ But, after the horrors and failures of the previous year, who could grudge Stalin’s generals their outburst of triumphalism? The struggle for Stalingrad had cost 155,000 Russian dead, many of them consigned to unmarked graves because superstition made frontoviks, as Russians termed fighting soldiers, reluctant to wear identity capsules, the Red Army’s equivalent of dog tags. A further 320,000 men were evacuated sick or wounded. But this butcher’s bill seemed acceptable as the price of a victory that changed the course of the war.

The Allied world rejoiced alongside Stalin’s people. ‘The killing of thousands of Germans in Russia makes pleasant reading now,’ wrote British civilian Herbert Brush on 26 November 1942, ‘and I hope it will be kept up for a long time yet. It is the only way to convert young Germans. I wonder how the Russians will treat the prisoners they capture…it will show whether the Russians are really converted to civilised life.’ The answer to Brush’s speculation was that many German prisoners were killed or allowed to starve or freeze, because the contest in barbarism had become unstoppable.

The Red Army achieved stunning advances in the first months of 1943, gaining up to 150 miles in the north, to halt beyond Kursk. Soviet generalship sometimes displayed brilliance, but mass remained the key element in the Red Army’s successes. Discipline was erratic, and units were vulnerable to outbreaks of panic and desertion. Command incompetence was often compounded by drunkenness. Captain Nikolai Belov recorded scenes during an attack that were not untypical:

The day of battle. I slept through the artillery bombardment. After about 1½ hours, I woke and ran to the telephone to check the situation. Then I ran up the communication trench to 1st Rifle Battalion, where I found its commander Captain Novikov and chief of staff Grudin dashing about with pistols in their hands. When I asked them to report, they said they were leading their men to attack. Both were drunk, and I ordered them to holster their weapons.

There were piles of corpses in the trenches and on the parapets, among them that of Captain Sovkov, whom Novikov had killed – I was told that he had shot a lot of [our own] soldiers. I told Novikov, Grudin and Aikazyan that unless they joined the forward company, I would kill them myself. But instead of advancing towards the river, they headed for the rear. I gave them a burst of sub-machine-gun fire, but Novikov somehow found his way back into the trench. I pushed him forward with my own hands. He was soon wounded, and Grudin brought him in on his back. Both of them, notorious cowards, were of course delighted. Assuming command of the battalion myself, in the evening I crossed the Oka river to join the leading company of Lieutenant Util’taev. When night fell, I advanced with three companies, but the assault failed.

The fundamental cause of the disasters which befell the German armies in Russia in the winter of 1942–43 was that they had undertaken a task beyond their nation’s powers. The Wehrmacht was saved from immediate disaster only by the generalship of Manstein. Hitler had said grudgingly back in 1940, ‘The man is not to my liking, but he is capable.’ Manstein was almost certainly the ablest German general of the war. In March he stabilised his line, launched a counter-attack which retook Kharkov, and checked the momentum that had borne forward the Soviet spearheads from the Volga to the Donets, thus securing Hitler another breathing space.

But for what? The balance of advantage on the Eastern Front had shifted decisively and irrevocably against Germany. The power of the Soviet Union and its armies was growing fast, while that of the invaders shrank. In 1942, Germany produced just 4,800 armoured vehicles, while Russia built 24,000. The new T-34 tank, better than anything the Germans then deployed save the Tiger, began to appear in quantity – Chelyabinsk, one of Stalin’s massive manufacturing centres in the Urals, became known as Tankograd. That year also, Russia built 21,700 aircraft to Germany’s 14,700. The Red Army deployed six million men, supported by a further 516,000 NKVD troops. In the winter fighting of 1942–43, Germany lost a million dead, along with vast quantities of materiel.

The Wehrmacht’s combat performance remained superior to that of the Red Army: until the end of the war, in almost every local action the Germans inflicted more casualties than they received. But their tactical skills no longer sufficed to stem the Russian tide. Stalin was identifying good generals, building vast armies with formidable tank and artillery strength, and at last receiving large deliveries from the Western Allies, including food, vehicles and communications equipment. The five million tons of American meat that eventually reached Russia amounted to half a pound of rations a day for every Soviet soldier. Allied food shipments probably averted a starvation catastrophe in the winter of 1942–43.

Of the Red Army’s 665,000 vehicles in 1945, 427,000 were American-built, including 51,000 jeeps. The US provided half the Red Army’s boots – loss of livestock made leather scarce – almost 2,000 railway locomotives, 15,000 aircraft, 247,000 telephones and nearly four million tyres. ‘Our army suddenly found itself on wheels – and what wheels!’ said Anastas Mikoyan with a generosity uncharacteristic of Stalin’s ministers. ‘When we started to receive American canned beef, fat, powdered eggs and other foodstuffs, this was worth a lot of extra calories.’ Mikoyan believed that Lend-Lease supplies shortened the war by a year to eighteen months.

It was plain to Hitler’s commanders that victory in the east was no longer attainable. The only issue for Germany was how long its armies could withstand Russia’s relentlessly growing strength. When spring prompted the melting of the Volga’s ice, among a host of horrors revealed by the thaw were the bodies of a Russian and a German, victims of Stalingrad, clasped in a death embrace. Yet already that German’s living compatriots were more than three hundred miles westward, embarked upon a retreat that would never be reversed.