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Machine-gunner Aleksandr Gordeev deplored the crudity of his own army’s tactics: ‘The frontal attacks puzzled me. Why advance straight into German machine-gun fire? Why not make flank attacks?’ He briefly deluded himself that his own company, reduced to one-third strength, would be spared from making further assaults, but instead early one morning it was reinforced by rear-area personnel, some of them clerks. They were issued double rations of vodka, ‘and those who wanted it drank more’. Gordeev’s assistant gunner was reassigned as a rifleman, and ‘walked off as though assured he was facing death’. He was replaced by a soldier sweating with terror, and limping from the consequences of a self-inflicted wound. Gordeev wrote, ‘The situation was pretty shitty; this wasn’t a company, but a drunken mob’; it was nonetheless plunged back into battle.

In Nikolai Belov’s sector of the front, on the morning of 20 February 1943, a Russian bombardment designed to pound the Germans fell instead on his own men, who suffered heavily even before meeting the enemy. After a day of bloody fighting, at 1600 he himself was wounded. He lay between the trenches for four hours before darkness fell and sub-machine gunners were able to drag him back into the trenches, and thence to the rear for treatment. Belov returned to his battalion three weeks later to find almost all its officers gone, most of them dead: ‘Major Anoprienko left for the [Military] Academy. Division commander Colonel Ivanov is killed. Captain Novikov shot [presumably for dereliction of duty], Grudin killed. Dubovik killed. Alekseev died of wounds. Stepashin stripped of rank and sentenced to ten years [imprisonment].’

But Russia could endure such losses, and even such clumsy, brutal war-making. Stalin’s forces were now much larger than those of Hitler, and their superiority was growing steadily: some Soviet weapons systems were better than those of the Wehrmacht. Russian air power was increasingly formidable, as ever more of the Luftwaffe’s declining strength was diverted to defend the Reich from Allied bombers. For a time in the spring of 1943, the Germans looked incapable of holding any line east of the Dnieper, four hundred miles from Stalingrad. Indeed, it seemed plausible that Hitler’s Army Groups A and Don could be prevented even from getting back to the river. As thousands of prisoners were herded into cages, Russian soldiers savoured booty, notably including clothing: many men in Ivan Melnikov’s unit seized the opportunity to replace the cloths wrapped around their feet with German boots. ‘It was hard to take off our foot bandages, for they had stuck to the skin and one had to tear them off rag by rag,’ Melnikov wrote with clinical dispassion. ‘Using water unsparingly, we washed our blistered, bleeding feet. Some of us put on socks that we found … Then we marched onwards full of cheer.’

At the end of January, a fast tank force directed by South-West Front commander Nikolai Vatutin crossed the Donets east of Izyum and raced south towards Mariupol on the Sea of Azov, to get behind the Germans. On 2 February, Zhukov and Vasilevsky launched an ambitious two-pronged attack, one spearhead driving south-westwards, past Kharkov towards the Dnieper, the other heading north-west for Smolensk by way of Kursk, which fell on 8 February. Kharkov was captured a week later, and within days Soviet forces approached the Dnieper crossings at Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporozhye.

Thereafter, however, Russian difficulties increased. Panzers wrecked Vatutin’s mobile force by superior tactics and gunnery. Manstein took command of Army Group South, and launched a series of punishing offensives. Before the spring thaw reduced the battlefield to mud, which as usual immobilised armour, on 11 March the Germans retook Kharkov, where many Russians experienced extraordinary odysseys. On 8 March, medical orderly Aleksei Tolstukhin found himself trapped by the German advance on the city. He wrote later to his parents: